The Good Old Days

To realize how fumbled the current vaccine rollout is, we can look back to 1947, when a single case of smallpox in New York City led to the vaccination of six million people in less than a month.

— Marc Siegel

As of today, Americans have received 231 million jabs. We're bungling our way through the pandemic.

When blowhards like Marc Siegel insist America can't manage its way out of a paper bag—that we can't do anything like we did in "the good old days"—my blood pressure surges.

Does he think we were always "exceptional" during past crises? That our execution was always flawless?

We weren't. It wasn't. 

Consider only one crisis.

During World War II, over 52,000 Americans died in aerial combat; another 26,000 died in training accidents. 

Training accidents. These dead never saw a German or Japanese target.

It's no surprise. 

We hired companies like GM and Packard—which had never produced a single airplane—to rush-ship planes by the tens of thousands, planes that were rife with design flaws; and then asked men who'd never been in an airplane to fly them. 

With the massive and hurried increase in aircraft production came a commensurate increase in crashes. America lost 23,000 planes in aerial combat; 42,000 in training accidents.

Anxious airmen in training gave the clunky B-24—the most-produced of American bombers—the dreary nickname the “flying coffin.”

So much for exceptional. 

So much for flawless.

We've always bungled through.

And will again.

Travesty

This disease controls my life.

— Dietrich Hectors

As depicted in Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's new documentary "Hemingway," a wartime concussion—one of five he suffered in his time—left the writer with a little-discussed condition: tinnitus. 

Even the documentary fails to discuss it. Hemingway's chronic tinnitus gets one mention in six hours of narration.

Debilitating tinnitus—not just “ringing in the ears,” but buzzing, hissing, whistling, swooshing, and clicking in the ears—afflicts 20 million Americans, according to the CDC.

Who pays attention? 

Almost no one.

But tinnitus, "the perception of sound when no actual external noise is present," drives millions of Americans to despair and leads some sufferers to suicide, even though medical researchers deny a causal connection.

Last month, Texas Roadhouse CEO Kent Taylor killed himself after Covid-19 left him with tinnitus. 

In recent years, tinnitus has led many other distinguished people to end their own lives, including rock musician Craig Gill, management consultant Robert McIndoe, graphic designer Rick Tharp, and industrial engineer Dietrich Hectors (who left a heart-wrenching "farewell letter" on Facebook).

I wouldn't suggest Hemingway's 1961 suicide stemmed from his chronic tinnitus. 

The writer suffered from a mountain of other maladies, including traumatic brain injury, hemochromatosis, and alcoholism. Medically speaking, he was an unmitigated mess. 

But tinnitus could only have worsened his torment.

According to the American Tinnitus Association, when you consider lost earnings, lost productivity, and medical outlays, tinnitus costs the nation $26 billion a year. Yet tinnitus goes unrecognized by Medicare and Medicaid, and federal funds for basic research are paltry—stifling innovation and the chance of a cure.

Last year, the feds spent only $400 million on hearing-related research. In contrast, it just spent $500 million on Covid-19 relief in St. Louis—alone.

How so atrocious an affliction can remain ignored is a travesty.

NOTE: If you suffer chronic "ringing in the ears," contact the American Tinnitus Association for help.

Adultifying

Adulthood is the ever-shrinking period between childhood and old age. It is the apparent aim of modern industrial societies to reduce this period to a minimum.

— Thomas Szasz

The mayor of Columbus, Ohio, is under assault for calling Ma’Khia Bryant, the 16-year-old fatally shot by police this week, a "young woman."

The mayor is guilty of “adultification bias,” a form of discrimination against Black girls.

Adultifying Black girls makes them out to be "more adult-like than their White peers," according to The Washington Post.

“We as a society view Black girls as grown women who aren’t capable of being talked to and respected and protected as children,” Ijeoma Opara, an assistant professor at Stony Brook University, told The Post.

The professor failed to mention that Bryant had been stabbing people with a knife when she was shot.

We learned earlier this month that Brandon Hole, the 19-year-old "FedEx shooter," was obsessed with the fictional Applejack of the TV show “My Little Pony.”

“I hope that I can be with Ap­ple­jack in the af­ter­life, my life has no mean­ing with­out her,” Hole wrote on Facebook less than an hour before he killed eight people and himself.

I won't make the mistake of calling Hole a "young man," because he wasn't. He was a baby who wielded rifles.

Parents and teachers at large are doing a crappy job. 

They're infantilizing kids and permitting tantrums in public—some of which turn fatal.

When I was 19, I didn't obsess over a fictional pony. I obsessed over my girlfriend, the atrocity of the Vietnam War, where I'd earn enough money for rent, and whether I should major in psychology or something else.

I was far from mature; but my world was an adult's, not an infant's, world.

The 14th-century word adult comes from the Latin adultus, meaning "grown, ripe, mature."

We need young men and women to quit acting like two-year-olds—particularly when they're armed.

It's time for more adultifying, not less.

Saved by the Cell

Publicity is the very soul of justice.

— Jeremy Bentham

Journalists have voiced near-universal praise for Darnella Frazier, the 17-year-old who filmed the murder of George Floyd with her cell. 

Her footage all but convicted Floyd's killer.

She deserves our praise. 

Her cell made the law work.

Eighteenth-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham thought the law's purpose is "to govern;" that is, to keep us safe. 

But to govern, the law must be enforced—and enforcement is everyone's responsibility. 

The law, he said, "governs through the governed."

Because it depends on the governed, the law is highly fallible—because we are. The corrective, Bentham said, is publicity. 

Publicity, he said, "keeps the judges on trial."

"It is through publicity alone that justice becomes the mother of security. Without publicity, all other checks are fruitless."

Without publicity, the law is toothless; but with it, the law can prevail, as it did yesterday.

HAT TIP: Thanks go to historian Jon Meacham for inspiring this post.

Kidnapped!

The inventor of the PDF, Chuck Geschke, who died last week at 81, was kidnapped at gunpoint from his workplace 30 years ago.

On a Tuesday morning in May 1992, in the parking lot of Adobe's headquarters in Mountain View, California, Mouhannad Albukhari and Jack Sayeh beckoned Geschke to their car. 

The two Syrian terrorists snatched Geschke at gunpoint, blindfolded him with duct tape, and drove him first to a local motel, then to a bungalow "safehouse" sixty miles away.

Over the following four days, Albukhari and Sayeh repeatedly phoned the executive's home demanding $650,000 (the amount Geschke thought his wife could raise).

The FBI told Geschke's family to pay the ransom. So on Friday night, Geschke's daughter put the money in a bag and drove 75 miles to the seaside town of Marina, where she dropped the bag on a dead-end road. Mouhannad Albukhari was hiding in wait just a few feet away, unaware the FBI had set up a dragnet. Nine hours later, after a roundabout helicopter chase, FBI agents nabbed him.

"After a gentlemanly discussion," an agent told the Associated Press, "he agreed to do the right thing and to take us to where Mr. Geschke was being held by Mr. Sayeh."

Geschke was freed and the two kidnappers arrested and convicted for life.

Geschke said at the sentencing, “There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind that these two individuals planned to murder me."

NOTE: A gripping, moment-by-moment account of Gescke's ordeal can be found in this four-part newspaper series from 2009:

Part 1: A dramatic kidnapping revisited
Part 2: Two days of terror, uncertainty
Part 3: Chuck’s dramatic rescue
Part 4: Aftermath of a kidnapping