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Graham Dockery

is an Irish journalist, commentator, and writer at RT. Previously based in Amsterdam, he wrote for DutchNews and a scatter of local and national newspapers.

is an Irish journalist, commentator, and writer at RT. Previously based in Amsterdam, he wrote for DutchNews and a scatter of local and national newspapers.

Social justice types cheered when Minnesota dairy firm Land OLakes removed a racist image of a Native American girl from its packaging. But on the bizarre battlefields of the culture wars, nobody wins.

Mia, a Native American woman complete with feathered headdress, has graced Land OLakes packaging since the 1920s. During that time shes gone through several redesigns, but the company quietly scrapped her in February, leaving a plain landscape behind. By the end of the year, Land OLakes farmers and suppliers will feature on its packaging in her place.

The company gave no reason for doing away with Mia, but its widely suspected that the move was to please the social justice crowd. Native American academic Lisa Monchalin previously called Mia an example of sexualized depictions of Indigenous women, while North Dakota state Rep. Ruth Buffalo (D) - also a Native American said that the image of the comely butter maiden goes hand-in-hand with human and sex trafficking of our women and girls by depicting Native women as sex objects.

Hang on. Who on earth associated the butter girl with sex? When last I checked, fully clothed milkmaids dont make the Playboy centerfolds. Burlap dresses arent the new bikini bottoms. Her ties with human and sex trafficking too are a ridiculous overreach.

But the conservative outcry at her removal is ridiculous too. Land OLakes website has been flooded with one-star reviews in recent days by customers who say theyll boycott the company for buckling to political correctness. Even Iowa Congressman Steve King (R) got involved, lamenting the work of the PC millennials whove taken over his apparently beloved butter brand. Okay boomer.

To top it all off, Robert DesJarlait, the son of the artist who drew the current iteration of Mia, joined the debate in a Washington Post op-ed on Wednesday. DesJarlaits father who is Native American added some genuine Ojibwe tribal motifs to Mias dress, a flourish Robert said helped his father maintain a connection to his identity.

She simply didnt fit the parameters of a stereotype, DesJarlait said, adding that her removal leaves behind a landscape voided of identity and history. Paraphrasing an ironic meme thats done the rounds since the debacle kicked off, DesJarlait quipped they got rid of the Indian and kept the land.

If theres anything we can learn from this debacle, its that in these most minor battles in the online culture wars, nobody wins. Mias inclusion on the butter pack is racist, but her removal is erasure. You cant please everyone, and if we remove everything deemed problematic, who really benefits?

Not the Native Americans, DesJarlait thinks.

As an Irishman, I dont feel stigmatized, and certainly not sexualized, when I see the Lucky Charms leprechaun. But I wouldnt get beat out of shape if General Mills removed his winking visage from their cereal boxes. I simply wouldnt eat Lucky Charms because I dont want diabetes.

Maybe everyone aggrieved by Buttergate can reevaluate their choices on different grounds. For instance, should Land OLakes products be canceled not because of their imagery, but because of their practise of pumping their spreadable butter full of canola oil a nutritionally devoid seed oil that causes oxidation of the organs?

At the very least, discussing the health implications of consuming such a product would go some way toward solving a real problem.

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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

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Who needs woke butter wars? Dairy company removes racist depiction of Native American woman but Native artist says it was fine - RT

Were both really embracing this [sex] as time together rather than using it to stress out, report a school teacher from Chattanooga (TN) to NBC News. Theres fear in general, sure there are people that I love that are at a higher risk but sex has definitely been a distraction for us. Its finally a moment when were not thinking about or talking about this virus.

The coronavirus is spreading, the death rate rising and the number of the those working from home and/or are unemployed is reaching unprecedented levels. Compounding this situation, the CDC advocates social distancing remaining out of congregate settings, avoiding mass gatherings, and maintaining distance (approximately 6 feet or 2 meters) from others when possible.

It is a period when an ever-growing number of Americas are stuck at home and likely with more free time then they know what to do with. Sure, for some it is turning into a great escape from the daily grind time to clean house, to read the books or see the movies ones put off and, for some, to have sex.

For many couples and individuals with kids at home (especially younger ones who cant fully understand whats going on), however, childcare can be overwhelming. For others, the boredom of endless domestic life can foster bickering if not outright abusive situations. And for those living alone, the tedium of bad TV, ever-repetitive media reports (how much Trumps self-promotion and ever-worsening medical reports can one take?) and other ways to waste time will take their toll.

Jessica Zucker, a psychologist writing for NBC News, advises readers, sex can be a great stress reliever. She warns, but if youre feeling an aversion to sex, whether it be with your partner or yourself, know that your reaction, too, is typical. There is no one right way to handle unprecedented moments such as these.

The TV doctor, Mehmet Oz, MD, confirmed this opinion. The best solution if youre holed up with your significant other in quarantine is have sex, he said. Youll live longer, youll get rid of the tension maybe youll make some babies. Its certainly better than staring at each other and getting on each others nerves.

There appears to little data analyzing sex life during the current plague. Zucker reports that in a poll she conducted with her 46,000 Instagram community as to whether the epidemic was helping or hurting their sex lives, responses were split almost down the middle: 52 percent said their sex life had improved, and 48 percent said it was stunted.

However, a recently reported poll of about 9,000 people concerning the impact of the coronavirus on their sex life offers a surprising insight. One quarter of the respondents (24%) said the outbreak had positively affected their sex lives; another quarter or so (28%) reported its impact being neutral; and nearly half (47%) claimed that Corvis-10 had negatively affected their sex life.

So, how is your sex life during the time of the 21st-century plague?

***

Sex is a complex personal and social phenomenon. It can involve a wide range of very different experiences and practices. For example, it can include but is not limited to (i) sex with oneself (e.g., autoeroticism, voyeuristic), (ii) sex with another (i.e., hetero or homo, consensual, commercial or coerced) or (iii) sex with others (e.g., group encounters). And then there are all the ways people can engage in sex, everything from the old-fashioned doggystyle to the latest sex-wellness product or online VR partner.

The best single source for information about sexual practice and coronavirus is a recent release from the New York City Department of Health, Sex and Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19). It warns: All New Yorkers should stay home and minimize contact with others to reduce the spread of COVID-19. And then it suggests a variety of tips for how to enjoy sex and to avoid spreading COVID-19.

First and foremost, NYC Health urges people to have sex with people close to you and to avoid close contact including sex with anyone outside your household.

Most helpful, it offers the following four suggestions as to how to have safer sex:

+ Avoid kissing anyone who is not part of your small circle of close contacts.

+ Rimming (mouth on anus) might spread COVID-19; virus in feces may enter your mouth.

+ Condoms and dental dams can reduce contact with saliva or feces, especially during oral or anal sex.

+ Washing up before and after sex is more important than ever; wash sex toys with soap and warm water; disinfect keyboards and touch screens that you share with others (for video chat, for watching pornography or for anything else).

And, finally, skip sex if you or your partner is not feeling well.

***

Nothing illuminates the impact of the current plaque on sex life then how its playing out in two key sectors of the sexual marketplace pornography and (consensual) sex work. The outcomes are predictable.

Pornhub claims to be the worlds leading free porn site and as the coronavirus captured ever-increasing countries around the world, viewership of porn skyrocketed. It reports that the upswing in viewership started on March 9th and by 11th it had climbed by 14 percent. On March 13th, it reports there was a 5.1 percent increase in U.S. traffic compared to an average day, and a 6.4 percent increase on March 17th. Ever opportunist, it took advantage of the new plague by offering a limited fee premium that led to a spike in viewership, nearly 18 percent in the U.S. and 16 percent in Canada; increases in viewership jumped in Italy, Spain and other countries as Covid-19 played out.

Forbes reports that the term corona virus first appeared on Pornhub on January 25th and continued to rise. It reports that as of March 3rd, there were over 6.8 million searches containing the keywords corona or covid. Searches peaked on March 5th at 1.5 million and, it observes, with the American public getting ready to settle in for a few weeks of self-isolation, Pornhub is likely to see another rise in traffic, regardless of keywords. Perhaps most revealing, it notes: District of Columbia is top of the list for popularity of coronavirus searches [on Pornhub] by state when compared to the U.S. average.

The Daily Caller, a right-wingwebsite, warns that a pornography website [IsMyGirl] is targeting McDonalds workers suffering low wages during the coronavirus pandemic by offering them the opportunity to earn upwards of $100,000 a year to participate in pornographic content. The sites founder, Evan Seinfeld, said in a press release sent to more than half a million McDonalds staffers: In an effort to help McDonalds employees, and to make sure they can continue to provide for themselves and their families, we want to help provide them with a legitimate option.

Porn industry performers appear to be especially vulnerable to coronavirus. The Free Speech Coalition [FSC] the adult industry trade association takes a strong stand: Shooting [porn] at this time is not safe, but closing PASS and prohibiting shoots with ones household partners would only compound an already alarming public health situation. [PASS is the industrys centralized opt-in testing system,PerformerAvailability Screening Services (PASS), in which performersare tested every 14 days.]

To its members, it advised the following safer-sex practices:

+ Stay at home.

+ Shoot only solos or with partners who live in your household.

+ Do not leave your home to work.

+ Do not have physical contact with someone who doesnt live in your household

The FSCs communications director, Mike Stabile, warns, right now, most performers want to continue to shoot while they cansets are less risky than the grocery store, and who knows how long an Italian-style shutdown will last. He reminds people, adult performers dont get sick days or government bailouts, and many crew members non-adult jobs are already being cancelled.

Many porn production studios are closed due to the virus, but some porn performers are taking advantage of the downturn to create new opportunities. One performer, Maitland Ward, says, Im stuck at home, too, so Im doing a lot more content just to fill time as well. She reports, actually, Ive seen upticks in some of my income because people are home and they want entertainment and they want to get away from all the corona stuff. Another performer, Sarah Vandella, claims that adult models and actors are encouraged to utilize their own personal time to continue to create content as much as possible for Skype and other streaming platforms.

While there appears to an upswing in porn viewing, the fate of (consensual) sex workers is more precarious. Maxine Doogan, head of the Erotic Service Providers Legal Education and Research Project, decries the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on sex work: Theres just no business. Its not happening. The group, Decriminalize Sex Work, shares this assessment, warning, sex workers are a financially vulnerable and criminalized community, and thus their lives are greatly impacted by times of uncertainty and strife.

In April 2018, Pres. Trump signed into FOSTA-SESTA, a law ostensible aimed to contain sex trafficking and further the religious rights culture wars. However, its principle accomplishment was to close the website, Backpage.com, that promoted commercial sex. Looking back, Doogan notes that one consequence of new law was that a lot of people lost their housing pretty immediately, they lost their business, their ability to feed themselves. Were going to see that with this quarantine, no doubt. Amidst todays crises, she reflects, I have older customers that Im concerned about their health. Im keeping connections with people email, and text, and calling, she adds. Its what we had to do when we lost our websites. We called each other, we called our customers, we kept connected.

Other sex workers share Doogans concerns. We are facing a lot of fear of loss of housing, hearing from people who are forgoing medication in order to afford food, going hungry in general, says Fera Lorde of the Brooklyn chapter of the Sex Workers Outreach Project. Sex work serves a vast population of people for many different reasons, and many of us are already living with risk factors like pre-existing conditions, lack of healthcare, family members to take care of who are elderly or disabled, or unstable housing. Decriminalize Sex Work has published on online coronavirus health guide, Sex Worker and LGBTQIA Resource Guide: COVID-19.

Most sex workers, like gig workers and nondocumented workers, may not file annual income tax forms and, thus, many not qualify for unemployment benefits or the planned federal bail-out payment. Many are facing very hard times. So, sex-worker support groups like for restaurant workers and others are setting up crowd-funding campaigns to help meet peoples needs. A GoFundMe group, Emergency COVID Relief for Sex Workers in New York, has raised nearly $60,000. Other groups e.g., SWOP Brooklyn, Lysistrata Mutual Care Collective and the Butterfly Asian and Migrant Worker Support Network are undertaking similar projects.

***

In a recent New Yorker article, the social historian Jill Lepore discusses the unique role literature plays in our understanding of plagues. She traces plagues, natural and political, over the last six centuries through a half-dozen memorable works of fiction. As she advices contemporary readers, Stories about plagues run the gamut, from Oedipus Rex to Angels in America. There are plagues here and plagues there, from Thebes to New York, horrible and ghastly

Her article meanders, insightfully, from Giovanni Boccacciois The Decameron (14th-century Black Plague); to Daniel Defoes A Journal of the Plague Year (the London plague of 1655); through Mary Shelleys The Last Man (set in 2092); Edgar Allan Poes The Masque of the Red Death (a medieval world); Jack Londons The Scarlet Plaque (set in 2073 but looking back to 2013); Albert Camuss The Plague (set in the 1940s with the plague referring to the virus of Fascism); and to Jos Saramagos Blindness (a critique of the 20th-century authoritarian state).

One can only hope that a writer with equal artistic talent as those discussed by Lepore will one day capture the reality of the first (of perhaps many) 21st-century plagues, coronavirus. And, equally revealing, convey the meaning ofsex life for those enduring Corvis-19.

Continued here:
Sex Life in the Time of the 21st Century Plague - CounterPunch

The journalists at BuzzFeed News are proud to bring you trustworthy and relevant reporting about the coronavirus. To help keep this news free, become a member and sign up for our newsletter, Outbreak Today.

A website with Education Secretary Betsy DeVoss son on its board of directors published a viral article that claims the coronavirus would be exterminated if lockdowns were lifted.

On April 7, the College Fix, a news and opinion website that normally publishes stories about politics and college life, ran a story titled Epidemiologist: Coronavirus Could Be Exterminated If Lockdowns Were Lifted. The most popular story ever published by the College Fix, it received over 1.7 million Facebook likes, shares, and comments, according to social media tracking tool BuzzSumo.

The article cited an academic arguing for herd immunity, the idea that ending the lockdowns will result in people becoming immune to the virus after contracting it, which is heavily contested by epidemiologists.

The College Fix is a conservative publication featuring both student and nonstudent writers based in Hillsdale, Michigan, and overseen by the nonprofit Student Free Press Association. Rick DeVos, the son of Betsy DeVos, sits on the Fixs board.

The DeVos family has a long history of funding conservative causes with its vast fortune. According to Fortune magazine, Betsy DeVoss family, including her husband and children, is worth about $2 billion.

Written by assistant editor Daniel Payne, the College Fixs story featured quotes from a YouTube interview with Knut Wittkowski published by UK-based video company Journeyman Pictures. In the video, Wittkowski misstated basic facts about the pandemic, saying there are no more new cases in China and in South Korea, contradicting publicly available statistics.

The College Fix described Wittkowski as a veteran scholar of epidemiology and previously the head of the department of biostatistics, epidemiology, and research design at Rockefeller University in New York. Although Wittkowski did hold that position at Rockefeller, the university has sought to distance itself from the scientist. On April 13, Rockefeller University released a public statement saying although he was previously employed by the university, Wittkowski had never held the title of professor and that his views on herd immunity did not represent the institution.

"Dr. Wittkowski was head of biostatistics, epidemiology, and research design in the Center for Clinical and Translational Science at Rockefeller University," a university spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. "That group was not an academic department, however. Unusual among its peers, the university does not have academic departments, in fact. Dr. Wittkowski was employed at Rockefeller from 1998 to 2018."

Many other publications are using articles from the College Fix to argue against extending lockdowns despite the main sources contested science. The story first made the rounds in Facebook groups aimed at conservative audiences before breaking out of the closed online spaces and into more mainstream ones. Its biggest Facebook boost came from Mark Levin, a conservative radio host whose show gets syndicated by Fox News.

I am not 'discouraging social distancing' (breaking the law), Wittkowski told BuzzFeed News in an email. I'm asking people to discuss the policy decisions made with their representatives. These are two very different things.

In both the article and the video, Wittkowski said that schools should be reopened while the elderly and at-risk people should be isolated. However, coronavirus victims have included young people and children.

Daniel Payne, the author of the article, said the College Fix didnt identify Wittkowski as a professor and used the same credentials as what he stated in the video. Paynes story was a news article, and the associate editor told BuzzFeed News that the College Fix does not have a wider editorial stance on social distancing.

Our editors regularly write columns on the site expressing different viewpoints on varying higher ed topics, but those opinions do not constitute a unified editorial standpoint, he told BuzzFeed News.

Dr. Aaron Glatt, the chair of the department of medicine and hospital epidemiologist at Mount Sinai South Nassau, told BuzzFeed News that Wittkowski was essentially advocating for more people to die from COVID-19.

In multiple studies now, we've seen that when you restrict social proximity what we call maximizing social distancing you can impact the number of people who will get COVID and flatten the curve, decrease the number of new cases, decreasing significantly morbidity and mortality, Glatt said.

The danger is that many, many people will die if we just let nature take its course. That's the problem. We don't want people to die.

The story featuring Wittkowski is one of several stories the College Fix has published that argue for the pandemic lockdown to end. Rick DeVos himself, however, has tweeted angrily about college students not following lockdown procedures.

Launched in 2010 by John J. Miller, a correspondent with the National Review, to nurture conservative and libertarian college students, the College Fix has had its writers frequently go on to work for other conservative publications. The website is funded through the Student Free Press Association, a nonprofit that receives the vast majority of its funding from contributions from sources that it does not disclose. In 2018, it received $749,509 in contributions, according to its tax documents. BuzzFeed News has reached out to Miller for comment.

Although its not clear where much of the current funding comes from, Inside Higher Ed reported in 2017 that the Fixs income came from Donors Capital Fund, a large nonprofit that funds right-wing causes.

In 2014, Donors Capital Fund gave $265,000 to the Student Free Press Association, which amounted to half its yearly operating budget. In 2015, the Student Free Press Association received $100,000 from the fund, according to tax forms available online. Tax filings for 2016 and 2017 do not show any further donations from Donors Capital Fund.

Donors Capital Fund also has received funds from another organization, Donors Trust, to which the DeVos family has contributed. In the past, the nonprofit Donors Trust has given money to organizations rejecting scientific facts about climate change. Both organizations have also donated over $1.7 million to Project Veritas, a right-wing activist group, according to the Washington Post.

Its not possible to say whether any of the funds contributed by the DeVos family flowed directly from Donors Trust through Donors Capital Fund to Student Free Press Association and the College Fix. Aside from giving money to Donors Capital Fund, Donors Trust has also given $100,000 to the Student Free Press Association in 2017 according to tax forms. Miller previously said the DeVos family hasnt given money to the College Fix, which would not rule out indirect funding.

See the original post:
The College Fix Was Founded To Fight Culture Wars On Campus, But Its Biggest Hit Is About The Coronavirus - BuzzFeed News

Catastrophic events like the coronavirus pandemic force us to examine, and in some cases rethink, how we see the world. Sometimes they also shed light on important trends and patterns of behaviour that predated the pandemic. Consequently, it is now possible to see and understand the culture wars that have divided societies for more than three decades in a new light. So what have recent events taught us about the dynamic and drivers of the culture wars?

Numerous commentators have claimed that the culture wars are on their way out. Time and again I have heard people say that they simply cannot last much longer. Indeed, the impending demise of the culture wars has been predicted many times since the 1990s. In 2009, the Center for American Progress published a report titled The Coming End Of The Culture War. In 2018, an article in the Baffler declared that the culture wars are dead. More recently, just before the pandemic, one writer suggested that China might bring an end to the culture wars.

Meanwhile, on the anti-identitarian left, some have raised the hope that the politics of class will soon return and neutralise the more grotesque manifestations of identity politics. Others have seized on the devastation brought by the pandemic to conclude that, faced with a common foe, the constant squabbles over identities and related cultural matters will exhaust itself. Please, please let Covid-19 kill the culture wars, pleads a journalist in a recent edition of the Spectator USA.

But it has become clear that not even a deadly pandemic could lead to a truce in the culture wars. On the contrary, Covid-19 has raised the stakes and intensified pre-existing conflicts, to the point that just about any new detail that emerges about the pandemic is seized upon as vindication of ones previous point of view. Consequently, culture warriors are not interested in the number of deaths or the statistics regarding the health and economic consequences of the pandemic. Their main aim is to highlight the supposedly unfair consequences of the pandemic and its management for their chosen identity group or cause. If coronavirus doesnt discriminate, how come black people are bearing the brunt?, asks Afua Hirsch, a columnist in the Guardian. Similar questions have been posed about the impact of Covid on other minorities and on women.

The culture wars are so deeply entrenched that they make it very difficult to forge a sense of genuine unity in face of a common foe. This is why the instinctive response of both sides of the cultural divide in the United States was to use the pandemic as a pretext for settling old scores. As the pandemic spread across America, New Jerseys Democratic governor made a point of refusing to declare gun shops an essential service that could stay open. In their wisdom, Republicans in Texas and Mississippi decided that nothing was more urgent than to try to limit access to abortion provision.

In the past, when faced with a common enemy such as Nazi Germany during the Second World War ideological differences were put aside in a common effort to defend the nation. It is unclear whether such unity could be forged if society was confronted by a similar external foe today.

The response to Covid-19 indicates that conflicting attitudes that have surfaced during the culture wars are now so deeply held that they spontaneously guide many peoples behaviour and reactions. Not everyone is a signed-up member of one side or another in this conflict. But of those who are, most are likely to respond in a fairly predictable way to the issues at stake in this pandemic.

According to reports, at least initially, social distancing in the United States was polarised along party lines. Supporters of Trump were sceptical and made a feature of not taking social distancing seriously. Meanwhile, their opponents were much more likely to live according to the advice offered by experts. Reports indicate that Democrats were likely to say that the pandemic was worse than it appeared, while Republicans would say its bad, but its getting better.

In most parts of the Western world, there are also conflicting attitudes towards reliance on expertise. One side of the cultural conflict is more comfortable with experts, rather than elected politicians, taking important decisions. The other side is far more suspicious of experts and looks to other forms of authority for guidance and leadership.

In a pandemic you cant do without experts. So pre-existing differences have also been refracted through many of us embracing experts whose outlook most corresponds with our personal views. In the UK, those who support a total lockdown prefer the doomsday scenario of the Imperial College modellers to the more modest prognosis put out by Oxford University.

Debates about the supposed trade-off between saving lives or salvaging the economy, between locking society down or adopting a more nuanced approach towards the management of the crisis, between giving up freedoms or demanding that people have a degree of freedom even during the pandemic, often intermesh with previous conflicts of values.

The differential responses to what is in fact a public-health crisis indicates that, for many people, the conflict of cultural values has become a lived experience, one that has become deeply internalised. Some of the activists in this conflict really see symptoms of discrimination, oppression or inequality everywhere, and the new circumstances brought on by Covid-19 simply confirm what they already suspected was the case.

The conflicts over Covid-19 are not just about racial, gender or sexual identities. The current debate over the trade-off between lives and the economy indicates that class plays an important role in this political drama.

In recent times, numerous commentators have raised questions about the modern worlds runaway economy its obsession with consumerism and growth. Some have pointed to the virtues of working at home and of slowing down. Since the lockdowns began, many commentators have suggested that domestic life, especially with the aid of online opportunities, has its good points. Online yoga classes, Zoom cocktail sessions, baking cakes, and living a more frugal but wholesome life supposedly allow these people to minimise their concern about the devastating economic and social consequences of societys response to the pandemic.

What all this misses is that, even during this crisis, there are millions of people working in the supply chain, delivering stuff to peoples homes, and running essential services. This pandemic is differentially experienced by those who work at home and those who do not. In most instances, this difference is principally one of class. For many working-class people, the threat posed by the pandemic is as much about economic survival as about physical health. But for some culture warriors, such attitudes smack of right-wing contrarianism. Dismissing concerns about the economy as a symptom of indifference to life, Polly Toynbee claims that divisions on the questions of your money or your life has sparked the latest culture war.

In many instances, those who are at home and those who continue to work also have different cultural values from one another. Those who have to work are not particularly worried about the culture of consumerism or the perils of economic growth. On the other side, there are those who do not want to return to the days of economic growth. Green zealots regard Covid as a useful exemplar of what they mean when they talk about a climate emergency. From their perspective, the loss of freedom brought on by emergency measures is precisely the kind of world they would like to see in the future.

Ultimately, Covid-19 highlights profound differences in attitudes towards the place of humanity in this world. For some time now there has been a powerful mood of uncertainty about the moral status of human beings and their role in the world. In recent decades there has been a one-sided emphasis on humanitys destructive powers and its indifference to the welfare of future generations and the planet. From this perspective, human ingenuity and creativity are portrayed as more of a problem than a solution to the challenges we face. Many greens believe that lockdown is a small price to pay in exchange for bringing closer a carbon-neutral world. Since they regard human freedom as principally meaning the freedom to destroy the planet, its loss is no big deal.

In the decades ahead, the faultline in the culture wars will be much more explicitly focused on the meaning and desirability of freedom itself. Until now, conflicts on the issue of freedom have mainly focused on issues to do with freedom of speech. But in recent months the focus has shifted to a far more fundamental question the value of freedom itself. The freedom of movement, the freedom to create and innovate, the freedom to take risks all are going to be increasingly challenged by those devoted to creating a culture of human restraint.

This is why, at the moment, those who are concerned about the threat this crisis poses to democratic freedoms are so casually dismissed. And this highlights a very real problem that we ignore at our peril.

Frank Furedi is a sociologist and commentator. His book Whats Happened To The University?: A Sociological Exploration of its Infantilisation, is published by Routledge. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).)

Picture by: Getty.

To enquire about republishing spikeds content, a right to reply or to request a correction, please contact the managing editor, Viv Regan.

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What Covid-19 has revealed about the culture wars - Spiked

When President Donald Trump declared a national emergency last month, as the coronavirus outbreak worsened, he deployed language familiar and perhaps oddly comforting to many Americans. Designating himself a wartime president, Trump likened the countrys COVID-19 response to the U.S.s mobilization during World War II. Every generation of Americans has been called to make shared sacrifices for the good of the nation, Trump insisted.

This rhetorical maneuver reflected the long American history of declaring war on any conceivable enemy whether physical, abstract, domestic or foreign. But as familiar and ubiquitous as war might be for many Americans, at least figuratively, that same history also shows that it is a poor framework through which to understand complex social problems such as poverty and public-health emergencies like the novel coronavirus or drug addiction.

War has been a permanent condition and the governing metaphor for American life since at least the Second World War. Instead of reining in its military and defense infrastructure at the end of the war and the beginning of what is ironically known as the postwar period the U.S. opted to go in the opposite direction, bolstering the national security state in the hopes of thwarting the perceived Soviet and Communist threat. A massive expansion of federal power, the National Security Act of 1947 formed the skeleton of our modern national defense apparatus. The Act established the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council (NSC), a cabinet-level body that would help formulate military and foreign policy on the presidents behalf.

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Drafted and circulated in 1950, the councils NSC-68 report cast the young Cold War in stark, severe terms. It declared that the cold war is in fact a real war in which the survival of the free world is at stake and argued that Americans must be willing to give up some of the benefits which they have come to associate with their freedoms. In other words, though World War II had ended in victory, Americans would continue seeing the world through a wartime lens and indefinitely so.

In many ways, the assumptions underlying NSC-68 would guide U.S. foreign policy through the end of the Cold War and beyond. Even after the collapse of the Soviet Union and thus the end of the Cold War, the U.S. [f]reed from major challengers remained committed to military action, although it often couched these interventions in terms of human rights.

It is therefore no surprise that Americans have long understood challenges far from the battlefield (such as COVID-19) through the lens of war. Beyond the actual experience of war as combat, as historian Michael Sherry has shown, the United States obsession with war has meant imagining many things in terms of it from President Lyndon B. Johnson depicting incidents of urban unrest as a war within our own boundaries to President Richard Nixon declaring a war on cancer in 1971 (as the Vietnam War raged), from LBJs War on Poverty to Pat Buchanans war for the soul of America (i.e., the culture wars) to the interlocking wars on crime and drugs. The band Wilco lamented this war fetish in their 2001 song War on War, in which frontman Jeff Tweedy sings that, in such a conflict, Youre gonna lose.

Americans know war, theologian Stanley Hauerwas notes, and when we are frightened ironically war makes us feel safe. Michael Sherry concurs building on the work of the late historian Marilyn B. Young when he calls the United States a nation deeply wedded to and defined by war, though maddeningly reluctant to admit it.

Still, real war remains distant and abstract for the overwhelming majority of Americans. As scholar Andrew Bacevich indicated in 2011, approximately half of 1 percent of our citizens bear the burden of service and sacrifice meaning 99.5% of Americans are not personally attached to the military or the national security state. The physical and emotional distance separating most Americans from the battlefield allows them to glorify war while knowing nothing of its unspeakable horrors or the sacrifice it entails.

War is destructive, violent and annihilative. But the nations commitment to war (both as reality and metaphor) has a tendency to take other policy approaches off the table. What has been called the troopification of everything generates financial and political support for any activity conducted under the umbrella of war. And so Americas over-reliance on the blunt, imprecise instrument of war hinders its ability to respond to myriad other problems, from public-health emergencies to chronic issues such as hunger. The infrastructure needed to address such concerns doesnt mesh well with war. Its use as a rhetorical and framing device within our present crisis therefore represents a dismal failure of imagination.

Most damningly, perhaps, Americas recent wars whether directed at targets physical, abstract, domestic or foreign have mostly failed. The United States excels at war, Sherry observes, though no longer at winning it. In just the past 50 years or so, the U.S. has failed to win the War in Vietnam, the war on cancer (despite many notable achievements in research and treatment), the War on Poverty (although LBJs campaign slashed poverty rates), the war on crime (which did much to terrorize and imprison poor and working-class black and brown people but little to actually curtail crime), the war on drugs (given the persistent reality of drug addiction) and the seemingly endless global war on terror.

This track record does not bode well for the nations war against COVID-19. We need an efficient, coherent public-health response coordinated by a competent federal government. What we dont need is another war.

Paul M. Renfro is an Assistant Professor of History at Florida State University and the author of Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State (Oxford University Press, 2020).

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War Has Been the Governing Metaphor for Decades of American Life. This Pandemic Exposes Its Weaknesses - TIME