Thoughts on getting through these days

Albert Camus (1913-1960)

Stephen King…what can I say? I grew up reading his books and watching the movies.

I sometimes go years without going there. Other times, I binge on book after book. By King’s own admission, some are more gripping and substantial than others.

One that stuck with me over the years is The Stand. In case you missed it, the book starts with a super flu epidemic nicknamed Captain Trips that wipes out most of the human race.

Then things really get bad.

On a more literary level, one of my favorite novels is The Plague by Albert Camus, which I’ve often mentioned. It’s about an epidemic in Oran, Algeria around 1940, when the country was still under French control. And the disease is a metaphor for life in Nazi-occupied Europe.

The plague takes over the lives of everyone. People are separated from loved ones and feel totally confined and cut off from the rest of the world. Everything changes, including the sense of time.

In both books, the epidemic requires people to make moral decisions. In The Stand, it’s a pretty stark choice between good and evil. In The Plague, it’s interesting to see the different ways people respond to the situation. Some respond with quiet heroism, while others seem to profit or thrive from the epidemic.

For obvious reasons, those books have been on my mind lately. First though, let me say that the current situation is nowhere near these literary extremes and I don’t think we’re going to get anywhere close to them.

But I think the situation does require a response from us. Probably the worst things we can do now are either to politicize the Coronavirus outbreak (as in “Fake news. SAD”) or spread hysteria…which may entail taking a deep breath or two and stepping away from the TV every now and then.

So how should individuals and communities respond to the latest developments? And what can we learn from it? I have a few ideas:

*take reasonable, evidence-based steps to protect ourselves and pay attention to the latest recommendations and cooperate with the reasonable directions of health authorities, even if it can be a pain in the rear;

*if necessary, do what you can to nudge public officials to step up and do all they can to respond and prepare for the future if the virus spreads. Also, encourage them to take steps to ease the economic impact. We've already had some success with this in WV;

*take Mr. Rogers advice and “look for the helpers.”

*put things in perspective: it’s not like we were immortal before Coronavirus came around. We don’t know how bad the hit is going to be, but it’s not the only threat out there. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, between Oct. 1 2019 and Feb. 29 2020, there have been an estimated 20,000 to 52,000 deaths from “regular” flu in the US. Worldwide, somewhere between 291,000 and 646,000 die annually from seasonal flu.

In a normal year, 40,000 Americans die from auto accidents. It’s been estimated that sugary drinks kill over 180,000 people per year in the US. According to the DHHR website, 300,000 deaths per year are related to obesity. The CDC reports that 480,000 Americans die each year due to cigarette smoking. Worldwide, tobacco kills around seven million people per year.

We don’t notice what we get used to.

*let’s not recreate past mistakes. Sometimes events like this make people search for someone to blame or some vulnerable group to target. During the Black Death of the mid 1300s, Christians blamed the plague on Jews, who were accused of poisoning wells. This unleashed horrific persecution throughout Europe. The “enemy” is a virus, not other people.

*this could be a reminder of how interconnected people are all over the world. Sometimes I think that very wealthy people, for example, think they can insulate themselves and their children from the effects of their actions on others, whether it’s the damage done by extreme inequality or climate change.

Sticking with the literature of epidemics, that was a theme of Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Masque of the Red Death,” in which Prince Prospero and his aristocratic friends party in apparent safety while an epidemic raged outside their walls. It didn’t work out very well for them. 

There may be a lesson in that. As Bob Marley sang, “When the rain falls, it don’t fall on one man’s house.”

*this could also be a reminder of how important things like paid sick days, universal health care, universal basic income and out of school food programs for children are. We have a lot of unfinished business.

*but the main one is, after taking all reasonable precautions, not to stop living or being human or showing compassion to others out of fear. Shakespeare’s Henry V observed that “we owe God a death,” but let’s not die while we’re still breathing.

That’s the message of a Buddhist parable about a man chased by a tiger. When he comes to the edge of a cliff, he climbs down a vine. The tiger is waiting. At the bottom of the cliff, there’s another tiger. Meanwhile, two mice just out of reach start gnawing at the vine. Then he notices a ripe strawberry. He plucked it and took a bite. It tasted great. The end.

That’s pretty much the human condition.

I’m not suggesting that people should crank up the song “Don’t Fear the Reaper.”

But if you do, enjoy the cowbell.

(This is an updated version of an op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail last week.)

Random scary movie rant

I'm all about messing with kids' minds. In a good way. My family certainly messed with mine...or allowed it to be messed with.

When I was little, my dad read Edgar Allen Poe's stories and poems to me. They seemed pretty real when I would visit the ancestral farm in a dark hollow in Tazewell, Virginia, complete with an old family cemetery on the hill.

The torch was then passed to my brother, who pretended to call the Plutonian shores and ask for the Raven to come get his little brother Ricky.

I bugged my mother to read Dracula out loud to me when I was pretty small. Watched all the old movies.

When I had kids, I messed with them in a similar fashion. There's something fun about scary stories and movies, obviously. Otherwise they wouldn't be a billion dollar industry.

Come to think of it, many of the well known traditional folk and fairy tales that have been told for hundreds or thousands of years are pretty scary too. I think they serve functions of which we may not be fully conscious.

To paraphrase a well known saying, a mind is a terrible thing not to mess with...up to a point.

Sometimes, though there's a fine--or not so fine--line between the good kind of scary and the bad kind.

I though of this yesterday when I went to see the movie adaptation of Stephen King's Doctor Sleep.

I grew up on Stephen King. I can go for years without reading him, then go on massive binges. This  was one of those binge years, with nine of his down so far, usually in audio form and consumed while driving, running, walking the dog, or mowing. They vary widely in quality, by his own admission. And in...intensity.

Doctor Sleep was one of the most intense ones when I listened to it on CD a few years back.

As in, damn.

 It's the sequel to the "honey, I'm home" 1980 classic The Shining that featured Jack Nicholson as the father from hell..

The sequel is kind of about childhood trauma and the after effects. The main character is Danny Torrance, who was the little kid in the original. As a grownup, he's had to deal with addiction, self-destructive behavior, and inner demons.

This isn't a spoiler, but the main conflict in the book has to do with a group of people (at least they used to be people) who abnormally prolong their lives by feeding on the pain and fear of young children, especially children with special abilities.

The way they do it in the book--and especially the movie--is extremely graphic and disturbing. The movie version is even worse than the book.

I mean, really.

When I got to the theater, I was amazed that people brought very little children with them to see it.

I wondered if they even know what the kids were in for. If they didn't, it seemed kind of irresponsible to me. But if they did know, that seemed worse.

Don't get me wrong.

I'm pretty libertarian about cultural issues and hate censorship in any form. I tend towards the free range theory of child rearing. I think overprotective helicopter parenting is a disaster. I think a certain amount of adversity, discomfort and challenge is good and necessary for a child to become a functional adult.

But there are limits. And not everything is good for every age. Entertaining terror for teens and adults might not be just the thing for preschoolers.

As the biblical book of Ecclesiastes says, "to everything there is a season."

Weekend sendoff, including good news, evil clowns and bees

Here's a potpourri to finish up the work week.

First, did you know that creepy clown threats are a thing now? I was not aware of that. It turns out that even Kanawha County schools in WV have beefed up security because of it.

(I attribute a lot of this to the evil clown in Stephen King's It book and movie. It was, groan, disarming.)

On the bright side, Medicaid expansion is working well in Louisiana, where over 305,000 people have gained coverage in the last few months. Families USA also reports that:

*Nearly 12,000 of these newly enrolled adults have already started receiving screening and treatment for chronic conditions and illnesses including breast cancer, colon cancer, and diabetes.

*More than 1,000 women have received mammograms or other diagnostic breast imaging and 24 of these women are currently being treated for breast cancer. 

*Nearly 700 adults have received colonoscopies and more than 100 had polyps, an early sign of colon cancer, removed during the procedure. 

*160 adults have been newly diagnosed with diabetes and have started receiving necessary care to help them manage their condition. 

You can find more from them on the benefits of Medicaid expansion here.

Finally, here's an interesting look at what might be the emotional life of bees. Who knew?

Stephen King land

El Cabrero has been a terribly irregular blogger lately, but at least I have a story about why. It goes something like this...

Once upon a time last Thursday, I went on a work trip to a certain northern WV town that's about four hours away on a good day. And this wasn't a good day.  Then, it was like the books of a certain author on which I have been binging lately seemed to come alive.

First, let me say that in general I'm a literary snob. If you don't believe it, search the archives of this blog. You'll find ancient Greeks, Chinese philosophers, Shakespeare, Melville, Dante, Homer, Emerson, Thoreau, etc.

But sometimes you gotta eat some popcorn, right? My popcorn stash consists of listening to an unabridged Stephen King book. I can go for years without indulging but his books always seem to eventually wind up on the menu. I've done three in the last month or so.

Now you know, all kinds of weird stuff happens in Stephen King books. Vampires, plagues, a cell phone pulse that wipes out civilization, haunted places, etc. Oh yeah, and evil cars.

It so happened on that on what turned out to be a road trip from hell, my car went Stephen King when I was driving back through darkness, ice, snow, high winds and freezing temperature.

The car, whose make will remain nameless except to say it starts with the third letter of the alphabet and ends with the twentieth, would randomly flash a "reduced engine power" message and stop going without warning. Oh and the lights would go out too. The only thing to do was restart the engine and hope it wouldn't do it again, which of course it did.

 Some places where it performed this endearing trick were busy two lane dark roads with no shoulder and with traffic right behind me. Others were interstates where getting to the side was a feat and getting back on the road on the ices was iffy as well. In general, it did this when there was no place to safely get off the road and seek shelter from the storm.

For the record, I'm no stranger to car trouble. But this was the first and only time (so far) when I felt like my car was consciously trying to kill me or someone else.

In a word, I got stranded. Miraculously, the car didn't succeed in causing a major accident, although it didn't seem to be for lack of trying. I eventually made it home in a rental but have to go back and retrieve said vehicle soon.

I just hope it has outgrown its homicidal phase.

IS INEQUALITY ON THE AGENDA? Maybe. Too bad this didn't happen a long time ago.

SPEAKING OF WHICH,  here's a look at the real redistribution of wealth (sneak preview: it's direction is upward).

A BETTER IDEA. The state of WV has been flirting lately with private prisons. Here's a better alternative.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

We all could use a mind mess

El Cabrero is something of a literary snob. I mean, Homer, Virgil, Dante, Aeschylus, Melville, Dostoevsky, Austen, Bronte, name it, I'm there. You can find all of the above discussed at length if you search this blog's archives (see upper left).

Still, every so often you gotta blow things out. And for the past few days, I've done this by listening to a Stephen King book. And it stoned me.

Some of you may recall the book or movie The Shining, about a haunted resort in the Colorado Rockies. You may also recall the little kid who said "Redrum" when things went south. King's latest, Doctor Sleep, is about that kid when he grows up.

I listen to books all the time when driving, running or doing mindless tasks. No big deal. But this one crawled up my inner quarters. If your mind needs messed with, give it a try.

OK, SO THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE A SOCIAL JUSTICE BLOG. Well, for one thing, Stephen King is pretty progressive. For another, here are two great op eds by two of America's greatest columnists. Here's E.J. Dionne on Pope Francis, who is almost making me switch from the Anglican to the Roman team, and here's Paul Krugman on raising the minimum wage, which some of us are going to try to do in WV.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

APPROACHING FIVE YEARS

It's hard to believe, but we're approaching the fifth anniversary of the Bush administration's unnecessary war in Iraq. That's longer than the US Civil War and our involvement in World War II.

For the latest reckoning of US casualties, click here. As mentioned here earlier this week, the World Health Organization estimates over 150,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the invasion.

Financially, the war has been estimated to cost over $1 trillion in the first four years. Now it's costing around $720 million per day or $500,000 per minute.

Over the last several days this blog has been exploring how people interested in a less violent and more just world can learn from studying conflict and strategy, with a special focus on Sun Tzu, who believed the highest level of accomplishment is to accomplish one's objectives without a struggle.

It's only fitting at this time to quote his warnings on the dangers of a long war, from Chapter 2 of The Art of War:

If battle is protracted, your weapons will be blunted and your troops demoralized. If you lay siege to a walled city, you exhaust your strength. If your armies are kept in the field for a long time, your national reserves will not suffice. Where you have blunted your weapons, demoralized your troops, exhausted your strength and depleted all available resources, the neighboring rulers will take advantage of your adversity to strike. And even with the wisest counsel, you will not be able to turn the ensuing consequences to the good.

Thus in war, I have heard tell of a foolish haste, but I have yet to see a case of cleverly dragging on the hostilities. There has never been a state that has benefited from an extended war. Hence, if one is not fully cognizant of the evils of waging war, he cannot be fully cognizant either of how to turn it to best account.

BLOOM AND BUST. Yale literary professor Harold Bloom doesn't care much for the Iraq war, Harry Potter, or Stephen King. I'm with him on the first, have no opinion on the second, but must admit a certain occasional flirtation with the works of the third. Especially the older stuff.

LIKE A SPRINGSTEEN SONG. This item from yesterday's NY Times about the loss of blue collar jobs points to a sad trend.

MORTGAGE CRISIS AND THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN COMMUNITY. According to this item from The Nation,

Black homeowners have been hit particularly hard, largely because predatory lenders have been steering them toward subprime loans for years at more than twice the rate of white homeowners, even when they could afford prime rates. According to the Urban League, home equity accounts for almost 90 percent of black homeowners' net worth. So as the housing market collapses, much of the new wealth that has accumulated in black communities in recent decades will go with it.

The Urban League and Rainbow/PUSH are planning a Jan. 22 march on the Department of Housing and Urban Development in DC to bring attention to this crisis.

FEAR AND TREMBLING. As the 2008 elections approach, some management types are scared about the prospects of a new Congress passing the Employee Free Choice Act which just might help rebuild the middle class. El Cabrero is temporarily overcome with sympathy for their plight. OK, I'm over it.

MORE ON MASSEYGATE. Here's the latest AP coverage about the ties between Massey CEO Don Blankenship and WV Supreme Court chief Justice Spike Maynard. Selection:

Since his election as justice in 1996, Maynard has helped decide at least eight cases at the Supreme Court involving Massey or one of its subsidiaries, an AP review shows. Maynard voted in Massey’s favor in all eight, dissenting from the court’s ruling in four of those cases.

PHYS ED. Here's something on a more rational approach to physical education and lifetime activity.

TWO BURNING ISSUES. This article suggest that blaming erratic behavior on a midlife crisis is a lame excuse. Damn. I was just getting ready to try that one. And, if you've ever spent sleepless nights wondering where, exactly, the fortune cookie came from, you can now rest in peace.

AND WHILE WE'RE AT IT, how 'bout a rodent big as a bull?

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED