Life vs. Profit

Peter Rumble, Chief Executive of the Santa Rosa Chamber of Commerce, has published a possible framework for opening businesses now that we are deep into the coronavirus pandemic. His plan makes sense. It mandates extensive testing and so forth.

Working people need to make a living. That is a national problem.

Meanwhile there seems to be a struggle starting between some Democratic county supervisors (Shirlee Zane and David Rabbitt) vs. the county health officer, Dr. Sundari Mase. 

Dr. Mase moved the country into social isolation very early; as a consequence Sonoma has had only two coronavirus deaths, which is remarkable. But Zane considers the orders put out by Mase to be "arbitrary," causing "economic hardship." 

"Arbitrary," of course, is exactly the wrong word. Relying on science, Dr. Mase has saved many lives at the expense of profits and wages. Her position is well reasoned. It is probably not based on ignorance, impatience or pressure from political funders.   

Pocket Care

Susan and I have been cleaning doorknobs, washing our fingers with soap and so on, but until recently we've overlooked the dangers found in pockets.

It's self-evident that if your hands get contaminated and you reach into your pockets, the pockets are likely to become hellholes of viruses.  

Before cleaning a pocket you should wash your hands for 30 seconds, then pull on a small pair of latex gloves. Next, to keep those gloves sterile, pull on a second pair of latex gloves. Reach deeply into your pocket with one gloved hand and pinch the bottom seam between your finger and thumb. Retract your hand. Now the pocket should be inside out.

Remove and discard the contaminated pair of outer gloves and grasp the inside-out pocket with a pair of metal tongs. Wielding the tongs, carefully lower the pocket into a pot of boiling Lysol for a few seconds. It doesn’t take long. 

Finish by hanging the pocket out to dry, discarding the contaminated tongs and the inner latex gloves and again washing your hands and putting on new gloves. You're good to go.

Personal Conscience

Voting for President involves personal conscience, of course, which became a problem for me in 1968.  The Republicans nominated Richard Nixon, a paranoid gutter-rat. After the murder of Robert Kennedy, a growing figure on the left,  the corporate wing of the Democrats nominated Hubert Humphrey, a public supporter of the Vietnam War. 

During the Democratic convention, the Chicago police rioted on television, beating anti-war protesters, mostly students, while some key Democrats applauded. Humphrey, an iconic liberal, came to represent many of the things wrong with his party.  

In November some progressives voted for Nixon because he seemed to them more apt to bring our troops home. They were attempting to be practical. I could not vote for Nixon. 

I'm not saying that Humphrey was as bad a man as Nixon. Humphrey was obviously the lesser of two evils. But I could not in good conscience vote for an advocate of a pointless war.

Polls showed that under JFK public trust in government reached 80%.  Since then our major parties have frequently misled the voters. Trust in Washington has stabilized at about 20%. 

Art vs .Life

In 1970 Jerzy Kosinksi’s BEING THERE, a comic novel, sold well. Nine years later it became a movie starring Peter Sellers, Shirley MacClaine and Melvin Douglas, who won an Academy Award.

The story goes like this. A simple minded man called Chance the Gardiner, who gets most of his knowledge from mindlessly watching television, accidentally falls in with the elite. They take his dim-witted comments as metaphors, and by the end of the story Chance is about to become President.

The parallel with Donald tRump, another simple minded man, is evident (except that Chance is inherently nice). tRump knows next to nothing. He watches TV all day and then repeats, within hours, the banalities he hears there. Many Anericans take tRump’s babbling for wisdom.

:“Liberate Michigan” is a slogan tRump heard on Fox News and repeated two hours later. 

Life has imitated art.

The Herd

My plan is to stay home until a lot of fools create herd immunity the hard way--but I have to factor in people who have little choice but to go to work.

The Odds

On occasion you might hear an ahistorical talking head on television say that America has never been more divided. That, of course, is false. Historians understand that this country's usual state is badly divided. We once fought a Civil War in which hundreds of thousands of people killed one another. 

It's like the answer to the question, "What has been the most powerful anti-union force in our history?" (The Confederate army)

But we do seem to be living in a failed nation.

Today a major division is between people who want to remain in quarantine (because of the coronavirus) and those who want to ignore a pandemic and return to normal living. A few elected officials have argued that it is better to let people die than to close businesses temporarily.

I don't believe that most people calling on us to ignore the pandemic are suicidal. Some are remarkably stupid. They don't grasp how plagues work. Most, though, suffer from a problem we all share, which is an inability to rank dangers in a realistic way. For example, which is more dangerous, tRump or global warming?  

What to Watch

If you get Netflix there are two not-new series you can watch that are excellent. Unorthodox is a fascinating story in four parts about a young wife in the Hassidic community in Williamsburg who rebels and flees to Berlin. Fallet is an offbeat black comedy series about two flawed detectives out to solve a murder. 

genome

Driven by global warming, as their environments shift beneath them, wild animals keep advancing.  Many carry corona viruses, which can evolve into something unorthodox in a week.

If you don't believe in evolution, you should be safe. . . .

I suspect, as the planet warms, we will see many pandemics, each genome different from the last. People in provinces where medicines and food are limited will suffer most; the rich will catch diseases from their servants and die.

The President's Morning

At four the President rolls out of bed and walks barefooted into his bathroom where he urinates into a gold toilet, plus some onto the floor. Then, donning an old pink Chinese silk robe from Michael Cohen, the President sits down at a desk and signs his daily authorizations allowing the Sun to rise in the east and roosters to crow. After three double whoppers and  German chocolate cake for breakfast, he sends out two dozen twitters mocking children with cancer etc.  

By eight the President has dressed formally, and a sex worker has set his hair in place. The Leader of Western Civilization orders his bodyman to turn on the television and play the day-old, digitally recorded Fox opinion shows. More twitters, including one that states that the army will soon become a wing of the coast guard. He writes that he is changing the name of the coast guard to "The Swabby Corps," because, he explains, a lot of people call them that. Back on the 'net he asks congress to fund the building of the Erie Canal. 

Before lunch. he goes for a fart walk in the rose garden. That's when he notices a wart on his nose. To cure it, he orders the head gardener to plant two chicken heads at the foot of a red crepe myrtle. 

Quarantine

"Did you wash your hands?"

"Yes."

"No, you didn't. You came in and just sat down."

"I washed my hands. God damn it!"

"Okay then."

Virus v. Flu

We've heard that the flu will probably kill as many people as the coronavirus. Yet middle-class people don't fear the flu, and the virus frightens them. Why?

It depends on which class is in danger. Middle-class and rich people with health care get flu shots. If they catch the flu, their doctors know how to treat it. Poor people without health care, on the other hand, die from the flu. And poor people, in this culture, don't matter much.  If they did, we'd  have universal health care.

But the rich and famous can get the new virus. There is no protective shot, and scientists are still trying to develop an effective treatment. The poor without health care are dying in much greater numbers than the rich, but the rich and middle-class are in some danger. That changes everything.

Shuttering

I like to keep my English current, so I've been tracking the usages of the popular verb of today, "to shutter." Mostly it is used in place of "shut down." As in "The bison in Yellowstone have been shuttered since early March." 

Most of the talking heads on TV manage to work "shutter" in at some point, but this morning a news reader on CNN asked, "When do we start reshuttering the economy?"  

God only reknows.  

Nominees

I know this is absurd, but what if the two major parties each nominate a rapist for President. How will you vote? My guess is that you will vote for the lesser rapist, on the principle that you should not let perfection be the enemy of white male privilege.

AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE

Last night Susan and I watched an old Steve McQueen movie, AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE, based on a play by Ibsen, with help from Arther Miller and others.  

See if you can find it on cable. The story is a parable for our times.

A doctor in a small town in Norway discovers that the water in their spa has been poisoned by a tannery. The spa and the tannery are the main employers in the town, so the mayor orchestrates an attack on the doctor and his family. It's not that the majority don't believe the doctor. They do. But his message is inconvenient. Almost everyone turns against him, including the liberals. 

This morning Senator Sanders withdrew from the Presidential race. His candidacy was going nowhere, not because he wasn't believed but because the truth is so damned inconvenient. The majority of Democrats had turned Sanders into AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE. (How did Ibsen know about this more than a hundred years ago? We are the same now as we were then.)

Mary's Pizza

Today we decided to get food from outside. It's been a while. Susan ordered from Mary's Pizza, and we drove over to pick it up.

There were three or four servers bringing the food out to the cars. None of them wore any sort of facial covering or mask against the virus. 

Live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse.

Multifunctional Headwear

You  are probably aware of multifunctional headwear, tubes that you can pull on to warm your neck--or pull up to cover your face  or head. Maybe the best known maker is Buff, but there are others on the 'net. 

They make comfortable face masks.

Left to Die

I was looking at a map that showed which states adopted shelter-in-place early and which did not. As of today, April 2,  eleven governors have not issued stay-at-home orders, our main defense against the pandemic.

As you know, the White House dithered for months and lost months of preparation and still has not stepped up. There's a penalty when you elect scum to lead western civilization.

It's not hard to identify the states with useless governors. They are too stupid, too uncaring or too ideologically bent to avoid the unnecessary deaths that are going to pile up in places like Florida. 

Some of my ancestors began life in a border state. But in the 1870s they decided they "wanted to live" (according to one of my great-grandfathers, related to the Hatfields). The family headed west with a herd of horses and a covered wagon.

Since then huge numbers of people have decided to go someplace better. It's too late to move during the current pandemic. But when things settle down, intelligent people might consider getting out of a place where the voters elect leaders who will leave you to die.

Shuttered

"Madison Square Garden will be shuttered for two months."

You've probably noticed that we no longer shut down things; we shutter them.

I'm thinking maybe there is a city where the owners of stores etc. have actual shutters (maybe metal shutters) that they pull out and lock down when going to lunch. This new verb, "to shutter," had to start someplace.

Can we expect more new terms like "to stopper"? As in "The boy stoppered laughing"? 








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