I read the email received from an old friend this morning, expressing sadness over having to cancel plans to visit family in Alaska.  The pandemics spread accelerates around us, now we receive word of acquaintances who are hospitalized.  The email had news of a mutual friend who was admitted to the ER last night with a diagnosis of Covid-19.  I pray that he will recover.  My world would feel the loss of this kind soul.  I know him well.  For many years I listened to his jokes and stories of outdoor adventures while we worked together.

In all that comes, through the iphone breaking news feed or a more personal email from a friend, broods the image of president Trump.  Today in the The Morning update from the NY Times, Dr. Anthony Fauci was quoted that Trump’s coronavirus task force has not been allowed to communicate with President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team…

I am reminded of the scene in one of the Star Wars films when Darth Vader makes a heart-stopping entrance onto a rebel ship (Rogue One) in the midst of the chaos of deadly fighting between the two sides.  Star Wars, in serial film episodes, revolves around the axis of struggle with evil embodied in Darth Vader.  Whatever the fascination with the Vader character, after this scene, one thing is certain.  He is a stone-cold killer.

Finally some quotes taken from BREATHING Chaos and Poetry by Franco “Bifo” Berardi.

Time is the objectification of a biological organism’s act of breathing, which is sensitive and conscious.

Singular respiration is concatenated with others’ breathing, and this corespiration we name “society.”

In the industrial age, when a dominant rhythm was imposed over the spontaneous rhythms of social subjects, power could be described as a code aligning different temporalities, an all-compassing framing rhythm …

We speak of Political sovereignty when the sound of law was silencing the noise emitting from the social environment.

In our contemporary connective postindustrial society, the opposite is true:..power is based upon the boundless intensification of noise. … Post-political power is a statistical function that emerges from the noise of the crowd.  

“Sovereign is he who commands the shitstorms of the Net.”*

*Byung-Chul Hun, In the Swarm: Digital Prospects (MIT Press, 2017)