Posted on by rjonakait

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.

Posted on by rjonakait

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.

Posted on by rjonakait

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)

Posted on by rjonakait

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.

Posted on by rjonakait

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.

Posted on by rjonakait

Another Haircut (concluded)

          Four months after I got my haircut by the man from Uzbekistan, I went for a haircut in a newly opened place a few blocks from my house, an offshoot of a barbershop a mile away where I had previously gone. I was immediately disappointed when I walked in. I saw the prices. The new shop charged more than the old one–$27 compared to $20. This was slightly above my borderline for what I am willing to pay, but I was already inside, and there was no waiting time, so I went ahead. (pun?)

          The haircutter was a handsome, young man born in Albania. His family seemed to have had some money. His grandfather had owned an Albanian textile factory but lost it in “the war.” The war. I did not know what he was talking about. My mind went searching, coming up empty, but somehow, I learned as he talked that he meant an Albanian war with Serbia in the 1990s. The way he talked, it sounded as if Albania was still recovering from those events, but without much specificity he also talked about the corruption of Albania, which he conceded held it back. His family still lived there, but he did not seem particularly attached to Albania and had no intention of returning  except for a visit. He was much more committed to bringing his brother over to the States.

          He had learned his quite good English from watching movies. He was fascinated with Hollywood and wanted to get to California. It was not clear if he was dreaming of some role in the movie industry or whether he just wanted the beaches, the sun, the hills, and the canyons. I am not sure that he had thought much beyond getting to Melrose Place or Santa Monica Boulevard.

          He lived in the Bronx. This surprised me because it is a goodly distance from the shop, but he told me that he lived in a neighborhood where most of the Albanians in New York live, a place that was formerly solidly Italian. And, thus, I learned a bit more about New York, an inexhaustible topic.

          Five months later I got the hair cut again. Old joke. A baseball manager, whose team is not doing well, takes a chair in the barbershop. The barber asks, “How would you like it cut?” The manager replies, “In silence. Total silence.” And that was my feeling when I last got my hair cut at that place a mile from my house. I was not in the mood for talking. I used the time to close my eyes, count my breaths, and meditate. A barber chair is a surprisingly good seat for that.

          Soon, however, my hair will even offend me again enough to do something about it, but, of course, this is a time of “social distancing.” And although I worry about these small businesses and all the workers who probably work from paycheck to paycheck and from tip to tip, I won’t be going to a barbershop. Instead, I will ask the spouse to give me a trim. She is quite good at it. (I admit a conflict here. She edits this blog, and I am grateful. She makes it better and helps cut down the too many mistakes I would otherwise make. So, she will read this. But that is not the reason that I praise her haircutting ability. I swear and affirm that she really and truly does a good, excellent, amazing job trimming my hair.) She, however, is not, like those other haircutters, a first generation American to learn from. On the other hand, her roots (pun?) are from Alabama. That’s alien enough to me so that she might have some amusing, informative stories as she snips.

Posted on by rjonakait · 2 Comments

Another Haircut

Another Haircut

          I could use a haircut. This is generally true for me. I don’t go to a haircutter often. Among the reasons for this reluctance may be my boyhood when I was made to get a crew cut or, even worse, a flattop and go to the barber every two weeks whether I needed to or not. Then, when a bit older, it was the time of rebellious, shaggy hair, and a haircut was an act of bourgeois conformity. Soon hair stylists started to replace lowly barbers with costs that my frugal lifestyle and income could not afford. Finally, my hair started thinning (a kind way to put it), and I knew no matter what was done to it, at best my hair could look kempt but not particularly attractive. That my seldom-cut hair would not have been acceptable to those who admired or wore a Brooks Brothers suit, which I never have, did not bother me.

          My standard has been to get a haircut when the hair sticks out above my ears and on top of my head (I don’t see the back of my head, so why would I care what it looks like?) so much that it has been bothering me for weeks. This usually is a period of at least four or six months from my last tonsorial visit. But even then, it takes me still a while longer after I have determined it is time to get it cut to do so because I do not have a regular haircutting place. Instead, in my travels around the city I look for an establishment where the service is inexpensive. It amazes me how much the price of a haircut varies, at least for my hair. It can be two or three times as expensive in one place compared to another, and my eye can’t tell the difference in the result. So, I look for cheap. If the price listed in the window is right, I then look to see that I will not have to wait for more than a minute or two before I can get into a chair. Even though I am almost always carrying a book to read, I hate waiting to get my hair cut. These demands and routines mean that I have gotten my hair cut in many different places in Brooklyn and Manhattan, and I have gotten it cut more than several times in only a few establishments.

          Although I do it infrequently, I enjoy getting my hair cut. I enjoy the sound of the scissors and electric razor. I love hot lather on the neck. I like being brushed off and the apron swung to the side. I even like getting into the chair. And I often find the person clipping away to be interesting.

          Most often the haircutter is a first generation American. When I first came to New York, the cliché was the Italian-American barber who came from some small village in Abruzzi or Apulia. Now it is different. I recently had my hair cut by a Palestinian who told me how hard it was for him to go home, flying to Tel Aviv and then having to cross over into Jordan. To my surprise, he indicated that it was easier for him to deal with the Israelis than the Jordanians on his trips home. Most often, however, the person cutting my hair these days was born in a communist country. This has been true even when I get my hair cut in the country during the summer. There the barbers have been Polish-American, and from one I learned the strengths and weaknesses of the Polish delis within a half hour drive of the Poconos house. She even told me of her favorite place to get Polish food. It was unlicensed and in someone’s house. It seemed to require an introduction and several passwords. I would like to report how good it was, but I was too chicken to try it.

          Some of my recent haircutters in New York City have come from former parts of the Soviet Union. That was true thirteen months ago. I was in the Gramercy Park neighborhood of Manhattan. The shop’s sign said a haircut cost $20, my kind of price. A barber was sitting in one of the three chairs reading a newspaper. My kind of wait—none–and soon I was seated and covered, and he was snipping.

          He told me that he owned the shop and that later in the day his son would also be there. He said that he grew up in Russia. I asked what part and he said Uzbekistan, which he said was now independent. I did not ask him, but I wondered, why he said that his birthplace was Russia instead of the Soviet Union since Uzbekistan is not Russia. Maybe it was because Americans are easily confused about this part of the world, and he hoped to simplify.

          He had come to the United States in 1997 and had been in his shop for nearly as long. He said that he had heard that the area had once been dangerous, “a lot of drug dealers.” He credited Rudy Giuliani’s mayoralty for making the neighborhood safe.

          He lived in Kew Gardens, Queens, about which I know little. I did not know if this is where a lot of Uzbeks lived, but I knew there were several Uzbek restaurants near Coney Island and Brighton Beach in Brooklyn. He told me they were all good, but, if I understood him—his accent was thick–they all served the same food, and it did not matter which restaurant I went to.

          Although he had grown up speaking three languages, he had no English when he came to America. He immigrated with two children, aged nine and five, and his wife, who did speak English. She is now a paralegal in the Queens Family Court. I could see his pride when he said that she was labeled the best Family Court paralegal, “not just in Queens, but in all five boroughs.”

          As I paid and was about to leave, he told me for no apparent reason that he was Jewish. I asked why he had not gone to Israel. He said that it was “too hard.” He had relatives in both Israel and the US, and when he had the chance to come to New York, he did. I don’t know if he was referring to all of Uzbekistan or just his region, but he said that it was 95% Muslim now, but that it used to be only 70%. I asked about a Christian population. I did not understand his answer.

          When he began the haircut, he had asked me if I had seen the State of the Union address, which had been the night before. He apparently had watched it and was confused why so many women were wearing white. I tried to explain that it was the hundred-year anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment and about the suffragettes and their white clothing, but I am not sure that he understood. He may have had no history of his own that related to those events. Other than that, I avoided the State of the Union address and other political topics. Perhaps if the subject had arisen after we had talked for a while, I might not have tried to steer the conversation elsewhere. It might have been interesting to hear what a Jewish person from Uzbekistan who ran a small business and had immigrated here twenty years ago thought of our president and other politicians.

          As I was almost exiting the door, he told me his name was Mark and asked for mine, which I gave him.

          Twenty dollars for a haircut. And an education. Plus, a generous tip. (No haircutter makes much money from me, so I think I should overtip.) Not bad.

(concluded April 3)

Posted on by rjonakait · 2 Comments

Snippets

          Before this March, when was the last time you put “social” and “distance” in the same sentence? Social distancing seems to be an oxymoron, but perhaps there is no better term. Keep a respectful separation from others, but “a respectful separation” sounds like a divorcing couple trying to convince friends and relatives that everything is amicable. If there is social distancing, is there a remote intimacy? That sounds like many relationships in their tenth year.

          Do you think Melania has barked, “Social distance! Social distance!” so often, she now just utters, “SD! SD!”?

          Are there controlled scientific studies that support six feet as the proper social distance? I have not seen them cited. If good science backs up that amount of separation, I think the study would have been in the metric system. What is the proper social distance in Europe?

          Does anyone do a drinking game where a shot must be downed every time Vice President Pence mentions Trump in one of those briefings? Participants would be drunk within thirty seconds. After two minutes, they would have to be taken to an ICU that would not have open beds and need a ventilator that might be found by bidding on ebay.

          Only “essential” businesses are open in New York. Liquor stores are classified as essential. Only essential businesses are open in Monroe County, Pennsylvania. Liquor stores are not labeled essential there. Make of that what you will.

          I had the horrifying dream that during a coronavirus briefing, I lost a pound every time the president referred to himself. I saw myself shed weight and quickly I was at a desired poundage, but I sped past that into appearing anorexic. In a few minutes, I was a skeleton. I woke up in a cold sweat.

          Is Greenland free of the coronavirus? If so, maybe Trump should have bought the island after all.

          While COVID-19 has clusters, it is a national problem. However, the Trump administration has only lackadaisically tried to increase the production and distribution of personal protective equipment for healthcare workers and ventilators for those who get seriously sick. As a result, life-and-death choices will have to be made as to who gets protected and treated. Where is Sarah Palin and all those who were entranced by her as she ranted delusionally about Obamacare death panels? Now we have planning for the life-and death decisions. And they should be called TPDs—Trump Death Panels.

          “He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow.” George Eliot [Mary Ann Evans].