On the plus side, as modern interpolators might say, the bubonic plague winnowed down Europe’s population to a scale more congenial with its resource base. After that big first wave of the disease, land was cheaper and human labor better rewarded. Eventually, more food got around.
Incidentally, the plague provoked nostalgia for the classical antiquity of Greece and Rome, especially among the scholars of Florence, launching the extravaganzas of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and eventually our own pageant of techno-supremacist Modernity.
Covid-19 seems rather a punk-ass illness compared to the Black Death. Its victims by far are people already on a fast track to the last roundup.
We know exactly what causes it, if not so exactly its origin, and yet the response among our experts has been far more ambiguous than those long-ago bishops of Christendom to the Great Plague.
The various scientists, physicians, public health officers, and politicians seem, to the casual observer, about equally divided between those who consider the corona virus a grave threat and those who insist it’s hardly worse than any annual flu.
What is one to believe? Or do?
Which brings us to the verge of the Great Opening-up. The current nostalgia for pre-Covid-19 business-as-usual is understandably intense.
Gone especially from daily life are all the ceremonies of human togetherness, from gatherings of friends to the casual shoulder-rubbings of urban life to the crowded venues of the lively arts to the great moiling orgies of pro sports.
The life of the perpetual jigsaw puzzle, YouTube, and Netflix has proved inadequate to human aspiration. Gone, too, are livelihoods, revenue streams, and rewarding roles in everyday existence. The itch to get out and do, get out and make, get out and be, is overwhelming.
Behind those plain yearnings, though, looms the specter of a system that appeared to be already foundering before Covid-19 entered the scene.
There is, at least, considerable agreement that the disease catalyzed the disorders of finance and economy and accelerated the damage — just not among the people most responsible for engineering the fragilities that actually crashed things
Jerome Powell, Pope of the Church of the Federal Reserve, went on the 60-Minutes show last night to reassure the nation that things will eventually get back to normal. “I think you’ll see the economy recover steadily through the second half of this year.”
Yessir, if you say so. Were his fingers crossed? You couldn’t tell because the camera had him framed in a head-shot. Personally, I think the Fed Chairman was blowing smoke up the nation’s wazoo.
Spooky as it’s been, the Covid-19 virus has also been a great cover-story for the natural collapse of a severally unbalanced, ecologically unsound, and dishonestly represented set of arrangements that are now unspooling at horrifying speed.
The car industry is dying. The airline industry is laying out its fleet of big birds in desert graveyards. The college racketeering operation went off a cliff, along with medical profiteering.
Agribusiness no longer has a business model. Hundreds of kinds of services no longer have customers who can afford their offerings from acupuncture to zymurgy.
None of that will be fixed by injections of miracle money borrowed from ourselves in quantities that would turn every US citizen into a millionaire — if it wasn’t just pounded down the rat-holes of the stock and bond markets.
The big question about the Great Opening-up is when the recognition of all that turns to raw emotion. Covid-19 may still be with us then, but it will be the least of our problems. The masks will come off. The dance will commence.
By James Howard Kunstler
Originally appeared at: James Howard Kunstler
The 21st Century
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of 21cir.
Yes, it is a corrupt sick system drenched with blood of innocent civilians through wars of aggression. They are now using covid-19 to strip away peoples’ liberties and freedoms including impoverishing them so they cannot speak or defend themselves. They know if you are dying of hunger, you are weak and will accept anything to be able to eat including the criminal lockdowns and poison vaccines being pushed by criminal psychopath Bill Gates! He has already tried to bribe Nigerian government this month with 10M USD, to test poison laden corona vaccine (containing glyphosate etc) on unsuspecting Nigerian population! The Italian MP Sara Cunial is right, Bill Gates should be arrested and hanged for murder children and women etc in African, India etc. His country, the US is the number one thieving looting criminal, terrorist, dictatorship nation with fake democracy in the world. Currently the US is stealing Syria’s oil in broad day light backed up by its criminal allies UK, Australia Canada etc. It instigates wars of aggression against innocent civilians in foreign nations, and funds and props up despotic brutal regimes, dictators around the world. This is accomplished through its CIA run fake NGO USAID, NED etc. The US has murdered millions of human beings since WII and continues to commit genocide and war crimes undercover of its fake criminal R2P extra territorial criminal interventions. Yet there is no meaningful opposition among the US population against US war crimes and acts of aggression, mass murder, genocide and heartless psychopathy even in these times of COVID-19? See how the US and its populace is happy to kill innocent women and children by blocking COVID-19 MEDICAL AID to Iran, Venezuela, Cuba etc ? Including stealing medical kits meant for other countries that are in need of help.
Americans are sick at heart and soul, they are psychopathic mass murderers and heartless killers, Just look at the mass shootings!! The US is one sick psychopathic nation whose leaders commit mass murder, lies and deceive the world non stop, alongside its five eyes criminal allies UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada etc. All should be tried for war crimes and mass murder under Nuremberg international law!!! Right now the US is busy training ISIS terrorists at Al-Tanf Syria illegal US occupation base, then unleashing them on Syria , middle east, Africa, asia , south America etc. to commit heinous crimes (decapitating women and children’s civilian heads, eating their brains , rape and murder etc. see this link- https://www.globalresearch…. Who would trust the US and its evil deception in trade, media , wars of aggression, poison medicine made by its criminal pharma companies, poison food agriculture by its evil Monsanto etc? Remember the war of lies based on fake narrative of Iraq’s saddam’s WMD, Libya and Gadafi soldiers using Viagra to rape women? Kuwaiti princes posing as some poor girl lying on tv about babies being removed from incubators? And what about the latest Syria’s Assad being falsely accused of chemical attack in Douma with corrupt OPCW producing now thoroughly debunked criminal fake report to instigate war against Syria? Now US is stealing Syria’s oil in broad daylight backed by criminal allies UK, Australia, Israhell etc? What about US training and funding terrorists aka moderate rebels in Altanf illegal US invasion camp in Syria, then unleashing it on Syria and beyond? Lastly, have you seen US destructive wars based on pure lies on Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan , Yemen, Somalia, Congo, South America , Syria etc. etc
The USA,UK,Australia,Canada are all pawns of Israel, as are China and Russia