One hundred and two years ago yesterday as noted in the repeat post below from 2018, the misnamed “Spanish Flu” began its march around the world. Today we face an as yet unmeasured sequel in the form of COVID 19. It is much too soon to offer a meaningful comparison between the earlier pandemic and this one. The rate of spread of COVID 19 and the measure of its deadliness is only speculation at this point. We also live in a much different world, with many more potential victims engaged in wider travel. Fortunately, health care is generally better in most countries, though we have no specific treatment for this new disease and can only help enable healthy bodies to do their best to combat the disease.

One difference we have identified is that the 19018 flu hit young adults the hardest, while this virus attacks the elderly most severely, particularly in their lungs.

When you are faced with plagues of Biblical proportion, it is fitting perhaps to look to Biblical examples for some lessons. One that comes to mind is the admonition of Joseph to Pharaoh that Egypt should save for seven years to prepare for the lean years to come. In our time, we, or at least pharmaceutical companies and the wealthy, have been reaping richly but have neither saved nor invested properly for these times. The price we pay in live may be dear.

Here is my earlier post.

George Santayana wrote that those who can’t remember the past are doomed to repeat it, a sentiment said by others in many ways, though we rarely heed the advice.  It was 100 years ago now that the world encountered a pathogen more deadly than the world war then at its height.

The 1918 flu killed somewhere between 50 and 100 million people.  The first record of what was later confirmed to be a new strain of influenza was on March 4, 1918 when Albert Gitchell reported sick to the doctor assigned to Fort Riley in Haskell County, Kansas, who was Dr. Loring Minor.  By the time Gitchell died, over 500 soldiers at the camp had sickened as well.

The area where the fort was located was pig-farming country, which could have spread the disease to humans, but other theories of its origin suggest that its first human infections occurred in Asia.  What pathologists do know is that the circumstances of 1918 were the setting for the perfect contagion storm that took place.  For the first time in history, travel across and between countries had become common.  Soldiers from all sides were packed closely together making the spread of the flu through coughing a firestorm of disease.  As they were transferred, they carried the infection with them.

Notably, the 1918 strain of flu struck hardest at the young, especially soldiers, presumably because they had not gained any level of immunity from similar strains that older persons might have experienced.  Once the disease had been identified, the public was urged to stay isolated and to wear masks in public.  All that were available, however, were of porous cotton, which offered little protection.

The central focus for the disease became military bases in France, where soldiers passed through on the way to the front.  Oddly, it took the name, the “Spanish Flu,” because the country was neutral, and the press there was permitted to report the extent of the carnage the disease caused.

By whatever name, the virus is believed to have mutated as it circled the globe, becoming even more virulent.  It ultimately may have abated only because it had consumed most of its available victims.  In the course of less than a year, 3 to 5 percent of mankind died.

With modern medical care and flu vaccines, we tend to downplay the impact of the flu today.  A 2013 study, however, estimated that a similar flu pandemic today would kill perhaps as many as 300,000 in this country alone – better than half of the impact of the 1918 strain here.  If those numbers don’t concern you, consider the fact that this year’s flu vaccine appears to have only been 20 percent effective.

There is little we know about influenza.  Indeed, we can only guess what type of flu will come later this year and cobble together vaccine elixirs that we hope will help.  One wonders what Santayana, who lived through the 1918 pandemic, would say today.

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The first engagement in what became the American Revolution took place on this day, two hundred and fifty years ago. In it, British troops fired on a crowd of several hundred who had gathered to taunt soldiers occupying Boston to enforce Townsend Act taxes in the colony. The incident became known as the Boston Massacre.

Accounts of the evening are many and were largely consistent. The crowd outnumbered the soldiers, who had loaded their weapons and ultimately fired without being ordered to do so. Eleven in the crowd were shot and several died on the scene. The first to die was Chrispus Attucks, a former slave, which we can now look back on as an ironic twist of fate. He was one of about 5000 African Americans who fought for the American cause in the Revolution, where slavery survived far longer than in the British Empire.

The soldiers and their Captain were indicted for murder amid outrage over the shooting. Several lawyers refused to represent the defendants. John Adams, already known as opposed to British rule, did so as perhaps the first American lawyer to put the rule of law above personal preference and public interests.

Six were acquitted and two who were found to have purposefully fired into the crowd were convicted of manslaughter. Their punishment was to be branded on the thumb in open court.

Adams was not alone in doing what was just and right. Samuel Hemmingway, a surgeon who tended to one of those shot, testified that the victim felt the soldiers had fired in self defense. The victim, Patrick Carr, died from his wound, making Hemmingway’s testimony perhaps the first “dying declaration” exception to the rule against hearsay testimony.

We look back on this era as if the Revolution ensued quickly, but it was five long and troubled years before war began with “the shot heard round the world” at Concord. Change and hopefully progress often takes its time, which is something to bear in mind in dark days when one might wonder where justice and hope for the future resides and who will stand against the tides of sentiment to do what is right.

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The highest of our courts has had its say in the case of Sergio Adrian Hernandez Guereca and found that his parents have no right in this country to sue over his killing by a border control agent who shot him twice him from across the border, killing him in Mexico. The case was Hernadez v. Mesa. A second, similar case involving a cross border killing in which a child was shot sixteen times was also decided in the same way by the court.

The boy was fifteen, and it is said he had been playing a game in which he ran across a cement culvert to touch the border fence and then run back. A video taken at the time apparently shows him throwing pebbles at the agent, but I can’t locate a copy online and am not sure I want to witness him being shot in the face. For the record, the Justice Department found there was insufficient evidence to charge the border patrol agent with any crime.

The five justice majority called the incident tragic, but then devolved into rationalizations of national security and diplomacy, neither of which topic will ever offer solace to the child’s parents.

For any who might think this post is a screed against the current Administration’s immigration policies, this particular killing took place in 2010, during the Obama years. Separating families and housing children in conditions where some have died deserves its own condemnation, but I’ll save that for another day and time.

I spent the past few days trying to process the result of this case, until I realized something like it happens all too often here within our borders, which is equally unthinkable but true. In working through my dissonance I put these lines on paper, to express my feelings. I respect your right to reasoned disagreement, but when all is said, my thoughts land here.

He Had a Name

A Mexican boy of 15

Sergio 

playing at the border

Adrián

shot in the face

Hernández

for throwing pebbles

Güereca

at a border agent

He had no rights here

            Jesus Hernandez

or his parents to sue

            Guadalupe Guereca

found the courts

And some here ask 

            Michael Brown

in our land of the free

Trayvon Martin

why this is news at all

            Tamir Rice

where young blacks

            Cameron Tillman

are shot by police 

Laquan McDonald

so often now

Jordan Edwards

we forget 

Samuel Mallard

their names

Kwame Jones

De’von Bailey

JaQuavion Slaton

Brandon Weber

Wiley McCoy

D’ettrick Griffin

Ramarley Graham

Kendrec McDade

Tony …

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One hundred years ago on this date the Eighteenth Amendment went into effect, one year after having been ratified by the requisite number of states, under the terms of the amendment as proposed by Congress in 1917.

I’m sure most pundit commentary on this anniversary will concern itself with the futility of legislating morality and the repeal of prohibition in 1933, but the amendment is also a footnote to something that took place just this week, when the Virginia symbolically ratified the Equal Rights Amendment.

What would have been the 28th Amendment, guaranteeing equal right to women, is not likely to become the law of the land because the terms of the authorizing legislation required that the amendment be ratified by 38 states by 1979, seven years after finally being authorized by Congress. (The ERA was first proposed in 1923, as part of the series of social reforms that led to Prohibition.) The ERA, as ultimately passed by Congress, fell short of the required state ratifications in the time allotted, but continued to be pursued by a variety of interest groups and passed the required three-fourths of the states now over forty years later.

The interesting thing about the Eighteenth Amendment in this context is that it was the first proposed amendment to require ratification in a set time period. The Supreme Court upheld this time limit in Dillon v. Gloss, making it likely that Virginia’s action will be deemed merely symbolic and perhaps an attempt to prod Congress to reauthorize the ERA. Still, you never know what the Court might say this time.

To add to the confusion, four states (Nebraska, Tennessee, Idaho and Kentucky) have tried to rescind their ratification of the ERS. The Supreme Court also held, in the case of Ohio’s conditional ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment, that the state’s action was valid and final. This seems to imply that attempts to backtrack on the ERA would be considered invalid.

Of all this, I suppose, one thing will certainly be true. When all is said, someone will find a way to say still more.

And, as a follow up, several states are suing to have the ERA declared in effect.

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The only person ever to pitch a perfect World Series game, Don Larsen, died yesterday at the age of 90. In his fifteen years as a journeyman pitcher for seven teams, Larsen amassed a mediocre record of 81-91, but for one magical day in 1956 he was perfect, defeating the Brooklyn Dodgers with no hits, no runs, and no errors.

Much has been written about Larsen’s feat and his life, which were something of a contrast. He confessed that his control over the baseball and his enjoyment of a good time in life were far from perfect, and he himself lived in awe of his accomplishment with apparent humility.

Game five of the Series could easily have gone the other way, with both hits, home runs and one potential error snatched from the Dodgers by excellent fielding from the Yankees team. As the game progressed, Larsen said that he realized he had a no-hitter going (something that had never occurred in the World Series and has not since). It was not until the game was over, Yogi Berra had leapt into his arms, and Larsen had returned to the dugout, however, that he learned he had pitched a perfect game.

In today’s era of frequent pitching changes and end of game closers, it is increasingly likely that there will never again be a perfect Series game. Like Joe DiMaggio’s 56 game hitting streak, Don Larsen’s perfect game is apt to remain pinnacles in a game measured by numbers. Larsen’s, like the ones on his license plate will stand: “000.”

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The movie “Gone with the Wind” premiered in Atlanta on this evening in 1939 at the Loew’s Grand Theater on what is now the site of the headquarters of Georgia-Pacific.  300,000 people, roughly the size of the city itself, were reported to have lined the streets that night for a glimpse of Hollywood in person.

The movie was an adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s 1939 book of the same name.  In my youth as an Atlantan, the book was almost required reading, at least among those of my color.  Ted Turner owned the rights to the movie and for a time played it almost nonstop at a theater in town, so exposure to it was fairly ubiquitous.  Margaret Mitchel’s home in Midtown has burned and been restored several times, which is ironically fitting, since her book depicts the burning of Atlanta by General Sherman.

Both the book and film have increasingly been criticized over the years for glorifying the Antebellum South and for unflatteringly stereotypical depictions of African-Americans.  Those criticisms are justified, but there are things to learn from and respond to in both. Alice Randall wrote a response to the book in 2001’s “The Wind Done Gone,” which is written from the perspective of Cynara, one of Scarlet O’Hara’s slaves.  A suit by the Mitchell estate over the book was ultimately settled, but the mixed feelings that Gone With the Wind evokes still remain, even and perhaps especially here in Atlanta.

In my reading, the book is primarily about a strong, but flawed, woman in a tumultuous time.  Less so than the film, the book shows some  – though not nearly enough – of the darkness that was part of the culture of the times.  That subtlety is one reading of the title and the book that is often lost in the duality of view that the book and film evoke.

Those thoughts are what I tried to express when I wrote this poem some time ago.

Not Yet Gone With the Wind 

If Scarlet O’Hara was not beautiful

as Peggy Mitchell penned

then Hermes couldn’t play a tune

and Alice didn’t fall down a rabbit hole

Three husbands certainly disagreed

though two died before

we knew more than their names

and in the end the last

didn’t even give a damn

for that rascal Rhett

was himself no more a hero

than Scarlet was Harriet Nelson

So what is it still

about a vain and selfish

slave-owning fool

who chased the symbol

of a time that never really was –

poor whimpering Ashley –

that still has a place in a world where

slavery is banned and racism rightly wrong

I suppose in a way of sorts

we still find change disturbing

regard the future warily

and remember a past that was not

We carry on believing that

we’ll always have our Tara

and trusting that after all

tomorrow is another day

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On this day 160 years ago, Charles Darwin published the Origin of the Species, a work that sparks controversy to this day. His theory was that species evolve through a process of natural selection in which the fittest survive to pass on successful traits to subsequent generations.

The “Theory of Evolution” evolved, if you will, from observations Darwin made in the Galapagos Islands and elsewhere decades earlier, during travels chronicled in The Voyage of the Beagle. He delayed publishing his views until 1859 in large part because he feared the controversy they would cause and ultimately did so when he learned that others had begun developing similar theories.

The recognition that things do not remain static has a long history of sparking controversy. Galileo’s publication that the earth is not the center of the universe, but revolves around the sun certainly upset authorities, despite it being accepted by scientists long before. Hegel posited that ideas evolve to new and higher forms through syntheses addressed by antitheses. One could even argue that Socrates’ dialogues followed a similar pattern. His penchant for using them to spark controversy certainly hastened his demise.

Darwin’s theory, that the “Creation” is not fixed, fit well within the scientific thought developing at the time, and in fact, his publication was prompted by the work of others that had begun to reach similar conclusions. What made it both groundbreaking and controversial was that life was not static and that we were merely evolved apes, rather than creatures made by God’s hands on the sixth day. It was deemed a theory since the genetic process by which traits are passed on was not itself discovered until the 20th Century and deserves a better title today.

In its way, Darwin’s theory was as dramatic as Edwin Hubble’s discovery that the universe itself is not static, but is actually expanding. We are only yet beginning to consider the implications of his finding. I suppose if you put together the notion that life evolves and that the universe itself is infinite and evolving, one might theorize that somewhere out there a higher form of life may well exist. I sometimes hope so, since we could use some help preserving and improving ourselves.

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The twice annual ritual of time travel occur tonight in which we step back an hour, regaining the sacrifice we offered to Kronos in March. Here is a short poem on the subject to read if you are up at two A.M. with nothing to read. It is from a book of poem I wrote titled, The Funny Thing About a Poem.

Marking Time

Today was longer

than the day before

with the hour we borrowed 

in March when they seemed 

so ripe and fresh

only now filled with leaves

piled beneath bare trees

waiting for someone

to sweep them away

like the hands of a clock

marking time in passing

People ask where time goes

salt from a shaker 

seasoning the savor of life

If well-preserved it melds 

into collections of memories

hours here and there

piled high at the feet

only waiting 

for one Fall day 

with an extra hour

to press them into

the scrapbook of sorts

that is where time goes

when it steps back

one hour suspended

waiting for time

to pass once more

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It was ninety years ago today that the US stock market began several days of steep declines that marked the beginning of the Great Depression, an era that defined the lives of a generation, both here and abroad. The market had actually begun to decline in September, but the floor fell on Black Tuesday and reached its worst rate of decline on Thursday. Although more gradual, the market continued to decline until March or 1932.

One certainty though was the suffering that ensued as businesses closed, jobs were lost and millions were left to subsist on whatever they could find to do. My father’s father had been an insurance salesman, only to survive by sharecropping, which left his family so poor that they had to move from shack to shack each year when they couldn’t pay the bank or owner from the sales of crops. Their story is echoed in those of countless family stories still told to this day.

There was no one cause for the crash. Certainly, stock prices were over valued, which was enabled by wide availability of loans with which to buy stocks on margin. Lax banking regulation also played a role and led to waves of widespread bank closings as frightened depositors sought to withdraw their savings. There are creditable experts, however, who say that these causes were merely symptoms of natural cycles in capitalism with periodic booms and busts.

The economic decline that the crash precipitated seemed to be fairly permanent, despite the efforts of the FDR administration’s public jobs programs. Ultimately, it was the government’s massive WW II war efforts that ironically lifted the nation from its depression.

The subprime mortgage bubble that led to the 2008 economic crisis was frighteningly reminiscent of the 1929 crash, with its massively overrated subprime mortgage investments. By most accounts, only the $700 Billion Dollar TARP bailout fund and prompt actions by the Federal Reserve Bank prevented another disaster.

I am tempted to point toward other bubbles currently in our economy that might endanger our financial system, but I’m no economist and even they are as bad at predicting recessions as geologists are at foreseeing earthquakes. I suppose the best one can say is still the maxim, “If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.”

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In my corner of the world, Summer and its heat still lingers, but the baseball season is turning its calendar to October and the playoffs. Already we know a few things about 2019.

Despite tweaking a few things, the average game is longer than ever – three hours and nine minutes, of which just under 18 minutes of action occurs. That’s more advertising than on a NASCAR racer.

Parity is still an issue among teams. In the end, only one division was truly competitive with four teams winning 100 games or more for only the second time, although some will argue, and as noted, there is plenty of time for that.

And most notably of all, home runs are at an all time high, eclipsing even 2017 and all the years of the steroid players. To all those who love baseball like me, tradition is elemental to the game, so the debate over this change is as important as it is a mystery. Here is a comprehensive and incredulous analysis.

Some experts point to hitting coaches, who espouse an upwards angle of swing to match the downward path of the ball from the mound. Others suggest harder woods in bats, such as maple which has grown in popularity. The betting money, which you can’t do in the game, is on the ball itself.

The “juiced ball”, according to 538, dates from after the 2015 All-Star break. They suggest that a less dense cork core and perhaps a more uniform placement in its center may have something to do with it. Scientists at the University of Washington believe something has reduced the ball’s “coefficient of drag.” Of course, there are also conspiracy theorists, which baseball seems to attract, who claim that, whatever the cause, the league owners sponsored it to try to draw more fans, which by the way have actually gone down.

Since this site is my own soapbox, I offer global warming as the culprit. Warmer air, which we have a lot of these days, is less dense and thus has less resistance to a high fly ball to left, or any other, field. For the same reason cork itself and even the wool within the ball is apt to be different than it was a hundred years ago.

There are plenty of reasons to challenge my theory, but it is more fun to posit one than to do the kind of research that the scientists at UW are doing. One thing is for sure, it’s not baseball without something for loving fans to argue about. With all that love, I offer you this:

Field of Dreams

   Baseball is more than a game.  It is life played out on a field.

            Juliana Hatfield

The magic that occurs to a little leather ball

in the sixty-six feet between the pitcher’s mound 

and home plate is proof if any is needed

that God exists and that he invented baseball

And if you marvel at the complexities 

of nature and the mysteries of the universe

you can trace the mischief in his fingerprints 

through the mystic depths of the infield fly rule

that quantum state in which a dropped fly

is deemed caught even if it could not have been

as mysterious as the retrograde of planets

retracing their arcs in the night sky

Where else can cold-blooded statisticians

and grass-stained boys share the uncommon joy

over twelve extra hits in a season

or stand in awe of a sinking fastball?

Inhale the scent of new mown grass

hear the crack of hand-sewn leather on ash

believe the dream of a walk off homer in the ninth

it may be in a sand lot – but it is also Wrigley Field

Life my feel as cruel and unfair at times 

as a called strike that was high inside

but in baseball every day is opening day

and hope lives forever in the two words “Play ball!”

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