Stand Up!

Margin of Error

A great man, the statesman and civil rights activist Rep John Lewis has died.

"He once described an incident when, as a young man, he was beaten bloody by members of the Ku Klux Klan after attempting to enter a "white waiting room. Many years later, in February of '09, one of the men that had beaten us came to my Capitol Hill office -- he was in his 70's, with his son in his 40's -- and he said, 'Mr. Lewis, I am one of the people who beat you and your seat mate'" on a bus, Lewis said, adding the man said he had been in the KKK. "He said, 'I want to apologize. Will you accept my apology?'"After accepting his apology and hugging the father and son, the three cried together, Lewis remembered. 'It is the power in the way of peace, the way of love," Lewis said. "We must never, ever hate. The way of love is a better way.'" -- CNN

The son of sharecroppers, he marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and served 17 terms in Congress.

***

From a man who believed in the power of love to one who preaches hate. Trump's contention that "nobody" could have foreseen that the Covid-19 disaster has been revealed to have been simply another lie.

"Former Trump administration economist Todas Philipson said on Friday that his team alerted the White House about the dangers of a looming pandemic outbreak about three months before Covid-19 is believed to have made its way into the United States...(His) report warned a pandemic disease could kill as many as half a million Americans and cause up to $3.79 trillion in damage to the U.S. economy." (CNN)

Then there is this:

"The official portraits of former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were removed from the Grand Foyer of the White House within the last week...and replaced by those of two Republican presidents who served more than a century ago...The portrait of former President Barack Obama is not expected to be unveiled for a formal ceremony during Trump's first term." (CNN)

And a frightening report from OPB:

"Federal law enforcement officers have been using unmarked vehicles to drive around downtown Portland and detain protesters since at least July 14. Personal accounts and multiple videos posted online show the officers driving up to people, detaining individuals with no explanation of why they are being arrested, and driving off.

"The tactic appears to be another escalation in federal force deployed on Portland city streets, as federal officials and President Donald Trump have said they plan to “quell” nightly protests outside the federal courthouse and Multnomah County Justice Center that have lasted for more than six weeks."

That's three news reports to ruin your breakfast. My apologies.

***

The average relationship now lasts two years and nine months, according to Google. Getting over the average relationship, however, can take decades. The margin for error here is roughly two years, nine months, plus or minus.

Roughly 48.2 percent of Americans are married, but about 50 percent of all marriages end in divorce, according to Google.

If you tossed a coin, same odds.

But...

...into this cynical, depressing moment of time, a little light can bring some hope. My happy news is that I have just learned that I have a grandchild on the way. (S)he is due next spring.

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Out of Water

The other night as I was heading to the bedroom when it was almost 12, I encountered my grandson, also almost 12, fishing in the hallway.

"Good luck," I whispered.

Given our lack of success fishing at more conventional locations this year, he might as well try it close to home, I reasoned.

Maybe he'll catch a fish out of water.

That reminds me of one of my favorite New Yorker cartoons about leadership. It depicts a school of fish following their leader through the atmosphere high above the ocean. Back in the pack one fish says to another, "I knew we were in trouble the minute we left the water."

A new rabbi joke I heard recently was about a priest, a minister and a rabbit that go into a bar. When the bartender comes over, he takes the orders from the first two but hesitates at the third member of the group. "Aren't you a rabbit -- what are you doing here?"

"I'm here because of auto-correct."

That, in turn, reminds me of an old story told by folk singer Woody Guthrie during the Depression. Two rabbits, a papa rabbit and a mama rabbit were munching in a field when they heard the distant barking of dogs.

They just kept munching as the sound grew closer until they saw a pack of dogs on a nearby ridge. Knowing they were now in grave danger they started trying to run away.

They ran and ran but the dogs kept getting closer until they were almost on them. Exhausted, the rabbits ran into a hollow log while the dogs gathered outside its entrance barking loudly.

Mama Rabbit says, "I don't think we're going to get out of here alive, Papa."

"That's alright," answers Papa, "Let's just hunker down until we outnumber 'em."

***

We definitely need all the jokes we can get. The daily infection total in the U.S. has now exceeded 71,000. With our elected leaders either MIA or battling with each other, I'm afraid we're left to fend for ourselves.

That said, there is so little we can do. Wear masks, stay apart, wash hands frequently. Do all that and we're still at risk from an insidious enemy that floats in on the wind.

Bad luck wind been blowin' at my back

I was born to bring trouble to wherever I'm at 

-- Johnny Cash

But before we can label this as bad luck, we need to get out of shock. Everyone I talk with is still in shock and that includes me, (I talk with myself a lot.)

Just the other day, I was talking to someone, it may have been myself, who said, "I can't believe this is happening." Shock.

Many people are mad at that photo released by the White House of Trump grinning mindlessly as he endorses a can of Goya beans. But that's a man in shock. The beans are in shock too. ("Did you ever think we'd be invited to the Oval Office for a photo op?")

BTW, the meaning of Goya in Spanish is Goya, which scholars believe is an ancient utterance beans make when they go into shock.

Someone was asking me, it might have been myself, why I write in such a disjointed manner, where one topic leads to another and on and on to the point where one can wonder, "Are we ever going to get to anywhere here?"

As for the disjointed style, try writing in a mask, maintaining distance and frequently washing with hand sanitizer, and you'll become disjointed as well. Just don't get too used to smelling that hand sanitizer!

As for where we are going, I knew we were lost the minute he left the water. (I often refer to myself as he. It's a gender issue.)

Okay, I can see where this is headed. I think I'll track down my grandson and go fishing in the hallway.

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And the Kids?

As the reality of this pandemic sinks in, many are struggling with how to stay hopeful. Ironically, it's not  really all that hard if your basic philosophy is that life sucks.

If my expectation as a child had been that everything was going to be rosy in life, I'm sure this moment would be more difficult than it is proving to be. But from an early age, probably around ten or eleven, I'd concluded that the world wasn't a warm fuzzy place at all, but an alien universe where crappy things showed up all the time without warning.

Relatives kept getting killed in train wrecks, industrial accidents, or dying from cancer. Kids at school were organized into gangs that cheered with bloodlusty chants during fistfights at lunch time. School itself was boring; I learned far more at the library than there.

Male culture, boy culture specifically, puzzled me. The jokes weren't funny and the anti-girl sentiment didn't track with my sense of girls at all. I liked girls but was too shy to do anything about that yet.

Popular culture was okay, but I'd outgrown Davy Crockett and cowboy myths years earlier. Sports were fine so I devoted much of my time to following my favorite teams.

Church was absurd in my view; anyone who bought the Holy Ghost scenario seemed to me to be detached from reality. Plus I was convinced one of the ministers was deranged when he had to be helped from the pulpit.

Mostly I ignored everything external and retreated into worlds of my own creation, imaginary places where I could set the rules and report the results (to myself). God knows how many baseball and football games between fictional teams I narrated in my head. I especially loved the box scores that resulted.

It took many years before I realized there were other people like me, who felt alienated by the mainstream and very much alone as a result. During high school, I knew exactly one Jew, one black kid, one Latino kid, one gay kid, and zero Asian kids. I didn't really have any friends who were girls, though by now I was liking them more and more.

From this background, I landed in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan on a scholarship. My roommate was black and my new acquaintances were from all sorts of backgrounds and orientations. First the first time I felt comfortable in my element.

It had long since become clear what I wasn't -- Jewish, black, Latino, gay, Asian, or female. But now it started to become obvious what I *was* -- much happier in a world where lots of people around.me were different from me on the surface but like me underneath.

Achieving that happiness was easier due to my having loving parents, sisters, and several nice cousins. They basically seemed to tolerate me being a weirdo. Plus I had no expectation of becoming rich or famous, so poverty and obscurity were not disappointments or burdens.

I had a good work ethic and tons of curiosity. The new world of restless intellectualism and social activism suited me just fine.

Into all of this mixture came a dawning realization: I could write and some people even liked what I wrote.  My best friend from high school invited me to visit the college newspaper, The Michigan Daily, as the spring semester of my freshman year got under way.

This was good timing because another thing that had become apparent was that math was not the right major for me. This was clear the first day I showed up for class and everyone else had a sleeve protector, compass and slide rule.

All I had was a knack for simple arithmetic.

Journalism at The Daily offered a new route for self discovery and achievement and soon I was addicted to the thrill of being part of each day's news cycle. I made new friends and by now I was liking girls a lot.

***

This week, I attended a reunion of sorts via Zoom with many of my colleagues from that formative campus experience 54 years ago. The main thing I wanted to say to those other 70-somethings was "thank you" for helping me find my path in life.

At the time I met them, probably no adult -- not my parents, their friends, my former teachers or current professors -- could have influenced me to completely pivot and reorient my life in a new direction.

But my peers helped me do just that.

It was that experience and others like it that shaped my opinions about education, and how young people actually learn what really matters in life. To a very large degree they learn from each other.

Great teachers understand this and they remain alert to each opportunity to encourage peer-learning when it presents itself.

Ten years ago, one of my sons was starting his freshman year at an inner-city high school in a tough neighborhood of San Francisco. He was a talented soccer player, and the varsity coach tapped him in the pre-season to be a starter on the team.

The great majority of his fellow students were from minority families -- Latino, Asian, Black, Pacific Islander, including many undocumented immigrants and English-language-learners.

After a few weeks, and a few soccer games where he'd played well, I picked him up after practice one afternoon and asked him how it was going. He said it was "pretty good" but that there was this one kid in his math class who kept staring at him and who he was pretty sure didn't like him.

He was an older kid and his name was Jesús.

Of course I was concerned, because gang activity was known to be a problem at the school. No one was allowed to wear blue or red, the colors of the Norteños and the Sureños, and an armed guard stood at the one unlocked entrance to the building. Drugs were openly dealt on the corner near school; and cop cars were always around.

A few weeks later, I asked him about Jesús and he said that they were now study partners.

"How did that happen?"

"One day he came up to me and asked me to help him with math. The teacher noticed and said to me later, 'anything you can do to help Jesús, please do. He has a 0.00 GPA and he won't listen to me.'

"So I started tutoring him after school and he told me he loves fútbol but coach won't let him play until his grades go up."

My son, who was the only white kid on the soccer team, had never liked Spanish classes but I noticed that now he spoke quite a few Spanish words he'd been learning on the pitch. His Latino teammates liked him and nicknamed him "The European."

Months later, I was in the stands at one of his futsol (inside soccer) games in the winter league, when I noticed after the game that a large, burly Latino kid from the opposing team went over and gave my son a big hug.

"Who was that?" I asked him on the drive home.

"Oh, that's Jesús. His GPA is up. We're friends."

***

One of my worries about schools remaining shut this fall is how peer-to-peer education like that will happen if everyone is social-distancing and working remotely.

For kids like me 54 years ago, or my son 10 years ago, or Jesús, what will be the coming school year be like?

My concern reaches far beyond politics or who is right about what educators should be doing during the pandemic. It is deeper and more personal than that. 

What about the kids?

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Kids' Mural

Julia is helping at an art camp where the students have been creating this practice mural.

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Our Song

So we are six months into what infectious disease experts believe will probably be a two-year cycle, during which the human race will continue to absorb a major hit from Covid-19. That means 2022 is the new target date for any sort of return to normalcy.

This is very much what World War II had to have felt like in the early 1940s. Some big shocks have hit us, and the distant roll of approaching danger portends problems for a long time to come.

But the best understanding of what this enemy is doing to us and how unique that is is to compare it to other recent pandemics like Ebola. The difference is that Ebola is so lethal it kills its hosts (us) whereby Covid-19 mostly leaves us surviving but with substantially weakened bodies. There were only four Ebola cases in the U.S. during that pandemic. There are millions of Covid cases already.

The prospect for a vaccine is uncertain but let's be optimistic and say it will come at some not-too-distant point. There are some encouraging signs already. The unfortunate truth is it will not cure the disease or completely prevent it. What it may do, if we are extremely lucky, is help us suppress Corona-V to a limited degree.

That's why "flu season" will no doubt be renamed "Covid season." Every winter it will arrive with the coolor air, the rains and the snows. As is the case this year, it may also spike even in the warmer months as well.

So we will have no option but to fundamentally change our lifestyles. Not wearing a mask in public will become illegal, punishable by fines and in the case of repeated violations, imprisonment.

Going to prison will introduce new risks of infection and death. But society will have no choice but to segregate the stubbornly unmasked from our social commons.

***

Everything I learn about this health crisis suggests to me that it is inextricably related to climate change. That is not a conclusion many others have reached yet, so let's hope I am wrong.

But regardless, the climate battle is one that requires us to engage on a number of fronts. One is related to a core passion of mine for the past 50 years -- the "Circle of Poison."  According to the Pesticide Action Network (PAN), "Monsanto (now owned by Bayer) recently petitioned the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to approve a new GE corn seed engineered to tolerate applications of not just one or two chemicals, but five — dicamba, glufosinate, quizalofop, 2,4-D and glyphosate."

If you've followed this issue at all, you will recognize this represents an unmitigated disaster for our common environment. Please visit PAN's site to learn more.

Then again, on the topic of climate change, there is some potentially good news. It's contained in the political evolution of Joe Biden, whose speech Tuesday promises a $2 trillion investment in clean, green, sustainable energy.

Biden is emphasizing that his approach will create jobs, which of course will become ever more desperately needed during this pandemic. He now recognizes that climate change is both the largest threat to our future but our best opportunity to strengthen our economy in socially responsible ways.

Accordingly, the choice this November will boil down to a choice based on future technologies vs. one based on the past.

Trump has made clear where he stands -- celebrating oil and coal production, which are declining industries that cause climate change. So all he can offer is nostalgia for a time gone by.

I'm part of his generation and therefore personally understand viscerally the appeal of nostalgia, wistful memories and the longing for simpler days.

The elderly know, of course, that our time here is more limited than it once was. And we're okay with that. We also can tell you all the nostalgic stories you'd like about the past but there are few kernels in any of them to grow the kind of garden we need for a viable future.

So it is time to discard nostalgia and embrace hope and turn that into action. The only song for our future is one we can sing for each other. In that spirit, I want to repeat the verse I published yesterday.

The key word in this song is "while." Let's make sure we sing this while we're still here in the world...

And you can tell everybody this is your song 
It may be quite simple but now that it's done 
I hope you don't mind 
I hope you don't mind 
That I put down in words 
How wonderful life is while you're in the world -- Elton John

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One Percent

Tell me this isn't happening. In the middle of the worst health crisis in modern history, the President is having his henchmen attack the country's leading infectious disease expert because his public opinion poll ratings are too high.

But it's true. Dr Fauci, who is strictly apolitical, having worked for six presidents now, is trusted by a much larger portion of the U.S. population than Trump, and that makes the President jealous.

How pathetic!

While this latest psychodrama plays out, California has basically shut down again. From being one of the states considered a relative success story in the Covid-19 fight, the Golden State has fallen back into one where the pandemic is on the verge of surging out of control.

So much so the state's two largest school districts, Los Angeles and San Diego, announced they will have online-only classes this fall, in defiance of the White House.

Beyond that, the way this affects residents is not that we can't go to bars or restaurants; most of us wouldn't do that anyway. Our "non-essential" medical appointments are being cancelled once again, and we are being forced to further delay treatments that are already badly overdue.

Dentists, eye doctors, hearing clinics, exercise centers, physical therapists, and so on are closing for business and our collective health needs are reverting to being on hold. Will tomorrow ever come?

Even our entertainment is out of reach. By all rights, this should be the middle of baseball season, but that's been on rain delay since early April, which reminds me of the story of the longest home run ever hit:

"One day during the 1930s, the Pittsburgh Crawfords were playing at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, where their young catcher, Josh Gibson, hit the ball so high and so far that no one saw it come down. After scanning the sky carefully for a few minutes, the umpire deliberated and ruled it a home run. The next day the Crawfords were playing in Philadelphia, when suddenly a ball dropped out of the heavens and was caught by the startled center fielder on the opposing club. The umpire made the only possible ruling. Pointing to Gibson, he shouted, "Yer out -- yesterday in Pittsburgh!"

That rendition is courtesy of Robert W. Peterson's book about the Negro Leagues, "Only the Ball was White."

The main battle is becoming whether we can keep our sense of humor through all of this. After all, laughter may represent our only and final line of defense.

Recent reports suggest that about one percent of the U.S. population has had Covid-19 so far. That's over three million people. So is that the good news or the bad news? Hundreds of millions of us are left.

If Dr. Fauci is right, we'll soon be seeing a million new cases every ten days or three million each month! But what is there to keep that rate from accelerating? No amount of "contact tracing" can track down all the exposed people when we reach those levels.

If the experiences of the first one percent are indicative, we most likely will see a variety of long-term effects on those that survive. This is a severely debilitating illness for some.

One down, ninety-nine percent to go.

Those of us awaiting the day we fall ill can feel scant comfort at the prospect that a vaccine will save us. Whenever it arrives, if it arrives, it will be too late for millions of Americans. Hundreds of thousands will die.

When it comes to a sense of humor, that is a lot of laughter that will never occur. Think about the sound. The sound of nobody laughing. 

And you can tell everybody this is your song 
It may be quite simple but now that it's done 
I hope you don't mind 
I hope you don't mind 
That I put down in words 
How wonderful life is while you're in the world -- Elton John

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Geographical Corrections

Saturday evening we were at Point Molate on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay, watching the waves drift in from the Golden Gate. Sunday afternoon found us at an inland ranch where my granddaughter was having a horse-riding lesson. Her horse was named Gizmo.

It was 98 degrees at the ranch; back at the coast it was 74 degrees. Such is life in Northern California during fire season and when sheltering-in-place keeps most of us close to home.

***

Imagine it was your job to clean up the President's image. And one of your tasks was to censor the Access Hollywood tape of Donald Trump bragging about grabbing women because it was too graphic for his followers. So you decide to metaphorically transform his statement into a geographically correct version. So here's what he would have said, now you've corrected the record:

 "...when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. ... Grab them by the Mexicali. You can do anything."

You could have focused on Florida or Texas instead of California, but "grab them by the Keys" or "grab them by the Rio Grande" just doesn't have the ring of Mexicali. 

For Florida, this is shaping up to be a bummer of a summer. Over 15,000 people a day diagnosed with Covid-19. The GOP convention set for Jacksonville looms as a public health disaster in the making. The state's ICUs are already overwhelmed, with who knows how many patients to come.

I'm proud of my original home state, Michigan, which is run politically by three impressive women --  Gretchen Whitmer, Dana Nessel and Jocelyn Benson. Whitmer, the governor, is dismissed by Trump as "that woman" from Michigan. What he fears most is that they will help flip the state to Democrats in this year's election, and thereby end his Presidency.

Though his attacks on all three have been relentless and misogynistic, they remain unbowed. Whitmer said recently: "by the end of this, Donald Trump is going to know not to mess with these women from Michigan.”

But until then, having a would-be authoritarian in the White House has other terrible implications, including giving license to oppressive governments around the world to attack independent journalists. Please read in The Times: "While America Looks Away, Autocrats Crack Down on Digital News Sites."

***

It's difficult to envision how this pandemic is shaping the outlook for our youngest members of the human race. Situations and events come and go, but certain shared experiences shape the identity of a generation in ways that will persist all of their lives.

No child living through this pandemic will forget it. But the scary thing is they may well not remember life *before* Covid-19. The last role that interests me to play is a scare-monger, but what if what we thought was normal never returns? What, instead, if we are to suffer wave after wave of pandemics, until only the most cautious and fastidious people remain.

That would be a world where the young would have to curb their curiosity and propensity to experiment. For a couple to meet and break through the rules of social distancing, would be the biggest risk either of them ever took.

If they remained healthy and reproduced, they would have no incentive to relax standards for their children. Everyone would be raised to avoid risks at all costs. The germs would be all around, so wearing anti-bacterial and anti-viral suits would become the norm.

Many of the rituals of the good life would fade away. No one would go to bars, except for those who had given up all hope of a future. Come to think of it, that's a little like bars were back before the shutdown.

Mask technology would have to advance, so that the mask reflected your feelings, down to and including a fake smile when you feel like wearing a fake smile.

Drones and robots would provide all the labor humans used to do. Work would be regimented according to rigid categories of AI-oriented endeavors.

Everyone would have to receive a guaranteed salary, regardless of whether they worked or not. Your main "job" would be remaining healthy.Schooling would be done remotely, with no exceptions.

Airplane travel would end. People would be born, live and die within circumscribed territories, sharply reducing the gene pool options when it came to reproduction.

No one would ever actually meet a politician in person. Those best at reading teleprompter copy would rise to the top.

Sports would be limited to video games. There would be no live concerts or performances.

There are many other characteristics of that brave new future but this is enough for now.

You get the picture. 

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Rock n Roll

The early years.

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Small Matters

We've been hearing from our correspondents everywhere about the new cognitive disorder that appears to have mutated from too much Covid-19 news coverage. It is a formerly rare complication known as Dépendance pathologique à Trump.

The symptoms may include an unhealthy fixation with what the current U.S. President is up to and particularly what he is tweeting with his exceptionally small vocabulary. Scientists are researching whether an exceptionally small vocabulary is associated with exceptionally small hands or the excessive use of exclamation points (!!!!!!) or having orange hair, but preliminary findings are based on too (forgive the expression) small a sample size to justify making them public.

Therefore we are making them public.

We're also actively seeking material for our new weekly news program, Saturday Night Dead, which strives to fill the hole left while SNL is off the air for the summer. One of our new features is to spotlight the stories of people who died from anything but Covid-19 this past week.

These include the tragic passing of the President's personal valet, Master Sergeant Bates, affectionally known simply as Master Bates, who apparently died from walking on too many eggshells around his boss. He was found shot to death in the middle of Fifth Avenue.

Police apprehended a suspect but he turned out to be above the law.

In an exclusive interview, First Lady Melania Trump revealed why her husband inspects the White House bunker so often these days but it was exclusive so we can't tell you.

In additional news, Trump's closest associates have taken to answer knocks at their door with the classic greeting, "Is that a subpoena in your pocket or do you like me?"

This just in: Craigslist reports an uptick in personal ads such as "subpoena seeking dompoena" in the popular section known as Missed Connections.

And this update from the show "Fox and Friend" (there's only one left), which is suggesting its nosedive in the ratings is due to the rise of the exceptionally small Radical Left!!!!!!

Here's the latest sports scores: 0-0, 0-0, 0-0, 0-0, 0-0, and naught-naught.

Our perspective this week comes from Inspector Clouseau in "The Pink Panther 2.0," who said "No, I don't consider myself a beautiful woman."  ("Je ne me considère pas comme une belle femme.")

That pretty much sums everything up.

***

Beyond fake news, in Manhattan, some good news for a change -- Katz's Deli is open for outside dining way downtown. Katz's serve the best pastrami sandwich I've ever eaten. Also, it is large enough to count for breakfast, lunch and dinner. all at once.

In an internal document, the CDC calls the prospect of fully reopening schools and colleges this fall the "highest risk" of spreading Covid-19. Trump wants them open and has threatened to cut off federal funding to schools that don't comply.

Saturday, Trump finally wore a mask to visit wounded veterans in Walter Reed Hospital. This was a first and let's hope not a last.

More than 100 corporations have asked the administration to protect Dreamers under DACA. That's one indication that what is good for business is not necessarily what Trump thinks is best for him personally.

Speaking of the economy, experts fear that all that will be left after the pandemic will be mega-corporations and retail chains. In other words the whole country will become Interstate 10. At least we'll still have Katz's.

The number of states where Covid-19 cases are falling? Three. In 94 percent of U.S. states, the virus is rising, some precipitously.

Still question global warming trends? You might want to open a dialogue with the millions of Americans enduring 100-120 degree heat today. Just bring the ice.

Just another small matter gentle on my mind.

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