Yes, I know it's Tuesday, which is later than usual, but you try posting a newsletter when one of your canine teeth breaks off over the weekend and you have to get emergency dental work done on very short notice, you know?

Aside: non-Canadians reading may not know that Canada's government-focused healthcare system does not cover dental care, because apparently surgery is not healthcare when it is done on your mouth, I guess. (It also doesn't cover optical care or pharmaceuticals.) This is a gentle reminder that systemic inequities often persist out of simple inertia rather than anybody demanding that they persist. There is no real movement in Canada to have dental care remain private (well, except for dentists, and even a lot of them will privately acknowledge that the system makes no sense), and most people would probably prefer the system be folded into the rest of our socialized care system, but it just... doesn't, and keeps on not doing so.

Anyway, luckily my wife has dental insurance through her job, and as some of the best dental insurance you can get in Canada, it will cover a whopping 50% of the costs of reconstructive dental work. So we're only slightly boned. Great system we have here, eh?

LAST WEEK IN ISLAM

Two interesting developments this week in Islam's intersection with politics, going in pretty much opposite directions.

In Turkey, President Erdogan declared that the Hagia Sophia will be reconverted back to a mosque. If you don't know, the Hagia Sophia was originally an Orthodox Christian cathedral when it was built in the sixth century, and other than about fifty years during the Fourth Crusade when it was controlled by the brief-lived Latin Empire and it was used as a Roman Catholic cathedral, remained so until the 15th century when Mehmed II, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, converted it into a mosque. It remained a mosque until 1931, when Kemal Ataturk closed it and then, as part of his Turkish secularization project, re-opened it as a deconsecrated museum which would honour the building's entire history, both as a church and a mosque. And that's been the case until, well, Friday.

It's a move that, in and of itself, makes little sense on its surface. Firstly, the spectacular Blue Mosque is literally right next door from the Hagia Sophia (in part because Sultan Ahmet I wanted to build a mosque that was more impressive than the Hagia Sophia), so it's not like there isn't a prominent Islamic place of worship right there anyway. Secondly, the Islamic practice of re-consecrating other faiths' religious sites is one that tends to piss off other religions, and regardless of the fact that the Hagia Sophia wasn't being used as a church any more, it's still something a lot of Orthodox Christians are probably going to find offensive - many of whom live in Russia and Greece, so it's pissing off a lot of neighbours. And third, I've been reading comment from several Muslim writers who think that converted mosques are inevitably inferior to purpose-built mosques anyway, so why even bother?

The answer is probably just a political one, because Erdogan - like many authoritarians - needs to keep his base happy in order to remain in power. For the last few months he hasn't really needed to pander, because he's gotten the Covid-19 approval bump from the "rally around the flag" effect that so many leaders around the world have gotten for basically being in charge during a brutal pandemic, regardless of their performance at stopping said pandemic. (Erdogan basically miffed the early stages of the pandemic and Turkey was hit powerfully as a result, but in fairness he course-corrected hard and the curves have started flattening out.) But as the pandemic starts to wind down, he's dealing with the Turkish lira collapsing against other currencies, GDP shrinking and twenty percent unemployment (and rising), so he needs to find strategies to keep his popularity up. Erdogan's base is conservative Muslims - so make the Hagia Sophia a mosque again.

On the flipside of the Islamization coin, Sudan this week announced new legal reforms which don't exactly make the country's legal system non-Islamic, but a lot of their most fundamentalist-based laws are being changed or removed. Non-Muslims are now allowed to drink, import and sell alcohol (although there is some question as to what happens if they drink in public, so baby steps). They're also removing the law against apostasy, meaning it is no longer a criminal act to renounce Islam. Also, they're banning female genital mutilation. (I mention this not because FGM is a particularly Islamic act - it isn't, it has a lot more to do with geography than anything else, it predates Islam's spread in Africa, it isn't mentioned in the Quran and there are plenty of Christian communities in Africa which still practice it - but because, hey, they're banning it, that's great and worth mentioning.)

All of Sudan's actions this week are relatively small in the grand scheme of things, but they're encouraging to see: they're all changes which speak to great secularization, and much was said by Sudanese officials introducing the new legal changes about the need to meet international human rights standards. Granted, everybody and anybody right down to the most brutal dictator will talk about human rights, because nobody is formally opposed to human rights. That said, when countries are actually doing things that might improve human rights, it's good to see those things being said regardless.

YES, THE UNITED STATES IS STILL A PANDEMIC DUMPSTER FIRE

I was originally planning to write something about the African response to Covid-19 for this newsletter, but it's mostly pretty basic stuff. Like with most of the world, African countries are mostly dealing with the pandemic in a responsible way. They have challenges, of course, mostly due to the fact that a lot of African countries are very poor and have more trouble with full economic shutdowns than rich first world countries do, but overall they're being sensible: limiting attendance at churches and mosques, relaxing curfews very gradually, that sort of thing. (Tanzania is, unfortunately, appearing to pick the "denial is a strategy" route of dealing with the pandemic, but so far as anybody can see they've had relatively little exposure so far, in large part because all of their neighbours locked down much more firmly and because international flights shut down for a while. But they're an exception.) Basically, it's a boring story, and you can sum up most of the key details in a single paragraph, like the one you just read. Or possibly skimmed, I don't know.

The United States, meanwhile, is just... it's honestly kind of stunning at this point, because there is a very large international consensus on what works to contain Covid-19: a lengthy and strict lockdown period followed by steady and gradual re-opening of public spaces and services, tied with financial support to make sure nobody goes broke because of the lockdown. That has been the model for every country that has beaten Covid-19 down to negligible numbers, and at this point there's quite a few that have basically eliminated it almost entirely and a whole bunch more who can see the end of the tunnel. My point is that everybody knows what works, thanks to an extensive series of tests know as "the entire planet having to figure this out at the same time."

Meanwhile, in the United States, yesterday the federal Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos (a billionaire with no actual experience in any education field whatsoever until her nomination to her post and with no apparent agenda beyond promoting private schools) gave an interview with CNN wherein whenever a perfectly reasonable concern about how it can be possible to re-open schools in the fall in the middle of a pandemic, her response was simply "we have to get kids back to school." No plan was given, no explanation provided; just simple repetition of a statement, and the idea that reiterating a demand is enough. Occasionally she suggested that local school boards would have to come up with solutions themselves, and then threatened to withdraw federal funding from schools that don't re-open (which she actually can't legally do, but the problem with putting idiots like this in charge is that they often don't realize when they're breaking the law and do it anyway).

At the same time, Texas and California have re-instituted lockdowns after premature re-openings in order to cope with massively surging Covid-19 numbers, because just about anybody even remotely an expert told them exactly what would happen if they re-opened too soon and then they did it anyway. Florida isn't even putting a new lockdown in place; it's just letting the disease surge. (Walt Disney World put out a "we're reopening" ad last week and some internet wag immediately recut it, to brutal effect, with the theme from The Shining.) And these are just the most prominent disasters, because they're all large states. Many smaller states have the same problems.

At the same time, the USA is poised for a total economic collapse on multiple fronts. The increased unemployment benefits and mortgage/eviction holidays, both federal and state level, are all ending in the next six weeks, and there are going to be an enormous number of people who simply can't make their monthly rent let alone the three months of backdated rent they owe, or are in a similar situation with their mortgage payments. There simply doesn't seem to be any plan, anywhere, to deal with any of this.

I honestly can't emphasize how shocking all of this is. Calling it a "surrender" seems sort of incorrect, because that implies the people in charge in the USA ever viewed the pandemic as something to be defeated in the first place, as opposed to just a temporary inconvenience to be weathered only until boredom set in.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Not a lot to report on this front, actually. The Netflix Eurovision movie (with the incredibly unwieldy title of Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga, because branding I guess) is reasonably good, though, and the filmed version of Hamilton on Disney Plus is pretty great even if they censor out the two F-bombs, which is lame even if it is on Disney. Then again, Disney digitally covered up Daryl Hannah's bare bottom in Splash with CGI hair extensions for its Disney Plus version, so expecting them not to needlessly censor things is probably a stretch too far.

See you soon.