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Are We Crazy?

California governor Newsom announced the closure of bars and other “nonessential” businesses in the state on March 15.

My oldest son fled California to our place in northwest Montana after Gov. Newsom’s shut down of the state.  Of course, the conversation turned to the topic of the pandemic.  I expressed my doubts about the wisdom of some of the extreme means to confront the virus.  He said that I may be taking the threat too lightly.  I said, “No, the threat is real but you can’t make idle a sizable portion of a labor force of 160 million people for any length of time.  A shutdown even for a month is unsustainable. ” More to the point, as Harry Callahan of “Dirty Harry” fame said, “A man’s GOT to know his limitations.”  Translation: A shut down has its limits … real, concrete-bridge-abutment-style limits.

Regardless, shutting down a population’s need to produce for any length of time and expecting no serious repercussions because you’re going to paper over the induced economic coma with “paper”, literally, as in paper money and bonds, is pure fantasy.  Think about it.  Squashing the livelihoods of the hospitality industry, suppressing production of anything bureaucratically defined as “nonessential”, eradicating a good slice of the transportation industry, etc., etc., will make the 25% unemployment rate of 1933 look small.  Moreover, piling debt obligations onto the backs of the grandkids smacks of something pretty close to immoral, and economically suicidal.

Who would have imagined the possibility?  Traffic is light on East First Street after the new restrictions by Gov. Newsom went into effect on March 20, 2020 in Los Angeles, California.  (Photo by David McNew)

Newsom’s gang in Sacramento – and Cuomo’s in Albany – are already operating on the thinnest of fiscal margins.  Crushing the revenue pipeline for any length of time will force these guys to cry “uncle”.  When the resultant mobs of the pitchfork brigades descend on the state capitol, the shut down will be in the rear view mirror.

Sure, getting sick has its hazards, but reverting back to hunting and gathering carries its own perils beyond a disease’s mortality rate.  Get real.  Rich societies – meaning those that produce lots and lost of stuff – make for rich health care.  You can’t have the latter without the former.  The Mayo Clnic and Johns Hopkins sounds better to me than the village shaman.

Health care after euthanizing a nation’s economy: a female shaman from the Clayoquot region of Vancouver Island.

RogerG

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Panic in the Age of Trump

Walmart, Sandpoint, Id., paper goods isle on Sunday, 5/15/2020.

The photo (above) is of the paper goods isle of Walmart, Sandpoint, Id., on Sunday, 3/15/2020. A  young mother with a couple of kids in tow had 2 30-roll bricks of toilet paper in her cart, the only tp that I saw in the entire store.  Is this what modern-America panic looks like?

Shoppers at BJ’s Wholesale Club market at the Palisades Center mall in West Nyack, N.Y., March 14, 2020. (Mike Segar/Reuters)

On that same day, we rolled into a gas-‘n-stop for fuel and corn nuts.  A fellow customer waiting in line mentioned a wild rumor on social media that Trump is considering the closing of the interstates.  Panic, once again, in the age of Trump?

Our eyes and ears are saturated with “pandemic” and doctors on tv with warnings galore. Social interaction has become a dirty word.  It’s “coronavirus this” and “coronavirus that” everywhere we look.  Is America starting to resemble in thought and deed the America of the 1938 radio broadcast “War of the Worlds” by Orson Welles?

Are we, modern sophisticates, really so “above that”?  I doubt it in the age of Trump.  Trumpophobes see all external stimuli with real or imagined evil intent as emanating from Trump.  “Trump’s Katrina” is bandied about in the same manner as “abortion” and “control of her body” comes off the lips of Madonna.

Maybe what’s at work is something I call “vortex thinking”.  Most everything of consequence today goes down two vortices: Trump and climate change.  The Polar Vortex of a few years back, with its bone-chilling temps, was blamed on … global warming.  A tornado that passes through your backyard is pinned on … global warming.  Etc., etc.  Regarding Trump, anything that’s bad in your life is due to … Trump.  Everything that’s bad to anyone at any given time is placed at the feet of Trump.

George Will – no fan of Trump by any means – calls the phenomena “Caesaropapism”.  Our presidents are now accorded demigod status.  They are expected to control the tides in the manner of Persian king Xerxes flogging the Hellespont for destroying his pontoon bridge in the advance of his invasion of Greece in 480 BC.

Xerxes’s soldiers flogging the Hellespont.

Depending on the group of boosters, a president is saintly or evil incarnate. He or she is expected to be a master marionette controlling the actions of 330 million individuals.  Does “sophistication” now mean thinking like a 5-year-old?  Apparently so.

Right now, we are experiencing the first natural disaster to be pinned on the next-Republican-president-in-line.  Bush 41 was pasted with the rather mild recession of 1991-1992. Bush 43 had his hurricane.  Trump’s is COVID-19.

What separates a hurricane and a virus from an economic downturn is the fact that recessions are, indeed, man-caused.  They may occur due to a constellation of actions that were taken earlier in a president’s term, or, more likely, they erupt from the gestation of factors unleashed long before he took the oath.  Ditto for the good economic times.  For instance, back in 2008-9, the bills came due after many years of easy money and political pressures to extend mortgages to financially insecure people.  Obama rode it to the presidency.  Ironically, his wing of the Dem Party had a big role in setting up the dominoes.

Now we have the coronavirus.  Yeah, it’s unique … like all the previous strains were unique.  Sure, take all the practical mitigations available but remember, this thing, like the earlier ones, will have to run its course.  We have one thing going for us: we aren’t the Athens of 480 BC, or Constantinople of 541-542, or Europe of the mid-14th century.

The Triumph of Death by Pieter Bruegel, 1562, is a famous painting that relates to the Black Death of the 1340’s.

Please, get some perspective … and stop hoarding the toilet paper!

RogerG