RUTHFULLY YOURS

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Among the many comments I received on my essay of four days ago – “COVID-19 Pandemic – Random Thoughts” – was one from a woman in Australia that gave me a start. She referred to my last sentence: “We cannot and should not let fear and panic catapult us into a recession or worse – where Constitutional rights are abrogated.” She wrote that she fears this is where we are headed and “that something about this doesn’t add up.” She’s right; the response to the pandemic seems more onerous than the virus itself. Since last Thursday, a number of states, including New York, California, Illinois, New Jersey and Connecticut have issued measures aimed at keeping residents in their homes. While those measures are not strictly enforced, the New York Times reported on their front page yesterday: “By the end of the weekend, at least 1 in 5 Americans will be under orders to stay home.” Over 3,300 National Guardsmen have been deployed across 28 states in COVID-19 support roles. An overreaction?

Perspective is needed. For example, comparisons have been made to other pandemics, and the favorite of those who deal in hyperbole is the Spanish flu. It lasted two years and was the deadliest since the Black Death killed a third of the population in mid-Fourteenth Century Europe. While the origin of the Spanish flu is disputed, most authorities believe it began in a UK staging and hospital camp in Étaples, on France’s northern coast near Le Touquet, in late 1917. Allies chose not to publicize the pandemic, for fear of alarming folks at home. It finally died out in late 1919. By then an estimated 500 million people had been infected (a quarter of the world’s population), with 50 million dead – more than combined military and civilian deaths due to the War. Estimated U.S. deaths were 675,000, almost six times the 117,000 U.S. soldiers killed in the War. A comparable number of deaths in the U.S. today would be more than two million. But apart from its infectious nature, the comparisons make little sense. Then, news of the disease was hushed up. Today we have daily White House briefings. Then, the disease spread through crowded Army camps, hospitals and troop ships. Today, we have “social distancing.” Modern medicine, in 1919, was a thing of the future. Penicillin was not developed until the start of the Second World War. Today, public-private partnerships have been deployed seeking tests, curative drugs, immunizations and vaccines. One has only to look at old photographs to recognize that hygiene was not the same then as today.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/21/covid-19-the-elephant-and-the-house-cat/

Here’s something special: a headline in The Economist that speaks the truth: “In Europe, and around the world, governments are getting tougher.” You betcha. Last week, I wrote with contempt about San Francisco’s mayor who had just announced she would “legally prohibit residents from leaving their homes except to meet basic needs.” “Well,” I thought, “It’s California, what do you expect?”

But now several other states, including New York, Connecticut, and Illinois, have issued “shelter-in-place” orders. They closed all “nonessential” businesses (nonessential to whom? To they people who work there?) and are throwing their weight around in other ways.

Restaurants: closed, except for take-out and delivery. Gymnasiums: closed. Museums: closed. Concert halls: closed. Public fraternization: essentially prohibited.

Why? Because of the biggest threat to mankind that the world has ever seen: the COVID-19 virus, also know as the Chinese flu, which to date has killed—are you ready—276 people in the United States, almost all of them over 80, almost all with serious co-morbidities.

Two-hundred-and-seventy-six people! And yes, that frightening number will rise. It will be 400, 500 before you know it. Maybe when all is said and done, we’ll see 1,000-1,200 identified who have died from complications that can be traced to this respiratory illness.

Meanwhile, somewhere between 22,000 and more than 50,000 people have died from the seasonal flu in the United States this year. Why is there no panic about that?

The Wuhan virus is a bad bug. But far more lethal than the “pandemic”—it sounds so much scarier to say “pandemic” than “epidemic,” even if the term is not justified—far more lethal, I say, are two other “P” words: panic and passivity.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-vindicates-capitalism-11584659306

The left is never apt to let a serious crisis go to waste, as we see with its daily use of the coronavirus pandemic to bash the Republican administration. The bigger danger is the efforts it is already making to exploit the panic for its longer-term goal of destroying U.S. capitalism.

Socialist Bernie Sanders led the charge last Sunday in his Democratic primary debate with Joe Biden. Bernie rolled out his usual themes, this time through the virus lens. The pandemic “exposes the incredible weakness and dysfunctionality” of the U.S. health system, he said; the cure is centralized, socialized care. Americans can’t get the drugs they need because “a bunch of crooks” run drug companies, “ripping us off every single day.” The virus exposes the “cruelty and unjustness” of an economy that allows “big-money interests” and “multimillionaires” to profiteer off “working families.”

He’s hardly alone. The coronavirus has “laid this bare: America was less prepared for a pandemic than countries with a universal health system,” declared Vox. The pandemic has “inflicted new stress on a system already too unequal to function,” wrote Sarah Jones in New York magazine, lecturing on the need to “devolve power from wealthy interests.” “The coronavirus crisis exposes the stupidity of Trump’s healthcare policies,” railed Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik. A Morning Consult poll suggests this opportunistic sloganeering is resonating, with 41% of the public more likely to support universal health-care proposals amid this pandemic.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/coronavirus-pandemic-tests-american-society/#slide-1

Is American society ready for the coronavirus pandemic?

Afew months after September 11, 2001, David Brooks went back and looked at coverage of Pearl Harbor for an article in The Weekly Standard (“After Pearl Harbor,” December 10, 2001). What he saw intrigued him. A sense of unity and patriotism followed both surprise attacks. But media after Pearl Harbor had none of the sorrow, sensitivity, and angst that filled the news, with reason, after 9/11. Recognizing the inevitable costs of war, Americans on the home front at the outset of World War II were nonetheless eager to carry on as usual. They did not apologize or second-guess. They soldiered on. “When you step back and contemplate the range of post-Pearl Harbor media,” Brooks wrote, “you are struck by how extraordinarily proud of itself America then was.”

I revisited Brooks’s article this week while thinking about the differences between America during the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918–1919 and America during the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic today. Some of the distinctions are self-evident. America is far more wealthy, free, and technologically advanced than it was then. We enjoy the benefits of incorporating half the population into our economy and society, of ending de jure anti-black racism, of attracting the best and most ambitious talent from across the globe. We are no longer a rising power but a reluctant hegemon. A raw deal awaits any American who trades places with a doppelgänger from midway through Woodrow Wilson’s second term.

What changed is the American ethos. Expressive individualism replaced self-restraint. Narcissism and the therapeutic sensibility triumphed over the reticence and sense of tragedy that comes from living in places and times where there is no safety net and death is a constant presence. The culture of debunking, revisionism, and repudiation informs education, entertainment, art, and occasionally sport.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/20/what-happens-when-everything-stops/

Our ordinary lives and routines have been upended, but let’s see that as an opportunity to do some good even as we grapple with the very real challenges we’re all facing. It only seems like everything stopped. Life goes on.

The days after 9/11 were eerily quiet. There were no airplanes in the skies; they had been grounded. People were still in shock and waiting to see if another deadly attack would come. It didn’t, thank God, but the nation slowed down dramatically that week. And then we adapted and went back to living, albeit aware of a newly aggressive enemy.

But now much of the nation is under official or semi-official lockdown. Schools have sent students home for the year in many places. Professional and college sports have stopped. Concerts are canceled. The stock market is down more than 30 percent from it’s recent high. Even churches—the very place where people seek solace in times of crisis—have temporarily closed their doors, too.

And now all nonessential businesses are closed by government order in California, Illinois, New York, and a growing list of other states. Rumors are rife that the federal government will invoke the Stafford Act and declare effective martial law. I have no idea if that’s true, but it’s a rumor that is making the rounds so widely that you’ve probably already heard it.

Strange rumors and semi-plausible scenarios are what you get in uncertain times when people fear for their lives and their futures.

But what happens when everything stops?

Of course, not everything has stopped. The electricity is on. Water still comes out of your faucet. You can buy groceries, though there are spot shortages of key items. But it’s all of those nonessentials that make life sweet, right? So what now?

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/19/dangerous-curves/

If you weren’t very ill in late January or February, you probably know someone who was. The complaints often sounded the same: A fever for days, a stubborn and unusual-sounding cough, a persistent sore throat—the severity of the symptoms seemed worse than the usual influenza.

Doctors, assuming it was a version of the seasonal flu, administered flu-fighting drugs without testing. (My college daughter was very sick with the same symptoms; her flu test was negative.) Plenty of afflicted Americans just stayed in bed without ever seeing a physician.

Obviously, anecdotal evidence that the COVID-19 illness has been around for at least the past few months isn’t enough to make the case that there’s a chance the worst days of the outbreak are behind, not ahead, of us. But data from the Centers for Disease Control seems to support the possibility that the country has been besieged by the novel coronavirus since the start of 2020.

And while political leaders and medical experts push for more and more draconian measures to “flatten the curve,” it raises some questions. Are we looking at the right “curve?” And how accurate is the current curve if it doesn’t include possible cases before the height of the hysteria began in late February and early March?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/trap-white-privilege-and-rejecting-cult-jason-d-hill/

In thirty-four years of living in America, I have never faced the problem of radical racial resistance from committed individualists, many of whom fall within the conservative camp. They have mostly accepted me as an individual and treated me as an equal. My race to them was neither a qualifier nor a disqualifier, but a sociological marker which, as far as I could tell, was irrelevant to how I performed. In my experience with far-left progressives there exists an insidious racism that is often hard to diagnose. Their sense of their own whiteness required black helplessness and inadequacy to shore up a sense of guilt, which would then prompt action on their part, from which they could seek redemption and contrition.

There is unbridled hubris behind such psychic exploitation, because one needs to posit an inferior before one can masochistically experience redemption from some perceived wrong one has inflicted against another. That wrong, which the so-called progressive feels she or he has wielded, is white privilege.

https://quillette.com/2020/03/18/an-optimists-case-for-covid-19-lockdown-our-safest-and-quickest-path-back-to-normalcy/

The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared COVID-19—the acute respiratory disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus—a pandemic. And almost everywhere you look, the data appear to show a frightening exponential rise in new cases. As I write this, on March 17th, the latest available reports show that confirmed cases have doubled in Italy over the last five days. In Spain, the most recent doubling period has been just three days. In France, Germany, Switzerland, the United States, the UK, and Netherlands, the figures are four, three, three, five, three, and four respectively. When these facts are presented in graph form, the vertiginous lines suggest a world feverishly coughing its way into apocalypse.

But assuming that governments act responsibly, and absent some horrifying SARS-CoV-2 mutation, there will be no apocalypse. Stock markets and economies will suffer greatly. But even this damage can be mitigated through decisive action. The more aggressively that our leaders act to suppress the spread of COVID-19, the more quickly the crisis will pass, and the sooner we will all be able to return to normal daily life. The decisions we make now could mean the difference between a global recession and a historical event on par with The Great Depression.

The good news is that we definitely can suppress COVID-19, even if no cure or effective vaccine emerges. We know this because it already has been done in the most populous country on Earth.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/progressive-chatty-cathy-dolls-dont-america-bruce-thornton/

Chatty Cathy was a doll popular in the late Fifties to the mid-Sixties. Its gimmick was a string coming out of the back that when pulled played a tiny record filled with banal phrases suitable for preteen girls. The old toy strikes me as a good metaphor for the progressive media, who whatever the event or crisis, repeat the same trite and juvenile responses like “racism” or “xenophobia.”

Take the latest pull of their string, the president and some of his administration calling the coronavirus the “Wuhan virus” or “Chinese coronavirus,” or referring in any way to China as ground-zero of the pandemic. According to CNN’s Chatty Cathy in Chief, Jim Acosta (pictured above), such statements are “xenophobic” because they “stigmatize” all ethnic Chinese, even Americans of Chinese descent, most of whom have little or nothing in common with Chinese nationals other than superficial physical characteristics or surnames.