179. Covid News

I’ve been writing these notes on the Pandemic for two years.  At the beginning it was sometimes a daily thing, as Covid dominated our lives. Now Covid takes its place in daily news with Ukraine and fire in New Mexico. Some days it’s not in the news at all—although, as President Biden reminded us yesterday, it is the only news in some American homes. 

 

He said that there were over a million empty chairs at American tables because of Covid deaths, that it is not over, that people are still dying every day. He asked Congress for money for more vaccines and remedies to cure the sick. Flags will fly at half-staff in memory of the million.

 

Commentators were quick to point out that the real death count is probably more, taking account of the indirect Covid deaths caused by crowded health care facilities, staffing shortages, delayed treatments for other things. And the people in poor places and anti-vax surroundings who we didn’t learn about or who didn’t want us to know.

 

Dr. Fauci, who hasn’t made the evening news for some time, came on last night to tell us that he had once predicted 200,000 deaths as a possibility—and people thought he was grandstanding. He said that a quarter of the million deaths—250,000—would have been avoided if people would have taken advantage of the vaccines. 

 

We’ll be picking at the entrails of Covid now, saying what we should have done, missing those we’ve lost, getting “boosted” or not, arguing still and inexplicably about the reality of it. But Covid is part of our landscape, like war and fire, elections, Supreme Court decisions and climate change. 

 

If I wrote daily about Covid now people would think me obsessed. I think about the few who wrestled with the 1918 virus for decades, and those now who labor away in labs and pore over medical, demographic, ethnic, and economic statistics in efforts to understand, to trace its path, to prepare us for the next pandemic. 

 

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178. Between two “truths"

Between Two “Truths”

 

It strikes me, sitting here in the Republic of Turkey in the middle of Anatolia, that we in the United States see ourselves as divided between two “truths”: Covid 19 is a dangerous epidemical disease—Covid is a hoax; the election was fair—the election was fraudulent; January 6 was an attack on Democracy—January 6 was a legitimate protest; we should defund the police—we should fund more police; Public Television provides accurate news information—Fox News has the truth.

 

I could go on, but the important thing is that our belief systems precede and shape our “truths.” These belief systems are shaped over years with the mentoring of family, community, religion and peers. Facts occur to us as pictures through our eyes—directly or from photos or paintings or screens; words from pages, newscasts, social media, movies, and those spoken directly; sounds—from mouths and screens, tubes and tubas, wind, water, and weather; from touch and smell and taste. But they have to make it through the belief barrio for interpretation. Difficult: a vegetarian will gurgle at meat, cowboys I know hate the smell of sheep, and Bedouins wear layers against the sun that white Westerners meet with sunscreen. 

 

I believe that we grow into our beliefs as we grow into the clothes that we eventually find comfortable. There are many who love to change clothes frequently, or at least experiment with new ones, but all of us to some extent are prisoners to the garb—and the belief systems—that we’ve grown comfortable with.

 

Is it a stretch to think that whole countries behave similarly? Or that at the least the leaders of countries, whether elected, appointed, or having gained purchase by force, wear the countries they lead like garments, shake and hunker in them at new “facts” until they find comfort, looking to neighbors to see and hear and feel approval and disapproval?  

 

When Russia’s tanks rolled into Ukraine and its bombs hit Ukrainian cities, the world stepped up—almost in unison—to condemn Russia and support Ukraine. We—the world—reacted to the first images, the pictures and the sounds of war being waged by one powerful country onto a much smaller neighboring country.

 

But now the world’s nations—more accurately, the leaders of nations—are looking and listening past the initial images, and some number are finding that Russia’s truths are a more soothing fit to their worlds than are those of America and Western Europe and the Ukrainians under Russia’s boot.

 

How can we live together in a country in which belief-clothes are so different, and in a world where countries vary so much? How can we find some common truths? 

177. The Hangover

It struck me today, as I watched yet another news broadcast with horrible photos of the War in Ukraine, that, reeling from a long Covid-induced drunk, we’re bleary-eyed with the morning. As things have eased in recent weeks with shots and boosters and the immunization provided by the disease itself, we look back on a two-year long binge drunk. And we are hung over. 

 

Numbers of us sobered up from time to time, many with Covid, some of whom died and are still dying—although in smaller numbers. The easy ones, the old drinkers with little resistance—those with age and asthma and other health issues working against them—went first, with the grieving of a relative looking in the nursing home window. A few loud-mouthed braggarts who thought they could drink forever, without masks and shots, went down.  

 

We moderates minded our Ps and Qs, but are still shaking off the effects of the long-haul binge. We’re hungover, wondering whether we dare take a drink of fresh air, have a glass of wine in a restaurant or drink in a bar. Maybe a little taste—the hair of the dog. 

 

Or, “ah, to hell with it. Give me a Bloody Mary and put that War-thing going on in Ukraine up on the screen.” 

 

The next long drunk? 

176. Murder—up close and at a distance

In 1960, Israeli operatives captured Adolph Eichmann in Argentina, and brought him to Jerusalem for trial. Eichmann had been a Nazi leader in sending millions of European Jews into exile and death camps, and was a major figure in the “final solution”—to rid Germany entirely of Jews. 

 

The 1961 trial was broadcast world-wide, Eichmann testifying and watching from a glass booth. The social historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt covered the trial for the New Yorker Magazine, and in 1963 published the story in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Many Jewish leaders of the day harshly criticized Arendt, herself a Jewish refugee from Germany who had escaped before the War, for being soft on Eichmann, for understanding and explaining him.

 

What I recall—and it has been over 50 years since I read the book—is that the word in the title, “banality,” was used to describe Eichmann as, in many ways, a “normal,” even prototypically normal, human being. The fear she raised is that someone the court psychologists found normal by their measurements, someone who had been a less than stellar student but an outstanding bureaucrat who saw inferior humans as abstractions, had been capable of carrying out the atrocities that we now call the Holocaust. 

 

There were lesser Eichmanns of course, the people who stood Jews—and Gypsies, homosexuals, and communists—up in front of open pits and shot them to bury them; those who filled the gas chambers, who put people on meat hooks into ovens. And there were those who lived “normal” lives in villages within smelling distance of the camps. (After liberation, General Eisenhower took an entire village to a death camp and made them dig graves.)

 

I remember and write this today because of Ukraine. Yes, Putin is responsible for the holocaust that is happening before our screen-glued eyes. But what of the functionaries between Putin and the soldiers on the ground? And what of the soldiers themselves, who tied hands behind backs and shot people, who shot children in the streets? And what of those who launched and continue to launch long-distance missiles at hospitals and schools? 

 

When we consider the bureaucrats and these practitioners of long-range destruction of cities and people in Ukraine, does it come too close for us to leaders who sent soldiers and drone strikes that brought destruction to Afghanistan and Syria?

 

We fear a nuclear holocaust—rightfully so. But we and the world must learn how to stop the killing done by everyday soldiers and mobs—and by bureaucrats following orders and casting destruction from safe distances where the targets are only images on screens. 

 

We must do more than stand by until forced—metaphorically—to dig the graves of the victims. 

175. Two minutes on war--Murder

 Murder—up close and at a distance

 

In 1960, Israeli operatives captured Adolph Eichmann in Argentina, and brought him to Jerusalem for trial. Eichmann had been a Nazi leader in sending millions of European Jews into exile and death camps, and was a major figure in the “final solution”—to rid Germany entirely of Jews. 

 

The 1961 trial was broadcast world-wide, Eichmann testifying and watching from a glass booth. The social historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt covered the trial for the New Yorker Magazine, and in 1963 published the story in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Many Jewish leaders of the day harshly criticized Arendt, herself a Jewish refugee from Germany who had escaped before the War, for being soft on Eichmann, for understanding and explaining him.

 

What I recall—and it has been over 50 years since I read the book—is that the word in the title, “banality,” was used to describe Eichmann as, in many ways, a “normal,” even prototypically normal, human being. The fear she raised is that someone the court psychologists found normal by their measurements, someone who had been a less than stellar student but an outstanding bureaucrat who saw inferior humans as abstractions, had been capable of carrying out the atrocities that we now call the Holocaust. 

 

There were lesser Eichmanns of course, the people who stood Jews—and Gypsies, homosexuals, and communists—up in front of open pits and shot them to bury them; those who filled the gas chambers, who put people on meat hooks into ovens. And there were those who lived “normal” lives in villages within smelling distance of the camps. (After liberation, General Eisenhower took an entire village to a death camp and made them dig graves.)

 

I remember and write this today because of Ukraine. Yes, Putin is responsible for the holocaust that is happening before our screen-glued eyes. But what of the functionaries between Putin and the soldiers on the ground? And what of the soldiers themselves, who tied hands behind backs and shot people, who shot children in the streets? And what of those who launched and continue to launch long-distance missiles at hospitals and schools? 

 

When we consider the bureaucrats and these practitioners of long-range destruction of cities and people in Ukraine, does it come too close for us to leaders who sent soldiers and drone strikes that brought destruction to Afghanistan and Syria?

 

We fear a nuclear holocaust—rightfully so. But we and the world must learn how to stop the killing done by everyday soldiers and mobs—and by bureaucrats following orders and casting destruction from safe distances where the targets are only images on screens. 

 

We must do more than stand by until forced—metaphorically—to dig the graves of the victims. 

173. Two minutes on the War--Saving Face

When I wrote of my fear that Putin, if hemmed in by economics and resisted successfully by Ukrainian forces for long enough, might lash out with nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons, a friend wrote back in agreement. And then said “We need to offer him something to save face.”

 

But is there an exit route, something that we can give him or he can take which will result in enough satisfaction that he will stop this horrendous invasion? 

 

Granted, Putin has stepped past many lines. Last night, on “Firing Line,” NYTimes photojournalist Lynsey Addario said that the Russians are now indiscriminately lobbing ordinance into population centers, and deliberately targeting civilians—women, children, old people—who are evacuating. Addario, who has “covered every major conflict and humanitarian crises of her generation, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Darfur, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, South Sudan, Somalia, and Congo,” says that Ukraine is the worst. It took years for three million refugees to flee Syria—and less than a month for that number from Ukraine. 

 

This puts Putin in the company of past bad dictators, including but not limited to Pinochet, Marcos, Khadafi, Saddam Hussein, Riza Shah, Idi Amin, and his own countryman, Josef Stalin. We needn’t get into discussions of who exiled more, who killed more, and who was more dangerous to neighboring countries. All of these men—yes, all men—are noted for their bad deeds. All gripped power and hung onto it by intrigue and corruption. All had cadres of supporters, sometimes idealists who thought, at the beginning, that they were following a man who would benefit their countries. Some fled—most famously Trotsky fleeing Stalin—but always a group stuck by the dictator and became complicit in everything he wanted and directed in his use of power and personal vision for the country. 

 

In retrospect, wealth seems only an adjunct to the crucial commodities of vision and power—restoration of past greatness a common thread from the Shah’s identification with the ancient Persian Peacock Throne to Putin’s Greater Russia. Most pundits discount the direct influence of oligarchs, the toadies who serve Putin but don’t influence him. They are not part of the inner circle, which includes Putin’s old KGB colleagues and others who’ve risen through military and intelligence ranks.

 

Looking at that roster of mostly twentieth century autocrats, their demise almost always came from within, from the inner circle itself, or from a still-standing religious or ethnic power center close-by. Marcos was toppled by a military faction; Idi Amin by exiled Ugandans and his failed war against a neighbor; the Shah by rising forces of democracy and religion; and Stalin died in a pool of his own urine when his guards feared waking him. 

 

All dictators come to their ends, and rarely is it a safe exit provided by outsiders. The outside can, as Ukraine and much of the world are doing now, stress the dictator’s rule, but the collapse comes from within. Look to the military and Kremlin intelligence—or his own health—for Putin’s end.  

172. One minute on the War

It’s true that more people die in plagues, pandemics, and the swarms of infectious diseases that swell and whither in their own times and places around the world than die in wars. A third of Europe died in the plague; fifty to ninety percent in indigenous American tribes fell to smallpox, measles, and other European diseases in the first years of colonization; and an estimated fifty million died world-wide in the 1917-18-19 Influenza epidemic. We’re now at eight million Covid deaths world-wide, and are approaching a million in the US alone. 

But Ukraine is heart-stopping. 

 

Diseases are car accidents and Ukraine is an airplane crash. More of us die in car accidents than in plane crashes, but we have levels of control on the highway that we, as passengers, don’t have on planes. With diseases, we vaccinate, mask, drink clean water and take care of ourselves—or we don’t. Our Covid Pandemic, a stealth invader, works its way through the crowds, picking off one and leaving the next. Most—though not all—of us who take precautions live on. 

 

In the War in Ukraine, personal choices—to flee or to stay, to go to this bomb shelter or that one—are small compared to the power and randomness of Russian artillery and bombs. War in Ukraine is, as one still surviving told a reporter yesterday, a daily lottery for its citizens.

 

Doctors and politicians differ, sometimes mightily, on dealing with the Pandemic, but they drive the buses and we are citizen passengers, mostly listening to their advice, sometimes screaming at them to make the other turn. Or we drive our own cars and disregard the warnings of experienced drivers completely. It might be an at times contentious world, but it is largely predictable.  

 

To stay with my analogy, Putin is the aggrieved pilot of a huge plane loaded with deadly weapons. He also has a yen for ancient glory. And looking at the pictures of Meriupol, the destroyed hospitals and refugee-filled theater, the blocks that were once apartment houses, and remembering the jihadist preparations before and the lottery-like outcomes after 9/11, I fear that his deadly combination of aggrievement and hubris will result in Putin flying his plane into a deadly explosion that will engulf us all.

 

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171. War and Pandemic 2

In four years of World War, from 1914-1918, over 5 million people were killed, 116,500 of them Americans. In basically two of those years, 1917-1918, some 50 million people world-wide, and 675,000 Americans, were killed by the Influenza. 

 

It’s true that the War and its aftermath—the celebration of the Armistice—coexisted with the Influenza, and that they intermingled, borrowed deaths and casualties from each other. Nevertheless, the differences in the numbers are shocking. 

 

But not as shocking as the photos and videos of bombed out cities in Ukraine, of apartment houses, hospitals, theaters, houses and neighborhoods reduced to eye-stopping rubble. Not as shocking as “All Quiet on the Western Front” and “Gallipoli,” books and movies that dramatized World War I. 

 

Wars have heroes and villains, display boldness and cowardice. Zelensky is a hero, Fauci is not.  Putin is a villain, the gaggle of anti-vaxxers and Covid minimizers pathetic, but not, in most minds, the embodiment of evil. And it’s true that in war one side’s heroes might be the other sides’ villains, but history often shines light that is bright enough for each side to discover its own heroes and villains after the war is done. 

 

War is history’s sharp turns, when new nations emerge—as they did after WW I—and new and sometimes surprising alliances grow—as those of the US and Japan, the US and Germany did after WW II. 

 

Disease is history’s slogs, the long hauls that depopulate and weaken peoples and nations, and allow others to emerge stronger. The patterns of changes that The Plague wrought on Europe, or the impacts of the Influenza on the post WW I World are fodder for academic treatises, but not clear enough to teach in the standard history texts. Rarely and only briefly best-sellers.

 

Our time is like this. We don’t know what the outcome of Russia’s war on Ukraine will have—but we already have our heroes and villains, with more to come. 

 

And we don’t know where Covid 19 will go, how it will seep across nations and continents, but do know that it already has stolen more lives than the last decades of regional wars. It’s heroes are quiet ones, dressed in lab coats and hospital smocks, but we are too busy embracing “normal” life’s return to pay them much mind. Their stories will eventually be told in books, but not best sellers. 

 

War will always top the best-seller charts. 

  

170. The Pill

The Pandemic has become a light and almost refreshing diversion from the horrors of war. Yes, people are still getting sick—and some are even dying. But the numbers are down so far and went down so fast that people across the country are breathing more freely again. And breathing without masks and trepidation at not wearing masks.

 

I think it was buried somewhere in President Biden’s speech, but  that free testing will now be accompanied by a free pill to those who test positive. The new Pfizer pill is apparently successful at warding off the worst impacts of the virus. This is the clincher. Even if I get the disease, there is now an easy way out.

 

That pill reminded me of another, of “the pill” that came into the world in 1960. It was an apex moment in contraception. Other methods of birth control, which had been common, especially among wealthier Americans, were prohibited by a series of “Comstock laws” beginning in the 1870s. They gradually loosened, and in the 1940s Planned Parenthood emerged as a vocal advocate for family planning, and in the 1950s, the Rockefeller founded “Population Council” started preaching the gospel world-wide as an antidote to overpopulation. 

 

It seemed that the pill had arrived just in time to solve problems, from family poverty to international resource scarcity. In the bargain, it would make another oft-practiced but increasingly distained and prohibited practice, abortion, unnecessary. 

 

Not quite. The pill came in 1960, but the purity movement stubbornly hung on. In 1965, the Supreme Court ruled that government could not stop married couples from practicing birth control. It wasn’t until the 1970s that restrictions for unmarried women were lifted. 

 

The liberalizing movement continued with the fight for abortion rights—the pill had apparently not fixed the birth control problem completely—and in 1973 the Supreme Court ruled that a woman had the right to control her body, including the right to abortion. 

 

Purity movements continue to fight abortion rights, and to advocate for specific definitions of family, the world’s population continues to grow, and starvation and wars beset us at this historic moment. It is doubtful that the Covid pill will completely stave off a virus that continues to weave its way around the world, continues to impact health care systems and local and national governments, and the lives of millions of ordinary people. 

 

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169. Pictures of War--and of Covid

Pictures of war are always dramatic—even the sad ones. They run the full range of emotions, from the battered and beaten bodies, the maimed and the dead, to the triumphant entries of American tanks into Paris and Baghdad. In between are the slogs of war, the muddy battlefields, forced marches, the rests in foxholes and cigarettes lit with Zippo lighters. 

In the past it was all men; women were in the nursing corps, dancing with soldiers at USO parties, handing out donuts to the troop trains. Beginning, in my memory, with the Israelis, women warriors have been part war. And here I should mention that long before women were allowed or encouraged to help make war, they were recording it in words and pictures. Margaret Bourke-White’s WW II photo-journalism opened doors that have led to our time, when we accept women war correspondents from Kabul to Kyiv. Jane Ferguson’s reports from Afghanistan during and after the evacuation were stunning. 

Pandemics are not so picturesque. There were early dramatic photos and video of EMTs hauling Covid-dead bodies out of New York apartments, and some sad footage of folks saying farewells to loved ones through hospital and nursing home windows. And then the pandemic pictures drifted off to interviews with Fauci and with overworked doctors, nurses, and hospital administrators. Like a droning white noise in the background.

Until last night, the closest thing to triumphal photos of the current pandemic were the flag-waving Canadian truckers, and theirs was divisive work meant to further divide, not to rally a broad public against a common enemy. 

Last night Joe Biden took the podium for his State of the Union speech without a mask, Vice-President Kamala Harris and Speaker Nancy Pelosi flanking and behind him. They too were maskless. The room was full, a different picture than what we have been seeing for the last two years. Most of the Senators and Congressmen and women, the staffers and dignitaries, were maskless and smiling. I caught sight of my friend Pramila Jayapal smiling up close with the President—and remembered the TV cameras catching her hiding in fear in the balcony on January 6, 2021. 

We weren’t all happy with everything Joe Biden said—from left or right. But we all seemed to embrace the moment, to somehow realize that the worst of Covid-19 might be behind us, and that what most of us have done to ward it off—with masks, distancing, isolation, and vaccination—has been worth the effort. It was, somehow, a reassuring picture. 

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168. Yesterday’s News

The PBS Newshour last night focused on Ukraine, of course, but it was also the first newscast in over two years that I remember making no mention at all of the Pandemic. No news on infection rates, death rates, vaccinations. The truckers’ convoys in Canada and New Zealand, and one supposed to be organizing in our own country didn’t even make the Newshour. 

 

Wallowa County showed just one new case yesterday, and the state continues to show rapid declines in cases and hospitalizations. Mask mandates are moved forward, and re-openings are announced. Death marches on—expected as its path of ups and downs follows cases and hospitalizations. 

 

But Covid-19 has been tempered by vaccinations and contagions resulting in forms of “natural” immunity, and been swallowed by fatigue, boredom, anger, and now War. 

 

I’ll mark February 24, 2022 on my calendar as the day that Covid ceased being the number one concern of the population and our governments. It might come back, gnaw away at us one mild case, one hard case at a time. It will matter to the hard cases and their loved ones, but to the rest of America it is now yesterday’s news.

 

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167.. War and Pandemic

War and Pandemic

 

The threat of war in Ukraine has pushed Covid from the headlines. It makes me think about the Influenza epidemic of 1917-18 and the first World War, when Armistice celebrations at war’s end fueled an influenza surge.   

 

But there are so many differences between then and now: the vaccines, rapid communication, and the fact that this Covid seems to like older people best. Many of those who’ve died have been in nursing homes and assisted living places. Children and the young and healthy seem to do better with it.

 

Which is one reason that people are sliding into one form and another of “normalcy”—the power of prediction made possible by rapid communication and statistics being another.  States are announcing lifting mask requirements on the basis of statistics and hospitalization rates. Oregon’s indoor mask mandate will end on or before March 31; Washington’s is set for March 21. It’s amazing that these predictions can be as accurate as they are—Omicron peaked as we were told it would.

 

War still hovers—over and around Covid as did the 1917 Influenza. That pandemic’s special trick was to attack people in the prime of life, in their teens and twenties. It followed the troops, jumped the trench lines, and made its way around the world. Troops were great carriers, and when the men came home from war and the population celebrated, the Influenza virus did the same.

 

War, and near-war, seem to be everywhere. Not only in Ukraine and Belarus, but in Ethiopia, Syria, and Yemen. Meanwhile, refugees are spilling from their homes in Afghanistan and Iraq, and from conflicts and droughts in Africa and South and Central America. 

 

And the virus, Covid, snakes its way through all of these places, mutates and moves more quickly. Maybe it made a bad move with Omicron, increasing its infection rate but decreasing its severity. That, and the vaccinations, seem to be slowing Covid down. I wonder what it—the virus—will do to adapt? Will it be satisfied with “endemic”? Or will it mutate again, aim itself at younger people who can carry it further faster? 

 

Or will its impact pale or lose itself in the greater costs of war, refugees, and starvation. The word is that 1 million Afghans will die of starvation this winter. 

 

There are no vaccines for war or starvation. 

 

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166. Truckers

Years ago, during my time in Turkey, I had a friend who was British by speech and passport, but a roaming expat in reality. Another name he sometimes called himself was “colonial.” He’d grown up in what were still British colonies in Africa and India/Pakistan. His wife was Italian. When the colonies slipped away with independence, he’d continued to work for the Empire as an English teacher. He was teaching English through the British consulate in Izmir, Turkey when I knew him in 1969.

 

In November of 1969, reporter Seymour Hersh broke the story of a US Army massacre of as many as 500 Vietnamese men, women, and children. The event had occurred more than a year earlier, in March of 1968. The massacre had been stopped midstream by a military helicopter pilot who put himself between the troops and fleeing visitors. An early investigation white-washed the incident, but broader inquiries led to court martials, and a public soon split over the guilt and sentencing of Lieutenant William Calley. 

 

My expat British friend’s mother was still alive. She told her son that such things happened all the time in the colonial years, but that news of them didn’t get back to England for months and years, and by then the participants had gone on to other places, the incidents faded from public knowledge, and the dead and damaged were not English in any case.

 

Hersh’s story traveled the world, but the news was blunted by months of military missteps and delays. Calley was the only one of more than a dozen implicated in the crimes that was convicted. He served three or four years and was released.  I don’t remember names or stories of any of the Vietnamese.

 

Today, Covid stories travel instantaneously. Reasons for despair and disgruntlement cross the world: schools closed or disrupted; marriages troubled; rare reactions to the vaccine; the breakthrough cases; the mistaken identification of Covid as reason for death; the postponement of elective surgery; depression, anxiety, alcohol. 

 

And government—any government—and its mandates become the agents of personal distress. Some Canadian truckers, who are, like the rest of Canadians, largely vaccinated, took out anti-government frustrations by convoying and blocking border crossings. Rebel, confederate flags from the US flew in Canada. Truckers convoyed in France, and grow in Brussels and New Zealand. 

 

Truckers—a few of the tens of thousands of truckers in Canada and France and New Zealand—traveled, protestors waved flags and attracted the vaccinated and the unvaccinated alike under the banner of “freedom.” 

 

Their pictures and sounds traveled faster than Covid itself across the world.

165. Truth Telling

In my last one-minute blast I argued that the year-long sustained effort by mainstream journalists to tell the truth about the 2020 election, and to label Donald Trump’s lies lies at every opportunity, is making a difference. And I suggested that we do the same thing with Covid—that the mainstream press drop the big numbers and hospital staff losses, the hospitalizations per thousand and the deaths per thousand, and tell us the true stories of the unvaccinated, breakthrough cases, the afflicted health care workers, the nursing homes. That they go back to what they started on the streets of New York when this whole pandemic thing exploded. Do you remember the mobile frozen storage units brought in to house the dead?

 

There is the occasional whisper by a nurse or doctor that a dying patient wished he would have been vaccinated—and that others go to their deaths celebrating their freedom to choose. At least we’ve heard hints of that. Why aren’t we hearing the words and seeing the dying patient or the relative watching and waiting?

 

I want to hear from Washington State police trooper Robert LaMay’s wife or mother. LaMay was fired in October… “after failing to get vaccinated against COVID-19 by the deadline set for state employees by Gov. Jay Inslee. Three months later, he died from the virus.” Along with more than 300 other local, state, and federal law enforcers who passed with Covid in 2021. I’ve not heard from a dying cop or a surviving spouse.

 

Truth-telling does make a difference: On Friday former Vice-President Pence broke with the former president: “Trump was wrong,” he said, in thinking that he—Pence—could overturn the election results. 

 

Most tellingly, NYTimes columnist David Brooks said on Friday that Evangelical churches are reconsidering and reuniting. The few who boldly spoke against the election lie, the minister who broke early with Trump over his “grab” video, the few church leaders who admitted that sexual abuse occurred in Protestant as well as Catholic churches, the churches who reached across color lines, are no longer cowering. Ministers and parishioners are calling it liberating.

 

Meanwhile, what do we do with the mask mandate riots in Ottawa? The reported hundreds of thousands of healthcare workers who have given up? Getting past the headlines to truth-telling is hard work. 

164. What the Media Covers

Yesterday morning, on National Public Radio’s “The Takeaway," reproductive rights advocate Elizabeth Nash said that the news media—even the “liberal’ media—covers abortion not as a health issue, but as a political issue. Individual testimonies, the stories of women who have had abortions, and those who are grappling with the myriad health, economic, and family issues that go into the decision making, are rarely told in news stories on abortion. And while polls show that 70 or 80% of the public supports Roe v Wade, including many and maybe a majority of Republicans, the media is wed to the quickly divisive and often sensational politics of abortion. 

 

Similarly, the growing concern over full hospital beds and decreasing numbers of health care workers is not, in the press, tied to specific cases. We do not hear from the woman denied an operation, or her anxieties when it is postponed. We might occasionally—very occasionally—hear the word triage, but more often it is hidden in obfuscation. “Prioritizing” is softer than the harsh decisions implied by “triage.” 

 

And when news commentators interview nursing staff and hospital directors, the story is about tired and overworked staff members—the number of beds available, and how many patients a reduced medical staff can handle. The personal interview with a nurse who has quit is rare, and interviews with patients and their family members waiting for care almost never.

 

Covid itself is most often displayed in numbers and politics. The stories of suffering and death, which we saw from New York in Covid’s early days, are now rare. We are “normalizing” Covid much as we are normalizing the rest of the world, in terms of Red and Blue, R and D, Liberal and Conservative, West Coast, the NE, and the rest.  

 

Soon after the last presidential election, there must have been some agreement among newscasters that the election would not be talked about in terms of “allegations,” but in terms of lies and truth. It’s sometimes been a hard line to hold, but there is evidence that repeating the truth of the election results and the failures at overturning it—and pointing explicitly to the lies, is causing more and better discussion, even within the Republican party. 

 

How might the Covid world change if we concentrated on telling true stories of Covid patients and patients denied service, health care workers have been infected themselves, and those who have fled their professions entirely?

163. A Perfect Day

The sun is rising out my window, and Chief Joseph Mountain is bright against the sky. There is snow on it, lots of snow, as there is in my yard and on the yards and fields of neighbors. Plenty of snow means plenty of water later in the year.  The air is as clean as the new snow. No hint of gaseous poisonings. No noise, no rumblings of engines, sirens of ambulances, police cars or fire trucks. The dog went out at 5:30, when I got up in the dark. She’s waiting patiently for our walk with the rising sun. It’s about 10 degrees, right for this time of year. I’ll wear a warm jacket and cleats on my feet for the walk. She’ll chase real and imagined cats and deer, and I’ll rein here in with a noise collar.

 

I’ll go to work in my other home, the Josephy Center. It’s a beautiful log building full now of “Abstract Landscape” art. And, of course, full of books in my enclave, the library. I’ll work there from 10 till noon, and then host friend John Frohnmayer for a noon zoom “Brown Bag” discussion of Sport and Philosophy; Ethics in Golf; Skiing and Mysticism. 

 

It could be a perfect day… but there is the undercurrent of Covid lapping at us. The news from a friend that his daughter’s heart surgery has been postponed in Portland because of Covid; another friend waits with a painful knee to get it fixed, waiting because of Covid. And there is news in the local paper about retired veterinarian Sam Morgan falling, breaking his back, going hypothermic, being life-flighted out. Boise had too much Covid to keep him there in recovery. I think he’s in Seattle.

 

Wallowa County’s Covid numbers surged last week, as did the State’s. They might be coming down, but hospitalizations and deaths lag behind numbers. And, once again, most of those being hospitalized and dying are unvaccinated. Even though there are “breakthrough” cases of the vaccinated, in Wallowa County and in the State, about 70 percent of us are vaccinated, and we account for maybe 30 percent of the infections. Oregon Health Authority reminds us that the odds against hospital and death are much higher for the unvaccinated.

 

It’s increasingly difficult to be generous towards those who refuse vaccinations, become sick, and take up hospital beds that others need. 

162. Life--and death--go on

Gail Swart passed away last week. Cancer that she beat back years ago—teaching school while she fought it—came back. She was still teaching piano just weeks ago, and her own children were able to gather round her these last weeks. A visitor just two days before she passed remarked on her humor and her smile. 

 

In my mind’s eye, Gail always has a smile, and often a chuckle. And that often at her own expense. And her long and fruitful life brought that smile to children and grandchildren, and hundreds—no, thousands—of piano students and Enterprise elementary school students over decades.

 

It’s easy to stay with superlatives, remark on the long and good life, and grump that Covid came along and stole the chances for people to spend time with her these past weeks. I didn’t make my way up to her house at the lake, but know that if she thought of me at all, it was with a warm heart. And a chuckle.

 

The first time I remember meeting Gail was shortly after we moved here and Judy was working for Children’s Services. It was a Wednesday or Thursday night of Chief Joseph Days week, and my then-wife and I were enjoying a beer at the Gold Room in Joseph when she got paged. Sheriff Duckworth had a mom under the influence and an infant he had to do something with as he put mom in jail. 

 

Judy called Gail Swart, her number one foster mom. No one checked our alcohol levels as we drove to the courthouse, picked up the baby, and went to the Swarts’ house. Don was at the door, and had pulled an old crib from the basement. Their kids—all beyond crib age, were asleep. He and I put the crib together while Judy and Gail got acquainted with the confused baby, and we left them in charge. We didn’t go back to the Gold Room. 

 

And then Gail was teaching school and we had a second grader who wasn’t much of a singer. No problem. Gail put him in a Santa suit and gave him “Ho Ho Ho” lines for the school Christmas play. 

 

Years later, Gail and her sister Nancy made generous donations that allowed Fishtrap to buy their childhood Coffin home. I “lived” in Gail’s house for years. She played a recital to a full house there once, and she and her children and nephews and nieces visited with their own memories 

 

I remember most the music and the smile, the piano playing and the storytelling. It was a wonderful life. 

 

It’s easy to say “smile” and “wonderful.” But I wanted to chase my own life back to those precious instances when the smile and wonder were for and with me.

 

# # # 

161. More on “fun"

 More on “fun”

 

What I was trying to say on Tuesday was that Archie Bunker and Meathead, in the early 1970s, made it possible for my Republican and conservative-by-nature father, and me, thinking myself more worldly and aware of injustices, to laugh together. We could laugh with each other and at each other.

 

In the backroom of the Bookloft in those same years, and well into the Reagan years, Republican Chuck Gavin, the secret cigarette smoking, World War II-wounded vet who’d “done his backpacking” during that War, would regale us with stories of his fight with “John Barleycorn” in the hospital after being wounded; the old rodeo buddies who showed up at his door after he’d married a city girl—he’d hand them a few bucks for entry money and shoo them away before Shirley caught sight of them; and the way he’d put a wet finger to the wind when advising sheepmen when to sell their stock. Jack Finch would tell us that he and Ronald Reagan shared a birth year, and “that SOB doesn’t even remember the Depression.” And Max Bauer would take us on raucous tours of Wallowa County in the years following the big War. “A lot of war-widows around,” he’d say, and his mother shooed him off to college before he got caught in one scandal or another. He and Gavin shared getting their college educations on the GI Bill.

 

We’d all drink our coffee and laugh together—the two of my regular morning customers vying to out-story the one who had just finished his story. 

 

Which-ever side of this Covid thing you are on, it is near impossible to laugh with your sister or neighbor who lives on the other side, especially when it comes to the Covid itself. New York Times columnist Frank Bruni says today that religions’ falling believers are being replaced with worship based on political division, He quotes a new Times survey:

“Millions of Republican voters have decided that downplaying Covid is core to their identity as conservatives… Millions of Democrats have decided that organizing their lives around Covid is core to their identity as progressives.”

 

And not only can’t we laugh with the other side. We can barely laugh among ourselves, though comedy shows rooted to above-described political tribes apparently try. I guess—I don’t watch them.

 

I’m waiting for the next Archies and Meatheads, who were, despite their differences, “All in the Family.”

# # #

160. Fun

 Fun

 

Fun happens spontaneously, and the Pandemic doesn’t like it. The pandemic wants people to be measured and careful, and the people who do not want to live this way, the people who want “normal” life and choose to disregard Covid’s seriousness don’t have much room for emotions we normally associate with fun. Oh, I guess they have fun—when they are not listening to or making tirades about vaccines and masks, when they are with others like them. But as Covid and the fights over vaccinations and masking become prominent in their lives, there is not much room for fun.

 

Those of us who are careful and serious about keeping Covid at bay don’t have a lot of room for fun either. And our politics—like that of those on the other side—show it. We want the other side to see the truth and help us fight the Covid. We want the Democrats to get their stuff together and legislate. We are strident, which isn’t much fun.

 

Back in fun days, when I was in the bookstore and Chuck Gavin, my old boss at the Extension Service, was retired and hid a pack of cigarettes among the used books in the back room, he would come to drink coffee with Jack Finch, the retired school teacher from Imnaha and before that the head of vocational education in Alaska—with a time in between to serve on Governor Rockefeller’s Arkansas parole board. Chuck couldn’t carry his cigarettes because he was hiding them from his wife—a 70-year-old hiding cigs; now that’s fun. 

 

Finch was the avowed liberal, whose best story was about Rockefeller desegregating the Arkansas prisons. A big, white, farm boy complained to officials that it was nothing personal, but that with his upbringing and whatnot, he could not be expected to live with black prisoners. The warden found the biggest, blackest prisoner in the system and made the two cellmates. Jack would light up with a barrel-chested chuckle as he told it. 

 

Gavin was a Republican, and told any newcomer to the coffee clutch that he had me only five years at the Extension Office. Another five years and he would have had me wearing short hair and voting R. I always replied that I would have turned him D.

 

But for real fun in the back of the bookstore, we waited for Max Bauer, a retired accountant and jazz player who had grown up here, served in the Army Band in WW II (where band members had the job of retrieving corpses when there was not a band gig), and become an accountant courtesy the GI Bill. He’d recently moved back home to take care of his aging mother, her long-time lover, and a discarded husband who’d gone off to train polo ponies when she’d chased him out for the younger lover. He was an old man now, and passed the bookstore daily on his walks between the Range Rider card game and his basement apartment in his ex-wife’s house. 

 

Forty years ago we could make fun of WW II, the President, and the ménage à trois of an aging saxophone player’s mom—together! I can’t remember hearing or seeing one funny thing about this pandemic. 

159. Geological time

My friend Ellen is a geologist. When times get tough in the present—politicly, socially, personally—she thinks it useful to think in geological time, in which our moment is small. I’m not a geologist, cannot keep one “zine” apart from another in my mind, but I have read some amount of history, and tough times in the present get me thinking about the rise and fall of nations and empires. 

I went to Turkey in 1965, less than 50 years after the Ottoman Empire, long dubbed the “sick man of Europe,” collapsed in the course of the First World War. At the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, European powers sought to pick the skeleton of the old Empire, which had in the course of that War included what we now call Lebanon and Syria and parts or wholes of other current nations. Italy wanted this, France that, and Greece another bit of the centuries-old body. That old body, in the 1500s and 1600s, had stretched across the Middle East and well into Europe. It had grown and shrunk at its edges over centuries, and during the first War Lawrence of Arabia was leading Arab revolutionaries on its southern flanks, and the north—up against Russia—and central Anatolia were blaming Armenians for their woes.

Still, at the Dardanelles, the narrow straits that linked the Black Sea and the Aegean, a young Turkish general named Mustafa Kemal held of British and Australian troops at the Battle of Gallipoli. A British head of the Navy named Churchill lost his job over it; Mustafa Kemal fashioned a new country, Turkey, and became known as Ataturk.

I think of this now because it seems that we are in the middle of great movements—the Pandemic; drought, hunger, and refugees; rising seas and melting icecaps—and that we’re not sure where the edges are. Climate change had something to do with the industrial revolution, but pick your starting point. 

And the Pandemic? Do we go back to the battle with Ebola or AIDS? To the 1918 Influenza? Or to Europe’s bringing smallpox to the “new” world? 

I find some comfort in being in “the middle of things.” It’s not the end of the world—nor the beginning of a new age. We do what we can, not knowing where or what the far end of it is, but history, and the gift of curiosity, keep me looking for the signs, as my friend Ellen searches the markings on rocks for clues to understanding the past and the present. 

# # # 

 

158. Chaos Update

 

The recent surge in Covid cases and hospitalizations, CDC’s confusing “guidelines” on tests and quarantines, the airline turmoil over the holidays, the confrontations between teachers unions and school and city administrators in Chicago, schools and colleges dancing between in-person and virtual classes, job resignations and health care worker shortages, competition for hospital beds, and the open breaks between the masked and unmasked under the “Masks Required” sign in our local Safeway all bring chaos to mind. 

 

And “chaos” brings me to the book I am reading, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope, by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. The two are married, and “Nic” Kristof is trying to run for Oregon governor from his childhood home in Yamhill. That is not the subject of this post! The book starts with the kids Kristof grew up with in Yamhill, and traces the severe declines in some families as blue-collar jobs are lost and alcohol, drugs, and violence increasingly permeate lives. The authors then go back and forth between Yamhill and other places in the country with stories of despair and others of hope. This morning, as I read this passage, the connection between Covid and Chaos and its impact on children sent chills:

 

“Evidence from neuroscience, psychology, and economics underscores that a crucial window for helping American children is in the first five years, partly because they often suffer lifelong brain damage when raised in chaos and deprivation… they are exposed to ‘toxic stress’ and their brains are flooded with cortisol, a stress hormone that changes brain anatomy.” 

 

With the pandemic, children are in school or daycare one day, and out the next. Rates of depression and suicide talk and attempts among teenagers are spiking. Parents are working from home one day, and not working at all the next. Parents disagree with each other or their neighbors on masks and vaccinations and Covid. My guess—although I have seen nothing official—is that stress levels in homes over work and child-rearing and housekeeping are on the rise. My guess is that alcohol and legal and illegal drug use are also on the rise.  

 

I don’t know where this leaves us, except to remember that the impact of our own actions and words on our children and grandchildren can be immense, and that kind words and caring for them and for all the small ones that are in our lives or just happen into them momentarily might be the most important things we do today. 

 

# # #

 

 

 

 

 

157. Chaos

The recent surge in Covid cases and hospitalizations, CDC’s confusing “guidelines” on tests and quarantines, the airline turmoil over the holidays, the confrontations between teachers unions and school and city administrators in Chicago, schools and colleges dancing between in-person and virtual classes, job resignations and health care worker shortages, competition for hospital beds, and the open breaks between the masked and unmasked under the “Masks Required” sign in our local Safeway all bring chaos to mind. 

And “chaos” brings me to the book I am reading, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope, by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. The two are married, and “Nic” Kristof is trying to run for Oregon governor from his childhood home in Yamhill. That is not the subject of this post! The book starts with the kids Kristof grew up with in Yamhill, and traces the severe declines in some families as blue-collar jobs are lost and alcohol, drugs, and violence increasingly permeate lives. The authors then go back and forth between Yamhill and other places in the country with stories of despair and others of hope. This morning, as I read this passage, the connection between Covid and Chaos and its impact on children sent chills:

“Evidence from neuroscience, psychology, and economics underscores that a crucial window for helping American children is in the first five years, partly because they often suffer lifelong brain damage when raised in chaos and deprivation… they are exposed to ‘toxic stress’ and their brains are flooded with cortisol, a stress hormone that changes brain anatomy.” 

With the pandemic, children are in school or daycare one day, and out the next. Rates of depression and suicide talk and attempts among teenagers are spiking. Parents are working from home one day, and not working at all the next. Parents disagree with each other or their neighbors on masks and vaccinations and Covid. My guess—although I have seen nothing official—is that stress levels in homes over work and child-rearing and housekeeping are on the rise. My guess is that alcohol and legal and illegal drug use are also on the rise.  

I don’t know where this leaves us, except to remember that the impact of our own actions and words on our children and grandchildren can be immense, and that kind words and caring for them and for all the small ones that are in our lives or just happen into them momentarily might be the most important things we do today. 

# # #

 

 

 

 

156. French Toast

Yesterday morning I made French toast. Mixed a couple of eggs with (whole) milk and a generous dollop of vanilla. Let the bread soak and saturate before putting it on the cast iron griddle I’ve had for 50 years. (The griddle is as good as it was then, and good for another fifty, or 150, if I can get one of my kids or grandkids hooked on iron.)

 

I buttered the toast and flooded it with powdered sugar and fresh lime juice—and I ate. 

 

And it occurred to me that the French toast tasted as good as it ever had, better than it did when I was 30 years old and shoveling food into a mouth damaged by pipe heat and smoke, all the while hustling myself and family to get stuff packed for the ski run. 

 

This post could be about taking pleasure in simple things. About the pleasures of being in a warm home and being able to take care of myself. Or about the privilege that I enjoy with the eggs, milk, and bread it takes to make French toast—and having an ample and full belly. 

 

I could get nostalgic about kids at home and skiing on Sundays. Or tear up with the mistakes I’ve made that seem to get shuttled down the generations. Or dissolve with the new growing of Covid and the facts of family members and friends who are, even as I write this, sick with it.

 

It’s where we are, where I am. And maybe the simple lesson of this writing exercise today is to stay the course, support the son who is sick and the grandson who came home from his new job and life in nearby La Grande to do laundry and eat grandpa-cooked food—curry last night, sourdough pancakes this morning. 

 

I’ll keep working at the Josephy Center, keep writing blog posts and newspaper columns, keep advocating for causes I’ve taken on and grown with, and keep wearing my mask and pushing those close to me to vaccinate and boost. And count myself lucky to be doing it all.

 

Wishing you all well too in this crazy, fractured, and yet still familiar world. 

 

# # # 

 

155. Holy S(**&

The big difference between the 1918 Influenza and our Covid-19 can be said in a word: speed. The speeds with which news travels, medicine develops, and people and the virus we carry move. 

Here in Wallowa County we’d about settled in for a long winter’s nap, watching the snow fall from the sky and drift across our roads and yards. Some of us had tried to wash off the old year in New Year’s Day’s polar plunge in Wallowa Lake—while others vowed they’d never go in that lake in mid-summer.

 

We were finding routines, working from home again, but this time because it was too damned windy to go out and our cars might have blown off the road or been covered by a snowplow’s shower. When we woke from that January 2 storm and went to stores for milk and bread, we wore our masks or we did not. Those of us who are mask wearers put them on and off like a pair of mittens as we go in and out of stores. The unmasked don’t heckle us and we don’t heckle them. It’s a kind of standoff—although I know there is muttering from our side that the unmasked and unvaccinated should pay their own hospital bills when the Covid hit sthem, and I imagine the anti-vaxxers and maskers chuckle or fume quietly about our silliness. 

 

And then what? A month ago we hear about this new strain of the Covid that is faster than its predecessors, and that it seems to move right through the vaccinated. Yes, the second and third paragraphs in the news stories opine that the vaccinated suffer less and are hospitalized less frequently, and Dr. Fauci bravely takes the TV mike to say once again that our best defense is vaccinating the unvaccinated and wearing our masks. It is wearying.

 

And then yesterday, January 4, Covid explodes in Oregon, with 4540 new cases, and over 500 hospitalized. And we learn that a friend brought Covid back from a California holiday and another tested positive on returning from Arizona. And the news carries new warnings and directions on testing and quarantining and isolating (and what is the one and what the other?).

We’re well into the second year of this disease, and the second or third or fourth wave, depending on who is counting and where. 

 

A quick look back at 1918 shows an eerily similar trajectory. Mostly by train and troopship, the 1918 influenza circled the globe in 3 or 4 waves and infected some 500 million, a third of the world’s population. It killed 675,000 Americans when our population was 110 million. It petered out with less virulent outbreaks about two years after it started. 

 

We have vaccines—and we have airplanes and personal vehicles that allow us to go anywhere, and fast. Speed seems to be cancelling the advantages of vaccines, and if 1918-1920 patterns continue, the current omicron version will take its toll and play out in a few more weeks or months. Vaccinations and infections will continue to rise, but with luck, and following the path of its 1918 cousin, the Covid will mutate or wind down, and take its place alongside seasonal flu. Sometime in late 2022 or early 2023.

 

# # #

154. My Heart is Full

It was negative 13 when I got up this New Year’s morning and began thinking about the annual Wallowa Lake Plunge. By 9:45 it had climbed to -2, and when I got out of the water and into my waiting car at 10:05. my phone told me that the temp had slipped from -1 to 0. Our coldest New Year’s plunge in fifteen years of it.

 

State Highway plows had cleared the parking lot, but the walk down to the shore was still snowy. People gathered without much mingling and visiting—there was a job to be done and we were intent on it. I have the loudest voice—or have been at it longest, and was the only one there from year 1, so I started counting down at 30 seconds. By the count of “10-9-8..” there were 50 or more at the shore, not bothering this year to count off our numbers or even hold hands. We walked and ran and dived in, and then hustled out to waiting partners and warm hats and socks and cars. 

 

It was a gorgeous day. The waters were rapidly steaming off the lake, working hard at freezing it. The mountains at the lake’s south end, Mount Joseph to the right and west, and the east, “most perfect glacial moraine in North America” were all snow-covered white. There was not wind or moisture in the air above the land to slow sound; it was all happy noises and smiling faces as we quickly congratulated each other on what we had done and made our Happy New Year’s wishes.

 

I drove the short mile home, looking with wonder at the place I live. The mountains looked chiseled by a fine artist’s hand, the road was packed and clear. I fed the patient dog and jumped into a hot shower, got out to a bowl of hot left-over chile and a mug of coffee-d hot chocolate. 

 

***

There was a zoom call with Turkey earlier this morning, and I made my resolution to be there in May. We had a philosophical conversation about the Covid, acknowledging that it is now part of our world, one of the many global and personal events over decades that have shaped our different but overlapping journeys.

 

And now, sitting by a very warm fire and thinking about a ride on my studded-tire bike and a walk with my dog, it strikes me that I was born in 1942, and that this is my 80^th year. 

 

I’m a lucky man.

 

Happy New Year!  

153. Crazy

Crazy 

 

I think it is now—will be tomorrow, on January 1, 2022—15 years for the Wallowa Lake Plunge on New Year’s Day. There were five of us that first year, and one, Beth Gibans, passed away this year. Informally—and it’s always been informal—we are calling it the Beth Gibans Memorial Plunge. The plungers now number 70 or 80, and Beth has been with us every year that I can remember, even as she battled a ferocious cancer. 

 

Many call us crazy. They say they won’t jump into that lake in the middle of July! But if we are crazy, what is the world!

 

Denver and Boulder, in snow country Colorado, are burning; hundred-mile per hour winds and no snow on the ground took Denver suburbs from no fire at 10 AM to 500 houses burned and mass evacuations at 6 PM yesterday.

 

Meanwhile, it is snowing and freezing in Seattle and Portland.

 

What will the next crazy chapter in the “housing crisis” be? Extraordinary price increases in some areas, including Wallowa County, with more and more people sleeping on streets, in tents, cars and homeless shelters in cities and suburbs across the land. Million dollar houses next to tents. Crazy?

 

We have homelessness, Covid, inflation, dislocation of workers, and supply chain disruptions—and the stock market indexes hiccup their ways to new records, resting briefly for market pros to take profits, then marching upward again. Is that crazy? 

 

ESPN paid $470 million for the college football bowl games. Hawaii dropped out of its own bowl game, and UCLA dropped out of the Holiday Bowl—three others have been canceled due to Covid. If college sports—and pro for that matter—aren’t crazy right now, what is? 

 

Still in sports, a lawyer who worked hard against performance-enhancing drugs in baseball and cycling in the 1980s argues today for bringing Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds into the Baseball Hall of Fame. The game was full of cheaters, so he argues the best of them deserve to be in the Hall.

 

At 10 AM tomorrow morning I will dive into Wallowa Lake and come up ready to begin another crazy year! I hope—but doubt—things get a little bit saner. 

 

I think of that old movie, “Mondo Cane,” a kaleidoscopic chronicle of humankind’s strange habits. I remember the German matron force-grinding food into the goose to make the best liver pate, and the cargo cult waiting in Australia for the next airplane to drop its goodies from the sky. People were just as crazy in 1962. 

 

Happy New Year!