Covid-19 has the whole world in an anxiety attack. The appearance of this special strain of Coronavirus is a direct but obviously unintended consequence of globalization. I spoke with Marika and David this morning and we collectively concluded that the appearance of Covid-19 in particular is pretty much due to the rapid expansion of global air travel some forty years ago created partly by the needs of globalization. The shipping container was a major factor in globalization as was the internet, but air travel brought warm human and humid bodies from one end of the planet to the other ripe for the spread of this kind of virus. Wow!

What a world transforming situation we are in at the moment. I don’t think it will have a long term effect on global capitalist production because it would cost hundreds of billions of dollars to re-tool ‘Western’ countries that have for some time now created a commodity-production system based on a complex of independent, unconnected factories producing individual parts for products that are then assembled in a factory designed to do just that. Wuhan, in China is a place where thousand of contractors and factories work for American and Western corporations in general making bits and pieces of everything to then be assembled in factories there or here for our consumption as hardware such as drills, heaters, washing machines, television sets, baby cribs, etcetera, as well as clothes, blankets, and sundry other wearables and that sort of thing. Of course, China isn’t the only place where this happens. Name a country in South Asia or South East Asia and the same thing is happening there. Viet Nam actually specializes in nails and fasteners for the construction industry, or to put it differently, Western corporations have chosen Viet Nam for this role. Bangladesh does clothes, so does Sri Lanka. But they all dabble in a range of products depending on the deals they can arrange with corporations who crave the absence of taxes, low wages and the dearth of health and safety regulations in the export processing zones set up specifically for this purpose in these countries.

As far as I’m concerned, Covid-19 has just made it so that I’m even more isolated than I was before. I’m at the pinnacle of vulnerability. I’m over sixty-five, I’m immuno compromised, I have an underlying illness and I’m fighting off some kind of bacterial infection at the moment that the docs are still trying to identify. If I get Covid-19, my chances of survival are slim to none. Well, something’s going to kill me. I’d like to wait a bit though to find out what that will be and I hope it’s not this virus.

I have a lot on my mind at the moment. I mean, what else have I got to do with my time but sit here and think? The reality of my own death is always close to mind and is stimulated constantly by programs like the recent one on the CBC White Coat Black Art program that deals with end of life care and how we as a society deal with it, or more precisely, don’t deal with it. Check it out here.

Most of you are way too young to have seen the movie Fantastic Voyage when it first came out in 1966, but this movie with Raquel Welch and Stephen Boyd was an inspiration for a generation of special effects techs to come. So, get this: a famous scientist is sick. He has a problem with his brain. A group of intrepid (they’re always intrepid) colleagues of his and some other brave adventurers get themselves shrunk in a special ‘ship’ that then is injected into the bloodstream of said sick doctor. Mayhem ensues of course as well as the necessary redemption. The trailer says it all.

The movie is hugely fantastical, but intriguing too. I imagine a little ship in my own veins going into my bone marrow to see what all the fuss is about and maybe do battle with the evil forces that are invading my body intent on killing me. It’s all fun to think about. The movie is a hoot. Thinking about what’s going on in my bone marrow, not so much.

I’m also thinking about life and death in general, following the last three blog posts I put out there for your reading pleasure. Serendipitously, Maria Popova, the immensely creative force behind the website ‘brain pickings‘ put out a piece on the work of John Muir (1838-1914). It’s well worth having a read through. It pretty much expresses in highly poetic prose what I wish I had written about the way I see the universe and our place in it. Popova quotes Muir:

One is constantly reminded of the infinite lavishness and fertility of Nature — inexhaustible abundance amid what seems enormous waste. And yet when we look into any of her operations that lie within reach of our minds, we learn that no particle of her material is wasted or worn out. It is eternally flowing from use to use, beauty to yet higher beauty; and we soon cease to lament waste and death, and rather rejoice and exult in the imperishable, unspendable wealth of the universe, and faithfully watch and wait the reappearance of everything that melts and fades and dies about us, feeling sure that its next appearance will be better and more beautiful than the last.

It’s only the last line I have any issue with because I don’t think there is any guarantee that the new will be better and more beautiful than what came before. But that’s really a quibble. The continuity of the biological world, and of the social world, make them seem eternal, immortal. No wonder we tend to deify them. For the BaMbuti of the Ituri forest (as reported by Colin Turnbull in the book The Forest People) before colonialism completely annihilated them, the forest was their mother. They didn’t deify the forest but they recognized that life emanated from her every pore. For other cultures, those living under the threat of imminent disaster, deification was common, something that Weber recognized in his Sociology of Religion a hundred years ago as did many others before him and since then.

Well. that’s all I can squeeze out of this poor brain of mine for the moment. Enjoy your social distance and get out into the sunshine.