Saturday scenes: shutdown Mission

Early Friday morning I took a walk north on Valencia to 16th St, east to Mission, and south to my starting point, carefully distancing myself from the few other people abroad at 8am.

It was jarring to see the Crepe House boarded up. Note the young heterosexual couple strolling together with their morning coffees. Insofar as there were people walking within the six foot zone we're supposed to keep clear, these were the sort I saw.

Across the street, the tough lefty survivors of Radio Habana Social Club are out for the duration.

There was a line at Ritual Roasters -- properly spaced out to avert contagion over caffeine I should mention.

There were a few unhoused people sleeping in doorways, but less than I am used to seeing. Where have people gone, I wonder?

El Buen Sabor was also boarded up.

There were plenty of runners! Up until very recently, I might have been among them -- I used to run Valencia in the bike lane sometimes, but only very early on Sunday mornings when I could be sure of little traffic. Maybe I should give this another try ... But I couldn't do what either of these people were doing, running on the sidewalk. I need the relative softness of asphalt -- hence running the street.

Never noticed this place on Mission before; nice sign.

This gent was checking a take-out menu. Aren't we all? We're actually more likely to grab take-out as long as some of these hole-in-the-wall places continue to serve. They need all the customers they can get or they won't make it through this. I don't trust that any bailout is going to reach the owners and workers of Mission storefront restaurants. Will they be replaced by chains or just shuttered forever?

Yet another locked coffee shop. Will such community places ever reopen? It's hard to imagine they can hold on for a long closing. Yet we all know urban communities are not only changeable, they are also surprisingly resilient. Time will tell.

Direct action: homes for homeless Angelenos

“With this health crisis and this housing crisis, we need every vacant house to be a home for those who don’t have a safe and stable place to sleep in,” said Ruby Gordillo, 33, while standing on the porch of a two-bedroom bungalow before moving in with her three children.

Gordillo and others involved in the protest have said they were inspired by a group of homeless mothers in Oakland. Late last year, those mothers took over a vacant, corporate-owned property and, after they were evicted, secured backing from Gov. Gavin Newsom to force the Bay Area property’s sale to a community land trust.

Like the Oakland moms, the protesters in El Sereno are affiliated with the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, an organization that has advocated several statewide measures to expand rent control and tenant protections.

Los Angeles Times, March 18, 2020

Brave ... and desparate.

Friday cat blogging

No, this cat is not wondering why I'm breaking the lockdown. This was some weeks ago, when a passerby was a more ordinary curiosity. I am still Walking San Francisco, staying six feet away from any other walkers ...

Can Donald Trump cancel the November election?

Suppose all the polls say he'll be defeated when the country votes on November 3rd? It certainly looks likely this will be where it's at: presidents who preside over apocalyptic plagues and economic plunges aren't popular. So can he intervene somehow to stop us from choosing a replacement? Given the character of the man, he is almost certain to try.

So it seems responsible to collect what we know now about this possibility so we can begin to get our minds around what we might have to raise hell about. With some luck, none of the bad stuff will happen, but we haven't had a lot of luck lately.

Some states have postponed primary elections during the last week. Without the cooperation of Congress, Trump cannot do that in November; the voting day, the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, was set by statute in 1845. Good thing we elected a Democratic House; I don't see Nancy Pelosi caving in on that.

Moreover, that pesky Electoral College is required by law to meet in December and it takes the results of an election to choose the electors. And the 20th amendment to the Constitution says the president's term is four years, ending at noon January 20; after that, election or no election, no more President Trump unless he's won re-election in the normal way.

What the president is more likely to try to do is scare people out of voting. There's no reason to think he'd be truthful when doing that. He might claim the Chinese had poisoned all the polling places or some such racist fantasy. Limbaugh and Hannity will be right on it. Can you see him announcing an emergency cancellation that he has no authority for? Sure, he already has used a phony emergency for his Wall. Trump's opponents need to work to be sure our folks know he doesn't have the authority to stop the vote.

One protection we might have against a phony emergency is that the people most likely to believe Trump's claims are his voters, not ours. Old Republicans are, unfortunately, some of the most credulous people around. And about that sort of thing, Trump is canny.

The best way to protect the November election now is to agitate for making mail balloting available everywhere. This is tough to achieve since voting rules are set state-by-state and most blue states already make voting easier in many ways. Its largely the GOP places that make voting so hard. Oregon Senator Ron Wyden is pushing for $500 million in federal money to help states set up mail voting systems -- how about making that part of the coronavirus stimulus? And how about some more cash to set up early voting polling places so voters can practice distancing without lines? Republicans won't be eager; they believe that when everyone can vote easily, they lose more than they win.

Resources:
Buzzfeed examines what laws might stop Trump from breaking the November election.

Ed Kilgore has a great rundown of which states provide mail-in ballots now. California encourages voters to sign up for permanent mail-in voting and automatically sends out ballots to the two thirds of us who want them. Happily, both our neighbors, Arizona and Nevada, do the same. In the latter case the practice is getting its first run in 2020. Voters in Arizona have to ask to their County Recorder's office to be on the Permanent Early Voter list.

The Brennan Center offers a plan to "Protect the 2020 Vote from the Coronavirus" which suggests numerous doable measures that could be taken to make voting safer and easier in a time of pandemic. They've got suggestions on all of it, from easy voter registration to healthy polling places. Activists should take note: some of our states and local authorities can implement much of this even if we can't win federal money.

A couple of good news elections in Illinois

Cook County prosecutor Kim Foxx defeated her challengers in the Democratic primary, assuring re-election in the fall. She had overcome millions of dollars of TV attack ads designed to scare voters that her efforts to reduce the numbers held in jails were corrupt and dangerous. It didn't work. Because of the damn virus, her victory speech had to be delivered to cameras instead of a cheering crowd.

“I want to help make Cook County a more inclusive and thriving community, where everyone is welcome,” she said. “I pledge to keep pushing for that change, that is fair, that is just, that is equitable, that will keep our communities safe,” she said.

When Black women are elected as prosecutors, too many white people are ready to believe that the justice reforms they bring in make them on the side of the crooks. But not in Chicago in this cycle!


Meanwhile challenger Marie Newman has unseated incumbent Democratic Congressman Dan Lipinski in the primary. Lipinski was one of the last of Dems' right wing dinosaurs. I mean come on, the guy routinely worked to restrict women's access to abortion and voted against Obamacare. It took Newman two tries and a lot of fundraising to knock him out -- but bit by bit, we can win better Dems.

A plague of fear

So that coward and nincompoop in the White House is trying to blame China for a virus -- and this follows:
Also this:

Gun stores are reporting a sharp rise in the number of Asian people purchasing firearms to protect themselves from racist attacks amid the coronavirus outbreak.

David Liu, the owner of Arcadia Firearm & Safety in San Gabriel Valley, has claimed that he has seen around 10 times more customers walk through his door in recent weeks.

"It was crazy," Liu told Newsweek. "One example is on March 3 and 4, I had 50 plus people come in here to take their firearms safety test and everyone one of them bought a gun. That's quite unusual for my small shop.

"They're all coming in because the media is telling them that Asians are being targeted, Chinese are being targeted."

We get a choice: fear or solidarity. Let's help each other choose better.

Growing up in a cage

This book came to me literally as a found item. While Walking San Francisco, I happened upon the San Francisco Public Library mobile tech classroom. Somebody had set outside a carton of books the library was "de-accessioning" -- getting rid of -- for free. I couldn't go by without looking and picked up this title: Gaijin: American Prisoner of War.

What a find! Graphic novelist Matt Faulkner has adopted experiences from his own family history to draw the story of the coming of age of a mixed Japanese-American San Francisco teenage boy, Koji Miyamoto, after the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. His father was traveling in Japan at the time; U.S. authorities find that suspicious. His schoolmates call him "Jap" and beat him up; when internment is ordered, his white mother chooses to go with him to the holding camp set up on Alameda island. There, a gang of "pure" Japanese boys taunt him as a "gaijin" -- outside person. They claim his white mother is making nice with the white solider jailers. This insult leaves him furious and confused. He dreams that his father is a Japanese aviator bombing American enemies. He becomes more and more lost in violent fantasies and tries to join up with the camp's bullies who have been abusing him.

Fortunately an older male internee who had employed his father, Mr. Yoshi Asai, befriends the increasingly disturbed boy-child. Luck and dignified compassion enable Mr. Yoshi to keep Koji from being caught stealing food and from being treated as a criminal. Eventually all 8000 northern Californian internees from Alameda are driven off to Camp Agua Dulce in the mountains above Santa Clarita.

The novel jumps to the war's aftermath and then to a mature Koji's reunion in postwar Japan with his father who survived the war though the father is portrayed as using a crutch to walk.

Faulkner's drawings are extraordinary, warm and full of deft movement. Their warmth contrasts with the considerable violence of the action in the story.

I had to wonder, why was the library getting rid of this? The copy I picked up is undamaged. Perhaps it falls between many stools -- not really a book for "young adults" as it is labeled, uncomplimentary to just about all the races and adults represented, yet not strictly moralistic either. Just what I appreciated.

If anyone in San Francisco wants this book, I'll deliver it to your front door in this season of social distancing. Just ask in comments.

Online church

Some of the community of the Episcopal Church of Saint John the Evangelist meets for Sunday reflection in the season of the coronavirus. Not at all what we would want, but in this emergency, community is where it is at. Now how to include and support the less technologically enabled?

From my clutter: navigating the pandemic ethically

I had hoped to make this a "no coronavirus" zone this Saturday -- but so much of my brain and what I find to share is COVID-19 related that I'm breaking my resolve.

As readers here know, we spent last fall on Martha's Vineyard island off Massachusetts. It had occurred to me that this isolated spot was probably not a bad place to be in context of a pandemic. Apparently many have had the same thought and seasonal visitors are arriving months early. According to the Martha's Vineyard Times, there's a "rush of traffic." The newspaper interviewed a medical ethicist:

In a phone conversation with The Times, Ruth Faden, founder of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, spoke about the ethics behind people deciding to come to the Vineyard to leave areas where there’s been an outbreak or a growing number of confirmed cases.

Fader is a specialist in ethical issues in medicine, biomedical science, and public health. “In some respects I think it’s better if everybody stays put,” she said. Faden, a part-time Island resident, has been wondering herself whether to return to the Island. “The less movement the better and that’s because it’s just unclear what is happening.”

As for non full-time residents coming to the Island from areas with outbreaks or growing numbers of cases, Fader said it depends on what they know about their chances or likelihood of bringing COVID-19 to the Island. “How are you supposed to proceed in the absence of testing? Fader said. “Did these people do something ethically wrong? It’s something that is maybe not ethically ideal, but it’s hard to fault people. This is their home too and they love it.”

As to whether people have a moral obligation to try not to facilitate the transmission, Fader was blunt. “The answer is yes. We should be really careful.”

Heart warmingly, the notice I received today from the library I use on the island about closing assured me:

Our WiFi is operational and accessible from the parking lot and porch. You are welcome to use it.

I wonder whether the shuttered San Francisco Public Library is offering the same service. Guess I'll wander across the street and check.

Yes, the Mission branch of the SFPL does offer WiFi by the locked front door.

If you've got the mental energy for a long, thoughtful article about the psychological ramifications of living in the coronavirus zone, this from Peter M. Sandman and Jody Lanard, risk experts, is interesting. Maybe even insightful.

We relatively normal people are caught in a battle between our gut and our brain.

Our gut “knows” that we’re almost certainly facing a pandemic severe enough to disrupt our normal lives.

If we were 100% rational, our brain would know it too. “Star Trek’s” Mr. Spock would find the evidence persuasive that the COVID-19 threat is bad and rapidly getting worse. Mr. Spock would instantly understand COVID-19’s short doubling time – why one week nothing much was happening in northern Italy and a week later it was as if a Category 5 hurricane had hit them. Sure, the pandemic might fizzle; the virus might mutate into a milder strain; a miracle cure or vaccine might get invented overnight; the world could get lucky. But those are long shots. The vast majority of experts now expect at least a few very bad months, and maybe a couple of very bad years.

... Our guts are right. Our brains are behind the curve. Caught in our fear, self-doubt, and embarrassment, we do half-hearted pandemic preparedness. The same is true of our officials. They too are torn between the intuition that they’re not doing enough and the embarrassed fear that they might be doing too much. We suspect this accounts for their halfway or grossly belated containment and mitigation measures.

If only officials could tell us that they are feeling what we are feeling. They are. We’re sure they are. If they could say so, we might be able to help each other overcome our ambivalence and focus on facing the COVID-19 pandemic head-on, together. But saying so is a challenge.

Our terrified President is hopeless, but other officials could adopt this.

As I yelled across appropriate distance to a friend yesterday, this isn't making us behave better. There are reports:

Already we’re beginning to see suspicion and paranoia play out in public spaces. People struggling with allergies report that every cough elicits glares. In Sydney, Australia, reports say that a man died after he collapsed outside a Chinese restaurant and onlookers refused to perform CPR. Asian-Americans have reported racist comments and harassment, based on the wrongheaded belief that they’re more likely to be carrying the coronavirus.

Yes, Trump's administration is encouraging us to default to our racist and xenophobic impulses. So what else is new?

New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie is wondering

whether, in the aftermath of the coronavirus, Americans will lose even more faith in the ability of institutions to do anything. And if that happens, what does it mean for those of us who want to build a more humane society?

This is from Bouie's newsletter which I highly recommend. He's thinks both historically and with a vision toward possible futures. And shares both photos and recipes.

Oil: "the excrement of the devil" and some of its works

It's gotten a little lost now that we are living in a world turned upside down by coronovirus, but we're also in the backwash of some kind of global oil price war. No wonder the great casino on Wall Street has gone bonkers.

Just what's going on with the oil business seems murky. That psychopathic Crown Prince in Saudi Arabia has been locking up his relatives, perhaps to seize the throne prematurely, and somehow his antics turned into a bidding war with Russia over who could pump and sell the most oil at lower rates. Global prices took a nose dive, which might seem like a good thing when you have to fill up the car, but it's not so simple.

Lower gasoline prices will benefit consumers and lower transportation costs for businesses. However, they are very bad for U.S. oil producers. Highly indebted fracking firms may not be able to obtain further bank loans or perhaps even stay in business. States such as Texas and North Dakota, where fossil fuel extraction is a big part of the economy, would face hard times.

"The excrement of the devil" wags the dog that is the world economy; our current apparent collapse into recession may have as much to do with a couple of dictators' fossil fuel fixations as financial barons fearing the flu.

We're fortunate that someone does know a great deal about the history and machinations of the oil economy -- and where Trump and Russia fit in it all. MSNBC's news host Rachel Maddow has a story to tell.

Her new book Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth consists of 29 chapters of good yarns, episodes in fossil fuel villainy. In this vivid denunciation of the cruelty, corruption, and crackpot lunacy of the oil extraction industry, she spells out the horrors in a well-crafted romp about lone wolf drillers, corporate kleptocrats, and vicious dictators, all the way from Pennsylvania fields, to fracking quakes shaking Oklahoma, through Equatorial Guinea, Iraq, and Venezuela, to Vladimir Putin, Rex Tillerson and Donald Trump. She writes:

I like driving a pickup and heating my house as much as the next person, and the through line between energy and economic growth and development is as clear to me as an electric streetlight piercing the black night. But the political impact of the industry that brings us those things is also worth recognizing as a key ingredient in the global chaos and democratic downturn we're now living through.

I don't mean to be rude, but I also want to be clear: the oil and gas industry is essentially a big casino that can produce both power and triumphant great gobs of cash, often with little regard for merit. That equation invites gangsterism, extortion, thuggery, and the sorts of folks who enjoy these hobbies. It's practitioners have been lumbering across the globe of late, causing mindless damage and laying the groundwork for the global catastrophe that is the climate crisis, but also reordering short-term geopolitics in a strong-but-dumb survival contest that renders everything we think of as politics as just theater. ...

And so she goes on to lay out in a series of related vignettes what she concludes: Russia's kleptocrats, finding themselves rulers of a collapsed country with no productive economic assets but a backward oil industry, have been "driven to distraction" and have worked to ensnare the world in the international chaos we suffer from -- "the new world disorder."

This is a provocative, thoroughly researched, book, well worth reading. ...I read this as an audiobook while driving across the country last fall. As it happens, one of the few semi-hopeful eruptions of outraged citizens taking back power from the oil barons that Maddow recounts took place in a state we drove through. For decades, Oklahoma's schools were starved of resources because of the refusal of oil barons, fracking cowboys, and corporations to pay taxes on their wealth. The plutocrats even won a provision in the state constitution to require a three-quarters vote to raise their taxes. But Oklahomans have been fighting back.

What happened was democracy. "In politics, money most often trumps merit," says Mike Cantrell, the independent Oklahoma oilman who finally got fed up with the lousy funding and bucked Big Oil in his state. "But constituency trumps everything." After years of killing cuts, the constituency finally started to kick up enough of a fuss that pols started to worry about the damage to their elective selves if they stuck to the status quo. Starting in early 2018, months of walkouts, strikes, and rallies by students, teachers, and parents across the state finally gave Oklahomans in elective office enough courage to punch the bully in the nose. Or at least be seen trying to throw that punch if they wanted to keep their seats.

In the spring of 2018, the legislature approved a series of tax raises (with the needed three-quarters majority in both houses) to increase funding in public education, including a teacher pay raise of close to 15 percent, across the board. Key was a hike in the energy production tax from 2 percent to 5 percent ...

Reading Blowout, I knew what these signs along the Oklahoma highway meant: democracy in action.

Friday cat blogging

Morty is not feeling so well these days. He is an old guy with aches and a nasal tumor. He spends a lot of time in his house, looking out warily lest I approach with his blood pressure pill. He knows about lockdown. All his life we've been insisting: "cats don't go out!"

Mini-rant on ageism

I found myself driving along behind this today. Who's that? Big Brother? It struck me as creepy.

Apparently it is part of a campaign to End Ageism. The gent is identified as "Mario," a 65-year old Family Therapist. He doesn't strike me as particularly likely to have experienced age discrimination. Quite the contrary. White professional men frequently gain social stature in early old age.

In fact, they are just about the only people who, as a society, we think belong in leadership positions. At least, so the current political moment is showing us.

To be fair, the campaign promotes other people and other images, but why make this young-looking man the image of "leadership"? Some designer was being utterly banal.

And Mario staring from the back of a bus is just weird.

She is still gripping and unsettling

Revolution of the Heart: The Dorothy Day Story - Trailer HD from Journey Films on Vimeo.

This documentary aired on Public Broadcasting on Monday. I liked it.

I'm suspicious of hagiography around Dorothy and that particularly applies to the campaign to acknowledge her as a saint. She was awe inspiring and nearly impossible -- the impulse to drown the latter in the former can be overwhelming. The film catches her stubbornness as well as her compassion. The Catholic Worker movement wouldn't have existed without both.

Above all, I recommend this for the visuals, for its smooth integration of old pictures with the narrative of Dorothy's life and work. Most of the photos are black and white images which seem true to the poverty of the Depression era as well as among the homeless men who frequented the Bowery area in the 1960s and '70s. It was a starkly gray scene. There were more women about than these pictures would suggest; I found it interesting that more than one the clips of Dorothy speaking about the work referred to women in need who became part of the community.

From viewing this film, you might think that "the poor" among whom Dorothy found her vocation were all white people. That would not be an entirely true picture. In the Catholic Worker's advocacy mission, the movement stood loyally on the side of civil rights for African Americans; Dorothy identified closely with Clarence Jordan's Koinonia Farm, a bravely integrated communal experiment in Georgia.

Yet these gestures toward the nation's original sin were extrinsic to the life of the Worker in Dorothy's time. Certainly the Lower East Side of New York in Dorothy's later years was still home to plenty of older European immigrants who had not escaped from urban squalor to the suburbs -- though their children might have. And there were always some African Americans among the homeless men the Catholic Worker fed and clothed. But in addition to young white people looking for low rents, the neighborhood was filling with Spanish-speaking newcomer families, mostly Puerto Rican. The various kinds brushed past each other, but interacted little in my time there. Dorothy was aware of racial tensions and did what she always did about conflict: both ignored and prayed.

Who'd have thought there'd now be a Whole Foods on New York's Houston Street?

The film describes Dorothy's piety as "conservative." I wouldn't object to the label, though for people who never lived inside American Catholic culture, I'm not sure it communicates adequately. Her understanding of Christianity was formal, traditional, Tridentine, and hierarchical with the overlay of Catholic immigrants' need to prove to "respectable" Protestant Anglos that they weren't just dumb, dissolute Irish Micks and Polaks. Few American Catholics are like that now. Quite a few Catholics were not like that then, including her contemporaries, Thomas Merton in his later years and the Berrigan brothers -- with whom she often felt out of phase.

Yet Dorothy was also mystical, enfolded in a piety that arose out of stories of heroines and saints. One of the oddments in the film which rang very true to me was Cornel West trying to explain how Dorothy's life was rooted in the mass, in receiving Christ in the Eucharist daily. I wouldn't have turned to Cornel West for that insight, but I'm delighted these moviemakers did.

What I often find lacking when people try to explain the power of Dorothy's life is an appreciation that, even into old age, she was a beautiful woman. (For what I consider a sad example, see the Robert Lentz icon.) Yes, she had a piercing stare that could only be met by steeling ones inner core, but she also emanated both calm amid chaos and delight from her depths. In this film, that Dorothy is there for all to see.

If you have a chance -- and I am sure there will be many -- do see this documentary.

I lived in the New York Catholic Worker community for several years in the early 1970s and among Catholic Workers for the remainder of the decade.

A delicious account of fraudulent electioneering

When Michael Bloomberg was ramping up his effort to buy the Democratic nomination, I didn't keep myself from pointing out one obstacle to the full-on field campaign his consultants claimed would carry him to victory.

That kind of off-the-shelf campaign apparatus is mostly non-existent within the politics industry: it doesn't pay well enough.

Turns out I was right to be skeptical. But Bloomberg's needs sure created an opening for some lucky grifters.

FiveThirtyEight has published a delicious account of how one teenager made out like a bandit during a brief stint on the Bloomberg campaign.

Throughout Bloomberg’s 101-day campaign for president, the former New York mayor spent more than $500 million. Part of that money was spent paying a campaign outreach firm, Grindstone Field Solutions, to hire hundreds of “deputy field organizers” (DFO) to campaign through phone calls, texts and social media posts, many of them teenagers like James.

The money was good: On average, James said he did about 10 hours of work a week, and on some days he wouldn’t do any work at all. But he got paid $83 per day regardless of how much work he did, which he said surprised him.

... “I actually did work but I think I could have, honestly, done no work and still gotten paid for this campaign,” James said. “They had no way of tracking. There was no enforcement system. They said, ‘This is your quota and we might call you if you don’t do your work.’ I never got called and I certainly didn’t meet all my quotas.”

There's lots more to James' story at the link.

Now if James got paid $83/day for essentially doing nothing, what do we think the contractor was paid for James' "labor"? $100 a day? $150? $200? I would not be shocked if it was the last.

There's often a lot of outright theft sold by consultants to candidates and their donors, but it looks as if Bloomberg's operation beat all. Let's hope what Bloomberg is putting into the general election on behalf of Democrats is better used.

Tantalizing opportunity for a Democratic Senate win in Montana

Steve Bullock is the current (termed-out) governor and a popular guy who has won tough elections in a red state. He didn't make a dent during a brief national run for president, but he just might be able to flip a Republican-held Senate seat. He certainly is the strongest candidate Democrats could have hoped for.

And he employs damned good ad creators as you'll see if you watch his video.

I remember being in Montana for work when Democratic rancher John Tester's Senate campaign was a long shot effort to win a difficult contest. Could anybody wrest a statewide race from a Republican? Tester is now in his third term. With a lot of money, a little luck, and a strong campaign, Bullock might be able to perform a similar feat.

The coronavirus overruns northern Italy

Toomas Hendrik Ilves, who passed this on, is a former president of Estonia, now active in international institutions working on cybersecurity and global health. He is not some kind of alarmist nut.

A thread that needs to be read by all who dismiss COVID-19, call it the flu, or hysteria. Northern Italy is in triage-mode. Northern Italy is also extremely developed, rivaled in the US only by rich urban areas. https://t.co/PDTteswjBb

— toomas hendrik ilves (@IlvesToomas) March 10, 2020

In case readers don't want to work their way through a Twitter thread, here's what follows; I've expanded some places where the writer uses abbreviations:

2/ First, Lumbardy is the most developed region in Italy and it has a extraordinary good healthcare, I have worked in Italy, UK and Aus and don’t make the mistake to think that what is happening is happening in a 3rd world country.

3/ The current situation is difficult to imagine and numbers do not explain things at all. Our hospitals are overwhelmed by Covid-19, they are running 200% capacity

4/ We’ve stopped all routine, all ORs [Operating Rooms] have been converted to ITUs [Intensive Care Units?] and they are now diverting or not treating all other emergencies like trauma or strokes. There are hundreds of pts [patients] with severe resp failure and many of them do not have access to anything above a reservoir mask.

5/ Patients above 65 or younger with comorbidities are not even assessed by ITU, I am not saying not tubed, I’m saying not assessed and no ITU staff attends when they arrest. Staff are working as much as they can but they are starting to get sick and are emotionally overwhelmed.

6/ My friends call me in tears because they see people dying in front of them and they con only offer some oxygen. Ortho and pathologists are being given a leaflet and sent to see patients on NIV. PLEASE STOP, READ THIS AGAIN AND THINK.

7/ We have seen the same pattern in different areas a week apart, and there is no reason that in a few weeks it won’t be the same everywhere, this is the pattern:

8/ 1)A few positive cases, first mild measures, people are told to avoid ED [Emergency Department] but still hang out in groups, everyone says not to panick

2)Some moderate resp failures and a few severe ones that need tube, but regular access to ED is significantly reduced so everything looks great

9/ 3)Tons of patients with moderate resp failure, that overtime deteriorate to saturate ICUs first, then NIVs [Non-Invasive Ventilation], then CPAP hoods, then even O2.

4)Staff gets sick so it gets difficult to cover for shifts, mortality spikes also from all other causes that can’t be treated properly.

10/ Everything about how to treat them is online but the only things that will make a difference are: do not be afraid of massively strict measures to keep people safe,

11/ if governments won’t do this at least keep your family safe, your loved ones with history of cancer or diabetes or any transplant will not be tubed if they need it even if they are young. By safe I mean YOU do not attend them and YOU decide who does and YOU teach them how to.

12/ Another typical attitude is read and listen to people saying things like this and think “that’s bad dude” and then go out for dinner because you think you’ll be safe.

13/ We have seen it, you won’t be if you don’t take it seriously. I really hope it won’t be as bad as here but prepare.

...

At this point, it seems very likely that we in the U.S. are past the point where COVID-19 can be kept from spreading among us. But we can still take sensible precautions, wash our hands, avoid incautious personal contact, and any crowds. If enough of us do these things, we just might be able to keep the pandemic to the lower curve on this graph. Italy is experiencing the great purple spike pictured here.

Honor International Women's Day!

Don't worry: there are English subtitles for those of us who are linguistically challenged.

My 1620 project: those Massachusetts Pilgrims

This year is the 400th anniversary my ancestors' arrival on this continent. They were among the Puritan colonists at Plymouth, Mass. Family lore says we are descended from both Priscilla Alden and Miles Standish, the couple who were protagonists of unrequited love in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's popular 1858 romantic poem The Courtship of Miles Standish. They married others and had large families. Massachusetts was a lightly populated, much inter-related place for many years.

The Plymouth settlement acquired a huge role in the U.S. national legend as the northern "founding" -- a source of much of our religious and colonial history. This is mostly myth, but these were nonetheless intriguing people. All I was ever told about Plymouth as the child of a mother somewhat proud of her ancestry was that "they must have been very brave." Indeed these Puritans must have been. They crossed the Atlantic on a leaky, overcrowded cargo ship, 102 passengers on deck with 30 crew members. They failed to find their intended destination, the mouth of the Hudson River, and put ashore of necessity on the coast of Massachusetts two months later. Only 50 survived the first winter.

It seems fitting to share one last tidbit from Diarmaid MacCulloch' The Reformation: A History about this unpromising colonial enterprise. He sets them in their place in the conflicted landscape of England on the eve of the Civil War over state and religion (1642-1651). He agrees they were stubborn -- and perhaps a little daft.

[There were] those who saw the early Stuart Church of England as too flawed to be truly God's Church. ...The godly made their venture far to the north up the Atlantic coast from [Anglican and royalist] Virginia, in an area of forests and deep sea inlets that was soon named New England. The first colony in this northern region, Plymouth, in what later became a part of Massachusetts, was founded in 1620 by self-conscious separatists who made no bones about their wish to separate completely from corrupt English religion. These "Pilgrim Fathers" had first migrated as a single congregation to the Netherlands, but now sought a more challenging and less restricting place to become a "civil body politic, for our better ordering and preservation." For all its subsequent fame in American mythology, their settlement remained small and poor, for not many wished to join them; they had made their brave voyage in the years before the group around William Laud achieved power in England [repressing their beliefs in the name of the king]. Notably, for all their intense practice of piety, there was no clergyman among them for the first nine years of Plymouth's existence.

[Though unwarranted by actual history, a] rhetoric of covenant, chosen-ness, of wilderness triumphantly converted to garden, has come down into American political and religious consciousness ... the varied spectrum of American Protestantism has grafted onto its memories of Massachusetts the appearance of the obstinate individualism and separatism of the Plymouth Pilgrim Fathers [an ethos deplored by the later Massachusetts congregationalist colony at Boston led by Governor "City on a Hill" John Winthrop].

My determination to learn a little more about these people this year was one impetus for my long exploration of MacCulloch's opus. There's much to unpack. More will follow this year from more sources.

Previous posts in my The Reformation: A History series:
The Reformation: Islamophobia and a slavery past
The subversive weapon of the Reformation: musical propaganda
Bishop Laud and his cats
On blaming capitalism on the Protestant Reformation
But how did Reformation-era people live?

The illustration is from an 1884 Plymouth tourist postcard.

From my clutter: annals of floundering democracy

This is a No Coronavirus Zone for today. All portents say that plague will be with us for a long time and that the federal government under the current administration is devoid of capacity to help us weather it. Wash hands and be careful out there.

In Oregon, Democrats have been elected to super-majorities in the state legislature -- 18D-12R in the senate, 38D-22R in the lower house. Most Oregonians want progressive policies. But using a quirk in the state constitution, the remnant GOPers have stymied legislative action on climate change bills, and then on just about everything, as explained by David Roberts. It's a story of institutional failure to figure out how to fight back against extremist wolves in legislative clothing; Democrats and mainstream media act flummoxed:

In national politics, as in Oregon, anti-democratic tactics and rhetoric are escalating on the right, but there is little pushback or accountability. They pay no penalty for lying, violating norms, or taking legislative hostages, so they keep doing it, keep escalating. The institutions around them seem unwilling or unable to draw lines in the sand, and when they do, as when Democrats impeached Trump, they find those lines blown aside by partisan unity.

Republicans learn again and again that if they stick together, they can get away with anything — stolen elections, misbegotten wars, botched disaster responses, recessions, and now an openly criminal president. As long as they are a unified “side,” media and other institutions will treat them as a legitimate side, no matter what they do.

Elsewhere, demographic change grinds on -- and though progressives can't count on the browning of the country to deliver automatic victories, it sure helps when everyone is allowed to vote.

... the portion of the electorate that is white has fallen since 2016. White voters still make up a majority, accounting for 59% of those who identified their race when registering, but that number slipped from 62% four years ago.

Georgia Is in Play

In California, when the electorate breakdown slipped below 60% white, Democrats began to pick themselves up off the floor and gradually take over the state government. (Roughly, with bumps along the way, starting in 2000.) Come on Georgia -- go Stacey!

Meanwhile, Rev. William Barber has an admonition for Democrats.

If past action is a predictor of future actions, the Dem nominee will not wage a fight to win Southern states. If this happens, it’ll be an act of political racism—using black voters in the primary to secure the nomination but then walking away from them in the general election.

— Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II (@RevDrBarber) March 7, 2020

Black southern voters have been the backbone of the national Democratic Party for a generation, yet embedded among white Republican majorities, they get very little for their staunch support. The next Democratic administration better deliver.

Available space for housing?

Church properties with parking lots are rare in this crowded city, but our state senator is promoting a plan to put those spaces to better use. Since I usually beat up on Scott Wiener for situating his drive for our needed increased housing density in plans that increase gentrification while benefiting rich developers, I should give him credit when he does something better.

Now Wiener is pushing to make it easier for religious institutions to build housing people can afford on their property.

Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, introduced a measure Thursday to remove local zoning restrictions for residential development by churches, synagogues, mosques and other faith organizations, as well as nonprofit hospitals.

SB899 would permit them to build apartments and condominiums that are entirely affordable to low-income residents without having to ask officials to rezone their land for multifamily housing.

Projects in residential neighborhoods could be up to three stories tall and include as many as 40 units. In mixed-use and commercial areas, they could be five stories tall with 150 units. Developers would have to agree to keep the housing affordable to low-income renters for at least 55 years and to low-income buyers for at least 45 years.

San Francisco Chronicle

That might actually help a little.

Super Tuesday: a tired electorate in a tired country

Whoever is elected President in 2020 will be older than I am as I approach my 73rd year. That feels discouraging. Lively inventive societies are not ruled by the old, though, if they are wise, they can be informed by their old people. Somehow the earnest engagement of millions of citizens has brought us here.

It seems that after Super Tuesday we're back to something very close to where we were last July. We've learned that people who will vote in a Democratic primary want above all to get rid of Trump. Their aims and understanding of that imperative differ, but they agree on that much.

So we're back to the two old white guys already known to this electorate. None of the new faces broke through widely. When Biden showed an actual sign of life in South Carolina where he has a legitimate Black base -- and endorsers and all-rans pointed to him -- he resumed his front runner status.

Nobody has convinced this electorate that any new and better future is on offer in this election. Collectively, we hope to retreat to an imagined safety. That's the disappointment -- but can empathetic people disparage safety as a goal? Only if we convincingly propose something worth increasing risk to gain. Not happening at present.

Elizabeth Warren offered competence and grit -- but had the wrong plumbing and the insult of excess intellect.

Bernie has a 30 percent base (figured generously) rooted in young, Latinx, and left voters. He hasn't built a campaign to enlarge that base. He has just asserted his righteousness. And he's pretty righteous. But righteousness alone, especially when yoked to some of his followers' ill-aimed rage, doesn't build toward a broader force. Winning a majority requires adding to your coalition -- as well as being right.

At least we had the chance to see Mike Bloomberg personally humiliated, a guilty pleasure not to be sneezed at.

And so -- on to working to deliver the one end voters have settled on: defeating Trump in November. That work is not optional for anyone who struggles for a better day.

Coronavirus: pay attention to the schools

Thanks to Paul Krugman's newsletter I found myself reading Simon Wren-Lewis on what the likely impact of the coronavirus might be. About 10 years ago, this British economist was enlisted by health experts to model what a major influenza epidemic would mean to the economy.

What leaps out from his highly readable summary of that work is that, on top of losses caused by workers getting sick and missing work, school closures could really hurt the economy.

School closures can amplify the reduction in labour supply if some workers are forced to take time off to look after children. ...

Should be obvious, but in this country we don't habitually think of work in terms of family implications.

This put me in mind of one of my take aways from a book about the 1918 flu epidemic. New York City was surprisingly successful in keeping the flu outbreak from devastating the crowded, impoverished, immigrant working class of the metropolis.

... Initially [health commissioner, Royal S. Copeland] intended to close all public schools, as had happened in the neighbouring states of Massachusetts and New Jersey. But the pioneering head of the health department's child hygiene division, Josephine Baker, persuaded him not to. She argued that the children would be easier to survey in school, and to treat should they show signs. They could be fed properly, which wasn't always the case at home, and used to transmit important public health information back to their families. ... [Copeland tried her approach] and in doing so he brought bitter recriminations down on his head, including from the Red Cross and former health commissioners. But he and Baker would be vindicated; the flu was practically absent from school age children that fall. ...

They didn't close the schools -- and they were therefore able to use the students to carry home precautionary information to parents, many of whom were not fluent in English.

For the moment, this does not seem to be the response favored in the present developing situation.

School superintendents throughout the country are pondering whether and how to close their school systems as the coronavirus approaches, weighing the pros and cons and seeking advice from outside experts including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, state health officials and professional groups.

The executive director of the American Association of School Administrators said his organization fielded at least 60 inquiries about closures from concerned superintendents over the past week. Daniel A. Domenech, the executive director, said he gave similar advice to each: The moment you must drop everything and close, he said, comes when students, parents or teachers contract the novel coronavirus.

That holds true even if just one person is infected, Domenech said — because, in schools, infections can spread dangerously fast. “Schools are the breeding grounds: Teachers are always sick, because kids are always sick,” he said. “They bring in the germs and, boom, the classroom is infected.”

School authorities could certainly use more coherent advice from state and federal officials than they seem to be getting as yet. There are over 13,000 school districts in this country which are trying to figure this out. ...Since this was Super Tuesday, the FiveThirtyEight crew took a light weight crack at envisioning how the coronavirus might play in the campaign.

Coronavirus will be an issue ... campaigns will have to adjust ...

Trans citizens could be barred

Some people may find they are not allowed to vote this Super Tuesday.

Some 378,000 eligible U.S. voters who are trans do not have identification such as a driver’s license that reflects their appearance or gender identity, said a report by the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law, a public policy research institute.

In the United States, 35 of the 50 states require voters to show identification and of the trans people without IDs, 260,000 live in one of the 35 states, the research said.

Reuters

Just to be clear, California is NOT one of those states. If you live in Cali, go vote!

It will surprise no one that experts agree that the people least likely to have required ID are young, poor, and members of non-white groups. So are a heck of a lot of trans citizens.

You have to talk with the people ...

Frequently while Walking San Francisco I come across a sign like this painted on the sidewalk. The city is generally enthusiastic about adding "street trees," those planted between curbs and sidewalks. Somebody is saying, forcefully, "not here!"

Street trees -- as it sometimes seems everything in this town -- became an election issue during the last decade. At a moment of budgetary shortfall, the city announced that property owners would be required to take responsibility for the care of trees in front of their parcels. If the tree was sick or a hazard, they were required to prune and/or remove it. Voters said "hey, wait a minute" by way of Prop. E in November 2016, placing care of street trees under the (currently scandal-plagued) Public Works department. We also created a $19 million annual mandatory budget line for tree care. These days, Public Works has made a census of all 124,000 city street trees and is doing maintenance, gradually.

San Francisco has all those trees in large part through the work since the 1970s of the nonprofit Friends of the Urban Forest. The area was mostly sand dunes and windswept barren hills until settlers from the US east tried to replicate the forested lands they came from. We have the trees we have because residents planted them. (We live behind a street tree, whose planting I chronicled here.)

All this is a long introduction to a fascinating account of why some urban residents have rejected tree plantings. The economically challenged city of Detroit struggles to make itself attractive for residents and observers alike. It has funding for 1000 to 5000 trees a year. What could be more improving than adding street trees? Yet a quarter of residents offered the free trees said "NO". The remembered history of city trees in their Black neighborhoods was of very bad times.

It’s not that they didn’t trust the trees; they didn’t trust the city.

... A couple of African-American women [a researcher] talked to linked the tree-planting program to a painful racist moment in Detroit’s history, right after the 1967 race rebellion, when the city suddenly began cutting down elm trees in bulk in their neighborhoods. The city did this, as the women understood it, so that law enforcement and intelligence agents could better surveil their neighborhoods from helicopters and other high places after the urban uprising.

The city was chopping down trees at a faster clip at this time. And the city was flying helicopters over their homes at one point—-to spray toxic DDT from above on the trees. However, the government’s stated reason for the mass tree-choppings was that the trees were dying off from the Dutch elm disease then spreading across the country. These were competing heritage narratives of the same event—-the clearing away of trees in the 1960s. The two narratives are in conflict, but it was the women’s version, based on their lived experiences, that led to their decision to reject the trees today.

Nobody had talked with neighborhood residents about Detroit's tree planting push. It wasn't that people didn't like trees. But when you've been "done to" for decades, you tend to look askance at gifts from untrustworthy sources.

I have no idea whether any such suspicions inform the "NO Tree" San Franciscans. The only local tree rejection instance I know of personally came because a resident wanted to be able to park on the sidewalk -- illegal, but once common in crowded neighborhoods. But the lesson holds. Friends of the Urban Forest tries to engage and consult with property owners; that means they have to be community organizers who prove they listen as well as professional arborists.

H/t to Erik Loomis for pointing to the Detroit story.

But how did Reformation-era people live?

I was surprised, on coming close to the end of Diarmaid MacCulloch's The Reformation: A History, to encounter several chapters dealing with cultural elements that are central in present day, modish historiography. I did not expect these themes in a sweeping early modern history published fifteen years ago. This historian prefigures current "woke" preoccupations. The result is fascinating.

MacCulloch was not content to provide merely a chronicle of the thinking and struggles of insurgent preachers, theologians, popes and rulers. Instead he made the choice to share his understanding of how the social transformations implicit in the implosion of medieval Christendom was lived by ordinary people. These topics form separate chapters among in his conclusions. Hence the section called Patterns of Life which contains Death, Life and Discipline; Love and Sex -- Staying the Same; Love and Sex -- Moving On; and Outcomes. Rather than integrating community life themes into a timeline or geographical narrative, he offers his wide-ranging observations in thematic form. The result is absorbing, sometimes hard to follow as when he jumps from conditions in tolerant Poland to among early Jesuits in Spain, and likely problematic to a different sort of historian who delves more deeply into a single, restricted, even manageable, time and place.

In MacCulloch's telling, our hidden, private preoccupations get a light touch. Introducing Love and Sex he writes:

Augustine [Bishop of Hippo, 354-430 CE] speculated wistfully about the time before the Fall in Eden, when Adam and Eve's private parts behaved in orderly fashion. The Church has been trying to tell private parts what to do ever since.

What Christian theologians asserted about men, women, and sexuality was nonsense, but it was ancient nonsense, and humanity has always been inclined to respect the assertion of ancient wisdom. [No more?] The classical and Christian package of ideas also had a lunatic coherence. ...

One might have expected that in the seventeenth century, the more generous or pluralist impulses of humanist scholarship would have had an effect in widening the possibilities open to human beings. There was nevertheless a double problem: Humanist scholars were mostly men, and the powerful lay and ecclesiastical rulers who picked and chose what they wanted to hear from their humanist clients were also mostly men ... one female scholar of the 1970s posed the question "Did women have a Renaissance?" and having surveyed Renaissance humanism across Europe, came to a resounding negative. ...

... To examine the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in relation to marriage, gender, sexuality, and the family is to weigh [a] balance of massive practical continuity against equally significant change and transformation. ...

I'm not going to try to summarize all he offers about these themes, just a few highlights that jumped out for me.

• Northwestern Europe -- England, Scandinavia, the northern Holy Roman Empire [much of Germany], the Netherlands, and northern France -- was characterized by nuclear families consisting of no more than two generations living together during the Reformation as now.

• In those societies, if the general pattern followed English records, people married late at an average of 28 years. Because both man and wife were adults, patriarchal domination was not so pronounced as in areas where older men took teen brides.

• But death in the midst of life was a constant presence what with simmering wars and unchecked pestilences. In this circumstance

  ... the Church's insistence on lifelong marriage meant something different then than now: One partner or other would have the experience of serial monogamy at much the same rate as is now created by the secular deaths of marriages through divorce or legal separation.

• Women's best chance of winning some autonomy and personal respect in these societies came from outliving husbands.

  With time on their hands and a lively consciousness of the approaching afterlife, elderly women often became key players either in enforcing religious norms or promoting religious change

• MacCulloch explores what can be divined about homosexuality in European societies of the Reformation era. Some Protestants became obsessed with horror about "sodomy" -- not very precisely defined -- which they attributed to "popery." He finds some glimpses of homosexual relationships among a few males, including monarchs and courtiers, but this discussion suffers from the usual defect of historical research into suppressed subcultures: what records survive show us only the lives of the most privileged with little inkling of the experience of ordinary men -- and women.

• In Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation countries, the Virgin and an idealized Holy Family were offered as models for what were usually multi-generational extended families of the laity. Concurrently, the Church insisted far more rigorously on clerical celibacy, led by the new Jesuit order of militant priests.

• 
  Meanwhile, Protestants, despite encouraging their ministers to marry, refused to be out-manned by their Catholic competitors.

  Commonly [newly married ministers] grew beards (it also helped their central task of preaching that a full beard would make them look like everyone's picture of an Old Testament prophet).

  Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer's 1547 portrait represented him in full bewhiskered majesty.

• The religious enthusiasms unleashed had all too similar consequences for the role of women in these devout societies:

  ... women might discover that God intended previously unheard of possibilities for them in the early years when Protestantism was still not even a name, and when the main traditional outlets for women's independent religious life had been destroyed with the suppression of nunneries. The general pattern in Protestantism was very similar to the experience of some religious [nuns] in the Counter-Reformation Catholic Church -- self assertion, followed by male reassertion and renewed tradition discipline.

MacCulloch's conclusion of this enormous history recognizes how foreign his sweeping panorama must seem to 21st century readers. He thinks we let ourselves off too easily when we emphasize how different we are from these tempestuous early modern Europeans. We too are much driven by anxiety and fears both genuine and imagined.

Modern westerners -- including modern Christians -- are likely to deplore much in the struggles of the Reformation. Both late medieval Christianity and the mainstream Protestantism that sought to destroy it were religions of fear, anxiety, and guilt, although they both claimed remedy and comfort for anxiety and guilt through the love exhibited by God to humanity in Jesus Christ. The Reformation arguments were in large part about how human behavior and actions could influence God into saving them from eternal despair.

... Radical thinkers and preachers in the early stages of the Reformation in particular represented possible future identities for Latin [western] Christianity. Yet they have been marginalized and rejected by Catholics and Protestants alike, because they radically questioned the grim certainties both sides shared, and suggested new, more constructive approaches to divine power and its interplay with humanity. ... A modern Anglican -- or even a modern Roman Catholic -- is likely to be more like a sixteenth century Anabaptist in belief than he or she resembles a sixteenth century member of the Church of England.

... Europeans were prepared to burn and torture each other because they disagreed on whether, or how, bread and wine were transformed into God, or about the sense in which Jesus Christ could be both divine and human. We have no right to adopt an attitude of intellectual or emotional superiority, especially in the light of the atrocities that twentieth-century Europe produced because of its faith in newer, secular ideologies. Anxiety and a sense of imperfection seem to be basic components of being human, for those of no religion as well as the religious. Some continue to call the answer to these mysteries by the name of God. ...

Previous posts in my The Reformation: A History series:
The Reformation: Islamophobia and a slavery past
The subversive weapon of the Reformation: musical propaganda
Bishop Laud and his cats
On blaming capitalism on the Protestant Reformation