Category Archives: Abolition Of Work

Ted Knight, who died on March 29 aged 86, was a divisive figure even in the Labour movement.

He led Lambeth council from 1978 to 1985 and spearheaded its defiance of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who had attempted to cap local government spending.

He refused and persuaded his 31 Labour colleagues to do so. Ultimately, they all ended up being disqualified fromelected public office for the rest of their lives.

John McDonnell, ex-Shadow Chancellor, described his old friend last week as one of the finest and most courageous socialists I have known.

Norwood resident Mr Knight had been politically active from his childhood in the North-East.

His father, who was in the Royal Navy, encouraged Ted to hand out leaflets for Clement Attlees Labour Party at the post-war General Election. Knight joined the Labour Party League of Youth in 1949.

He was expelled from the party in 1954 for being a member of the Socialist Labour League, which associated with Trotskyists and organising a meeting on the abolition of the monarchy.

He was finally re-admitted in 1970 and told the admissions panel he wasa Marxist.

And he was soon secretary of Lewisham Trades Council. He became a councillor in Norwood in 1974 and by 1978 was the leader of Lambeth council.

Mr Knight quit his job as a contracts manager of a cleaning firm to work at the council full-time.

He led the council on a 60 a week the allowance for attending committee meetings and drove a 12-year-old Rover car.

He said: When you are in control of a 150million budget it is nonsense to suggest that you can do it in your spare time.

Knight founded the weekly Labour Herald in 1981, along with Ken Livingstone, then leader of the Greater London Council, and Matthew Warburton, the deputy leader of Lambeth.

In his memoirs, Mr Livingstone said Knight had an impeccable haircut, immaculate clothes and class-based approach to politics.

The Conservative landslide at the 1979 General Election meant both sides took up entrenched positions but Thatcher had the power to impose the law.

In 1984, she decided to cap local government spending through the Rates Act. Scores of Labour councils initially resisted but in the end only Liverpool, led by the notorious Derek Hatton, and Lambeth stood their ground.

Mr Knight dubbed Red Ted by Thatchers supporters in the national press refused to abide by the capped rate in 1985, because it would have meant massive cuts to services.

The district auditor notified him and the 31 others that he intended to fine them 125,000 for the debts run up when they refused to set a legal rate.

Mr Knight said: We intend to fight. We wont concede. We wont because we cannot concede if we are really representatives of working class people in this area.

In the end, the money was raised by Labour party members.

The Department of the Environment, which funded up to 75 per cent of local government spending at the time, in the end found the money to sustain Lambeth spending at its existing levels for a year.

But many of his party colleagues complained that his activities as Lambeth leader divided the party, made it unelectable and paved the way for Conservative dominance for the next 11 years.

Former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn was his agent when he stood in Hornsey in 1979. He said last week: We were and remained very different characters. But it never stopped us from working together across London.

His leadership of Lambeth council was legendary. He stood up to the Thatcher Government and improved public services to meet the needs of working people. The establishment made him pay a huge price by trying to bankrupt him. But he was not deterred by this and spent his life campaigning for socialism.

Mr McDonnell said: Ted Knight was one of the finest and most courageous socialists I have known. He was indefatigable in his campaign for a society based upon equality, social justice and solidarity.

No matter what was thrown against him, he stood firm in his beliefs.

He devoted his life to the greatest cause there is, humanity.

Len McCluskey, the general secretary of the union Unite, said: Ted was a true spirit and a fierce fighter for his class.I have been proud to know Ted for many years, and to have been inspired by his leadership and socialist convictions.

Ted will be much missed but in offering our sincere condolences to his family and friends on behalf of Unite, I hope the admiration and respect so many have for Ted will be of comfort. Goodbye my friend.

Ed Hall, from Blackheath and former secretary of Lambeth Unison, said: At his peak, he could come across as haughty, even dictatorial. But I personally think he was astonishingly selfless and brave.

It was obvious his career would be destroyed by his rebellion in a way which Margaret Hodge and Ken Livingstone would never have been able to stomach.

But it did not seem to bother Ted that he would be in the shadows.

I was always astounded he managed to persuade 31 other Labour colleagues to follow him when the same fate awaited them. Where some politicians are looking for advancement, he did the opposite.

He helped keep youth clubs and libraries going and supported the gay and feminist movements when they were unfashionable.

And I cannot think of anyone like him who could turn around a cold community hall meeting of hostile people.

Mr Knight was also co-founder and chairman of the Croydon Assembly organisation, which staged regular meetings and rallies at Ruskin House over the past decade.

He also became chairman of Gipsy Hill Labour Party branch in 2016.

A memorial meeting will be organised later in the year.

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South London Memories: Ted Knight, divisive figure and political activist in the Labour Movement - London News Online

The mainstream conversation around mental health in the U.S.and throughout much of the Western worldfocuses on the relatively mild afflictions of the decently well-off. Sometimes, during times of fear and crisis, cynical politicians may zero in on the possible mental illness of individuals who commit acts of mass violence. But rarely do we talk about conditions of those with severe mental illness who, instead of receiving compassionate lifelong care, are usually tossed into prisons and onto the streets, typically out of view of those of us who can waltz in and out of psychologists offices as regular or occasional acts of self-care.

Psychiatrist and filmmaker Dr. Ken Rosenbergs latest documentary, Bedlam, premiering on PBS April 13, asks the American public to seriously contend with the extreme neglect and punitive measures Los Angeles County, as well as the rest of the country, has leveraged against those who most desperately need consistent and competent care. To do this, Rosenberg fuses both the personal story of his own sisters struggle with schizophrenia (and his subsequent choice to pursue a career in psychiatry) and the stories of several patients and their families who are routed in and out of the overburdened emergency psychiatric healthcare system.

Long-term care for those with severe mental illnessparticularly among the poor and working classhas essentially been eradicated from the U.S. in the decades since the middle of the last century, as mental health institutionalization became seen as inhumaneand many of the practices in most institutions werethe U.S. government, under JFK (whose own severely mentally ill sister was irrevocably harmed by a lobotomy), decided to turn patients out into society with little or no support. Instead of reimagining what compassionate lifetime care for those who needed it could look like, the state and federal government decided it would be easier to take the laissez-faire route.

Dr. Rosenberg wasnt originally going to include his family and sisters story, and in the film, you can tell that the rehashing he does is painful. I intended to make a film that had nothing to do with me. [A film] that would show life in the emergency room, because thats always interesting and exciting. But it was not really fair to the viewers because they wouldnt know why I was there and why I was doing it, Dr. Rosenberg explained. When you film someone in the emergency room, you get a glimpse of someone in a moment in time, but its not really the whole picture. You dont know what theyre like when theyre well, with their family, at work; theres so much you dont know about them.

But the effect is one of visible solidarity with his subjects: Bedlam doesnt gawk at or scrutinize the people with mental illness it encounters or their families; instead, the film becomes a charged vessel for action. I felt that to really do justice to the subjects in the film, Id really have to go to homes and collaborate with them and find them, said Dr. Rosenberg. And the beauty of filmmaking is in doing that, I found Patrisse, Montes sister, who ended up being one of the worlds foremost activists by the time the film was over.

That is Patrisse Cullors, a co-founder of the Movement for Black Lives and member of prison abolition organization JusticeLA (shes also a writer on the Hulu show Good Trouble). Her brother, Monte, goes in and out of the ER and prison due to his schizoaffective and bipolar disorders, and Patrisses lifelong activism coalesces around the act of caring and thus advocating for him. We first meet Monte in 2013, in the psych ER, where he is kind, energetic, and also in the middle of an episodehe had previously stopped taking his medication, and is having visions of fantastical horned adversaries.

Patrisse understands that caring for her brother will be lifetime workand its work shes honored to do. In the film, she explains that when her brother was first diagnosed, she made the decision she would never let his condition negatively affect how she sees him. Its a theoretically simple sentiment, but one you see play out in the documentary in incredible ways. Monte is a big black man, and so racismwherein he is seen as a threat to the state not only because of his illness but because of his racial identitybecomes yet another preexisting condition. So, in co-founding the Movement for Black Lives and JusticeLA, Patrisse had the question of mental illness at the front of her mind.

For a number of reasons, there dont seem to be a huge number of people who are (currently) able or willing to show up for severely mentally ill family members and friends with the same solidarity and acceptance (not to mention the degree of advocacy) that Patrisse offers to her brother Monte and others. Dr. Rosenbergs own family story shows how this widespread reality is not necessarily due to a lack of love but because both our social fabric and the provisional mental healthcare system we have are designed to undermine or prevent any and all love expressed between the severely mentally ill and their communities.

Because of Monte and Patrisse, as well as Todda middle-aged white houseless man with HIV and an undisclosed mood disorderBedlam becomes a film that is not about severe mental illness as its own isolated issue or identity, but about prison abolition, which is to say the coalition-based, momentous social change necessary to begin building a society based on cooperation and care rather than fear and punishment.

The idea of prison abolition is critiqued by both left and right, with extreme cases brought up as supposed evidence that prisons must continue to exist in some form, for some people. For liberals, that typically means those who commit acts of violence (rapists and serial murderers, especially) and for some leftists, that means white-collar capitalist criminals (the ruthless billionaires, profiteers, and exploiters). There are also racialized people otherwise open to abolition whose limit may be found at the very real existence of violent racists. Prison abolitionists are well aware of and sensitive to the harm of violence in communities and for survivors, but dont believe prisons have solved or can solve its trouble and terror.

I think there is a lot of misunderstanding [about] what we mean when we say abolish the prison/police state, Patrisse told me over the phone, Because the idea of abolition is about getting rid of one thing, but its also about imagining anew. And abolitionists practice at the intersection of healthcare, our legal system, [and] how we fundamentally take care of each other as human beings. We have designed a system that is punitive, that is about othering people, shaming people. Weve designed a system that really does value people based [on] their skin color, their size, their ability, their gender; and abolition is actually challenging us to evolve as human beings, to relate to harm and violence from a place of compassion, interdependence, dignity, and care. The abolitionist approach is a philosophy, a theory, and in that theory we try to figure out how we process it.

Weve designed a system that really does value people based [on] their skin color, their size, their ability, their gender, and abolition is actually challenging us to evolve as human beings, to relate to harm and violence from a place of compassion, interdependence, dignity, and care.

When someone like Lis Smith, former Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigiegs senior communications adviser, accuses abolitionists of posturing for Twitter retweets and preventing reasonable incremental change, she is really admitting the current system suits herand her careerjust fine. But Patrisse insists that no one is safe in the process and the theory we live under right now. Prison abolition demands us to imagine a collective future of care, not a top-down rationing of it. And abolitionists arent against meaningful reform: With the March 3 primary election, Patrisse and the organization she chairs, Reform L.A. Jails, was able to make an important step forward by getting a majority of votes for measure R, which requires Los Angeles County to invest in rehabilitation and mental health treatment while reducing jail populations.

Dr. Rosenberg, for his part, believes coalition is essential to a mental healthcare movement that doesnt meaninglessly split hairs over, for instance, drug treatment versus psychotherapy or a medical model versus a psychological model (he writes more extensively about these differing perspectives in the book version of Bedlam). Because we are so at odds with each other and because we are so ashamed of this and deny it and dont talk about it, as a consequence, thats where we get taken advantage ofby pharmaceutical companies, prisons and jails. And the care of the mentally ill ends up going to the highest bidder.

Bedlam makes a compelling argument for why mental health cannot be treated like a niche issue, separate from either the material or social conditions of the 99 percent. As weve seen with the coronavirus pandemic, the failure of the U.S. healthcare system is tied up in the failure of the state itself. To do anything about it, well have to get at the root.

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Inside America's Mental Health Crisis and the Case for Prison Abolition - The Daily Beast

Call your own shots. In another abrupt shift, President Trump said on Thursday that hes now leaving the reopening of states up to governors. This latest development came as the White House issued a set of basic checkboxes to help understand when to allow various activities to resume. These include, for example, not opening back upuntil:

Critical caveat: Four months after the first U.S. case was found, the White House still has offered no detailed plan for reaching any of the goalsabove.

Public-health experts insist that one key to resuming normalcy is greatly expanding testing, ensuring that it is accessible and affordable, and putting the resulting data to effective use through contract tracing and isolation plans. And states have had to organize in regional consortiums to end the medical-gear bidding wars that had emerged in the absence of a federalresponse.

By the way: Those governor consortiums grew again on Thursday with the emergence of a Midwest group consisting of the governors of Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana and Kentucky. CNN has more on that, here.

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Youre going to call your own shots, Trump told U.S. governors in a call Thursday afternoon, a recording of which was obtained by AP. Were going to be standing alongside ofyou.

Some White House officials did concede that this will all take a while. The new guidelines make clear that the return to normalcy will be a far longer process than Trump initially envisioned, with federal officials warning that some social distancing measures may need to remain in place through the end of the year to prevent a new outbreak, AP writes. And they largely reinforce plans already in the works by governors, who have primary responsibility for public health in theirstates.

Update: The Theodore Roosevelt sailor who died of COVID-19 has been identified. Aviation Ordnanceman Chief Petty Officer Charles Robert Thacker Jr., 41, of Fort Smith, Arkansas, died Monday at Naval Hospital Guam. His wife, also a Navy sailor, was at his side, a Navy releasesaid.

There are now 660 known cases of COVID-19 among Thackers shipmates, or 13 percent of the sidelined aircraft carriers crew. More on the ship after thefold.

Whats Wrong With the Air Forces Connect Everything Project // Patrick Tucker: In a new report, GAO watchdogs say officials cant say how much it costs or if itll evenwork

Global Business Brief // Marcus Weisgerber: USN, USAF acquisition chiefs talk COVID; Shipbuilder staggers shifts; Contractor accidentally ejects himself; andmore

No Military Has Done More for Corona-Stricken Allies Than Germanys // Elisabeth Braw: The Bundeswehr has been flying supplies to, and medevacing patients from, its Europeanneighbors.

Haircuts in a Time of Coronavirus? // Jim Golby: There have been too many confusing messages during this crisis. Senior military and civilian leaders should be enforcing social distancing as much as discipline, and with onevoice.

Welcome to this Friday edition of The D Brief from Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. Send us tips from your community right here. And if youre not already subscribed to The D Brief, you can do that here. On this day in 1946, the French military officially withdrew its last soldier from Syria under the so-called French mandate, thereby granting Syria its fullindependence.

The French navy is under fire for how the coronavirus spread on its aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle, Reuters reports from Paris. So far, Nearly 700 out of 1,767 sailors in the carrier group that includes the flagship Charles de Gaulle have so far tested positive for the virus, a total expected to rise when results are finalised from a third of the tests. Twenty crew members are in hospital, including one in intensive care. Read on, here.Roosevelt updates: The Navys COVID fact sheet for Friday reports that 660 of the Theodore Roosevelts 4,865 sailors have COVID-19, while 3,920 have tested negative. 4,059 sailors have moved ashore into isolation accommodations on Guam, where the nuclear-powered carrier has been sidelined since March 27. Seven sailors are in U.S. Naval Hospital Guam for COVID-19 symptoms, one in the ICU.Othernews:

Elsewhere in Europe, outdoor Rome has become a place for the birds, thanks to the coronavirus. AFP takes you there, here.And in Belfast, Ireland, vans are driving around with kegs of Guinness for at-home delivery since the pubs are all closed.Perhaps unsurprisingly, Moscow has more coronavirus cases than state testing shows, Reuters reports today. Employees from three Moscow-based private laboratories told Reuters that positive results were coming back in between 1% and 5% of cases - a wide range but a significantly greater share than the official tally. Like many countries, Russia is not carrying out mass testing, focusing solely on people with symptoms, those who have returned from abroad or people who have had known contact with infected individuals. More here.Meanwhile in NW Syria, some families are heading back to their destroyed neighborhoods because they just might be safer there than in crowded refugee camps.Also in Syria this week: Russian and Turkish troops went on their fourth joint patrol on Wednesday, Reuters reported in a very short hit, here.

In tech news this week, Indias government is the latest to ban Zoom for official business, citing concerns over the apps privacy vulnerabilities. The advisory came from Indias Cyber Coordination Centre, and comes as several companies including Google, Apple, NASA, and Tesla have urged or warned their employees from using Zoom, TechCrunch reports, adding German and Taiwan have also banned the use of Zoom in their nations. More here.Google seems to smell blood in the water and on Thursday announced an expansion of its video conferencing tool Meet for educators and businesses. The integration of Meet with e-mail is the first of several features being launched ahead of schedule because of a surge in demand for video conferencing, Reuters reported after speaking to Google vice president Javier Soltero.Notable fine print: Google is not charging customers for upgrades to Meet-related features like large video calls during a six-month period ending in September, Reuters writes. The policy, which is aimed at winning over customers in the long run, could add to the strain on Googles profits at a time at when its ads sales business is taking a hit. More here, or read Googles explainer here.

And finally: This week we learned that U.S.military personnel perform, on average, like or slightly better than the civilian population along a variety of metrics including such as family income and family wealth as well as cognitive abilities. Thats one facet of some recent research in the Journal of Strategic Studies looking at American military demographic trends over the past roughly five decades. The findings were highlighted in a Thursday report from The Economist entitled, Social climbing: Recruits to Americas armed forces are not what they used to be.The work was sparked by a reassessment of an intense debate between two opposing camps, headed by two leading intellectuals, Milton Friedman and Charles Moskos. For Friedman, compulsory military service led to a military of slaves. For Moskos, a military of volunteers was a military of mercenaries.As a former soldier, attempts to apply that slave/mercenary dichotomy to the U.S. military of today seem more than just misguided and offensive to your D Brief-er. But apparently, From past research, we know that from the abolition of the draft through the mid-1990s, Moskos prediction about the socio-economic backgrounds of those who joined the military turned out to be correct. However, that is no longer the case.Long story short: for the period 1997-2008, the U.S. armed forces have been recruiting primarily from the middle-class rather than from poorest (or the richest) groups, the researchers write.To expand on that, recent recruits tend to have higher than average socioeconomic background: they disproportionally come from the middle of the family income, family wealth, and cognitive skill distributions, with both tails under-represented. Whats more, among individuals from low socioeconomic backgrounds, those with higher cognitive abilities i.e., those with better career options are more likely to enlist, in contrast to the existing understanding.Perhaps most interestingly for the future of U.S. national security, the authors write Rather than an entity separated from the rest of society, as some have warned, men and women who serve are likely to embody the values and culture of the median voters. This affects not only the nature of the military itself, but also the calculations in terms of costs and benefits of democracies electing to go to war.Theres even a takeaway regarding Chinas rise in the 21st century buried in this research: But as the research by Stephen Biddle has long shown, U.S. military prowess comes not only from its technology, but also from the human capital of those employing it and from the extensive training they receive. This means that in the emerging military-technological rivalry between the USA and China, the competition for talent will play an increasingly important role.Read the rest of the research, here. And a big tip of the hat to Defense One contributor Jim Golby for flagging it on Twitter thismorning.

Have a safe weekend, everyone. And well see you again onMonday!

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Where is the White House's testing plan?; States teaming up; Navy COVID casualty, ID'd; The most helpful NATO ally; And a bit more. - Defense One

Uberisation has become so prevalent in our Western economies that the word itself has entered the most conservative French dictionaries. The uberisation of the economy refers to a new type of worker, most of the time working for digital platforms as gig workers. Such platforms business model only works if they offload their costs related to employees and most often, also their tax burden, as most of these companies are based in tax havens or states that have highly reduced corporate taxes.

Digital platforms such as UBER, Deliveroo, Take it Easy, Foodora or Amazon choose to rely on freelance service providers rather than contracted workers in order to make an increased margin of profit. These platforms entice thousands of workers with false promises on the advantages of not being salaried employees: freedom, staggered working hours, being their own boss and so forth.

The other side of the coin is obvious, but not always properly assessed by those that are targeted: since they are not contracted workers, they do not benefit from the protection of Employment Law or from collective agreements. They therefore do not have access to employment benefits such as paid holidays, compulsory weekly rest, a minimum fixed salary, limited grounds for dismissal and, above all, unemployment protection and pension contributions. This pension contribution usually amounts to 50 percent of their wage and would be covered by the employer in France if they were under contract

What freedom is there when such platforms impose clients and routes? How can you be your own boss when you cannot turn down a call or a passenger at the risk of being badly rated and immediately dismissed? What free time do you have when you do not set your own prices and those imposed on you are so low that they force you to work until you find that you are putting your life, and sometimes even your health, in danger?

Ken Loach, in his latest film Sorry we missed you, illustrates the precariousness under which the uberisation of our economies is placing an increasing proportion of workers, including its potentially fatal consequences: You dont get hired here, states the delivery-depot boss in Loachs movie You come on board. We call it on-boarding. You dont workforus you workwithus but you die alone as a consequence of it, he may have added.

Uberised workers have become the new slaves of our economies: they are exploited at will for miserable incomes without any social protection and permanently tracked by embedded geolocation tools. The newspaper The Australian referred to this as The Hunger Games at Work.

Many large companies have seen the benefits they can derive from this flexible and disposable workforce. For example, some French retail banks recently announced that their account managers would soon no longer be hired as employees but will be accepted on a freelance basis.

During COVID19, major household retailers are now also adopting similar practices: in France as in other European countries, supermarkets like Franprix and Carrefour are taking advantage of this crisis to uberise their new staff instead of hiring them, even though their current profits would enable them to continue hiring employees.

Not only do self-employed workers no longer have any income, but they also have no right to unemployment benefit. They have little or no access to medical services depending on the country in which they work. Yet on the frontline, one finds those exploited workers, serving as delivery people who take on the risks of the virus to deliver takeaway meals, DVDs and toys to a confined population who will pay a trifle for a non-essential service.

A large number of customers who have become accustomed to these types of services for quite a few years now do not seem to ever ask themselves the question of whether or not they are endangering the lives of others. It is reminiscent of left-wing politicians prior to the COVID19 crisis arriving in Uber cars to campaign rallies where they would denounce low wages and precarious working situations.

Uberised workers constitute a proletariat that we do not hear from because they are not salaried workers and hence do not have workers representatives nor trade unions to speak for them.

For the moment, salvation came from a few courageous individuals amongst them and from the reasonable decisions handed down by several courts of justice that have taken hold of the problem in a number of European countries and beyond:

Most recently on 4 March 2020 the French Court of Cassation demonstrated the existence of employer-employee relationship between the Uber platform and its workers as they must obey the platforms commands and handed down a major ruling which reclassified this kind of service contract as an employment contract with all of the protections inherent to the status.

Platforms complained that this would ruin their business model. Ironically, it could be argued that in the early 19th century some businessmen also considered that the abolition of slavery would ruin their businesses, but this obviously would not justify holding back the abolition of slavery. Nevertheless, Emmanuel Macrons government immediately reacted by declaring that there was a need to invent new rules allowing freedom. Whose freedom?

In these times of COVID19, where health protection is synonymous with life or death, it is essential on this subject as on many others that DiEM25 encourages and leads trans-European reflection to counter the wishes of neoliberal governments allied with such platforms.

These platforms do not even pay taxes in the countries where their underpaid and abused workers operate, face danger and have to be taken care of by underfunded hospitals and infrastructure. They need to be held accountable for the position that they are putting workers in. The uberisation of the economy must be halted in order to guarantee that the labor rights of all European peoples are protected.

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Uberised workers are on the frontline of the crisis - DiEM25

Seven years after Nirbhaya was gang-raped and tortured on a bus in Delhi, four of her killers were hanged at 5.30 a.m. at Tihar Jail on March 20, 2020. Millions in India and around the globe celebrated. The judiciary may have delivered a just verdict but are mere legal remedies enough? Despite the initial shock and horror that the Nirbhaya incident evoked, violence against women continues. The question still remains whether women are free to walk the streets of any village, town, or major city in the world at any time of day or night?

Anthropologist and dancer, Saskia Kersenboom writes in her article, Bhoga-Sakti: The Silent Witness to the Life of Devadasis, the word bhoga refers to delight, enjoyment and sensuous experience and that Telugu speaking communities referred to devadasis as bhogam. In addition, a devadasi functioned as a proxy to the goddess both in the temple and outside for the well being of society. She learned dance and music and was the repository of artistic knowledge. Perhaps for centuries, India had a balanced perspective on the erotic, as evidenced in early devadasi practices, but partly because of colonialism, there was a shift in thinking by the nineteenth and early twentieth century which led to the abolition of devadasi practices. As a result of the adoption of Victorian era moral codes, among other factors, erotic poetry that had been previously acceptable was now censored and considered a moral depravity. Art historian and curator Naman Ahuja in his article, The Responsibility for Protecting Erotica, points out, the more we censor and repress erotica, the worse the offences against women will get.

Collaborative approach

S3: Sthree: Woman is a multi-year, multidisciplinary, inter-cultural work in development that deals with violence against women. The collaborative work between us (Priyadarsini Govind and Dr. Priya Srinivasan) with Lalgudi Vijayalakshmi (violinist/composer), Uthra Vijay (Carnatic singer/composer), Ching Ching Ho (Director/dramaturgy), Dr. Philipa Rothfield (philosopher and dance writer) and Arun Munoz (photography), suggests why the classical arts contain possibilities to uphold social justice issues in this work. Bringing together Ching Ching, who works as a translator and director, and Philipa, who is trained in contemporary movement and feminist philosophical thought enables the sharing of the work to diverse audiences.

The performance pares down the classical dance music ensemble to a solo voice and instrument. The unique addition is a Carnatic music choir (Keerthana Womens Choir) which represents the collective female voice and is an important physical and aural theatrical presence in the production. Using the device of interruption, the experimental work toggles in time between excerpts of the 3rd century epic poem, The Devi Mahatmyam, and police reports of the Nirbhaya and Jill Meagher incidents in Delhi and Melbourne in 2012.

Priya: The idea came after the Nirbhaya protests were sparked. I wanted to find out how the classical forms I was trained in could speak about this issue. Around this time I saw Priyadarsini perform her famous Devi piece and was deeply moved by its beauty and power. The advertising campaign in India on Abused Goddesses which came out in 2013 also had a deep impact on me. I began thinking about how to weave the power, beauty and raw energy of the Goddess killing asuras with the demons of the 21st century. Earlier iterations of this work included collaborations with Uthra Vijay in Barcelona and flamenco artistes such as Alba Guerrero in 2018 and with Hari Sivanesan (veena artiste) and Jay Dabgar (tabla player) in Melbourne in 2017/2019 asking what would happen if musicians moved to become characters in the piece, and dancers spoke, to ask how we can call upon the goddess now? I wanted to use the beauty of the classical forms including ancient Sanskrit texts and harness them to the raw power of contemporary incidents of violence from police reports to see what it could create.

Priyadarsini: As a performing artiste, my goal is to understand the beauty of a text and then to visualise and capture it in my interpretation for the experience of the viewer. The composition has a latent power in and of itself and the training I have received is to go deep inside it. I harness my training to visualise the meaning within the text and remain faithful to the composers intent. When I ventured into a production like S3 that is experimental, both theatre and dance and not a traditional dance piece, that uses different texts, I had to strike a balance between my training and how to communicate social issues. I had to re-learn my medium and adapt my style to communicate the violence of the Sthree text through my art that is at once powerful and moving without losing the intrinsic beauty of the medium of dance. I had to find my voice within the text. What I have received from this work is the raw emotion and the power of a story that needs to be told.

Choir chanting

Both the Nirbhaya and Jill Meagher rape and murder incidents in 2012 gave rise to protest movements in Delhi, Melbourne and around the world. The performance production of S3 explores the female voice calling upon the Goddess when the human female body is subject to complete annihilation. Can the power of the collective female voice through the choir chanting of ancient hymns to the Goddess call her into existence? The intention of the production is to catalyse thoughts and responses in people and question why violence against women keeps occurring? Can the performance trigger the audience to feel their anguish and rage in a safe way inside the theatre space? How can performing this work enable artistes to reach audiences so they can tap into their emotions and move them into action?

Priyadarsini Govind is a national and international award winning Bharatanatyam dancer and artiste based in Chennai.

Dr. Priya Srinivasan is a dancer, curator and author of the book Sweating Saris: Indian Dance as Transnational Labour, based in Melbourne, Australia.

(Part 1 of the series appeared on march 19: https://www.thehindu.com/

entertainment/dance/relevance-

of-a-devadasis-work/

article31107081.ece)

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Dance as a medium to deal with social issues - The Hindu

It never gets old. Every time the political establishmentsucceeds in suppressing a challenge to the status quo, liberal pundits rush to their desks to cluck their tongues. Once again, they proclaim, class struggle has been exposed as a delusion. Marxism, an outmoded 19th century doctrine, has been "refuted" once again.

In a recent, much-read Vox article titled "Why Bernie Sanders Failed," Zack Beauchamp joins this tired chorus. "The Sanders campaign and his supporters bet on a theory of class politics that turned out to be wrong," he says. Sanders failed because his strategy "rested in part on a Marx-inflected theory of how people think about politics," Beauchamp says. He continues:

A basic premise of Marxist political strategy is that people should behave according to their material self-interest as assessed by Marxists which is to say, their class interests. Proposing policies like Medicare-for-all, which would plausibly alleviate the suffering of the working class, should be effective at galvanizing working-class voters to turn out for left parties.

The problems with Beauchamp's argument are myriad. Perhaps most crucially, he seems to have no idea what Marxism is. Nor did his editors.

One can't blame Vox entirely. Throughout the history of capitalism, Marxism has been subjected to caricatures and distortions. But not only are the basic premises of Marxism quite different from what Beauchamp suggests, it turns out that the fortunes of the Bernie Sanders campaign confirm them quite definitively.

First and foremost, liberals are constantly worried about people "voting against their interests." When they talk about this, they're already invoking social class as a political problem. When Vox says "class conflict doesn't dominate the American political scene," this is totally at odds with the way we actually talk about American politics. According to a certain liberal common sense, working class voters are continually supporting Republicans, against "interests" which haven't yet been defined.

This is why Marxism is relevant; it isn't a reduction of politics to "material interests," it's a critique of the whole category of "interests." Now, it's true that in the most famous excerpts of Marx there are various references to the antagonistic interests of the two social classes that Marx theorized: the bourgeoisie, who own the means of production, and the proletariat, who have to work for them. It's also true that these excerpts, leading up to "The Communist Manifesto," seem to depict an inevitable process. In this version, the forces of history lead inexorably to workers realizing their objective, economic interests and engaging in revolution to achieve them. These get unified into a kind of textbook interpretation, which has been promulgated by academics as well as by the official socialist movement, which says that workers will ultimately necessarily engage in class struggle when they inevitably realize their objective interests.

But this interpretation of Marx whether it's being advanced by critics of Marxism or Marxists themselves (what used to be called "vulgar Marxists") doesn't accurately convey the insights of Marx's analysis. Specifically, there are two problems.

First, it's one thing to say that the two classes of capitalist societies have antagonistic interests. This is just a description of a social fact: bosses and workers can't both get what they want. Bosses want to get richer, and workers want to live better lives; but as Marx described at length, the bosses only get richer by exploiting workers.

This is all pretty straightforward. But there's big leap from describing these antagonistic interests a relationship between classes to saying that people are fundamentally motivated by economic interests, and that this determines their political behavior. As it happens, that's not a Marxist argument; it's actually the argument of apologists for capitalism like Adam Smith, who were trying to argue that acting in one's self-interest wasn't immoral, but was actually the basis for greater prosperity.

The idea that human action is motivated by interests is a core aspect of capitalist ideology, and it's become such a powerful component of our common sense that sometimes Marxists try to cram their own perspective into it, by arguing that self-interest really has to include sympathy for others. But Smith already argued that sympathy was fundamental to human behavior in his "Theory of Moral Sentiments," which preceded the more famous "Wealth of Nations." The Marxist theory is totally different.

In fact, in some of his earliest writings, Marx had already totally rejected the idea that politics could be equated with individual self-interest even if these interests were seen as the basis for democratic rights, which were Marx's primary concern as a young radical struggling for democracy against the absolutist state in 19th-century Europe. From his vantage point, the problem was not that capitalism violated people's interests, but rather that it separated people from each other and from the community, and furthermore, separated them from their very own powers, which then towered over them in the form of the state.

Marx thought that real emancipation would mean reabsorbing these separated powers into the human community not realizing some abstract "interest." In fact, the reason Marx came to think that the working class would have to lead the revolution for real emancipation wasn't because it represented objective, "material" interests, but because it had no real "interests" within the existing society.

When the bourgeoisie waged a revolution against feudalism as in the American and French revolutions it had represented its own limited, partial class interests as the interests of the whole society. But the proletariat, because it was so totally excluded from the structure of society, could only have an "interest" in universal emancipation, in overcoming the domination of everyone. In other words, the program of the proletariat was the abolition of "interests."

Second, Marx quickly had to abandon the view that revolutions would happen automatically when workers became aware of their exploitation, because right after the appearance of "The Communist Manifesto," the revolutions of 1848 demonstrated that revolutions are extremely complicated processes. There are many different class "interests" at play the interests of aristocrats, landlords, financiers, industrialists, the middle classes, the working class, peasants, and so on. In revolutions, different fractions of society form alliances and make different kinds of demands that hold those alliances together. So these "interests" aren't just reflections of people's objective positions in society, but are constituted by political processes.

Ultimately people might "vote against their interests," the phenomenon which causes so much liberal handwringing today. Marx reflected on this in the aftermath of the revolutions of 1848, noting that there was no clear alignment of interests among the various class fractions. The counterrevolutionary stability of French society ended up being secured by a despotic buffoon this might sound familiar who relied on conservative ideology and the support of the peasantry for his election and subsequent coup.

This meant, for Marx, that he had to shift from just looking at the economic determination of historical events to thinking about the state. The capitalist state had the function of maintaining class rule; in a fundamentally unequal society, there has to be some way of pacifying conflict and ensuring stability. But the way it did this was often contradictory, with different factions in the state advancing different strategies for maintaining power.

The fact that the capitalist state is structured around maintaining the power of the ruling class and this can constantly be verified empirically when you look at the policies politicians advocate, their sources of funding, the social networks they're embedded in, and so on means that socialists trying to enter into the state have the deck stacked against them. They're trying to shift political power towards the working class within a structure that is specifically designed to exclude the working class from governance. The response from the Democratic Party to the unexpected (albeit short-lived) success of the Sanders campaign showed precisely how this works: politicians will form alliances and use the party apparatus against the opposition.

The easiest way to maintain ruling-class power is through violence, and capitalist states have not been shy about doing so in the past. But in democratic societies, this can't be the standard operating procedure. Violence is still used in the form of the police and the military, but the state has to gain popular consent, and the Marxist term for how this happens is "ideology."

Liberal pundits tend to talk about ideology in terms of opinions people hold, which are supposed to determine how they vote. This is quite distinct from the Marxist theory of ideology, which is not about consciously held opinions. It's clear that there's frequently a disconnect between people's opinions on policy issues and their voting behavior. Furthermore, people's opinions change all the time; I have personally changed my opinion on several matters over the past few weeks.

So ideology is better understood as the way we form our ideas as a result of everyday habits that we're trained in by our existing institutions. Voting is such a habit. If I spend my entire adult life choosing between two political parties which each represent the same position on certain fundamental questions about the nature of our society for example, whether healthcare is a human right that habit generates certain patterns of thought which I may not even consciously consider. Presented with the choice between a candidate who advocates policies that the whole political system says is impossible, and a candidate who is backed by the whole party apparatus, I may make a choice that is in my "interests" as a Democratic voter rather than as a worker.

Someone should tell Vox's editors that recognizing the role of ideology doesn't mean thinking that people are dupes. It means understanding why people consent to a system which systematically exploits them.

That's why the theory of ideology isn't the same as talking about "false consciousness" (a phrase Marx never used), which we could contrast to an authentic, transparent, "class consciousness." Our "consciousness" is determined by all kinds of different, frequently contradictory aspects of our environments and personal histories. If it's going to work, ideology has to be articulated in a way that speaks to our experiences, in languages that really represent the different facets of our lives. Emphasizing class doesn't mean ignoring those languages in fact, these "cultural" factors are part of the way we understand and experience class.

So a serious Marxist theory and strategy understands that changing people's opinions will mean actually engaging with the language and symbolism of ideology. To a significant extent, the Sanders campaign did do that. It won large support among immigrants not only by appealing to their "material" interests but also by emphasizing Bernie's immigrant background, doing extensive outreach in Spanish, demonstrating Bernie's alliances with young politicians who are also immigrants, and so on. These representational strategies are extremely important, and socialists today ignore them at their peril.

But there is no incompatibility between engaging in an "ideological struggle" and advocating for policies that concern people's material conditions. Or, better, there is only an incompatibility if socialists fail to put together a strategy that can unite them.

As the great Marxist theorist Stuart Hall wrote: "material interests, on their own, have no necessary class belongingness. They influence us. But they are not escalators which automatically deliver people to their appointed destinations, 'in place,' within the political ideological spectrum."

After all, our "material interests" can be pursued in many different ways. Vox says that "Identity, in all its complexities, appears to be far more powerful in shaping voters' behaviors than the material interests given pride of place in Marxist theory." But this just kicks the explanatory can down the road. A white male voter might think it is in his "interest" to preserve race and gender inequalities for the privileges that they confer. But a socialist organization which operates on the principles of solidarity can argue to this voter that it would better serve his interest to give up these privileges in favor of a unified movement against economic inequality. These interests are constituted politically, by organizations which can change the everyday habits that generate ideology. When we act differently and relate to each other in different ways, we can have new ideas. People don't "vote against their interests"; they vote according to what they understand their interests to be within the limitations that exist. If there are organized practices which can change these limitations, those interests can also change.

So Vox is right to say that people aren't ultimately motivated by economic interests. But this isn't an argument against Marxism. The most important and fundamental component of Marxism isn't the idea that people are motivated by economic interests which, as I've pointed out, is a residue of capitalist ideology that Marxism criticized. The core of Marxism is the idea of emancipation. Marxism became a powerful force in history because it aimed at universal emancipation, and this project was taken up by revolutionary movements around the world. People risked their lives for emancipation, and in many cases died for it. What this history shows us is that emancipation goes definitively beyond interests. Every time someone goes on strike or stands up to police violence, they are acting against their immediate interests they could be fired or killed. But when people do risk poverty and death for a political cause, they demonstrate that we human animals are capable of much more than pursuing our immediate interests. We can act in the name of the principle that whatever happens to us individually, no one should go hungry.

Today, every nurse who goes into a hospital to treat patients suffering from COVID-19, knowing that they put their own lives at risk, demonstrates that human beings are capable of acting in the name of solidarity rather than immediate self-interest. And they are challenging us to take that solidarity to its conclusion. In a moving reflection on being a nurse during the pandemic, Emily Pierskalla of the Minnesota Nurses Association writes that if she dies while caring for the sick, "I want you to politicize my death. I want you to use it as fuel to demand change in this industry, to demand protection, living wages, and safe working conditions for nurses and ALL workers."

Capitalist society is built to undermine this solidarity in the name of self-interest, and even if previous socialist strategies have failed, the task remains the same. That's the real lesson of Marxism, and it has never ceased to be relevant.

Read more here:

Bernie Sanders' campaign proved that organizing around class interests works - Salon

By the time President Franklin D. Roosevelt nominated Perkins to serve as Secretary of Labor, her credentials for that role were impeccable, but critics still doubted if she could do the job because of her gender. As Downey documents in her book, some Labor Department staffers even threatened to resign rather than report to a woman.

But Perkins had learned to press on in spite of sexism. Even as a much younger woman, she had adopted a matronly wardrobe and worn tricorn hats, thinking that if she reminded men of their mothers, they would take her more seriously.

Perkins told FDR she would take the job only if he would commit to pursuing seven key policies: a 40-hour work week, a minimum wage, unemployment compensation, worker's compensation, abolition of child labor, direct federal aid to the states for unemployment relief, Social Security, a revitalized federal employment service and universal health insurance.

Perkins became the longest-serving labor secretary in history, holding the role from 1933 to 1945. During that time, she accomplished all but one of her original goals: universal health care.

Speaking in a radio address in 1935, Perkins explained "It has taken the rapid industrialization of the last few decades, with its mass-production methods, to teach us that a man might become a victim of circumstances far beyond his control."

Excerpt from:

She came to the rescue during the Great Depression. Now her work is still aiding jobless Americans - Auburn Citizen

Glenn Gould considered audiences a force of evil. Not in their individual segments but en masse, I detest audiences. He retired from public performance on 10 April 1964, at the age of 31, having given fewer than 200 public recitals. The Canadian classical pianist had longstanding philosophical objections to the ritual of performing live. He found applause automatic and insincere, and often asked spectators not to bother. He even wrote a (partly) tongue-in-cheek manifesto, the Gould Plan for the Abolition of Applause and Demonstrations of All Kinds, in which he called for clapping to be banned. Gould believed that the most useful and honest response to music came following a period of solitary reflection, rather than as instantaneous public display.

In the age of lockdown, weve been handed an opportunity to test his theory. The current absence of live music instinctively feels like a grave loss, but Gould was far from alone among musicians in his dislike of it. Whether through nerves, perfectionism, paranoia, boredom or aesthetic objections, many artists have harboured similar reservations, either stopping entirely or performing on stage only rarely.

Scott Walker, who died last year, played his final concerts in 1978. Although an out-of-tune trumpet at a Birmingham show proved the bathetic final straw, Walker was plagued by stage fright, a fact that seems obvious watching his last public appearance, on Later With Jools Holland in 1995, where he practically ran off set after singing the raw, riveting Rosary. In later years he preferred to outsource performances of his music. During three shows at the Barbican in 2008, Damon Albarn and Jarvis Cocker sang his most recent works while Walker masterminded proceedings from the wings.

Walkers belief that he made his most satisfying music after renouncing the stage is not unusual. Tracey Thorn, who performed with her husband Ben Watt as Everything But The Girl before becoming a solo artist, stopped playing live almost 20 years ago. Id struggled with stage fright, and singing live had always been an effort, so there came a point when I was happy to have a break, she says. With three children under the age of three at the time, she found my priorities changed. It wasnt really a conscious decision to never perform live again.

Thorn has found the shift in focus really liberating. I remember in the past, recording songs and thinking, This ones going to be a bugger to sing live, because of the range, or dynamics. Now I just dont have to consider that at all.

A decision that can at first seem like a retreat can instead stimulate bold new creative adventures. After April 1964, Gould focused on studio work, embarking on a love affair with the microphone. The record the Beatles made immediately after stopping touring in August 1966 theyd grown to loathe the tinpot sound quality and freak-show element of playing to audiences who came to scream rather than listen was Sgt. Pepper, an album that simply wouldnt have been made had there been any intention to perform it.

Mark Hollis didnt play live in the final 33 years of his life, having taken his band Talk Talk off the road in 1986. Freed by the knowledge that nothing they recorded would ever need to be replicated on stage, the bands extraordinary final records, Spirit Of Eden and Laughing Stock, ebb and flow with a wild fluidity they would not otherwise have possessed. In the 35 years between the Tour of Life in 1979 and her return to the stage in 2014, Kate Bush played no concerts and made only a handful of brief on-stage cameos. Its doubtful she would have found the time, energy and imaginative freedom to craft albums as daring as The Dreaming, Hounds Of Love and Aerial had she been shackled to the album-tour-album cycle.

Bush, clearly, has no trouble performing when she feels inclined. Other artists simply seemed temperamentally ill suited to the task. The tiny band of people who saw the English singer-songwriter Nick Drake at one of barely 20 live performances often felt that they were intruding on a private ritual. Paul Wheeler, Drakes friend at Cambridge University, recalls him as a student playing informally in friends rooms. Nick would play his songs perfectly, very much as they appeared subsequently on recordings. He would look down, not catching anybodys eye, and simply pass the guitar on when he had finished.

What was mesmerising among friends fell flat on the few times Drake played publicly. Supporting Fairport Convention on 24 September 1969, at the Royal Festival Hall, he sang a bit off mic and didnt lift his head much, recalls the folk singer Linda Thompson, who was a close friend. I loved it. I knew the music very well and in spite of him not being very loud, he sang and played beautifully. The audience wasnt interested.

One reviewer described watching Drake perform as an hour of sheer tedium. It wasnt that he couldnt play, and play well; he simply seemed to lack the ability to meet the audience somewhere near halfway. Perhaps Drakes deeply personal music was always meant to be consumed as it was created: alone.

Other renunciants, like the garrulous Harry Nilsson, who had hits with Without You and Everybodys Talkin and was beloved of the Beatles, seemed more suited to charming a crowd. Yet Nilsson tried playing live a handful of times in the late 1960s and hated the experience. He didnt want to perform he was insistent on that, says his friend, the great American songwriter and arranger Van Dyke Parks. He still wanted to entertain through recorded music, but he didnt buy into the idea that you must go out and get clapped at and approved of in public to make a living. He wanted to be Hitchcock in his own great movie.

Nilssons gung-ho studio vocals at least challenge one prevailing orthodoxy: that a live performance is somehow more deeply felt than a recorded one. I actively think its utter bullshit, says Thorn. I believe that as a singer you often perform in the studio in a very pure way. Youre not playing to the gallery, or doing your tricks for an audience response. Youre singing the song the way it needs to be sung. I absolutely love singing in the studio, and find it really meaningful and emotional.

Live performers can get tired, or bored, or jaded, falling into patterns they know will elicit an instant response. They mess with your favourite song, twist the melody, add drum solos. You are cajoled into clapping and chanting when sometimes, frankly, youd rather not. As Gould recognised, generally we are pre-programmed to respond positively, whatever the quality of the performance. Often, we are simply applauding the fact that someone we admire is standing in front of us. How else to explain the growing popularity of hologram shows?

What concerts provide aside from, these days, the lions share of an artists revenue stream is an arena for emotional connection. The music serves as a pretext for wider communion. This is the contact we are currently missing so badly, and which artists and fans are looking to replicate with the online gigs and virtual festivals currently occurring all over social media. All they lack and its a significant absence is a physical audience. Sometimes thats the best bit of a gig, says Thorn. Not the performer on stage, but the being in a crowd. The communal experience. It will come again. Until then, til things are brighter, thank goodness we have the records.

Read more:

The musical benefits of not playing live - Spectator.co.uk

Last few weeks have exposedcertain pathological attitudes we have been living with including thefollowing:

A few statements from his God in Search for Man today, leaving his more detailed treatment of the theme in In The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Manfor future. For Heschel Sabbath is the art of surpassing civilization and preview of heaven the incomplete form of the world to come is the Sabbath. What shall one be doing in heaven if not rest and chant or sing to hearts content? And Sabbath is a reminder of every mans royalty; an abolition of the distinction of master and slave, rich and poor, success and failure. To celebrate the Sabbath is to experience ones ultimate independence of civilization and society, of achievement and anxiety. The Sabbath is an embodiment of the belief that all men are equal and that equality of men means the nobility of men. The greatest sin of man is to forget that he is a prince. During lockdown we are all princes, not paupers as it is civilization that defines a pauper. The Sabbath is an assurance that the spirit is greater than the universe, that beyond the good is the holyThe Sabbath is holiness in time. ..The presence of eternity, a moment of majesty, the radiance of joy. The soul is enhanced, time is a delight, and inwardness a supreme reward. Indignation is felt to be a desecration of the day, and strife the suicide of ones additional soul.

Six days a week we are engagedin conquering the forces of nature, in the arts of civilization. The seventhday is dedicated to the remembrance of creation and the remembrance ofredemptionto the exodus from a great civilization into a wilderness wherethe word of God was given. By our acts of labor during the six days weparticipate in the works of history; by sanctifying the seventh day we arereminded of the acts that surpass, ennoble and redeem history.

Civilization is on trial. Itsfuture will depend upon how much of the Sabbath will penetrate its spirit.The Sabbath is the counterpoint of living; the melody sustained throughout allagitations and vicissitudes which menace our conscience. Every holiday wemust kindle the lights in the soul, enhance our mercy, deepen our sensitivity.

Now an important question thatconcerns especially medical staff, administration and volunteers who helpreduce pain in the wake of Corona. The question where is God during Corona maybe answered by transposing the remark about Holocoast to corona. Where was God during Holocoast? is answeredby a counter-question Where was Man? A doctor/volunteer says labayka(I am present). And We tend to read the Bible looking for mighty acts that Goddoes and not seeing that all the way through the Bible God is waiting for human beings to act. This lesson is especially put forthby Camus hero (Dr. Rieux) in The Plague who serves tirelessly statingthat all he knows is that his job calling, vocation and salvation is tolessen misery. Heschel shows how, in the face of absurdity that epidemics mayforce us to take notice of, one can still find meaning of life. There is ameaning beyond absurdity. Let them be sure that every little deed counts, thatevery word has power, and that we can do every one our share to redeem theworld despite of all absurdities and all the frustration and alldisappointments. And above all, remember that the meaning of life is to livelife as it if were a work of art. Youre not a machine. When you are young,start working on this great work of art called your own existence.

Holidays healing days, holydays, days devoted to living as against this or that work/engagement/officialassignments/money making are invitations to feasts we mostly miss. Heschel states: Man is not a beast of burden,and the Sabbath is not for the purpose of enhancing the efficiency of hiswork. We have forgotten distinctionbetween labour and toil (where soul is not) and means (work, time) and end(rest/living/eternity). Pity those who rest to work confusing means (work) foran end (rest). Angels flee from the shops/offices where work goes on even afterdesignated closing time and on some holidays.

P S For those who take the Prophet (SAW) seriously by optingfor a sort of itikaf or self/home quarantine during epidemics and dontcourt suicide (cardinal sin) or endanger lives of others but nevertheless dieduring Corona, these words of our sage Heschel: In Jewish tradition, dying inones sleep is called a kiss of God, and dying on the Sabbath is a gift that ismerited by piety. For the pious person, my father once wrote, it is a privilegeto die. Dying during epidemic is a kiss from God for Islamic tradition and ifcombined with the lockdown/quarantine celebrated as sabbath, it is pure grace.We neednt trouble relatives for mourning and death rituals. Death is acelebration and may well be celebrated by a feast death anniversaries shouldbe celebrated as is the tradition of urs.Death is an adventure we lose in hospitals and is best enjoyed consciously,in home as if it is the first night of wedding (One recalls here Ghulam RasoolNazki who made it a point to die consciously adventurously, joyfully.)

More:

Living and dying in the times of corona - Greater Kashmir

Examing the lurch to the far right of the Republican Party in 2020, when Donald Trumps hostile takeover has all but conquered the conservative movement, it is difficult to pinpoint any singular moment that lit the flame, writes Pdraig Hoare.

The Republican Party as we knew it is dead. It is now the party of Donald Trump - it just took almost 60 years to get there

The Presidential election of 1964 is a good starting point.

When Republican candidate Barry Goldwater was bludgeoned on his way to a resounding defeat by Democrat president Lyndon Baines Johnson, it seemed like the end of the road for the small government, minimal regulation resistance movement that he had been trying to build.

Americans, in the vast majority, were appalled by Goldwaters extremism in the 1960s, the Arizona senators warmongering and desire to remove social safety nets for citizens in the name of reducing the size and power of the federal government was a step too far.

LBJ inflicted the most resounding of defeats on Barry Goldwater, winning by the widest margin in more than 100 years in a general election.

That should have signalled the end of Barry Goldwater.

Historians now quip that Goldwater actually won the 1964 election, but that the results didnt materialise until 1980, when a former Hollywood actor named Ronald Wilson Reagan beat incumbent James Earl Carter in a landslide, usurping Goldwaters small government positions to do so.

Reagan was no fool, despite the genial, lovingly bumbling paternal role he played to endear him to millions of Americans tired of petrol shortages, the Iranian hostage crisis and unnaturally high inflation.

Reagan took the Goldwater manifesto, but was shrewd enough to realise he needed to broaden the coalition he was assembling.

The Religious Right and Moral Majority would fill the gap, enduring to this day to serve the Republican Party as a core voting bloc that will all but ensure the Deep South on election day, as well as key states such as Texas and Indiana in the Midwest.

With proponents of less regulation, smaller federal overreach Reaganomics firmly in place, as well as the vastly over-influential evangelical religious movement locked in, the American right wing had strength in numbers in the 1980s.

Reaganites took it even further with the abolition of the Fairness Doctrine, a key political move that cannot be understated, with its ghastly impact reverberating today as liars, charlatans, conspiracy theorists and fear-mongers pollute the airwaves and television screens to reinforce far right wing talking points.

Under Reaganomics, the pursuit of happiness enshrined in the hallowed US Declaration of Independence became corrupted by the pursuit of profit, and would dominate the agenda in the 1980s, becoming so entrenched in American life that Democrat William Jefferson Clinton would be forced to keep many elements intact during his Presidency in the 1990s.

The election of the first black President, Barack Hussein Obama in 2008, would serve as a political call to arms to the American right, which had lost its lustre under a George Walker Bush presidency marred by endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The far right suddenly had a boogieman on which to focus its ire this Harvard-educated elite with ties to Indonesia and Kenya.

Crucially, it had Fox News and right-wing radio figures such as Rush Limbaugh to carry the message.

Obama was the perfect lightning rod on which the right would be reborn, culminating in the presidency of Donald John Trump in 2016.

The American right is now dominated by fear of immigration, science, minorities, womens issues and expertise, with the most bombastic and dangerous takes accepted as mainstream opinion.

The Grand Old Party as we knew it is long dead, eaten by itself as it allowed invaders to take over in the most Faustian of bargains.

Barry Goldwater, horrified in later life as to how his conservative principles were now used politically, had inadvertently helped create a Frankensteins monster in 1964 it just took 50 years to manifest.

President Lyndon Johnson, riding on a wave of national grief over the death of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, was ambitious when it came to civil rights and eradicating poverty.

His Great Society vision would seek to eliminate prejudice and ensure all Americans had a fair shot and social safety nets. To be able to put his vision in place, the Democrat needed to win the 1964 election.

He could not have picked a better opponent himself. Barry Goldwater, the Arizona senator and arch-conservative, was popular with the small government, less social safety nets resistance movement that had been building since Dwight David Eisenhowers presidency of the 1950s.

Republican Eisenhowers tendency to compromise with Democrats to pass legislation was anathema to the Goldwater believers.

The trouble for Barry Goldwater was that the vast majority of the rest of the country were horrified at the thought of removing social safety nets made popular under Franklin Delano Roosevelts New Deal.

He was trounced by LBJ in the 1964 General Election, with most observers predicting he would fade into obscurity.

More than a decade later, a former Democrat turned GOP Governor of California, actor Ronald Reagan, would invoke the spirit of Barry Goldwater as he ran against unpopular incumbent Democrat president, Jimmy Carter, in the 1980 election.

This time Americans were ready for change, believing the small government, less regulation would kickstart the economy with trickle down economics the concept being that rich Americans and corporations would share their success with the middle-class, who would also benefit from lower taxes and less interference from Washington.

Barry Goldwater was now enjoying a renaissance, a conservative icon to be heralded alongside fellow visionaries like free market economists Ayn Rand or Milton Friedman.

While he would support Ronald Reagan in 1980, he lamented in later life the undue influence of the so-called Moral Majority in American politics.

Religion had no place in conservative political circles, he said, supporting a womans right to choose, gay men and women in the military, and other personal freedom in private lives.

Republican Presidental candidate Barry Goldwater greets crowds in Indianapolis in1964. But US voters were not ready for Goldwaters swing to the right. Picture:AP Photo/file

In 1981, Barry Goldwater told the US Senate:

There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs.

"There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus, God, or Allah, or whatever one calls the supreme being. But like any powerful weapon, the use of Gods name on ones behalf should be used sparingly.

The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100%.

"If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both.

Im frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in A,B,C, and D. Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me?

"And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate.

"I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of conservatism.

The genie was already out of the bottle, and evangelical Christians would exert a disproportionate influence on American life that lasts to this day.

The name Jerry Falwell is synonymous with evangelical Christians and political influence, and it is little wonder why.

Ronald Reagan needed to expand his conservative movement beyond Goldwater small government and free marketeers, and Baptist minister Falwell knew it.

Falwell and his fellow evangelicals formed the Moral Majority in 1979, as Reagan was embarking on his run to the White House.

Their position was for traditional family values, which in reality meant opposition to equal rights for men and women, opposition to homosexuality, opposition to divorce, as well as support for prayer in schools and allowing third-level religious institutions like Bob Jones University to uphold segregation while remaining tax exempt.

The crucial issue that the Moral Majority used as a rallying point was opposition to abortion.

Ironically, it had not been on the agenda for most evangelical Christians in the 1970s, even following the landmark Roe V Wade decision in 1973 in the Supreme Court that legalised abortion.

Evangelical preacher Jerry Falwells Moral Majority had a significant influence on the Reagan administration and the GOP beyond. Picture: Getty Images

Leading magazine at the time, Christianity Today, voiced its disapproval at the Roe v Wade decision, but did not use it for political capital. It largely remained a non-political issue, albeit a troubling personal one for many religious voters.

Falwell and the Moral Majority used abortion as a rallying call to Catholics in 1979, a mere 20 years since evangelicals vehemently opposed Jack Kennedys ascendancy to the White House on the grounds of his Catholic faith.

Abortion suddenly became the lightning rod for religious voters in the 1980 election, with scholars and sociologists such as Martin Riesebrodt now saying it masked the real motives behind Falwells Moral Majority the preservation of traditional family roles, where men went to work and women raised children and kept the house.

It also meant men keeping a stranglehold on government and political offices throughout the land, and minorities in influential positions at a minimum by preserving the status quo.

Expert academic in US religion, Michael J McVicar explains in his 2016 paper: The Religious Right alone did not create the Reagan coalition, but its infrastructure concretised a general trend in the electorate.

"Conservative white evangelicals who had returned to the Democratic Party to support Carter in 1976, now defected back to the Republican Party, solidifying a trend decades in the making

"After the 1980 election the Religious Right became synonymous with the GOP in the popular imagination, a linkage that would fascinate and frustrate political conservatives and Christians alike and trouble Democrats for decades to come.

"The interconnected components of the Religious Right provided important leverage in close elections across the country: in party primaries, local elections, and national congressional midterm elections where voter turnout and razor-thin margins decided outcomes, the organs of the Religious Right could prove decisive.

When the Moral Majority organisation was declared defunct in 1989 due to financial mismanagement and declining popular support, it didnt stop the Religious Rights influence.

Falwell said: The religious right is solidly in place and, like the galvanising of the black church as a political force a generation ago, the religious conservatives in America are now in for the duration.

The Fairness Doctrine, introduced in 1949 under the supervision of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), ensured that radio and television broadcasts must adhere to being fair and balanced when presenting issues that could be contentious.

In other words, the perception of bias must be absent from presentation, and the integrity of fact and truth had to be preserved where possible.

It was abolished in 1987 during Ronald Reagans presidency.

According to legislative attorney Kathleen Ruanes report in 2011 for the Congressional Research Service, issues of public importance were not limited to political campaigns.

Nuclear plant construction, workers rights, and other issues of focus for a particular community could gain the status of an issue that broadcasters were required to cover in a fair and balanced manner, she wrote.

In 1987, after a period of study, the FCC repealed the Fairness Doctrine. The FCC found that the doctrine likely violated the free speech rights of broadcasters, led to less speech about issues of public importance over broadcast airwaves, and was no longer required because of the increase in competition among mass media.

First Lady, Nancy Reagan with President Ronald Reagan at the White House in December 1986. The former governor of California recognised that including the religious right and the Moral Majority within the conservative tent was a successful electoral strategy for the party. Picture: AP Photo/Dennis Cook.

"The repeal of the doctrine did not end the debate among lawmakers, scholars, and others about its constitutionality and impact on the availability of diverse information to the public.

In other words, the rise of right-wing radio and television was now unfettered to spew opinion as fact, no matter how invidious or insidious.

It is true that left-wing radio and programming could also avail of the same lax regulation, but the American right obliterated any competition from the opposite end of the spectrum, using racial tropes, fear of the unknown, and crime to monetise social unrest.

Figures like Rush Limbaugh, with barely concealed contempt for minorities, the marginalised, and womens issues as a whole, became overnight stars on the airwaves with a public yearning for an idealised past that existed only in their imaginations.

Limbaughs reward for stoking social flames for 30 years? A presidential Medal of Freedom awarded by Donald Trump in 2020.

The advent of Fox News in 1996 was seen as a conservatives alternative to the perceived liberal and left-wing bias of the general news media.

The media had long been a patsy for Republican failures GOP politicians routinely blamed the press for their own shortcomings long before Barry Goldwater.

Fox News became a huge hit with conservatives from the beginning under the leadership of former GOP operative Roger Ailes, an outwardly charming man with disturbing private views and behaviours that included sexual mistreatment of women and a pathological hatred of Barack Obama.

Donald Trump was encouraged to claim Barack Obama was not a US citizen on Fox News a classic fear-based trope that the first black president was an outsider, of the other, a Muslim to be feared.

Fox News host Glenn Beck told the morning audience that Obama had a deep-seated hatred of white people, while the networks prime-time stars Sean Hannity and Bill OReilly told the audience nightly that the president was a far-left radical, hellbent on taking their money and establishing a benevolent dictatorship that would curtail their freedoms.

Fox News has became the most-watched news cable channel in the USA, predominantly with older viewers who are self-proclaimed conservatives, religious right and anti-immigrant.

Its viewership shows little sign of decline now that it has abandoned any semblance of fairness in favour of lauding Donald Trump.

Many of those in the Republican Party who initially had doubts about Donald Trump have seen their influence diminished and their reputations damaged during his Presidency

By any measure of the imagination, Donald John Trump should be anathema to conservatives.

With no political ideology other than far-right populist positions, the thrice-married philanderer who paid off an adult film star, insults women routinely, and treats the White House as his own personal fiefdom would leave conservatives of the ilk of Barry Goldwater aghast.

Yet he is an icon to right-wing conservatives and religious blocs ranging from the Boomer generation, born in the 1950s, to younger white reactionary voters afraid of changes to the social order that dilutes their power and privilege.

Dissent is not tolerated in the Party of Trump, while all political opponents in his own Republican Party have been either vanquished or seen their influence curtailed.

Former foes such as right-wing media personalities Glenn Beck and Mark Levin saw the way the wind was blowing, and not only fell into line, but have seriously profited financially due to their Damascene conversions.

Former political foes such as Ted Cruz, who called Trump utterly amoral and a pathological liar during their battle for the GOP nomination in 2016, have joined the Trump train, leaving their conservative principles at the door to serve the king.

He is proud of being a serial philanderera narcissist at a level I dont think this countrys ever seen he describes his own battles with venereal diseases as his own personal Vietnam, said Texas senator Cruz said in 2016.

Ted Cruz is now one of Trumps staunchest allies, having seen his own support jeopardised on talk radio and Fox News for not towing the line.

You get what you paid for, the old adage says. You made your bed, you must now lie in it. Be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it.

The Grand Old Party as we knew it is dead, long live the party of Donald Trump.

It just took nearly 60 years to get there.

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Pdraig Hoare: Trump is the party now - Irish Examiner