Take This Job and Shove It!: The Growing Revolt Against Work

BY NICKY REID

 JANUARY 21, 2022Facebook

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 “Experience demonstrates that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other”

-Frederick Douglass

“A worker is a part time slave”

-Bob Black

There is something very strange going on with the US economy, dearest motherfuckers, and you don’t have to look at the Dow Jones to see it. All you have to do is take a stroll down main street. Everywhere you look on every storefront and shop window from your local Wendy’s to the bank, there are signs screaming ‘Help Wanted!’, ‘Parttime and Fulltime Positions!’, ‘Jobs Available!’, ‘Seriously Dude, Fucking Work Here!’ Businesses of nearly every variety are practically begging for employees but there are no employees to be found. The bean counters in the Federal Government have taken notice too. The latest job reports from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reveal the sheer Grand Canyon magnitude of this thing in flashing red numbers. Over 20 million Americans have quit their jobs in the second half of 2021, a record 4.5 million in November alone, that’s fucking holiday season! This is literally unlike anything we’ve ever seen before and there are no signs of it slowing down in the foreseeable future. Some clever motherfucker has coined this dumbfounding phenomenon the Great Resignation. We have an economy drowning in job offerings, but no one wants to work, and all the experts seem beside themselves explaining why.

Far be it for me to call myself an expert. I don’t have any Ivy League degrees hanging over the credenza or a position at some smarmy Randian think tank, but I am one of these unemployed people these experts seem to be so mystified by and I do have a theory that might shine some light on their conundrum. Are you ready? Listen very carefully so as not to miss the subtle nuances of my argument. Work fucking blows! It sucks and plebian scum like me don’t wanna live like that anymore and why the fuck would we? It’s not natural and it’s not fucking healthy, spending 80% of your life stewing in traffic jams, slaving behind deep fryers, and punching numbers into computers. We’re not descended from ants. People are monkeys. God designed us to eat, fuck, fight, shit, repeat, and we’re done with civilization’s fucking capitalist zoo.

We’ve all been duped into accepting wage slavery as the natural order of existence but even a cursory glance at history tells us that this is total bullshit. The modern concept of work as we know is only a few centuries old. It’s a byproduct of the 16th Century Protestant Reformation and it wasn’t designed for productivity; it was designed as a means of social control. Those assholes taught us that working ourselves to death would bring us closer to God so they could keep us from jacking off. When the bank took the church’s place during the Industrial Revolution, the bourgeoisie simply replaced God with a dollar bill and used the death cult of the Protestant Work Ethic to squeeze every last drop of man-hours out of the proletariat like a dirty dishrag. They work us so goddamn hard that we don’t even have enough free time to revolt, let alone masturbate, and that’s not just a happy coincidence.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Human beings spent 90% of our history in hunter-gatherer societies and we were a hell of a lot happier as savages. We spent no more than 3 to 5 hours a day hunting, foraging, fishing, and preparing food and spent the rest of our time fucking off, smoking dope, and inventing wheels. The great anthropologist Marshall Sahlins called it the original affluent society and it existed for thousands of years without managers, bathroom breaks, Muzak, and office Christmas parties. In the centuries since most of mankind abandoned to nature, we’ve developed such smashing advances in modern technology as prisons, genocide, factories, compulsory schooling, nuclear bombs, shrinking icecaps, and islands of garbage the size of continents. This lifestyle choice known as work is an anomaly, an offramp to human devolution like monotheism, Celine Dion, and the gender binary. If the gods wanted us to live this way, we wouldn’t be choking to death on our own exhaust fumes. Climate change is a warning and so was Covid.

Whether it was the fruit of gain of function or just too many condos too close to the bat caves, the Pandemic served as a violent alarm clock to many hardworking Americans. In a matter of months, 25 million people either lost their jobs or had their hours drastically cut. People also lost their homes, their cars, and their healthcare insurance. In the blink of an eye, all the lies of our statist consumer culture had been stripped naked and people didn’t like what they saw. It turns out that our advanced western society offered no real security when the shit got real, and Americans started to seriously rethink this whole work thing.

The Antiwork Movement isn’t exactly new. It’s as old as Proudhon and Marx. Anarchists and socialists like William Morris, Paul Lafargue, Ivan Illich, Bob Black, and David Graeber have been telling any working stiff who’ll listen for generations that we’ve been hoodwinked, but it took the Pandemic to make a modest movement into a monster. Since the lockdowns, a once humble antiwork page on Reddit has rapidly ballooned into one of the site’s fastest-growing subreddits with over 1.4 million members and growing. They call themselves Idlers and they’ve made their voices heard well beyond the echo chambers of social media by organizing Black Friday boycotts and by shutting down Kellog’s job portal with a deluge of spam in solidarity with striking factory workers.

It’s a big fucking movement and like any big fucking movement there is a diverse array of opinions and not everyone is on the same page. Speaking as a post-left panarchist, I’m a strong believer in creating an endless variety of stateless options provided that they’re all 100% voluntary. I see no reason why primitivists and hunter-gatherers can’t coexist with small autonomous syndicalist factories and family farms as long as we all agree to hang the boss man by his tie. Hierarchy needs to be recognized for the modern social pollution that it is but there are all kinds of funky dance moves that can be used to stomp out that fire before it engulfs us all. I’m inspired by these cyber idlers getting together and sharing information on everything from how to get paid while slacking off to eking out a sustainable living-making soap. I believe that this is a movement that plausibly has more potential than Occupy because it calls on its members to take back their own God-given autonomy and totally rethink the way we organize society. But for disabled people like me this has never really been a choice to begin with.

I don’t work, dearest motherfuckers, because I can’t work. I was born with more mental illnesses than I can count, and I’ve only collected more over the years. They have all kinds of fancy intellectual labels, dysthymia, agoraphobia, social anxiety disorder, gender dysphoria, OCD, PTSD, ADD, but they all essentially add up to one thing. Like many other Americans, I am simply pathologically unemployable. I couldn’t make it in the straight world if I wanted too and Kali knows I’ve tried. Just the idea of a 9-to-5 existence, with its fast-paced monotony, erratic hours, swollen crowds of irate customers, and role-crazy teenage despots, gives me a nervous breakdown. It has forced me to do the unthinkable as an anarchist and go on government disability just to make ends meet, and I used to kick my own ass for being this way but the more I think about it the more I’ve come to realize that I’m not the one with the fucking problem.

The definition of mental illness and disability is essentially suffering from an inability to conform to the confines of mainstream society but considering how corrupt and downright evil this pandemic has proven mainstream society to be, I believe people like me aren’t so much crippled as we are allergic to the social toxins of a malignant civilization and just like the ranks of the Antiwork Movement, our numbers are growing. I refuse to accept that it’s merely a coincidence that more Americans than ever are emotionally unstable and neurodivergent in times like these. We are the human equivalent of climate change. We have evolved into something incompatible with the evils of perpetual growth.

I’m done beating myself up for being a freak. Just like my decidedly unconventional gender identity, I’m proud of being biologically driven to break with modern society. But I’m also done with welfare. It’s a form of social control just like employment and I’m committed to escaping its cage as soon as I can pick the lock. This is why I oppose Universal Basic Income, an idea very popular with many in the antiwork community. Programs like these do nothing to upend the power imbalance of the workplace. They merely replace the boss man with a bureaucrat and offer you a steady trickle of income as long as you obey the state that doles it out.

They’re essentially paying us not to revolt while they rape the planet blind with their toxic sludge-belching genocidal war machine. I refuse to be complicit. The Antiwork Movement has inspired me to plot my escape. Instead of working or preparing myself mentally to assimilate into the workforce, I’m devoting my time to strengthening my people in my local Queer and disabled communities. I’m preparing to learn how to shoot, make scented candles from scratch, freelance as a dominatrix, and get certified to give blood tests at local shelters. All while I finish writing the great Queer American novel and every day, I come a little closer to chewing through the leash.

But this thing is bigger than me. It’s bigger than any of us individually. The Antiwork Movement has the awesome capability of being nothing short of revolutionary. If we can get enough people to drop out of mainstream society and go off the economic grid, we can slay this beast called empire. By building a new economy based totally on freelance subsistence labor and voluntary grey market exchanges we can simultaneously starve both the Federal Government of our tax revenue and their friends in the Fortune 500 of our wage-slave labor, killing the incestuous tag-team of big business and big government with one stone without so much as firing a single bullet. We can destroy the old system by merely rendering it obsolete with a new one. And it all starts with a pink slip that reads ‘take this job and shove it.’

Nicky Reid is an agoraphobic anarcho-genderqueer gonzo blogger from Central Pennsylvania and assistant editor for Attack the System. You can find her online at Exile in Happy Valley.

Would Dogs Be Better Off Without Us?

BY JESSICA PEIRCE MARC BECKOFFFacebook

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Would dogs be better off without us? This may be a difficult question to consider if you live with a dog, love dogs, and find beauty in the enduring loyalty of the human-dog partnership. If you are reading this book with a dog curled up next to you on the couch or on her fluffy dog bed, happily licking peanut butter out of a Kong, this question might even be too painful to contemplate: How would my dog survive, naked and afraid, set adrift in a frightening new reality, without me to keep her safe? Yet try to imagine for a few moments not only what your dog might lose, but also what she might gain. Better yet, think about the whole range of individual dogs who currently share the planet with humans and consider the potential losses and the potential gains of having the world to themselves. And think about dogs who might come after the transition, who have never known life with humans. Maybe dogs as a species would have a better go of things on a planet that they didn’t have to share with people, if the 20,000-year-long domestication experiment—which, arguably, has had its problems—were called off once and for all.

Dogs would be challenged by living on their own in a posthuman world. But a posthuman world is also full of what you might call “dog possibilities”—the various ways in which dogs would adapt, innovate, and expand their experiential worlds. We’ve seen that there is far more to the lives of dogs than being a house pet, spending the day chasing balls, barking at the postal delivery person, or waiting anxiously for their person to come home from work. A dogs’ world is a bustling place, with dogs working on their own and with others to solve the puzzle of survival and to reap the rewards of life. Trying to catalog what dogs might stand to gain and lose if humans disappeared can help bring into focus some of the ways in which humans make life hard for dogs. More pertinent for those of us who live with companion dogs are the potential insights about how we might, without even realizing it, be asking our dogs to live in ways that constrain who they are and who they might become, the many ways in which we compromise the “dogness” of dogs. Having a sense of the whole experiential range of dog possibilities may help us become better companions to our dogs.

To explore whether the dog sitting next to us on the couch is fantasizing about a humanless world, we’ve tried to identify the potential gains and losses for dogs in a world without us. As you might expect, the question, “Would dogs be better off?” does not yield a simple “yes” or “no” answer, and the further you dive into the question the murkier the waters become.

Variables at Play in the Gains and Losses Game

We’ve constructed a comprehensive list of what dogs stand to gain or lose if humans go extinct in our book. Here are a few thoughts on why judgments about gains and losses are complicated.

What dogs may gain or lose as a species is distinct from what an individual dog stands to gain or lose. The sudden disappearance of humans will result in broadscale losses at the individual level. Many dogs will be ill-equipped to survive, not having had any lived experiences of obtaining their own food, finding shelter, or forming a workable pair bond. Depending on how humans disappear, individual dogs in captivity—for example, inside homes with no way to get out, or locked inside shelters or laboratory cages—will perish. Overcrowding of dogs in some areas may lead to intense competition for scarce food resources. Moreover, large numbers of individual dogs will be unable to reproduce because they have been desexed, and so even if individuals manage to survive, they will be at a genetic dead end. Nevertheless, enough dogs may survive this first wave so that viable populations will be able to take hold in habitable ecosystems. Dogs as a species may very well go on to flourish.

The gains and losses for dogs in a world without humans will be unique and will depend a great deal on where a dog begins this unprecedented journey into a posthuman future. The unique characteristics of where and how each dog is living when humans disappear will greatly influence what challenges they face and what is experienced as a loss or gain. How well they cope will depend on an individual dog’s personality, past experiences, learning, social and emotional intelligence, and physical attributes.

Dogs currently live in wildly diverse relationships with humans, and while some dogs may keenly miss humans, others will be glad to see us go. A pet dog with a well-informed, motivated, and empathic human caregiver has more to lose than a dog caged at a research laboratory or in a puppy mill. Feral dogs will miss the enormous piles of garbage that humans produce but may not experience any loss of human companionship. Although the challenges for pet, free-ranging, and feral dogs will be different, the loss of humans and the transition from human selection to natural selection will be abrupt, and it won’t be pretty for many of the dogs on the planet.

There will be far fewer posthuman dogs inhabiting the planet. A reduction in total numbers should not necessarily be viewed as a complete loss because arguably there are too many dogs, their population having been bloated by intensive human breeding and careless pet-keeping practices. The size of dog populations, especially in dog-dense areas, will need to be much smaller to be sustainable, with sustainability depending on the carrying capacity—the maximum population size of a species that can be sustained within a given environment—of different habitats in which dogs are trying to survive.

Posthuman dogs may form short- or long-term groups. What might be a gain for a group isn’t necessarily a gain for all individuals within the group, and much will depend on who else is in the group and the ecological conditions with which the group must contend. Groups of animals tend to be most robust when they contain a broad range of behavioral phenotypes. It may be good for a group to have a combination of high-ranking and low-ranking individuals, but life might be difficult for those individuals who are of lower rank.

If humans disappeared, some gains and losses would be felt immediately, such as loss of human food subsidies and the gain of freedom from physical constraint, but the effects of human disappearance will reverberate and shift over generations.

Editor’s Note: For more about the book, see “Science and Speculation Say Dogs Would Do Well Without Us” (Psychology Today, October 21, 2021) by co-author Marc Bekoff. For a deeper dive into many of the topics addressed in the book, please visit Dr. Bekoff’s blog, Animal Emotions.

This excerpt is from A Dog’s World: Imagining the Lives of Dogs in a World Without Humans, by Jessica Pierce and Marc Bekoff (Princeton University Press, 2021). This web adaptation was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Jessica Pierce is a faculty affiliate at the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical School. Her books include Run, Spot, Run: The Ethics of Keeping Pets. Find her at jessicapierce.net. Marc Bekoff is professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado Boulder. His books include Canine Confidential: Why Dogs Do What They Do. Find him at marcbekoff.comand on Twitter @MarcBekoff.

In Coimbatore: Death, Disease and Divinity

BY KAVITHA MURALIDHARAN

 JANUARY 21, 2022

LONG READ
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Illustration: Priyanka Borar.

“I remember rats falling down from roofs and dying in our homes. It was the most ominous sight I have ever seen. You might laugh at it today, but a rat falling from the roof meant we had to leave our houses, not knowing when we could return.”

That vivid and graphic account comes from A. Kuzhandhaiammal, a resident of Kalapatti locality in Coimbatore. Now in her 80s, she was not yet in her teens when plague struck that Tamil Nadu city for the last time, in the early 1940s.

Coimbatore’s unhappy history of epidemics – ranging from smallpox to plague to cholera – has seen the rise of a phenomenon that exists elsewhere but seems concentrated in this region. The proliferation of ‘Plague Mariamman’ temples. There are 16 of them in this city.

And, of course, the Covid-19 pandemic has seen the coming of a ‘Corona Devi’ temple as well. But it is the Plague Mariamman (also called Black Mariamman) shrines that command a far greater following. There are a few in neighbouring Tiruppur district too that still hold festivals and attract visitors.

From 1903 to 1942, Coimbatore suffered at least 10 bouts of plague, killing thousands of people. Decades after it left, plague remains etched in the collective memory of this city. For many old-timers like Kuzhandhaiammal, the mention of plague is a chilling reminder of what the city historically lived through.

Outside of what is perhaps the most famous of the Plague Mariamman temples in the bustling Town Hall area, a flower seller is readying for a busy evening. “Today is Friday. There will be a good turnout,” says Kanammal, in her 40s, without lifting her eyes from hands that continue to intricately weave the flowers together.

“She is powerful, you know. It doesn’t matter that we have a Corona Devi temple now. Black Mariamman is one of us. We will continue to worship her, especially when we fall sick, but even for other kinds of general prayers too,” says Kanammal. By ‘general prayers’ she refers to the more routine demands of devotees – prosperity, success and long life. Kanammal was born nearly four decades after the end of the plague era. But many of her generation, too, flock to Mariamman for succour.

The impact of plague was such that it came to constitute a part of Coimbatore’s cultural ethnography. “The original native residents of the town were not just witnesses to the havoc wrecked by plague. They were the victims. You will not find one family here that has not been affected by plague,” says Coimbatore-based writer C.R. Elangovan.

According to the 1961 District Census Handbook , Coimbatore city witnessed 5,582 deaths in 1909, and 3,869 deaths in 1920 from different bouts of plague. Other reports suggest that Coimbatore’s population was reduced to 47,000 in 1911 after the plague outbreak of that year. All in all, heavy tolls on a city that in 1901 had a population of around 53,000.

Elangovan says his own family fled Coimbatore to briefly “live in the forests” before they could hope to return to the city “without being harmed.” That hope came from what seems an unlikely source today.

“Through those dark years, with no medical help available, people turned to divinity,” reasons P. Siva Kumar, a Coimbatore-based entomologist with a keen interest in the district’s ethnography.

That hope, as so often happens, was also tied to fear and despair. It was in 1927, the middle of the city’s plague era, that the philosopher Bertrand Russell declared religion to be “based primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes.”

All these varied reasons have something to do with the existence of those 16 temples dedicated to the deity – whose popular name, too, underwent a shift. “People also started calling Plague Mariamman as Black Mariamman,” says Elangovan. “And since maari also means black in Tamil, the transition was seamless.”

And even as the plague itself retreats into the shadows of history, generationally handed-down memories of its impact manifest in diverse ways.

People turn to Plague Mariamman for prosperity and long life, but they also seek relief from diseases like chicken pox, skin ailments, viral infections, and now Covid-19. PHOTO • KAVITHA MURALIDHARAN.

“I remember my parents taking me to the temple whenever I was ill,” says Nikila C., 32, a resident of Coimbatore. “My grandmother made regular visits to the temple. My parents believed that the temple’s holy water would help cure disease. They also offered pujas at the shrine. Today, when my daughter is unwell, I also do the same. I take her there and do pujas , and give her the holy water. I may not be as regular as my parents were, but I still go. I think it is part of being a resident of this city.”

*****

“I serve as a fourth-generation priest here and people still visit seeking remedies for chicken pox, skin diseases, Covid-19 and viral infections,” says M. Rajesh Kumar, 42, at the Plague Mariamman temple in Town Hall area. “There is a belief that this goddess offers reprieve from such diseases.”

“This temple has been in existence for over 150 years. When the plague visited Coimbatore [1903-1942], my great-grandfather decided to consecrate an additional idol as Plague Mariamman. After him, my grandfather and my father took care of it. I do it today. Since then, no region under the reign of the goddess has been affected by plague. And so people have continued to have faith in her.”

A similar story surrounds the temple in Coimbatore’s Saibaba Colony. “This one was originally constructed about 150 years ago,” says 63-year-old V.G. Rajasekaran, an administrative committee member of the Plague Mariamman temple in this locality. That is, it was built before the advent of plague.

Interestingly, both these and many others like them, were already Mariamman temples, but celebrating her in other roles or avatars . When the plague hit this region, bringing devastation in its wake, additional statues of the deity were consecrated – all of them in stone – as Plague Mariamman.

When plague hit the city some three decades after the founding of the temple he serves, “at least five or six people died in each family,” says Rajasekaran. “The families left their homes after the deaths of their members, or as the plague progressed, when rats fell from the roofs. It took four or five months before they could return to their homes.”

The residents of Saibaba Colony, then a small village, decided to install a separate statue towards worship for cure from plague and decided to call her Plague Mariamman. “We had two deaths in our family. When my uncle fell ill, my grandmother brought him to the temple, laid him before Plague Mariamman, and applied neem and turmeric on him. He was cured.”

Since then, that village and several others (which are now part of Coimbatore city), believed that worshipping Mariamman would save them from the plague.

Elangovan says this could be the reason behind the prolific numbers of, and proximity between, the Plague Mariamman shrines. “Saibaba Colony, Peelamedu, Pappanaickenpalayam, Town Hall and other localities would have been different villages a century ago. Today all of them are part of Coimbatore city.”

Writer and chronicler of Tamil cultural history Stalin Rajangam says the worship of Plague Mariamman could have been a “very natural consequence, a reaction to a disease that had wreaked havoc. The concept of the belief is this: you believe in god to find a solution to your problems, to your worries. The biggest problem for humankind has been illness. So, obviously, belief centres around relief from diseases.”

“It is common in Christianity and Islam too,” Rajangam adds. “Children are treated in mosques for illnesses. In Christianity, we have worship of Arogya Madha (mother of well-being). The Buddhist bhikus are known to have practiced medicine. In Tamil Nadu, we have the siddhars , who were originally medical practitioners. That is why we have something called the siddha stream of medicine.”

There is a Mariamman temple in almost every village of Tamil Nadu. She may have a different name in some regions, but her shrines are there. The idea of particular gods and their wrath or ability to cure is not restricted to one religion or one country. And scholars across the globe have taken the religious response to plagues and epidemics more seriously in recent decades.

A temple in the Pappanaickenpudur neighbourhood of Coimbatore. Painted in red, the words at the entrance say, Arulmigu Plague Mariamman Kovil (‘temple of the compassionate Plague Mariamman’). PHOTO • KAVITHA MURALIDHARAN.

As the historian Duane J. Osheim puts it in his paper, Religion and Epidemic Disease , published in 2008: “There is no single or predictable religious response to epidemic disease. Nor is it correct to assume religious responses are always apocalyptic. It might be better to recognize that religion, like gender, class, or race, is a category of analysis. The religious response to epidemic disease may best be seen as a frame, a constantly shifting frame, to study influencing illness and human responses to it.”

*****

Annual amman thiruvizhas (festivals for Mariamman) are quite common in Tamil Nadu even today. And these reinforce the need to understand the relationship between public health and religious belief, says Stalin Rajangam. The festivals typically happen across the state in amman temples during the Tamil month of Aadi (mid-July to mid-August).

“The preceding months – Chithirai , Vaigasi and Aani [respectively, mid-April to mid-May, mid-May to mid-June, and mid-June to mid-July] are very hot in Tamil Nadu,” says Rajangam. “The land is dry, and the bodies are dry. The dryness leads to a disease called ammai (chickenpox/smallpox). The remedy for both is coolness. And that is what the thiruvizhas are all about.”

In fact, the worship of ‘Muthu Mariamman’ – yet another role for the deity – is about seeking providential relief from chickenpox and smallpox. “Because the disease leads to outbreaks on skin, the goddess was called Muthu Mariamman, muthu meaning pearl in Tamil. There have been medical advancements that effectively deal with the poxes, yet the temples continue to draw crowds.”

Rajangam also points to some rituals associated with the festivals that could have medicinal if not scientific value. “Once the thiruvizha is announced in a village, a ritual called kaapu kattuthal is held, following which people cannot step outside of the village. They will have to maintain hygiene within their families, on their streets, and in the village. Neem leaves, considered a disinfectant, are liberally used during the festivals.”

The guidelines announced for Covid-19, when the scientific community was still grappling with a solution, was something similar, points out Rajangam. “There was physical distancing and use of sanitisers for hygiene. And in some cases, people resorted to using neem leaves because they did not know what else they could do when Covid happened.”

The idea – of isolation and the use of some kind of sanitiser – is universal. During the Covid outbreak, public-health officials in Odisha invoked the example of Puri Jagannath to drive home the importance of quarantine and physical distancing. The authorities highlighted how Lord Jagannath shuts himself up in theanasar ghar (isolation room) before the annual Rath Yatra.

And the idea of the goddess and fighting disease is “so universal that an amman temple in Karnataka is dedicated to AIDS,” says writer S. Perundevi, associate professor of religious studies at New York’s Siena University,

She adds that Mariamman worship is a “very comprehensive idea … In fact, in Tamil maari also means rain. In certain rituals like mulaipari (an agricultural festival), Mariamman is seen and worshiped as crops. In some cases, she is worshipped as gems. So, she is also seen as the goddess who gives the disease, the disease itself, and its cure. This is what had happened in [the case of] plague too.” But Perundevi warns against romanticising the disease. “The folklore of Mariamman,” she points out, “is more an attempt to accept an encounter with disease as part of life and find solutions.”

*****

So who is Mariamman?

This Dravidian deity has long fascinated researchers, historians, and folklorists.

Mariamman was and is perhaps the most popular goddess in the villages of Tamil Nadu, where she is regarded as the guardian deity. And her stories are as varied as the sources they come from.

Some historians cite Buddhist tradition as recognising her as a Buddhist nun from Nagapattinam, to whom disease-afflicted people, particularly those stricken by smallpox, turned to for a cure. She asked them to have faith in the Buddha and cured very many, treating them with neem-leaf paste and prayer – and advice on hygiene, cleanliness and charity. On her attaining Nirvana, people built a statue of her, and there, holds tradition, begins the Mariamman story.

There are several other versions, too. There is even the tale of the Portuguese, when they came to Nagapattinam, naming her Maryamman and claiming her to be a Christian goddess.

And there are some who claim her to be just a counterpart of Shitala, the north-Indian goddess of smallpox and other infectious diseases. Shitala (‘one who cools’ in Sanskrit) is seen as an incarnation of Goddess Parvati, spouse of Lord Shiva.

But evidence emerging from research of the past few decades suggests she was a goddess of rural people, worshipped by Dalits and the marginalised castes – in fact, a deity of Dalit origin.

Unsurprisingly, the power and appeal of Mariamman saw, over the ages, attempts at assimilation and appropriation of the deity by the dominant castes.

As the historian and writer K.R. Hanumanthan pointed out in a paper, The Mariamman Cult of Tamil Nadu , as early as 1980: “That Mariamman is an ancient Dravidian goddess worshipped by the early inhabitants of Tamil Nadu …  is revealed by the association of the deity with the Pariah [Paraiyars, a Scheduled Caste], erstwhile ‘untouchables’ and the oldest representatives of the Dravidian people of Tamil Nadu.

In many temples of this deity, says Hanumanthan, Paraiyars “seem to have acted as the priests for quite a long time. For example, in the Karumariamman temple of Thiruverkadu near Chennai. The original priests were Paraiyars. But they were later replaced by Brahmins when the Religious Endowments Act [1863] came into practice.” This British colonial Act gave legal sanction to an upper-caste takeover of the temples of marginalised communities that was already underway. Post-Independence, states like Tamil Nadu brought in their own laws in an attempt to undo or mitigate this injustice.

*****

And now a ‘Corona Devi’ temple? Seriously?

Well, yes, says Anand Bharathi, manager of the temple of that name in the Coimbatore suburb of Irugur. “It is in line with the Plague Mariamman worship,” he says. “When we decided to install a statue for Corona Devi [in an already existing shrine], the disease was at its peak. And we believe only worship can save us.”

So when Covid-19 happened, Coimbatore was among the few places in the country that saw, in late 2020, a place of worship spring up for the disease.

But Devi? Why not Corona Mariamman, we ask. Well, Bharathi finds there are problems with the lexical semantics of connecting those words. “The word Mariamman sits well with plague but not with Corona. So, we decided to call the goddess Devi instead.”

There is a Mariamman temple in almost every village of Tamil Nadu. She may have a different name in some regions, but her shrines are there

Medical advancements notwithstanding, worship of the deity and the associated rituals continue to be a part of the public response to health issues.

But unlike in the case of Plague Mariamman temples, the Corona Devi temple has not, for most of its existence, allowed worshippers to visit in person – because of the lockdowns. Apparently, a temple built around the deadly virus has to treat not just its deity but the pandemic’s protocols, too, as divine. The temple administration claims it performed a yagna (a ritual worship or offering with a specific objective) for 48 days following which the clay statue of Corona Devi was dissolved in a river. The shrine is now open to visitors, but they might be unnerved by the absence of a figurine to worship.

Writers like Elangovan reject the idea of the Corona Devi temple being part of Coimbatore’s ethos in the way that Plague Mariamman temples are. “It is at best a publicity stunt. It has nothing to do with Plague Mariamman shrines, you cannot draw comparisons between them. Plague Mariamman temples are an intrinsic part of Coimbatore’s history and culture.”

Plague Mariamman places of worship across the city continue to draw crowds to this day, even though plague itself remains just a bleak if awful memory. In 2019, just before the onset of Covid-19, the Plague Mariamman temple at Pappanaickenpalayam became a minor sensation after a parrot sat on the statue of the goddess during a festival, sending devotees into a tizzy.

According to local reports, the ‘event’ lasted for hours, drawing even more visitors to the temple. “Mariamman is a village deity. Her temples will never lose their relevance among the ordinary public,” says Elangovan. “For example, for the Koniyamman temple festival at Town Hall, the sacred fire pit is made at the Plague Mariamman temple in the same locality. The rituals are inter-related. Koniyamman is considered the guardian deity of Coimbatore.”

Not many members of the present generation are aware of such intricate history and myths. Yet, these shrines continue to hold significance for them. “I honestly never knew the temples had this kind of history,” says R. Narain, a 28-year-old entrepreneur in Coimbatore. “But I am a regular visitor to the temple along with my mother, and I will continue to visit it in future too. It changes nothing for me. Or maybe, I will be more awed now.”

This first appeared on Rural India Online.

Have We Learned Nothing From the COVID-19 Pandemic? New Animal Epidemics Ignored

BY MARTHA ROSENBERG

 JANUARY 21, 2022
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You would think as COVID-19 has now killed 5.54 million, there would be greater vigilance about other brewing zoonotic epidemics. Yet even as 41 countries now have outbreaks of avian influenza, called HPAI or H5N1, including the US, there is little to no reporting on the threat in the US press. The attitude still seems to be “wait and see” as it was with COVID-19 though cases surfaced six months before any action was taken; have we learned nothing?

Since the new year, millions of birds have been killed in Israel, Spain, France (notable for its foie gras), the UK, the Netherlands, Hungary, Nigeria, India, Japan and other countries to stop the spread of avian influenza. Yet depopulating and “repopulating the global poultry stock” doesn’t work and just keeps “reloading the gun” of avian influenza say Dr. Michael Greger in his excellent book, “Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching.”

While the HPAI/H5N1 “bird flu” virus does not easily transmit to humans, when it does it is often fatal. Moreover, since bird and swine viruses are both Type A influenzas, a bigger worry is reassortment as we saw with the 2009 H1N1 virus (called “swine flu” until pork industry pressure). This virus was an eerie mix of five swine and bird flu influenzas. The 1918 flu epidemic was also from a bird influenza virus.

Reporter Tom Philpott indicted the massive Smithfield Foods subsidiary Granjas Carroll de México, along the Mexican border, for hatching the 2009 virus –– though Smithfield strongly disagreed.

Concerns about influenza reassortments appear in the scientific literature. According to the journal Infection, Genetics and Evolution, “Nowadays, it is well-established that A(H1N1)pdm 2009 was the result of a genomic reorganization between two A(H1N1) swine viruses with at least four previously reassorted gene segments from avian, human and swine-adapted viruses…The H5N1 virus infecting humans was the result of a reassortment among a quail H9N2 strain with segment-4 (hemagglutinin, HA) from goose H5N1 and with segment-6 (neuraminidase, NA) from teal H6N1 viruses…These are excellent examples of how reassortment can impact the evolution of segmented viruses.”

In addition to bird flu mutations, scientists and public health officials also worry about the evolution of the Swine Acute Diarrhea Syndrome coronavirus or SADS-CoV which is very similar to COVID-19 and also endemic to China and linked to bats. While SADS-CoV does not appear to have reached US shores yet, it is related to porcine epidemic diarrhea virus (PEDV) which caused the death of millions of US pigs in 2013–2014.

Another disease that has overtaken most of the world while barely reported in the US is African Swine Fever (ASF) virus. It killed a quarter of the world’s pigs in 2019 and is now endemic in 50 countries including our neighbor Haiti. Unless you read the ag press you’ve probably never heard of it.

ASF has devastated China’s pork industry and may explain why China relies on the Smithfield Tar Heel, North Carolina slaughter plant, which it bought in 2013, for pork.

Few realize the gigantic slaughterhouse which kills as many as 35,000 pigs a day is owned by China’s WH Group. China bought the plant soon after thousands of pigs with circovirus were found floating in the Huangpu river. Congressional hearings were held but the sale went forward.

Has Pandemic Response Improved?

It is understandable that public health officials want to avoid “false alarms” when a pandemic does not develop –– especially after the apparent overreaction to a swine flu outbreak in the US in 1976 that did not materialize. Still, erring on the side of caution with COVID-19 and acting sooner would have saved millions.

Less noble are the motives of news outlets whose fast and processed food advertisers cause them to downplay and even ignore animal diseases that could cut into sales. Who, for example, ever saw piles of pig or poultry carcasses on the news when viruses that killed those animals relentlessly ripped through the US less than 10 years ago?

Thanks to slow-to-act public health organizations and Big Food-captured news outlets, zoonotic epidemics that could become pandemics are still ignored until they are knocking at our front door and it is too late. Has COVID-19 taught us nothing?

Martha Rosenberg is an investigative health reporter. She is the author of  Born With A Junk Food Deficiency: How Flaks, Quacks and Hacks Pimp The Public Health (Prometheus).