Time in the time of coronavirus: Where did 2020 go?

 Al Jazeera English

In March, I ended up stuck in the southern Mexican coastal village of Zipolite on account of the pandemic – an abrupt change of pace from the past 17 years, which I had spent darting schizophrenically between countries. There was no official lockdown or curfew in Zipolite, but checkpoints were installed on either side of the village to restrict access and departures.

In a split second, then, my daily routine changed from one of being constantly on the road to one of lying in a hammock watching ants parade across my stomach and thinking of all the things I could be doing were I not lying in a hammock.

While the individual days passed excruciatingly slowly, the months flew by. The end of the year has now spontaneously arrived, and I can’t fathom how it is that I am still in Zipolite.

Indeed, for many across the globe, a coronavirus time warp has taken hold. As a New York Times article notes: “Google has registered a surge of searches for the day of the week”. The Washington Post remarks: “Every day is Blursday”.

Over at Wired magazine, Duke University cognitive neuroscientist Kevin LaBar explains that the human brain “likes novelty … It squirts dopamine every time there’s something novel that’s happening, and dopamine helps set the initiation of the timing of these events.”

Hence the warping of time perception when there is not much going on. Trauma and anxiety also alter the perception of time, as does uncertainty about the future.

In my own privileged case of quarantine lite – in which I have not had to deal with added stressors like unemployment, lack of food, or domestic discord – the time warp has featured an element of “coronastalgia”, if you will. Bizarrely, I have found myself missing the very situation that I have yet to emerge from confinement to one village.

But while my brain has apparently decided to view the present as past from some projected future vantage point, others are experiencing a “feeling of being stuck in the present”, as Felix Ringel, an anthropologist of time at Durham University, writes in the Conversation.

Ringel observes that, for many, the sensation of “stuckness” is nothing new thanks to the “acceleration of time” produced by neoliberal capitalism, which has “put humanity into crisis mode for several decades already” by disappearing welfare states and job security and generally relegating the masses to infinite precariousness.

To be sure, there was plenty of uncertainty about the future before the onset of the pandemic – and not just in terms of capitalism-driven planetary self-destruction.

Capitalism itself is traumatic for the non-elite majority of the world’s population, upon whose perpetual immiseration the whole system depends. And chronological limbo has long been the norm for many refugees from imperial wars and neoliberal destruction, not to mention climate change and related ills. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Israel’s Honeymoon With the United Arab Emirates Is Grotesque

 Jacobin

Back in 2010, the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman issued the following complaint: “Destructive critics dismiss Gaza as an Israeli prison, without ever mentioning that had Hamas decided — after Israel unilaterally left Gaza — to turn it into Dubai rather than Tehran, Israel would have behaved differently, too.”

Never mind that Israel never “left” Gaza — or that even if Hamas had managed to transform the diminutive Palestinian coastal enclave into the capital of Iran, international law would not have authorized the Israelis to then convert it into the “world’s largest open-air prison.” It’s also unclear how any territory could be turned into Dubai while under siege and frequent bombardment, or how Gazans would go about building malls with ski slopes — or building anything, for that matter — when Israel intermittently blocks construction materials from coming into the narrow strip of land.

Now, courtesy of the September normalization agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates — the culmination of a long-standing clandestine love affair — it seems the Palestinians will finally get to experience a taste of Dubai. (And Emirati alcohol consumers will get a taste of Israeli-made wine from the illegally occupied Golan Heights.)

In a recent CNN dispatch titled “The UAE and Israel’s whirlwind honeymoon has gone beyond normalization,” correspondent Ben Wedeman writes of the “mutual enthusiasm” infecting the Israeli government and the federation of Arab sheikhdoms, so much so that the UAE “appears to have dropped, in practical terms, any objections to Israel’s occupation of Arab lands.” That’s no accident. Disappearing the occupation is a primary function of normalization, fitting right in with the Friedmanite approach to Middle East peace, which posits that, if the Palestinians would just stop bitching about being occupied and massacred and get on with their lives, they, too, could be Dubai — the equivalent of telling a person in a burning house to simply ignore the flames. READ MORE AT JACOBIN.

UAE National Day: Lavish celebrations in a surveillance state

 Middle East Eye

On Wednesday, the United Arab Emirates celebrates 49 years of existence.

The Gulf News website suggests "49 things to do" in honour of National Day, such as “go shopping” - no doubt a fitting activity in a police state of mega-malls, soul-obliterating materialism and shameless overconsumption, where basic freedoms of speech, expression and association are effectively criminalised, while bombing and starving the nation of Yemen are not.

In a 2006 essay titled “Fear and Money in Dubai”, American historian and urban theorist Mike Davis described the iconic Emirati city-state as epitomising “apocalyptic luxuries”. Dubai, he wrote, had become a “huge circuit board upon which the elite of transnational engineering firms and retail developers are invited to plug in high-tech clusters, entertainment zones, artificial islands, glass-domed ‘snow mountains’, Truman Show suburbs, cities within cities - whatever is big enough to be seen from space and bursting with architectural steroids”.

Nearly a decade and a half later, things have naturally only gotten more apocalyptic. And as if there weren’t already enough luxury and fake cheer to go around, the UAE is set to hold a Golden Jubilee when it turns 50 next year. Think midlife crisis on steroids.

But in the meantime, the current year has been a momentous one for the Middle Eastern federation of sheikhdoms - and not only because the Covid-19 pandemic has given the Emirati monarchs an excuse to further eradicate civil liberties at home, while also engaging in nefarious collaboration with the UAE’s newly unveiled BFF, Israel.

As detailed on the official web portal of the Emirati government, the year 2020 - excitingly themed “Towards the next 50” - had been dedicated to preparing the country not only for the golden jubilee celebrations, but also for the next half century of existence, ideally culminating in a centennial in 2071. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

“You Pay to Die” — New Anthology ‘Asylum for Sale’ Assesses the Global Anti-Immigration Regime

 El Faro

In 2016, Uyi, a Nigerian artist, attempted to leave Libya—where he had endured months in prison-like accommodations following a perilous overland journey from his home country—and make it to Europe on an overpacked rubber dinghy. Reflecting on the time he spent being tossed by waves in the Mediterranean, Uyi says: “We stayed on that boat for what felt like days. It was so horrible. You pay to die. That is how it is: you pay to die.”

Uyi survived the voyage thanks to a migrant rescue ship that has since been forced out of service by the homicidal European Union policies often collectively referred to as “Fortress Europe,” which envisions mass drownings as a handy deterrent against continued immigration. In 2016 alone, an estimated five thousand people perished while trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea, by far the deadliest migrant corridor in the world. And yet physical death is, it seems, only one way to die in the context of a thoroughly dehumanizing industry that has arisen around anti-migration policies—and that essentially makes migrants pay for their own dehumanization. 

I recall an elderly Syrian refugee I met in 2015 in Lebanon, where widespread physical and economic abuse of refugees has merely compounded the trauma of the war they fled at home. As a result, the old man said, many saw themselves as dead already.

Uyi’s reflections appear in one chapter of Asylum for Sale, a new book edited by Siobhán McGuirk—a postdoctoral researcher in anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London—and Adrienne Pine, an anthropologist at American University in Washington, DC. The anthology of writings and artwork takes on the commodification of asylum as a lucrative industry under neoliberal capitalism. Contributors include scholars, activists, journalists, and asylum seekers themselves—such as José López, the pseudonymous author of the book’s first chapter: “On Seeking Refuge from an Undeclared War.”

The war in question is in Honduras, a nation that has long occupied a special place in the sadistic heart of the United States, serving as a base for imperial military and economic operations in the region. In the aftermath of the right-wing coup in 2009, the US increased aid to Honduran security forces that were murdering, raping, and otherwise terrorizing Hondurans; after all, maintaining a corporate-friendly regime in the country was more important to the gringos than, you know, worrying about human rights. The climate of violence and impunity would ultimately cause countless Hondurans to flee towards the United States in the direction of potential safety —for many, a hazard-ridden trajectory rendered only more lethal by frenetic border militarization schemes and the effective criminalization of migration.

López, a gay man involved in the anti-coup resistance, sought asylum in the US in 2016 after concluding that remaining in Tegucigalpa was likely a death sentence. He was interned for three months at the Atlanta City Detention Center — “one of the worst immigration prisons in the country,” he describes it — where the city received $78 per day from the federal government for each Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainee, putting the price-tag for López’s own suffering at $7,020. Remarking on the “massive money in asylum”—from private sector prisons to corporate contractors to the exploitation of an underpaid immigrant workforce by the very setup that criminalizes them, as with “illegal” immigrants employed in the prisons themselves—López observes that “it’s an entire economic system,” a “vicious cycle with profit at every stage.” Indeed, not only is profit wrung from the US-backed neoliberal war on Honduras, the victims of that war are then revictimized in the interest of further neoliberal profit and the expansion of the asylum industry. READ MORE AT EL FARO.