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Post-Pandemic Dispositions (continued)

          Mass culture no longer gives us the communal events or the common references we once had. For me, The Big Bang Theory has been a case in point. The recently concluded network comedy series aired from 2007 to 2019, and its finale drew 18 million viewers. Through many of those seasons it was the most popular comedy and sometimes the most popular scripted show on television, and it continues in syndication with high ratings. Even so, a Big Bang reference escapes many, perhaps a majority, of the country. If two generations ago I had worn a shirt with a depiction of Lucille Ball or Bob Newhart or the characters of Bonanza, I believe almost all would have recognized the images. I do own a shirt depicting a Big Bang Theory character (Bazinga). My friends and many others are puzzled by the reference.

          With all the offerings we have, entertainment is more fragmented, and no longer the unifying force in the country that it once was, and in some ways has become divisive. When I say I have never seen Gomorrah the conversation ends. I might reply, “But have you seen Fleabag?” We are primarily talking past each other. And, of course, popular music is similar. We had more in common when Wolfman Jack, Cousin Brucie, and Larry Lujack on top forty radio stations that dominated the airwaves played the same limited selection of songs over and over.

          That our popular culture has become more fragmented over the last generation might be a trivial thing, but our sources of information have also fractured the country. Fewer people read the newspapers that carry news from the wire services, which, having to satisfy many papers and readers, strive for neutrality. Network news, while still important, no longer dominates. We have seen the rise of cable news that aims to please not a broad demographic and ideological audience but a specific segment of the populace. Many of my young friends, however, do not even get their information from newspapers, network TV, or cable news. They turn to social media and the internet and too often follow the normal human impulse of finding stories that confirm what they already believe. I understand that.

A brief example. On a recent trip to Sicily, I visited salt pans near Trapani where I saw pink flamingoes. Someone mentioned that flamingoes become pink when they eat tiny shrimp. This sounded quirky enough that some skeptics did not buy it, but I had heard this crustacean explanation before on the Discovery or National Geographic Channel, and therefore felt it must be true. Even so, that evening I googled why flamingoes were pink; the shrimp explanation was given. That was the end of my exploration. Like many others I tend to believe something on the internet when it confirms what I already thought. I know that when my search is about something important, I should seek diverse sources, but I also know that it is all too easy not to do that. And, unfortunately, many in this land have never learned that it is important to look for relevant disconfirming information as well as confirmations.

When I search on the internet, however, I think that those responsive screens offering links to sources are somehow neutral—that we all see the same things on our devices when we enter “causes of pink flamingoes.” Not so, or at least not so for many searches. Those search engines want to please; they make more money if I continue to use them. And it pleases me to get confirming information not stuff that might cause the discomfort of challenging my beliefs. From my previous searches and clicks they have learned a lot about me. I look for information about Machu Picchu and ads for trips to Peru appear for days when I go to my computer. I may find that useful or annoying but not nefarious. However, as Michiko Kakutani points out, when I search for “stem cell,” I will get different results from those who support or those who oppose such research. The same is true for “proof of climate change” and many other fraught topics. We get different information from the same searches, and the country becomes a little more divided each time as a result. And, of course, something similar happens with the information we get through social media. Increasingly, we become more divided because we operate from different sets of “facts.”

          This trend is exacerbated with the cries of “fake news.” Of course, no information source is always right, but the fake-news label is not about ferreting out good information. It is just a dismissive rejoinder. If it were more than that, it would be accompanied by careful explanations of why a piece of information was wrong and something else is right. How often have you seen that? “Fake news” just means that you may ignore something and continue to believe what you already do. It is not meant to bring about a serious exploration of the information but to continue divisions that already exist.

(continued April 29)

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Post-Pandemic Dispositions

While America has always had regional and political differences, for much of American history technology and infrastructure projects knit the country closer together. Steamboats transformed river traffic. Both goods and people could move more quickly and efficiently than had been imaginable, and cities on the same river, and later lakes, became, in essence, closer and more involved with each other. 

          Canals were built that tied sections of the country together that were not previously connected by rivers or coasts. The most famous, the Erie Canal, made it possible for goods to flow from the Midwest to the East and back making these areas interdependent in ways that they were not before. The extensive networks of other canals helped amalgamate what had been separate localities into regions.

          Railroads made almost every part of the country closer to each other. The West Coast and the East Coast for the first time were truly part of the same nation. With railroads and their kid brother, streetcars, city neighborhoods, outlying areas, and downtowns became part of a single metropolis.

          Air traffic and the interstate highways furthered the process. Although many differences remained, regions were bonded into one country because of transportation improvements, almost all of which were government funded or subsidized.

          Communication advances also knit the country tighter. With the telegraph, interregional business became more efficient. The telegraph allowed the same national news to be read throughout the country on the same day. Speedy communications between friends, acquaintances, and relatives in distant parts of the land became possible. And, of course, all this was immeasurably furthered with the telephone.

          Technological advances allowed people throughout the country to experience the same culture. With the phonograph masses could hear Enrico Caruso, Gene Austin, and Bessie Smith far beyond the limited audience of a performing space. Movies made Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, Rudolph Valentino, and many since then into nationwide stars. With the national distribution of movies, fashion and other trends now quickly spread throughout the country as masses saw Veronica Lake’s hairdo and that Clark Gable was not wearing an undershirt. Newsreels allowed Americans throughout the country to experience Hitler rallies, the invasion of Ethiopia, and World Series highlights in ways that were not possible before.

With radio, millions could hear at the same time fireside chats and Edgar Bergen in their living rooms. (I still don’t quite understand ventriloquism on the radio.) Television intensified that trend as huge portions of the country simultaneously watched the same entertainment, sports, and news. Conversations around the country the next day would be about the same topics—Lucille Ball’s antics, Alan Ameche plunging for a touchdown as the Colts beat the Giants in overtime, JFK’s funeral, and the moon landing.

For much of our history, technological and infrastructure changes moved Americans more towards being one people. Now, however, we often see a land with many increasing and unyielding divisions. Much of this talk of a new divisiveness is overblown. Even as the United States became more united in some ways, strong factions always existed. However, it is true that some recent trends and technological advances have meant that Americans’ sharing of common experiences has lessened. Cable television may have started this. With the hegemony of three television networks destroyed, we no longer had common TV shows. The goal of reaching a mass audience has now been replaced by targeted audiences. Michiko Kakutani in The Death of Truth maintains, “New Star War movies and the Super Bowl remain some of the few communal events that capture an audience cutting across demographic lines.”

What communal media events do we have now? I had heard and seen many comments about the end of Game of Thrones as its finale approached. A mass cultural event was about to happen, or was it? The initial showing of the last episode was watched by 13.6 million people on HBO and 19.4 million on all platforms within a day or so. That is a lot of people experiencing the same event at almost the same time. But compare that to the finale of M*A*S*H in 1983 when 105.9 million watched without the advantage of immediate replays and with about 100 million fewer people (234 million) in the population compared to 2019 (330 million).

The M*A*S*H audience was indeed extraordinary—77% of TV viewers. Even so, the final episode of Cheers in 1993 and of Seinfeld in 1998 drew 84.4 million and 76.3 million viewers when the country’s population was about 260 million. The viewership of many other final episodes including All in the Family at 40.2 million in 1979 and Gunsmoke at 30.9 million dwarf Game of Thrones in both raw numbers and the percentage of the population. More than a half century ago, in 1967, 78 million people watched the final episode of The Fugitive (72% audience share) when the country had 199 million people.

It is true that the Super Bowl remains an American communal event. The last one drew 102.1 million viewers which made it the tenth most watched Super Bowl and eleventh most watched TV show ever—that M*A*S*H finale again.

A similar change in communal movie watching has also occurred. Movie success is measured in dollars, not audience size. The last Star Wars offering had a box office take of $177 million for its opening weekend in 2019. This was less than for the 2017 Star Wars opening ($220 million) and the 2015 opening ($247 million.) Rough calculations using what I pay for movie tickets—expensive New York but senior-citizen rates—the last Star Wars opening had millions fewer viewers in that weekend communal event than even the Game of Thrones finale. (continued April 27)

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The Beholder

    

A friend awhile back sent me a synopsis of a mystery she was writing. Her heroine was a stunningly beautiful woman. I thought of the various male protagonists in mystery series I had read–Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, Lew Archer, Hieronymus Bosch, Dave Robicheaux. While women are often attracted to these men, I don’t remember any of them being described as jawdroppingly handsome. Their sexual power comes from something other than, or in addition to, their looks.

I came around to thinking of Dorothy Sayers’s depiction of Harriet Vane in the Lord Peter Wimsey books. There had been several Wimsey books before Vane is introduced (she is a murder defendant), and while Lord Peter falls in love with her, she is not described as stunningly beautiful. Instead she is the kind of woman men might debate about—is she beautiful? A few might find her intensely attractive; most would not. But Lord Peter does. 

At first this seems like a disappointment; how could Lord Peter’s obsession not be absolutely stunning, someone every man desires? But that she is not makes her more intriguing. Harriet is her own mystery to be figured out. Why do some find her beautiful and others do not?  Even if not a beauty to all, she must be physically arresting for so many to notice, but that Lord Peter is attracted to her must mean that she has attributes beyond the mere physical  that makes her breathtaking to him.

Harriet is a more interesting character because she is not mere eye candy. She will not turn every head in the hotel lobby or the crowded barroom, but those who really look at her with knowledge of who she is in all her aspects see that her physical attractions, of which there are many, combine in unforeseen ways with her daring, literateness, intelligence, and wit to have produced a stunningly beautiful woman. But only to the man who can see the whole woman. And after she makes love with the man who has already regarded her as beautiful, the man sees her even as more beautiful than before. 

When one realizes that her beauty is not just dependent on a physicality that will pass but depends on all the aspects of her that will continue to change and grow and deepen, the reader sees that her beauty will be a continuing surprise, and that Lord Peter Wimsey will see her as more beautiful every day. This is a reason to love for a lifetime, and we readers have no doubt that he will.

(I learned an important lesson from one of the Dorothy Sayers’s book. As Wimsey is dressing for the evening, his manservant Bunter tells him never to tie a bowtie perfectly. In response to Lord Peter’s puzzled reply, Bunter tells him that people should realize that wearer tied it and that the bowtie was not a clip on. I have found it easy to comply with this wisdom.)

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Vexing Vaccination Questions

Many questions about the pandemic are being discussed. Most of them are about the immediate future or for the next couple months. Other issues are more distant but so troubling that consideration of them should begin. They concern the vaccinations that we all hope will become available. First and foremost, scientists, doctors, politicians, and commentators all seem to be confident that a vaccine or vaccines for coronavirus will be developed, but if that virus regularly mutates, is that confidence overstated?

Who will pay for vaccinations? I assume, but do not know, that Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurers will cover the costs. What kind of burdens will be placed on these systems? We already hear often that the financing of Medicare and Medicaid is precarious. Are all private insurers sound enough to handle the costs?

But what about all the uninsured, a group whose size is no doubt going to increase? Many people get health insurance because of employment. When they lose their job, they lose coverage. Many of them won’t be able to afford insurance on the open market or under Obamacare even if Obamacare is not further gutted under the lawsuits the Republicans are pursuing. Does that group go without vaccinations? Will the government pay for them and get further into the health insurance business?

The initial availability of a vaccine will raise other important and difficult ethical, economic, foreign relations, and governmental questions. The pandemic is a worldwide phenomenon—there are outbreaks on every continent—but every person cannot be vaccinated at once. There won’t instantly be eight billion doses or the distribution networks or people to immediately vaccinate the world’s population. As a vaccine is rolled out, some people will get the vaccine before others, and we have little idea about how long it will be before the last in line gets vaccinated. This will be true for the world, but also true in each country.

How will the vaccine be allocated among nations? Every country will want the number of doses that is necessary to protect its population, which means that countries will compete for the vaccine. The severity of that competition will be affected by whether only one vaccine is found or more than one, but also by whether the vaccines are patented. (Of course, they will be patented, you might think, but Jonas Salk did not patent the polio vaccine he along with others developed.) If something is patented, the patent-holder normally can control who will manufacture the patented product. If the vaccine is patented, not everyone who could make the vaccine will be able legally to produce the drug unless the patent-holder agrees, and the patent-holder can also determine to whom the vaccine will be sold. Should this normal regime for inventions be allowed to operate with this pandemic or should there be legislation requiring the automatic licensing of a patented vaccine? In other words, should the government (gasp—dreaded word) regulate (gasp – another dreaded word) the manufacture and distribution of the vaccines or even seize the patent with something like eminent domain?

Patents grant monopolies. Monopolies increase prices. A lot of money can be made from these vaccines. Should there be (gasp yet again) price controls? At least some of the large vaccine makers have already said that none of their profits will go to their shareholders but will be used to subsidize vaccinations in disadvantaged countries and be used for further research and development. In other words, the companies expect profits—probably massive profits—but the companies promise to use all that money humanely (and, of course, the research and development will have the goal of making other profit-making products from which, no doubt, dividends will flow). Should we just trust the largesse and good will of these multi-national corporations?

There will be strong pressures to impose export controls in the nations where the vaccines are manufactured to make sure that the producing countries will have adequate supplies as quickly as possible. Of course, this raises ethical questions about whether some nations can deprive other populations of immediate access to vaccinations, but it will also present foreign policy concerns. Will there be a new kind of most-favored nation status where vaccination exports are allowed to some countries but not others? If so, who decides and on what criteria? In this country, would it be health officials, and if so, who would they be? Or the State Department? The President? Congress? And will all this be complicated by the fact that vaccine companies are part of multi-national corporations? The largest such one is Sanofi Pasteur. If you have been vaccinated against the flu, the odds are your dose came from Sanofi Pasteur. It has five plants in the United States with its American headquarters in a little town in Pennsylvania, but it is a division of a French corporation. Does the French government have any authority to determine where vaccines made in Swiftwater, Pennsylvania, go?

But let’s assume an effective vaccine is rolled out for use in the United States. Doses for 300 million American will not all be available at once. Who will get them first? Who will get them second? Who will make those decisions? What will the criteria be?

The closest analogy I can think of is the mass polio vaccinations in the 1950s when schoolchildren, including me, stood in line to get a shot. My memory is very incomplete here, but I believe it was the forerunner of the March of Dimes who undertook the project, not the government, but I think there was a widespread consensus that children should be the first ones. The coronavirus will not be as simple.

I would hope that there will be a consensus that the first to be vaccinated will be those on the frontlines—healthcare professionals and first responders with a close second being essential workers like those in grocery and drug stores and delivery people. But beyond that what should be the priorities?

Perhaps epidemiologists should control the schedule aiming for the fastest way to achieve something like herd immunity. On the other hand, since people over 65 are most likely to die from Covid-19, perhaps this group should have priority. Someone like me (I am old) might expect to live ten years more if I don’t get the disease. Giving me the vaccine could be said to save ten life-years discounted by the likelihood that I would get the disease and recover without being vaccinated. Giving the vaccine to a forty-year-old could save 45 life-years discounted by those same factors. Looked at this way, it could be more beneficial to inoculate the younger person first, but who should, or will, make those decisions?

On yet another hand, economists might conclude that the country will benefit most by first vaccinating those who contribute most to the economy, but I am sure that economists (and others) will disagree how to calculate that.

It is not clear who will set the priorities. Nothing I have read in the Constitution gives the President the authority to set them. Perhaps the Constitution can be stretched to say that Congress can set them or delegate this power to the executive branch, but public health matters have traditionally been, and perhaps constitutionally are required to be, under the control of the states. If the states do make the decisions, we can expect to see different priorities in different places, just as lockdown orders and the labeling of essential businesses has not been uniform across the country.

Or, of course, we can adopt the conservative philosophy that market forces should set the priorities. Whoever can pay the most should get the vaccine first. Will this basic tenet of modern conservatism be re-thought?

It would be a waste to give the vaccine to those who do not need it, but we need to know whether those who have recovered from the disease have immunity to it, how strong the immunity is, and for how long, questions that have yet to answered. And then we would have to be able to test widely for the antibodies if they do give an effective immunity. So far, our present system has not performed well on giving widespread tests for the disease, which are necessary to control the present spread of Covid-19. Will our system be any better for antibody testing?

Whatever the priorities, some people lower on the priority rungs waiting for a vaccination after a vaccine is available will die before they are vaccinated. Although we will not call them this, whoever sets the priorities will constitute a death panel. It will be a frightening responsibility.

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Round and Round, or is it Oval and Oval? (concluded)

          The obituary last summer of Jerry Seltzer who popularized roller derby made me recall the days I watched roller derby and the time in winter of 1968 I went to a match. I was in law school in Chicago, and a friend and I decided to go to the roller derby at the Chicago Coliseum. This was fitting since it was at the Coliseum where roller derby began in 1935 (the year Joan Weston was born). Roller derby always had a derelict air to me, and it was fitting that we took a bus on a dreary, cold night through almost barren streets. I spied a pawnshop or payday lender. Foot high, golden letters on its front window proclaimed, “WE TRUST YOU!” The words were mostly obscured by a rusting, pulldown gate. Things had apparently changed since the sign had been painted.

          I only learned later about the Coliseum’s distinguished history. It had hosted five Republican National Conventions in the first part of the twentieth century. Six months after my roller derby attendance it also hosted a different kind of political gathering–an anti-Vietnam War rally in the days shortly before the 1968 Democratic National Convention. That memorable gathering was held at a different Chicago venue, the International Amphitheatre located, not unfittingly, adjacent to the Union Stock Yards.

I attended that 1968 anti-Vietnam War Coliseum rally. In those counterculture days, nothing seemed to have been planned for the event—anarchic might best describe it. I remember little of what occurred except that Allen Ginsberg sat cross-legged on the stage endlessly intoning “OM.” I quickly got bored and left. I went to the car I had purchased since my previous Coliseum visit and started to drive to my apartment. A police car followed me, and I was pulled over after a few blocks. Two smirking cops came over, and I rolled down a window. I had been driving carefully, and I knew that this was not a traffic stop. In this land of liberty, they had been staking out the gathering exercising free speech and assembly and started asking me about what was occurring at the rally. I gave some monosyllabic replies. As I wondered where this was heading, they asked what I did, and I answered that I was a law student. They shot nervous glances at each other and soon departed. I was as happy as I ever was for being in law school.

But my first visit, in 1968, to the Chicago Coliseum was not about war and peace, the future of the country, divisions in the land, or police spying on citizens; it was only about the battle that was roller derby. My friend and I had seats in the first row of the balcony. We could see all of the track and the spectators on the far side but not those directly underneath us. The crowd nearly filled the seats, folding chairs on the track level. Many in attendance knew all the names of the skaters and jeered many of them, forcefully shouting out shortcomings about their skills, courage, and looks. This was a different Chicago from my rather circumspect law school neighborhood. It was fun.

I cannot tell you the names of the teams or the skaters, but it was exciting watching them zoom around the oval with bodies and taunts flying. Fights broke out time and again, and the crowd was into it even though to this skeptical eye the fisticuffs looked staged. Late into the match a “bad guy” was on top of a “good guy” flailing away right underneath us. And then something unexpected happened. The skaters who were all over the track started rapidly converging towards the fight, but they were not looking at the combatants. They were fixed on the audience where a man came into our sight holding a folding chair with two hands above his head. He started to bring it down on the back of the villain, but, as I had seen many times on TV, the hero threw his opponent off him to reverse the fight. In that split second, the chair came down on the face and chest of the unprotected good guy with blood gushing from his nose and mouth. This no longer looked fake; the blood was real. The skaters, enemies a moment earlier, circled together like a wagon train shooting nervous glances into the audience to see if they needed protection from any other crazies. None appeared, and the chair swinger was manhandled off by security.

The action was delayed for only a few minutes as the injured skater with what appeared to be a broken nose was helped to the locker room and the blood was cleaned up. I don’t know who won, but I do remember that it was on the final jam.

A few years later, the Coliseum closed, and a few years after that, the sport, or whatever it was, died. However, shortly after this century began, roller derby was again revived. I have read that there are hundreds of leagues throughout the world. I have seen the present version advertised and have seen it on some obscure TV channel once or twice. It now seems to be solely a woman’s sport with the hint of pro wrestling and camp still remaining, most obviously in the colorful, pun-filled names of the athletes, but perhaps it is truly a legitimate sport now. There is no reason why it couldn’t be. It has athleticism and strategy. But I have not gone to a match. Perhaps, I thought, it is time for another visit to roller derby. I investigated and found that there is a league in New York City, the Gotham Girls, with teams representing the various boroughs. The league, which was on a winter hiatus, was scheduled to begin again in April. I made plans to go to the opening event, and then the pandemic hit. The new season’s opening day was cancelled, but I hope that roller derby has another resurrection. I would like to see the updated version.

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Round and Round, or is it Oval and Oval?

          Jerry Seltzer died last July. I did not know of him before his death, but his obituary brought back memories; he was instrumental in the roller derby I watched many times on television and once in person.

          Roller derby was invented by Jerry’s father, Leo Seltzer, in 1935 in Chicago. Originally it was an endurance activity, akin to walkathons and dance marathons, but this proved too boring, and Leo, with advice from the writer Damon Runyon created rules for a competitive, contact sport. Two teams of five roller skaters at a time circled a banked track. Skaters at the back of the pack had to get to the front and then lap the remaining skaters earning a point for every lapped skater on the opposing team. The other skaters elbowed and body-checked their opponents to help their teammates pass and score.

          Early television, short on programming, featured roller derby several times a week. This led to an overexposure and a declining interest, and the sport seemed all but dead when Jerry took over from his father. He taped the contests, and through innovative use of television syndication, built up interest in roller derby again. He used a shorter track, 100 feet, with more banking that allowed for better viewing. The new track could be put up and taken down quickly, and this allowed roller derby to make one-night stops in towns where the television ratings showed that it was popular.

          Jerry Seltzer’s efforts resurrected roller derby. Half a decade after he took it over from his father, he had it back in Madison Square Garden where it had last appeared more than a dozen years earlier. Its popularity surged with crowds of upwards of 19,000 and even more when he held it in baseball stadiums.

          Roller derby occupied the ground between spectacle and sport. It was fast with body-checking that sent skaters on their asses and over guard rails. Fights were common as were arguments with referees. Roller derby was more integrated than many other sports. There were all colors, but the unusual aspect of roller derby was that teams consisted of both men and women. Each team had ten skaters. Five men would race and elbow five men from the other team, and then five women would take the track against five women, and those women were just as physical as the men. I don’t know if they were paid equally, but the women were an equal part of the team, something that was not true in other sports. As a result, unlike many sporting events where few women attended, roller derby attracted both male and female spectators who cheered and booed the skaters of both sexes.

          For me, the biggest star was a woman, Joanie Weston. She was instantly identifiable. She always wore a scarf and had strawberry blonde hair. Weston was five feet ten and weighed 165 pounds, and every ounce of her radiated athleticism. Her skating was fast, and her powerful elbows and hips sent opponents flying. She was as well known as any woman athlete of her era, but the figure skating or tennis crowd who knew Peggy Fleming or Billie Jean King seldom crossed paths with the blue-collar folk who watched roller derby.

          Other than watching her prowess on the track, I did not think much about the rest of her life until I read her 1997 obituary after she died at 62 from Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease, a rare brain disorder. I learned she excelled in every sport she tried. As a college softball player, she batted .730 one season and hit eight home runs in a single game, but there were few sports then in which women could make a living. She ended up in roller derby, but I was pleased to learn that she loved it and made a good living.

          Years ago, I did not have to watch much roller derby on TV to doubt whether it was a real sport. There were good guys and bad guys with raucous interviews and taunts. No one ever seemed to get more than momentarily hurt in the frequent fights. And the contest was invariably decided in the last jam, as the scrum of skaters was called. The roots of roller derby may have been in endurance walking and dancing, but it had settled into a pro wrestling mold.

          But it was still fun to watch. The great writer Frank Deford was right when he wrote that not watching it “just because you knew the Bombers would prevail on the last jam was like not going to watch Dame Margot Fonteyn dance Aurora because you knew how ‘The Sleeping Beauty’ would turn out.” (The pro wrestler Ric Flair would bristle when someone would say that pro wrestling was fake. “It’s not fake,” he said. “It’s choreographed.” At least from my understanding of pro wrestling, Flair, who never seemed humble, was being modest in this instance. The opening segment of a wrestling match is scripted, but then the wrestlers have to improvise, and since Flair had many matches of a half hour and longer, this improv took great skill and stamina until the final moments of the bout came, which were choreographed.)

(concluded April 17)

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Snippets

          The headline said: “Scientists Don’t Know if Hydroxychloroquine is Useful—Or Even Safe—for Coronavirus Patients.” While accurate, it is incomplete. No one knows if that drug works on Covid-19 and if it is safe for that purpose. It says something not good about us, however, that a potential medical treatment is now a partisan touchstone. When a right-wing couple was told that a mutual acquaintance had been placed on a ventilator, she immediately asked if Charlie had been given hydroxychloroquine. I am sure that she hoped he would get better, but she was also hoping for vindication for Trump, Laura Ingraham, and other Fox News touters of the drug. Charlie had been given hydroxychloroquine, and she looked a bit devastated that it had not helped. But it is worse that liberal acquaintances seem to hope that the drug is not effective for coronavirus because that would make Trump look (even more) foolish.

          The debate over hydroxychloroquine again illustrates how poorly humans generally reason about cause and effect. I look out the window every night before going to bed, stand on one foot, and tap my nose three times. There are no polar bears in my bedroom. Should I conclude that my ritual keeps the beasts at bay? That some doctors have given hydroxychloroquine to coronavirus patients who have then improved is a reason to explore in a rigorous way whether the drug is effective (and safe.) It does not prove it when most patients get better with or without the drug.

          I am yet again reminded of the words of Ambrose Bierce in The Devil’s Dictionary: “EFFECT, n. The second of two phenomena which always occur together in the same order. The first, called a Cause, is said to generate the other—which is no more sensible than it would be for one who has never seen a dog except in pursuit of a rabbit to declare the rabbit the cause of the dog.”

          We all, however, should fervently hope that hydroxychloroquine is an effective treatment.

Wondering about how the present crisis will conclude, I think of the words of Marina Lewycka in Two Caravans: “When you write a story, you can decide how it ends.”

          “Life always comes to a bad end.” Marcel Aymé.

The Covid-19 epidemic has made people think about the many recent popular dystopian novels, movies, and TV shows. That gun sales have increased during the outbreak makes me think of them.

“You know, there’s a distinct lack of female arms dealers, I’ve always thought.” Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends.

In the midst of our present troubles, we should not forget that nature goes on and that it is spring:

 “The grass bends

          then learns again to stand.”

                              Tracy K. Smith, “Us and Co.”

“But when I take the blue-stemmed grass in hand,

And pull the grass apart, and speak the word

For every part, I do not understand

More than I understood of grass before.”

                                        Thomas Hornsby Ferril, “Blue-Stemmed Grass”

          “And I learn again, in my nerve endings, that information is never the same as knowledge.” Richard Powers, The Gold Bug Variations.

“If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant. If we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome.” Anne Bradstreet.

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Red Scare, Deep State (concluded)

          American believers in Soviet-led communism faced a wrenching crisis when Stalin made his pact with Hitler at the beginning of World War II. The American communists were now asked (told?) to abandon their firm anti-fascist faith overnight. Many could or would not do that and left the party. Others altered their faith with tortured rationalizations that took their own psychic toll. Such a crisis of faith should be inevitable when people are truly committed to ideas and principles and find that their leaders precipitately announce new principles or take actions radically at odds with the principles. My devout Catholic friends confronted this personal turmoil with the reports of widespread priest pedophilia and the coverups by the church hierarchy. They had a crisis of faith of what it meant to be a Catholic. They resolved those personal crises in different ways, but all those who truly had faith had a crisis.

          Many American conservatives, however, seem able to bend and break their ideas and principles at will without such any intellectual crises. Many on the right parrot what Trump preaches without hesitation even when Trump radically changes his message. There have been many examples, but we can see it happening with the present pandemic.

At first, Trump dismissed the importance of the coronavirus emergence; that it was like the flu, but not as serious; and he suggested that Democrats were overstating coronavirus concerns in order to undermine him. Now he says, “It’s not the flu. It’s vicious.” He tells us that there are “hard days that lie ahead.” He blatantly alters history and states that early on he knew that it was going to be a devastating pandemic.

Many of the Trump acolytes and apostles have simply followed his path without any apparent qualms. When Trump saw an “overblown” crisis devised somehow to get him, so did right-wingers. Now that Trump sees a crisis so do they, applauding him, as he does himself, for all the actions he has taken to mitigate the Covid-19 harm that a short while ago was downplayed. They tell us time and again how lucky we were that the president imposed a travel ban on China even though this travel ban was late in coming allowing more than 400,000 people from China to come to the US after the outbreak there. By the time of the travel ban, the coronavirus had already arrived in the United States and was spreading without any presidential action to hinder the disease’s onslaught. Even so, these events seem to have caused no re-evaluations by the Trumpistas of their devotion to the president. (Many other examples could be cited during this presidency. For example, I remember when free trade was a core, embedded conservative principle. I have seen little conservative agonizing with Trump’s radical transformation of that article of faith.)

          Reading about the Red Scare in A Good American Family: The Red Scare and My Family by David Maraniss reminds me of the present day in another way. At the core of the 1950s hysteria was the belief that communists were in positions of power in the government and media and were secretly operating to undermine this country’s democratic values and the American way of life. This was most famously illustrated by Joe McCarthy’s speech in which he said that he held in his very hand a list of communists in the State Department, but it was also evident in the debates over who “lost” China and in the congressional investigations of Hollywood and the newspapers, which ensnared Elliott Maraniss.

Today we have something similar: the Deep State. The Red Scare, however, was based on the notion of un-Americanness and the general subversion of America. The Deep State has much more of a specific focus—the president. Primarily, the cries of a functioning Deep State are explanations for times when Trump does not get what he wants or when facts, data, or opinions displease or criticize him or sometimes just fail to praise him. The Deep State claims are consistent with a cult of personality most often found in autocratic states, and the cult of personality helps explain why conservatives do not seem anguished when the president shifts courses, re-writes history, and breaks conservative tenets. Those conservatives are not committed to principles but to the man. The notion of a principled conservative may not be a complete oxymoron, but these days one is hard to find.

Posted on by rjonakait

Red Scare, Deep State

The history book group recently discussed A Good American Family: The Red Scare and My Family by David Maraniss. Maraniss, a Pulitzer Prize- winning journalist, has written excellent histories and political and sports biographies. A Good American Family is, however, more personal; it is about his mother, Mary, and father, Elliott, who had been American communists. (A member of the discussion group, whose relatives had also been American communists, had urged us to read the book.)

          Elliott Maraniss, raised on Coney Island, went to the University of Michigan in the late 1930s, where he met and later married Mary Cummins. Both were active communists. He enlisted in the army in World War II and as a captain headed a black salvage-and-repair company in the still-segregated army. He admired both FDR and Eisenhower and voted for Ike in 1952. After the war, the elder Maraniss became a newspaperman with a Detroit newspaper but apparently remained a communist and surreptitiously also wrote for a communist newspaper.

In 1952 Elliott was subpoenaed to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee and was fired. For years after his dismissal he bounced around from job to job, often losing the work after the FBI visited his employer. He eventually ended up in a secure position at the Madison Capital Times published by one of my heroes, William Evjue. (While growing up, my family received two daily papers—the local The Sheboygan Press and the more worldly The Milwaukee Journal. Evjue published a weekly expanded edition of his paper with more political news and opinions than on other days, and our family got that weekly edition. My memory is not completely clear here, but I believe that the Capital Times was the first newspaper to publish a letter of mine. When a young man, Evjue had worked for the Madison newspaper the Wisconsin State Journal, but he founded the Capital Times when the State Journal opposed Robert M. La Follette, Sr. and the Progressive Party during World War I. Evjue was chair of the Wisconsin Progressive Party in the 1930s.)

          Reading about Americans who were communists in the mid-twentieth century reminded me of Vivian Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism, which I read shortly after it was published in 1977. I admit my memories of it are less than complete, but from what I remember Gornick, too, had parents who were communists, and this set her off on a nationwide journey in the 1970s to interview other Americans who had been communists.

The interviewees expressed the excitement, allure, drudgery and sacrifices of being a party member. These were people who felt that they were part of something bigger than themselves. They were seeking a better world not just or even necessarily for themselves individually, but they sought a more just world for workers generally. I was struck that several of the interviewees said that they had not expected significant changes to come in their lifetimes but believed that their work would lead to them eventually after they were gone. They had a faith, and to me it often seemed akin to a religious belief.

          The American Marxist movement, broader than just the communist party, however, was schismatic. Socialists were Marxists but also anti-communists Even so, there were several socialist parties that differed with each other, and over time there was more than one American communist party. They battled each other over correct dogma, and these fights often seemed more important to them than the fights against their supposed common enemies—the capitalists and plutocrats. It reminded me of religious schisms—think Sunni and Shia, Roman and Orthodox Catholics, Catholics and Protestants, one Protestant denomination against another, each proclaiming the correct path to salvation and a better world.

          The communist party also confronted something like what religious people have had to. How does the believer handle learning that those in authority have violated what had been their accepted beliefs? In Christian churches this has often involved sex and money, but for American communists the major test first came at the beginning of World War II with the Hitler-Stalin pact. There were good reasons to be entranced by communism in the 1930s, including a struggle promoting workers’ rights to a fairer economic system and fights for civil rights in a United States that oppressed racial minorities. And it seemed admirable that communists stood firmly against German fascism.

  Overnight, however, with the pact between Germany and Russia, the communists were asked to abandon their fundamental tenet of anti-fascism. Gornick’s book makes clear the agony this produced for American communists. Many had their faith shattered, could not stomach the new directives from Moscow, and left the party. Others did mental gymnastics to accept the new direction, but for every American communist this was a gut-wrenching time. More disillusionment followed when the famous “secret” speech of Nikita Khruschev in1956 became public, openly acknowledging the purges, the anti-semitism, the needless starvation, and other abominations under Stalin’s dictatorship.

          Maraniss’s book is lacking here. His father, an editor on the University of Michigan newspaper, defended the Hitler-Stalin pact, a position that the son-author labels “indefensible.” About the father who later wrote soviet propaganda under an assumed name, the son says, “I can appreciate his motivations, but I am confounded by his reasoning and his choices.” The adult son clearly wondered about Elliot’s decisions, but nothing in the book indicates that the author ever asked his father and mother about these issues. I understand that topics are often avoided in families, but that they were left unspoken in the Maraniss family leaves a hole in the book.

Concluded April 10.

Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

          Are you like me and consider it ironic, to say the least, that President Trump offered to help North Korea with coronavirus problems when this country has massive shortages of personal protective equipment for healthcare workers and ventilators for patients? Do our intelligence sources say North Korea is doing worse than we are (and why would our governmental resources be spent on monitoring North Korea’s response to the pandemic?) or is this just another Trumpian hunch? Then after the president’s gracious offer (have graciousness and Trump ever truly been used together in the same sentence?), North Korea fired some more ballistic missiles, I guess as a way of thanks. Perhaps cities and states should send missiles over Mar-a-Lago to get more aid. Or perhaps cities and states should beseech North Korea for a helping hand.

          In this time of social distancing, a Swiss proverb seems apt: “Love your neighbor, but don’t pull down the hedge.”

          With the new health and social norms, are you, too, finding it hard to give up sex with strangers?

          “She kissed me, her mouth tasting of liverwurst on rye.” John Fante, Ask the Dust.

The Arizona governor issued a stay-at-home order, but he said that essential businesses could remain open. The essential businesses include golf courses and beauty and nail salons. Make of that what you will.

Perhaps without sports to participate in or watch, it may be a bit easier to ignore my age: “There are two things that are particularly good at reminding us how old we are: children and sports.” Fredrik Backman, Beartown.

“The secret of staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly, and lie about your age.” Lucille Ball.

The headline said: “Grand Canyon Closed.” Is there footage of this remarkable geologic event? Was anyone squeezed to death?

The news reports that some Americans see the pandemic as an end-of-times sign. They maintain that God is fed up with all the abortions (even though He never mentions it in His Bible) and all the homosexuality (even though lesbianism is not mentioned in those aforementioned scriptures and Jesus does not condemn same-sex relationships). I am surprised that the apocalypse would be provoked by these things now and not by all of history’s wars where humanity has found so many ways and reasons to kill each other. Even if you see abortion as killing, why is it so much worse than the impalings, stabbings, garrotings, hangings, bombings, beheadings, and gassings that God’s creatures have carried out since the time the world was saved through Jesus? Why don’t people who see the pandemic as an indication of God’s wrath ever conclude that God looks down and sees who humanity has chosen as leaders and has gotten disgusted?

“If man had created man, he would be ashamed of his performance.” Mark Twain.