There Are No Dolphins in Venice
04/17/20
by Brian Mier
Hot Streak - Quarantine Comic by Rylan Thompson. Pen, gouache, acrylic, and collage on paper, 8"x10" .
On January 15, 2010, two colleagues and I arrived by van at the border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti. We were coming in to Haiti to help get our Haitian field office up and running. It hadn’t collapsed from the 7.0 earthquake three days earlier, but the building was too damaged to go into, and 13 of 20 staff were missing. At the border Jaques, our finance department director, met us in his pickup truck and we moved our bags and supplies, including a dozen bottles of rum and whiskey and several boxes of Valium, into the back. As we drove towards Port Au Prince, we began to see stronger and stronger signs of the earthquake that had killed around 220,000 people in five minutes. First, there were roof tiles missing here or there, then a collapsed wall, then collapsed buildings, and people with bandanas over their faces to hide the smell of rotting corpses.
During the entire ride, Jaques was giddy. Three days earlier, he had spent four hours successfully pulling his wife out of the ruins of the bank where she worked. She was on the third floor when she hid under her desk, but when Jaques pulled her out she was at ground level. As we drove along, Jaques spoke of how positive he thought the disaster was going to be for the future of Haiti. “Thousands of people are moving out of the city, back to the countryside and the homes of their ancestors. People are returning to the land and will start farming. We’ve been needing this for a long time. There is no reason Haiti can’t start becoming self-sufficient in food again.”
Six years later, I took a vacation to Haiti to visit friends and explore the pristine beaches. As it turned out, most of the people who left Port Au Prince after the earthquake moved back. It was cathartic for me to see how things had gotten back to normal—the only sign that the quake had ever even happened were the ruins of a few buildings downtown. But the idea of a mass relocation to the countryside and Haiti becoming self-sufficient in food again was, unfortunately, the kind of pipe dream people make themselves believe during disasters to keep their spirits up.
I bring up these memories because of the global emergency we face right now. While the total worldwide body count may be lower than the number of people who died during that horrible 5 minutes in Haiti in 2010, for now that count is still growing. Furthermore, it’s touching all of us through lockdown orders, quarantines, and the fear that we or elderly relatives could die. As Boccaccio said about the plague that hit Northern Italy in the 1300s, time is standing still. All of our plans are on hold, and there are disturbing signs that governments are using this crisis to their advantage, especially to increase surveillance of their own citizens.
Nevertheless, a lot of people seem just as giddy as my friend Jaques was in Haiti back in 2010. By now everyone has seen the bogus photo of dolphins in the Venice canals. Most people have read the internet hoax poem by imaginary 19th Century poet Kathleen O’Mara, with lines like, “when the danger ended and / People found themselves / They grieved for the dead / And made new choices / And dreamed of new visions / And created new ways of living / And completely healed the earth / Just as they were healed.” On Twitter, people showed hope for the future by citing the bubonic plague as an influence on the Renaissance, a period when 95% of the population lived in serfdom. Even Slavoj Zizêk jumped onto the bandwagon of giddiness. In a recent interview with The Spectator, entitled What I like about Coronarivus, he gushes, “coronavirus gives a new chance to communism […] Of course, I don’t mean the old-style communism. By communism, I mean simply what the World Health Organization is saying.”
The fact of the matter is that the current political conjuncture is horrible. In the UK and US, we have witnessed the most promising candidates in decades propose the kinds of structural adjustments that are needed to prevent worldwide environmental collapse, protect workers’ rights from the rise of the gig economy, and stop endless imperialist wars and regime change operations—only to be crushed by systematic character assassination and smear campaigns in both the corporate and social media, while simultaneously being sabotaged from within by their own political parties. In both countries, a three-year period of hope that lulled a lot of people into a false sense of security has ended. We are now faced with governments controlled by genocidal clowns who contributed to the current crisis by refusing to take warnings seriously, and prioritizing profits over the lives of their citizens.
Furthermore, far from coming together as a people, the US government and its citizens have emerged as the most selfish people on Earth. As socialist countries like China and Cuba send doctors in solidarity to the areas hardest hit by the pandemic, the US government is deliberately killing the sick and elderly populations of Iran and Venezuela by blocking the entrance of medical equipment and medicine. As China sends donations of ventilators, protective equipment, and medicine to developing countries around the world, the US government is engaging in twenty-first century piracy by intercepting shipments of ventilators and medical equipment, and then stealing that merchandise. Many Americans are fighting each other over toilet paper and hand sanitizer, and stockpiling weapons for the dog-eat-dog dystopia they imagine to be right around the corner. While some countries, like Spain, are using the crisis to make structural adjustments (nationalizing private hospital systems, rolling out universal basic income) that benefit the population as a whole, the USA is handing trillions of dollars to corporations with no fiscal oversight mechanism or conditionalities to guarantee that employment levels are maintained.
If there is one certainty that has come out of the last year, it is that elections are not going to save anyone from the clowns. Even if the democrats win in October, they are no longer fielding a candidate who is promising to do anything significant to avoid impending environmental and labor collapse, or guarantee the basic human right of universal access to public healthcare.
The fact is that a lot of capitalists are panicking right now. Economists are predicting the worst depression since the 1930s. The international bubble of fictitious capital has burst. People are talking about the end of neoliberalism, but this does not mean that what comes next will be any better, and pretending otherwise is dangerous. While transforming into a FDR-style society, with Keynesian redistributive measures and massive public works projects in a push toward full employment at living wages may be one possible outcome, the fall of neoliberalism could also lead to a corporate-led totalitarian surveillance state that responds to the unemployment crisis caused by economic slowdown, robotization, and computers by culling the population through measures like accelerating plagues and throwing immigrants into concentration camps.
We can applaud the collapse of neoliberalism, but nothing better is going to come without a fight. I am just another guy sitting around in quarantine and don’t pretend to have all the answers, but I’ve seen a lot of solid-looking suggestions on how people can take advantage of this crisis to organize for a better society. We can push for a permanent universal basic income to counterbalance the impending labor crisis, in which some 20-40% of the workforce will no longer be needed due to robotics and computerization. (Some countries, like Spain and Finland, are already rolling that out.) Regardless of the dolphins in Venice fairy tale, it looks like the massive drop in carbon emissions caused by the crisis is going to buy humanity a little more time to prevent total environmental collapse. And the crisis is illustrating how important workers in transport logistics industries are to the economy. As labor activists point out, we may not manufacture much anymore in the US, but truck drivers, longshoremen, warehouse, railroad and airport workers still have to power to paralyze the United States if they strike together. The strikes that are building among service sector workers like Amazon employees during the coronavirus crisis should be supported wholeheartedly.
The important thing to remember is that there is no savior out there who is going to solve our problems for us. The viciousness with which corporate elites and the political establishment pounced on the Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn campaigns shows us that there is no electoral solution to our problems right now. In an environment when we can no longer even take things to the streets and protest in public, the challenges for creating a better, more empathetic society with solidarity for all are greater than ever. There are no dolphins in Venice. Plagues don't heal humanity or automatically lead to communism. Jeff Bezos just made $23 billions dollars. And with Trump’s handouts, the banks are laughing all the way to the........
When I returned to Haiti in 2016, I went out for a few drinks with Jaques. Society had not transformed the way he predicted in 2010, but he had become one of the richest people in Haiti. The Japanese character for crisis is made up of two symbols: danger and opportunity (“opportunity” is not the primary meaning of the second character, but the point could still stand). The pandemic is certainly creating all kinds of opportunities, but how many people are willing to move beyond individualism and greed and start thinking of how we can hijack these opportunities for the sake of the common good of the people? The challenges to doing that are overwhelming. It’s time to start talking about tactics.
Brian Mier is co-editor at Brasil Wire and editor of the book Year of Lead: Washington, Wall Street and the New Imperialism in Brazil. He has lived in Brazil for 25 years.
Rylan Thompson (@rylan.thompson) currently lives and works in Chattanooga, TN. He has just recently stepped back into the world of color after about a decade wallowing in black and white. His recent series, Shrine Mutations II, are large color re-workings of small black and white sketchbook drawings. rylanthompson.com