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5 Feb 2021. TIME FOR REFLECTION The Friday Morning Seminar today was high energy, three wonderful presentations, one on comparative experiences in Quebec (both with British Colombia and with the U.S.), one on behavior with masks and the messages written on masks; and one on this journaling project and the challenges of collective ethnographic in this mode as well as future challenges of archiving and analyzing. The Quebec case, told in a TED talk style, using the "we" to diffuse some of the blaming of individuals although the Premier Legault came in for some scrutiny, especially when he replaced a health minister with public health experience with a businessman with no public health experience; his attack on the press (especially an experienced health reporter, Aaron Deful. Editorial cartoons helped make a number of points about Quebec's "exceptionalist" ideology, and the "aesthetics of statistics", that is the way in which statistics are used politically but are themselves often not transparent. The blame game has some traction, until one begins to see stark parallels with other places, particularly the U.S. (exceptionalism albeit on different grounds, efforts to control the statistics and narrative, attack on journalists, attacks on Asians; and explosion of cases, and staff burnout, before they are finally brought under control). The contrast with B.C. is stark: BC did much better in controlling the pandemic, while Quebec's death rate per capita exploded in June to the fifth highest in the world. Yet, amazingly enough, the rate now has been brought down to that of Vermont, one of the lowest. Some of this had to do with nursing logistics for long term care facilities: in the beginning nurses were going from facility to facility carrying the infection along with them; eventually there was a mandate of being allowed to work only one facility and the army was called in to help. Another key failure was ignoring the immigrant and racialized communities of North Montreal (with no plan in place), exacerbated by the lack of collecting data in these communities. Instead the province relied on a "zone-linked" alert system. Some of all of this, as in the US has to do with decaying public health care (even though it is Canada with universal health care): budgets for decades have been balanced by cutting budgets for health, leading to shortages of health care workers. Eventually lockdown and curfew (8pm-5am), closing of restaurants and bars, mask mandates (as well as the border), and other controls, the rates of infection have gone down. Suggestion that one think about pandemics as redistribution of crises. (E.g. putting off of surgeries, including oncology.) The talk on masks by a hospital nurse (and PhD anthropologist!) was fascinating in two major ways: first, for the slogans and images with which people customize their mask, and second, because she does screening of patients, her efforts to gently figure out psychological or cultural nudges to get people to take pride in wearing their masks. The first includes political slogans, including the wonderful contradiction of wearing a mask that says "Jesus is my protector, Trump is my president" although not wearing masks has become a pro-Trump statement. Still by saying "I like your mask", the patient straightened up with pleasure and might wear the mask to propagate his cultural identification. The most poignant of the masques was a picture of the wearer's mother and her dates of birth and death. When she commented on his mask, he too straightened with pleasure, and explained that it was a tribute to his mother, a wonderful woman, who died of COVID, and he liked talking about her, and keeping her memory alive. Others were emblazoned with sports teams symbols (Baltimore Ravens, Star of the Texas Cowboys) or the treads of the Marines combat boots and saying that he had fought in Vietnam and now he would fight COVID> The talk on the Journaling Project generated a good deal of excitement and interest, both inherently for trying to capture the "contemporary history" of the pandemic in real time, and for the kinds of analyses possible (e.g. seeing the fluctuations and contradictions of people's rating their week's mental health together with their narrative accounts, some saying they had not posted for a while because they were feeling low or depressed, but now felt they could come back to it). Also there was interest in how to handle what is becoming a vlds (very large data set) and issues of archiving. Interestingly the writer Stephen King had a piece in the NYT this morning on his thinking process for developing a film on the pandemic, a need to focus narrowly to capture what will be memorable in the future. In this case he wanted to explore Zoom life and its claustrophobia, but not exclude live action. The device is a couple who normally would be separating but because of COVID have to stay together, but whose prior work identities are no longer so all consuming. Learning that big department stores in London had moved out all their most expensive stock fearing riots, he devised a plot about planning a heist at Harrods (something to do together?). He says, "When reality offers you such an unusual dislocation of what is normal, a situation that no one has been through before, it can be quite gleeful to write about — it’s like stepping on fresh snow." https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/movies/locked-down-anne-hathaway-chiwetel-ejiofor.html So it makes me think: (a) what story nuggets that can endure over time in memory are contained in the Journaling project (and can on access them, whose property, etc.); and (b) what short stories, television, film, etc. creative writing will be generated that ethnographers could use for analytic clues in the Journaling Project. This week is the beginning of Phase 2 of the COVID vaccination roll out: all who are over 75 are eligible, but neither [of my health providers] actually have any vaccine yet. In Somerville a clinic has been opened for those who are disabled or otherwise will have trouble with access; others are asked to wait. Otherwise, this week has also been one of a beginning of the national political reflections on January 6. Gun toting, conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga), apologist for 6 Jan, who has endorsed a murder threat against Nancy Pelosi has been stripped of her committee positions with eleven Republicans joining the Democrats; Trump has rejected an invitation to testify or be deposed for his impeachment trial to begin next week and is caught in the cross-hairs of not conceding the election but his lawyers having to argue that his main defense in the trial is that he is no longer President and so can no longer be impeached ; and the first big Biden legislative effort (Rescue America -- COVID relief) has been pushed through using the budget reconciliation provision (requiring only a majority to pass bills that can be shown to have an effect on the budget -- vote along party lines was broken by our new Vice President, Kamala Harris.
February 9, 2021