Boris Johnson is standing by as COVID exploits the cracks in the increasingly Disunited Kingdom.

COVID exaggerates and exacerbates pre-existing conditions. The angry white males are angrier, and the cautious more hesitant. There is an inevitable bullying effect to all this. As noted on a deleted Facebook thread earlier this week, the sentence "capitalism is narcissistic" is an example of unnecessary redundancy.

Conservatism? Yeah, that too.

Boris Johnson looks increasingly like the prime minister of England alone, by Martin Kettle (The Guardian)

There have been cracks in the United Kingdom for many years. Coronavirus has prised them wide open

As Boris Johnson finished his televised address on Sunday evening, many viewers were confused by what he had just said. One thing about his message, though, had been strikingly clear. To the surprise of many of those watching, and perhaps even to Johnson himself, it turned out that the coronavirus outbreak has changed the prime minister of the United Kingdom into the prime minister of England.

Over the past two months we have all become familiar with the fact that Covid-19 wreaks its most powerful effects on those individuals who are said to suffer from “serious underlying conditions”. What is only just becoming clear is that the virus can have a similarly destructive effect on nation states and societies which suffer from their own serious underlying conditions too.

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When health policy was devolved in 1999, few anticipated an effect like the one that became clear this week, as Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland all decided to maintain the lockdown strategy that Johnson started to loosen in England. As long as differences in health policy were confined – as they have been for the past 20 or so years – to approaches to issues such as spending, prescription charges and social care, the differences between the nations, although significant, remained politically manageable at the UK level.

But when, as this week, it became effectively illegal for English people to cross the Scottish or Welsh borders to do what they are now permitted – wrongly, in my view – to do in England a significant political line has been crossed. It would be interesting to see if historians can identify the last time that English people were barred from Scotland or Wales. But we must be talking centuries. In such circumstances, it is harder than ever to know what “one nation” Conservatism now means. Which nation? And what United Kingdom?

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As the lifting of the lockdown loomed, the pandemic’s effect has become increasingly centrifugal. Johnson’s wish, partly under pressure from the Tory party’s right wing, to encourage renewed economic activity in spite of the continuing pandemic, has encouraged the devolved nations to move more cautiously and to differentiate themselves more sharply from Johnson and from England. But it is not all Johnson’s fault ...

Clinging to the Same Stories.

"America's seismic demographic shift is upending life in our suburbs, cities and our popular culture. So why are we still clinging to the same stories to make sense of these changes?"

Maybe it's encroaching middle age, a broader mix of world events, or just another car driving the right way on a wrong way street, but that last bit about clinging has been a theme of late. Preexisting frames are tough to beat. Not beating them, though, means you are beat.

When Our Kids Own America, By Gene Demby (NPR) 

Brooklyn Park, Minn., which sits just to the northwest of Minneapolis and hugs the Mississippi River, was once the quintessential American suburb: Pretty sleepy. Midwestern. Mostly white. Jesse Ventura, the garrulous former Minnesota governor and pro wrestler, used to be the city's mayor. It was the childhood stomping grounds of a young Garrison Keillor of A Prairie Home Companion. The city’s annual festival is called “Tater Daze,” a nod to its potato farm origins. 


The Wonder Years could have been set in Brooklyn Park. 

Over the past two decades, though, the city has undergone the kind of transformation that’s changing life in so many American suburbs. In 1990, around nine in 10 people in Brooklyn Park were white. By 2010, nearly half the town’s residents were people of color. People in the surrounding area started referring derisively to the town as “Brooklyn Dark.” 

Many longtime — mostly white — residents were either moving out or resisting the tide of newcomers. As the shift got underway in the mid-’90s, a white local bar owner spoke up at a City Council hearing: "If you come from a different perspective or a different place, don't bring those standards to Brooklyn Park.” A different perspective. Lurking just beneath those words is an unspoken stake of ownership: this place is ours. 

This pattern seems familiar by now: “they” invade, there’s tension, many of “us” leave, whether it’s white folks gentrifying a brown community or brown folks ethno-fying a white one. And as long as the dichotomy was just that stark — as long as white folks and people of color could reliably play the roles of “we” and “they” — the pattern was easy to understand. But what’s happening to the “quintessential American suburb” echoes what’s happening to our classic “Chocolate Cities” like Oakland, Calif., Washington, D.C., and Atlanta, Ga., and what’s happening in hip-hop and pop music. That old story is starting to get complicated.

President Obama in Fairfax, Virginia: "Romnesia."

Romnesia: "Obamacare covers pre-existing conditions."