What happens now

The 1918-1920 "Spanish" influenza pandemic appeared on the front page of the Arizona Republican on Oct. 5th, 1918. The all-caps headline: INFLUENZA RUNS ITS MAD COURSE THROUGH NATION." By Nov. 18th, the newspaper promised a full local report: 64 cases the previous evening in the Emergency hospital and 74 at St. Joseph's (city population about 28,000). The subhead of the story said, "Steady Progress Made to Halt Spread."

The "Spanish" flu, which likely began at an Army post in Kansas, was the deadliest pandemic since the Black Death in the 14th century. It killed at least 50 million worldwide and 675,000 in the United States. World population was 1.8 billion (vs. 7.7 billion now). That of the United States was about 100 million (vs. 330 million now). The pandemic was spread by the world war and unusual in fatally striking young people. This was before antibiotics, ventilators, or other miracles to come.

Phoenix shut down for six weeks until cases went down in December 1918. Masks, successful in many cities, were "not given a fair chance" here because of Phoenicians' "tendency to revolt." Yet four waves total hit and an estimated 2,750 out of the state's 334,000 people died. Phoenix was too small then to be included in a fascinating University of Michigan study on how the 50 largest cities responded. These measures included shut-downs, lowering crowding, wearing masks, and strict rules against spitting on the sidewalk.

After it burned itself out, as all pandemics do, life went on. Cities didn't die — indeed, America became much more urbanized. Neither did transit or passenger trains or sit-down restaurants or retail shops. Interestingly, for all the recollections from my grandmother — who was 29 in 1918 — she never mentioned the influenza pandemic.

I write this as we begin the 11th week of shutdown in Seattle as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. Unlike the far deadlier 1918 flu, this time most of the economy was entirely shut down, with the prospects of reopening uncertain in many places and the path to a recovery fraught with difficulty. A depression is possible.

Meanwhile, hot takes abound about how this pandemic will change everything.

CNN: "Our cities may never look the same again after the pandemic." CityLab: "After lockdowns ease, public transportation ridership in the U.S. is likely to remain low for years." The suburban apologist Joel Kotkin: "Angelenos like their single-family sprawl. The coronavirus proves them right." MIT economist Jeffrey Harris: "The subways seeded the massive coronavirus epidemic in New York City." The New York Times: "David Chang isn't sure the restaurant industry will survive Covid-19." The New Yorker: "The case for letting the restaurant industry die." And the obituary for downtowns because people can work from home.

To be sure, some pushback has happened, such as Alon Levy's delicious takedown of Harris' flawed and wrong attempt to blame the subways. These hot takes usually have some pre-pandemic axes to grind. Historian Mark Lila wrote a needed corrective in the Times:

A dose of humility would do us good in the present moment. It might also help reconcile us to the radical uncertainty in which we are always living. Let us retire our prophets and augurs. And let us stop asking health specialists and public officials for confident projections they are in no position to make — and stop being disappointed when the ones we force out of them turn out to be wrong.

The fact is that the pandemic's severity was caused by the willful incompetence of the Trump administration. Not cities. Not transit. Not density or restaurants, department stores, concerts or ballgames. Covid-19's hotspot in the Seattle area was not downtown, but assisted-living centers in the affluent Eastside suburbs.

And I guarantee you Europe and Asia won't give up on their cities, transit, and high-speed trains. The future worldwide is in urbanization. The challenge is to make it high quality.

Still, I wonder about Americans. People in 1918 were made of sterner stuff. My grandmother lost two of her four children when they were little boys. This was tragic but commonplace in a world where such scourges as polio, yellow fever, scarlet fever, cholera, tuberculosis, and smallpox ravaged the world.

Now, too many people live in the expectation of perfect safety. They are misguided but perhaps a majority. Two thirds of Americans today were born after 1970.

I don't scare easily. I lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis and Able Archer '83. I lived through the ultimate 3 a.m. phone call: Nov. 9th, 1979, when President Carter's National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski was awoken with news that the Soviet Union had launched 250 ICBMs at the United States. No, minutes later the missile count was raised to 2,000. Brzezinski decided to let his wife keep sleeping. He was about to call Carter, who would face a "use 'em or lose 'em" choice about our Minuteman force, when a third call told him it was a mistake. A training tape was running at NORAD. I lived through a similar false alarm in 1983, when the Soviets picked up five incoming U.S. missiles. Duty officer Col. Stanislav Petrov didn't report the incident, and in so disobeying orders probably saved the world.

But then I grew up riding my bike without a helmet, running free with my friends without "play dates," and playing war and cowboys and Indians. I walked or rode my bike to school. And this was hardly an innocent time. In addition to the constant terror of the Cold War, this was when Ernie Miranda was stalking women in downtown Phoenix near where my mother worked and our cities were convulsed with riots.

Now I'm horrified to think that after all the hard work spent repairing decades of subsidized destruction of our center cities, bringing back our downtowns, building transit systems — minimal by advanced-nation comparison but huge for America...and all this essential for combating the existential threat of climate change...could be undone.

I can't imagine this happening. But I couldn't have imagined the destruction of the Phoenix oasis and so much of Arizona. Or CEOs in T-shirts and open collars as the new men's "business casual" conformist uniform. I couldn't have imagined the election of Donald Trump.

So who knows.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Comments

[Cal Lash]

No one knows

[Ruben]

President Kennedy May 1961 - Our national goal is to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade.

President Trump May 2020 - Our national goal is to fully stock the toilet paper aisles in our grocery stores by the end of the decade.

*****************************

I'll never understand the mask thing. I wear the mask to protect the cashier from me, not the other way around. You would think it is not that difficult to understand.

******************************

When I see a photo of a person wearing a sidearm, carrying an AR 15 with a rocket launcher over his back going into a Subway to order a sandwich, I don't say "Hey, now there's a patriot." What I say is "this idiot is wasting our oxygen and needs to choke to death on a meatball sandwich."

**************************

I've never been one to "run with the herd" so I'm guessing that herd immunity thing is out of my reach. (:-(

[Ramjet]

The present situation is merely another step in the history of the evolution of the world.
It is worse because of the increased population of the world. I have long said that we are screwing ourselves out of a place to stand.
It will, as it always has, pass away. It is a given that some new calamity will eventually come along to make us forget the current one.

[Stephanie Oliver]

No predictions coming from this corner as far as which was worse the 1918 flu or Covid-19. Sterner stuff, our grandparents? I have a good friend whose husband is a respiration therapist for patients who’ve been on ventllators for more than a week. Is science our friend here when positive outcomes are unlikely. Waiting to hear what happens in Brazil?

[Cal Lash]

Brazil's indigenous decimated.
Once good health service decimated.
Amazon environment decimated.
Eventually Brazilians hang
Bolsonaro from the highest tree.

[Bill Pearson]

One way or the other, we will get through the COVID19 mess. Ir will take longer for the economy to come back than some are suggesting.

What we cannot survive is another four years with the king of chaos trying to run the country based on his "gut feelings." There is/was a reason to surround past presidents with qualified experts in their field. Only the best people indeed.

I cannot even begin to picture a lame duck president trump. With no boundaries and no repercussions for his willful ignorance and the country might just collapse. If he is re-elected, maybe that is what we deserve.

[DoggieCombovr]

The Mark Lila quote is spot on. There has been plenty of making it up as we go along-it is a "novel" virus after all.

Don't need masks for healthy people, ooops, wear masks in public all the time--the mortality rate is an order of magnitude greater than flu, or not, maybe it's about the same per current studies--the virus is easily transmitted from contaminated surfaces, but maybe it's not...

There has been a degree of mass hysteria that I haven't seen since Y2K. The difference is, we got up on 1/1/2000 and, by golly, the world didn't end, and "normal" life resumed. This is going to play out for who knows how long, and everyone is on their own journey to decide how to deal with it.

[Mike Doughty]

Bill- as Clint Eastwood saying to Gene Hackman in Unforgiven-“deserving ain’t got nothing to do with it” then he shot him.Greatest cowboy movie ever made.
Cal- great poem

[Robert Smith]

2 remarks, neither related. Miranda used to hang out on front of my father's south side grocery store selling autographed Miranda Warning cards for whatever people would pay for them ... These times are reminders of the Santayana quote "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it". The Spanish Flu pandemic provides lessons that our current government serms hell bent to ignore. These are hard times.

[Stephanie Oliver]

Cal- good luck with getting rid of Bolsanaro, if the military and the drug runners are in charge. São Paulo and Rio don’t care about the Amazon or the indigenous. And it’s the beef eating northern hemisphere that is turning the Amazon into a cattle range.

[Cal Lash]

Well Oliver wanna join the insurgency?
You, me and Sean.
Mike, Poem? Just random mind bs.
Unforgiven Eastwood's best acting!
Jon 7190 I'll try and get back to u later about your previous posting on conservatism.

[azreb]

Ramjet, the population of the world has increased by 33,000,000 during the pandemic.

[Stephanie Oliver]

Cal- What’s the secret handshake? Who’s Sean?

PS Puppet Bolsanaro is culling the herd.

[Calvin E Lash Jr]

"Culling the herd"
i sent you that story.
I prefer thinning.
Sean is the older than you and i guy
that gets to lead. But it will be a bit as he is occupied with a
woman on a train in Russia.

[Gilbert resident]

Jon maybe your grandmother didn't lose anyone in the pandemic. My grandfather told me his younger sister went away to school and died of the flu in 1918. It killed so quickly she couldn't travel the 50 miles home. And, likely she died without family present. He told her s
tory to me 55 years after her death. He was unharmed in WW1 service, but she succumbed. He certainly thought it was a great disruption.

If only we can make something good come from our pandemic, like national healthcare. I can't shake the feeling that we are on our own, with no plan or thought about how to make the elderly and immune compromised safe while reopening the economy. We have better lives, mass communication and science now, yet politicians are pretty callous about the lives lost. Very troubling.

[Cal Lash]

Gilbert?
try this

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-coming-collapse/

and for more , this

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/sheldon-wolin-and-inverted-totalitarianism/

[Cal Lash]

Urbanization, density, plagues, isolating.
I agree with Ed Abbey,
"if a man cant piss in his his front yard, he is living to close to town."

Cal from a tin can in the desert.

[Cal Lash]

food
https://lithub.com/growing-food-in-cities-is-more-important-than-ever/

What happens now:
https://lithub.com/what-comes-next-life-after-pandemic/

[Mark in Scottsdale]

On one side of my family, the entire immediate family got the Spanish flu, and were all so sick no one could care for each other. They felt their neighbors saved their lives by looking in on them and helping them through the worst days. What a testament to the value of community.

They were rural agricultural folk too sick to travel and the doctors were too busy in town to journey out and see them, so their neighbors were truly lifesavers. One hundred years later, I exist, thankful for their making it possible.

[Cal Lash]

Mark
”What is explained can be denied but what is felt cannot be forgotten”
Charles Bowden

[Ruben]

As a young man, excited about a space launch and upset about racial tensions sweeping the country.

As an old man, excited about a space launch and upset about racial tensions sweeping the country.

I must be in a time warp.

[Cal Lash]

it seems more were interested in a free merchandise night launch at Scottsdale Fashion Mall than a space ship docking.
Any happenings in downtown Strawberry?

[Cal Lash]

Whats next?
A 50 year old letter and today.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1971/01/07/an-open-letter-to-my-sister-miss-angela-davis/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYR%20George%20Floyd%20Angela%20Davis%20Yevgeniya%20Baras&utm_content=NYR%20George%20Floyd%20Angela%20Davis%20Yevgeniya%20Baras+CID_4eaff4ed65bdcd01496493c89ddd13f8&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_term=An%20Open%20Letter%20to%20My%20Sister%20Miss%20Angela%20Davis

[Ruben]

Bad time to ask Mr. Cal. I-17 has been closed most of the day so traffic has been rerouted through Strawberry - Pine - Payson.

I would imagine about now the toilets and dumpsters in Strawberry are overflowing with donations from the flatlanders.

Stay cool.

[Cal Lash]

What happens now?
Trump declares martial law and declares he is king for life. Its the only way bonespurs can avoid hiding out in a DC basement.

[Ramjet]

The plan all along has been to declare that an election can't be held due to the catastrophic condition of the country. Trump therefore must remain president for life.

[DoggieCombover]

I find it beyond laughable that you could attribute the ability to plan to Trump. He flies by the seat of his pants, with no advice considered.

[AzRebel]

I'm going to go out on a limb here and speculate that Gov. Doofy is taking daily doses of that colliluquine stuff. Through most of this mess he had been approaching things in a sane, measured way. Ever since the Orange one visited our state, Gov. Dufus has gone nuts. He opened up the state with strange and conflicting guidelines. Now because of a little vandalism in Snobsdale, he imposes a STATEWIDE curfew??????????

Hell, up here in the hills we don't know what day it is much less if it's 8pm.

I'm guessing it's right around what we call dark-thirty. By then we're in bed.

[Cal Lash]

Dog, your correct about Donnie but if there is a plan whoe planned it. Or as Joe Turner said, "by Random>"

[B. Franklin]

I prefer Governor "Cup or Waffle Cone?"

But Gov. Doofy or Gov. Dufus works as well.

[Ruben]

Non-tabloid headline:

AZ

101,000 test positive

99,200 SURVIVE

[Ruben]

Went to a local restaurant yesterday.

Ten employees, no masks.

Asked for manager/owner.

Why no masks?

They say they have asthma.

All ten have asthma??

If they tell me they have asthma, I can't force them to wear masks.

Restaurant employees are their own worst enemies.

I'm done feeling sorry for them.

[Ruben]

P.S. The manager\owner was wearing a mask.

[Cal Lash]

Payson is Mountain Man country.
No masks but beaver hats.

[B. Franklin]

Still no cure for stupid.

Add in arrogance and you've got an unbeatable combination.