The Electron Pencil

The problem is we’ve been waiting for COVID-19 to find us rather than we going out and trying to find it.

That’s the gist of the strategy urged by a fellow named Jim Yong Kim in an essay he wrote in this week’s edition of The New Yorker. Kim is a decorated veteran of a number of epidemiological wars around the globe. He’s a medical doctor as well as a PhD in anthropology. In the 1990s he co-founded Partners in Health, an international organization formed to halt the spread of disease in underdeveloped countries. Kim has experience in stopping or dramatically slowing the spread of cholera, ebola and tuberculosis in places where the water often runs dirty, when it runs at all. In the ‘Aughts he ran the World Health Organization’s HIV/AIDS arm. He’s been the chair of Harvard Medical School’s Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, the president of Dartmouth College, and he even served as the head of the World Bank until last year. The dude has chops.

He’s the kind of person you want to listen to when he pitches a solution to a problem. And COVID-19 is right in his wheelhouse.

Acc’d’g to Kim, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong have successfully stemmed the spread of COVID-19 by implementing a rigid and aggressive five-step program. Places like Germany, Australia, and New Zealand also have made remarkable headway against the pandemic by employing that quintet of actions, albeit to a slightly lesser degree of stringency than the aforementioned Asian locales.

I’m going to list the five steps in a bit but first allow me to vent. For pity’s goddamned sake, doing this five-stage thing is so logical, so proven, so necessary, that the fact that this holy land as well as scads of other nations around the world haven’t set it in motion is tantamount to a crime against humanity. Making Kim’s five-step strategy our national strategy would require leadership that’s smart, strong, and compassionate.

I have to concede that the four Asians locations are, to one degree or another, authoritarian, so it was a hell of a lot easier for their leaders to say, Look here, this is what we’re gonna do.

But in war — as President Gag has described the novel coronavirus crisis — even leaders of “free” nations can take extraordinary measures to get the populace and businesses working in concert toward victory. Li’l Duce positions himself as a strong man; here’s his chance to show real strength.

“We’re not going on the offensive,” Kim writes, “taking the fight to the virus and stopping its transmission.” We’re waiting for a miracle, he says. As the pandemic spread across the United States, “it’s seemed like the only thing to do is hunker down, wait, and hope.”

In South Korea, far and away the most successful at containing this virus, “people talk about COVID-19 as if it were a person. Leaders of the Korean Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have told me that the virus is sneaky, nasty, and durable — and that it has to be hunted down.”

Finding COVID-19 is just one of the five steps. Here they are:

1. Social distancing to flatten the curve
2. Widespread random testing to find who is infected.
3. Tracking down and testing all those who had contact with infected people.
4. Isolating all people who test positive and providing full financial support to them, making it more likely they will not violate their quarantine.
5. Hospitalizing all people whose symptoms require it, utilizing dedicated facilities in hotels, convention centers, warehouses, etc.

In the United States, getting us all aboard on this five-step program would require a president who can wrangle the governors of the 50 states; who can direct certain manufacturers to immediately gear up to produce tens of millions of testing kits and PPE; and who’ll persuade pharmaceutical companies to repurpose their labs to process all those test results. In war, that’s what you do. You get automakers to manufacture Jeeps and tanks.

In this country, we need to give quarantined people the ability to stock the refrigerator, pay the rent, and keep the utilities on. You’ve got to give them the dough to stand them through weeks of isolation and the inability to work. And you’ve got to give them hope.

All this would be a monumental task for any president of a nation, many of whose citizens fetishize self-sufficiency and are fearful to the point of pathology of big government. Nevertheless, a game attempt to implement this program ought to be the president’s highest priority. He might not be as successful as the leader of Singapore, a man who can pretty much snap his fingers and make a program go, but, hell, it was P. Gag who fancied himself a wartime president the other week.

Alright then, now get out there and deliver, baby.

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I don’t sympathize much with the hordes of folks gathering on the steps of statehouses or in front of governors’ mansions protesting the various state lockdowns and insisting the COVID-19 crisis is really some sort of wild conspiracy being carried out by tyrants. It’s impossible to feel any kinship with people who parade around with guns, blame everything on libruls, and pledge fealty to the lunkhead in the White House.

(Jeremy Hogan, as usual, did a bang up job covering the protest in front of Gov. Eric Holcomb’s residence yesterday. Go there for it and more local news. And, please, support Jeremy and The Bloomingtonian!)

Odd isn’t it, that these people see plots to take over their states and their lives and strip them of their precious shootin’ irons when, more often than not, for the last few decades both houses of Congress, the US Supreme Court, the majority of statehouses, and the Oval Office have been in the hands of the party that they gravitate toward. For pity’s sake, their guys have been in power, mostly, and yet they scream and shriek as if they’re the Uyghurs of China. But that’s a mystery for another day.

Even odder still, as someone pointed out on social media, a lot of these protesters have been prepping for doomsday epidemics, invasions, and commie takeovers for decades now and — wouldn’t you know it? — the first moment a pandemic strikes they’re all shrieking and crying about how it ain’t so.

Mistake No. 1: assuming loons of this sort hew to the basics of logic.

Back in the first graf of this entry, I qualified my premise with the adjective “much.” That’s because despite the fact that the protesters pretty much represent everything abhorrent to me in this 21st Century holy land, I do get their frustration. I’m feeling it too. I’ve been cooped up in Chez Big Mike for more than five weeks now with The Loved One (she, I’m certain, has a different monicker for our stately manor) and although neither of us has yet begun to gaze longingly at the cutlery when the other is in the room, there does exist, shall we say, a tad of strain suffusing through the household.

Mark it up to not being able to talk to anybody other than each other, Terra the Cat and Sally the Dog. TLO’s and my conversations can be engrossing, sure, but, as myth has Groucho Marx famously stating, “I love my cigar but….”

I desperately need some alternative human contact and, fortunately, a friend dropped by Saturday afternoon. We chatted in our lawn chairs on my driveway for two hours in the sunshine and at a prudent remove from each other. That was as welcome a dose of medicine as any I’ve had in ages.

That is except for the fact that I got myself a raging case of sunburn on my head, face, and lower legs, so much so that I was made fairly delirious by it for at least a good 24 hours post-exposure.

In any case, yeah, I’m itching to get out into something resembling the world I was living in a mere month and a half ago, a world filled with friends, acquaintances, shop clerks, librarians, pedestrians, drivers who cut me off, and all my other fellow human beings on this planet. And I want to rant and rave and shake my fist, blaming somebody for my encagement.

So I’m not completely baffled by the protesters’ rage. Just by them.

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What Do We Know About The Sun?

I mentioned my agonizing sunburn up above. That’s what happens when you live in the Midwest and the sun comes out once or twice a month. You rush outside and bask in it, forgetting that it’s a ball of flames some 864.938 miles in diameter fed by a nuclear furnace whose emanations can turn any of our heretofore harmless skin cells into raging melanomas.

Honestly, as I sat roasting in the sun, all I could think of was how happy I was to discover the actual color of our earthly sky is blue and marveling at the Georgia O’Keeffe clouds flitting by, driven by a brisk breeze. After a couple of hours, I was inordinately happy — and burnt to a cinder.

If I were to admit to any one regret in my life, it’s that I’ve lived it solely in the Midwest, the states of Illinois, Kentucky, and Indiana, inclusive. Why I never relocated to the Pacific coast with its mountains, ocean shores, redwood forests, Big Sur, caldera lakes, palm trees, mighty bridges, bright colors, and warm winters is yet another mystery I’m incapable of divining.

I almost made it in the early summer of 1974 when, fresh out of high school, I jumped into an old heap with an friend and struck out for San Francisco, visions of the Summer of Love dancing in my mind (even though the Haight-Ashbury of my fantasy by that year was long gone, replaced by a hellscape of heroin addiction). My friend and I got as far as the near edge of the Great Basin on Interstate 80. In the middle of the night as we approached the Utah-Wyoming border, I pulled the car over because I was feeling drowsy and the next thing either of us knew, a nodding driver slammed into our rear end at 75 miles per hour, sending us down a ravine and into the hospital and the heap to its well-deserved final resting place, a car compactor.

We never made it to the Haight-Ashbury, likely a stroke of luck for me, aimless and impressionable as I was at 18, but in the long run it sentenced me to a lifetime of harsh winters, endless stretches of overcast days, flat lands, and a nagging sense of what-if.

And the worst goddamned case of sunburn I’ve ever experienced in my life because, for pity’s sake, we Midwesterners too often forget the sun is a singeing, searing, broiling ball of fire.

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Inside Dope

The Hill and others report that Michael Cohen, the president’s former personal attorney, is busy writing “a tell-all book.”

Acc’d’g to The Hill article, Cohen aims to have the book published by the November election. And sez comedian Tom Arnold, who’s his friend, “He’s pissed.” Arnold claims Cohen promises “to spill the beans.”

Lots of folks who loathe this presidency will be rubbing their hands together in glee. My advice to them? Chill, babies. Even if Cohen swears on a stack of Bibles that he once saw Trump stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, just for the sport of it, none in Li’l Duce‘s base will be swayed. Recall, if you will, the kicker of Trump’s boast to that effect: he “wouldn’t lose any voters, okay? It’s, like, incredible!”

It sure is. Everything and anything about this presidency has been incredible. Hell, Donald Trump is the very dictionary definition of incredible, as long as we agree that the word means, “too extraordinary and improbable to be believed.” *

[ * From Merriam-Webster. ]

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Mangia, Southeast Asian Style

Everybody’s cooking nowadays. I’ve been doing it since I was a late teenager. Hell, I’ve been making homemade bread since at least 1980.

For you newbies to the kitchen, I’ve got a nice little recipe for pad thai. I whipped this dish up Saturday night and am enjoying leftovers still. All the ingredients usually are available at Kroger or, if you’re of the ilk, at Bloomingfoods or Fresh Thyme. Here goes:

Big Mike’s Pad Thai

INGREDIENTS

• 8 oz. Flat rice noodles
• 3 oz. Vegetable oil
• 3 Cloves garlic, minced
• 8 oz. Salad shrimp, chicken or tofu, diced as needed
• 2 Eggs, beaten
• 1 cup Bean sprouts
• 1 Red bell pepper, thinly sliced
• 3 Green onions, chopped
• 1/2 cup Dry roasted peanuts, chopped
• 2 Limes, wedged
• 1/2 cup Fresh cilantro, chopped

SAUCE

• 3 tablespoons Fish sauce
• 1 tablespoon Soy sauce
• 3 tablespoos Light brown sugar
• 2 tablespoons Rice vinegar
• 2 tablespoons Creamy peanut butter

DIRECTIONS

Boil the noodles per the package directions, until just tender. Rinse under cold water. Set aside. Mix sauce ingredients together. Set aside. Mix the sauce ingredients well. Set aside. Heat half the oil in a deep skillet over medium-high heat. Add the meat, garlic and bell pepper. (Cook the shrimp about 2 minutes; the chicken 3-4 minutes.)

Push all cooked ingredients to the side of the skillet. Add more oil and cook the beaten eggs in it, breaking them up with your spatula as they cook.

Add the noodles, sauce, sprouts, and peanuts. Toss well to mix thoroughly. Top with cilantro, the remaining peanuts, green onions and squeezes of lime.

Eat.

If you’re lucky, I’ll give you my recipe for my own potatoes, ham, cheddar, and broccoli au gratin the next time I post here.

These are treats for special days so, as a rule, remember Michael Pollan‘s haiku-ish injunction:

Eat food.

Mostly plants.

Not too much.

Every once in a great while I even follow his lead.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about death these last few weeks as, I suppose, many of you have.

At my age, musing on the final curtain becomes sort of a hobby, inasmuch as the realization has set in that fully three-quarters of my life is in the past, if I’m at all lucky. If my (grandly optimistic) estimate is correct, that would mean the time allotted to me on this planet would bring me to the age of 85, give or take a few weeks. Fingers crossed I’ll be here until the year 2041, my grand exit coming sometime in the late spring of that annum. Cool — that means I’ll get to see flying cars and vacation trips to the Moon and….

Wait a minute. Those were the prognostications of the 1960s for the year 2000, which we all know passed sans cars with wings. Hell, even trips to the Moon enjoyed by daring astronauts had long been scratched by then due to ennui and bean-counterism.

In any case, whatever 2041 holds, I just may be around to see it. Still, the prospect of a couple more decades of respiration seems a modest — terrifyingly so — aspiration. Hell, when I was 15, I knew deep in my heart I was going to live at least until the year 3535, when we’d be traveling the universe via wormholes, and arranging lunch dates with god, Albert Einstein, and Ava Gardner.

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Where Do You Wanna Go? Club Lago? Okay, Club Lago.

In our youth, we know we’ll live forever, or something close to it. All those olds walking around? The damn fools; they let themselves get old! Not me. I’m active. I can eat and drink and bonk from morning to morning and still find a way to get up for work. Dying’s what happens to other people.

Then, suddenly, we look in the mirror and see that old goat looking back. Golly! Did I let myself get that way?

So now, rather than another millennium and a half in front of me, there’s — at best — a scant twenty or so years, if all goes well with my body and among my species-mates. Yikes.

Yeah, death. It’s coming. And the truth is I’ve sat in my recliner and started cold sweating on any number of occasions late at night, wondering if this goddamned COVID-19 thing is going to rub me out. Sometimes I shake my head and successfully move on to another train of thought and sometimes I can shake the coconut like a bobble-head doll and still I obsess over the End of Me.

Wouldn’t you know it? I’m of two minds when it comes to the final countdown. Just as I entertain contradictory feelings about the whole of the human race (I both love it and hate it), I find I’m torn between two polar positions re: death.

On the one hand, my last breath is the absolutely, positively, incontrovertibly most terrifying thought ever to run through my mind. Honest, my skin turns cold. The hairs on my arms stand straight up. Miscellaneous orifices either open or close in direct opposition to their intended states.

I want to gnash my teeth and moan, Why does this all have to end?

Then again, just as often I lament, When is all this shit finally gonna end?

Funny thing is, I consider both my attitudes toward humanity and mortality to be about as healthy as they can possibly be. Those who profess to love all people unconditionally are either blind as bats or have drunk some mighty powerful Kool-Aid. Same with those who swear up and down that life is precious and wonderful and dear god in heaven never take me away from this paradise.

Life is indeed precious and wonderful…, now and then. I do love all people…, occasionally. Yet there are often physical and emotional pains beyond endurance that cause us to wish for a quick exit. And there are monstrous jerks walking among us about whom we rightfully think, Y’know, if he got hit by a speeding truck right about now….

I’ve always been puzzled by people who say they love the changing of the seasons, that the dead of winter makes them appreciate spring and summer all the more. My retort to them always has been, That’s like saying I hope I get sentenced to ten years in prison so when my release date rolls around I’ll be happy as a pig in the mud.

But the truth is it’s the roller coaster, the crazy line graph of life that forces us to appreciate the good, the beautiful, the sublime. Just as you can’t really know what makes a great play or song or movie or book w/o partaking of awful examples of the same, the secret to understanding happiness — or at least contentment — is to have suffered, either profoundly or somewhat.

Am I suffering right now? I don’t want to go that far. I’ve seen the meme about what Anne Frank had to endure and been resentful of the intended sentiment — for pity’s sake, we don’t all have to be subjected to the worst horrors humans can visit upon one another before we’re given license to complain, yet I’ve realized our current enforced grounding isn’t the worst thing that’s ever happened. But it is an ordeal.

Some, like The Loved One and others who identify with the personality type Susan Cain wrote about in Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, are reveling in the solitude, in the absence of the challenges of other people.

Me? I feel like I’m starving for human company. I went to the Kroger to stock up this past Friday. The first person I encountered, in the produce section, made eye contact with me. I nodded and smiled (although I doubt she noticed that, what with my mask on) and said, “It feels great just to see people.”

“Isn’t it the truth?” she replied, surely smiling underneath her mask. I felt warm and squishy for the next couple of hours. I’ll bet she did too.

I was thrilled to be alive, at least for those few short hours.

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I like to think I started becoming a citizen of the world in 1967. By that I mean that year, at the age of eleven I found myself entranced by the goings on outside of my home and the block where I played with my friends. I began reading the Chicago Sun-Times every day and the Sun-Times and the Chicago American on Sundays. Both were Democratic newspapers. My parents wouldn’t think of letting the Tribune into our house. That paper was for the bankers and lawyers and other swells of suburban Oak Park, just across North Avenue from us but in truth about six million miles distant in every other way.

I also began paying attention to the nightly news. In those days, the networks ran a world news report each weekday at 6 or so. The local news came on at 10 o’clock. The names I’d caught out of the corner of my ear in years previous — Mayor Daley, R. Sargent Shriver, Nguyên Kao Ky, and Charles DeGaulle — became fully realized three-dimensional figures to me, as opposed to simply words I’d hear issuing from the mouths of Huntley & Brinkley, Walter Cronkite, or, closer to home, Channel 7’s Fahey Flynn.

It’s possible for me to even pinpoint the date I became a news junkie. Or, more accurately, the month. It would be January. Within a span of eleven days that month, three astronauts — Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee — died in a flash launchpad fire as they sat in their Apollo 1 capsule and rehearsed for their scheduled liftoff in February, and McCormick Place, the largest convention hall in the world at the time — a trivial datum the city crowed about ad nauseum — was consumed by a spectacular fire and essentially groaned, twisted and crumbled to the ground, creating a horrible eyesore on Chicago’s lakefront.

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Being eleven years old, I had begun to view astronauts not only as mystical, fantastical hero cowboys, but as human beings brave enough to climb on top of a several-hundred-feet-tall can of explosive fuel and be launched into the vacuum of space. I’d been especially taken by Gus Grissom, who, it was well-publicized, was a short man, barely qualified by height to be an astronaut. For some reason I though it was the coolest thing in the world that such a little guy could move so surely and freely among giants. Also being the age I was, I bought into the City of Chicago’s incessant boasting about the largest this, the biggest that, or the busiest whatever. There were Buckingham Fountain, O’Hare airport, the Dan Ryan Expressway, McCormick Place, and so many more. The fact that I lived in a city that contained so many superlative things made me feel…, well, bigger.

The deaths of the astronauts and the destruction of McCormick Place got me into what would become a nearly life-long habit of devouring all the news I could find. I gobbled up everything about the Apollo tragedy. I read about McCormick Place and studied newspaper pictures of the collapsed hulk every time a new one came out. I was baffled that such seemingly eternal institutions (to my young mind) could disappear in the snap of a finger.

From there, I became a constant consumer of news about Vietnam, civil rights, the Cubs (who, that year, had awakened from a dreadful two-decade slumber), and elections of any and all sorts. My newfound passion for news spiked the next year when the Prague Spring, the Tet Offensive, and the North Korean seizure of the USS Pueblo all took place in January and, in succeeding months, Lyndon Johnson quit the race for president, and first King and then Kennedy were killed. There were riots, trips around the Moon, sit-ins and campus takeovers, John Carlos and Tommie Smith raising their black-gloved fists at the Mexico City Olympics, the French taking to the streets, jetliners being hijacked, and even the premier of Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-in and the ascendance of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour to keep me glued to the papers and the TV news.

And so things remained for the next 30 or so years, during which tons of things happened in my city, in my nation, and in my world, things I had to keep abreast of, things that drew me in and kept me riveted. Reagan getting shot. Iran-Contra. Three-Mile Island and Chernobyl. The fall of the Soviet Union. The Gulf War. Oklahoma City. The space shuttles Challenger and Columbia. And then, the mother of all news — 9/11.

But by September 2001 I had started to break away from my heretofore insatiable hunger for news. Some time around the the mid-’90s, I came to the conclusion that watching TV news made me more nervous than informed. Everything and everybody, it seemed, was out to get me. Babies by the thousands were being kidnapped and sacrificed in satanic rituals. Just thinking about sex could infect me with the AIDS virus. A mob of crack addicts milled around my house, waiting for the first chance to get in, steal everything, and kill me for the lark of it. North Koreans wanted me dead. Iranians wanted me dead. Iraqis wanted me dead. Bacteria on my dish sponge wanted me dead. Unfailingly, I felt edgy to the point of distraction after every TV news broadcast.

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Be Afraid. Be Very, Very Afraid.

So I simply decided to forego TV news. Simple as that. While I was at it, I got rid of my TV as well. Well, not actually. I just gave up cable and used my ridiculously bulky TV set solely for videotapes and then DVDs. Truth: I felt better immediately.

I was in no way less informed. I kept up with every event and development through the newspapers and online. Reading about the happenings of the world is far less stressful than being constantly confronted with lurid pix of every bombing, every mad rapist/murderer, every molecule of bad cholesterol out to eliminate me.

As Marshall McLuhan famously remarked, “The medium is the message.” And the TV medium works best when it excites the senses, when it scares you. The message of TV has always been, Be terrified. The more frightened you are, the more likely you’ll tune in at 10 to see what’s next.

That was then. Now, we get our news almost exclusively online. And during these terrifying pandemic days, pretty much all the news is COVID-19. People are dying. It’s getting worse by the day. This rock star has the disease. That actor has died from it. The Rock urges us to wash our hands. Basketball stars are having trouble staying in shape with their season on hold. Churchgoers say the blood of Jesus will protect them from the virus.

All COVID-19, all the time.

Now, the other shoe is dropping. I have quit the news, period. COVID-19 is a clear and present danger. It could kill me. I accept that and have agreed to follow all social distancing and disinfection rules. The greatest medical experts in the world are just now coming to some understanding of what this thing is, why it kills some and not others, how it jumps from person to person, yet there is still so much to learn. So much that is a mystery even to people who’ve dedicated their lives to the study of viruses and public health.

I needn’t keep up with every incremental advance in the total knowledge pool. Lots of so-called advances are merely guesses, stabs in the dark. Lots are the speculations of people who have no business doing the speculating. At some point in the as yet unseen future, I’ll be happy to read about what the world’s scientists know about this virus.

Now, no.

I’m out, and feeling better about it already.

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Tons o’folks are in the running for the title of Madame-or-Mister Bloomington. I can name at least a dozen off the top of my head. One of my faves is my pal David Brent Johnson, jazz maven over at WFIU, 103.7 FM.

He and I just exchanged book rec’s. It seems appropriate since the whole world is stuck inside trying to figure out how to pass the 103 hours of every day now. Loads of ’em are buying books. Margaret Taylor, the big boss at the Book Corner, tells me the phone is ringing off the hook with calls from people living all over the country wanting to order books. She takes the orders and ships the desired titles out in minutes. That’s cool, considering not too terribly long ago many observers were singing dirges for independent booksellers. Then, about five or so years ago, the indies became hot as Dragon’s Breath Chili Peppers. See, scads of people didn’t want to enrich the already far-too-loaded Jeff Bezos and plutocratic villains like him by ordering from big box outfits and online mega-retailers.

For more on the mini-mania for independent booksellers, check out this piece.

And if you’re curious about the Dragon’s Breath Chili Pepper, as my next door Tom is sure to be, it was developed by a hobby gardener in Wales (who’d’a thunk?) and has a Scoville Heat Unit rating of 2.48 million (that’s right, million). The damned thing is so hot it actually burns human skin. The gardener, a fellow named Mike Smith, apparently is the Dr. Frankenstein of tongue-frying inasmuch as his peppers are too hot to actually eat. They’re so hot that medical researchers are looking into using carefully — very carefully — measured quantities of their volcanic molecules as a topical anesthetic. Just the right dosage, they hope, will deaden the skin nerves for people who are allergic to conventional anesthetics.

Back to DBJ and me. Both of us are voracious readers under normal circumstances — and these, of course, are not. I just got finished re-reading The Third Man, the novella by Graham Greene. And if you’ve never seen the 1949 film noir of the same name and directed by Carol Reed, friend, get on it this minute. The movie, starring Orson Wells, Joseph Cotten, Trevor Howard, and the Italian actress Alida Valli, is a masterpiece. The late film critic Roger Ebert said of it: “Of all the movies that I have seen, this one most completely embodies the romance of going to the movies.”

The British Film Institute declared it the top UK film ever made in 1999.

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There are so many bits of fascinating trivia surrounding this movie. The screenplay was written by Greene himself. He actually wrote the novella as a warm-up to penning the script. He explains his thinking:

To me it is almost impossible to write a film play without first writing a story. Even a film depends on more than plot, on a certain measure of characterization, on mood and atmosphere; and these seem to me almost impossible to capture for the first time in the dull shorthand of a script…. One must have the sense of more material than one needs to draw on.

Welles whose character, the shady Harry Lime — we learn at the start of the movie — is dead perhaps murdered. In a flashback he delivers one of the most memorable lines in cinema. He and his friend, the pulp fiction author Holly Martins (played by Cotten) are on top of the giant Ferris wheel in Vienna’s historic amusement park, The Prater, looking down at all the people below. Lime regards them as ants or insignificant dots because that’s the kind of person he is. Lime and Martins descend and get off the ride. For some reason, both Reed and Greene felt something more was needed to be said, both for tempo and for closure to the scene. Welles ad libbed this:

You know what the fellow said. In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed. But they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love in 500 years of democracy and peace — and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.

That line, of course, was not in the novella or the screenplay. Nor was it of Welles’ own creation. He’d simply recalled a similar line uttered by the Gilded Age painter James Whistler (whose “Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1” is more commonly known as “Whistler’s Mother”). Fellow painter Theodore Wores once said to Whistler that San Francisco surely would become one of the world’s great birthplaces of art, considering the natural beauty in and around it. Whistler would have none of it. He said:

Consider Switzerland. There the people have everything in the form of natural advantages — mountains, valleys, and blue sky. And what have they produced? The cuckoo clock.

Acc’d’g to Welles in the book This Is Orson Welles, after the movie came out he was flooded with protests by Swiss people. They told him the cuckoo clock actually was made in southwest Germany’s Black Forest.

When you watch The Third Man, you may notice the entire musical score is performed on a single instrument, the zither. The score was written by an amateur zither player named Anton Karas, an Austrian. While touring Vienna in preparation for shooting location scenes, Reed dropped in at a wine bar and heard Karas playing in a corner. Just like that, he asked Karas to score his film. Karas told Reed he didn’t even know how to write music. Reed said that didn’t matter and insisted Karas come back to England with him to write the music for his film. Karas did so under protest.

In any case, the final shot of the movie, set in a cold, lonely cemetery, ends with Valli’s character, Anna Schmidt (Lime’s girlfriend) walking briskly away from Lime’s grave as the casket is being lowered into the ground. Martins, who is attracted to her for a couple of reasons (watch the movie to find out) stands at the entrance to the cemetery, expecting her to acknowledge him. But Schmidt, staring icily ahead, ignores him and walks out as the lonely-sounding zither music (“Harry Lime’s Theme”) continues to play for a long moment. It’s one of the simultaneously sweetest and saddest scenes I’ve ever seen in a movie.

Greene’s novella, by the way, opens with this line: “One never knows when the blow may fall.” That’s as apt a line as any for the moment we live in right now.

Okay. So book rec’s. DBJ urged me to read 1959: The Year Everything Changed, by Fred Kaplan. In it, Kaplan argues America, along with much of the world, leaped into the modern age. As evidence he cites that year’s invention of the microchip; Castro’s revolutionaries seizing power in Cuba; the launches of the USSR’s Lunik 1 and the USA’s Pioneer IV (the first human-made objects to break free of the Earth’s gravity and soar into outer space); IBM’s introduction of the first practical, affordable business computer; Martin Luther King, Jr’s visit to Ghandi’s pacifist disciple, Vinoba Bhave, in India; the federal government acknowledging widespread institutionalized racism in the United States; in music, groundbreaking jazz LPs issued by Dave Brubeck, John Coltrane, and Ornette Coleman; in literature, Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus and Norman Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself, as well as John Howard Griffin beginning to travel the south disguised as a black man for his exposé Black Like Me; in movies, the American releases of John Cassavetes’ “Shadows” and Francois Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows”; the Searle company’s application for approval of the first birth control pill; and much, much more. All of these events profoundly changed their respective fields or participants or culture and society in general. It’s a good read.

In return, I rec’d to him Erik Larson‘s new book, The Splendid and the Vile. It’s about Winston Churchill’s first year as British prime minister. The cover note explains:

On Winston Churchill’s first day as prime minister, Hitler invaded Holland and Belgium. Poland and Czechoslovakia had already fallen, and the Dunkirk evacuation was just two weeks away. For the next twelve months, Hitler would wage a relentless bombing campaign, killing 45,000 Britons. It was up to Churchill to hold the country together and persuade President Franklin Roosevelt that Britain was a worthy ally — and willing to fight to the end.

I understand from reading other World War II histories that Hitler was baffled that Great Britain would not come to the bargaining table despite the bombing, despite Dunkirk, and despite the fall of virtually every other domino in Western Europe. The Nazi leader didn’t really want to invade England — in fact, he rather admired both that country and the United States for their supremacist bents — but invasion seemed an inevitability after Churchill essentially hand-held the British people to resist the Germans to whatever end, bitter or not.

I just got my copy of Larson’s latest in the mail and I can’t wait to dig into it. Most people know Larson as the author of The Devil in the White City but I was particularly taken by his In the Garden of Beasts. The man is a superb historian and storyteller, so much so that many readers think his books are novels. They are not; every single one is a nonfiction history, based on contemporary accounts, archives, records, journals, other histories, and the private and published papers of each book’s characters. In fact, I’ve had several arguments with people who swear Larsen’s books are fiction. Again, they aren’t; they’re that good.

Reading’s going to get us through these homebound days. I had good preparation for this when I underwent chemoradiation therapy for cancer in 2016. To get through that ordeal, I simply refused to think about today — this moment, when I was sick to my core and unable to move from bed or couch — and thought only of a day in June, months hence, at which point I’d be able to…, well, move again. I got through it; not easily, by a long shot, but nevertheless successfully. And I feel I — we — will get through this too.

This time I have the added hope that none of us lose even one friend, family member, co-worker, or neighbor. That’s why I’ve been signing off my emails of late with this entreaty:

Please don’t get sick and die.

That’s all I ask right now.

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Here’s Jane Goodall on the COVID-19 crisis:

[ h/t to Renaldo Migaldi for this. ]

Goodall raises a point not many of us have considered during this mess. Lots of these dangerous viruses arise from wild animals — specifically, humans hunting, trafficking in, and eating them. Acc’d’g to Goodall, China has banned the importing, breeding, and selling of wild animals for food across the nation in response to COVID-19. She says the novel coronavirus may well have arisen from the selling of a pangolin, or scaly anteater, in the “wet market” in Wuhan. Wet markets are collections of open-air stalls where live wild animals are sold for food in China.

Wild animals develop immunities to microorganisms that we may not (and vice versa). So any virus or similar bug that jumps from another species to us (or, again, vice versa) might well be dangerous or even fatal.

Jane Goodall is the long-time primatologist and anthropologist. She’s been known as an ace in the primate field since she started studying chimps in Tanzania some 60 years ago. She was 26 years old when she first traveled to what was then regarded as a savage, dangerous place. (Most of the world’s view of Africa was informed by Tarzan movies.) She sure as hell had a lot more guts than I ever would at any age.

The story goes that as a little kid, Goodall was given a stuffed chimp rather than a teddy bear. Apparently, she still keeps that stuffed chimp in her bedroom.

Anyway, Goodall is known around the world and has been named a United Nations Messenger of Peace. BTW: the UN Messenger of Peace designation, initiated in 1997, originally was a part of the UNICEF goodwill ambassadors program. And the very first UN goodwill ambassador was… Danny Kaye.

Just another example of fun stuff you can discover while looking something else up.

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10-Year-Old Oatmeal

The guy who writes and draws The Oatmeal recently marked his 10th anniversary putting out that fabulously funny website. His name is Matthew Inman. He lives in Seattle and, acc’d’g to a 2012 story in The Guardian, he raked in a half million bucks a year from it, a wad he richly deserves.

His takes on the relationships between dogs and people, as well as those between dogs and cats, are inspired.

In any case, as an anniversary gift to his loyal readers — and I sure as hell am one — he’s drawn up a list of ten (well, sorta ten) things he learned about making art in the past decade.

At least three times a week I make sure I don’t go to bed w/o clicking the Random button a few times on his comics page.

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The World In A Roll

This is from a fellow named Mike DiGioia, with whom I used to work at a an artsy little magazine called Third Coast. It was a weird operation and people came and went like browsers at a resale shop. On a positive note I did get to be able to write a piece for it on the original Kartemquin Films boys who produced and directed the acclaimed documentary Hoop Dreams, though, so it wasn’t a total loss. Mike was pretty cool — he found a big stray dog and named it Joe — but otherwise it was a forgettable experience.

Anyway, here’s his take on the Great TP Wars and how they relate, surprisingly (or not), to what our world’s economic system has become:

There’s a finite amount of toilet paper at any given time, yet it’s enough for all of us. A minority of people bought it all up and are hoarding it and now the rest of us are looking at empty shelves. Now just scale that up to everything and that should help you understand our society in general.

Yep, That about sizes it up.

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Y’know, these horoscopes really hit the nail on the head sometimes.

[ h/t to Vanessa Shinmoto. ]

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Double Talk

Here’s the link to the podcast of yesterday’s Big Talk, an encore presentation of my January 2020 chat with university chancellor and diversity pioneer Charlie Nelms. It’s Part 1 of a two-parter with the wrap slated to air next Thursday, April 2.

Catch Big Talk every Thursday at 5:30pm on WFHB, 91.3 FM.

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My Annual Spring Watch

Every year, baseball’s Opening Day stands as a landmark in my Spring Watch. That annual vigil begins soon after the New Year. I figure, we’ve gotten past football’s regular season and the holidays and even though it’s the dead of winter, we’re rapidly advancing to those delicious days when the weather is bearable for humans and there’s light in the sky.

I start the Watch on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday, January 15th, usually by watching the documentary, King: Montgomerey to Memphis, narrated by Harry Belafonte (as cool a guy as ever lived) and directed by Sidney Lumet. (It was the only documentary Lumet, who helmed Fail-Safe, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, and Network, ever directed.)

Next comes the Super Bowl about two weeks later, followed by Valentine’s Day and the opening of baseball’s spring training camps in Arizona and Florida. I mark few of these days for the own sake but as progressive standards in the march toward sane weather.

And, speaking of March, my birthday falls in the first week of the month. That’s another landmark. Then St. Patricks’ Day and the beginning of the NCAA basketball tournament. April Fool’s Day and baseball’s Opening Day fall around the same time, appropriate for most of my life as a Chicago Cubs fan, considering from the age of 11 when I fell in thrall to the team (gee thanks, Ma!) until the year 2015, only a fool would honestly believe the Cubs could accomplish anything of note.

Finally, there’s Easter. By that Sunday, the clocks have already been turned forward and, even though there’s a good chance of snow and/or sub-freezing temps now and again, there are just as likely to be glorious days in the low 70s. My Spring Watch, by then, would be concluded.

Counting down all those big days during the Watch helps me survive the winter with hope and a modicum of sanity.

This year, of course, one of those landmarks has been robbed from me. Opening Day for my beloved Cubs had been slated for yesterday, March 26th, in Milwaukee. The game wasn’t played due to the COVID-19 crisis.

Nevertheless, my Spring Watch goes on. The forsythias out in front of the house are having an orgy…

… and the grass is becoming more and more green and lush and will continue to do so over the next few days with predicted rain showers.

This is a spring like no other. In a lot of ways, I feel as though I’m 10 years old again, being grounded for two weeks or more by my mother. Poor Ma, she never learned that grounding me didn’t work. There were long stretches when I’d be grounded after every single time I went out. Grounding was her knee-jerk response to me coming home late. And I came home late every time. I don’t know why; perhaps I was born w/o an internal clock. All I know is, I was busy playing ball in the alley or riding my bike all over the neighborhood and the next thing I knew it was 5:05 pm. Already five minutes late (Ma was a stickler), I’d figure, Dang, I’m in for it now anyway, so I’d decide to stay out another five, ten, or 45 minutes. I’d walk in as Ma was putting dinner on the table and, as I washed my hands, she announce I was grounded for two weeks.

I often concocted phony excuses to get out of the house during those groundings. There was basketball practice, I’d say, even though I hated playing basketball and rarely did so. A little older, I told Ma there was Drama Club at Amundsen Park. That was a real dodge — I loved being on stage. Once I told her I had to go to the park every day for Junior Citizens meetings during an ungodly long grounding. Somehow I would up being named Junior Citizen of the year, as bizarre and unexpected an award as I’ve ever received. At that time, any rational observer would conclude I was far more likely to win hoodlum of the year — and, I confess, I’d have been more proud of that.

Now, in my 60s, I feel as though I’m being grounded again. I hate it just as much as I hated it when I was 11 or 12. Only this time I’m not coming up with schemes to get around it.

The stakes are a tad higher this time around.

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Peace In Our Time

Update: It’s been more than two weeks now that The Loved One and I have been self-quasi-quarantining. I’m happy — and shocked — to report we haven’t declared open war on each other yet. In fact, there haven’t even been border clashes to date.

There was one little harrumph the other day but nothing came of it. Even at this advanced age I surprise myself.

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I went for a drive through the Indiana University campus and around Courthouse Square yesterday evening about 30 minutes before sunset.

I wanted to see what the city of Bloomington looked like under our quasi-lockdown. I haven’t wanted to do so up to this point because I was afraid it’d depress the hell out of me but for some odd reason I felt up to it yesterday.

So, nothing’s really open. Stores selling merchandise, by and large, are closed. Restaurants are closed to eat-in customers and a few have signs out front reading, “We’re open for to go,” which I consider an almost endearing way of putting it. Never, I would think, have those words been arranged just so until now. It may be the line for us to remember these days after we work our way out of this mess.

A lot of teenagers were out, riding skateboards or playing tennis or simply wandering aimlessly. By a lot, I mean perhaps nine or ten clots of two to four kids keeping each other company and, sadly, breaking all the social distancing rules.

On 7th Street between Indiana Avenue and Fee Lane, I saw one couple, apparently graduate school aged, walking and talking. The guy was on the sidewalk and the woman was walking along the curb, clearly maintaining a good eight or so feet of distance between them. I at first wondered if that’s really what they were doing so I went around the block and passed them again. Sure enough, he was keeping to the sidewalk and she the curb. They were grinning and gabbing to such an extent that I thought it might have been a date, an early one where the two are trying to get to know each other and trying to impress and amuse each other. In a way, I hope that’s what really was going on; they’re so drawn to each other that they had to get together even during this health crisis, but they’re both responsible enough to keep their distance.

Then, I turned south on Jordan Avenue. In front of the Musical Arts Center a couple stood very close to each other. She had a surgical face mask attached to her ears but it’d been pulled down, exposing her mouth. He wore no mask at all. They were so close, I figured one or the other was about to go in for the kiss. This time I didn’t go around the block to see what they’d do.

Perhaps the whole emptiness thing should have depressed me or would have depressed me otherwise, but the sunset was so glorious, vivid azure blues streaked with whites and oranges with a thin brushstroke of red here and there, that I couldn’t help but feel elated. Directly across Jordan from the almost-kissing couple was a bed of brilliant yellow daffodils. And every time I’d turn toward the east, the golden sun sinking in the west would be shining off windows and and metal surfaces turning the city into an amber kaleidoscope.

I wouldn’t have been able to take that drive on a rainy or merely overcast evening. It would have been too sad.

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Nelms, Again

So, I’m starting my run of rebroadcasts on Big Talk this afternoon. This week and next I’ll feature my January, 2020 two-part interview with Charlie Nelms, a university chancellor, diversity pioneer, education consultant, and former child of the backwoods of Arkansas. One of eleven children, his parents were sharecroppers who instilled in the family a deep love of books and learning.

Tune in today and every Thursday at 5:30pm on WFHB, 91.3 FM. Then come back here tomorrow for the podcast link for the previous day’s show.

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Blood From A Turnip

You might think it odd that I haven’t savaged President Gag much during this COVID-19 crisis.

Normally I’d be prone to blame him for anything and everything, up to and including the temperature being too low in the morning. I’ve been hard as hell on him since he became the Republican Party frontrunner in early 2016. (BTW: Let me repeat that and add to it — He was the goddamned Republican Party frontrunner — and then he won the presidency on a technicality! Jesus, it’s been four years already and I still have to type that stuff out to believe it.)

But I’m laying off him regarding the coronavirus. There’s a reason for that

Donald J. Trump, heir to a fortune, grifter, bully, kid (and adult) who never learned to play nice, serial bankruptcy claimer/philanderer/liar, and crypto-racist (except when his racist bleatings were all too overt) could never — and should never — have been expected to be the calm, steady, forceful, caring leader who’d guide us through the scariest hour this holy land has experienced in a generation.

Who among us would ever expect Li’l Duce to convey the message that he feels our pain, or it’s morning in America, or ask what you can do for your country? The man is utterly incapable of communicating empathy, sympathy, kindness, or concern. The reason for that is he’s very likely utterly incapable of feeling those things.

Look, I wouldn’t get mad at Sally the Dog because she couldn’t help me finish the morning crossword puzzle. I wouldn’t go online to rail that she’s let me down. And I certainly wouldn’t hold out any hope that she’ll suddenly see the light and help me with some clues tomorrow morning.

None of us should ever have expected or even hoped for the current president to be the rock upon which we rely in these dark days.

So no, you won’t see or hear me criticizing the president for his performance during this ordeal. Everything else he does remains fair game, though.

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I ate breakfast in the car this morning at the Cutright marina on Lake Monroe. I watched a trio of red-headed woodpeckers forage for their meals. Two adults and one juvenile. At first I heard one or more of them as they…, well, pecked at trees, unseen nearby. Their (or its) pecking was slow, sort of lento, musically. Whereas other woodpeckers have a more rápido (again, musically) peck.

After a few moments, one of the adults flew past my hot rod and perched upon a wooden barrier. She (males and females are similarly plumaged) watched a gang of drab brown birds pick at the grass around her, then she decided to hop down where they were and partake of the feast. The other birds scattered, leaving the buffet table for her. She seemed to be eating a lot down there, which surprised me because I’d thought woodpeckers only ate bugs out of trees.

Eventually, she was joined by another adult and then the juvenile. I don’t know if all three of them were related but the juvenile sure seemed to be acting snotty with the other two.

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I Was A Cartoon Kid

Speaking of red-headed woodpeckers, one of my favorite cartoon characters when I was a kid was Woody Woodpecker. Only he wasn’t a red-headed w., as I’d thought all along back then. He had that tuft of feathers on top of his head, making him a pileated woodpecker. Now those guys are big, up to a foot and a half in length. R-h. woodpeckers are small like wrens and have smooth, albeit also carmine, pates.

I loved many of those half-hour cartoon shows of my youth. The Woody Woodpecker Show (1957-1966) and the others always had secondary characters that starred in their own segments. WW’s were Wally Walrus, Andy Panda, Chilly Willy, Buzz Buzzard, and one or two others. Usually the half hour would be divided into four segments with the main character’s bits sandwiching one or two of the secondaries’.

It was the same with George of the Jungle (1967-1970). His cartoons were always packaged with Tom Slick’s and Super Chicken’s. BTW: If you want to really understand a young boy’s burgeoning sexuality, consider this: George of the Jungle, apparently, had two girlfriends, Fella and Ursula. In the opening sequence of his segments, the girlfriends would be introduced, dancing to a jungle tom-tom beat. They were extraordinarily curvy and wore revealing, leafy, camiknickers. Swear to god, they aroused the bejesus out of me! Of course, I didn’t realize exactly what that arousal was at the time; I only knew I couldn’t take my eyes of them and my breathing got faster. Also, I’d think about them at various times throughout the rest of the day. It got to the point that I anticipated Saturday mornings just so I could catch a peek of Fella and Ursula. So, if you have nine or 10-year-old kids at home and can’t figure out some of their behaviors and habits, take this story into consideration.

The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle & Friends — AKA Rocky & His Friends and The Bullwinkle Show — (1959-1963) also had a stable of associated characters: Mr. Peabody and Sherman, Dudley Do-Right, and the repertory companies of Fractured Fairy Tales and Aesop & Son. Some storied voiceover artists of the ’60s, including Paul Frees, Hans Conried, and even William Conrad, appeared in the Rocky and Bullwinkle stable.

BTW, Pt. II: Rocky was voiced by a woman named June Foray, who died in 2017 at the age of 99. She also voiced Dudley Do-Right’s girlfriend Nell as well as any number of Granny characters in classic Warner Bros. cartoons. Her great disappointment in life was auditioning for and not getting the role of Betty Rubble in The Flintstones. She lost out to a woman named Bea Benederet, who went on to play Kate in the evening sitcom, Petticoat Junction. And, speaking of a young boy’s burgeoning sexuality, when Kate’s three daughters — Billie Joe, Bobbie Joe, and Betty Joe — peeked over the rim of the water tower that they were swimming in (apparently unclothed, I desperately hoped) in the show’s opening, this then-10-y-o nearly passed out trying to conceal his heavy breathing from his parents who also were in the living room.

Why am I thinking about all this? I dunno; perhaps a pandemic lockdown brings out the best in me.

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Grandparents: Two For A Dollar

Speaking of the pandemic, late-stage capitalists are now floating the idea that it’d be okay for this holy land to risk the lives of millions of old fogies and bats just so we can get everybody back in the streets and spending our hard-earned pennies on useless crap from Best Buy and Walmart. President Gag, for one, says we ought to quit hunkering down and get back to work (and, far more importantly, shopping) by Easter, which comes Sunday, April 12th this year, a scant 18 days from today. Medical experts say hell no, but the Randians and their philosophical brethren and sisteren imply What’s a few hundred thousand grandmas and grandpas in exchange for a robust economy (read: system that keeps the rich rich and the rest of us not)?

Lots of folks are aghast at this proposed trade-off. Some are even crying hypocrisy, harkening back to the early days of the Obamacare debate, back when that deep-thinker Sarah Palin and cronies scared the hell out of senescent America by claiming there’d be “death panels” for Mawmaw and Peepaw. Now, acc’d’ng to the same bunch, Mawmaw and Peepaw should be happy to stop breathing so that their kids and grandkids can enjoy a healthy dollar. Or, more accurately, so that shareholders of United Worthless Shit Technologies Worldwide can get their customary dividend checks.

The righteous among us gasp that trading lives for economic good is a damned step too far, that we’ve all gone mad trying to protect our nation’s precious wealth gap. To which I reply: chill, people.

Truth is, we’ve been sacrificing people — women, men, children and, for that matter, anything that moves — time and again for economic reasons. What in heaven’s name do you think most wars are fought for? Our endless wars in the Middle East since the first Gulf War began in 1991 have claimed the lives of — at absolute minimum — a half a million human beings on all sides.

And — for chrissakes — this nuclear armed superpower that we live in and love/hate was perfectly willing to incinerate hundreds of millions of people on both sides of the Cold War if the godless commies dared to impose their economic system on too many more populations back in the late 1950s through the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

It can be argued that most wars through the history of humankind have been fought for the sole purpose of ensuring the dominance of one nation’s economy over another’s.

Li’l Duce may be the biggest J.O. ever to occupy the Oval Office (with stiff competition from the likes of Andrew Jackson) but he’s not the first willing to off people — countless numbers of them — in the interest of strengthening the American economic system.

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I visited Lake Monroe twice yesterday. I went there in the morning when it was still sunny and bright and ate my brown-bag, homemade breakfast. Then I went back this evening, in the rain, and did crossword puzzles until it got dark.

The geese and the squirrels at the lake must think they’ve died and gone to heaven. No huge diesel pickups towing quasi-ocean liners with engines attached that could propel them to the moon and back. No dickheads tossing beer cans off their boats after they pull out of the water. The critters are able to tend to their mates and eat to their hearts’ content w/o human interference for the most part.

There was a line of geese crossing the road near the Paynetown beach this AM. I just stopped for them, about 50 yards away, and let them waddle away. A woman jogging toward me saw me just sitting there in my car and I worried for a minute she’d think I was some kind of stranger-danger guy. But as she passed she waved and gave a knowing smile.

[MG NOTE: Really, go right now and view some of Jeff Danielson’s photography. He and his wife Marcy D. used to run the Runcible Spoon. He’s older than I am and he still plays soccer. I hate him for that but I love him for his camera work.]

The water level at the lake definitely is at flood stage. The water’s just about ready to spill over the approach to the Cutright ramp. One good rain ought to do it.

The lockdown is a shame for the people who operate businesses at the lake, like the general store and the marina. They took a giant hit last year when flooding cut the ramps off from February until July. In fact, you can still see the high water marks on the trees and picnic shelters in both Cutright and Paynetown. Now this.

Hey, we’re all taking a giant hit.

On the plus side, scads of folks are really getting into cooking their own meals these days. I wonder what the fallout from that will be. Will people swarm the restaurants when we’re given the all-clear, or will they say, You know what, I like my own cooking; I’m gonna keep doing this?

Yesterday I made a delicious lentil soup with ham and broccoli. here’s my recipe:

Lentil, Ham & Broccoli Soup

INGREDIENTS

• • 32 oz. container, chicken broth
  • 3 T Olive oil
  • Chopped onion
  • Chopped broccoli
  • Chopped celery
  • Chopped carrot
  • 1 T minced garlic
  • 1 pkg (16 oz) lentils
  • * 14 oz can diced tomatoes (in juice)
  • 1 cup diced ham
  • Salt & pepper, to taste
  • Balsamic vinegar, to taste

* You can substitute a small can of tomato sauce and several tomatoes you’ve chopped yourself

DIRECTIONS

Heat oil in soup pot over medium-high heat. Add onions, celery, and carrots, coating well. Sauté two minutes.

Add broth, lentils, garlic, and diced tomatoes. (Add water if you wish but be careful not to make it too liquid-y.) Bring to boil and reduce heat to simmer. Cook 10 minutes until carrots are softish. Stir in ham, broccoli, and S&P. Continue simmering for at least 1/2 hour, until lentils are tender.

Serve with vinegar.

Eat.

All my recipes end in that one word, Eat.

A friend visited today. He pulled up in our driveway and we leaned against our respective cars, about ten feet away from each other, and simply chatted. We talked of books and state parks and his wife’s new preoccupation with making masks and when Anthony Fauci will be fired. Then we promised each other we’d do a bunch of things when the lockdown is lifted. We were like little kids, repeatedly and excitedly saying, “And then we’re gonna….”

People are getting into hobbies, if my social media feed is any indication. Some — like my friend’s wife — are even making masks for free distribution to essential workers. I’ve hauled out the old telescope and have cleaned and oiled it. I’m even drawing up a ring binder on celestial mechanics. We’re getting back to being nerds in this Era of Coronavirus. Again, I wonder how that’ll play out after this is all over.

Speaking of hobbies, I read that the CEO of Hobby Lobby, David Green, reportedly ordered his stores to remain open during this crisis because his holy roller wife got a message from god saying that’s what they should do. Natch, the internet went bonkers over that one — as it should have — and, next thing anybody knew, Green reversed himself. Apparently, god is more of a Randian capitalist than he is.

A guy I know who’s a notorious soc. med. presence (and delights in infuriating one half or the other of the populace) has come up with this idea:

Ok, how about this:

No more billionaires. None

After you reach $999 million, every red cent goes to schools and health care.

You get a trophy that says “I won capitalism” and we name a dog park after you.

Frankly, I think this is brilliant. My only quibble is we should cut things off at $100 million.

Which brings up this poser: How are our feelings about late-stage capitalism and the hoarding of wealth going to change during and after this crisis? As weeks go by and we’re stilled locked down and more and more people are going to be running out of dough, when will the tipping point arrive? When will the unemployed and the broke take to the streets? What demands will they make? And how much pressure will the moneyed classes and their legislators be able to bear?

Time — now more than ever — will tell. And we’ve got plenty of time on our hands right now.

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