What Happened Today: March 10, 2022

Omicron winds down; Canada’s psych experiments; Australian floods

Mar 10, 2022

The Big Story

In England, the mortality risk from a COVID-19 infection is now lower than that from the flu, according to a new analysis of public data by the Financial Times. Citing a high vaccination rate and the level of natural immunity acquired by infections, the analysis found that the reduction of risk applied to the population as a whole but also, significantly, to the nation’s elderly population. “Even among the over-80s, where about one-in-200 Omicron infections still results in death, this figure is now lower than the equivalent for flu,” said the analysis.

In the United States, COVID-19 infections and mortality rates continue to drop quickly, with the daily death count falling by 24% over the past two weeks and COVID-19 cases down by 48%, a sign that the current Omicron wave might have subsided. Still, federal agencies continue to require masks in certain public places, like in transportation hubs and on trains and airplanes; the Transportation Security Administration extended its mask mandate for travelers through at least the middle of April. Earlier this week, Hawaii became the last U.S. state to drop its universal indoor mask requirement.

The Back Pages: David Grossman on the Urvakan Records album A Collective Memoir

The Rest

→ The casualty count from yesterday’s attack by Russia on a maternity hospital in the southern port city of Mariupol has risen to three killed and 17 wounded, Ukrainian officials said today. The attack broke a tentative cease-fire in the city. Hundreds of thousands of people remain stranded there while food and water supplies have run dry, and negotiators have failed to establish humanitarian corridors for them to safely escape. As videos of the aftermath of the attack flooded the internet yesterday, Russia initially denied the attack took place, with its defense ministry claiming the scenes of wounded, bloody women were orchestrated by Ukrainian crisis actors. Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov then justified the bombing by claiming the hospital was under the control of “local radical militias,” an assertion offered with as much evidence as the bit about crisis actors. The strike is of a piece with the military attacks of medical facilities that Russia led during its war on the Syrian people; between 2011 and 2017, according to Physicians for Human Rights, 492 Russian attacks on healthcare facilities led to the deaths of 847 medical workers.

→ Lithuanian officials have halted a delivery of nearly half a million COVID-19 vaccines that was destined for Bangladesh, on account of what Lithuanian National Radio and Television reports as Bangladesh’s failure to support a resolution condemning Russia for its invasion of Ukraine during a United Nations General Assembly last week. Before joining 35 other nations that abstained from the vote, a Bangladeshi representative said the resolution was not sufficient to halt the conflict and advocated for a diplomatic solution to the crisis, walking a thin line of criticizing Russia’s actions while avoiding a direct condemnation of a world power—a delicate balance reflective of Bangladesh’s need to maintain good geopolitical relationships all around as it tries to achieve economic stability. Despite the resolution’s purely ceremonial purpose, Lithuania has penalized the people of the world’s most densely populated nation for cheap political theater, withholding the life-saving vaccines from those who need them.

→ Families of some of the hundreds of Montreal residents subjected to psychological experiments, psychedelic drugs, and electroshock therapy to treat symptoms of depression in the 1950s and 1960s at the city’s Allan Memorial Institute were recently allowed by the Quebec Superior Court to seek more expedient individual legal recourse rather than join an ongoing class-action application against the hospital and the Canadian government, which allegedly funded the medical project known as MK Ultra. Allan Memorial is now under the auspices of the the McGill University Health Center, which said in a statement that Donald Cameron, the doctor who ran MK Ultra with administrative support from the Central Intelligence Agency, conducted “controversial” experiments with “unfortunate” outcomes, but that a previous lawsuit over the project found that Dr. Cameron was an independent practitioner and the hospital was not liable. In that previous suit, from 1992, the government did not acknowledge wrongdoing but still gave a small group of the victims $100,000 for what it described then as “humanitarian reasons,” a sum of money that has done little, the victims and their families say, to alleviate the damage inflicted by the program on its patients. The new lawsuit says the project was designed to take “control of the patient’s psyche in order to recondition it” and used electroshock therapies and a suite of injected drugs to induce patients into coma-like states. Some patients were left struggling with daily basic function, with no memory of their children, and others who do have a memory of the experience recall it as “being in a snake pit and being gagged,” adding that living with the memory has been a “living death” stretching for decades since.

→ New court documents released by the Missouri Attorney General reveal that a group of children’s rights activists representing children between the ages of 2 and 14 won a $3.4 million class-action settlement against the Missouri Department of Social Services for its excessive use of psychotropic prescription drugs to treat as many as 30% of the 13,000 children in the Missouri foster care system. Improper records and poor administration meant children were administered drugs they didn’t need for behavior issues and sometimes mistakenly administered several pharmaceuticals at the same time, exposing the children to “unreasonable risk of serious physical and psychological harm” with drugs, the lawsuit said, that can lead to “irreversible movement disorders, suicidal thoughts, aggression, weight gain, organ damage, and other life-threatening conditions.” Along with receiving the monetary settlement, the foster care children will require a mental health consultation and regular medical check-ins to continue receiving the prescription treatments.

→ Following a brutally violent weekend in Philadelphia, where five young men were murdered across two different shooting incidents during one seven-hour stretch, the city updated its total homicides to 95 for the year, which puts Philadelphia 10% ahead of its homicide rate at this time last year, the deadliest ever in Philadelphia’s history. Since the start of the pandemic in 2020, violent crime has continued to climb to rates not seen since the 1990s across the United States, particularly in urban areas, and in cities with both conservative and progressive district attorneys. In New York City, a recent Quinnipiac University survey found that 74% of registered voters believed crime to be a “a very serious” problem, the highest rate since the survey began asking that question in 1999.

→ “A major catastrophe … of national proportions,” was how Prime Minister Scott Morrison described the floods that struck the eastern coast of Australia this week, claimed 22 lives, and caused tens of thousands to flee their homes. Government agencies thus far dispensed around $281 million to flood victims, and 4,000 members of the military have been dispatched in the aid effort, though Morrison has been criticized for delays and mismanagement of the emergency response. Citing the floods and devastating brush fires in recent years, Morrison said, “Australia is becoming a harder country to live in because of these natural disasters.”

→ Bradford Morrow, the founding editor of the literary journal Conjunctions, announced that after 40 years it will cease publication on account of “the economic pressure the pandemic has created in both education and publishing.” Like The Believer and Tin House magazines, two other publications that have recently shuttered, Conjunctions has lost the support of its patron, in this case Bard College, the magazine’s publisher for the past 30 years. Last year, Bard took in an unprecedented financial gift of $500 million from George Soros to help the college “defend the arts, the humanities and basic science as the essence of the liberal arts,” but either Soros or Bard doesn’t consider the journal worth defending. Or rather, the idea of the arts has been radically upended. Some will recall when Conjunctions was considered an influential venue for experimental and avant-garde writing, and small journals kept the American literary scene honest, dynamic, weird, and alive. The 2001 20th anniversary issue, with pieces from William H. Gass, Anne Carson, David Foster Wallace, Rick Moody, Diane Williams, John Ashbury, and John Barth, was emblematic of what journals could be.

→ The Supreme Court ruled that records from CIA black sites are protected by the “state secrets privilege,” a law that allows the United States to withhold information that it deems a threat to national security. In what is likely to create a sweeping legal precedent for future cases, the decision followed a request for evidence from Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad, a Palestinian man the CIA abducted in Pakistan in 2002, mistaking him for a high-level al-Qaeda operative. Tortured by the CIA at multiple black sites, including one in Poland, Muhammad was repeatedly subjected to “enhanced interrogation” before being imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay. After Muhammad sued the CIA operatives who tortured him, he requested evidence from the black site in Poland, but the Supreme Court denied that request. In a dissent joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Justice Neil Gorsuch argued that the court should not let the “shame” of its post-9/11 torture program cloud the court’s judgement: “The facts are hard to face. We know already that our government treated [him] brutally—more than 80 waterboarding sessions, hundreds of hours of live burial, and what it calls ‘rectal hydration.’ Further evidence along the same lines may lie in the government’s vaults. But as embarrassing as these facts may be, there is no state secret here.” Muhammad, who has not been charged with any crimes, has been held at Guantanamo Bay for the past 20 years.

→ The Sessho-seki, a “killing stone” located in the volcanic mountains of Nasu in Japan, has split in two, terrorizing those who believe its ancient origin story. According to legend, the stone contains the spirit of an evil fox who plotted the murder of a 12th-century emperor. Since then, the stone has spewed murderous vapors, and now, with the spirit split into two, it’s conceivable that the killing stone is twice as deadly.

→ Before CNN and Fox News, before shock jocks and powerful pundits, there was Father Charles Coughlin, an ambitious priest who invented political talk radio as we know it and was at one point considered the most powerful man in the United States. A rabid antisemite who wrote fan mail to Mussolini and cheered on Hitler, Coughlin also used his enormous platform to spread hate. In “Radioactive,” an 8-part podcast produced by Tablet Studios, with support from Maimonides Fund, and in association with The WNET Group’s reporting initiative, Exploring Hate: Antisemitism, Racism and Extremism, Detroit journalist Andrew Lapin weaves together archival materials and incisive interviews to tell the story of Father Coughlin’s alarming rise and dramatic fall.

Listen here: pbs.org/wnet/exploring-hate/2022/03/09/radioactive-the-father-coughlin-story-study-guide/

David Grossman on the Urvakan Records album A Collective Memoir

These days, the question isn’t whether you should buy an album whose proceeds are being donated entirely to support Ukraine—it’s which one you should buy. Pitchfork has compiled a helpful list of projects worth supporting. These are all worth checking out, but I wanted to highlight one project that stands out for its closeness to the conflict: a compilation album produced by Urvakan Records titled A Collective Memoir.

Urvakan Records is less a record label and more an Armenian festival based around “interest in revitalizing the country’s abandoned and deserted sites and their ambiguous state of being neither completely ruined, nor truly alive as they were decades ago.” To that point, urvakan means “ghost” in Armenian, and the group’s main interest is in music it describes as “hauntological.”

Fittingly, then, A Collective Memoir is less an album than a “sound research project” commissioned by Urvakan, asking artists from Armenia, Georgia, Russia, and Ukraine to “explore how ‘collective memories’ could be embodied in sound by using some of the aural techniques capable of evoking such memories in the subconscious of people from locations fairly different, but some ways similar, in their cultural code.”

In a shocking twist, A Collective Memoir was released less than 24 hours before Russia’s full-force attack. The results are remarkable. Nikolaienko, an artist from Kyiv now based in Estonia, offers reel-to-reel tape loops of vibraphone jazz, perhaps recalling Duke Ellington’s 1971 concert in then-Soviet-controlled Kyiv. The sounds feel like specific memories discovered in the midst of a fog.

A Siberian history teacher named Egor Klochikhin produces music under the name Foresteppe, and his contribution to the project is a cover of an emo song called “Zola.” A guitar strums quickly, almost aimlessly, and builds up slowly for nearly two hypnotic minutes. A voice emerges, though it’s hard to make out what it’s saying, but the reverb starts to intensify around the strumming guitar. Clicks start sounding out in the background, and at the end they reveal themselves to be the sound of train tracks.

The weight of history is felt throughout the compilation, lightened toward the end by the sound artist L’s contribution “Stretched Logo,” which pushes and pulls a 1990s ad beyond all recognition, stretching out syllables into impossibly long sounds and hammering it with electronic noise.

A Collective Memoir shows one thing: Even before the invasion, there was enough pain to go around post-U.S.S.R. The project’s goal, through sounds that aren’t particularly pleasant or even particularly musical, is to offer a unification of memory. It emerges differently for each person, but taken as a whole, it is a startling soundscape upon which listeners can reflect. Sadly, some of the artists involved in the project have now had to flee from Odessa. The past is never just the past.

David Grossman is a freelance writer based out of Brooklyn and is on Twitter at @davidgross_man.

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