MELTDOWN MAY HITS A NEW HIGH (OR LOW)

Well, it certainly has been a week, hasn’t it? America appears to be completely melting down so much that we all forgot the pandemic was a thing. (It is still a thing and I’ve got some stuff to say about it in a bit.) I must admit, I did not have “May 2020” as the month when society lost faith in the idea of policing in my Predict The Future Bingo Card (really, all I’ve managed so far was predicting that volcano eruption in the Philippines a few months back, and that doesn’t even get me the free sandwich at Subway, you need at least four stamps for that) but times are what they are, I guess. In any case, the protests in the United States following the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis (and I call it murder because that is what it obviously was) have been and continue to be crazy.

Actually, let me rephrase: the protests themselves have been more or less what you would expect. They’re mostly nonviolent protest, granted with some violence and looting - which is more or less inevitable when you have large masses of people who are justifiably angry (and/or just there to take advantage of the presence of angry people in order to start shit, which also happens and has definitely happened at least some of the time in the past few days). The protests are just protests, and honestly the property damage hasn’t been especially grandiose, particularly given how many protests there are and how huge they are.

What has been crazy is the reaction of the police. Now, a little background about me some readers might not know: I was on the ground for the 2010 G20 protests in Toronto as a journalist, which were enormous protests and which also collapsed into riots and then massive police overreaction, so please take heed when I say what has been happening in America the past few days makes those protests and riots and police overreaction look absolutely piddly.

This is at least in part because in 2010 smartphone videosharing was still in its infancy (heck, smartphones period were still pretty new at that point), so maybe the police in 2010 Toronto were this bad. That said, speaking as someone who was there and who wrote quite a bit about them being bad, I think I can say that this level of badness - or at least this level of public and widespread badness - is absolutely unprecedented in the modern era, and certainly at a level not comparable to anything since the civil rights protests/suppressions of the 1960s or the strikebreaking battles of the 1920s.

There are countless videos and photos of cops using vehicles to run over protesters, cops shooting and attacking press, cops getting caught being agents provocateurs, cops indiscriminately spraying pepper spray at bystanders, cops shooting at people in their own homes with rubber bullets, cops indiscriminately attacking anybody within range… I could go on, at length, and it’s all terrible. The most recent trend of videos is “cops destroying property after the protesters leave,” which is remarkably cynical even at this stage -

• oh, wait, somebody literally just posted the Cincinnati police taking down the American flag at their police HQ and replacing it with the Blue Lives Matter flag, which A) manages to be even uglier than the American flag is (the American flag is a busy, fiddly mess, America; I’m sorry but it’s the truth) and B) is something you would expect, say, an occupying army to do rather than the police. Of course, that’s an unfair comparison, because armies are competently trained to deal with civilians.

At this point I have no idea what happens next and am not going to try to predict anything. The police in most cities are amping up the violence of their responses further and further, and the protesters are only getting angrier, and non-police authorities have very few options in stopping the police because the cops mostly won’t listen to mayors and city councils when the chips are down. (The NYPD police union, earlier today, revealed that they had taken Bill de Blasio’s daughter into custody at one point, which feels not unlike a hostage situation.) When you get to this stage, the only real tool civilian authorities have left to them is mass police firings, which most of them don’t want to do for reasons that are fairly obvious.

Plus, expecting a helpful response from the federal government is obviously a fool’s errand right now, because Donald Trump A) obviously likes it when police beat up Black people and B) is a feckless coward, which is why right now the White House has effectively shut down almost entirely in the face of public protests outside. The only thing of note that has happened at the federal level was Trump tweeting that he was going to designate “antifa” as a domestic terror group, which he can’t technically do because there’s no such thing (terrorism statutes only apply to foreign terror groups) and because antifa aren’t actually a “group” in any reasonable sense, but the important point here is “technically” and if Donald Trump orders a large number of unlawful arrest-and-detentions I’m not sure the people thrown into prisons are going to feel better because their capture was technically illegal.

Indeed, the cynical part of me wonders if designating “antifa” as a terror group wasn’t thought up precisely because it’s so ill-defined that it gives them the leverage to effectively arrest and detain whomever they want. Certainly that would be a dramatic turn of events, but it’s also the playbook for how a weak governing regime turns itself into a purely authoritarian one - there are countless examples in 20th century history of this, and most of them coincidentally involve the government co-opting friendly police and militias (which clearly exist right now) into paramilitary units and/or death squads, depending on which nomenclature you prefer.

So, yeah. No idea what happens next. What usually happens in these situations over the past decade is that after a week or so, the protests die down because protesters can’t keep it up forever, but thanks to the pandemic a whole lot of people have a whole lot of time on their hands, and the protesters are getting angrier and angrier as the cops get more and more violent. It feels like a lot of things are coming to a head.

MEANWHILE IN ONTARIO

So, yes, the pandemic is still happening, and this past week Americans might not be aware that we had an actual scandal related to the pandemic here! How terribly exciting and awful.

In Canada, a lot of Covid-19 deaths have been in nursing homes, because, well, nursing homes have a lot of old people in them and are natural contagion vectors everywhere, so if you have a lot of old people in nursing homes, you’ll likely have more Covid-19 deaths. But, in Ontario at least, nursing homes are extremely variable in quality - so much so that the armed forces had to be called in to assist in some of their operations. When the army got called in, the army saw the conditions that were on the ground, and then the amry wrote a report that was… “not a good report” is underselling it, to say the least. Non-sterilized equipment being used repeatedly, rotten food, cockroaches, “a startling disregard for basic cleanliness,” et cetera. And as news of the report spread, a lot of people who follow the nursing home industry spoke up and said “no, this happens across the country.”

None of this is exactly news, you have to understand. Every couple of years, a newspaper or journalist or somebody has published an expose into nursing home quality and the lack thereof. Chartwell, the nursing home company which keeps former Ontario Premier Mike Harris (boooo) on the board of directors, has been the target of these exposes more than once, with the last one memorably exposing how upon taking over new homes they reduced lunches to plain hot dogs every day, which is just a bland sort of terrible but terrible nonetheless. There have been government inquiries and exposes for literally two decades now. There were exposes about this in the late 90s. The current Ontario government has been terrible on this - conducting only five inspections of the approximately 600+ nursing homes in the province last year - but this is a problem that has lasted through multiple governments.

So now there is some noise about What Can Be Done. Doug Ford is promising to do… something, as is Justin Trudeau, but what that something shall be seems amorphous at present. The NDP under Jagmeet Singh are pressing for the federal government to nationalize or at least regulate nursing homes under the Canada Health Act, which is probably the best thing to do since the private sector has proven themselves utterly unable to responsibly handle nursing homes without firm regulatory pressure, but Trudeau has responded with some dismissive talk about federal and provincial division of powers, which is governmentspeak for “we need to do as little as possible.” Because, in the end, the answer to the problem of Canadian nursing homes is really pretty simple. We don’t spend a lot of money on nursing homes, and if we want them to be better, we have to spend more money on them, which means raising taxes, and Canadians are - as I have written many times before - a stingy and parsimonious people at heart, which is why we have this problem in the first place. I would like to believe that we would simply all decide to spend the damn money and fix things. But I would also like a pony.

ALSO MEANWHILE, IN HONG KONG, AND NOT BECAUSE OF THE PANDEMIC

China imposed a national security bill over Hong Kong last week. Or, rather, they proposed to do so, but this is China, where procedural roadblocks aren’t really a thing like they are in other major countries, so it’s going to happen in the very near future. And while everything else that happened is important, this is possibly more important.

I’ve written a fair amount about Hong Kong in the past year, because Hongkongers by and large see themselves as being distinct from the rest of China for the reason that they mostly are: different currency, different economy, different political system, even a different Olympic team for some reason. Of course, China proper has long planned to eventually fold Hong Kong into the regular Chinese fold, and that was always going to happen in stages, with the first stage of course being “China reclaims power over Hong Kong from the British,” and then gradually absorbing Hong Kong back into the Chinese system.

The proposed national security bill - which is quite obviously a response to the massive Hong Kong protests of last year - is another stage in that process, because although we don’t know what the bill will contain, Chinese politicians have already made quite clear that it will address “subversion of state power,” which almost always means protests, and “secession,” which means pro-democratic action, and of course Hongkongers and their elected representatives will get precisely zero say about what goes in the bill. None of this is surprising, because once the pro-democracy protests got big enough for Western politicians to say stupid things about them, they were big enough for Chinese authorities to say “welp, that’s enough of that” - and the current Chinese regime is extremely fanatical about there only being one China, and different rules for Hong Kong has long grated on that front.

This is basically a holding pattern for now until the bill’s details are made available. But the chance that it will be anything other than a security crackdown on Hong Kong is negligible.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Mostly right now my wife and I are binging our way through every season of Top Chef, because Top Chef is uncompromising: it is about making the best possible food under whatever circumstance, and no mercy can be granted to those who fail. Top Chef‘s firm moral rectitude is a balm in these trying times. Even if I am sick of all the chefs doing purees all the time. Nobody likes purees! Purees are baby food for adults!

Other than that, I am continuing to run Zoom trivia sessions on a semi-regular basis, and people seem to enjoy them a lot, so if you are interested you can always drop me a comment and I’ll hook you up for the next game.

See you in seven (or possibly fourteen).