Great story of a great artist, who dared to push all kind of boundaries. In the late 1950s, if you were into rock and roll, living in a small town, feeling a little bit out of joint and strangled by the prohibitions of the Catholic Church, as I was, you loved Little Richard. He, and he wasn’t alone, shattered the cultural, social, and musical norms that felt, for me anyway, like a straight jacket. And, in doing so, he gave me license to live and think outside the suffocating weight of official society, and not feel too bad about it.

I won’t attempt to summarize this NYT look at the stock market, other than to say its nature and dynamics in the middle of a pandemic can’t be fathomed without accounting for the billionaire class and the massive concentration of capital in the hands of new corporate behemoths.

I heard on Morning Joe that we should have prepared for the pandemic like we prepare for a hurricane. But Trump did the opposite. First, he said the pandemic isn’t going to hit landfall, but dissipate and go out to sea.

Then when it didn’t, he, unlike in a hurricane where a responsible leader throws the full weight of the federal government’s capacity to minimize deaths and destruction, while keeping people informed of the hurricanes path based on scientific models, he continued to minimize the danger and refused to coordinate a national effort to flatten and crush the pandemic’s trajectory. And now, as the pandemic tracks across the country, Trump is telling people to return to work prematurely, which to continue the hurricane metaphor, is akin to instructing people to return to their homes before the eye of the storm has passed.

This is madness. And to make it worse, Republicans, with barely an exception, echo and reinforce this message in their words and legislative actions.

What explains the callousness and indifference that Trump and his cronies display toward the disproportionate loss of Black and Brown lives in this pandemic? Or to the endless plague of cold blooded murders of young African American men at the hands of white vigilantes?

Is it out of ignorance? By no means. The short answer is to be found in the poverty of their moral core and the utterly reactionary, white nationalist politics they embrace and practice.

I became familiar with this song when I was a very young, around 6 or 7 years old, thanks to my mother who would play it on her piano and sing its words. Little did I expect that a few years later this song would give me some comfort and courage when she suddenly died. Now more than six decades later it gives comfort and courage once again, as I, along with the rest of humanity, find ourselves in the middle of a deadly pandemic. “Walk on, Walk on with hope in our heart” will give us a lift in these difficult times.