Open 'er Up! (Back to Business Edition)

Disclaimer: I'm about to call some people stupid. Or appear to call some people stupid. Or just suggest that some people are doing stupid things. I don't like to do any of these things. In the first place, it's not polite. Besides, I know that I do stupid shit all the time, so who am I to judge? Nobody, that's who. Why bother, then? I'll tell why. Because the stupid is really out of the box in America right now, and we should all be thinking of ways to get it back under lock and key.

People all over the country are taking to the streets to demand an end to all of these COVID-19 “stay at home” orders. They think it's bullshit! There was a real hubbub in Michigan, where an impressive number of cars showed up to drive around the state house, horns a'honkin and lights a'flashin, displaying signs and yelling at the governor to open up all of the restaurants, and factories, and every damn thing! There were also a lot of people standing around with signs and hard-ass looks on their faces. There was even a big group of them wearing camo and carrying big guns! No masks, either, they ain't wearing no damn masks. They were yelling, “lock her up!” about the governor, who is, indeed, a woman, and a Democratic woman at that. The entire world is in dire straights, and these people seem to wish that it was all much, much worse.

Why, pray tell, would anyone act this way? Is it because Donald Trump says that we need the country to get back to work, and he ain't wearing no damn mask either? Could be. Is it because those know-it-all doctors are starting to piss people off? Could be that, too. Is it because they need to go back to work so that they can pay their bills, buy food, and look for some affordable health care? Yeah, I think that's a bingo.

The same thing was happening in Frankfort, Kentucky; Raleigh, North Carolina; and Columbus, Ohio. So far that's a list of the usual suspects, Red states that love the Donald, and hate a long list of things that includes libtards, science, and the devil. There are a lot more of these rallies planned. Texas has one on calendar, but also many for places that I wouldn't immediately expect. California (!) for instance, and Oregon. Those west-coasters generally embrace science, did not vote for Trump, and are blessed with rational governments. But it appears that the stupid is well out of control now, and spreading faster than the Novel Coronavirus.

What are we really looking at? Who is behind this angry mob? Die-hard Trump fans? Certainly. Come hell or high water, those people will never admit that they were wrong. It's Trump-right-or-wrong to them. To paraphrase an old Russian proverb, “let him be the worst president in history, and dumb as a bag of hammers, but let him be our president.” (Original: “let it be worse; let it be ours.”) When Trump says “jump,” they don't ask how high. They just become airborne.

Also definitely libertarians, the Ayn Rand crowd. It's all about the FREEDOM, damn it! They're taking away our freedom! That's why the Tea Party is resurfacing, or at least people are waving their “Don't Tread on Me” flags. That's also why some of the gun club up in Michigan were waving Confederate flags. Somehow, I don't think that this is what those founders long ago were thinking when some of them said, “live free or die.”

Idaho, of course, is chiming in. The Idaho Freedom Foundation, in connection with other organizations, is planning a similar rally in Boise. They should get a big turnout up in the white homeland. That's a freedom crowd up there, a “freedom to discriminate and shoot up stop signs” crowd.

Infowars, unsurprisingly, has an opinion on the subject. They think that the virus is a plot hatched by the Chinese communists in league with the Deep State to destroy the American way of life and Donald Trump's career in politics. Inforwars is a bottomless font of stupid.

There's more stupid around right now than you could shake a stick at. The truth is probably that our less educated and more easily led brethren are reacting in stupid ways to a very real set of problems. American health care is no longer set up to help anyone; it's not even about the medical sciences anymore. It's a business; it's all about the money. You can die when we tell you to! That'll be when you're insurance runs dry. You lost your job? No more insurance for you! In the hospital on a ventilator? You have great insurance? They managed to save your life? Sorry, but there's a lot of stuff on your bill that was “out of your plan.” Your co-pay is $135,000. And by the way, American health care isn't in any hurry to develop and field adequate tests in sufficient numbers. Have you noticed? We're still waiting for that first, basic step to be taken. There's a reason for that, but it's too depressing to mention.

The American government is no more interested in people's well being than geese are interested in Jackson Pollack paintings. They're all the way on the money side now. They're going to skim billions from the stimuli and use the confusion to accrue more power to themselves.

Where can people turn to get a break? How about the churches? I'm sorry that I even brought it up. They're part of the problem. Churches are responsible for a considerable portion of our Corona virus cases, and deaths. “You can't tell us to close! God will protect us!” No one, to my knowledge, has been cured in a mega-church service, but a lot of people have been infected at one. Even one of the big-mouth “ I'm not closing my church!” pastors caught the bug himself and died. A fatal dose of either stupidity or greed.

It's no wonder that the American “your on your own” approach to government has driven Americans with few resources to distraction. All of those people are protesting against sensible medical approaches to this world-wide, deadly pandemic, approaches that are designed by experts to help them and their families live through the event, and I don't think that they could all be that stupid. Not actually stupid, although their actions and protests are stupid. They're just acting out, and they're taking advice from a bunch of idiots, from Trump, Fox News, Breitbart, Infowars, Rush Limbo, the whole crooked bunch of them. Those aforementioned devils in expensive suits are making the needy of America look stupid. You heard me. Hey! You people at those “open up the economy” demonstrations! Use your own heads! Stop acting stupid just because somebody who does not have your best interests at heart told you to do stupid shit!

As so often happens, the thread of this trouble making goes back to Reagan. Devil number one! He and his minions got the ball rolling on this anti-government hysteria. “Government is the problem!” “Government never helped anybody!” That started out as a trick to get rid of entrenched Democrats in Congress, “Vote against Washington!” was code for “vote in some new Republicans.” It worked too well. It was out of control, but still being pushed as the Republican agenda, by Newt Gingrich in his time in the House of Representatives. Do you remember? We had started to see many Hollywood movies in which the bad guy was the government, either a government agent or the whole government itself. We still see this in many movies. Now “government is the problem” has the status of a religion. “Drain the swamp!” It's the same now as it has always been: a trick to separate the Rubes from their money and their political rights.

If you or your baby get the Covid-19 and die, my heart goes out to you. If you get sick and live, or have only lost your job and/or your house, I'm sorry about that too. Be careful, however, where you place the blame. We, all of us, have allowed this situation to come into existence over the last forty years. It's our own damn fault that no one cares if we live or die. We were all too stupid to avoid it.

They Were Our Friends

Some of my old friends, very few, remember every single person that they ever knew. They remember all of their classmates, all of their neighborhood friends, everyone's parents, and all of our teachers. If one of our old friends on Facebook asks a question about anyone in town, they answer it in detail. It's amazing.

Not only do they remember everyone, but they kept in touch with a seemingly impossible number of people from our town, or in some cases, from their high schools. When I mentioned a certain Sister J., one of these social geniuses informed me that, “she just died last year. I had been visiting her at the Dominican's residence in Amityville. She was a wonderful woman.” My teacher in the second grade was Sister J., and she was indeed a wonderful young woman, only fifteen or barely twenty years older than her students, and so stunningly beautiful that she had become my first childhood crush. It never occurred to me, however, to keep in touch with her for our entire lives. But like I say, some people are social geniuses. God bless them. They are a useful font of information, and often they also remember us more clearly than others do. Fondly, it is to be hoped. In my case, they remember things that I had forgotten.

Memory Note: My wife has a great memory. Names of people, hotels, all kinds of stuff. She remembers our room number on hotel visits years ago. I tend to forget things that are outside of the range of my major interests. She told me once, “don't worry, you're just getting old.” I answered, “oh, Honey, my memory was never that good.”

I'm not in that group that can remember so many people and details. I could, and did, lose track of friends without half trying. I'm sure that this made me an inadequate friend back then. I began young to live my life on a daily basis, dreading every day waking up in the morning, and moving between anxiety and dread all day. Having awoken, my goal became to make it through the day without starting to scream and not being able to stop. God knows that my miserable parents were disappointed in me enough already, without getting a phone call from the hospital telling them that I had been admitted and sedated, and what would you like us to do with him? I'm sorry to say that this is still my modus operandi. Living like this has caused me to frequently forget about people who had been important to me only one month previously. Mea maxima culpa. I wish that it could have been different.

It's part of being this age, I believe, that makes us think about our remote pasts and wonder what ever became of the friends that we had then. In the rush of life we all became somewhat preoccupied with making a living, paying the bills, and maybe raising children and maintaining a marriage. Now many of us wonder, what happened to so-and-so? Something may draw our attention to a boy that was in our company at boot camp, an individual that we may not have had a single thought about in fifty years. We forget details of daily life easily, but suddenly we remember his name and wonder, how did he do out in the fleet, and thereafter?

Facebook has an interesting role to play in all of this. Facebook allows some of those childhood friends to become our friends again in the present. I am grateful to have reconnected with many friends from long ago on Facebook, and also many people of about my age whom I did not know back then. Friends of friends. That last bit is interesting. Some of my new Facebook friends I remember from the old neighborhood, but I had never interacted with them. Only seen them around and knew their names. Several remember me for some reason. Facebook is, however, a mixed blessing. In this pre-fascist/ near death of democracy period of American history, some of those old friends have turned into paranoid, political monsters. It's a terrible thing to witness. Quite a few of the wonderful, sensible teenagers of long ago, kids that I knew well, are now dyed in the wool Trump repeatocons. If he said it this week, they'll repeat it next week. It's depressing to watch American democracy die this way, allowed to die by people who really should have known better. That's how it happens, though. People believe the lies, and then the lies take form and the terror starts, and then it's too late and everybody shuts up. Unless it's time to shout, “I love Big Brother!” But I loved my friends then, and I love them now, Trump or no Trump. They are entitled to their opinions, and within the bounds of the law they are also entitled to their biases and their prejudices. Que sera, sera.

It is likely that the virus, and the accompanying cycle of worry and terror, add to the urgency of our search through the files of our pasts. Some days I can hardly stand the knowledge that many of my memories are unique to me, and that they will pass from the earth along with me when my time comes. That's a silly thing to worry about, but unfortunately pride is one of my shortcomings.

My memories of the dead are tender, at least for those who were good to me, but I have no beautiful words for them. Death, for me, means only that their file is marked, “deceased” and moved to the basement for long term storage. I love them still, and I remember them well, but that won't last much longer. They live in my heart, but that's just a sand castle that the next tide will wash away.

For those in the “what ever happened to . . .” category, I cannot address them all individually. These are the names from the past for whom the trail ended suddenly. There have been several that I tried to contact over the years, by letter when that was our only recourse, and by e-mail or Facebook later on. I had only negative reinforcement in those efforts, with one notable exception (thanks, Michael!). I may be more sentimental than most. For the bad boys whose names come to mind, the answer may be that they are either dead or in prison, although they may have successfully made the leap to organized crime, where, come to think of it, “dead or in prison” remain likely outcomes.

Many of my missing childhood friends probably just moved away without fanfare, as is usually the case. There were also a large number of children, mostly boys, who after a certain age were rarely seen outside of their homes unless it was in travel to or from school. My town was tough, very tough, and taking a beating or some very rough teasing was always a possibility. We either had to learn to deal with it or stay inside. I was more afraid of my mother than I was of the tough boys, so “out” was always my first choice. It's not as though the tough boys ever killed anybody, and they reserved their worst beatings for each other. A couple of the bad boys are now Facebook friends of mine, although when they discover my politics it renews their old urge to bounce me off of a wall.

There have been several friends who gave up on me and cut me off. Compassion fatigue, you know, people just get sick of the negativity that comes along with depression. It is also likely that I have habits which some people might find annoying. To those few who had been great friends to me for decades before giving up, just know that I love you and I understand. Thanks for everything; no hard feelings.

To all of my friends, known and unknown, I hope that your paths have not been too difficult. I believe that that is all we can politely ask of fate, or God, if you will. It's the only prayer that I pray. “Thank you, (fill in the blank), for never letting the worst happen.”

Our Plague Year

Daniel Defoe wrote a book called, “Journal of the Plague Year,” concerning an outbreak of the plague that made life more interesting than usual in London long ago. We're having our own plague year right now, pretty much all over the place. No doubt there are many bloggers succumbing to the temptation to write their little “Blogs of the Plague Year,” as heartfelt contributions to world literature. I will not be joining them. As fascinating as our plague is, I am not convinced that there is any entertainment value in it.

Our plague is in embryonic form at the moment. It exists, it has life, we are beginning to see the outlines of it. At the present time, though, it is like a human embryo. Lots of potential, but very little accomplishment to show for itself. It has our attention, that much is certainly true, and it has seized our fears and our imaginations, but we have no way of knowing which way the thing will turn. It could fizzle out before November's election, or it could rampage through the world for the next two or three years, killing a couple of hundred million people. Somewhere in the middle would be bad enough, and that's where we're probably going with it.

I don't like this Novel Coronavirus one bit, this so-called COVID-19. No sir, not one bit. It is unsportsmanlike. Many people do have it, but you'd never know it. You could observe them for an hour; you could take their temperature (normal) and look in their throats (clear, good color). No matter. You don't know Jack about whether they have the virus or not. You must run a specific test, or series of tests, to discover if a certain person is infected. Right now there is a disastrous shortage of these tests in America, so they're not going to waste one on someone who is asymptomatic. Especially someone unimportant. Unimportant people are getting short shrift in America these days. That person will go about their business, perhaps being waylaid occasionally by someone taking their temperature before they enter a mall. Temperature normal! Welcome to the Monkey Mall! This person is spreading the virus to others. Maybe it's an attractive woman, they are welcome everywhere and people love to engage them in conversation. These agents of the disease are wandering around right now, getting other people sick. It'll go through an incubation period of a couple of weeks and then we'll see who is lucky and who is not, when it comes to symptomology. Some of the newly infected will go blithely forth without symptoms to do the secret work of the virus, while others will be laid low. Quite a few will be laid “six-feet-under” low. It's just damn sneaky is what it is. It's not fair! No, I don't like it one bit.

I find myself in an extremely high risk group, and in a country that is not taking the threat seriously. My host culture has a lot in common with Italy. The people, like the Italians, are friendly and hospitable, and they are mostly interested in hanging out with their friends, eating in restaurants, and spending time with their extended families. We have already seen how those cultural attributes worked out for Italy. And, it is worth noting, Italy is the eighth biggest economy in the world. My host culture does not enjoy such developmental benefits. So I'm up shit's creek, and the question of my having a paddle or not is undecided.

I also find myself with a dangerous mixture of high-risk characteristics. My age is a distinct disadvantage, and the list of my medical conditions includes a couple of serious negatives. That must be balanced out with my natural disinclination to spend money on medical care. My opinion on the subject is that whether you throw money at it or not, the outcome will probably be the same. If you would die without the medical care, the odds are that you will also die in spite of it. So fuck that. Money is for the living; the dead have no use for such things.

This will be a lively time for me. The silver-lining is that I am being told to stay at home and not go out for any but the most critical reasons. This actually fits right in with my preferences in life. I hate going out. I always hated going outside my house in Los Angeles at six in the morning to get the paper. I hated the idea of running into one of the neighbors and having to talk to them. I loved them all, but mostly in the abstract. My social anxiety, from an early age, made every sojourn out of the house a terrible adventure that I would rather forgo. This was one of the reasons that work was such a challenge for me. I never minded the work, but you had to leave the house to go there. Also, there were people there, some of whom were disagreeable.

As it happens, “staying at home and never venturing forth” is a lot harder than it sounds. I have no support system, no army of friends or neighbors who are young and strong and willing to assist me in any way that I may require. I would be at the mercy of Uber to get to the fucking hospital in the middle of the night. Where does that leave one these days? Go to the store; touch nothing; accept no change because money is the dirtiest thing in the world; wear a mask, or not, depending on whom you rely for such information; talk to no one; don't go near anyone; and upon returning home wipe down all of your purchases with disinfectant; burn all of your clothing; and take a long shower. That doesn't seem practical, since prison is almost certainly worse than getting the virus. You'd get virus within a week in prison anyway.

We'll see where this thing goes. Nowhere good, probably. There is always a possibility that Washington will get its wheels on the ground and do a great job of taking care of us. Of somehow mitigating the impending disaster. Raise your hand if you think that there's any chance of that happening. (Looks around the room.) No, I didn't think so.

This is going to raise considerable hell with the world's political and economic order. A disruption this big, this colossal, could lead to big changes. I would say that there are equally huge possibilities for positive or negative changes. What will the world look like in three or four years? Star Trek? 1984? Soylent Green? Logan's Run? Brave New World? Nothing would be too surprising, considering the magnitude of the challenges that our leaders will fail to meet.

So I'll see you on the other side. Or not. Bon chance, mon ami! Viel Gluck! Catch up on your reading and hope for the best. The good news is that young people have very high survival rates so far. Our grandchildren have a good chance of making it through this, even if we don't. I do find that comforting.

More Than We Can Stand

Admiral Bull Halsey was hit with physical manifestations of stress from time to time, so I'm not the only one. He got such a bad case of eczema right before the battle of Midway that he was hospitalized and missed the show. They hated to lose him, but he was in no shape to fight a major sea battle. So they lathered him up with creams, wrapped him in bandages like a mummy, and put him to bed until he recovered. He was a pretty tough egg, but between Pearl Harbor, the battle of the Coral Sea, watching the Japanese rampaging around everywhere, and personally crossing the Pacific Ocean with two or our very rare aircraft carriers to launch a near suicidal bombing raid on Japan, poor old Halsey's body said, “enough!” He had found the limits of his endurance. It was more than he could stand.

I'm getting a bit jumpy myself these days. No, “jumpy” doesn't begin to cover it. “Jumpy” is baseline for me. I'm becoming hysterical. My own “non-specific dermatitis” has returned with a vengeance. That manifests itself as an an irresistible itch. It first appeared about four years ago, when my father died in the act of lobbing his hand-grenade of a will into my lap, the bastard. Then, and off and on for years, it was limited to my forelegs. A dermatologist gave it that generic name and said, “I don't know, put some cream on it or something.” The recent assault has hit me from my neck to my insteps, and by this week my skin is in shreds. No light colored shirts, and wear long sleeves please, we don't want to frighten the children. Having coffee with a friend this week, I complained about it and pushed up a sleeve. “Oh, shit,” he said, “I had this two years ago. You have scabies!” He explained in horrifying detail how tiny insects were consuming my body as I sat there. I went to the doctor, and, as frequently happens, the doctor made it worse.

She correctly told me that no, I did not have scabies. Then she did what doctors automatically do. She came up with a best guess about what prescriptions would fit the model of perhaps doing some good and at least putting some money in the hospital's bank account. She agreed with me, surprisingly, about the likely chain of causation: stress; auto-immune system response; histamines; generalized itching.

The medicines were quite expensive. Two creams, and two powerful oral antihistamines. One cream mostly for hydration, and another for knocking down the itching more locally. The next day I faithfully followed her recommended procedure. By ten o'clock in the evening, both of my palms had exploded with dangerous looking blisters that itched like crazy and threw heat like a radiator. After a forty minute consultation with Professor Google, I had a four-corners diagnosis. Dyshidrotic eczema, aka pompholyx. (Thanks, nhs.uk) Mostly on the right palm, so I knew that it was the hydration cream, which I had applied almost entirely with my right hand palm. The other cream was fingertips only, and I deduced that it was not that product since my fingertips were not involved in the new outbreak in the least.

Now, I am fully aware that these things are of little import when compared to the catalog of horrors that people are enduring in countless countries all over the world. The explosions, the migrations, forced and otherwise, the extremely prejudicial imprisonment of innocent people, the forced separation of families, the religious persecution. But I ask you, please allow that my afflictions are annoying, at least to me. These are only the manifestations that are visible. Who knows what all of this stress is doing to my heart. Yes, I also have stress-related coronary-artery disease. I have suffered from numerous stress manifestations all my life. From the small stuff (headaches; spastic colon; nightmares) to the truly impressive and painful (hidradenitis suppuratura; flesh-eating bacteria). I'm ashamed to admit it, but most of that was just from the stress of being myself. We're facing a lot of dangerous, external threats now, on top of just the challenge of keeping an even keel in our own lives.

We, all of us, live today with a combination of existential threats that would give a saint the heebie-jeebies. I have to laugh at the way some politicians and academics dance around these weird goings on and make pronouncements about related events as though there were no connection at all.

I still had some hope for our future up until the very early days of the Trump administration. The team were not all idiots, and it was possible to believe that there were some forces in Washington that could prevent a new, inexperienced, kind of stupid president from burning down the whole house. Even my slim hope was wildly inappropriate. All of the non-idiots have either abandoned ship or been fired by now, and they have been replaced by a new, younger group of “temporary” idiots. All temporary appointments, to spare the American people the spectacle of congress questioning them in the appointment process, where they would totally embarrass themselves, their families, their universities, and El Presidente. Temporary. None of them were destined to last long anyway.

Could you believe it when Mick Mulvanney said that what America really needed was more immigrants! I'm pretty sure a coconut fell on that guy's head or something. Or Mnuchin, saying that this is a great time to buy stock! Him and his trophy wife. I am loathe to disparage anyone's marriage, but if she's the trophy, what did the loser get? Betsy DeVos! The joke that writes itself! This week it looks like Trump has found the bottom of the barrel, hiring people right out of university for White House hatchet jobs. They are being tasked with finding and firing the disloyal White House employees that you know Trump would deny even existed. Must be the Deep State!

Trump himself, I think it's time for me to stop bothering him. The way the Democrats are throwing this election, it looks like we'll be dealing with Trump being the president until January, 2025. Yeah, I think that I should lay off, because Trump is beginning to frighten me. The only thing that has protected me all these years is the fact that I am such a nobody, such a nonentity. As an unknown blogger, the ants walk along their tunnels well over my head. I'm further down with the worms. But if he gets another term, and since word searches are as easy as they are, even I might get on a dangerous enemies list. The worst part is that he might actually have some money now. I'm sure that when he took office, if you looked at his entire balance sheet, he had more debt than money. For the rest of us, that makes us bankrupt, but for those in the know, they're rich either way. Whether it's debt or money, it's under their control, and they're rich. Don't ask me how it works. But by now I'd say his true net worth has skyrocketed. Don't forget, he can release a Tweet any time he wants, and he controls the content. His Tweets often affect the stock market, or the stocks of individual companies. He can then Tweet again, and send the market, or the stock, back up. I'm sure he's got about a thousand straw-men out there trading on those Trump induced stock movements. My guess is that he makes a couple of billion dollars doing this every year that he remains in office. It makes him a lot more dangerous if he's cash-rich all of a sudden. He can pay for more law suits.

Poor Melania, I'm sure that she has long had a plan to divorce his fat ass about six months after he leaves office, which she has probably computed will be about July, 2021. I'm sure that she's longing for it. Would Trump even care? She's past her expiration date anyway. Let her go, and move some new young honey into the White House. I bet Trump misses Jeffrey Epstein.

We've got a lot to worry about. That's a list I make all the time, so I'll spare you today. Where's your bet on who gets the blame for the COVID-19 virus? Who, or what, is Trump going to blame it on? The Chinese are always a good choice. There may not be any evidence pointing to any intent on their part, but the rumors are hot. This week I heard that Chinese scientists at some bio-war laboratory IN WUHAN were selling lab animals to restaurants. That will make some people's blood boil. Just the fact that Chinese people love to eat weird animals that you've never heard of, and use internal organs of other weird animals as medicine, will sound suspicious to lots of people. What the hell are civets and pangolins anyway? I feel bad for the people in Wuhan, and working people in China in general. I'm afraid a lot of poor people are not being paid until this thing blows over. That'll make people angry.

This latest corona virus is just a wake-up call. This virus has a fatality rate of around 2%, so it's safe to say that this is not “the big one.” Two percent puts it right around the death rate for the Spanish Flu in 1918. Two percent of the people who got hit with that thing came to a total of almost twenty-million people dead, but that was for the whole world, so any individual's chances were still very good. When an even stronger virus hits, and it presents in fifty countries simultaneously, and the death rate is north of 30% or so, what the hell will we do then? Even this little breeze is shaking the foundations of world commerce. What happens when the hurricane of viruses shows up?

How about this: throw a nice, strong virus on top of worldwide failures in the production of wheat or rice. Mix and match, you know? Pick your poisons, one from column A and one from column B. Like a perfect storm, with both A and B being caused by global warming. Governments would struggle to keep up with the catastrophe, but due to limited resources they would only be helping rich people! That's our new motto, “The rich first!” Already this week one of Trump's new temps announced that most Americans won't be able to afford the COVID-19 vaccine. It's all about the rich, baby! They're the “makers!” They're the “job-creators!” For most of the rest of us, it might be no food, no water, no Netflix, no nothing. “Nothing but this pointed stick and my hand around your neck.”

When that day comes, and the odds are pretty good that it will, it'll be official. We will all have found the limits of our endurance. It will all be more than we can stand.