A Journal of the Plague Year

 

While not everyone can be Isaac Newton and use his time while cooped up due to an epidemic to discover some of the basic laws of the universe, people spending more time at home than usual can use their time well by reading more. It beats watching network TV, and it beats the heck out of paying more attention than is necessary to the present political scene.

One book I recommend is  Daniel Defoe’s A  Journal of the Plague Year. Defoe was a good writer. He wrote Robinson Crusoe.  A Journal of the Plague year is written as a first person account of a man who stayed in London during  the time of the plague of 1664-66. It is said to be based on the journal of an older relative of Defoe’s who lived in London during the plague, though the prose is Defoe’s, and scholars believe some of the events described in the book are fictional.

The book tells a fascinating story on its own, but it is also interesting to compare its story to what is going on here and now with the Covid epidemic.  (Of course the plague in London was far worse than the present epidemic. According to the official bills of mortality the plague killed over 70,000 people in London from 1664 to 1666, around fifteen percent of the population. Historians  have conjectured that many more deaths which were listed as due to spotted fever or other causes were also due to the plague. The plague struck and killed people of all ages.  So far in the United States  around five  one hundredths of one percent of the population has been listed as dying from or while infected with Covid-19, almost all of whom  were over forty and had serious medical conditions before becoming infected. People in London knew the plague was contagious but had no idea of its cause, while the cause of the present epidemic is well known and treatments and vaccines for it are being developed and tested.)

The plague began slowly with a few cases in a few locations before spreading  across London. Many people with property or friends outside  the city left to avoid the disease, but many who could have left decided to remain and ride it out.  The mayor ordered lockdowns which were often ignored or disobeyed and which many thought were unnecessary and ineffective. Trade slowed as ships did not want to dock at London, but farmers and merchants from the countryside continued to bring food  to the city.  As the number of sick and dying people increased, some towns outside London refused to accept people leaving the city unless they could give evidence they were not carrying the disease.   Unemployed tradesmen who ran out of money and the city’s poor were supported with charity from more prosperous people and welfare from the mayor and the crown.  There were numerous charlatans,  conjurers, prophets, and con artists working the gullible with charms, spurious cures, fake preventatives, and predictions.   When conditions improved people of the lower and less educated classes hurried into the streets and resumed normal life, causing  a flare up of the disease.  

 

 

Unprecedented for the Democrats?

 

Many conservatives, dismayed by what is happening in the Democratic Party, are warning  that it is an unprecedented shifting of the party to the left. I think they are wrong, not about the shifting but in thinking it is unprecedented.

Bernie Sanders is probably a worse human being than Henry Wallace (who accomplished some useful things before entering politics and finally turned against the communists), but he is no more a friend of and apologist for Soviet communism  that Wallace was in his time in politics, and Wallace made it to vice president. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is nothing new for the Democrats. She is just a more telegenic Bella Abzug.  Karen Bass is probably no bigger a fan of Fidel Castro than was Ron Dellums.   Some of the things McGovern and his people were advocating in 1972 are well to the left of what  the Dems are proposing now, as were many of the plans and actions of the New Dealers.  

 The Democrats have had their leftists for decades, and at various times, as now, the leftists have had significant influence in or even control of the party.  Of course not all Democrats are leftists. Both major parties have a diversity of opinions and ideologies among their members. Sometimes more moderate and less authoritarian people have been in charge, but the leftist authoritarianism has always been present and important in the modern party. It is the main reason Democrats are rarely the lesser evil in elections. It is the reason they are not the lesser evil this year, even against Donald Trump.

 

Favorite Directors

 

While there is too much stuff on the internet of top ten this and best twelve of that, making a list can be a good way to get a person thinking about  his or her favorites in some category. After watching two of my favorite movies – Rear Window and Singin’ in the Rain – with my grandchildren in the last few days, I was thinking about who are my favorite  film makers.

 My first half dozen came fairly easily. In alphabetical order they would be Ford, Hawks, Hitchcock, Kurosawa, Renoir, and Welles. After that it got harder. Today I think I’d put Keaton, Kubrick, Lubitsch, and Wilder next to fill out a favorite ten, but that might change tomorrow.  There are so many others I like enough to think about including.

This is a list of favorite directors, not necessarily best directors.  Lists  of best directors would  vary depending on the criteria – whether single movie, entire career, originality, visual style, or whatever.

 

No Longer Caring?

 

Arthur Koestler wrote that after the nonaggression pact, he no longer cared whether Hitler’s allies called him a counterrevolutionary.   We may be  getting to a point where many people in this country decide they no longer care whether the allies of America hating looters and arsonists call them racists. It would be a good thing,  That trick and threat of the left has provided cover for a lot of wrong thinking, false claims, and bad actions.

We have scoundrels preaching that individualism, rationality and objectivity, a belief in hard work, self reliance, planning for the future, civility, and respect for the property of others are “white male” traits, inappropriate for and deleterious to non- whites and getting their actual racist nonsense accepted in surprising places including the Smithsonian. We have “educators” indoctrinating  white children to feel guilty because of their race. We have attacks on people such as Thomas Jefferson, when in fact Jefferson is honored for his achievements and his ideas and principles, not for his failures to live up to them.  We have demands for reparations to black people for slavery  which have  no more sense or justification than would an ultimatum  from today’s Englishmen to Italians for a payoff for Caesar’s conquest. We have assertions of white privilege and systematic anti-black racism when the main systems  in government,  education,  and corporations  are explicitly structured  for black privilege through affirmative action quotas, lower admission standards, contract set asides, and so on.

Most important we have a pervasive attempt to make white Americans accept undeserved guilt.  The leftists want to make people feel guilty to make them easier to rule. That is the game, and people need to refuse to play it.  No one alive today had anything to do with slavery. No one under the age of seventy eight could have voted for the politicians who supported and protected Jim Crow laws before they were abolished in 1964. There are anti-black (and anti-Asian, anti-white, anti-Semitic, anti-Hispanic, and other) bigots and racists in the country. Most white people are not among them. There should be  no reason for any innocent person to accept a clearly false accusation, feel a need to refute it, or even become uneasy because of it. Instead people should stop caring what present day despicable and dishonest enemies of a liberal society say about them and either ignore it or tell them to go to hell  - or a polite equivalent of course.

Truman and Hiroshima

Tomorrow is the 75^th anniversary  of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. There likely will be more than the usual amount of superficial second guessing and pious anti-American hand wringing in the traditional media.

 There are also serious second guessers – historians and military officers who wonder whether Truman made the right decision. I think he did, and that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the least costly way to end the war, not only for Americans but also for the Japanese. In the summer of 1945 there were still millions of men and thousands of airplanes available to the Japanese to defend the home islands from invasion and determination to use them. I have read that Japanese officers estimated that an invasion could be stopped at a cost of ten million dead Japanese soldiers and civilians. After the slaughter on Iwo Jima and on and in the waters around Okinawa,  American officers projected numbers of American casualties in an invasion ranging from several hundred thousand to a million.  In addition to that the Japanese are said to have planned  to murder the thousands of allied prisoners of war in camps around the Pacific when their homeland was invaded.  While one cannot be sure that there was not something other than dropping the atomic bombs which might have led the Japanese to surrender without being invaded, it is interesting to note that after the atomic bombs fell and the Japanese decided to surrender, there was an attempted coup in Tokyo to cancel the surrender and continue the war.  

My father was a Republican, but Harry Truman was a  Democrat he always thought well of.  He was a crew member on transport planes in World War II. He told me that in 1945 his unit was stationed in Hawaii and was scheduled to drop paratroopers during the invasion of Japan.  It was expected that during the invasion the Japanese would try to stop incoming allied planes by crashing kamikaze planes flown by inexperienced pilots into them as they reached Japan. So I  along with a great many other boomers have a personal interest in Truman’s decision to use the bomb. Without it a lot of us might never have been here at all.

More From Trump

Donald Trump is a jackass who has no business being president of the United States. Of the sixteen other people who sought the Republican nomination in 2016,  at least fourteen would have been a better choice, and an easy half dozen would have been a far better choice.  Republicans have a lot to answer for for the way they picked their candidate that year. He was elected only because the Democrats nominated someone who was worse – both as a candidate with plans and objectives and as a human being.

In the last week he has given the country two more example of how unfit for the job he is. In one of his tweets he outrageously suggested postponing the election because of the epidemic.  This country has never postponed and election, and a president has no power to postpone one. The country held the presidential election of 1864 during  a bloody rebellion and civil war. It held the presidential election of 1944 during a world war.  If as seems likely,  Trump meant the tweet to be taken seriously, it shows his ignorance, arrogance, power mania, and contemptuous disregard for law, limited government, and the Constitution. If he was joking, as some Republicans have hopefully or nervously suggested, it shows a buffoonish lack of dignity and understanding of the need for powerful people to be careful and thoughtful in what they say.

He has since delivered more of the same by declaring that if he does not get his way on a moratorium on or a reduction of social security taxes, he has the power to suspend the tax by decree.  It is not unfair to wonder whether he has forgotten, never learned, or simply does not care that the Constitution gives the congress the power to determine taxes.

He is at least as arrogant and power hungry as his predecessor, and less smooth in how he goes about it. Unfortunately he is also the person one should hope wins the election in November. Instead of offering moderate proposals and plans, the Democrats have adopted a dangerous and harmful leftist agenda (and with a candidate who is likely demented to boot), making it necessary for people who believe in individual rights and limited government to oppose them. That means voting for Republicans and supporting Trump’s reelection as the lesser evil, because overall his policies have been and his proposals and plans are far better than those of the Democrats. It is a hell of a note, bit it is what we’ve got. Neither an Ike, nor a  JFK, nor a Reagan, nor even  a Dole or a Humphrey will on the ballot for either party.