Isolation XIII:Bellringers And Bellends.

How are we gonna come out of this? Not just logistically, not just as a society, but personally. It seems a trite and selfish question to ask but I suspect I'm not the only one that has looked into their own soul and asked that question. Will we be the Tom Moore (raising £26,000,000 for the NHS) or the Jeff Bezos lining our own pockets? Will we be Jacob Rees-Mogg looking at it as a way to make ourselves even richer or will we be Joe Wicks trying to put a smile on kid's faces and get the country to do some keep fit. Will we be the social media troll punching out, or down, at people already anxious and lonely or will we be the person who checks in on their friends at a time of crisis? Will we be bellringers or bellends?

With the hugely honourable exception of frontline workers, not much is required of us to be good people now but, for that brave tribe of Internet trolls and abusers of women, there is work to be done during a crisis. People must be abused online and, under the cover of quarantine, they must be abused, and often killed, in real life too. Why let a toxic virus that has overtaken the world, jumped from continent to continent, and killed over 160,000 people so far affect your own biases, be them xenophobic or misogynist, or change your own toxic behaviour? Now is the time for you to shine, o hater of humanity? The virus that is killing people is not your enemy. Your enemy is the idea that the pandemic might bring people together to at least try and create a better world.

Domestic violence, including murder, has soared during lockdown, Internet trolls long silent have come out of the woodwork, and those calling for an early end to the lockdown are the very same people who earlier this year were, like Daniel Hannan, writing articles about how coronavirus won't kill people. Trump's denialism and scapegoating is now so acute he's tweeting out dogwhistle calls to arms to his supporters in Michigan, Minnesota, and Virginia. Trump supporters in these three (perhaps not coincidentally) Democrat led states, the President suggested, could storm the state houses and there was a little reminder in there too for them not to forget they have the right to bear arms.

Trump's behaviour is now so craven and despicable that he's not content with the US being the first country worldwide to top 39,000 COVID-19 deaths, he's now trying to instigate a civil war. What a disgusting useless piece of shit. Compare him to Tom Moore, the British 99 year old veteran of World War II who fought in the Burma Campaign in which over 22,000 British troops died.

Moore's due to celebrate his 100th birthday in eleven days and he'd planned to have a party with one hundred guests (living to one hundred is some achievement, still having one hundred living friends is incredible). Obviously, that can no longer happen. Which is sad. Tom didn't mope. He came up with another idea. Something he could do on his own. He'd walk one hundred laps of his garden in Marston Moreteyne in Buckinghamshire to raise money for the NHS.

Which he did. At time of writing to the value of £26,000,000. Captain Tom Moore seems to be doing a lot more for the NHS than the government and his feat is so admirable, so touching, that it makes your heart swell and your eyes well up. But should the NHS be relying on a ninety-nine year old man walking round and round his garden like a teddy bear or from future donations from planned gigs by the Manic Street Preachers and Liam Gallagher?

Shouldn't the government just pay doctors and nurses properly? As many have commented one good idea would be that if high earners were to make regular donations towards the NHS. It could come out of their wages and we could call it something like, say, tax. But, in Britain in recent years, we - the great unwashed, have, instead of voting for parties that aim to raise taxes to fund public services have, instead, voted for those who lower tax and run down public services. To the point we now have a government so venal, and so proud of their venality, they actually applaud when votes not to increase pay for frontline workers are won. Their Thursday night clapping rings very hollow now as does yours if you voted for this Tory administration.

I found out a good friend of mine's nan died of COVID-19 earlier this week. She was in her nineties and had suffered with pneumonia but that didn't make my friend's loss any less sadder and the fact she couldn't be with her nan at her passing has left her in a state of shock. When I received the text telling me the news I was watching Newsnight and Keetje Gull (the Head of In Patient Services at the Princess Alice Hospice near Wimbledon was talking articulately, and admirably dispassionately and impartially, about how the extra money promised by the government, and, more so, the extra PPE promised by the government was not arriving and how, instead, they were relying on local charitable donations.

Charity is a virtuous thing in society, no mistake, but charitable behaviour and the humanity that underpins it has been exploited by governments far and wide for far too long and the woeful lack in proper public funding for essential services is being exposed right now in ways bleaker than even I'd imagined - and I've imagined some pretty bleak scenarios.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock's promise to have testing 'ramped' (it's always 'ramped' with these guys) up to 100,000 per day by the end of April is looking as shaky as his boss Johnson's promises to spend £350m on the NHS, to build a unnecessary garden bridge in London, to lie in front of the bulldozers to prevent the building of a third runway at Heathrow Airport,  and to get Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe out of an Iranian jail. It's almost as if Hancock and Johnson are grifters, just winging it. Dodgy second hand car salesmen who've fiddled with the clock on a motor in order to flog it to you are not the people you need in charge during a deadly pandemic. Or ever.

Karl Marx spoke of how we'd need to go through the last stage of capitalism before we could live in a fairer, eventually freer, society and, now, we are in that phase. It will be fought against by the minority who have prospered through capitalism. Nobody ever wants to get off the gravy train. We saw this when the global banking crisis hit in 2008. It seemed, at the time, that that would be the start of the end and maybe it was in the long term. But in the short term those who lost their jobs in the banks merely colonised other industries, moved into other spheres.

The capitalist need to constantly find new hosts to exploit so that it can survive reminds me of nothing less than a virus and, like this virus we have now, ultimately it destroys many in its path. The most successful capitalists are the ones who are able to develop an amorality. COVID-19 doesn't need to affect an amorality. It is, by nature, amoral. In that respect it is a perfect analogy for Donald Trump. Something that is incapable of doing anything other than helping itself to whatever it wants. Be it money, Russian interference in elections, or unsolicited pussy.

I got a small personal look at how the greed of capitalism affects and infects everything around it when I worked in the lower echelons of the music industry. It had been a fun, but not well paid, job for years. Everyone (pretty much) got on and, together, we'd get the job done but, following the aforementioned banking crisis, a new tier of middle managers was inserted into the the company I worked for. Many of them had come from the City and, immediately, they set about installing the same management methods that had failed the City so badly. Bullying, incompetence, and misuse of any power they had.

The culture of bullying, more an ideology really, made previously competent 'team leaders' (and what decent person doesn't cringe at that title?) feel they needed to act tough to get on. Anti-Spartacist elements sided with management and soon staff who'd worked together side to side and forged good friendships, even relationships, over the years were set against each other. The dreadful culture of the City dripped down and down into what had been a creative industry until the whole place was swimming in it and many of us felt we could no longer don the metaphorical waders required to walk through the metaphorical sewer the place had become and took redundancy, found other jobs or, in my case, walked out.

I felt so demotivated my work suffered. I felt so demotivated I wanted my work to suffer. A colleague of mine told me, while being hassled about this, to cover my arse. Others suggested I might like to employ the 'dark arts' of passing the buck. This left me further demotivated and eventually my mental health started to deteriorate so badly that I felt I had no option but to leave. No redundancy. No leaving party. One crappy card sent through the post that was ripped up and put straight into the recycling.

After twenty years at a job I had once loved and been so proud to tell people I had. It cost me financially, severely so, and still does but it cost me emotionally too and I still feel hurt about it but I'm glad I did it. I'm glad I took a stand and I'm glad I prioritised my mental health over financial imperatives. In retrospect, I should have applied for redundancy a couple of years earlier. It might have saved me the night of alcohol and cocaine abuse that led to me lying on my sofa silently hoping to die.

That's just one of the reasons I abhor capitalism. There are many others and I've increasingly felt more and more alone in despising the system it creates. As the last five years have stretched on interminably the model of the City that crept into the West End and other spheres has become the dominant model of late capitalism. Look after yourself, your family, and fuck everyone else - let them die if need be. They're probably just dole dossers or Benefit Street scroungers. Or worse:- those things but foreign. We're finding out what happens when we elect a government that responds to that kind of bullshit. People die - and not just the people some of you wanted to die.

H.R. McMaster (Trump's former National Security Advisor) rocked up on Zoom to say that what's going on is a political crisis (which is true), that the Chinese Communist Party's mishandling of it exacerbated it (very possibly true), that China is using it to try and win a soft war by sending medics out globally to Africa, Italy, and even the US (most likely true), and that America and Europe need to counter it with their own political vision. Which is not true. It's bullshit designed to back up Trump, it's dark arts, and it's arse covering.

Trump continues to attack the WHO and has even stopped vital American funding of it at a time when American COVID-19 deaths are, by a huge margin, the highest in the world. A position that seems likely to not just be maintained for some time but, soon, go ever more stratospheric as the Satan-in-Chief digs in even deeper to cement his power base. To think that those of his power base who don't die of this will more likely than not vote him in again in November is almost the most depressing act of all of this.

But while our attention is diverted to the circus across the 'pond' there are British politicians like Bernard Jenkin (Consverative, Harwich and North Essex) who are, in a very British stiff upper lip kind of way, trying to shift the blame for government inaction on to journalists who have asked questions about that government inaction. It's cause to be very worried. It might not be accompanied by a Trump style meltdown but it is a trick straight out of Trump's playbook and it's one we should call out every time we see it.

It's good that the likes of Piers Morgan and The Times (in a lethally incisive and insightful piece) are now holding this administration up to account for its incompetent and negligent reaction to the pandemic but they should also shoulder some of the blame for being cheerleaders for a government that was cruel, amoral, and insufficiently serious to deal with any crisis, let alone one of this size. The warnings were there but the narrative was, and Gove's words will go down in history alongside Neville Chamberlain's claim that he had in his hand a piece of paper that ensured peace for our time just before WWII, we've had enough of experts. Nothing could have been more wrong. We need experts now more than ever and though this charlatan government, essentially an idiocracy, lack many things (empathy, sincerity, and seriousness) the most deadly quality they're missing is expertise.

While the American and British governments continue to let down their people and look for scapegoats, friends and family continue to shine in their compassion and their empathy. It was my Mum's birthday on Thursday. She was 74. Obviously she couldn't get out to celebrate but she told me she had wine and cake and she seemed in pretty good spirits. Both Mum and Dad have been ringing (for nearly an hour) every day and I've also spoken to Jason (from Vietnam), Shep, Ben, Michelle, Darren & Cheryl, and Mark C since I last wrote one of these Isolation blogs.

I had another fun Kahoot quiz evening which Jo hosted, Owen set, and Tony M won and that was a real tonic. A hilarious piece on The Daily Mash website about a person living alone who's been spending their time wanking and drinking instead of, like her coupled up friends, "being drawn into passive-aggressive arguments about cupboard organisation strategies", rang somewhat true. I have spent time just lying on the couch and wasted evenings drinking beer and listening to music in my pyjamas.

It's heroic now, you know! But it's probably not the recipe for a healthy body or soul. Certainly not when you're on your thirty-sixth day of isolation. Truth is I've not been drinking more (or less) than usual and there's only so many times a day a man can twang his wire once he's the wrong side of fifty so while booze and competing in Onan's Olympics are all fun in moderation it's with the music that I'm really bingeing.

This week chance hearings of Spaceman 3's Lord Can You Hear Me? and Al Green's Let's Stay Together really hit home with an emotional clout. As did the news that the bell of the partially rebuilt Notre Dame cathedral tolled for French health workers. Less happy news came with the death of Leeds Utd and England centre back Norman Hunter died, aged 76, of COVID-19.

Elsewhere it was revealed that the number of Americans unemployed raised to 22,000,000. A figure that certainly doesn't include Amazon chief Jeff Bezos who has made £24 billion from the crisis so far but still treats his workers like shit and incurred a five day ban in France for delivering inessential items. Another who's not joined the huge number of American unemployed is Virginia pastor Bishop Gerald O.Glenn who claimed that God was larger than COVID-19 and continued to hold congregations.

That's because it turned out COVID-19 had different ideas to him about God's power and killed him. Something that seems likely to befall many who have been getting together in large numbers in Louisiana and elsewhere in the belief God will save them. The irony of this (and of those protesting the lockdown with sub machine guns in North Carolina) is that their utter slavish devotion to a non-existent God is a perfect illustration of natural selection.

A for more worrying effect of this belief in a higher power is that four of the family members who survived Bishop Glenn have now contracted COVID-19 and may die and that's the thing that some people still don't get. Daniel Hannan doesn't get it, Donald Trump doesn't get it, and the fucking jogger that ran about five inches away from my face when I popped down the local corner shop earlier still don't seem to get it. The reason they don't get it (or choose not to get it) is that they find it impossible to care about anyone other than themselves and though such people being wiped off the face of the Earth would benefit all of humanity I'm not so cruel as to wish it upon them. Which, again, is where we differ. If these people can't up their game during a global pandemic they will never ever up their game. Which means that the rest of us will have to. Luckily, from the evidence I've witnessed during five weeks of solitary quarantine, we're more than equipped enough to do so.