Saturday, May 30, 2020

"Illuminating History," Bernard Bailyn

Sydney M. Williams

Burrowing into Books
“Illuminating History,” by Bernard Bailyn
May  30, 2020

History in the richest sense must be, I believe, both a study and a story –
that is structural studies woven into narratives that explain the long term
process of change and short-term accidents, decisions and encounters
which together changed the world from what it had been.”
                                                                                                Bernard Bailyn (1922-)
                                                                                                Illuminating History, 2020

Did you ever read a book and say, I wish I had had the author as a teacher? At age 97, Bernard Bailyn, Professor Emeritus of Early American History at Harvard, has authored his latest of over thirty books. Two earlier ones, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution and Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution, won Pulitzer Prizes.

This short book (246 pages), includes a seventeen-page introduction, forty-one-page epilogue and appendix, and five chapters. It is a chronology of Professor Bailyn’s academic life, from his thesis on Tristram Shandy at Williams College in 1943 to a seminar at Harvard, “Justice: Europe in America, 1500-1830,” in 2010. History interested him, he tells us, as he wanted to explore the “connections between a distant past and an emerging modernity.” “I discovered…within the plentiful data, [that] one or more obscure documents or individuals…illuminated the greater picture.” Bailyn’s specialty is the American Revolution and events leading to it: “the pivot on which the whole of American history and much of Western civilization turned.”

In the first chapter, “Keayne’s Will,” he explores colonial Boston. He takes the reader through the Will of Robert Keayne (1595-1656), in which Keayne reconciles his success as a Boston immigrant merchant with his belief in a harsh Puritan God. The Will was written over several years and provides clues to the man and the time. As Bailyn writes, “…he made clear the high tension that had always existed between his success in his ‘calling’ and the constraints on the spirit that had inspired it.”

In Chapter two, using census data, Bailyn explores family and home life in England and in British North America. “In that era a transformation had taken place in the form of education, the key to which lay not in formal schooling but in the history of family life, the primal core of education, and also the community and the church.” We travel to the English village of Nottinghamshire to look at families, their size and mobility. He deduces that the impact of the Industrial Revolution had not been “as radical as had been presumed.” We return to Massachusetts and the towns of Plymouth, Dedham and Andover. Among discoveries was that the average age at death for the twenty-nine male founders of Andover was 71.8. For the women, it was 70.8.

“Harbottle’s Index” heads the third chapter. Harbottle Dorr was a Boston shopkeeper who collected and indexed newspapers in the decade before the Revolutionary War, providing researchers an invaluable source. As well, Bailyn quotes from half a dozen news articles written before the Revolution by a preacher from Lyme (now Old Lyme), Connecticut, Stephen Johnson, who stressed that the gripe with England was not with the King, “but [with] Parliament and the late British ministry and their tools and hangers-on in England and America,” those whom today would be called bureaucrats. Using town records regarding acceptance of the Massachusetts State Constitution, especially those from Petersham, Bailyn gains a sense of people’s feeling toward self-government. As for the people of Petersham, their “commentary was unique in the breadth of its coverage, in its analytical acuity and in its extraordinary devotion to protecting every shred of the individual’s freedom against the powers of constituted authority.”

The fourth chapter is about “the charismatic, God-possessed Johann Conrad Beissel” Beissel was born in south western Germany in 1691 and emigrated to America around 1730. Two years later he created the Ephrata cloister, dedicated to celibacy, religion and music. It was located in what is now the borough of Ephrata, fifty-seven miles north west of Philadelphia. It was in music that the untrained Beissel “found his greatest spiritual satisfaction.” His mentee (and later friend of Benjamin Franklin), Peter Miller wrote of Beissel’s adopted Country, which had granted him liberty of conscience, after he had been driven out of his fatherland: it will “always be blessed and be a nursery of God…”

In the final chapter, Professor Bailyn uses the family of Thomas Hutchinson, the last royal governor of Massachusetts, to shed light on the networks created by transatlantic trade. He writes of how they became a model of what “…would become, a century later, the vast latticework of economic, political, and cultural entanglements that spanned the four continents of the Atlantic world.”  Between 1996 and 2010, Bailyn created a series of annual seminars to address connections between the four continents facing the Atlantic: “It was a world in motion, its populations shifting, large groups reorganizing their communal life in new and strange circumstances.”

In the epilogue, Bailyn writes of philosophical difficulties facing historians: “The past is a different world, and we seek to understand it as it was.” But, “we cannot divest ourselves of our own assumptions, attitudes, beliefs and experiences – strip away everything that intervened between now and then…” He suggests that historic fiction, when well done, can provide a reliable historical framework.

Tributes to his two PhD advisors, Samuel Eliot Morison (1887-1976) and Oscar Handlin (1915-2011), comprise the appendix. While both shared a passion for history, they differed in backgrounds and approach to its study.

The word “Illuminating” in the title is fitting, for the story he tells sheds light, not only on the scholarship that interests him, but also on his seven decades of academic life. It is a fascinating read.



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Monday, May 25, 2020

"How Much is One Trillion Dollars?"

Sydney M. Williams

Thought of the Day
“How Much is One Trillion Dollars?”
May 25, 2020

It is a popular delusion that the government wastes vast amounts of money through inefficiency
 and sloth. Enormous efforts and elaborate planning are required to waste this much money.”
                                                                                                            P.J. O’Rourke (1947-)
                                                                                                            Parliament of Whores, 1991

Congress is tossing around trillion-dollar relief packages, as we might a car or student loan, or a loan from Aunt Sally. A trillion is a big number, difficult even to conceive. Five thousand round trips to the sun would amount to less than a trillion miles. A trillion hours is greater than 100 million years, which would take one back to the Cretaceous Period when dinosaurs roamed the earth. A stack of a trillion one-dollar bills would reach 67,866 miles into the sky. The earth contains seven and a half billion people, a big number but less than one percent of a trillion

Here in the land of make-believe, the Democrat-led House of Representatives just passed the $3 trillion HEROES Act. A month earlier, Congress passed, and the President signed, the $2 trillion CARES Act. Combined, that Five trillion exceeds the 2020 federal budget. It exceeds, in current dollars, what we spent to conduct World War II. “Desperate times call for desperate measures,” is an ancient adage. However, do American taxpayers fully comprehend the size of the obligation to which Congress has committed them, their children and grandchildren? Senator Everett Dirksen (1896-1969 – R-Il) is alleged to have said: “A billion here, a billion there and pretty soon you’re talking real money.” Here it is, two generations later, and we’ve upped the ante a thousand-fold. In a time of crisis, Americans should not be parsimonious, but we expect our representatives to be prudent and respectful about spending money that is not theirs. To use this money to bail out profligate states and extend already generous benefits to public employees should not be the purpose. America needs to get back to work.

Government generates no income. That is hard to believe, given the lifestyles and the prodigality with which politicians toss money around. Government takes from taxpayers, and it borrows on behalf of those same taxpayers who are legally committed to pay it back. With a median annual household income in the U.S. of $63,000, and assuming a four-person household, the proposed borrowing for COVID-19 and its economic fallout amounts to just under a year’s income for the average household. And, that $5 trillion is on top of total federal debt of $22 trillion, growing at a rate of $1 trillion a year. Unfunded pension and health benefits compound the debt problem for the American taxpayer. Depending on the discount rate one uses, unfunded liabilities approach $50 trillion. Where will the money come from? There are only three answers: one, growth in GDP, which requires free markets, rule of law and limited but sensible regulation; two, higher taxes, which inhibit economic growth, and/or three, a depreciated dollar, which will reduce future living standards.

This is not to suggest the economy does not need a boost. It does. Individuals who have lost jobs and businesses threatened with bankruptcy, especially the thirty million small businesses who have less access to public funds, need cash infusions. In fact, the economy could use a domestic version of the Marshall Plan. But Congress and the Administration must also address run-away entitlements and the inflated incomes and benefits of public sector workers. Government can only raise revenues from individuals and private sector businesses. There is a limit to what they can take, without stalling the economic engine.

Hard truths about our financial situation are not part of the lexicon of politicians, especially during elections. The offer of “free stuff” is their preferred message. “Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die” is an appropriate aphorism for today’s Washington-bound politician. As a percent of GDP, Federal debt has doubled since 2000 to over 100% today, about where it was at the end of World War II. The growth in federal spending, and the concomitant debt and deficits, are fueled by entitlements, which are mandatory items in the federal budget, while, ironically, defense spending – necessary to maintain our freedom – is treated as discretionary. When one throws in interest expense (abnormally low now, but that will not always be the case), mandatory spending exceeds seventy percent of the federal budget. It is understandable why infrastructure is crumbling, and our high schools are, globally, less competitive.  Most important, on this Memorial Day weekend when we remember and honor those who died so we could live in freedom, the growth in mandatory spending constrains what can be spent on defense. Without a strong military, our nation will crumble, and our liberties will be lost.

But back to the number of a trillion. How much is $1 trillion? A lot. Perhaps to microbiologists and astronomers, with an estimated 37.2 trillion cells in the average human body and with an estimated sextillion stars in the universe, a trillion is no big deal. Even for some naturalists, a trillion doesn’t generate awe.  E.O. Wilson, the Harvard myrmecologist and author of The Social Conquest of Earth, estimates that there are 10 quadrillion ants on the planet. But I would rather Congress not hear these numbers, as they may look upon them as aspirational when prudence is preferred.























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Saturday, May 23, 2020

Letter to President Trump

Sydney M. Williams
www.swtotd.blogspot.com

President Donald J. Trump                                                                                         May 22, 2020
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, D.C. 37188

Dear President Trump,

This is an open letter written to ask: Would you speak to the nation about the virus we have confronted and the economic consequences of the response? I have read the speeches you gave in Warsaw in 2017, London in 2019 and at Davos this past January. Those were speeches that resonated with audiences. In the midst of this pandemic and economic slump, people need your leadership.

The country is fractured. COVID-19 has been politicized and has widened an already-deep divide. People are frightened. The lockdown has scared them further – lost jobs, a shrunken economy and collapsed financial markets. Reported economic numbers are backward looking, so will appear bad even as recovery takes hold. No one knows when or if a vaccine, or even a therapeutic, will be available. Nevertheless, people need confidence that tomorrow will be better than today, and they need it said fairly and honestly. They need to know that jobs will be restored, not just for the incomes necessary for food and shelter, but for the dignity a job provides. The desire to be independent is deeply ingrained in the American psyche. They need to know that shops, schools, restaurants and theaters will be re-opened safely. They don’t want platitudes. They want the truth, which gives rise to courage, pride and morale.

And they need to know that while the economy is being addressed those most vulnerable to the virus are being looked after. The American people are smart and empathetic. They need to be told the truth – that, like any virus, this one cannot be totally eradicated, but it can be managed.

This should be a speech that is not self-laudatory and does not assign blame. It should not be a campaign speech. It should be a recognition of where we are, not of where we might have been had different decisions been made. Leave speculation to others. It should be straight forward and honest. It should praise the bravery of healthcare workers, acknowledge the successes of governors and mayors and applaud the people for looking after one another. It should state the need to continue common-sensical practices of washing one’s hands, social distancing and wearing masks when with others. But it should also recognize the freedom of the American people – that liberty is the highest goal of a free people.

As well, it should be a speech that doesn’t shy from the economic costs incurred in combatting COVID-19, that the extraordinary debt government incurred – money printed  by the Federal reserve, the appropriation of funds by Congress and expenditures by the Executive – are obligations of the American tax payer.

I know this is asking a lot, but having listened to you, I know you are equal to the task. I recognize the press has not been your best friend, but it is the people who need your words, not the media.

Best regards,


Sydney M. Williams

Thursday, May 21, 2020

"The Media - Abdication of Responsibility"

Sydney M. Williams
www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Thought of the Day
“The media – Abdication of Responsibility”
May 21, 2020

Politics and the press; two cherished institutions that spoke
with tongues so forked they could double for fine dinnerware.”
                                                                                                Harlan Coben (1962-)
                                                                                                One False Move, 1998

It may be splitting hairs, but President Trump is wrong when he calls out The New York Times and Washington Post for printing “fake” news. What those papers are printing is “slanted” news, articles biased toward a leftist, political ideology. Fake news is fabricated, while slanted news is prejudiced, where a reporter selects what to emphasize, deemphasize or omit based on personal political preferences. Satire (“An obsolete kind of literary composition, in which the vices and follies of the author’s enemies were expounded with imperfect tenderness.”[1]) is a form of fake news. However, with the exception of good satire, both fake news and biased reporting are a disservice to readers seeking truth. It is the latter that is subtler, so more difficult to discern and address. The burden for determining what is real and what is false is the consumer’s, as reporters have abandoned responsibility to readers and viewers.

Owners, publishers, editors and bloggers can spout whatever opinions they choose. This is a free country and that is their right. But when opinions filter into news stories, and news is reported as unvarnished truth, the consequence is divisiveness and a threat to freedom, which relies on a well-informed citizenry.

Professor Carl Bergstrom of the University of Washington teaches a course called, “Calling Bullshit in the Age of Big Data.” In a phone interview with Michael Rosenwald, printed in the Columbia Journalism Review in the fall of 2017, he said “The average American spends nearly an hour a day on Facebook. Doing what? Mostly spreading bullshit.” Whether that is true or hyperbole, I do not know, but a Pew Research Center survey in 2016 essentially confirmed the trend. It found that 14% of U.S. adults shared news they knew was fake. Other surveys support the contention that people willingly pass on information they know to be fake, if it aligns with their preconceived political opinions; for example, promoting Trump derangement syndrome has become daily fodder for the leftist media.

Fake news should make us all wary. If something seems amiss, it probably is and should be double-checked. But slanted news is a beast of a different kind, especially when it appears in so-called respectable news sources. In a free country, the press has the right to print or report what they will. That principle predates our own Constitution. In Commentaries on the Laws of England, in 1770, William Blackstone (1723-1780) wrote: The liberty of the press is indeed essential to the nature of a free state: but this consists in laying no previous restraints upon publications, and not in freedom from censure for criminal matter when published. Every freeman has an undoubted right to lay what sentiments he pleases before the public: to forbid this, is to destroy the freedom of the press: but if he publishes what is improper, mischievous, or illegal, he must take the consequence of his own temerity.” Thus, while political bias in mainstream media is not “illegal,” a free but irresponsible press is subject to libel. But, more important for our purposes, an irresponsible and unaccountable press does not serve the people.

Thomas Jefferson, who once wrote to Lafayette that “the only security of all is in a free press,” anticipated the willing obeisance of a pliable media to a favored political leader. In a 1785 letter to the Dutch statesman Gijsbert Karel van Hogendorp, Jefferson wrote: “The most effectual engines for [pacifying a nation] are the public papers. [A despotic] government always [keeps] a kind of standing army of news writers who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, [invent] and put into the papers whatever may serve their ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper.” It was a lesson understood by Lenin, Hitler, Mao Zedong, and others of similar ilk. When mainstream media and political leaders align, freedom is at risk.

One of the most egregious recent examples of biased reporting had to do with the Russian investigation that should have ended with the Mueller report. Nine reporters from the Washington Post and the New York Times shared the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting on Russian interference in the 2016 election and its connection to the Trump campaign. In making the award, the Pulitzer Prize Board cited twenty articles between February 9, 2017 and September 8, 2017. We now know that the reporters got the story wrong. Whether they were stupid, incurious or blinded by biases is unknown. We do know that their editors failed to confirm facts. They were advocates for a political cause, not independent investigators. There has been no apology from the Pulitzer committee, nor any Mea Culpas from the reporters. In fact, it now appears that any collusion that took place in 2016 was between Democrats and the U.S. intelligence community. Where are those same investigators?

Reporting on COVID-19 has been politicized, swathed in biases, innuendos and inaccuracies. For example, why have not investigative reporters looked into New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s decision to send post-hospital, virus-infected patients to nursing homes rather than to the U.S.N.S.  Comfort, or to the make-shift hospital at the Javits Center? The most vulnerable are the elderly with comorbidities, many of whom are in nursing homes, where about 50% of all COVID-19 deaths have occurred, a fact known since the first deaths were recorded in Washington State in February. And, what about death counts?  Are they too high or too low? Colorado’s Democrat Governor Jared Polis’ decision to call out the CDC for exaggerating death counts received limited news coverage. Early models exaggerated the virus’ virulence. Now, today’s New York Times reports a Columbia University model estimates that 83% of all deaths would have been prevented if the lockdown had occurred two weeks earlier. How can they know with such precision? If the numbers accord with the narrative, the estimate is accepted as fact. In taking hydroxychloroquine, the President was accused of ignoring science. No mention was made of Michigan Democrat, State Senator Karen Whitsett, a COIVID-19 survivor who credits the drug with her survival.

While government cannot demand a newspaper or cable news channel report honestly, people are best served when editorial comments are consigned to opinion pages and news is presented accurately and without bias. With major news sources having forgone responsibility to the public, getting correct information has become the responsibility of the people. Freedom should be foremost in our minds, and valid information is a critical part of the process. As Albert Camus said in 1957, “A free press can, of course, be good or bad, but, most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad.” Biased reporting, with social media having joined the hunt, has become ubiquitous. It is when the press and politicians collude that democracy and freedom are at risk.




[1] Ambrose Bierce (1842-c.1914), The Devil’s Dictionary, 1906, a satirical dictionary.

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Saturday, May 16, 2020

Robert Frost & "The Road Not Taken"

Sydney M. Williams

Essay from Essex
“Robert Frost & ‘The Road Not Taken’”
May 16, 2020

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood”
                                                                                                Robert Frost (1874-1963)
                                                                                                “The Road Not Taken,” 1915        
                                                                                                Mountain Interval, 1916

The Preserve is a thousand-acre tract that abuts the one hundred acres owned by Essex Meadows. A fire road wends through it. A few weeks ago, Caroline and I were walking, when we came to the fork depicted in the attached photograph – two roads diverging, not in a yellow wood as this was spring but at least in a wood. Being New England bred and born, Robert Frost’s poem burst into my consciousness.

“The Road Not Taken” is Frost’s most famous poem and is considered his most misunderstood. It was written in June 1915 for his friend, the Welch poet Edward Thomas, with whom Frost would go on long walks when visiting in Britain. “Thomas,” wrote the American poet Katherine Robinson five years ago, “…was chronically indecisive about which road they ought to take and…[he] often lamented they should have taken the other.” It was a habit about which Frost teased his friend. When “The Road Not Taken” was published in 1916, Europe was engulfed in a war that would kill 700,000 British soldiers, something a reader should keep in mind. One of the victims was Edward Thomas who went to France in late 1916 and was killed on the first day of the Second Battle of Arras in April 1917. He was thirty-nine

The following is the opening stanza of one of Thomas’ “war” poems, “Lights Out:”

I have come to the borders of sleep,
The unfathomable deep
Forest where all must lose
Their way, however straight,
Or winding, soon or late;
They cannot choose.”

One can see why Frost admired his friend.

To return to “The Road Not Taken,” the poem’s obfuscation added to its fame. David Orr, poetry columnist for the New York Times and professor at Cornell, wrote that Frost “wanted to juxtapose two visions …”, the first in which the poet rues that he “…could not travel both,” and then later congratulates himself, as he “…took the one less traveled by.”  Professor Orr described the poem as a “kind of thaumatrope,” an optical toy with two opposing pictures that when spun merge into a single picture.

Some of the images add to the ambiguities Frost employed. He describes one road “as grassy and wanted wear,” yet a few words later “…that the passing there/Had worn them really about the same.” Then, does the “sigh” in the last stanza invoke disappointment or contentedness? And, in the last line, do the words “And that has made all the difference,” refer to a positive or negative experience?

I read poetry without analyzing it – my imagination and feelings determine what is meant, at least for me, and I recognize my interpretation may change from one day to the next. This poem is short, consisting of four stanzas of five lines, with four stressed syllables per line; the rhyming pattern – ABAAB – is pleasing to the ear. To me it invokes the woods through which my wife and I now walk and reminds me of my youth in New Hampshire, and the mile-and-a-half trek through the woods to my grandparent’s summer home. We would pass by a watering hole, proceed through an iron gate and make our way to the top of the hill, where cows grazed, and white clouds skidded across the blue sky. And on the way, of course there were birches – “One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.” One could do worse than be a reader of Frost.

As a conservative, I look upon the photograph as a metaphor and smile. I know these roads. The one to the right climbs and leads west toward the future, while the one to the left descends into the nether regions of the east and the past.



The Road Not Taken, Robert Frost

 

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.








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Friday, May 15, 2020

"Lockdown v. COVID-19"

Sydney M. Williams

Thought of the Day
“Lockdown v. COVID-19”
April 15, 2020

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
                                                                                    Hanlon’s Razor
Murphy’s Law Book Two, 1980
                                                                                    Attributed to Robert J. Hanlon
                                                                                    Scranton, Pennsylvania
                                                           
The world has seen other pandemics, but the response to COVID-19 has been unlike anything the world has ever experienced. It is said we should not put a price on a life. Yet, that happens every day. Emergency rooms constantly make life and death decisions. When a hospital suspends a cancer treatment in favor of a COVID-19 patient, a life and death decision has been made. The closing of a food processing plant in Iowa or the downsizing of a shipping facility in Newark, both for fear of spreading COVID-19 are decisions that will likely cause starvation in underdeveloped countries. Every action has a consequence.

Experts in the field of epidemiology scare us through words. On Monday evening, listening to the president of New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital, Dr. David Reich, I grew fearful. He spoke of pathogens and their mutability, and of molecular biology and infections. He lost me in his vocabulary. A friend sent a blog written by Dr. Erin Bromage who teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. Dr. Bromage wrote of how a single cough releases 3,000 droplets that travel across a room at 50 mph, while a sneeze releases 30,000 droplets that travel across the same room at up to 200 mph. If an infected person coughs or sneezes, 200,000,000 virus particles could be released. It’s enough to scare the bejesus out of the most fearless – that is until one realizes that any expert, in using unfamiliar words, can frighten someone less knowledgeable. As well, we ignore the fact that in our lifetimes, we have been exposed to trillions of virus particles. Perspective and common sense are needed. For example, each cubic meter of air contains ten trillion molecules, and each human is host to about 300 parasitic worms and 70 species of protozoa, many of which are employed in fighting infections. We are complicated beings who through millions of years of evolution have developed sophisticated immune systems. There is much we know, but more we don’t.

As accurate as what Dr. Reich said and what Dr. Bromage wrote, they do not change the fact that politicians unleashed an even deadlier response. We count those who die from COVID-19, but we ignore those who suffer and die from despair, depression and loneliness. It is balance we should seek. John Kass, a columnist for the Chicago Tribune recently wrote: “All I see is the imposition of extremes. Those of us who want to get the country back to work are portrayed as selfish fools who Just Want People to Die. And those who never want the lockdown to end are dismissed as fearful Coronavirus ‘Karens,’ peering through their windows, calling the police if they see someone walking on the street without a mask.”

The actor Matthew McConaughey, in a recent interview, spoke of the need for unity to fight COVOD-19, as Americans unified during World War II to fight Nazism and Japanese Imperialism. But his analogy is false. World War II was fought to combat assaults on freedom and western culture. Today we fight a virus. As well, the economic differences between then and now are enormous. Unemployment in the U.S. in 1940 was 14.7 percent. By 1943 it had declined to 1.9 percent. That crisis put people to work. Unemployment in December 2019 was 3.5 percent. Today it has risen to 14.7 percent. This crisis has seen unemployment soar. Last weekend, the editors of the Wall Street Journal wrote, “…this is the fastest jobs collapse in modern history.” COVID-19 is a virus that attacks, most aggressively, specific segments of our population – the elderly and the health-impaired. That is not to say other segments are immune. They are not. But we should be unified in our intent to protect the most vulnerable; we should be unified in our efforts to get the economy back on track, and we should be unified in our desire to protect the fundamental rights of all Americans to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, to avoid what Alexis de Tocqueville warned as the “soft despotism” of unnecessary rules and regulations.

The economic consequences have been devastating. On April 14, CNBC estimated 7.5 million small businesses, 25% of all small businesses in the U.S., were at risk of closing. On the day earlier, MarketWatch, a website providing financial information, put the number at 43 percent. The valuation of all U.S. public equities has declined $6.5 trillion, negatively affecting 160 million Americans who have investments in retirement plans. A study released on May 4, 2020 by the nonprofit research institute JustFacts concluded: “…the total loss of life from all societal responses [world-wide] to this disease is likely to be more than ninety times greater than that prevented by the lockdowns.” They are referring, in particular, to food shortages in developing nations, a consequence of food processing plant shutdowns and disruptions to food deliveries. Consider borrowings. Three trillion dollars have already been appropriated by Congress. The House wants an additional three trillion dollars, a third of which would be earmarked for states to help bailout over-extended pension obligations. To put those dollars in perspective: during three and a half years of World War II, the U.S. spent $350 billion – $5 trillion in today’s dollars. We will spend more to fight this virus than we spent to conduct World War II.

The what of what happened is well known; it is the why that should focus our attention, and not only the why of the virus. Why shut the world down? Why take such draconian measures? Why did we listen to Cassandras using models with false inputs? We are told we must obey the science. But whose? Yours or mine? Are COVID-19 deaths undercounted or overcounted? Should we pay attention to Dr. Anthony Fauci’s flip or his flop? In the UK, according to the Office of National Statistics, all deaths in 2019 amounted to 0.0074% of the population; thus far this year (annualized through May3), they account for 0.0075% of the population. No politician likes to be called a Luddite, yet science is always a work in progress. Science has no horizon; it exists on an infinite continuum, limited only by curiosity, experimentation and risk. We have not reached the end of science, any more than we reached the end of history in 1991. Doctors agree that COVID-19 can be slowed but not contained. As Holman Jenkins wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “…pandemics in the past have ended not with the virus going away – the 1918, 1957 and 1968 strains are still with us.” We adapt to a virus’s existence.

COVID -19 is particularly toxic for the elderly and those with life-threatening diseases. Protecting the vulnerable should have been our first order. Instead, perverse incentives were offered to nursing homes to accept COVID-19 patients, thereby threatening existing patients. Hospitals were incentivized to place COVID-19 patients on ventilators, while the same hospitals were directed to suspend elective surgeries and care for cancer and heart patients, the two largest causes of death in the United States. Schools and colleges, filled with the young who are less susceptible to the ravages of the disease, were closed, as were open-air parks and beaches. A commonsensical approach was never employed. Instead, models with phony input data were used to justify oppressive measures. Jobs are determined to be either “essential” or “non-essential,” when every job is essential to him or her who is employed. As Heather MacDonald wrote in City Journal last month: “It is not the role of a state bureaucrat to decide how essential an enterprise is. That is a judgement for consumers to make. To its employees, every business is essential.” People’s rights to assemble in prayer were denied. To satisfy media and political scolds, the public good was sacrificed.

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Sunday, May 10, 2020

"The Splendid and the Vile," by Erik Larson

Sydney M. Williams
www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Burrowing into Books
“The Splendid and the Vile,” Erik Larson
May 10, 2020

Only he had the power to make the nation believe it could win.”
                                                                                                Edward Bridges (1892-1969)
                                                                                                War Cabinet Secretary
                                                                                                As quoted by Erik Larson
                                                                                                The Splendid and the Vile

Eighty years ago, on Friday evening, May 10, 1940, Winston Churchill was summoned to Buckingham Palace where George VI asked him to form a government. The King, who had had a close relationship with Neville Chamberlain, was dubious about Churchill being the man for the job, given his reputation as an unconventional war monger. “I cannot yet think of Winston as P.M.,” King George wrote in his diary that May. Within a few weeks, he had changed his mind.

Erik Larson provides a fascinating and up-close look at Churchill, his family, close advisors and his relationship with the Roosevelt Administration. The story begins with end of the “Phony War” and evacuation from Dunkirk and ends a month before the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union.

Why another book on Churchill? More than a hundred biographies have been published. His histories of World War I and II comprise a dozen volumes. His speeches make up at least that many. Mr. Larson provides one explanation: “…it is in frivolity that Churchill often revealed himself.” John Colville, one of Churchill’s private secretaries, writes of an early Sunday morning in June that Churchill looked “… just like a rather nice pig, clad in a silk vest.” Churchill once quipped of his wife Clementine, when she was perturbed by a guest: “Clemmie dropped on him like a jaguar out of a tree.”

Larson makes wide use of letters and diaries, particularly those of Colville, his youngest child Mary, who was seventeen when the story begins, his daughter-in-law Pamela and, in Germany, the diaries and papers of Joseph Goebbels and Hermann Göring. We learn of Mary’s loves, of Randolph’s gambling and drinking, and of Pamela’s growing disillusionment with Randolph and of her affair with Averill Harriman. And we learn that the speech on August 20, 1940, in which he used the words, “Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few,” were first spoken to 1St Baron (Pug) Ismay, his chief military assistant, in a car driving back from a visit to the RAF operations room at Uxbridge five days earlier.

Churchill’s person and character made him beloved of the British people. He was short, round and bore a beatific smile. In speeches, he roused their patriotism, and in mingling with them, following a night of bombing, they heard words of revenge and saw tears of sympathy. In Bristol, in April 1941, after a particularly brutal attack, Churchill spoke: “…I see the damage done by the enemy attacks; but I also see …the spirit of an unconquerable people.” They saw strength in his bravery, as he watched bombing raids from the roof of 10 Downing Street, and they knew he would be by their side ‘til victory.

From the time Churchill became Prime Minister until the attack on Pearl Harbor nineteen months later, Britain fought alone. Hitler had conquered more of Europe than anyone since Napoleon. Until Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, an invasion of England seemed imminent. Churchill pinned his hopes on Roosevelt. Larson quotes from Harold Nicholson’s diary in April 1941, referring to Churchill: “His peroration implies that we are done without American help.” About the same time Averill Harriman, FDR’s “defense expeditor,” wrote his boss after listening to Churchill speak in Parliament: He (Harriman) marveled at “…the extent to which the faith and hope for the future of the people here are bound up in America and in you personally.” One weekend at Ditchley, with American emissary Harry Hopkins present, Churchill launched into one of his grandiose monologues about war aims of Britain. When he finished, he turned to Hopkins: “What will the president say to all that?” Moments passed. Then Hopkins replied: “Well, Mr. Prime Minister, I don’t think the President will give a dam’ for all that.” A deafening silence ensued: “You see, we’re only interested in seeing that Goddam sonofabitch Hitler gets licked.” Churchill smiled.

The bombing of England intensified. Hitler was convinced that once America entered the War, Churchill and Roosevelt would seek an alliance with Stalin. That would create, Hitler said, “a very difficult situation for Germany.” He was right. Nevertheless, by April Joseph Goebbels was feeling content with how the War was going. “His dairy,” Larson writes, “crackled with enthusiasm for the war and for life: ‘What a glorious spring day outside! How beautiful the world can be!’” A month later, Goebbels was more subdued: “England’s will to resist is still intact.”

There were personal moments, weekends at Chequers and Ditchley House in Oxfordshire. Marriage was often on Churchill’s mind. He was unhappy with daughter Sarah’s marriage to actor Vic Oliver. Randolph and Pamela’s marriage unraveled. Mary, at eighteen, had been proposed to by Eric Duncannon, an engagement that upset Clementine. “Churchill,” Erik Larson writes, “believed marriage to be a simple thing and sought to dispel its mysteries through a series of aphorisms, like: ‘All you need to be married are champagne, a box of cigars and a double bed.’”

Churchill enjoyed life, but he was singularly focused on victory. By the end of his first year, Erik Larson writes: “Against all odds, Britain stood firm, its citizens more emboldened than cowed. Somehow through it all, Churchill had managed to teach them the art of being fearless.” As to the claim he had given the people courage, Churchill demurred, “I never gave them courage. I was able to focus them.” As he himself was focused.

Erik Larson has given us a readable, literate and knowledgeable look at an important piece of history that began eighty years ago today. His title captures perfectly the difference between those who would defend western civilization and those who would destroy it.

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