Tag Archives: COVID-19

10.06.20
by

Faster Than a Lobster Quadrille

The young man peered at me over his designer mask. “Do you have a cell phone?”

“No.”

He stared. His brow wrinkled. “Uh . . . wait here.” He ducked back inside. 

There was a sign on the door that warned: 

“NO ENTRY. Call On Cell Phone.

Staff Will Meet You In Parking Lot.”

You’d think they were dealing crystal meth.

(In the interest of full disclosure, Gentle Reader: I do have a cell phone. 

(But I don’t use it. 

Photo by Meghan Schiereck on Unsplash.

(It’s an old clamshell on a $13-a-month plan. It lives in my car, awaiting that moment when I may drive into a snow bank and need help getting out. But who, in the meantime, needs to know of its existence?)

The door opened and the young man re-emerged. “They’ll be with you in a minute.” 

He edged by me and darted down the walk to where a better-trained customer stood, cell phone in hand, hoisting with the other hand a small cage which held a lop-eared rabbit.

Did I feel no guilt, you ask, gumming up the procedures of a nice veterinary clinic?

GUILT? Ha! You may as well ask a wolverine about origami.

Turns out, once they discover one’s masked presence standing at their door—even without a cell phone call—they will eventually bring out the allergy pills one pre-ordered for one’s itchy American Staffordshire terrier mix. 

In the present COVID-19 public health emergency, who could have predicted the emergence of common sense?

#

Milo Bung shook his head when I told him the story. “You go to a lot of trouble to avoid using your cell phone.”

“It’s no trouble at all.”

My old classmate glared like a bright young assistant district attorney cross-examining a defendant. “What have you got against cell phones?” 

“What has a cell phone ever done for me?”

Milo scratched his head. “How would I know?”

“Exactly.”

A new idea lit up his face. “What if you want to take a picture?”

“I would use my Nikon. But I’ve already made enough photographs for one lifetime.”

“Is that a fact,” said Milo. He looked askance. “You’ve given up photography altogether?”

“I remember the best moments of all my vacations. The images stored in my brain are better than mere photos. They have more je ne sais quoi.”

In any case, I thought but did not say, when my brain loses the memories, the pictures won’t help either.

Milo rapped his knuckles on the bar. “You’re a hard case, amigo.”

“Besides,” I astutely pointed out, “I like to deal with people in the flesh.”

“Isn’t that sort of old school?”

“That’s me all over.”

#

I was not always thus. It takes decades of study to become an old crank.

Gradually, if you’re a sentient being, you apprehend that in today’s world, the sense of community that underpins mental health has been eroded. In this desert of commonality and fellow-feeling, any face-to-face, or mask-to-mask, encounter, even with a stranger, can be salutary.

#

Years ago, a fellow yahoo on a Road Scholar trip—a man named Larry, by sheer coincidence—tried to browbeat me into needing a GPS navigating device.

“What!” he exclaimed. “You don’t have a *INSERT BRAND NAME HERE*? How can you not have one? You can get one for under a hundred dollars.” 

“Or I could not get one,” I pointed out, “and keep my hundred dollars.” 

“No, seriously. You can’t afford to be without it.”

“So far, I’m doing fine.”

“But it’s so cheap, you’ve got to have one.”

I could have explained that 99 percent of my trips are to places I know how to get to; that I can, and do, look up the other one percent in advance; and that if, despite that preparation, I should get lost, I can always stop and ask someone. But no logic would have convinced Larry that my lack of a *INSERT BRAND NAME HERE* was okay.

His real problem was that my zoom lens was longer than his. Given that circumstance, his only play was to beat me over the head with his GPS device.

#

I am no Luddite, I tell myself, but simply a man who values the personal touch. 

Why should I ring up my own merchandise at Home Depot when a real pro is on duty one lane over? A person who, by the way, would like to keep her job. 

Sure, I could knuckle under to the ruling paradigm, but I would feel like I was abandoning The Little Guy. If I have to stand in line a few extra minutes, so what? Where else do I have to be?

Our pet spa has the same “call up on the cell phone” routine that the vet’s office does. But rather than lose an eighty-dollar grooming job, they’ll eventually notice me and my shaggy spaniel as we wait in the parking lot.

Some inchoate power out there always wants me to do things in a new way. But, Lord help me, I like the old way. 

They want me to vote early this year—either by mailing in my ballot or by handing it to a designated early-ballot collector sitting under a sign in a public park. All well and good.

But, why? 

Is the election going somewhere? Will the polls be closed?

No. 

My plan is to show up, masked, on election day, at the polling place where I am registered, holding my photographic ID in hand. I trust they’ll let me vote—even though they won’t be able to see that my face matches the photo on the ID—and they’ll count my vote. 

So what’s the problem?

#

Tout le monde, Dear Reader, is NOT rushing off to some Brave New World so fast an old geezer can’t keep up—impressions to the contrary notwithstanding.

You might mention that to Milo Bung when you see him.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Writer

Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.

Price of Passage

Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois

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(History is not what you thought!)

06.09.20
by

Milo Bung: Fact or Fiction

There is a niche of special distinction in the Class Clowns’ Hall of Fame, and it contains a marble bust of Milo Bung, smiling beatifically and crowned with laurel. When we were in sixth grade Milo was a source of much innocent merriment.

Laurel-crowned Milo Bung. Or perhaps, Apollo? Photo © Marie-Lan Nguyen / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY 2.5

Where your average class clown fed on spectacles like putting a thumb tack on the teacher’s chair while she was down the hall grabbing a smoke, or stacking books on a desk corner so they would fall when somebody walked by, Milo was more subtle. 

His specialty was a unique glassy-eyed stare, which he flashed whenever the teacher called on him for an answer. I don’t know whether he was transfixed by the mystery of South America’s principal exports, or just languid by nature. 

Whatever Milo had, subtlety was of its essence.

Masking 

I bumped into him at the supermarket recently, pushing his cart the wrong way up a COVID-directed aisle. “Milo,” I said, “where’s your mask?” 

“Mask?” he wondered.

“Like the one I’m wearing. You know, for coronavirus.”

“Oh, is that why everybody’s wearing masks?”

I nodded, as emphatically as one can nod at Milo Bung. “Without a mask, you might get sick and die.”

His eyes opened wide. “Then I’d better stock up right now on Cheetos.” And off he dashed, up the down aisle.

Looting

That was my most recent encounter with Milo until now; but apparently he has not gotten sick and died yet, for I saw him tonight on the ten o’clock news. A squad car lay burning in the street. Several demonstrators, or maybe outside agitators, stepped through the smashed front window of a store that sells ladies’ foundation garments. They carried boxes and cartons of what must have been frilly unmentionables. 

Despite the burning squad car, no cops were in view; yet here came Milo, strolling down the street, right into camera range. He halted smack dab in the center of all this resistance to injustice. He swiveled his head this way and that, then stared into the camera with an expression that proclaimed, “Is anybody else seeing what I’m seeing?” He shrugged and ambled out the right side of the frame. He had something in his hands. Looked like a bag of Cheetos. 

Knowing they must have taped this earlier in the evening, I surmised that Milo Bung, if not in jail, might now be at home. So I dialed his number. Sure enough, he answered.

“I saw you on TV! In the middle of a riot!” I shouted as calmly as I could.

“A riot?” said Milo. “(Crunch, crunch.) Oh, sure, that’s what it must have been.”

“Couldn’t you tell?”

“Well, something funny was going on, that’s for sure. It’s getting so a guy can’t take an evening promenade (crunch, crunch) without running into out-of-towners.” 

“Out-of-towners!” I roared. “How do you know they were out-of-towners?”

“Well, (crunch, crunch), stands to reason. I mean, how many guys do you know from around here (crunch, crunch) that need so many boxes of lacy underwear for their sweeties?”

“Are you munching Cheetos?”

“Yeah, I got boxes and boxes of them. Come on over, I’ll give you some.”

“But weren’t you even aware what they were rioting about? It was injustice. Racial injustice. What do you think about that?”

There was a moment’s silence on the line while Milo digested my question, and his Cheetos. “One man’s injustice,” he said, “is another man’s free underwear.”

“Is that all you’ve got to say?”

“No, but if I told you, then you’d blab it to everybody else, so I’m clamming up.”

Uniformed Service

Milo was always a step or two ahead of the rest of us. He was the first boy in our class to declare what he wanted to be when he grew up: An elevator operator. “I like the look of a uniform,” he drawled. When we graduated from high school—and, lo! all elevators had been converted to self-service—Milo joined the Marines. 

Imagine my confusion when Ho Chi Minh let Milo live and returned him to our community in his original condition. He may simply have been unshootable. Wouldn’t surprise me one bit.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Author

Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.

Price of Passage

Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois

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(History is not what you thought!)

05.05.20
by

What’s All This Shouting?

The return to “normal” will not be swift or easy. On the contrary, it will be slow, cautious, and hedged. That’s because almost all Normal People are cautious and prudent in the face of a real threat to health. Almost all Normal People also are working day by day, without fanfare, to restore an orderly economy and society.
Northern cardinal. Photo by Aaron Doucett on Unsplash.

A cardinal tweets his piercing notes outside my window at five-thirty. The Global Pandemic has not changed his routine one iota.

Why do we revel in disaster and cling to desperation? What is there that so inclines us to doom and gloom?

The old TV show Hee-Haw had a recurring scene in which several indolent hillbillies lolled on a cabin porch and sang:

“Gloom, despair, and agony on me;
Deep, dark depression, excessive misery;
If it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all.
Gloom, despair, and agony on me.”

I am thinking of the coronavirus. Not the virus itself, Gentle Reader. Rather, the social phenomenon that COVID-19 has become.

The Public Face of Pandemic

If you were to attend only to the news broadcasts, to the briefings and pressers, to the partisan Memes of Malice which clutter the Facebook feeds and the Twittersphere, you might  think—no matter what point of view you’re coming from—that ALL IS LOST.

After all, it’s plain enough that Those Other People are behaving in dangerous and evil ways. Choose your poison:

A. Knuckle-dragging cretins flout the scientifically-determined guidelines, because they have no concern for the most vulnerable among us. They will spike the curve and cause millions of deaths, including their own, with no thought at all for the common good.
B. A bunch of shrewd operators are using this disease hoax as a pretext to grab power for themselves and deprive us of the right to live as we have always lived. They are destroying our economy and our means of subsistence, with no thought at all for the common good. 

If these are the themes you’re hearing, Dear Reader, I weep for your ears and your soul. And these are the themes we are all hearing, over and over again.

Worm’s-eye View

But let me tell you what I keep seeing on the ground, out here in the United States:

Most people are maintaining a respectful fathom’s-length distance to one another. Many but not all wear masks. Those who go maskless still do steer a wide berth around others.

Truly frail oldsters stay buttoned up in their homes. They receive phone calls, Zoom calls, window-mediated visits, and messages of cheer from those who care about them.

Almost all of us go to the store to buy food and other essentials, but not often, and only with great care. The store employees work tirelessly, as usual, keeping the shelves stocked as well as possible, even though spot shortages persist.

Children play outside in good weather and, shocking or not, interact with next-door friends, suffering no apparent ill effects.

You can get restaurant food—tasty, well-presented, thoughtfully packaged—by pre-arrangement, with carefully designed procedures for pick-up or delivery.

Ken Jennings. Phil Konstantin photo licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Most of the really necessary things can still be done, if inconveniently.

Mail is delivered.

Jeopardy! has begun recycling old Ken Jennings victories. What could be wrong with that?

Amid the wreckage wrought by pandemic and panic, the world is starting to resume.

Here in Wisconsin, taxidermists can once more ply their trade. You may scoff, but this is Wisconsin.

The place where my wife and I take our cars for service is open for business again, on a “drop-the-car-off-all-day” basis—no hanging around the waiting room.

Our church begins to plan for resumption of in-person worship services, though this may not happen until late summer or early fall. Until then, Zoom services are a blessing.

Lacey

Several colleges and universities have announced they plan to receive students on campus again for the fall semester.

The dog grooming service we use is re-opening on a limited basis, with a long waiting list of shaggy clients. It may be some time before Lacey gets her trim, but she will get it.

The plumber came out and fixed the water supply to our laundry tubs, but he wore a mask and gloves.

The price of gasoline seems to have bottomed out as more driving takes place than before. Sub-dollar prices, alas, are already in the rearview mirror.

Normal

The return to “normal” will not be swift or easy. Nor will “normal” be quite normal.

On the contrary, it will all be slow, cautious, and elaborately hedged. That’s because almost all Normal People are cautious and prudent in the face of a real threat to health. Almost all Normal People also are working day by day, without fanfare, to restore an orderly economy and society.

As Mister Rogers famously said, “Look for the helpers.” We’re all around.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.

Price of Passage

Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois

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(History is not what you thought!)

04.21.20
by

Life or Death

We are a death-denying society.

We think, “Death is bad, life is good.” 

Moses gets the word from Yahweh. Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510) fresco, Sistine Chapel. Public Domain.

Even God says: “I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him; for that means life to you and length of days, so that you may live in the land that the Lord swore to give to your ancestors, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob” (Deuteronomy 30:19-20). 

The Lord of Hosts tells us to choose life over death; who are we to argue?

So we try to live, as high on the hog as we can, and we do everything possible to avoid death. Even some impossible things, to avoid death, we attempt. We try to shut death out of our houses, out of our schools, out of our clinics, out of our hospitals, out of our emergency rooms. We try to shut death out of our mortuaries and cemeteries, preferring a quick cremation, followed by a “memorial” service that focuses on reliving our happy memories of the—uh, that is, you know, dear old Uncle Jack, bless his soul.

The Grim Reaper waits. Image by doom156, licensed under  CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.

Most effectively, we shut death out of our consciousness. The Grim Reaper is barred from the threshold of our thoughts. We live in uneasy assurance that there is no such thing as death. Death is taboo.

Yet, AS IF BY SOME MIRACLE, people keep dying. 

A Gentleman in a Dustcoat Trying

They die a few at a time, here or there. They die of heart ailments and strokes; they die of cancer; they die of accidents; they die of murder; they die of suicide. Sometimes they die unaccountably: I once read about a man who jumped off a four-foot-high platform at a county fair, and at the time his feet hit the ground he was dead. The coroner could only scratch his head. 

Whatever the cause, by age 120 or so, we achieve one hundred percent mortality.

COVID-19. Alissa Eckert and Dan Higgins, Center for Disease Control. Public Domain.

Once in a long while there comes a great epidemic, or a pandemic. You might say the very definition of such an event is that it taxes our resources as a whole society, not just as an individual or a family or a town. 

Now we have COVID-19. We have mobilized against this pandemic at a scale, in a timeframe, and in specific ways by which no disease in human history has been resisted. 

In America—I can’t speak for other societies, but yes, in America—we have mobilized chiefly, it seems, to deny death its victims. 

Through a panoply of means, some new and some time-tested, we fight this dread disease. The dread thing about this disease is its death toll.

 You don’t hear people saying, “I sure hope I don’t catch the COVID, it’s a pretty rough thing to go through.”

Those who recover occupy none of our attention, regardless how harrowing their escape. All the emphasis is on preventing death. 

If it were just one among the crowd of viruses that constantly assail us, claiming a few lives here and there, nobody would make a big deal about it. But COVID-19, because of its novelty (as in “novel coronavirus”), is statistically forecast to sweep through the world, taking millions of lives from populations that start with zero immunity to it. 

At this writing it has claimed about 42,000 Americans, but who knows what the coming months may bring?

According to our trusted experts—and I do trust their expertise—our most effective weapon against the onslaught has been “social distancing.” We seem to have dramatically reduced the death toll by staying away from one another—a method that has dealt a dire blow to our national economy. But that method has worked. 

All our physical distancing and other measures have slowed the progress of the disease, not stopped it. We have deflected the incidence of death from COVID-19; we have not banished death altogether. Remember the early days, when our experts first recommended these measures. The slogan was, “Flatten the curve.” There was no thought of eliminating the disease altogether.

The point of all our efforts was simply to reduce the caseload to what our hospitals and medical professionals could handle.

It has always been in the cards that a lot of people were going to die from this disease. 

So What?

There is a reason, Dear Reader, that I belabor this obvious point. 

Now that we have blunted the coronavirus attack, our leaders work on means to bring back the economy. This is no trivial concern. It will take a complex strategy, with a well-calibrated balance between, on the one hand, fostering more freedom of movement for productive endeavors; and, on the other, protecting the most vulnerable from exposure to a highly contagious disease organism.

It is not just the president who wants to get the economy working again. Responsible politicians of both parties and executives of businesses large and small share this urgency. They bear a heavy responsibility to restore the systems and mechanisms that provide us all with food, clothing, shelter, transportation, entertainment, education, health care, social satisfaction, and all the other things we require—including paychecks—before additional damage is added to what those systems have already sustained. 

DeForest Kelley. Public Domain.

It would be foolhardy simply to drop all the new practices we have adopted and go on a binge of “pre-pandemic normalcy.” If anyone seriously proposes this, they ought to think more thoroughly.

And if anyone seriously thinks that loosening any of the present restrictions is irresponsible, they also ought to think more thoroughly. 

How often have we heard it said that no cost is too great to save a single human life?  Quite often, to my recollection. Remember, in our society, death is taboo. Consider the refrain oft-voiced by the late actor DeForest Kelley, playing Doctor McCoy on the original Star Trek series: 

“Dammit, Jim, there are lives at stake!”

Yes, Bones, there are. 

There are always lives at stake. No matter what we do, or what we don’t do, lives are at stake. People will live this way, or that way; people will die this way, or that way.

Seldom are we given a simple choice between life and death. Commonly, we make hundreds of microchoices—to walk or drive, to eat a fish or a steak, to floss or not to floss, to wash our hands or leave them unwashed—each decision tending either to promote life or to hasten death, yet no single decision dispositive. 

Right now, a particular subset of microchoices is forced on us by the disease— commended to us as mandatory or at least highly beneficial. In weeks to come, those choices, one by one, will become antiquated and irrelevant. 

Life will go on. In the midst of it, people will go on dying.

Not you, any time soon, Dear Reader, I pray.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Writer

Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.

Price of Passage

Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois

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(History is not what you thought!)

04.07.20
by

How American of Us

All the kids in my neighborhood were vaccinated, and we would gladly show the little round scar in our upper arms to prove it.

Inoculation to ward off smallpox had been practiced for more than two hundred years. That is what “vaccination” meant in the 1950s. 

Today, “vaccination” means many things. It means different things to different people. Not everybody likes it. But at this moment in our history, we mainly think of vaccination as a tool we wish we had against COVID-19. It is not in our toolkit yet and won’t be for quite a while. We tap our feet impatiently. What are we supposed to do in the meantime?

#

Odd and unexpected are the prophets who may speak to us in these confused days.

Benedict Arnold. Copy of engraving by H. B. Hall after John Trumbull. Public Domain.

Benedict Arnold is known primarily as a traitor. A bold, charismatic leader of troops in our war for Independence, Arnold changed sides and became a secret agent for the British. He worked to give them the American fortifications at West Point, New York. 

His treason was found out, and he fled for his life. On October 7, 1780, a few days after he reached safety behind British lines, Arnold published an open letter defending his actions, titled “Address to the American People.” In that egocentric display of self-justification, the erratic Benedict Arnold—half a century before Alexis de Tocqueville’s famous visit and commentary—penned the definitive remark about Americans:

“The private judgment of any individual citizen of this country is . . . free from all conventional restraints.”

It was a true saying then, and it remains true 240 years later. Combined with the Puritan imprint on our public outlook and the indelible marks of our frontier experience, it explains a lot about our uniqueness as a people.

By “all conventional restraints,” I suppose Arnold meant the class-conscious pecking order of European society, as well as the customary appeals of king and country and the divine imperatives of Church potentates. 

To Americans all such guiding principles are merely advisory, both then and now. Each person must choose his or her own way. We are a nation of rugged individuals, most of all deep in our heads and hearts. We know we are right; if not for others, at least for ourselves and our families. We are self-willed, to a nearly anarchic extreme. 

Here, even the Magisterium of The Law “derive[s] its just powers from the consent of the governed” and, in practice, perches perilously on a wobbly base of voluntary compliance. “The private judgment of any individual citizen . . . is . . . free from all conventional restraints.”

We see this truth enacted in our present crisis. Compare the responses of other nations: 

  • The Chinese government, once it grasped the severity of the virus problem, sent in goon squads to round up the sufferers, burned the evidence, and put out some fake numbers to reassure the world.
  • The Swedes seem to be opting for a slow-rolling herd inoculation through gradual exposure of their citizens. This may possibly work in Sweden, where the surge of the virus will be dampened by the Swedes’ national impulse to work together as if they were, indeed, a herd.

Swedish-style cooperativeness is unthinkable here in the United States. Violators of even reasonable regulations would be legion, the loci of their intransigence unpredictable. Any forced imposition of rigid controls would backfire; people would rebel. Even the enforcers would rebel.

So the suggestion that we follow the Swedish model, though doubtless well-intentioned, is naïve and absurd. Americans, in general, won’t act like Swedes—even though some of them, like my wife, are Swedes. The results of relying on Swedish-style social cohesion from Americans would be disastrous in the short term.

But those who call for a unified national crackdown do not grasp the dimensions of the problem. The president, with all his minions, cannot command all Americans to do anything, any more than King Canute could turn back the tide. 

King Canute rebukes his courtiers as the tide rolls in, unblocked. Illustration by Alphonse-Marie-Adolphe de Neuville. Public Domain.

The governors have a slightly better chance of applying that nuanced mix of persuasion and compulsion that will work in their respective states. Even they will probably mis-calculate some of their edicts. What federal authorities can offer is material support to the states and the broad popular influence of national experts who speak with credibility.

#

Does all this add up to an imperfect response? Maybe so. 

Are other countries doing better? Who can say?

Will people die because our government has no magic wands to wave? Could be.

It is what it is. We are who we are, exercising our private judgments free of all conventional restraints. 

Let us seek to be wise, prudent, and kind in that exercise.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Writer

Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.

Price of Passage

Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois

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(History is not what you thought!)

04.04.20
by

To Fathom, or Not to Fathom?

4 April 2020, Day 25 of the Global Pandemic (According to WHO—or is it WHOM?):

My bandanna slips, baring my nostrils to the world. 

The knot behind my head is too loose; but it feels indecent, somehow, to untie and re-tie in public. So I shove the cloth up over my nose, clamp it there under my bifocals, snag a cart, and head into Hyvee. 

Say there, Pardners, hands in the air! And give us all your yeast and toilet paper. (And lupines, don’t forget lupines.)

Just a quick in-and-out, to pick up a few essentials. I push the cart into the liquor department, heading for the red wines. OOPS! Blue arrows have been taped on the floor, making each aisle a one-way street. Of course. This is so shoppers won’t accidentally come within six feet of each other. 

In nautical terms, they want us to be unfathomable.

A very sensible precaution, in my view. I push my cart down the wrong aisle, all the way  to the back of the store, then swing around an end-cap, and voilà! Red wine. 

Is it the same instinct that impels so many fellow citizens to stock up on toilet paper, which has reduced us to drinking cheap wine? I  pick up a couple of ten-dollar red blends for those special, romantic dinners (take-out beef bourguignon in a plastic tray, with baguette, from La Brioche) and a gallon jug of burgundy for all other occasions. With bottles rattling in my cart, I follow the blue arrows up the aisle to exit the liquor department. OOOPS! A man stands there, buying beer at the liquor department register. He must not need any dry groceries. 

No Fathoming Allowed

A big, round sticker on the floor says, “MAINTAIN 6-FT DISTANCE.” There is not room to go around the man, whose large purchase may take some time to ring up. I reverse course, go the wrong way down the red wine aisle, wrap two aisles over to the next outbound lane, and then full steam ahead. 

But, soft! What light down yonder brandy aisle breaks? It is a twenty-something woman, idling, eenymeenying between Korbel and Christian Brothers. Will it be this one, or that? She picks up a bottle, shifts her weight from one hip to the other, puts it back. Maybe . . . another brand entirely?

Back down the aisle the wrong way again, two more aisles over, and I gallop out of the liquor department to freedom. It’s a good thing liquor stores in this state have plenty of aisles.

I head for the main part of the supermarket. OOOOPS! My bandanna slips down again. Why is this so tough? If a moron like Liberty Valance could do this, certainly I can get the hang of it. I shove the gaudy rag back over my nose and clamp it even firmer with my glasses. For good measure, I twist the knot in back once and tuck it under itself. That’ll do it, I’m almost sure.

Now for the groceries. This store has a complex floor layout; even with its extravagant overhead signs, I often struggle to find what I am seeking. Today, that struggle is squared, or maybe cubed, by the blue arrows on the floor. Two or three times I find myself going the wrong way. It’s hard to remember not to just turn up, or down, the aisle where you suspect your item may have been hidden.

The Precious Fathom

I console myself by noting that half of the many shoppers seem to be entirely unaware of the blue arrows. Or maybe they just don’t care. Half of the shoppers, like me, conscientiously struggle to maintain that precious fathom of clearance. 

When you are in an aisle, you don’t want to take much time picking out your item. Other people are piling up behind you. Nobody wants to be responsible for squeezing past someone else and maybe exhaling at point-blank range. So you move fast, to prevent pile-ups.

I loop back around and skim the bakery needs aisle again, looking for yeast. It seems there is none to be had. Yeast is one of those things, like toilet paper, that new-minted survivalists feel compelled to hoard. 

OOOOOPS! My face covering slips again. Even the dim-witted Billy the Kid passed Bandanna 101 in Outlaw School. Why can’t I make it work? Quite a few people wear a scarf, handkerchief, or bandanna over nose and mouth. None of their face coverings fall down. What’s the matter with me? 

A few people wear manufactured-looking masks. They’d better not be hogging those special N-95s that all the medical people need. Are these people too good to wrap a sock or muffler around their head, like the rest of us? 

Quite a few people still wear no face covering at all. Just a day or two ago, that was me; but now I’m hip. Not that my bandanna will protect me from the virus; it’s meant to keep me from giving other people the virus. Not that I have the virus. How could I? I hardly go anywhere. But the good doctors on TV are now saying we should wear them. I’m not really infectious, but one should set a good example for others.

Grocery Workers: Essential, Fathomless

It may be casually noted that no store employees wear face coverings of any kind. Also, they frequently violate the Six-Foot Rule. That’s because they’re trying, desperately, to get the shelves stocked. A valiant young man arrives with a whole cartload of eggs to put in the case just as I take the last dozen. He’s doing his best, but he has lost sight of Social Distancing. Well, of course, these folks are official store employees. So I guess that’s all right, then.

Okay, no yeast. No Fudgsicles either, but as I recall, Hyvee always had a hard time keeping those in stock, even back in Pre-Pandemic Days. I’ve got most of the other stuff, including a 31.5-pound bag of Purina for Lacey and Midnight. 

At this juncture I feel compelled to note, just for the record, Dear Reader, that if one really strictly followed the blue arrows on the floor, one would be forever enmeshed in a sort of medieval labyrinth—stuck forever, like Charlie on the MTA—with no way to traverse to the cash registers. 

Taking my heart in my hands, I jump the queue—or, at least, violate the blue arrows—skirting around the whole produce section, steering a wide berth from any other shoppers, and streaking into the clearly-marked lateral blue-arrow lane near the check-out aisles. 

Here, there is more surrealism at which to marvel. A sign says: “DO NOT PUT YOUR ITEMS ON THE CONVEYOR. WE SANITIZE BETWEEN CUSTOMERS.” Sure enough, after the preceding customer clears the lane at least two fathoms ahead of me, the young man at the register runs the conveyor clear around twice, swabbing it down with something he squirts out of a spray bottle. At last it is deemed sanitary enough, and he says, “Go ahead.” 

Nothing to Sneeze At

I plunk my items down on the conveyor, leaving my huge bag of dog food in the cart. The young man tries to scan the dog food with his hand-held scanner as usual, but OOOOOOPS! He can’t cantilever it out over the conveyor far enough. Its cord is hung up with a bunch of other cords. That’s because the bracket that holds the hand scanner is cramped by the newly-installed plexiglass shield that is meant to protect me and the checker-outer— from each other, presumably.

Oh, what a relief! I may now sneeze to my heart’s content. There’s a sheet of plexiglass to protect the essential grocery worker. I have half a mind to give it a good blast—but, alas! no sneeze in me yearns to break forth. Better luck next time.

Forty-five minutes after stopping for a quick in-and-out, I trundle my cart out of the store and OOOOOOOPS! my bandanna slips again. But no matter, I’m in the open air. 

Where are Jesse and Frank James, when a guy needs a lesson in kerchief-tying?

#

Something tells me we’re not in Kansas anymore. We’re not even in Wisconsin anymore.

Be of good cheer, Dear Reader. Even this cannot last forever.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Writer

Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.

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Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois

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(History is not what you thought!)

03.17.20
by

Pandemic Politics

“Pandemic” was an adjective before it was a noun.

It means, “prevalent over a whole area, country, etc.; universal, general . . . .” It is usually applied to disease, thus giving rise to its use as a noun, “a pandemic,” meaning, “a disease which is pandemic.” But it could really be used for almost anything that is widely distributed over the world. 

Politics is pandemic. As was oft remarked of Chickenman, “It’s everywhere! It’s everywhere!” 

No, Fair Reader, you can’t escape it; for, as Aristotle observed, “Man is a political animal.”

In the midst of our current angst over COVID-19, President Trump has been accused of downplaying the threat. Trump’s opponents have been accused of weaponizing the fear of a dread disease. Players on both sides of the line of scrimmage are ripping up the Astroturf, wailing, “Unfair! They are politicizing a national disaster!” 

So, what else is new? 

If you read this blog regularly—a Recommended Best Practice—you may wonder, “Whence comes this commentary on current events? Is not this blog supposed to be about ‘seeking fresh meanings in our common past’?”

Okay, Dear Reader. You asked for it:

It Was Ever Thus

Politicians have made political hay out of all things sacred since the moment after time started. Many earnest combatants believe that everything is political; that exploiting all events to advance one’s political agenda is the purest form of service. (“You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that, it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”—Rahm Emanuel, 2008.)

Those who seek to serve society must understand the political context in which they operate. Military leaders, in particular, often feel that war should be exempt from politics. But they would be extremely foolish to suppose that it actually is.

General Promotions

Elihu B. Washburne U.S. Congressman, Secretary of State, Minister to France. Mathew Brady-Levi Corbin Handy photo. Public Domain.

During the Civil War, General Ulysses S. Grant showed a canny cognizance of the political winds which blew all around him. In that conflict, almost every general, North or South, was appointed and advanced politically. Even Grant, who demonstrated the highest ability, would never have received the opportunity to demonstrate that ability without the sponsorship of his local Congressman, Rep. Elihu Washburne. The Congressman put Grant in for a brigadier general’s star, immediately began thumping for his promotion to major general, and in every possible way championed Grant’s career.

In 1863, Grant was tasked with taking the city of Vicksburg, which President Abraham Lincoln saw as “the golden key” to unlock the Confederacy. Take Vicksburg from the rebels, and you re-open the Mississippi River to Union navigation. At the same time, you dreadfully complicate Confederate efforts to get men and materiel from the Trans-Mississippi West (Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas). Vicksburg in Union hands would be the beginning of the end of the rebellion.

Major General U.S. Grant. Public Domain.

Trouble was, Grant’s first try—aided by loyal subordinates Sherman and Macpherson and the ambitiously disloyal McClernand—had come to naught, for reasons beyond Grant’s control. “The strategical way according to the rule,” Grant wrote in his memoirs, “would have been to go back to Memphis; establish that as a base of supplies; fortify it so that the storehouses could be held by a small garrison, and move from there along the line of the railroad, repairing as we advanced, to the Yallabusha, or to Jackson, Mississippi.” 

However, “At this time the North had become very much discouraged. . . . It was my judgment at the time that to make a backward movement as long as that from Vicksburg to Memphis, would be interpreted, by many of those yet full of hope for the preservation of the Union, as a defeat, and that the draft would be resisted, desertions ensue, and the power to capture and punish deserters lost. There was nothing left to be done but to go forward to a decisive victory.”

What Grant delicately omitted was that political powers in Washington wanted Grant removed and replaced with McClernand—an officer who, despite his loyalty to the Union, was unfit for high command. So long as Grant was actively campaigning against Vicksburg, it was not too hard for Lincoln to resist these demands for his scalp. But any movement that appeared to be a retreat—back to Memphis, for example—would  most likely seal his fate. I am not the first to suggest that if Grant had done anything other than what he did—go forward through the Mississippi lowlands with no established supply line, feeding his army off the land—he would have lost his job. So that’s exactly what he did.

Grant could not afford to ignore politics.

In the end, he found a way to win without losing his job.

So What?

How does this history apply to the present day? Simply in this: Those who wish to serve the country need to be entirely apolitical; but they cannot afford to ignore the politics of the situation.

There are a lot of players, political and otherwise. One is New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, an interesting figure. He is on the opposite political team from the president—but neither of them can afford to make trouble with the other in facing the coronavirus challenge, both for political reasons, and for the sake of people’s health.

Cuomo, like any experienced governor, knows quite a bit about handling emergencies. I saw him on TV the other day, revealing one of the key things about emergencies—a lesson I learned years ago as a worker in Wisconsin’s state emergency operations. There are two things, Cuomo said—I’m loosely paraphrasing—two things: One is the objective state of things: the resources, the damage, the things that need to be repaired; or in the case of a pandemic disease, the infection rates, testing kits, all that operational stuff. The other thing is the public perception of the situation. The latter is what drives rumors, panics, compliance with relief plans or the lack of compliance, etc. Often, Cuomo said, that second factor, the public perception, gets to be a greater problem than the disaster scenario itself. 

Cuomo is dead accurate on that. (Your New Favorite Writer’s note to self: Write a blog post sometime about the 1996 Weyauwega, Wisconsin, train derailment.)

The only thing leaders can do about the second factor, the public perception, is to provide a steady flow of factual information from official sources. Credibility is key. People know when they’re being lied to, and it’s the kiss of death in handling an emergency.

Anthony S. Fauci, M.D. NIAID photo, licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Enter Dr. Anthony Fauci, and his sidekicks Dr. Deborah Brix, Admiral Brett Giroir, and Surgeon General Jerome Adams. These people are the key medical players on the President’s Coronavirus Task Force. They are physicians with impeccable credentials and experienced public health leaders. Their usefulness on the task force is based on their ability to help move key decisions. But just as important is the straightness of their dialog with the American public as principal briefers of this ongoing emergency. 

What makes them useful is that they never say anything that is not factual. Their credibility is gilt-edged. It is a remarkable feat, day in and day out, to speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, from the epicenter of a hurricane of fear, anxiety, and political games. 

As Executive Branch employees, they work under the authority of President Donald J. Trump—a gargantuan figure and one who speaks in momentarily expedient approximations. Fauci ranks as a genius, saying what is true and correcting what is false, while affirming truths uttered by the president and never crossing swords with him over statements that may be less reliable. 

Without being himself a politician, Anthony Fauci knows how to survive in a tough political environment, giving good service and straight advice with an easy grace. 

He reminds me of Ulysses S. Grant, who made virtues of necessities and got the military job done without having to bother Abe Lincoln overmuch with messy details.

Funny how often parts of the present resemble parts of the past.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Writer

Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.

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(History is not what you thought!)

03.12.20
by

Wuhan that Aprille . . .

We’ll be having an unusual spring.

When vast public ills descend on us, usually we can pinpoint the moment, or the day, when they became manifest.

In the case of sudden events—the eruption of Vesuvius, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, etc.—the time of their occurrence, even to the second, is obvious to all.

John Martin’s 1821 painting Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Public Domain.

Other disasters roll out more slowly, and the precise moment we later remember is really an instant of realization, a time when the nature and dimensions of the threat suddenly crystallized. Thus it was at the Battle of Shiloh—April 6-7, 1862—when the emergence of forty thousand yipping rebels from the woods near a Tennessee River landing destroyed the wishful Northern hope that the Secession had almost run its course. Likewise, in the spring of 1965, the Students for a Democratic Society’s march on Washington served notice that the Vietnam War would not be, like previous wars, supported by most of the American public. 

The Slow Roll

So it is with the COVID-19 pandemic. It has been raging, in China, since 1 December 2019. On 7 January 2020 the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a travel notice for travelers to Wuhan, relating to “the cluster of cases of pneumonia of an unknown etiology.” On 9 January the World Health Organization confirmed the existence of a “novel coronavirus,” and the first death occurred in China.

On 19 January, cases began appearing in areas of China outside Wuhan. 

On 21 January, the United States reported its first laboratory-confirmed case, in the state of Washington. 

Li Wenliang. Fair use.

On 28 January, China’s Supreme People’s Court ruled that whistleblower, Li Wenliang, had not committed the crime of spreading “rumors” when on 30 December 2019 he posted to a WeChat forum for medical school alumni that seven patients under his care appeared to have contracted SARS. In their ruling, the Supreme People’s Court stated, “If society had at the time believed those ‘rumors’. . . perhaps it would’ve meant we could better control the coronavirus today. Rumors end when there is openness.”

On 6 February, Dr. Li died of the coronavirus illness.

By that time, there were thousands of cases in China and many cases in other countries of the world and certain cruise ships at sea or quarantined in ports. 

Since then, we have had daily reports of new illness and deaths in many places around the world, and in the United States. America’s and the world’s financial markets have crashed as airlines, cruise lines, and many other business have seen their customer streams and supply chains badly affected.

Moment of Truth

Yesterday—Wednesday, 11 March 2020—is when this illness became real to most of us: 

Tom Hanks as Forrest Gump. Photo by lakesbutta. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
  • Tom Hanks caught it. And his wife, Rita Wilson. They have been diagnosed in Australia, where they are making a film.
  • The National Collegiate Athletic Association announced that their annual basketball tournament would be played with practically nobody in the stands. (Today, they canceled the event entirely.)
  • The World Health Organization officially declared a global pandemic (as if we didn’t know already).
  • Donald J. Trump made a speech from the Oval Office. Whether you liked it or not probably depends on what you think of Trump generally.
  • Norway closed, for crying out loud!

Now that Tom Hanks, our national Everyman, has caught the corona bug, and now that one of our great national festivals, the NCAA Tournament, has been canceled—COVID-19, overnight, has become dire in a way it was not before.

The Upshot

Classes, events, gatherings everywhere are being canceled or rescheduled. My own life has been affected: The University of Wisconsin Writers’ Institute, an event many of us look forward to all year long, is suddenly off the books. We await, with bated breath, the new dates.

It’s most frustrating. But it really is necessary. A full-court press, in the realm of what we now call “social distancing,” is probably the greatest weapon we have to “flatten the curve” of the coronavirus. It will save lives—mine for sure, maybe yours, too.

I have no advice for you, Dear Reader, any better than what you can get elsewhere. As Abraham Lincoln said in a much different context, “With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured.” 

Please do your best to stay healthy. I need all the devoted readers I can get. 

Blessings and best wishes for a long, long life,

Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Writer.

Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.

Price of Passage

Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois

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(History is not what you thought!)