Three Cheers for Mom and Pop

Notice the pattern?

Most small businesses—those lucky enough to be deemed "essential"—are innovating.

Most big businesses, on the other hand, are shuttering for the pandemic; so, too, are most mid-size ones.

Employees of "mom and pop" companies are working; employees of large and mid-size companies are filing for unemployment.

We're seeing incarnate which business leaders value employees and customers over shareholders.

And we're seeing which leaders know how to pivot, and which merely talk about pivoting when it suits them.

Three cheers for mom and pop!

These are Days

In late July 1606—part way through a season that would soon premiere King Lear, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra—William Shakespeare was ordered by London's Privy Council to shut down his theater. 

The plague was in town.

The Privy Council was worried that audiences would be “pestered together in small romes" where "infeccion with the plague may rise and growe, to the great hynderaunce of the common wealth of this citty.”

Rather than lay off the troupe, Shakespeare urged his actors to flee hot-spot London for a tour of the provinces, where they could strut the stage while staying safe from the dreadful disease.

But country villages were sleepy places; and many of the days and weeks the actors spent in them were spent idly.

Shakespeare, however, chose to capitalize on the downtime, using it to write three new plays, as recounted by historian James Shapiro in The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606.

Thanks to the plague, 1606 was a very good year for the bard. 

Indeed, no other of his remaining life would be as fruitful a year.

And how about you?

What are you doing with your time?

These are days you'll remember. 

When May is rushing over you with desire
To be part of the miracles you see in every hour.

You'll know it's true that you are blessed and lucky. 

It's true that you are touched by something
That will grow and bloom in you.

— Natalie Merchant

5 Lessons I've Learned from “The Walking Dead”

For five seasons—until I began to turn zombie-like myself—The Walking Dead captured my inner teen’s imagination.

Little did I know the show’s many lessons would come in handy.

Five stand out from the crowd:

Wear gloves and a mask when outdoors. A bandoleer or an ammo belt can look quite stylish, too.

Keep your social distance. Particularly when passersby issue guttural sounds.

Gas up your vehicle. You’ll need it to escape. Besides, gas is under two bucks right now.

Don’t follow leaders. Especially those who’ve turned orange—the first sign they’re zombies!

No matter what, carry on. As the hero Rick Grimes said, “We won’t get weak. That’s not in us anymore. We’ll make it work.”

NOTE: If you or someone near is suffering right now, please forgive my stab at gallows humor. Stay well! And fear the walking dead.

Newark in the Grip

Before Salk's wondrous vaccine reached American schoolkids in the early 1960s, my parents worried about polio. 

A lot.

In the summers, it was everywhere.

Historian Richard Rhodes describes it thus:

"Polio was a plague. One day you had a headache and an hour later you were paralyzed. Parents waited fearfully every summer to see if it would strike. One case turned up and then another. The count began to climb. The city closed the swimming pools and we all stayed home, cooped indoors, shunning other children. Summer seemed like winter then."

The late Philip Roth vivified those days in his brief, heartbreaking 2010 novel Nemesis, winner of the Man Booker International Prize.

It's July 1944. Polio is raging. A playground director, Bucky Cantor, faces a dilemma: should he quit his job and flee for the safety of a kids' summer camp in the Poconos, or should he tough it out in "equatorial" Newark? 

In his inimitable way, Roth shows how an earnest boy comes to grips with history and loses out.

Nemesis is a book about an epidemic; and also about youth, family, decency, religion, sex, love, hope, death, despair and destiny.

In 2010, Roth told NPR host Terry Gross the book began as he brainstormed ideas for a topic:

"I began, as I sometimes do with a book, jotting down on a yellow legal pad all of the historical events that I've lived through that I've not dealt with in fiction. When I came to polio, it was a great revelation to me. I never thought of it before as a subject. And then I remembered how frightening it was and how deadly it was and I thought, 'OK, try to write a book about polio.'"

It's Roth's final novel. And one of his finest.

Jack London's Nightmare

All man's toil upon the planet was just so much foam. 

— Jack London

In Seattle's Left Bank Books a few years ago, I bought a novel by one of my favorite writers, the left-leaning nihilist and dog-loving Jack London. I took my copy of The Scarlet Plague around the corner and into the Pike Place Starbucks, where I sat on a stool and read the whole of the 60-page book.

First published in 1912, The Scarlet Plague, focusing as it does on man's craven response to pandemic, remains one of modern literature's finest examples of post-apocalyptic storytelling.

Set in a ruined California, the tale takes place 60 years after the 2013 outbreak the "Red Death," a mysterious virus that depopulates the world. 

Jim Smith, an eye-witness to the pandemic, recounts to his grandsons how people were gripped by ancestral fear.

"We were sure that the bacteriologists would find a way to overcome this new germ, just as they had overcome other germs in the past,” he tells them. But panic set in when everyone realized “the astonishing quickness with which this germ destroyed human beings, and the fact that it inevitably killed any human body it entered."

Smith describes how the virus infects:

“The heart began to beat faster and the heat of the body to increase. Then came the scarlet rash, spreading like wildfire over the face and body. Most persons never noticed the increase in heat and heart-beat, and the first they knew was when the scarlet rash came out. Usually, they had convulsions at the time of the appearance of the rash. But these convulsions did not last long and were not very severe. The heels became numb first, then the legs, and hips, and when the numbness reached as high as his heart he died.”

Victims' corpses rot instantly, spewing the virus into the air. Pandemonium erupts and terrified citizens flee for safety:

“Imagine, my grandsons, people, thicker than the salmon-run you have seen on the Sacramento river, pouring out of the cities by millions, madly over the country, in vain attempt to escape the ubiquitous death. You see, they carried the germs with them. Even the airships of the rich, fleeing for mountain and desert fastnesses, carried the germs.”

Jim himself panics:

“I caught up my handbag and fled. The sights in the streets were terrible. One stumbled on bodies everywhere. Some were not yet dead. And even as you looked, you saw men sink down with the death fastened upon them. There were numerous fires burning in Berkeley, while Oakland and San Francisco were apparently being swept by vast conflagrations. The smoke of the burning filled the heavens, so that the midday was as a gloomy twilight, and, in the shifts of wind, sometimes the sun shone through dimly, a dull red orb. Truly, my grandsons, it was like the last days of the end of the world."

While you're self-quarantined, mix yourself a Bloody Mary and read The Scarlet Plague.

You'll also enjoy the CDC's review of Jack London's remarkable—and nightmarish—story.

Stay well!