Gavin Smith, University of Toronto

“One of the many perils lies in normalizing the ‘batshit crazy’ presently underway.”
—Wallace, Liebman, Chavez & Wallace 2020: 5

The COVID-19 pandemic has stripped the veneer off capitalist society whether in its softer social democratic version or its bare-faced pseudo Darwinian version. Both the cause and the cure are down to the way capitals, now thoroughly integrated into states, have driven the direction of technology to produce this perfect storm. The staggering failures at the curing end are not just glaringly obvious in the present crisis; you’d have to be especially starry-eyed not to see that the wheels and most of the chassis had been stripped off public health well before now. But at the causative end “the normalizing [of] the batshit crazy presently underway,” risks being lost in the chatter.