• HISTORY OF BLACK SCIENCE FICTION

Expanded Course in the History of Black Science Fiction: Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed

Nisi Shawl

Wed Oct 11, 2017 

In February of 2016, Fantastic Stories of the Imagination published an essay by me called “A Crash Course in the History of Black Science Fiction.” Since then Tor.com has published my in-depth essays on nine of the 42 works mentioned. The original “Crash Course” listed those 42 titles in chronological order, but the essays skip around a bit. This tenth one talks about Ishmael Reed’s magnum opus, Mumbo Jumbo.

JES GREW

Mumbo Jumbo is the story of a life-giving epidemic known colloquially as “Jes Grew,” a spiritual cure-all for soullessness sweeping across the continental U.S. during the 1920s. If the book has a human hero it’s Papa LaBas, a self-anointed houngan—that is to say, a priest of ancient African mysteries. LaBas searches alongside Jes Grew for its long-lost sacred text in the hope of grounding and legitimizing it, and thus defeating the prudish rulers of the status quo. Jes Grew is a natural force manifesting as music, love, literature, gardening, art, sex, cooking—manifestations that are the province, in my religious tradition, of Oshun, the deity in charge of luxury and abundance. And also of sudden evolutionary advancement—Oshun shows up on the scene and the universe expands to include divination, poetry, and other powerful improvements. Sans text, though, Jes Grew’s operation is limited to frivolous realms: dance crazes, fashion trends, and so forth.

SF OR F?

If there was ever a narrative that questioned received wisdom as to what constitutes stories of “magic” versus stories of “science,” Mumbo Jumbo is it. Challenging the validity of expectations for detachment and standardized replication associated with the scientific method, Reed makes a strong case that participation is a form of observation and variation on what’s observed is normal. Is his version of 2000 years of cultural trends and conspiracies based on a testable hypothesis? No. And yet he does examine the effects of the belief in and practice of magic on its adherents and opponents. Within the pages of Mumbo Jumbo, adherents of notoriously squishy social sciences such as anthropology Charleston madly with farmer-priests versed in divine agronomy; tracing the influence of Isis-and-Horus worship through reverence for Christianity’s Virgin Mary, the author arrives at surprising conclusions about the supposedly-objective Dr. Sigmund Freud’s bias towards the importance of the bonds between mother and child.

TRUE LIES, GRAPHIC CONTENT, SACRED SLANG

Mumbo Jumbo jumps back and forth over other boundaries besides those dividing the rational and the mystical. Illustrations liberally adorn its main body, free of captions, unrestricted to appendices. They comment on the writing as much as the writing comments on them. Quotations from and appearances by historical figures wind themselves in and out of Reed’s account of Jes Grew’s exploits. And in a metatextual moment the author has a character refer to his own Prince-like orthographic irregularities: Black Mason and famed number banker Buddy Jackson points out during an armed showdown with the Knights Templar that “The Charter of Daughters of the Eastern Star as you know is written in our mystery language which they call slang or dialect.”

SOME SORT OF CONTEXT

Mumbo Jumbo was finished, per the note Reed made at its end, at 3:00 p.m. on January 31, 1971, and published in 1972. I was 16 years old. Much of what’s now labeled “the 60s” was actually the early 1970s. I am here to tell you that in “the 60s” we believed we were about to save the world. Yes, my mother told me that was a naïve attitude. In vain. Books like this one convinced me and my peers we were in the throes of a new Jes Grew manifestation: the Funky, Downhome Dawning of the Age of Aquarius—and if its original liturgical text had been lost perhaps, as Reed hinted, we could write a new one!

Or perhaps Mumbo Jumbo was it. Reed had already wowed readers with The Freelance Pallbearers in 1967 and Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (a “hoodoo Western”) in 1969. This latest might be his greatest, and who was to say his greatest couldn’t help us willing Jes Grew Converts re-enchant the world?

Who’s to say it didn’t?

PROMINENT J.G.C.s

Today, dozens of novels, awards, grants, art installations, lectures, poetry collections, anthologies, songs, essays, plays, and film scripts later, Ishmael Reed is a mighty and continuing influence on writers everywhere. Me for sure. Renowned Black publisher, editor, and author Bill Campbell claims that if not for Mumbo Jumbo, his wildly iconoclastic novel Koontown Killing Kaper just plain wouldn’t exist.

Victor LaValle, Colson Whitehead (whose novel The Intuitionist is also part of my “Crash Course”), and Reed’s former student Terry McMillan have also been influenced by this genius. I’m sure there must be many more.

GUN BARREL INFO DUMP

Some call Mumbo Jumbo a hoodoo detective novel, a revamping of the genre akin to Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down’s revamping of the Western. Certainly it can be read that way, with Papa LaBas the somewhat anachronistic private investigator and Jes Grew his elusive client. In that light the 30-page info dump toward the book’s end is only a rather extreme rendition of a bit typically found at a mystery’s denouement—you know, the part in which suspects and survivors are treated to a summarizing disquisition at the point of a pistol? Only this summary starts millennia ago in Egypt and finishes up circa 1923.

HOW MANY YEARS TO GO?

Reed’s several references to a previous bout of Jes Grew in the 1890s imply that its cyclical resurgences can’t be anticipated with clocklike regularity. Roughly three decades pass between that round of the epidemic and the one Mumbo Jumbo recounts. Another five passed between the events the novel depicts and its publication at a time when it seemed like we were experiencing a new bout of this enlivening “anti-plague.”

When are we due for the next one? Let’s get ready for it as soon as we can.

Nisi Shawl is a writer of science fiction and fantasy short stories and a journalist. She is the author of Everfair (Tor Books) and co-author (with Cynthia Ward) of Writing the Other: Bridging Cultural Differences for Successful Fiction. Her short stories have appeared in Asimov’s SF Magazine, Strange Horizons, and numerous other magazines and anthologies.

The Good Book: Reading Ishmael Reed’s

Mumbo Jumbo as Neo-Hoodoo’s Sacred Text

The Albatross / Volume 5.1 2015
REUBEN COPLEY

https://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/albatross/article/view/13452/6092

Sacred - adjective \ˈsā-krəd\
worthy of religious worship : very holy : relating to
religion : highly valued and important : deserving
great respect
Text - noun \ˈtekst\
a verse or passage of Scripture chosen especially
for the subject of a sermon or for authoritative sup
port (as for a doctrine)
passage from an authoritative source providing an
introduction or basis (as for a speech)
source of information or authority
—Merriam Webster Dictionary

Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo uses a bricolage of techniques,
forms, and styles to tell a tale of viral cultural and religious trans-
mission: the story of Jes Grew. Mumbo Jumbo is a trickster that
textually transmutes information (some true and some false) into
a sacred text detailing the influences and history of the Neo-Hoo-
doo.1 The text incorporates a large number of influences from a
diverse array of artistic and intellectual sources to make a case for
an alternative understanding of the cultural history of the world
that challenges the mountebank constructions of the White man:
the “White man will never admit his real references. He will steal
everything you have and still call you those names.

1 Neo-Hoodoo is a term coined by Ishmael Reed that refers to the growth of
traditional African religious practices within the modern context of American
culture and society: the religion of Dahomey translated and transported to
Haiti and then onwards to New Orleans.

Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo through Confucianism

Cross-Cultural Visions in African American Literature pp 157-175| Cite as
Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo through Confucianism
Authors
Authors and affiliations

Yupei Zhou
Chapter

Abstract

Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo has been widely accepted as a postmodern novel. Most critics define the novel as postmodern on the basis that it is, both formally and thematically, a postmodern deconstruction of modern epistemology and politics and that it offers and experiments with artistic forms and epistemological paradigms alternative to the modern categorization of African American art and African Americans as the other. For most critics, the formal implies, explicates, expresses, or mediates the epistemological. The formal and the epistemological constitute a multicultural as well as oppositional discourse. As W. Lawrence Hogue states, “deconstructing the novel becomes a metaphor for deconstructing metaphysics” for Reed (“Postmodernism” 182). Hogue’s discussion of Mumbo Jumbo’s paradigm of postmodern epistemology takes the formal as his analytic framework. Likewise, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. points out that Mumbo Jumbo, by way of such formal strategies as pastiche, parody, doubling, and signifying, not only revises the Western idea of writing and reading but also critiques “the notions of closure” that are both obvious in Western metaphysics and “implicit in the key texts of the Afro-American canon” (226–27).


https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057%2F9780230119123_8

Keywords African American Study Critical Stance Binary Opposition Dialectic Relationship Supernatural Power 

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'Why should you cry?' Ghana's dancing pallbearers find new fame during Covid-19

Benjamin Aidoo, the group’s leader, wants to teach the world to hold joyful funerals, and is planning to expand his business across the globe

Helen Sullivan THE GUARDIAN Thu 14 May 2020



The Nana Otafrija pallbearers might look slick, but they are not afraid to get dirty. Their signature moves, carried out with a coffin in tow, include dropping to all-fours and crawling in unison; or lying on their backs, the coffin balanced on top of them, legs moving in time to the music – as though they have been crushed by the casket.

The dancing pallbearers first became famous in 2017 when their so-called “coffin dance” featured in a BBC documentary. Then, someone added an EDM track and a meme was born: footage of the dancers was spliced with botched feats of strength and other accidents and posted all over the internet.

Now, the coronavirus pandemic has transformed their performance into a way to warn people of the dangers of ignoring social distancing.

In India, policemen dressed in uniform danced along to the track while carrying a (healthy) man on a stretcher. In Peru, police dressed in riot gear did the same, with a mock coffin.
Benjamin Aidoo 🎩 on Instagram: “🎥 Thankyou #Peru 🇵🇪 Police 🚔 Thanks for all the Love and Support Guys, we appreciate all the love and Support 🕺🏿🕺🏿⚰️🕺🏿🕺🏿…”
https://www.instagram.com/p/B_ToRt1n0U1/?utm_source=ig_embed&utm_campaign=embed_video_watch_again

The dance has even been used by protesters mourning the economy in Lebanon: in Beirut men dressed as the pallbearers marched a mock coffin decorated with the fast-depreciating Lebanese Lira down the streets.

Fans can buy miniatures of the Nana Otafrija dancers from Hong Kong, or go to a Taiwanese bar where drinks are served by pallbearers. There’s also a video game-inspired version, where Mario dies and the pallbearers appear in pixellated form, moving in time to chiptune.

An official dancing pallbearers plastic figurine. Photograph: Twitter/ OFFICIAL GHANA DANCING PALLBEARERS

Benjamin Aidoo, the lead pallbearer, lists the Mario version among his favourites. His dancers have also taken it upon themselves to warn the public about the dangers of ignoring social distancing measures, with the help of a new slogan: “Stay at home or dance with us”.

Speaking from his home in Accra, Aidoo told the Guardian that he started working as a pallbearer while in high school in 2003. He came up with the idea of dancing with the coffin because he wanted people to be able to celebrate their dead. He also noticed that people would often grow so upset at their solemn funerals that they would faint or injure themselves. If they could focus on the dancing, he reasoned, they would be less likely to get hurt.

Once the pandemic is over, Aidoo hopes to teach people around the world to hold uplifting funerals.

“Most people love the display”, said Aidoo, “because they want to be happy.” When people’s parents die, for example, “You know what your mom and dad did for you,” said Aidoo. “Why should you cry?”

“When you know the life that he or she spent before dying, I think it’s a great thing for you to celebrate.”

Benjamin Aidoo. Photograph: Helen Sullivan/The Guardian

Things changed for Aidoo’s business when the family of a member of parliament who had died hired Aidoo and his fellow pallbearers – but insisted they wear all-white, matching outfits. The MP’s family paid for the outfits and the funeral celebration went so well that they tipped handsomely, too.

“That was the first time I ever saw a $100 bill,” said Aidoo.

Coronavirus could 'smoulder' in Africa for several years, WHO warns
Read more

After that, he said, “I had a vision for what I am doing.”

Aidoo now employs about 100 staff: 95 men and five women. Two of the women are lead pallbearers, like Aidoo: they march in front of the coffin with a cane – decorated with the Ghanaian flag – and top hat.

Aidoo has also recently hired a manager and together the pair are trying to build a global brand.

Asked how the coronavirus pandemic is affecting his business in Ghana, Aidoo explained that funerals are now restricted to 25 people – including pallbearers – and are sombre affairs. There’s no singing and dancing – so some people are keeping their loved ones’ bodies in the morgue until restrictions are lifted and they’re able to hold a large burial, with his dancers.

Once the pandemic is over he hopes to travel and to open branches of his pallbearing business in other countries, where people will be able to hire Adioo-style coffin dancers.

He urged his fans to “Stay safe, stay alive, respect the rules and regulations given to them.”

“One day we will surely get there. This pandemic will be over and then we’ll all meet.”

AS JES GREW IN MUMBO JUMBO ITS ANOTHER JAZZ FUNERAL
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311569102_Drumbeats_From_the_Aeons_Ishmael_Reed's_Mumbo_Jumbo

Why are so many people getting sick and dying in Montreal from Covid-19?

The city is at the center of the crisis in Canada and Quebec is now the seventh deadliest place in the world for daily deaths

Tracey Lindeman in Montreal

THE GUARDIAN Wed 13 May 2020
 

Rue Ste Catherine in Montreal is usually crowded with shoppers and traffic until late at night. Photograph: Peter McCabe


Springtime in Montreal is normally a cause for celebration. After the city’s long, arduous winters, people emerge from the confines of their apartments at the first inkling of warmth to lounge in parks and on patios – or terrasses – and enjoy a meal, beverage and the company of friends.

Not this year.

Montreal, a city touted by tourist guides as “North America’s Europe” for its rich culture and joie de vivre, is Canada’s centre for Covid-19. Of the entire country’s 70,000 cases and 5,000 deaths, the city of 2 million people has 20,000 cases and more than 2,000 deaths, or about 64% of the entire province’s death toll.

Those numbers have catapulted Quebec into an unfavourable position: it is now the seventh deadliest place in the world for daily coronavirus deaths, according to Quebec newspaper La Presse.

The empty streets of downtown Montreal. Photograph: Christian Ouellet/Alamy Stock Photo

“We are all concerned about Montreal,” said Quebec’s premier, François Legault, on Monday, saying that the situation there was “not under control”. The gradual reopening of schools and businesses may be further delayed if Montreal can’t get its act together.

If Peter McCabe’s Empty Montreal photo project is any evidence, the city has largely obeyed stay-home orders. His streetscapes devoid of human activity show a side of Montreal almost no one sees. “The air is crystal clear. That’s not normal,” he said.

But if people are genuinely staying home, the elevated infection rate isn’t normal either. Why are so many people getting sick and dying here?

A commuter wearing protective mask boards a subway train in Montreal. Photograph: Canadian Press/REX/Shutterstock

HOW IRONIC QUEBECOIS ARE BREAKING THE LAW BY WEARING FACE MASKS IN PUBLIC

Quebec passes law banning facial coverings in public

 This article is more than 2 years old

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/18/quebec-passes-law-banning-muslims-from-wearing-face-coverings-in-public

The Canadian province is barring public workers from wearing the niqab or burqa and obliging citizens to unveil while using public transit or government services

The trends overwhelmingly point to the reality that many infected with Covid-19 are people who already experience systemic inequality, poverty and discrimination – issues that existed long before the virus, and which are now being cracked open for all to see.

First, there are the old. A horrific exposé in the Montreal Gazette revealed that a local nursing home – known by its French initials as a CHSLD – had concealed the deaths of 31 seniors. Many of them seemed to have died after most staff abandoned the facility. Some of the seniors found alive hadn’t had water, food or a diaper change in days.

Provincial data shows about 82% of the dead lived in seniors’ residences – most of them public. Of the total 2,003 dead in Montreal, 74% of them were over 80; 97% of them were over 60.

The CHSLD crisis continues. According to La Presse, at least 141 CHSLDs in Montreal presently have at least one case of Covid-19, but that the government won’t say which ones. Meanwhile, the Quebec government has announced it will allow caregivers back into some CHSLDs.

Canada's bid to beat back coronavirus exposes stark gaps between the provinces
Read more  

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/15/canada-coronavirus-covid-19-provinces-trudeau

The other part of Montreal’s Covid-19 story can be summed up by the case of Marcelin François, a 40-year-old Haitian asylum seeker who died in his wife’s arms inside their Montreal apartment in mid-April.

During the week, François worked in a textile factory. On Saturdays and Sundays, he worked as an orderly inside whichever CHSLD his temp agency dispatched him to that week.

He lived with his family in Montreal North, one of the poorest neighbourhoods in all of Canada. It is a popular destination for asylum seekers – many of whom crossed the US–Canada border on foot shortly after American president Donald Trump took office. Half of the neighbourhood’s residents are members of a visible minority, and 42% are immigrants.

Like François, many asylum seekers are now working, without citizenship status, inside of Quebec’s seniors residences. And then they’re coming home at the end of their shift, to crowded apartments they share with friends and family, inside of shoddily maintained apartment buildings.


Earlier this month, the province admitted that its effort to manage staffing shortages by moving workers around the long-term care network could be spreading the virus. Montreal North feels the consequences of that. One in five Montrealers infected with Covid-19 are healthcare workers – none of whom are receiving danger pay. In Montreal North, 23% are infected, said community organizer Will Prosper.

“It’s these people who are still taking care of us, when not too long ago they were the people who we wanted to kick out,” said Prosper.

Other areas of Montreal badly hit by Covid-19 share similar traits with Montreal North: low-income, large immigrant communities, many people of colour, poor quality housing. Montreal’s Centre for Research-Action on Race Relations is demanding the federal and provincial governments collect data on the race and income level of Covid victims.

Nargess Mustapha, also a community organizer in Montreal North and the president of youth empowerment organization Hoodstock, doesn’t need data to see how Covid-19 has further entrenched existing inequalities. She’s on the ground, along with an army of young volunteers, distributing mask-and-sanitizer kits and food hampers to members of her community.

She recites a long list of reasons why Covid-19 has struck her neighbourhood so deeply: a lack of health services, inadequate transit access, people living in crowded apartments, poor relations with police – especially now that officers can hand out $1,500 fines to those not respecting self-isolation measures.

Meanwhile, 42% of homes are single-parent households, which makes things like child care for essential workers very complicated. And, a lack of internet access makes it tough to get government aid and information being distributed almost exclusively online.

“Being able to socially distance is a sign of privilege,” Mustapha said in French, pointing out that one neighbourhood sector has almost twice the population density of New York City’s densest borough. “It’s hard to apply those rules in Montreal North

Snowflake or safety first? How face masks were drawn into Trump’s culture wars

Arwa Mahdawi

Everything is partisan in the US now – even the coronavirus. Choosing whether or not to cover your face has become a political statement

Wed 13 May 2020
 

Residents of Kew Gardens Hills in Queens, New York City, queue to pick up free face masks. Photograph: Mary Altaffer/AP

Let’s face it: wearing a face mask is not pleasant. They can fog up your glasses and hurt your ears. If you are cursed with terrible allergies, as I am, they quickly become a disgusting sneeze chamber. They make breathing difficult.

But you know what else makes breathing difficult? Covid-19. So I suck it up and wear a mask, because that is what we are supposed to do now. In New York, where I live, it is also what we have been required to do for the past few weeks. You can’t go into a shop without a face covering and you must wear one whenever physical distancing is not possible.

One minute, wearing a mask made you an outlier; now not wearing one does. I would estimate that 99% of people I see out and about in Manhattan have a mask on. The other 1% are joggers who seem to think that, if they run fast enough, the virus won’t catch up with them.

While most New Yorkers appear to have embraced masks, it is a different story in other parts of the country. Everything is partisan in the US now, even death. As such, masks have become a political statement. Democrats are far more likely than Republicans to say that they will wear one (76% versus 59%), according to a recent poll. Wearing one signals that you believe in science; that you believe in putting the greater good ahead of your individual comfort. To some people, they are a sign of solidarity; to others, they signify that you are a liberal snowflake. They have become the opposite of Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” caps.

This may soon change. While Trump conspicuously eschews masks – he reportedly told advisers that wearing one would “send the wrong message” – his campaign never misses a monetisation opportunity. Last week, Brad Parscale, Trump’s 2020 campaign manager, shared a photo in which he was wearing a Maga mask with a caption announcing that there were “more coming soon!” Knowing Trump, his masks will probably be made in China.


Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

Coronavirus shows us it’s time to rethink everything. Let's start with education

George Monbiot


The pandemic is a tough lesson in the workings of the natural world – and proves how vital a knowledge of ecology really is


Wed 13 May 2020 
 

Clapham Common in London, 29 April 2020. Photograph: Guy Bell/Rex/Shutterstock


Imagine mentioning William Shakespeare to a university graduate and discovering they had never heard of him. You would be incredulous. But it’s common and acceptable not to know what an arthropod is, or a vertebrate, or to be unable to explain the difference between an insect and spider. No one is embarrassed when a “well-educated” person cannot provide even a rough explanation of the greenhouse effect, the carbon cycle or the water cycle, or of how soils form.

All this is knowledge as basic as being aware that Shakespeare was a playwright. Yet ignorance of such earthy matters sometimes seems to be worn as a badge of sophistication. I love Shakespeare, and I believe the world would be a poorer and a sadder place without him. But we would survive. The issues about which most people live in ignorance are, by contrast, matters of life and death.

I don’t blame anyone for not knowing. This is a collective failure: a crashing lapse in education, that is designed for a world in which we no longer live. The way we are taught misleads us about who we are and where we stand. In mainstream economics, for example, humankind is at the centre of the universe, and the constraints of the natural world are either invisible or marginal to the models.

In an age in which we urgently need to cooperate, we are educated for individual success in competition with others. Governments tell us that the purpose of education is to get ahead of other people or, collectively, of other nations. The success of universities is measured partly by the starting salaries of their graduates. But nobody wins the human race. What we are encouraged to see as economic success ultimately means planetary ruin.

Large numbers of people now reject this approach to learning – and to life. A survey reported this week suggests that six out of 10 people in the UK want the government to prioritise health and wellbeing ahead of growth when we emerge from the pandemic. This is one of the most hopeful results I have seen in years.

I believe that education should work outwards from our principal challenges and aims. This doesn’t mean we should forget Shakespeare, or the other wonders of art and culture, but that the matters crucial to our continued survival are given the weight they deserve. During the lockdown, I’ve been doing something I’ve long dreamed about: experimenting with an ecological education.

George Monbiot’s daughter with their ecology painting. Photograph: George Monbiot

I can’t claim to have found it easy, or to have got it all right. As millions of parents have discovered, there’s a reason why people undergo years of specialist education and training before qualifying as teachers. Persuading children to see you as a parent one moment and a teacher the next is especially challenging. But, working with an eight- and a nine-year-old (my youngest daughter and her best friend), I’ve begun to discover that my dream is not entirely ridiculous.

I’m not talking about teaching ecology as an isolated subject, but about something more fundamental: placing ecology and Earth systems at the heart of learning, just as they are at the heart of life. So we’ve been experimenting with project-based learning, centred on the living world. We started by constructing a giant painting, composed of 15 A4 panels. Each panel introduces a different habitat, from mountaintops to the deepest ocean, the forest canopy to the soil, on to which we stick pictures of the relevant wildlife.

The painting becomes a platform for exploring the processes and relationships in every ecosystem, and across the Earth system as a whole. These, in turn, are keys that open other doors. For example, rainforest ecology leads to photosynthesis, that leads to organic chemistry, atoms and molecules, to the carbon cycle, fossil fuels, energy and power. Sea otters take us to food webs, keystone species and trophic cascades.

We’ve done some fieldwork in soil ecology, an extraordinary and neglected subject, upon which all human life depends. You can study it at home or in the park. It introduces basic scientific principles and experimental design, which then – as we compare and record the results from different samples – leads us into various aspects of maths and writing.

We’re now making a model landscape, to demonstrate the water cycle, river dynamics, stratigraphy, erosion, soil formation and temperature gradients. To the greatest extent possible, I’m letting the children guide this journey. But because of the circular nature of Earth systems, it doesn’t matter where you begin: eventually you go all the way round. As on many previous occasions, I’m struck by children’s natural affinity with the living world. The stories it has to tell are inherently fascinating.

There’s nothing radical about the things we’re learning: it’s a matter of emphasis more than content – of centralising what is most important. Now, perhaps, we have an opportunity to rethink the entire basis of education. As local authorities in Scotland point out, outdoor learning could be the best means of getting children back to school, as it permits physical distancing. It lends itself to re-engagement with the living world. But, despite years of research demonstrating its many benefits, the funding for outdoor education and adventure learning has been cut to almost nothing.

This is the time for a Great Reset. Let’s use it to change the way we see ourselves and our place on Earth. The conservationist Aldo Leopold once wrote that “one of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen.” But if everyone has an ecological education, we will not live alone, and it will not be a world of wounds.

• George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

AP-NORC poll: Majority disapprove of coronavirus protests


WASHINGTON (AP) — A majority of Americans disapprove of protests against restrictions aimed at preventing the spread the coronavirus, according to a new poll that also finds the still-expansive support for such limits — including restaurant closures and stay-at-home orders — has dipped in recent weeks.

The new survey from the University of Chicago Divinity School and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds 55% of Americans disapprove of the protests that have popped up in some states as some Americans begin chafing at public health measures that have decimated the global economy. Thirty-one percent approve of the demonstrations.

Texas hair salon owner Shelley Luther was sentenced to seven days in jail last week after refusing to apologize to a judge for opening her salon in defiance of Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s emergency orders. She was released less than 48 hours later after Abbott removed jail as a punishment for defying virus safeguards.


In Michigan, thousands of people rallied outside the state capitol last month to protest Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s restrictions. Hundreds returned two weeks later, some of them armed, to demonstrate inside the statehouse.

Democrats are more likely than Republicans to disapprove of such protests, 67% to 51%. Thirty-two percent of Republicans and 25% of Democrats say they approve. Only 8% said public protests, marches and rallies should be unrestricted during the outbreak, while 41% think they should be allowed only with restrictions and 50% think they should not be allowed at all.

Dee Miner, 71, of Fremont, California, said she disapproves of the protests, but also feels people have the right to express themselves.

“We have to have the right to protest, but I have to tell you, seeing those people with those weapons at the statehouse in Michigan was pretty disturbing,” said Miner, a Democrat and retired dental office manager. “I felt sorry for the legislators having to work with that angry mob in the lobby. It seemed like it was just pure intimidation.”

Adam Blann, 37, of Carson City, Nevada, said he does not personally favor the protests, but does not believe they should be restricted.

“Its a tough situation,” said Blann, a Republican-leaning voter who works in the natural gas industry. “But I also think that one of the reasons we live in a great country is that we have freedom of expression, freedom of speech, freedom to protest.”



As some states have begun to slowly ease restrictions on businesses and individuals, the poll finds that 71% of Americans favor requiring people to stay in their homes except for essential errands. Support for such measures is down slightly from 80% two weeks earlier.
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Similarly, 67% of Americans now say they favor requiring bars and restaurants to close, down from 76% in the earlier poll. The poll also suggested dipping support for requiring Americans to limit gatherings to 10 people or fewer (from 82% to 75%) and requiring postponement of nonessential medical care (from 68% to 57%).

Mark Roberts, a retired transportation worker in Abingdon, Virginia, said he’s going about his business despite Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam’s stay-at-home order. Roberts said people in his southwestern Virginia community are driving the short distance into neighboring Bristol, Tennessee, to patronize restaurants open there.

“People from Virginia have been crossing over into Tennessee to eat and just get out, you know, and do things, and Virginia is losing out on it,” said the 61-year-old Republican.

Among Republicans like Roberts, the share supporting stay-at-home orders dipped from 70% in late April to 57% in the latest poll. The share supporting other measures also dropped, from 75% to 63% for limiting gatherings to no more than 10 people and from 70% to 53% for closing bars and restaurants.

Among Democrats, 84% favor stay-at-home orders, down slightly from 91% in the earlier poll. Eighty-seven percent of Democrats favor barring gatherings of more than 10 people, and 79% support bar and restaurant closures, about the same as in the previous poll.

Blann, the Nevada resident, said he didn’t mind officials imposing certain restrictions for a short period of time, but fears the potential of authorities being unwilling to roll back some of their newly declared powers.

“I do think the government should respond to allowing people to make more of their own personal choices without legal repercussions,” said Blann, who said he doesn’t expect to find himself in a crowded bar anytime soon, but is looking forward to being able to go back to church.

The poll found most Americans in favor of some kind of restriction on in-person worship, with 42% saying that should be allowed with restriction and 48% that it should not be allowed at all.

Marilou Grainger, a retired nurse anesthetist and registered Republican in Washington, Missouri, said she’s torn between the need to take precautions against the virus while also allowing people to make their own decisions.

“I think we should still be under a bit of quarantine, especially people who are 60 or older,” said Grainger, 67, who believes the jury is still out on whether lockdowns and stay-at-home orders have been effective in stemming the spread of the virus.

“Did we make a mistake? Did we totally annihilate our economy, or did we actually save some people issuing this quarantine?” she asked.

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Chase reported from Dover, Delaware.

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The AP-NORC poll of 1,002 adults was conducted April 30-May 4 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 4.2 percentage points.

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Online:

AP-NORC Center: http://www.apnorc.org/

Pandemic upends life on isolated, idyllic Galapagos Islands

By CHRISTINE ARMARIO and ADRIAN VASQUEZ May 11, 2020

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In this May 2, 2020 photo, a sea lion sits outside a hotel that is closed because of the new coronavirus pandemic, in San Cristobal, Galapagos Islands, Ecuador. The majority of the island hotels are usually occupied throughout the year, but all reservations have been canceled through July. (AP Photo/Adrian Vasquez)

SAN CRISTOBAL, Ecuador (AP) — Before the coronavirus, sudden life-threatening ailments among tourists, fishermen and others on the Galapagos Islands were considered so rare that hospitals didn’t have a single intensive care unit bed.

Now, officials are racing to equip medical teams on the remote islands with breathing machines while also trying to stanch an economic crisis that has left many of the 30,000 residents jobless.

The island chain’s famous isolation is now heightening its hardship.

For seven weeks now, not a single tourist has arrived at the UNESCO World Heritage site that inspired Charles Darwin. Studies of the archipelago’s unique marine and avian wildlife have halted. And residents are making urgent changes, like growing carrots, peppers and tomatoes at home so they don’t go hungry.

“Galapagos is the land of evolution,” said Joseline Cardoso, whose small family-run hotel on Santa Cruz island is empty. “The animals have adapted and we humans cannot be the exception.”

Ecuador is among Latin American nations hit hardest by COVID-19, and authorities on the Galapagos Islands believe their first cases probably came from Guayaquil, the coastal city where hospitals turned away patients and the dead were left in homes for days.

The storied islands have been relatively shielded by what happens 600 miles away on the mainland. A financial crisis two decades ago left many Ecuadorians penniless but steady international tourism kept the Galapagos afloat. Last year, over 275,000 people came to see the swimming iguanas, giant tortoises and birds with webbed feet the color of blue cotton candy.

Islanders rely on military aircraft to ferry the critically ill to Quito or Guayaquil. Many go to the mainland for appointments, and some hire doctors to fly in for major events like childbirth.

Locals like to joke that, “In the Galapagos, it is prohibited to get sick.”

But the coronavirus has upended any sense of island immunity.

The islands’ first four cases were diagnosed in late March, all believed to have come from Guayaquil before travel was cut off. Soon after, the first island-associated death was announced: a worker in his 60s who had been on the Celebrity Flora yacht and fell ill after returning to Quito.

There are now 107 cases in the Galapagos, including about 50 crew members still aboard the Celebrity Flora, a luxury ship operated by a subsidiary of Royal Caribbean Cruises. It docked in time for passengers to get flights home.


Authorities have scrambled to equip hospitals, where there are only four ICU beds – about one for every 7,500 residents – and a lab to do virus tests. The Charles Darwin Foundation donated two of the new ventilators. In addition to military transports, a police aircraft is being mobilized. The president has offered one of his two planes, said Juan Sebastián Roldán, his Cabinet secretary.

Most of the cases have been mild, with only two people hospitalized.

The bigger blow has been to tourism: At least 800 visitors usually arrive daily, and officials estimate the islands already have lost at least $50 million, a quarter of the expected annual income.

“The base of our economy has entirely collapsed,” said Norman Wray, governor of the islands. “This is completely changing the future of tourism in the Galapagos.”

Ivan López, a guide and scuba teacher, was taking tourists around the islands when Ecuador ordered a lockdown. He was told to get off the boat and immediately was jobless. A 39-year-old father of two, he believes he can stretch his savings for six months but doesn’t know what he will do if the crisis drags on. He’s started a vegetable garden.

Already-high prices in supermarkets have skyrocketed. When López searched recently for disinfectant, he found alcohol at $40 a gallon. The islands largely rely on cargo ships, which have been slower to arrive.

“If the ships stop coming, it will be chaos,” he said. “We won’t have anything to eat.”

Fishermen go door-to-door selling tuna and wahoo to islanders, while farmers drive through neighborhoods yelling out “Tomatoes! Lemons! Greens!” on a megaphone.

Cardoso, who dreamed up her six-room hotel as part of a student project, said her new reality feels like a nightmare she’s yet to wake up from. The hotel is usually 75% occupied throughout the year, but all reservations have been canceled through July.

“To be with an empty hotel breaks your heart,” she said.

Scientists have also seen their work analyzing the Galapagos’ wildlife abruptly interrupted.

The islands have a rich history of scientific investigation and discovery since Darwin arrived aboard the HMS Beagle in 1835, noting that species on the relatively new volcanic islands bore key differences from those in South America.

Humans have caused the islands irreparable harm, wiping out thousands of whales and tortoises, introducing invasive species like insects, wild pigs and goats, and damaging the delicate vegetation.

At the Charles Darwin Foundation, researchers had been studying a species of parasitic flies, which likely arrived over 30 years ago on a plane or boat.

The flies threaten 20 bird species, and scientists have been collecting data on them for over five years, but there will be blank spaces for 2020 that “we will not be able to recover,” said María José Barragán, the foundation’s CEO and science director.

She also said scientists have been unable to see how species are being affected by the absence of humans, though that will be studied once they are back in the field.

How soon the Galapagos Islands might be able to reopen is unclear. Ecuador’s government is allowing for a gradual opening in three stages. But the final stage is not a full return to normal and does not call for resuming national or international flights.

For many islanders, the pandemic has left them to meditate on their relationships with nature, industry and travel. Some wonder if they should continue to remain so dependent on tourism, while others say it highlights the need for self-sufficiency.

For Cardoso, the answer lies in the story of the finches, penguins and tortoises who share the islands with them.

“We have to put in practice the lesson of our history,” she said. “We have to adapt.”

Guaidó advisers quit following bungled Venezuela raid
May 11, 2020

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FILE - In this March 4, 2020 file photo, opposition leader Juan Guaido listens during a legislative session being held at a religious, private school in Caracas, Venezuela, an alternative location due to the government continuously blocking their access to National Assembly chambers. Guaidó said Monday, May 11, 2020 that two U.S.-based political advisers have resigned following a failed incursion into Venezuela aimed at capturing President Nicolás Maduro. (AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos, File)


CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó said Monday that two U.S.-based political advisers have resigned in the fallout from a failed incursion into the Caribbean nation led by a former-Green Beret aimed at capturing President Nicolás Maduro.

Guaido said he accepted the resignations of Juan José Rendon and Sergio Vergara, who had signed an agreement for a mission to arrest Maduro with U.S. military veteran Jordan Goudreau. While that deal fell apart, Goudreau has taken responsibility for going ahead with a failed attack launched May 3 on a beach outside the capital, Caracas.


Rendon said he gave Goudreau $50,000 to cover some initial expenses, but both say the contract was never fulfilled and he received no more funds.

The would-be invasion quickly became a publicity coup for Maduro, whose security forces intercepted most of the attackers.

Guaidó’s team said in a statement that he “accepted the resignation of the officials and thanked them for their dedication and commitment to Venezuela.”

Maduro says the objective of the raid was to kill him, but instead officials say they killed at least six of the accused “mercenaries” and arrested dozens of others, including two former U.S. soldiers associated with Goudreau’s Florida-based firm Silvercorp USA.

Guaidó, who is backed by the Trump administration among nearly 60 other nations as Venezuela’s rightful leader, has denied having anything to do with the alleged attack, but has come under pressure from at least one opposition party in Venezuela to explain what happened.

Goudreau has presented what he said is a secret recording of Guaidó himself attended, by speakerphone, the meeting at which the deal was signed. Goudreau said he was never fully paid, but went forward with the mission to help liberate Venezuela from Maduro, working with a former Venezuelan Army Gen., Cliver Alcalá, who was recently extradited from Colombia to the U.S. to face drug charges.

Venezuelan Attorney General Tarek William Saab recently said Venezuela will seek the capture of Goudreau and the two former Guaido advisers. Goudreau said about 60 people were involved in the incursion and Venezuelan officials say they have arrested at least 40, including 14 in the last two days.

The “Coup” Attempt in Venezuela Seems Ridiculous. But Don’t Forget — Regime Change Is the U.S. Goal.

Mehdi Hasan THE INTERCEPT May 9 2020

This photo released by the Venezuelan Miraflores presidential press office shows President Nicolás Maduro speaking over military equipment that he says was seized during an incursion into Venezuela, during his televised address from Miraflores in Caracas, Venezuela, on May 4, 2020.

Photo: Miraflores press office via AP

PICTURE THE FOLLOWING SCENE: Two former Venezuelan special forces soldiers are captured while trying to land on a beach in the United States. They confess on camera to being part of a wider plot to capture and kidnap the American president.



That same day, back in Venezuela, another ex-special forces soldier with connections to the longtime bodyguard of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, releases a video announcing the two men were working for his private security company, on a mission to detain and extract President Donald Trump and bring down the government in Washington, D.C.

Two days later, the Venezuelan foreign minister, who also happens to be the former head of the country’s feared intelligence agency, gives a press conference at which he chooses to deny only “direct” involvement in the operation. “If we had been involved, it would have gone differently,” he added, with a smirk.

What do you think the reaction would be here in the United States? Among political and media elites? In national security circles? Wouldn’t the U.S. press be running endless pieces denouncing and berating Maduro? Wouldn’t cable news be rolling on it? Does anyone doubt that the U.S. military would be preparing to attack targets across Venezuela in retaliation?

Yet that is exactly what we have witnessed over the past week — but in reverse, and without any sense of shock or outrage in the United States.


In this photo released by Venezuela’s Ministry of Communication, Jorge Rodriguez shows a video of American Airan Berry, a former U.S. special forces soldier associated with the Florida-based private security firm Silvercorp USA, during a televised statement in Caracas, Venezuela, on May 7, 2020.

On Monday, it was Venezuela that captured two former U.S. special forces soldiers, Luke Denman and Airan Berry, after what authorities described as their “botched beach landing in the fishing village of Chuao.” A video was released of Denman telling his interrogators that he had been tasked with capturing the Venezuelan president. Meanwhile, Florida-based ex-Green Beret Jordan Goudreau, head of the private security firm Silvercorp USA, appeared in a video alongside a former Venezuelan military officer in combat fatigues, in which he confirmed that Denman and Berry were working for him. (Press reports have since revealed that Goudreau had meetings with former longtime Trump bodyguard Keith Schiller, had signed a multimillion-dollar contract with the U.S.-backed Venezuelan opposition, and also claims to have been in contact with the office of Vice President Mike Pence.)

On Wednesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a former director of the CIA, spoke at a press conference where he issued his very carefully worded denial: “There was no U.S. government direct involvement in this.” He also couldn’t help but brag to reporters about how it “would have gone differently” if the United States had been behind it. (Memo to Pompeo: Google “Bay of Pigs.”)

Who knows? Perhaps Washington wasn’t involved this time. Perhaps Trump is correct to say that this particular fiasco, which sounds like the plot of a bad Hollywood movie, “has nothing to do with our government.”

Then again, this is an administration of liars, fabulists, and grifters. Dishonesty is the hallmark of the Trump White House. Their denials, therefore, are pretty worthless.

Plus, there is the recent history to consider: the demonization and strangulation of Venezuela has been a bipartisan project in Washington, D.C., since the rise of Hugo Chavez and the socialist “pink tide” in the late 1990s. In 2002, the Bush administration encouraged and supported a (failed) coup against Chavez. (As I later reminded former Bush official Otto Reich — who was accused of meeting with the plotters beforehand — the CIA had warned him and his colleagues that a coup attempt would be made five days before it occurred!).

In 2015, the Obama administration made the absurd decision to formally declare Venezuela an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to U.S. national security. At the time, the United States was 11 times bigger in terms of population, 600 times richer in terms of GDP, and with a military budget 1,800 times the size of Venezuela’s.

In 2019, the Trump administration called Maduro “illegitimate” and recognized opposition leader Juan Guaidó as the interim president of Venezuela. So far this year, Washington has indicted Maduro on charges of narco-terrorism; refused to suspend crippling sanctions on Caracas despite the spread of Covid-19; and deployed U.S. warships near Venezuela in what has been described as “one of the largest U.S. military operations in the region since the 1989 invasion of Panama to remove Gen. Manuel Noriega from power.”

Regime change is the explicit policy of the U.S. government.

To be clear: The regime in Caracas is brutal, autocratic, and corrupt. More than four million Venezuelans have fled the country in recent years; the president’s approval ratings hover around 10 percent.

But anyone who claims that U.S. opposition to Maduro is based on a concern for democracy or human rights in Venezuela is either dishonest or deluded. The United States has a long history of supporting strongmen around the world — and especially in Latin America. Think Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt in Guatemala. Or Gen. Augusto Pinochet in Chile. Or Gen. Jorge Rafael Videla in Argentina. The list goes on and on.

No, the real reason the United States is obsessed with toppling the government in Caracas is, of course, because Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves — but leaders opposed to both the United States and capitalism. In fact, Trump and his cronies have a habit of saying the quiet part loud. As former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe revealed in his book, “The Threat,” at a briefing with intelligence officials in 2017, Trump asked why the U.S. wasn’t at war with Venezuela, pointing out how “they have all that oil and they’re right on our back door.”

In January 2019, Trump’s national security adviser at the time, John Bolton, told Fox Business: “It will make a big difference to the United States economically if we could have American oil companies really invest in and produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela.”

We do not know whether Trump and Co. were involved in the Goudreau-inspired attempted attack on Maduro. What we do know, though, is that they continue to try and starve and bully Venezuela into submission. If the Trump administration gave a damn about the people of that country, it would heed calls from everyone from the pope, to the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, to a group of congressional Democrats, to suspend sanctions and help Caracas fight the spread of the novel coronavirus.

But it won’t — because it doesn’t.