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Graham Williamson reports on how the COVID-19 phase of the culture wars in Middlesborough are an endless re-run of the 1940s.

We are, it is said, at war. The full commemorative tea set of metaphors has been brought out to persuade us that the fight against COVID-19 is this eras Blitz. The anxiety, though, comes not just from the crisis but its potential aftermath. Boris Johnson now coyly refers to austerity as the A word, but that unspeakable road ahead is still one his party finds ideologically acceptable.

Here in Middlesbrough, we havent recovered from the last dose of austerity. Nobody here looks forward to seeing their town mentioned in the national press, unless they get a perverse kick out of cataloguing things were worst in the country for.

Heres one. On 1 March, Professor Sir Michael Marmot released his Health Equity in England report, which revealed that, for the first time in a century, Middlesbroughs life expectancy was moving backwards and quickly. From 2011 to 2016, the average Middlesbrough man saw 1.3 years shaved off how long he could expect to stay alive.

This was partly ascribed to deaths from substance abuse and suicide among forty-somethings. But, poverty has slower methods of killing, ones which are particularly lethal coupled with the Coronavirus.

Insecure work never knowing if next month will bring you enough money to live on saps the heart and immune system, as well as the spirit. Poverty makes newborn babies underweight and adults fed on cheap, low-quality food overweight. It forces families into overcrowded houses with damp walls and insufficient heating. These are all time-bombs that go off during a public health crisis. It is why the Centre for Progressive Policy put the area as number one on its list of at-risk areas.

If this is a war, a noticeable minority act like it is a phony one. Cleveland Police have been called out to 20-person barbecues and mass VE day parties. Our independent mayor Andy Preston blamed the BBC for giving the impression that lockdown would be relaxed on VE day an impression not dispelled by Prestons decision to re-open parks that very same day.

The rest of us know whos really to blame: the Idiots. They are not a unified group and share few interests other than idiocy and ruining it for the rest of us. Idiocy is so vague, it can provide a shared enemy even in times as divided as these.

Britains current culture wars are essentially a duel between competing visions of the 1940s: military glory versus the welfare state, an endless re-run of Churchill versus Attlee.

The comments sections of local news sites have been full of condemnation for them, which is fair. But something about the insatiability of the idiot discourse disturbs me. Even the most catastrophic failure of Government now causes little more than a sigh, but the Idiots never fail to provoke fury. Somehow, weve come to expect more from ordinary people than elected officials.

The idiots apparent nihilism, refusing to protect even their own lives, is another symptom of the same underlying condition behind our mortality rates. If you live in a place where the economy basically functions, the world now looks frightening and strange busy streets deserted, shop fronts now impassive metal masks. If you live in a poor area, this is what things look like all the time.

So our new normal is basically the old normal, which can breed a dangerous complacency. A VE Day party was held on the Grove Hill near my house, an estate traduced as the Beirut of Britain in the early 1990s and slowly demolished over the following decades. The people living there have seen nothing improve under John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Theresa May or Boris Johnson. Why should they listen to the Government now?

But it also expresses of a longing for community, the same need which drives the Clap for Carers ritual. In Middlesbrough, it verges on folk art, with NHS murals on garden walls and home-made banners being driven past the hospital.

Theres a particular breed of columnist who interprets everything that happens outside Wapping as moral panic or virtue signalling. Clap for Carers lends itself well to that boilerplate. The left resent the perceived insincerity of Conservative voters applauding nurses, the right tried and failed to hijack it with Clap for Boris.

I love it. Its the first time Ive seen my street, the residents of which can be transient, insular, isolated by age or illness, all outside doing the same thing. There are some parts of this country where the streets do not hold tea parties for the latest royal baby; Clap for Carers is our social bonding.

But it doesnt allay my fears about what comes next. In the race to deal with the pandemics economic fall-out, the Netherlands are using Kate Raworths doughnut model. Britain merely has a hole, specifically in our understanding of recent history.

Even The Guardian keeps discussing deficit spending by mentioning Gordon Brown, then Rishi Sunak and, in between, nothing. It is as if the facts of the last decade brutal spending restrictions that failed so badly that they massively increased borrowing, produced feeble growth and failed every other test Cameron and George Osborne set themselves is so incomprehensible to the commentariat, that their memories rejected it.

Yes, austerity is unpopular, but unpopularity is too generous a fate. Its actually pseudo-science. In 2010, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff published a paper claiming that economic growth collapses once debt exceeds 90% of GDP. It came at exactly the right time to justify austerity measures across the Eurozone, but no one could reproduce its findings.

It emerged that the 90% figure was the result of a spreadsheet error. To their credit, Reinhart and Rogoff withdrew their conclusion. The politicians who used their work did not. An Excel typo robbed my townspeople of more than a year of life. But that wasnt widely enough reported, so austerity is still seen as merely a harsh medicine unpleasant, but still effective.

It could, then, be re-sold to the public. The idiots are unpopular enough to be pressed into rhetorical service, just as the last age of austerity was blamed on their ancestors, the Scroungers. Or they could be reclaimed, like the DeVos-funded anti-lockdown protests in America, as the real patriots.

Local newspaper comments about VE day parties werent all condemnatory. One man said he was proud to join in, that the parties were about freedom and patriotism. All you lot, he said, go to the hospital to applaud every Thursday. Why couldnt the estates have their celebration?

Britains current culture wars are essentially a duel between competing visions of the 1940s: military glory versus the welfare state, an endless re-run of Winston Churchill versus Clement Attlee. Should the need arrive, this will be the populist rights gloss on our current moment: council-estate patriots being scorned for celebrating VE Day, while the middle-classes meekly applaud their socialist healthcare.

It is divisive, mean-spirited and above all untrue. But theres a war on, and we all know what the first casualty of those is.

Read more:
Postcards from the Red Wall: Victory Celebrations for a Nation at War with Itself - Byline Times

Photo: Kent Smith (Netflix)TV ReviewsAll of our TV reviews in one convenient place.

Patton Oswalt looks happy. Traversing the stage at the Knight Theater in Charlotte, North Carolina, for his latest Netflix special, I Love Everything, the comedian cant help but burst into a giant grin repeatedly over the course of his set. Even during his complaints about the horrific nature of the healthy breakfast cereals he now makes himself consume in his 50s (Im eating cereal that tastes like an unpopular teenagers poetry), Oswalt is all smiles. It may seem surprising to longtime fans who still recall the royally pissed-off nerd who launched salvo after whip-smart salvo in the culture wars during his early comedy albums like Feelin Kinda Patton or Werewolves And Lollipops. But the man who once raged against the appalling nature of 80s hair metal seems to have made peace with thingswell, except maybe Dennys.

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Patton Oswalt

May 19 on Netflix

Actually, this newfound joy might sound even stranger to those who remember Oswalts fiercely cathartic set addressing the 2016 death of his wife, writer and journalist Michelle McNamara, as detailed in his most recent stand-up special, 2017s Annihilation. Since then, he has remarried, and rediscovered the joy of everyday living. After acknowledging that he had initially assumed he would just exist after McNamaras death, he urges the audiencein the most earnest and emotional moment of I Love Everythingto seek out the best reason for living: If you find love, run toward it. And all of the jokes that surround that exhortation are suffused with that sense of uplift. Does it sap some of the vicious bite from his wit? Undeniably so. But it also makes it awfully hard not to like spending an hour with the comic; hes gone from being the antisocial malcontent holding hilarious court at the end of the bar to the funny friend who makes you feel better just by being around. Its a fair trade.

I Love Everything, for all its easygoing charm, is still instantly recognizable as the work of Oswalts free-associative comedic persona. Whether riffing on how the blandly organic makers of his aforementioned breakfast must have begun (Sorghum Farms was born outside a Phish concert in 1990) or inventing lengthy backstories for the tragic-looking characters on the kids menu at Dennys, his penchant for following narrative curlicues down absurdist rabbit holes remains undimmed. But where the punchlines used to live in the outrage that seemed to continually simmer below the surface of every acid observation he made, now Oswalts humor is laced with a relatable world-weariness that comes from having been through the wringer, coming out the other side, and being confronted the fact that maybe its not worth getting so pissed off about the little things, no matter how irritating. This is comedy borne of fascination, not rage.

Thats not to say some things dont still make him mad. But Oswalt largely passes by the Trump-shaped elephant in every room, pointing out the nigh-futility of joking about this administration by comparing it to an eighteen-wheeler full of monkeys and PCP that crashed into a train full of diarrhea. And everybodys watching it, like, Holy shit, look at this! And then you as a comedian walk up and say, Hey, wanna hear a joke I wrote about this? Instead, he saves his ire for things like having to miss the Hollywood premiere of Solo: A Star Wars Story, complete with a life-size recreation of the Millennium Falcon you could wander around in, because he had to attend his daughters second grade art show. Though even this gets shrugged off with the subsequent realization that his younger self would be fine with this trade-off, given it means he will have sex at some point in the future.

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Oswalt ends it all with an epic thought experiment about the time he took his daughter to Dennys as part of a Daddy-Daughter Day, a closing bit that demonstrates the comedian fusing together all the things he does bestunexpected wordplay, imaginative flights of referential fancy, and cutting assessments of humdrum corporate actions that might just be far more sinister than they appear. Its funny, smart, and imaginative in all the right ways, with a generosity of spirit underlying the cutting nature of the humor. (That generosity extends to his fellow comedian Bob Rubin: Oswalt has attached the stand-ups set to play right after his.) Patton Oswalt is changing into a different, more empathetic type of comedian, but for those willing to follow along on his new path, there are ample rewards.

Read this article:
Happiness looks good on Patton Oswalt in the charming and wry I Love Everything - The A.V. Club

Jes Macallan, Caity LotzPhoto: Jeff Weddel (The CW)

Heres whats happening in the world of television for Tuesday, May 19. All times are Eastern.

DCs Legends Of Tomorrow(The CW, 9 p.m.): Its an inevitability in a time-travel story: Eventually, your heroes will find themselves in an apocalypse. So here are the Legends Of Tomorrow, stranded in the U.K. and surrounded by zombies.

Look for Allison Shoemakers recap of the fittingly titled I Am Legends tonightan episode that seems likely to continue the shows hot streak.

Can you binge it? The first four seasons await you on Netflixand when you reach the crossover episode each season, you may want to zip over to the other Arrowverse shows for context.

Patton Oswalt: I Love Everything (Netflix, 3:01 a.m., comedy special premiere): Patton Oswalt looks happy. Traversing the stage at the Knight Theater in Charlotte, North Carolina, for his latest Netflix special, I Love Everything, the comedian cant help but burst into a giant grin repeatedly over the course of his set. Even during his complaints about the horrific nature of the healthy breakfast cereals he now makes himself consume in his 50s (Im eating cereal that tastes like an unpopular teenagers poetry), Oswalt is all smiles. It may seem surprising to longtime fans who still recall the royally pissed-off nerd who launched salvo after whip-smart salvo in the culture wars during his early comedy albums like Feelin Kinda Patton or Werewolves And Lollipops. But the man who once raged against the appalling nature of 80s hair metal seems to have made peace with thingswell, except maybe Dennys. Look for the rest of Alex McLevys review on the site today.

The Flash reunion (Stars In The House via YouTube, 8 p.m.):The Flash wrapped up its season just last week, but if youre already pining for Grant Gustin and company, todays your lucky day. Gustin will be joined by fellow cast member Jesse L. Martin, Danielle Panabaker, Candice Patton, Tom Cavanagh, Carlos Valdes, Danielle Nicolet, and Hartley Sawyer, and like all streams from SITH, the event will raise money for The Actors Fund.

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After the Dance with Stephen A. Smith: A SportsCenter Special and The Story Of Soaps (ABC, 8 p.m. and 9 p.m.): Tonight, ABC airs a pair of non-fiction specials intent on shedding light on other TV events and entertainments. First, ESPNs Stephen A. Smith tries to wring just a little bit more out of The Last Dance with this wrap-up special, which will feature a discussion with Magic Johnson and more surprise NBA legends.

Thats followed by The Story Of Soaps, a documentary special chronicling the evolution of the soap opera. (Yes, Susan Lucci will appear.)

Read this article:
The Legends Of Tomorrow get stranded during an apocalypse, naturally - The A.V. Club

The exchange was tense between the customer and Jesse, a Trader Joes employee sporting a white face mask and a flowery Hawaiian shirt.

Why arent you wearing the mask? Jesse asked the customer on a recent day at a store in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. I am not here to question what you believe in. These are the rules. I am just asking you kindly to wear the mask.

The customer, Genevieve Peters, who was recording the entire exchange, refused. We are in America here, she said, land of the free. Then she turned her camera on other shoppers, who were less than amused: Look at all of these sheep that are here, all wearing this mask that is actually dangerous for them.

Jesse, identified only by his first name in the video, telephoned police, who did not arrive. Finally, when Peters left the store, others customers burst into applause.

As more parts of the country reopen businesses, many retail workers have reluctantly turned into de facto enforcers of public health guidelines, confronting customers who refuse to wear masks or to maintain a wide distance from others. The risk of a violent reaction now hangs over jobs already fraught with health perils.

A Target employee in Van Nuys, California, ended up with a broken left arm after helping to remove two customers who refused to wear masks.

A cashier told a man refusing to wear a mask that he could not buy a pack of cigars at a convenience store in Perkasie, Pennsylvania. He punched her three times in the face.

In San Antonio, a man who was told he could not board a public bus without a mask shot a passenger, police said. The victim was hospitalized, and the gunman was arrested.

And in a confrontation that turned deadly, the security guard at a Family Dollar store in Flint, Michigan, was shot and killed after insisting that a customer put on a mask.

Meegan Holland, spokeswoman for the Michigan Retailers Association, said stores were caught in the middle. People can get belligerent when being asked to do something that they do not want to do, she said.

Masks have been recommended by public health officials as a key way to diminish the spread of the coronavirus, with at least a dozen states requiring them and many others issuing a hodgepodge of county or municipal orders.

They have also turned into a flashpoint in the countrys culture wars, with some defending their right to not wear one.

We have individual rights; we dont have community rights, said Peters, 56, the customer at the Trader Joes store, in an interview this week.

Public health experts said this argument was misguided.

I never had a right to do something that could injure the health of my neighbors, said Wendy Parmet, director of the Center for Health Policy and Law at Northeastern University.

Mask opponents generally overlook the fact that such regulations are meant to protect other people, not the person wearing the mask, she added.

Americans are navigating a patchwork of conflicting national and local guidance on masks. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for example, initially downplayed the efficacy of masks but now recommends them.

And they have become a ready symbol for those dubious about giving government officials wide powers for an extended period.

Retailers find the confrontations over masks a minefield.

It is a very hot-button issue, said Kenya Friend-Daniel, a spokeswoman for Trader Joes. The company declined to allow Jesse, the employee involved in the confrontation, to be interviewed.

We do not want to put our crew members in the position to have to enforce something like that, she said, noting that customers overwhelmingly wear masks.

In all its 505 stores, Trader Joes has put up signs recommending that customers wear masks, not least to protect its employees, Friend-Daniel said.

Refusing is not grounds alone for being ejected from a store, she said, even where wearing masks in public is the law, but creating a disturbance that bothers other customers is.

Target, in places where masks are the law, has stationed security employees outside its stores to remind customers to wear them, said Jake Anderson, a spokesman.

Stores are not the only businesses involved. Uber announced that starting Monday, drivers and riders must wear masks, and those who refuse can be kicked off the platform.

Smaller retailers feel especially vulnerable to balancing the need for safety and the need to revive their bottom line.

In Charleston, South Carolina, at M. Dumas & Sons, a 103-year-old mens clothing store, employees wear masks in line with a city requirement while customers are offered them at the front door.

Gary Flynn, the owner, estimated that 50% of his customers would walk away if required to wear a mask.

I want whatever I can get right now, he said, with business inching up but still only 25% of what it was a year ago.

He acknowledged that his workers were putting themselves in harms way to generate sales. So its a slippery slope, and its a moral challenge every day to try to figure out whats the right thing to do, he said.

Farther up King Street, Las Olas Swimwear boutique was doing brisk business in bathing suits, for beach-starved customers, as well as face masks. The store has sold more than 500 masks produced by a New York swimwear supplier.

Daniel James, the owner, stated unequivocally that he would fire any employee not wearing a face mask but said masks were voluntary for customers.

In Michigan, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer made masks mandatory in late April and allowed stores to bar customers who refused. But she did not criminalize such refusals, so police have only intervened when confrontations turned violent.

In Illinois, Rob Karr, president of the Illinois Retail Merchants Association, compiled a list of episodes that took place in the first 48 hours after masks became mandatory May 1.

One customer threatened to get a gun from his car to shoot the worker insisting that he wear a mask. Several employees were hit, while others were verbally abused. Sometimes customers fought each other. The list has only grown longer.

Some police departments refused to respond when stores asked for help, Karr said, while various retailers were fined $750 for not enforcing the ban.

In Warwick, Rhode Island, a police union initially announced on its Facebook page that it would not enforce Gov. Gina Raimondos mandatory mask order, calling it overreaching and bound to destroy the bridge of trust built with the community. The police chief then issued a statement saying the department would act.

Lawrence Gostin, the Georgetown University professor who wrote the draft public health law adopted by many states, suggested that in the absence of national guidelines, retailers should develop one policy for all their stores and stick with it, whether it has the backing of state law or not; that way the rules would be clear for all customers.

Some experts also suggested it was overkill to involve police in the general enforcement of public health measures.

The issue should be treated like wearing seat belts or not smoking in public, which eventually became habits, Parmet suggested, but such consensus must develop much more quickly given the danger from COVID-19.

In Hawaii, that consensus is emerging because neighbors are confronting anti-maskers themselves, said Tina Yamaki, president of the Retail Merchants of Hawaii.

It is the other customers in the stores that are shaming them to put it back on or commenting, she said.

Yamaki compared the mask dilemma to trying to ensure that a young child keeps wearing a hat: One minute it is on, and the next minute, after you look away, it disappears.

We cannot be policing that all the time, she said of the masks. We are not that type of law enforcement.

Correction:An earlier version of this article misstated the surname of a woman who was part of a tense exchange in a Trader Joes store. She isGenevieve Peters, not Powers.

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Whos enforcing mask rules? Often retail workers, and theyre getting hurt. - Boston.com

TikTok has seen its Play Store rating plummet to two stars as a flurry of low reviews landed over the past 24 hours. Despite reviews citing issues with the apps algorithm and content, the real reason for the poor rating is linked to culture wars, fanboys and disturbing viral videos. Settle in, because the story of TikToks sudden fall from grace isnt a short one.

Theres an ongoing battle between TikTok and YouTube in India, which allegedly started when influencer Amir Siddiqui posted a video on TikTok saying that the platform was was better than YouTube. Amir has since deleted the video, but it sparked a war between the platforms fans, which eventually resulted in a YouTube influencer putting out a roast in response.

Related: TikTok scoops up the man behind Disney Plus

Enter the ring: CarryMinati. On May 8, Carry published a video called YouTube vs TikTok: The End that royally took the mick out of Amir Siddiqi. It was wildly popular, becoming the most-liked video in India, but the platform pulled it down.

Its not clear why YouTube decided that the video violated its community rules, but the most popular theory is that the video constituted cyber-bullying and harassment. Republic World has also reported that the video contained homophobic slurs, so it could have also been pulled for this reason.

Either way, it wasnt a popular move among Carrys fans. Their response? Take out a bit of their anger on the TikTok app rating. The app was already suffering because of the ongoing culture war between the platforms, but now Carrys fans started to increase their attempts to get the TikTok rating down.

But the controversy doesnt end there. Another influencer has also has a role to play in this debacle: Faizal Siddiqui.

Recognised that name? Faizal is the brother of Amir, who (arguably) started the war between YouTube and TikTok. Faizal is pretty popular in his own right on TikTok or at least he was until he posted a recent controversial video on the platform.

Related: How to delete a TikTok account

That video shows Faizal pretending to confront a woman who has betrayed him. He throws a glass of clear liquid at the woman, whose face is then shown behind a splattering of make-up that looks a lot like acid scars.

Theres been a huge backlash against this, and public figures have condemned the video, saying it glorifies acid attacks. TikTok reacted by banning Faizal from the platform, stating that he had violated multiple community guidelines.

But the online community in India still werent satisfied, citing previous examples of poor taste videos that had been posted on the app. This is where the latest flurry of bad reviews comes in, with multiple citizens leaving bad reviews and encouraging others to do so.

We wont know how this affects user figures for a while, as negative reviews dont reflect these statistics. And its not clear if the sudden influx of poor reviews is directly related to the tasteless video, or if CarryMinati loyalists have co-opted the movement.

What is clear is that India has grown a sudden distaste for the platform and the shine has certainly been taken off TikTok because of this latest storm. Weve reached out to the company for comment and will update this piece with the response.

Senior staff writer

Ruth started her career at Metro newspaper, working as a staff writer for the features section. After a brief stint working on a new channel for VICE UK, she joined the Trusted Reviews team in 2019 as

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A TikTok backlash in India has ruined the apps rating - TrustedReviews