Daily Archives: April 23, 2021

In times of crisis, the actions of the public and officials are guided by two things we need to know: What is happening now, how bad is it? Then, what must we do to contain or minimize a worsening situation?

In the case of our current COVID-19 crisis these facts have come in two distinct but related sets of numbers. There are the hard daily numbers; the cases, the hospitalizations, the ICU loading and sadly, the deaths. Then there is the statistical modelling by which epidemiological, mathematical and statistical analysts apply those daily numbers to our provincial medical capacities to provide the best predictions of what might happen next so as to guide our leaders in their efforts at containment and prevention.

Because of their immediate impact on our families and our daily lives, the public tend to concentrate on the hard daily numbers and because that is where the news is, so too do the media. But the daily numbers only provide a snapshot of the pandemic at that moment in time; they are out of date almost as soon as they are published. In an accelerating world of variant driven, rapidly increasing case counts, they can only tell us where the pandemic has been.

The mathematical models, being predictive in nature, therefore less precise, are the only method by which we can make any projection of where the pandemic might go next and what toll it might exact when it gets there. The sole purpose of that statistical modelling is to point out what next steps we should be planning in order to protect hospitals and prevent ICUs from overloading and failure.

So far, the biggest failure in this pandemic has been the failure of our provincial government to either understand the models and plan responses in a timely fashion or, worse still, choosing to ignore them for expediency, political ideology or opportunistic photo-ops.

In Ontario, the modelling numbers and the trends have been there for all to see. We did not need to be epidemiologists or statisticians. We saw the modelling laid out before us. We only needed to read the newspapers or watch TV to see the approaching tsunami. The Ontario government saw the same models and projections, yet did nothing.

The fact that they knew and chose not to act became evident last week. In response to questions about the delay in locking down and applying new public-health measures, when all the scientific modelling predicted that case numbers and hospitalizations were about to explode, Ontario Solicitor-General Sylvia Jones replied: We wanted to make sure the modelling was actually showing up in our hospitals.

So we watched as the Ford government chose only to react to the headline grabbing daily numbers instead of planning their response to the modelling projections, then waited to assure themselves that one would in fact catch up to the other, which, predictably, it did. This was not a failure of science, not a failure of knowledge. This was a failure to act; a singular failure of leadership.

Throughout this crisis, the Ontario government has bought into the false health-versus-economy dichotomy and worse yet, after reluctantly and belatedly tightening public-health measures to combat the second wave, they reopened again too quickly and broadly, for all of two weeks, only to retreat rapidly this week. In their repeatedly desperate attempts to lock down while staying open for business, the Ford government has continually vacillated, hesitated and utterly failed to follow the medical science and the COVID-19 infection modelling.

Ontario now faces overloaded health and critical-care capacities, problems that cannot be solved by simply repurposing hospitals or adding ICU beds. Each requires highly skilled teams of nurses, physicians and more. Fifteen months into this pandemic, finding a reserve of such skilled teams will be a massive challenge, resulting in increased illness and deaths among every age cohort and, ironically, extending the economic fallout which, at times, seemed all they cared about.

Failure is not the best teaching method, but I think we were hopeful that governments at all levels, coping with something brutally new and unknown would at least learn from past missteps. But after 15 months of being outflanked by COVID-19 and with a third wave of this pandemic picking up steam by the day, our Ontario government has apparently learned nothing from the two previous waves.

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Jim Young is vaccinated, masked and still locked down in Burlington.

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Opinion | Science and health bested by panic and populism - TheSpec.com

Of all the controversial covers Macleans magazine has run over the years, few attracted a bigger backlash than its December 2018 edition. It featured Conservative Party of Canada Leader Andrew Scheer flanked by Doug Ford, Jason Kenney, Brian Pallister and Scott Moe, all wearing their best blue suits and sporting their best tough-guy demeanours. The headline, though, put it over the top: The Resistance. This was a cheeky nod to the anti-Trump movement in the United States, and the text underneath described them as a powerful new alliance ready to stand against the prime ministers climate plan. Welcome to Justin Trudeaus worst nightmare, it blared in boldface.

So much for that. The conservative premier quartet might actually be one of Trudeaus best assets in the next election, whenever that comes. And while their tone-deaf approach to Trudeaus climate plan certainly plays a role in that, its been their ongoing resistance to the best advice of doctors and other public health experts doing the heavy lifting here.

According to a recent Environics Research poll, when asked who they trust more to make the right decisions in handling the pandemic, Canadians in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario and Manitoba were most likely to say the federal government. On the flip side, they were also the four places where residents were least likely to prefer their own provincial governments, with only 18 per cent of Albertans and 20 per cent of Ontarians trusting their premiers.

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Its no wonder. While the federal government has made mistakes along the way, from its failure to close the borders early to some hiccups in the vaccine procurement process, they pale in comparison to the litany of anti-scientific goals that have defined the responses in Canadas resistance provinces.

The Ford governments recent behaviour, which included closing playgrounds and other public recreation areas and closing public schools one day after insisting they would remain open has been particularly egregious. Andrew Morris, an infectious diseases specialist and member of Ontarios COVID-19 Science Advisory Table, was unsparing in his description of the Ford governments response. They havent learned anything over the past six to 12 months, he told Toronto Life. I dont understand it. Its just so disappointing.

By constantly trying to balance the needs of the economy against the imperatives of a dangerous virus, and by catering to their political base rather than trying to lead it, premiers like Ford and Kenney have managed to both frustrate and infuriate their populations. And while they may eventually pay a high political price for their incompetence, the people who voted them into power in the first place ought to reflect on their role in this.

After all, that fateful Macleans cover speaks to a moment in Canadian politics when populist politicians promising easy solutions, from buck-a-beer to pipelines aplenty, were on the rise. But as COVID-19 should have taught everyone by now, simple solutions are no match for the complexity of the real world and challenges like a global health crisis.

Thats why populist leaders like Donald Trump, Brazils Jair Bolsonaro and Great Britains Boris Johnson have failed the test the virus has presented in spectacular (and lethal) fashion. And make no mistake: there will be other tests in the future that these populists havent studied for, whether its climate change, wealth inequality or another pandemic.

Once were able to vaccinate our way out of the abyss that Ontario and other provinces now find themselves in, we need a reckoning with the politics that got them there in the first place.

First and foremost, we need to stop electing people who dont believe in government, and who insist on running them like personal fiefdoms when entrusted with their administration. We saw what the rise of know-nothing, pro-business populism did to Great Britain and the United States, and we may have comforted ourselves here in Canada with the belief that we were better than that. We arent.

We also need to start demanding a higher standard of education and professional achievement in our leaders. Prideful ignorance is no match for the ever-more complex challenges of our time, and governing from the gut can have disastrous consequences. The fact that the 56-year-old premier of Ontario reportedly doesnt even know how to use a laptop is an obvious punchline, but it doesnt inspire much confidence in his ability to handle more complex challenges.

The good news here is that even some conservatives seem to appreciate that their movements ongoing flirtation with anti-intellectual populism is leading them down a dangerous road. As former Stephen Harper adviser Sean Speer wrote in a recent piece, the Liberal governments new budget is a powerful (and perhaps sobering) sign that progressives are winning the battle of ideas.

So far, though, Canadas conservative leaders still seem drunk on their preferred populist cocktail of misinformation and blame-shifting. On the same day the Liberal budget was announced, former finance critic and party heavyweight Pierre Poilievre tweeted a deliberately misleading chart about the federal debt one that was duly picked up and shared by other members of his caucus.

Theres still time for conservatives in Canada to start taking that battle of ideas more seriously. If they do, they may yet be able to meet the increasingly complex challenges that lie ahead. But one thing should be abundantly clear: while populism can be a good way to get elected, its a terrible way to govern.

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COVID is surging and populist premiers won't save us - National Observer

On Thursday, 15 April, Pope Francis sent a video message to participants in the International Conference, A Politics Rooted in the People, organized by the Centre for Theology and Community, and urged them just like a good shepherd to put the most vulnerable first. The following is a transcript of the English subtitles of the Holy Fathers message which he delivered in Spanish.

Dear brothers and sisters,

Im happy to send you some words of greeting at the start of this conference organized by the Centre for Theology and Community in London around the themes in the book Let Us Dream, above all as they relate to the peoples movements and the organizations that support them.

I want to send a special greeting to the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, which celebrates its 50th year of helping the poorest in the United States to live with greater dignity, promoting their participation in the decisions that affect them.

This is also the sphere of work of many other organizations present here, from the United Kingdom, Germany and other countries, whose mission is to walk with the people in their search for la tierra, el techo y el trabajo (land, housing, and work), the famous three Ts and staying by their side when they meet with attitudes of opposition and contempt. The poverty and exclusion from the labour market that have followed this pandemic have made your work and witness all the more urgent and necessary.

One objective of your meeting is to show that the true response to the rise of populism is precisely not more individualism but quite the opposite: a politics of fraternity, rooted in the life of the people. In his recent book, Fr Angus Ritchie (Executive Director of the Centre for Theology and Community) calls this politics that you do inclusive populism; I like to use the term popularism to express the same idea.1 But what matters is not the name but rather the vision, which is the same: it is about finding the means to guarantee a life for all people that is worthy of being called human, a life capable of cultivating virtue and forging new bonds.2

In Let Us Dream, I call this a politics with a capital P, politics as service, which opens new pathways for the people to organize and express itself. It is a politics not just for the people, but with the people, rooted in their communities and in their values. On the other hand, populisms tend to be inspired, consciously or not, by another slogan: everything for the people, nothing with the people political paternalism. So in this populist vision the people is not protagonist of its own destiny, but ends up in thrall to an ideology.

When people are cast aside, they are denied not just material well-being but the dignity of acting, of being a protagonist in their own destiny and history, of expressing themselves with their values and culture, their creativity and fruitfulness. This is why it is impossible for the Church to separate the promotion of social justice from the recognition of the culture and values of the people, which includes the spiritual values that are the source of their sense of dignity. In Christian communities, those values are born from the encounter with Jesus Christ, who tirelessly seeks out the lost and downhearted, those struggling to live from day to day, to bring them the face and presence of God, to be God with us.

Many of you gathered here have worked for many years doing this in the peripheries, walking with the peoples movements. It can be uncomfortable at times. Some accuse you of being too political, others of trying to impose religion. But you understand that respect for the people means respect for their institutions, including their religious ones; and that the role of those institutions is not to impose anything but to walk with the people, reminding them of the face of God who always goes before us.

That is why the true shepherd of a people, a religious shepherd, is one who seeks to walk in front, among, and behind the people: in front, to point out to them something of the way ahead; among them, to feel with the people and not to go wrong; and behind, to assist the stragglers and to allow the people with its own nose to find for itself the right paths.

That is why in Let Us Dream I speak of a desire: that every diocese in the world have an ongoing collaboration with the peoples movements.3

Going out to meet the risen, wounded Christ in our poorest communities allows us to recover our missionary vigour, for it is here that the Church was born, in the margins of the Cross. If the Church disowns the poor, she ceases to be the Church of Jesus; she falls back on the old temptation to become a moral or intellectual elite a new form of Pelagianism, or a kind of Essene life.4

In the same way, a politics that turns its back on the poor will never be able to promote the common good. A politics that turns its back on the peripheries will never be able to understand the center, and will confuse the future with a self-projection, as if in a mirror.

One of the ways of turning ones back on the poor is by having contempt for the cultural, spiritual, and religious values of the people, which are either ignored or exploited for reasons of power. The contempt for the culture of the people is the beginning of the abuse of power.

In recognising the importance of spirituality in the lives of the people, we regenerate politics. That is why it is essential that faith communities meet together and fraternize in order to work for and with the people. With my brother the Grand Imam Ahmad Al-Tayyeb, [we] declare the adoption of a culture of dialogue as the path; mutual cooperation as the code of conduct; reciprocal understanding as the method and standard.5 Always in the service of the peoples.

Now, more than ever, dear friends, we must build a future from below, from a politics with the people, rooted in the people. May your conference help to light up the way. Thank you very much.

[1] Angus Ritchie, Inclusive Populism: Creating Citizens in the Global Age (Univ. Notre Dame Press, 2019)[2] Pope Francis, Let Us Dream. The Path to a Better Future. In conversation with Austen Ivereigh (Simon & Schuster, 2020) p. 112[3] Let Us Dream, p. 121.[4] Let Us Dream, p. 120.[5] Document on Human Fraternity, quoted in Fratelli Tutti, n. 285.

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A politics of fraternity is the true response to the rise of populism - L'Osservatore Romano - L'Osservatore Romano

LOS ANGELES At one point in Rachel Kushners recently published novella, The Mayor of Leipzig, the narrator, an American artist, reveals: I personally know the author of this story youre reading. Because she thinks of herself as an art-world type, a hanger-on.

This aside is typical of Kushner, both in its self-deprecating humor and its metafictional address. Kushner, however, is scarcely a hanger-on. While she is best known as the author of three widely acclaimed novels Telex from Cuba, The Flamethrowers and The Mars Room she has also written incisively about art and artists for magazines and journals including Artforum and BOMB.

She often features the art world in her fiction, too. The Flamethrowers describes, in part, the protagonist Renos entree into the downtown art scene of 1970s New York (Reno sharing certain traits, such as a passion for motorcycles, with Kushner). It includes cameos from real artists, such as the sculptor John Chamberlain, mixed with invented ones in locations both historical Maxs Kansas City, Andy Warhols Factory and made up.

An anthology of her essays, The Hard Crowd, was published this month. Alongside tales of motorcycle racing, bartending in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco, and reflections on cult writers including Marguerite Duras, Denis Johnson and Clarice Lispector, the book includes essays on the artists Jeff Koons, Thomas Demand and Alex Brown. In another essay, Made to Burn, she reveals some of the art-historical inspirations for The Flamethrowers, such as Los Angeles artist Jack Goldsteins vinyl record of sound effects and the Italian photographer Gabriele Basilicos 1984 series Contact, showing the imprint of various designer chairs on a womans bottom. (The link between violence and modernism is everywhere but too broad to get into the form of a caption, she writes beneath the image.)

On the porch of her home in Angelino Heights here, Kushner, 52, spoke about her enduring interest in art and the individuals who make it. Here are edited excerpts from that conversation.

Whats in it for you, writing about visual art?

Its something of a natural affinity for me. I was always interested in art, even as a kid. Im originally from Eugene, Ore., then we moved to San Francisco. But I was lucky enough to get to visit New York in the 1970s and 80s and be exposed to the art world there. My aunt, the media activist and artist DeeDee Halleck, made films with the Land artist Nancy Holt and Richard Serra, and was friends with the installation artist Gordon Matta-Clark. When I was about 5, I remember visiting the artists Gate Hill Cooperative outside New York City, where DeeDee was living along with John Cage and the experimental filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek. A friends mother worked for Donald Judd as his studio manager. So I got a glimpse of things.

What impression did that make on you?

I was interested in it not just for the work people were making but how they talked and how they lived and the way they performed their personalities, which seemed to me a component of what they do. The way they move toward their curiosity, stay interested in new things happening around them. I look to them, probably more than I look to other writers, for how to be an artist, how to recognize whats yours for the taking.

How did you first come to write about art?

When I moved to New York in the mid-90s, I worked at a now defunct magazine called Grand Street, where the legendary curator Walter Hopps [the founding director of the Menil Collection in Houston] was the art editor. I had aspirations to write a novel, but hadnt figured out how to do that yet. Writing about art was a simpler proposition for me. Jack Bankowsky, then editor of Artforum, invited me to write for that magazine. And, separately, my social life was pretty quickly all artists. I felt comfortable in that world.

In The Hard Crowd you describe this period of your life in your essay about the painter and musician Alex Brown.

I wrote that piece right after Alex died, in 2019. In writing it, I realized that Alex had introduced me to an entire milieu, one that influenced the direction of my life. When I moved to New York, I met Alex right away, then his gallerist, Hudson, who ran Feature Inc., which was a gallery of artists who pretty much all hung out together, such as Huma Bhabha, Jason Fox and Alexander Ross. Really smart people. Older than me. I loved to listen to them having these late-night discussions, and it was all kind of over my head, but it was absorbing.

It seems you mine art as well as film and literature as raw material for your fiction.

Yes, I do do that. People in novels can and should be able to upholster their realities with art and films from this one. Plus, I never like reading about made up works of art. It seldom works and tends to feel coy and phony. For example, in The Flamethrowers, the character Ronnie Fontaine claims to want to photograph every living person, which was what the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler said he wanted to do [for his 1971 Variable Piece #70 (In Process) Global]. Or evocative details that I borrowed, like the artist and choreographer Yvonne Rainer removing thousands of pins from crevices in the floor of her SoHo loft, a former dress factory, with a magnet, in an era when artists were moving into former manufacturing spaces in New York.

Are there particular artists who have influenced you?

The filmmaker and artist James Benning is somebody I have grown quite close to, after he wrote me out the blue after he read The Flamethrowers. I was already thinking of his work, particularly the beautiful documentary he made in 2007, Casting a Glance, about Robert Smithsons Spiral Jetty. When I first watched his California Trilogy, I was just absolutely blown away by those films, and the way that he forces the viewer to sit with these long takes.

In 2018, I was at Scripps College as the Mary Routt Chair of Writing. As an assignment, I asked my students to come to the Skyspace installation they have on the Pomona campus by James Turrell. For two hours at sunset, we lay on cement benches and looked up at this rectangular cutout of sky. At one point, the sky started to vibrate, and the edges glowed violet and green.

Do you conflate looking and seeing and bearing witness? Theres a big difference between looking at the sky and visiting the Shuafat Refugee Camp in East Jerusalem, as you do in We Are Orphans Here from The Hard Crowd. (That essay appeared in The New York Times Magazine in 2016).

Im hesitant about this concept of bearing witness, because it suggests that theres a social importance to simply that, to being on the scene. But I was drawn to Shuafat, and writing about a place that few outsiders have been to. Im interested in the less and more visible elements of how a society organizes itself, and the way that people are sorted. I like to be immersed in worlds that are full of invisible codes that have to be teased out that have to be experienced directly, rather than through books.

In the new book, you credit the artist Richard Prince as an inspiration.

Richard has become a friend of mine. In The Flamethrowers, I included a character called John Dogg, which was Richards alter ego early in his career. In my story he made different work. In the catalog for his 2007 Guggenheim retrospective, there was a great essay by Glenn OBrien, which I loved because it was about humor and sensibility which, for me, really is what the art world is. You either get it or you dont. You just have to have the sense of play. Irony, too.

You have a lot of friends in the art world. Do you feel like an outsider?

Lets say Im more of an independent agent than an outsider. A floater. Like I could just go from one social scene to another but dont have to be defined or limited by each one.

Are your readers floaters, too? It seems unlikely that many will be as familiar with Jeff Koons as Marguerite Duras or Denis Johnson.

I wanted to make it so even somebody who had never heard of Jeff Koons could hopefully read the essay and get something out of it.

I love the part about the 1975 video clip you found, in which a young, mustachioed Koons, not yet performing his man-child consumerism, as you write, sweatily interviews David Byrne. He wanted to be cool, and he was cool, you said of Koons.

Hes the artist who is appreciated by people who are completely repulsed by and suspicious of the art world. I wanted to think about populism and in what way Koons is or isnt a populist artist, and in what way hes just kind of toying with populism.

One through line in the book seems to be this idea of being at the apex of your life, being finished with the new, and turning reflective, interior, to examine and sort and tally.

I wanted to give the reader an experience of these different worlds that Ive passed through and thought about. I think about something that was mentioned in the Peter Schjeldahl profile of my friend Laura Owens, the painter, from her diaries when she was young. Something like How to be an artist. One of her rules was contradict yourself constantly. I think thats totally amazing and insightful because it happens anyway. Cop to it, rather than always trying to present yourself as a seamlessly coherent narrative of mythology.

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Rachel Kushner on What She Takes From Art (and Artists) - The New York Times

Pope Francis meets with author Austen Ivereigh in November 2019. The pope collaborated with Ivereigh on the book, Let Us Dream: The Path to A Better Future. In the book, the pope said he experienced three COVID moments in his lifetime: lung problems that threatened his life when he was 21; his displacement in Germany in 1986 for studies; and when he was sent away to Cordoba, Argentina, for almost two years in the early 1990s. Let Us Dream will be published Dec. 1 by Simon & Schuster. (CNS photo/Vatican Media)

On April 15 Anglican theologian Angus Ritchie and papal biographer Austin Ivereigh coordinated a conference on the popes most recent book, Let Us Dream. It was a tremendous honor to be invited to present along with some representatives from Chicagos Coalition for Spiritual and Public Leadership (CSPL), not least of which because Pope Francis opened the online meeting by addressing us with a nine-minute reflection and blessing. (The popes reflection can be viewed at youtu.be/PxxGx6aXGZ8)

The gathering brought together theologians, university administrators, community organizers and pastoral practitioners from around the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe, as well as a number of migrants to those areas from the global south.

The pope has talked frequently about popularismo, or what Ritchie has rebranded Inclusive Populism. This political life rooted in the people served as the basis for our discussions about the challenges and opportunities emerging in what we all hope (eventually) to be a post-pandemic world. As the pope has said many times, we as a planet will either be better or worse after the trauma of the last year. None of us can now claim to be blithely unaffected by the trends of globalization, nor convinced that things can somehow magically return to be the same as they were before these recent events.

One of the words that kept arising in these discussions was protagonists, because recognizing the agency of the People of the God is the only way to avoid political and ecclesial paternalism.

As Pope Francis put it to us: When people are cast aside they are denied not just material wellbeing, but the dignity of acting, of being a protagonist in their own destiny and history, of expressing themselves with their values and culture, their creativity and fruitfulness.

He charged every diocese in the world to collaborate with popular movements more intentionally.

Let Us Dream is structured with precisely this goal in mind: to encourage people around the world to develop a new way of viewing reality, a spiritually-rooted path of discerning, and a fearless commitment to engaging both interior and structural realities. One of the popes intellectual and pastoral mentors, Belgian Cardinal Joseph Cardijn, once called this quintessentially Thomistic construction a see-judge-act methodology.

Theological themes like close proximity with those who suffer, fostering a culture of encounter, and manifesting responsible and sustainable stewardship of Gods gracious gift of the material world all allow us to assess the dawn of this new era after COVID with realistic hope for a better and more inclusive tomorrow.

As contrasted with faux populist movements metastasizing around the world, inclusive populism cannot be authentically reflected in ideologies that bedeck themselves in religious garb but fail to embody the message of genuine respect and self-negating conversion that lie at the heart of the Good News.

As theologian Brad Hinze, who was also in attendance, has argued: when conflict is properly understood, its familiar dimensions of violence and destruction of relationships (albeit real), can also be complemented by the ability to disclose and actualize the power of Gods mysterious self-communication at work in subject formation of individuals and groups. We know this in our own lives when painful moments enable us to grow as subjects who love, will and act more effectively. It is also true socially and collectively. A prophetic defiance of the status quo allows protagonists to mature in their relationship to the divine and to one other. Thus a politics rooted in the people will necessarily flow out of both parrhesia (speaking forthrightly) and the grace of conflict, which doesnt diminish respect for the other, but rather helps forge it in the powerful crucible of interpersonal exchange.

Originally from Collingswood, Michael M. Canaris, Ph.D., teaches at Loyola University, Chicago.

Excerpt from:

Dreaming of a pope-inspired, post-pandemic world - Catholic Star Herald