Absurdities

Love the offender, yet detest the offense.

— Alexander Pope

Self-justification is a powerful force.

A recent Goodly post offended a friend of mine, who's rejoicing over the end of mask mandates. 

He was particularly upset by my calling anti-maskers "discourteous" and "miserable" and wanted to know if I was labeling him as such.

"I and millions of other well-informed people are convinced we are well past the point of mandating mask-wearing," he said.

This fallacious argument is known among logicians as the argumentum ad populum. 

It insists that, because a belief is held in common by a large group of people, it is therefore correct.

The fallacy is clear: just because a crowd thinks something is so doesn't make it so. (More on this in a moment.)

In fairness to my friend, I believe he views my criticisms as instances of "name-calling."

Name-calling is mightily offensive to everyone (especially to name-callers).

He also views mask-wearing as an instance of "hygiene theater."

Medical experts now know Covid-19 is transmitted through the air and that many of the now-outdated public-safety protocols we cherish, like surface-scrubbing, hand-sanitizing, plexiglass shields and disposable menus, are worthless "theatrics" designed to soothe anxious citizens.

Mask-wearing, however, doesn't fall into the same category. 

Mask-wearing, in fact, deters the spread of Covid-19.

Naturally, you can always find a medical practitioner or two who insists masks are hooey; but they'd be lacking evidence. 

You can also assert that the entire scientific community is stupid and wrong; but you'd be lacking evidence.

My problem with anti-maskers is simple: their behavior is unconscionable. 

By ignoring the fact that Covid-19 has killed 1 million Americans and isn't done with us yet, they're guilty of criminal negligence.

And rather than delight in their guilt, I'm saddened. 

I'm sad that a microbe is smarter than the millions of our fellow citizens who'd tell you mask-wearing is whimpy.

They skew Conservative and represent the same crowd that voted for Trump in 2020 (although they'd deny it).

They're the "fake news" bunch.

They don't believe in science and medicine and don't accept civic duty, unless it's convenient, justifying their irresponsible behaviors with the argumentum ad populum.

I'm sorry, but accepting without evidence another's beliefs—or even many people’s beliefs—is just wishful, lazy thinking.

It's thinking of the kind that, throughout history, has produced absurdities like these:

• The earth is flat.
• The fifth day of every month is unlucky.
• Drinking gladiators' blood will cure epilepsy.
• Mice originate from cheese wrapped in dirty rags.
• The earth is 6,000 years old.
• Proximity to the sun determines IQ.
• Blistering the skin with a hot iron cures disease.
• Tobacco enemas revive drowning victims.
• Plowing the ground will make it rain.
• The speed of trains crushes passengers’ brains.
• Implanting goat testicles in the scrotum will cure ED.
• Lower taxes for the rich benefit everyone.
• All Mexicans are rapists.
  
• Vladmir Putin is admirable. 

We don't need anti-maskers' absurdities.

The world is absurd enough.

Endemic

There’s no finish line.

— Gov. Gavin Newsom

My hat's off to Gavin Newsom for declaring that Covide-19 is no longer epidemic, but endemic, in California. 

And so he's taking steps to mainstream it, acknowledging that government must combat Covid-19 perpetually, as it perpetually combats smoking, obesity, unsafe products, and water pollution.

And naturally, as with other public hazards, some people will die.

News flash, America: death is endemic everywhere. It always has been. It's inescapable and baked in.

Most of us simply choose to deny that cold fact.

Perhaps mainstreaming Covid-19, which to date has killed nearly 1 million Americans, will depoliticize it and wake sleepwalking citizens to the inexorability of their own deaths.

Our country would be a much happier place.

The existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger defined the human being as finite, a "being-toward-death" (Sein zum Tode).

Where man is concerned, death is baked in, Heidegger claimed. Death is life's "fellow." 

Heidegger also believed that accepting death—your own death—brought you unbounded freedom—and unbounded happiness.

"Turning away from a flight from death," he said, "you see a horizon of opportunity." 

Embracing your death—denying your denial of death—"puts you in a state of anticipatory resoluteness with a solicitous regard for others that makes your life seem like an adventure perfused with unshakeable joy."

Who knows but that mainstreaming Covid-19 could make common courtesy and civility—the "solicitous regard for others"—routine again; and make vaccination and mask-wearing badges of honor that announce to the world, "I can't outrun death and don't wish to try. I'm terribly mortal—and happy."

As to those discourteous, miserable many who resist vaccinations and masks I say, so think you can outrun your own death? Good luck with that. 

There's no finish line but one.

CES: the S Stands for "Superspreader"

America wants to get back to normal.

That goes without saying.

But why otherwise smart people would decide to hold a a mega-show like CES in the midst of the third wave of the pandemic merely to simulate normal defies explanation.

Perhaps the pressure from wishful exhibitors was too much for the show's organizer to bear. 

I won't pretend to know.

But I do know one thing.

Thousands of attendees will return home from the event infected.

They'll in turn infect others, who'll swamp the hospitals and deny beds to injury victims and the chronically ill.

And some of those infected will surely die.

All in the name of hope.

Hope, they say, is not a strategy.

Neither is killing your customers.

POSTSCRIPT: They also say, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Don't believe it.

Are Museums Laughingstocks?

Every generation laughs at the old fashions,
but follows religiously the new.

― Thoreau

A new study by the American Association for State and Local History suggests public interest in museums might have hit a brick wall.

Museum attendance declined 70% last year, the study finds. 

Casual observers blame the pandemic, of course; but museum executives are worried. Last year's falloff caps 40 years of decline. (Museum-going had already fallen by 50% between 1980 and 2020.)

The pandemic simply could be the proverbial "last nail" in the coffin.

Just ask any teen: museums are out of fashion, laughingstocks among the new generations. (I'm not sure Boomers and their parents cared for them all that much, either.)

Museum is a 17th-century word borrowed directly from the Latin for "library." Latin borrowed museum from the Greek mouseion, literally a "temple of the Muses."

The decline in museum attendance might signal that the Muses have abandoned us; that today's Americans are content to be a stupid and sluggish herd—a mediocracy.

Or it could mean museums are simply no match for amusements (a 15th-century word borrowed from the Greek amousos, meaning "Muse-less" or "uneducated").

That's more likely the case. 

In the words of media critic Neil Postman, we're "amusing ourselves to death."

Thank goodness at least some museum executives are responding to the crisis.

My wife and I recently visited The Concord Museum in Massachusetts, only two weeks after it had finished a $16 million renovation.

From beginning to end, the experience was a marvel—as engaging as any Disney destination, but with the content unsanitized (as it should be).

Brand-new galleries in the museum feature artifacts from the Transcendentalists Emerson and Thoreau; from hometown writer Louisa May Alcott; from local Abolitionists like Mary Brooks; from the African Americans who lived in Concord since its founding in 1635: and from the Nipmuc tribe that lived there long before.

Topping these rooms is the gallery devoted to the Battle of Concord, the dustup that ignited the American Revolution. In addition to militaria (including Paul Revere's lantern), it features a remarkable digital display—for narrative drive and subtle drama, far and away the best animation of its kind you'll ever see.

The Concord Museum's grip on innovation is firm, and, for that institution, could be the magic bullet needed to reverse audience decline.

But there's a roadblock to innovation like this: politics.

Politics—as they do many Americans—stymy museum executives, because politics dictate what gets displayed and what doesn't. They also define which museums get funding, and which are starved. Politics even define what a museum is—either a "permanent institution" (the right's definition) or a "democratizing space" (the left's).

Museum executive Thomas Hoving once said, "It's hard to be a revolutionary in the deadly museum business."

He's right. 

It might be asking too much of hidebound museum executives to become revolutionaries, although that is what they need to be, if museums aren't to remain laughingstocks forever.

Above: Thoreau's Desk at The Concord Museum.

Character Defects

 Perhaps you are right, Watson. I suppose that its influence is physically a bad one.

— Arthur Conan Doyle

The Wall Street Journal reports that drug overdose deaths rose nearly 30% last year. 

A record 93,300 deaths occurred.

Most were due to abuse of fentanyl, the illegal opioid said to be 50 times more stimulating than heroin.

Sherlock Holmes would alarm Dr. Watson by injecting a mere seven percent solution of cocaine. 

Imagine if he'd had access to fentanyl.

Public health officials blame last year's deaths on the hardship, dislocation, and isolation brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic.

I don't buy what the officials are peddling.

Addiction is due to character defects.

Well-meaning doctors insist otherwise, but a naïve ignorance of life explains their mistake.

They spend too much time chumming with colleagues, too little with addicts.

Dr. Watson knew better. He spent countless hours with an addict.

Watson would often scold Holmes for using a narcotic the detective called "transcendently stimulating."

"Your brain may be roused and excited," Watson would say, "but it is a pathological and morbid process. You know what a black reaction comes upon you."

Watson understood it was Holmes' raging egotism that drove him to shoot up. 

I've met enough people in recovery to know addicts' dependence stems from the drive to paper over character defects like pride, shame, hate, cowardice, and laziness.

Covid-19 didn't kill the 93,300 Americans who overdosed last year.

Neither did fentanyl.

Unresolved character defects did.

Above: Victorian syringe kit.

Bounce

Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life.

— Omar Khayyam

Americans are happier than ever, according to Gallup.

In fact, 6 of 10 (59%) are "thriving," the pollster says—a record number since it launched the National Health and Wellbeing Index in 2008.

That number is up nearly 13 points since the appearance of Covid-19 last year, when the number of happy Americans plunged to 46% (tying the record low, reached during the Great Recession).

Gallup divvies Americans into three buckets it calls "thriving," "struggling" and "suffering." 

"Thriving" Americans rate their lives 7 or higher on a 10-point scale. Over 59% currently do so.

Not that you'd know it from news coverage and social media, but only 38% of Americans currently are "struggling;" and only 3%, "suffering."

That's far too many in my book; but, still, it's a minority. 

Gallup also measures worry.

Worry gripped 6 of 10 Americans during the pandemic.

It grips many fewer now—only 4 in 10.

Instead, most Americans—7 in 10—are enjoying their lives every day.

Less than 3 in 10 are ever bored.

Gallup claims the bounce is due to the availability of the Covid-19 vaccine, the reopening of in-person events, and the recovery of the economy.

I would add to those causes last November's exorcism of the incubus Trump. No doubt about it. Ding dong.

Although, as Gallup warns, the Delta variant of Covid-19 could again crimp our happiness, it's clear, altogether, we're a pretty happy bunch, even if we don't deserve our happiness.

"What is happiness?" Friedrich Nietzsche asked. 

"The feeling that power increases—that resistance is overcome."

So if you're feeling blue, get with the program: feel the power.

And put on a happy face.

NOTE: Be sure to click the embedded links above. They're guaranteed to make you happy.

Lest We Forget

If America forgets where she came from, then will begin the rot and dissolution.

— Carl Sandburg

Covid-19 has killed 625,000 Americans.

Yet Trump, the ever-impertinent troglodyte, asks, “Have you noticed that they are now admitting I was right about everything?”

Right about Covid-19? Really?

Ebola, lest we forget, killed two Americans. 

Two.

Obama, lest we forget, dealt with Ebola with dispatch. (Ebola, lest we forget, is the virus that, before it kills you, makes you bleed from the eyes, ears, and nose, as you feverishly vomit and shit and cough up blood.)

Obama eschewed willful ignorance and heeded the science.

Obama strategized, asking doctors to guide his decisions. 

Obama activated the CDC and DOD, deploying men and materiel to West Africa to halt the spread of Ebola "at its source."

Obama built frontline hospitals; trained West African healthcare workers (25,000 of them); initiated contact tracing; and buried victims' bodies. 

“Here’s the bottom line,” he said in October 2014. “The best way to stop this disease, the best way to keep Americans safe, is to stop it at its source—in West Africa.”

Two years after the first case was discovered there, the outbreak was halted.

But not without costs.

Eleven people were treated for Ebola in the US during the epidemic, most of them doctors who deployed to West Africa. They flew back to the US for treatment. Two of the eleven died.

Two.

Not 625,000; two.

Trump tweeted at the time, "If this doctor, who so recklessly flew into New York from West Africa, has Ebola, then Obama should apologize to the American people and resign!"

And last May, Trump called Obama "an incompetent president—grossly incompetent."

Trump, incompetence incarnate—and the GOP's likely presidential candidate in three years.

GOP, you stand for amnesia, and for rot and dissolution.

I'll take leadership, any day.

“We are the United States of Amnesia," Gore Vidal once said. "We learn nothing because we remember nothing.”

Tragic Finale

The stupid, crazy, irresponsible bunglers. They've finally done it.

— Bill Maguire in The Day the Earth Caught Fire

If you need a refresher course on Donald Trump's inexhaustible loathsomeness, Nightmare Scenario is the book for you.

Authors Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta, both reporters for The Washington Post, present a gripping, 450-page account of Trump's "handling" of the Covid-19 pandemic.

To cut to the chase, Trump handled the virus like Captain Smith handled the Titanic. Never once did he consider Covid-19 to be anything more than an annoying crimp in his reelection plans, the book confirms.  

Villains in the play—Alex Azar, Jared Kushner, Scott Atlas, Peter Navarro, Stephen Moore, Mike Pence and, center stage, Trump—abound. They far outnumber the heroes, so don't expect to be anything but despondent at the end. Samuel Beckett is cheerier.

As I paged through Nightmare Scenario, I felt as if I were reading the script for a never-made Hollywood film, the concept for which was "All the President's Men meets The Day the Earth Caught Fire."

Based on White House emails, documents and 180 interviews, Nightmare Scenario is a study in hidebound leadership and more: fear, fantasy, sycophancy, infighting, betrayal and ineptitude—especially ineptitude.

You learn that, while the villains' roguery meant that their chances of ever stopping the virus were nominal, their contempt for critics and rivals—and America's citizens—was boundless.

You also learn that, by the time Covid-19 reached our shores, staff-wise Trump was down to the very bottom of the barrel. Anyone with skills had long ago abandoned Trump's foundering ship. Anyone with integrity had been thrown overboard.

The publisher's blurb calls the book "the definitive account of the Trump administration’s tragic mismanagement of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the chaos, incompetence, and craven politicization that has led to more than a half million American deaths and counting."

That sums it up well. The whole point of Nightmare Scenario is a tragic one. The actors in the play should be ashamed, as should the minority of voters who put our government in the hands of a failed reality-TV host. They're collectively guilty of the deaths of a half million citizens—and counting.

Up in Arms

Where there is power, there is resistance.

― Michel Foucault

On Easter 1680, Louis XIV visited Saint-Riquier, where he touched 1,600 of his subjects, certain his "royal touch" would protect them from scrofula (the disease we call TB).

The royal touch today is administered not by a king, but an underling; and not in a cathedral, but a convention center.

And it's a tad more likely to work.

But, as French philosopher Michel Foucault said, where there's power, there's resistance.

AP yesterday reported that vaccinated Americans accounted for only 0.1% of the 853,000 Americans hospitalized for Covid-19 last month.

That means 99.9% of the Americans hospitalized were not vaccinated—"a staggering demonstration of how effective the shots have been," AP concludes.

CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky told AP that nearly every case of Covid-19 last month was "entirely preventable” and that the 18,000 deaths due to the virus were "particularly tragic."

But, even though 603,000 Americans have already died from Covid-19, as of today 37% of American adults remain unvaccinated. 

The vaccine-resistance movement comprises the nation's most bone-headed Republicans plus a creepy coalition of comparable nincompoops (including Nazis, New-Agers, New Black Panthers and Nation of Islamists).

Personally speaking, I have no problem with these folks' foolishness.

Thanks to them, the medical device stocks I own are on fire (up nearly 36%). 

If an epidemic breaks out, I'll laugh all the way to the bank.

But the sociologist in me wants to know why these fools resist the royal touch.

The answer, I believe, is obvious.

They think that they're they're victims of government overreach; that they live unrestrained by chemistry, physics, history, and the law; and that their non-compliant gestures should earn them a merit badge.

More to the point, they think they're important.

"The world is full of contention and contentious people," John D. MacDonald said.

"They will not tell you the time of day without their little display of hostility. It is more than a reflex. It is an affirmation of importance."

These self-important fools do not understand biopolitics.

Norms govern us today, not kings. That's biopolitics.

Norms restrict our freedoms for the sake of society.

Norms dictate we don't double dip; spit in the punchbowl; pee in the pool; poop on the sidewalk.

Norms mean we submit to hygiene control.

From the biopolitical point-of-view, the Covid-19 vaccine is merely an element of hygiene control. 

It's merely another norm.

Complying with norms isn't being servile; it's being normal. 

It isn't a surrender of civil rights; it's a surrender to civility. 

And if you consider our six-million-year barbarous past, civility is pretty goddamn non-conformist.

Maybe it's the civil people who deserve the merit badges.

So, if you want to flout the norms of hygiene control, act like an ape, and risk your family's and your Republican neighbors' lives, go ahead. Don't take the shot.

I say more power to you.

I'll use my dividends to buy more stock.

Many Mickles Make a Muckle

Nothing in nature is more true—
"many mickles make a muckle."

— George Washington

In a post last May—when the lockdown was novel—I asked: What possible good can come from Covid-19?

My answer asserted that the virus was an "ugly duckling" from which would emerge a new normal "prettier than we ever imagined." As proof, I predicted:

• The environment would refresh itself
• The planet's animals would reassert themselves
• Parents would rediscover their children—and vice versa
• Neighbors would reach out to neighbors
• People would rediscover art, architecture, books, and bikes
• Family members would sleep longer and eat better
• Citizens would recognize government wasn't the enemy

Since my post in May, an additional 470 thousand Americans have died of Covid-19; and 8 million have become poor. 

But are the rest of us in a better spot? Is the new normal prettier than imagined?

Yes, I believe it is, and in a major way; because things—little things—add up.

Many mickles make a muckle.

Muckle comes from mickle, Old English for a "big deal." 

In Beowulf's time, Brits would say Grendel was a mickle; call the Justinian Plague  a mickle; or name a big village Mickle-something, as we would call New York "The Big Apple" or New Orleans "The Big Easy."

The thriftier Brits even had a proverb: "Many a pickle makes a mickle," by which they meant, "expenses add up quickly." 

The Scots, speaking of thrift, pronounced mickle as muckle. We get our word much from muckle.

George Washington, prone to mangling English, in a 1793 letter to his manager at Mount Vernon coined the proverb "Many mickles make a muckle."

The thrift-minded Washington, intending to scold the man for piling up expenses during his time away from the plantation, meant to write "Many a pickle makes a mickle," but instead wrote "Many mickles make a muckle," failing to remember the two words are synonyms, not antonyms.

Washington's confusion aside, things do add up, even little things. Especially when you're in a pickle, as we are today.

But things aren't all bad. Covid-19 has in fact ushered changes long overdue:

• Virology and telemedicine have blossomed
• E-commerce and white-collar productivity are booming
• Science and distance learning are no longer gated
• The skies and waterways are healing themselves
• And—an unmitigated blessing—Donald Trump is history

Many a pickle makes a mickle.

Pickle by the way denotes a "wee bit." A 17th century Scottish word, pickle referred to the grain on the top of a barley stalk.

Scotsmen also pronounced pickle as puckle, a word they still use to mean "bit."

Where we'd say "I want a bit of ketchup with my fries," a Scotsman might say "I want a puckle of ketchup with my fries."