Collage, from the French coller ‘to stick’, although an ancient practice is normally associated with the modernist movement of the 1900s, particularly with Braque and Picasso. As such, it also carries the sense of collision, knocking elements together in unlikely juxtaposition. The above work by the collagist Cold War Steve brilliantly conflates the First World War trope of a nation of lions led by donkeys with the memory of a selfless people. These are the Riley graves in Eyam, the last resting place of six of the Hancock family in 1666, representative of that whole village’s willing self-isolation and self-sacrifice to save their neighbours from the plague. Its invocation is timely on a day when Britain held a minute’s silence to honour the key workers who have given their lives to help others during the pandemic. It also focuses the naked need of leaders not to demand so much of their people that they reject them, as Trump now fears a tanked economy will cause him to lose the November election.
The balance governments must make is between the wealth and liberty of the many and the health of the still relatively few who will pay as a direct result of easing lockdown. ‘The science’ the UK government keeps shouting it is obeying becomes less clear and more divergent by the day, as new data sets and interpretations divide opinions even among the most eminent, whether it is about how many of the 20,000 (probably nearer 30,000) deaths would have occurred anyway, how many other deaths – through cancelled treatment, non-attendance at A&E, domestic violence and suicide – can be attributed to the lockdown, or, in the long term, the known correlation between economic recession and life expectancy. (Life expectancy dropped over four years in Russia in the decade following the collapse of Communism, hence the enthusiasm for Putin’s hard-line autocracy.)
As other countries experiment with re-opening different sectors of their economy, the UK is still dithering over what matters most. Entirely justifiable public sentiment about NHS staff disguises an enforced social reticence which could profoundly affect the country’s future. While most people apply social distancing with good humour and commonsense, there is a fanatical few who treat all other human movement as threatening and actionable, and one wonders whether people will ever return to easy familiarity, unquestioning physical jostling on the tube or at the football stadium. Once the 260 parishioners who had lost their lives in Eyam had died and the plague passed, did the surrounding villages embrace the plucky survivors with grateful open arms, or keep them at a healthy distance? William Mompesson, the rector who persuaded the people of Eyam to isolate, himself survived but, three years later, moving to a new parish, he was forced to stay in a hut until people came to trust him. Paranoia is easy to catch, hard to eradicate.
We can see why some countries embrace universal mask-wearing – and now recommended in Scotland – but this is like muzzling every dog to save people from the few that are rabid. The non-surgical mask is a much more effective reducer of transmission than it is a barrier to infection; droplets can survive on them and short supply means people re-use. So should we all adopt the plague mask to protect ourselves against the minority, or would that be a lesser evil than to have all our outgoing pleasures denied us for the foreseeable future?
With all the summer festivals and concerts cancelled, opera houses and theatres closed, the arts world faces a more calamitous contraction than many other businesses. The very notion of a ‘key worker’ relegates the rest of us to marginalia in the public discourse. I could happily go without 90% of the consumer trash still being extensively and expensively distributed by Amazon, whereas being permanently deprived of live artistic performance would be a colossal contraction of life’s value. The non-profit Americans for Arts reported a loss of $4.5 billion to the performing arts in America in the first month of the pandemic. The world’s richest man, Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, increased his fortune by $25 billion in the same time.
While Bezos has profited from everyone shopping online, America’s other billionaires and banks have also profited from the pandemic, moving sharply in on the vast resources the US government made available to save small businesses, hoovering up billions*. Meanwhile, there is a petition to deny the tax avoiding £4.7 billionaire BVI resident Richard Branson the £500 million he wants from the government to bail out his Virgin Airlines. This has yet to be agreed, but the government has now turned down a plea from the Church of England to refuse support to any business leader who squirrels his assets overseas to avoid tax, the source of the money they want to get their greedy hands on. France, Denmark and even Poland have all decided not to support companies registered in tax havens.
As the loot pours into the underserving coffers of the wealthiest, US black and Latino communities remain relatively worse off than they were forty years ago. UK inequality has grown in that time too and, given the incontrovertible fact that immigrant workers in the NHS have taken a disproportionately lethal hit, it behoves us all to demand that whatever settlement emerges from the current chaos attempts to re-balance that account. If this experience cannot constrain the xenophobic impulse behind Brexit, then there is little hope for this country and perhaps the 17th century belief, that the plague was God’s judgement on Man, was not so misplaced.
peterleewright.com 