As I write this, the numbers of new coronavirus cases are approaching a new peak in the United States. How exactly did we go from declining numbers to what appears will be new highs in a handful of weeks?

Citing a slogan from another time and another context, “It’s the economy, stupid.”

Almost everything in our economy is designed for the short-run. Profits are tabulated quarterly, if not weekly. Companies maintain little inventory, partly because inventory not sold by year-end is considered taxable income, and rely on just-in-time deliveries. Retailers and service industries have high percentages of employees working variable hours depending on demand, and more “professional” services are being outsourced.

According to numerous studies over the last several years, 75-80% of U.S. workers are living paycheck-to-paycheck, and 40% of all Americans can’t pay an unexpected expense of $400 without selling something or going into debt. Add to that the fact that roughly 60% of healthcare insurance is paid by employers.

So what happened when the U.S. shut down much of the economy to keep the coronavirus from spreading?

Unemployment jumped to the 13%-14% level, and government had to create massive amounts of money for unemployment, stimulus, payroll protection, and other worker and business support programs… and the funds supporting those programs are running out. State budgets are being savaged by lack of revenue and ongoing expenses, and, unlike the federal government, states can’t run long-term deficits or print money.

Over the past century, the U.S. economy has become, like business, a just-in-time operation, and with already massive government deficits…there’s just not enough money in the coffers of either governments or businesses to keep paying workers and the other bills. Almost all workers have no cash reserves to speak of, and many are already desperate. Tens of thousands of businesses will close… and stay closed… as a result of the shutdown.

So… there’s enormous economic and political pressure to “re-open” the economy, despite the fact that models show doing so will result in more than 60,000 additional deaths.

No choice is good in this situation, but the dollar cost or death toll cost wouldn’t be nearly so high if the U.S. weren’t so deeply tied to a short-term profit-maximizing just-in-time economy.

This situation reminds me, bizarrely, of an old time commercial for automotive oil filters where a mechanic explains that without good oil filters and maintenance, car engines fail. Then he says, “You can pay me now… or pay me later [to rebuild your engine].”

We haven’t even begun the long process of paying for an underfunded, over-leveraged, just-in-time economy… and we’ll be paying in both dollars and deaths, most likely for several generations.

Most adults know that basic goods have a cost to produce and a price at which they’re sold, and if the producer doesn’t cover his costs with enough to spare for him to live on… then he’s not going to be in business that long [unless someone’s subsidizing him, but that’s another question]. Most of us also know that there are other costs in life. If you want to be a doctor, then there’s the cost of medical school, and the time spent as an intern and a resident – and maybe more training beyond that in some specialties. Most “professions” require additional education and training beyond four years of college.

But there are other non-dollar “costs” that aren’t so obvious, and many aren’t considered costs at all.

I spent roughly twenty years in politics as a staffer, political appointee, and consultant, and two of the unacknowledged costs were long hours and the requirement to live in Washington, D.C., with high costs of living and/or a long commute, if not both. Political professionals who want to make a living at politics are essentially limited to living in restricted locales – large cities, state capitols, or Washington, D.C. Perhaps the highest cost is the effect of high pressure on health. Yet another cost is uncertainty. In those twenty years, I could have been released or fired at a moment’s notice [and it did happen]. Then there’s the psychological cost of continually trying to please [or at least not displease] conflicting constituencies convinced that their viewpoint is the only correct one while trying not to be undermined by your supposed friends [who are politically often more dangerous than the opposing party].

Other professions have similar costs. Academic university-level jobs that can support a family, especially these days, not only require a terminal degree, but will likely require relocation, sometimes more than once, and working under rules and practices that constantly change without apparent rhyme or reason, while laboring under various delusions, such as that every American child deserves and is capable of getting through four years – or more – of collegiate pedagogy or that technology can replace expertise, or that the newest idea is the best.

Professional actors and musicians, or for that matter, professional athletes, all compete in fields where essentially about 1/10 of one percent of those who finish their training ever make more than a bare-bones living, and those who do can almost never stay settled in one place, and, on top of that, can usually look forward to perhaps a decade of substantial income, possibly two at the outside, not to mention that the profession can easily destroy a personal life.

As in most fields, law is intensely competitive, particularly at the highest levels, and very few of the hotshot young attorneys actually make partner, possibly because some of the saner ones decide it’s not worth it – and then, given the nature of law, there’s the fact that they have to deal with clients with either insurmountable problems or more insurmountable egos.

Writing’s not any easier. I know a bit about that. In the first years of writing, I never even thought about self-promotion, but when I became a full-time writer, it became rather more important. Over a ten year period, I visited every bookstore I could manage to get to, somewhere in the neighborhood of 700-800 hundred [of course, you can’t do that now; there aren’t nearly as many bookstores]. That’s a time and effort cost. Then there’s the website, and answering emails and letters, and going to conventions and comic-cons and doing other author-outreach efforts. Most successful authors do a great deal of this [unless they have movie or TV deals], and with all budget tightening by publishers, bookstores, etc., authors have quite a range of non-dollar costs.

But these non-dollar costs aren’t unique to the professions I’ve mentioned. Virtually every job has non-dollar costs…and we tend to overlook them or accept them as a necessity. But they’re still costs, even if they can’t be totaled in dollars, pounds, Euros, pesos, yuan, or whatever.

Donald Trump isn’t wearing a mask. Neither are most of his supporters, from what I’ve been able to ascertain, and certainly most of those supporters who live near me aren’t. The Vice President insists that coronavirus cases are going down, even when CDC data says the opposite. Tomorrow, Trump will be holding an indoor rally for 20,000 people in Tulsa, with as many as 100,000 expected outside, and I’m willing to bet that most of them, if not the great majority, won’t be wearing masks, either. A number of Republican acquaintances have made it known to me that they believe that the danger of the entire coronavirus situation is overblown, if not an outright hoax. The university system here in Utah is declaring that fall classes will be conducted in person and begin on schedule, despite the fact that Salt Lake City is still in condition orange, and is considered a hotspot by the CDC.

So… what’s this all about?

It’s definitely not about public health, not with U.S. deaths over 120,000 and increasing daily, and with case numbers rising in 23 out of the 50 states.

Rather, it’s clearly about economics and politics, particularly politics, in the case of Donald Trump. Now that recent poll numbers show that, at least for the moment, a significant majority of Americans believe that Trump has mishandled the coronavirus pandemic, Trump has apparently decided that the only way he can win re-election is if he can revive the economy, and that’s exactly what he’s pushing for, regardless of the number of additional deaths this may cause.

The rally tomorrow is clearly a gamble. If 20,000 or more of his supporters appear, and there’s no significant increase in coronavirus cases, he can trumpet to the world that the risks are overstated, and what’s important is the economy. This position is helped in public perception by the time lag between exposure and the appearances of symptoms, as well as by the fact that many of those infected won’t show symptoms, even though they’ll spread the disease. Also, if the crowd comes from a wide area, once they disperse, it will be difficult to trace development of infection. All the while, Trump, or his team, will be saying words to the effect that the coronavirus isn’t so bad, and look what Trump has done for the economy.

And, anyway, so far as Trump is concerned, another few thousand deaths, or even more than that, is a small price to pay for getting re-elected.

And… it just might work.

In this era of automated everything, where businesses large and small are doing their best to reduce costs, one aspect of most businesses has become the automated telephone system. Such systems come in two varieties. Those that aren’t excessively frustrating and those that are.

Among the systems that are most frustrating are those with a long menu and no option for anything besides specific topics that aren’t what you’re calling about. So after nine options, none of which relate to the subject of your call, you have to go through the menu and guess which option is the closest to what you’re calling about. That gets followed with a second menu that often turns out to have nothing to do with the subject you’re calling about. If you’re fortunate, you may find what you called about.

Then there’s the system that actually asks you the subject of your call. Except… it often doesn’t recognize the words you’re using because it’s only programmed to “accept” certain words.

The best systems, to my mind, are like the one used by my local pharmacy. If you know your prescription number and your phone number, you can refill the prescription automatically. If you don’t, you can switch directly to a pharmacy technician. If it’s after hours you can leave your name and number and describe your problem, and someone will call you back during working hours – and they do.

On the other hand, there’s the current IRS system, where there’s been no way to get an answer to your questions either online or by telephone for two months, and there’s no way to reach a live person. My inquiry wasn’t vital. After three months, I just wanted to know when I might get my refund. Even though I filed electronically, and received a confirmation, the automated system couldn’t even find my return. I’ll certainly survive, but there are millions of people out there who are facing financial distress… and a whole lot of them are in the same limbo…and for them it’s serious.

Even before the coronavirus hit, for anything other than a simple problem, it took an hour or more to reach a real person. I know. Last year, the IRS lost a check I sent them for an amended return [because you can’t file amended returns electronically, nor pay them electronically]. I knew the USPS didn’t lose the check because the Treasury cashed it, but it took three months for them to acknowledge that they found it [and I spent HOURS on hold waiting to talk to a real person].

Computers, automated answering systems, and incompetence can combine to create even more frustration. My wife didn’t get a bill on schedule from a financial institution for her credit card and wanted to know what she owed. So she called the institution last week. Even with her credit card number, Social Security number, address, and email, they wouldn’t tell her unless she could tell them what her last purchase had been. She had several small purchases recently, but she couldn’t find the receipts or give them exact numbers. Without that exactitude, they wouldn’t reveal her balance. She could, of course, go online and set up access to her account, something that she’s been reluctant to do, and which would just create another system with another password. They did agree to send another copy of the bill to the email on file and by regular mail. So far, she’s seen neither.

Then there were the pastries we ordered. Somehow the vendor’s system decided to send them to our daughter, because that was where the last order went. When we discovered that – three minutes after we got a confirmation email – we called the vendor… and ended up on hold. Twenty minutes later, someone answered. We corrected the shipping address. The person on the other end assured us everything was taken care of. Four days later, the pastries ended up at our daughter’s house. I’m sure she and her family will enjoy them.

Rules are critical in games and government, and there are two aspects to rules: (1) whether they’re fair and (2) whether they’re enforced fairly.

In both games and government, it’s sometimes difficult to determine the fairness of rules and enforcement, but these days, with the growth of both national and personal recording media, i.e., cellphones, it’s gotten easier to show unfairness in both the rules and their enforcement.

For example, in the 2018 NFC championship game between the Saints and the Rams, a Ram defensive back slammed helmet-to-helmet into a Saint receiver as he was about to receive the ball, clearly illegal under the rules. No penalty was called, even though millions saw the impact. Later, the NFL admitted it was a bad no-call. Effectively, that no-call changed the outcome of the game. It cost the Saint’s players money and the chance to play in the Superbowl. The problem wasn’t the rules; it was the enforcement of the rules.

The same situation exists in government today as well, particularly in terms of police enforcement of the criminal codes. When enforcement is badly handled, it often goes viral, as in George Floyd’s death and in dozens of other instances.

But when the “rules” are flawed, that’s often not as obvious, particularly when seemingly “objective” rules or laws aren’t nearly as objective as their proponents claim.

Requiring a photo ID to vote is simple for many people. They already have one. But if you don’t, it can be difficult and time consuming to obtain one because virtually every form of ID requires confirmation, either other ID cards or a birth certificate, and if you don’t have a birth certificate in your possession, it can be time consuming, and sometimes almost impossible to get a certified copy without supporting documentation or appearing in person, and given most bureaucracies, can easily take hours, if not longer, spent waiting. This places a far heavier time and loss of income burden on lower-income workers.

So does having elections on weekdays. Most professionals can juggle their schedules or just take time off to go vote. A significant proportion of hourly-paid workers can’t… not without losing money, which is hard when every dollar goes toward basic necessities.

College admissions based on SAT or ACT scores were designed with the purpose of creating a way to evaluate applicants for college more fairly. And they worked reasonably well [for those applying] when the majority of applicants came from upper middle class or upper class white families. It’s clear that they’re far less accurate in evaluating abilities of applicants from different socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds.

Part of the “rules” problem lies in the fact that most rules are created by elites of some sort, who write the rules, i.e., laws, based on their background and understanding… and then attempt to apply them to everyone, with enforcement based on the same assumptions. This works reasonably well in homogenous societies, but far less well in societies with significant numbers of differing ethnic/cultural groups… and much of the world is becoming less homogenous… and the previous homogenous majority, in more and more nations, is either failing to act or reacting adversely… which can and has led to civil unrest and violence.

Because we really needed to do some cleaning out – understandably necessary after living in the same house for almost twenty-seven years – about two weeks ago I rented a construction-sized dumpster, not because I thought we had that much “stuff” that had outlived its usefulness, but because the smaller sizes came with restrictions on what we could put in them, and the range of what I knew we had to get rid of exceeded those restrictions. I also rented it because, first, there were items that wouldn’t fit in my old Tahoe, and, second, because the local dump is a twenty minute drive from the house – one way.

The dumpster arrived on schedule, and I started disposing, and, after four days of intermittent serious effort, and my creative use of a moving dolly, I’d managed to lever and haul the two hundred pound plus broken down massage chair out of the garage where it had been residing for half a decade, because, unlike other appliances, the one we wanted didn’t include – even for a fee – the removal of the old one. Then there were the cheap and battered veneer over particleboard or oriented strand board computer desks, or the set of iron patio chairs that ended up in the storeroom after we discovered that the non-removable castors had a tendency to snap and break in a way that was not repairable [at least not without access to a machine shop and welding gear]. And there was more… including a raft of barely usable and decrepit devices, the incredibly heavy “portable” dog fence that a relative had gifted to us [and which turned out to be totally useless], the non-functional stereo designed for cassette tapes…

But… after all the junk was in the dumpster, the need for true-deep cleaning became obvious, and my ingenious wife presented me with a brand-new power washer she’d ordered in advance to really deep clean the deck and the brick and concrete patios below. The catch was that I had to assemble it, because it came in a box – since, of course, there wasn’t one to be had in Cedar City. The instructions suggested that “five minutes” assembly time was all that was required. I’m not a mechanic, but I’m reasonably handy, or I thought I was. It took almost two hours, one hour of which was finding two screws the size of the ones that weren’t included in the box, which was necessary if I didn’t want to wait a week or two for the manufacturer to send what they hadn’t included.

Then, it took me almost an hour to figure out how to actually operate the machine. I’ve flown military helicopters. In the early days of computers I actually replaced components to improve performance. Part of the problem was that the directions never mentioned how to change the pressure coming out of the nozzle. So it was trial and error.

After that, it actually took less time to power-wash more than eighty linear feet of concrete sidewalks and brickwork than it did to assemble and learn to operate the machine.

But it seems in our ever more technical world, matters get more complicated, even when they shouldn’t. The afternoon after the power-washer fiasco, a new printer arrived [by delivery because we have no computer stores anymore in Cedar City] to replace the old one, a printer that, although not that old, had decided only to print in two of four colors, even after “cleaning” and the purchase of brand new cartridges, which also I’d had to order online. Now, over the years, I’ve gone through close to a score of printers. So I thought it wouldn’t be that hard. Wireless printers… no sweat.

Wrong. First, the on-screen directions on the printer stopped at “choose wireless or Ethernet.” I found a way around that. Then the damned printer wanted to connect to the wrong network and wouldn’t let me enter the right one. So I shut everything down and started over. I got it connected to the right network, and it said everything was fine. Except that it wouldn’t print because the printer was “off-line.” The computer settings wouldn’t let me change that, either. So I had to delete the printer from the computer and reinstall it. It works fine now, but to go through essentially three and a half installations?

My wife won’t let me print the details of the three hours it took her to work out the installation of a “simple” additional app to our satellite TV system.

I could go on for pages about all the stuff that’s supposed to be easy to install and use… and it never is.

How about you?

Lots of well-meaning people have said this, or words to that effect over the years, generally after an egregious example of police brutality or a miscarriage of justice against blacks has ignited tempers and buildings. I’ve been one of those who said that… and the words are indeed true. But those words have become, it appears, merely an excuse for not doing very much after the violence dies down.

As a result, the injustices and brutality continue… and, when another terrible instance goes viral, so does the violence. That’s understandable… and unfortunate… because people get even more angry and frustrated when unfairness persists and major problems don’t get fixed.

Often, officials and politicians say it takes time. Oh? How much time did it take to get massive stimulus packages out to largely white-owned businesses? How much time did it take to get a massive tax break for the upper 1%? Trump can come up with an Executive Order to punish Twitter overnight, because they fact-checked his tweets, but he doesn’t seem inclined to deal with a double standard of justice, possibly because he thinks, as he did in the Charlottesville white power rally, that there are “good people” among the racists.

Many of the people who go along with the racists aren’t truly evil people, but they don’t understand just how pervasive the structural injustices are, and when someone attempts to remedy the problems, all they see is the government spending money on people they perceive as undeserving, and money that’s not spent on them.

What they don’t see, and often can’t or won’t see, is that almost every law on the books is enforced more harshly on people of color, and there are years of studies to prove it.

And, in the meantime, those who use the violent reaction to the latest example of blatant police brutality as an excuse for doing little or nothing might ask themselves how patient you’d be if you, your parents, your grandparents, and your ancestors had been subject to such brutality for roughly 400 years… and the politicians and courts still hadn’t put an end to it, in a country that hypocritically has praised itself for equality under the law for over 200 years.

Those touting the need for the U.S. to get back to “normal” as soon as possible are essentially relying on the argument that the coronavirus is dangerous just to the elderly and people with certain underlying conditions, and that those people should stay at home, while the rest of the nation returns to “business as usual.”

The problem with this argument is that there aren’t just a handful of people with underlying conditions, which include those who are obese, smokers, and people with diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, lung disease, chronic and severe kidney problems, and compromised immune systems. According to a paper recently published in Emerging Infectious Diseases, 45% of adult Americans fit at least one high-risk category. But it left out people in institutionalized settings, and in nursing homes in particular, which have accounted for a hugely disproportionate number of deaths.

In effect, too many Americans want to think of the high-risk coronavirus population as just senior citizens and people with underlying conditions, which they believe consist of a small percentage of Americans. In fact, that “small” population is somewhere around half of adult America and quite possibly more. That’s not a “tiny fraction” of the United States.

And for those in that category who catch the coronavirus and have symptoms, early statistics show that roughly twenty percent will require hospitalization. Half of those who survive will require lengthy medical care, and early U.K. studies estimate that roughly as many people as those who died will be permanently disabled and unable to work.

While children and young adults, in general, have a lower risk of serious effects from the coronavirus, that risk still exists, and those effects, while rare, are often life-threatening. In addition, as every week passes, doctors are finding more and more side-effects of the virus.

Also troubling is a series of studies out of China that show that over fifty percent of people infected with the coronavirus – including people who had no apparent symptoms – suffered permanent lung damage. These symptoms are also turning up in significant numbers in the United States.

Back to “normal” fairly soon? Not without more damage to life and health than most people realize.

My wife and I buy a great deal of merchandise online. That’s not by choice, but by semi-necessity. I say semi-necessity because I don’t absolutely need those shelled pistachio nuts, but we did need the cleaning supplies vanished from the shelves of all the local emporiums. I buy my shirts online, and I do wear collared dress shirts almost every day, because no local store carries any color but white or pale blue, or a wide variety of cowboy shirts, which aren’t exactly my style. Paradoxically, the western wear store which carried boots I could wear has gone out of business; so now I’m buying boots online as well.

It’s not just clothing, either. We’ve had to purchase outdoor furniture covers online because the local home improvement big box store runs out of covers within a month of initial summer stocking… and seldom reorders. Now that all the office supply stores have closed, the go-to for such supplies is Staples online.

It’s not that Cedar City is dying. The population has more than doubled over the past 10-15 years, and we have auto supply stores, tire stores, and Mexican food restaurants, as well as more than score of fast food outlets, but the nearest decent women’s wear store is 55 miles away, which might explain why my wife’s clothes and shoes are bought anywhere but in Cedar City.

Part of this might be because Cedar City is a university town, but given the significant numbers of large and elaborate houses being built here – and inhabited – I can’t believe that we’re the only people in the town who have to resort to online purchases of a significant amount of goods.

Yet, usually, if there’s money to be made, there’s some entrepreneur ready to fill that need. If Cedar City can’t support one office supply store, when at one time there were three, when the population was significantly smaller, does that reflect a diminishing need for office supplies or lower profit margins for such stores… or both? I can see the decline in the sale of dress shirts for men and classy clothes for women, at least here in Cedar City, but the decline of western wear?

And even if these and other items no longer sell in large enough quantities to be “profitable,” does this mean that proprietors want more profit, or that there really is no profit in rural towns such as Cedar City, with a market area of approximately 50,000 inhabitants?

The result is that this reduced and diverted commerce goes elsewhere and reduces overall local income, as well as entailing a tremendous amount of waste in terms of the bubble wrap and cardboard used to package and deliver online goods. But if I have to choose between driving three hours one way [the nearest city to sell items not available here] to buy what might be called standard purchases or to use the internet… the internet wins almost every time… and the economy of Cedar City loses.

As I noted before, pure capitalism is extremely efficient at producing large amounts of goods and services at low costs. But it’s also efficient in other ways that people, especially its proponents, tend to overlook or minimize.

Capitalism is extremely efficient at concentrating wealth and maximizing income inequality, and, without regulation, it also maximizes the costs of production placed on everyone else, from workers to the environment. These two “efficiencies” have been known for decades and resulted in a fair amount of government regulation, and, in the case of income inequality, possibly a great deal less than optimal.

But there are other downsides to this relentless efficiency. One of these occurs in the efficiencies of food production. Factory farms are efficient at producing meat at low costs, but they’re also efficient at creating and spreading antibiotic resistant bacteria quickly, not to mention the coronavirus. Pesticides and fertilizers are efficient in producing more grain and produce, but that efficiency has also been effective in creating agricultural runoff that is quite successfully making large sections of the Gulf of Mexico uninhabitable to almost any form of marine life.

Another is our efficient air traffic system which is a highly effective way of spreading the coronavirus.

And the great efficiency of just-in-time supply chains creates highly efficient slow-downs and bottlenecks, if just a single supplier fails – and that was one of the causes for the lack of PPE, the other being the unwillingness to create stockpiles because inventory is money wasted in a just-in-time economy.

And, of course, there’s the Boeing Max groundings, the result of relentless efficiency in eliminating “redundant” sensors and not wanting to conduct greater pilot training in the new systems.

Then there’s the efficiency of the part-time and “gig-economy,” which not only reduces costs for businesses, but also leaves millions without affordable health care… and that certainly increases the effectiveness of the coronavirus and other diseases in spreading.

And because of our oh-so-efficient economy, states and businesses have to open up before it’s really safe because, otherwise, the economy will totally crash and millions will go hungry… or worse…

And, in even in short run, that’s efficient?

Some people wrap gifts elaborately. Others place them in a decorated bag, perhaps surrounded with colored tissue. And others don’t bother with wrapping at all. Likewise, some gift-receivers admire well and tastefully wrapped packages and make over the wrapping. Some gift receivers even carefully remove the wrapping, trying to preserve it [believe me, some people do]. Other receivers make a comment, such as “lovely wrapping,” and then get on with unwrapping the gift or package. Still others, especially younger children, rip away the wrapping and discard it, just to get to what’s inside.

Many readers see novels as having two separate components – the core story, i.e., the package, and the wrapping, which consists of the background and the way in which the story is told. For the most part, these readers either want as little “wrapping” as possible, or at least, minimal “wrapping.” They tend to want an action- or event-driven story with obvious motivation, and when it’s done, the “present” of a clear resolution.

And, because, just as there is a range of readers, there exists a range of writers. Among those authors are those who write in the “wrapped-present” style, and in fact, I’ve been accused of that by some readers, largely because, I suspect, my protagonists are either competent or learn to be competent and because they learn from experience. Many of their antagonists don’t learn. But I really don’t write in that style because the events and environment in which the protagonists find themselves shape them and influence how they reshape or influence their world.

A “basic” wrapped-present story would be one where the author could change every background detail and those changes wouldn’t affect the characters, the plot, or the resolution.

Then there are authors where everything is so tied together that almost any change in the setting, background or culture would affect everything. In that respect, Gene Wolfe comes to my mind, as do Ursula K. LeGuin, and Sheri Tepper, and there are certainly others as well.

Most writers fall somewhere in between, and more than a few have books that differ greatly in the degree of integration of story, setting, and presentation. And often, what is one reader’s unnecessary wrapping is integral to another reader’s appreciation and understanding… as well as to the full range of what the author has set forth.

I’ve always been a big fan of facts. When I was in school, though, I often got in trouble because I didn’t apply the scientific method to so-called facts I ran across. Some of those “facts” I embraced were from extended family members and some from unreliable print sources – like the 1910 encyclopedia from my grandparents’ attic, where some facts weren’t so much wrong as outdated. As I grew older, I did learn a bit more about facts, and when it might be painful to insist on factual accuracy. For example, adults didn’t like it when interrupted with an observation that their facts were incorrect, even when a reference book showed they were nowhere close

In college I learned in depth about another way of presenting facts – statistics. Later on, as an industrial economist and as a political staffer, I learned more than a few ways of lying, or sometimes just exaggerating, with absolutely accurate statistics.

But, really, facts and accurate statistics, even accurately and objectively presented, won’t change people’s minds when they’re emotionally convinced of something.

As we all know, or should know, some deeply held beliefs aren’t rational. I have an acquaintance who is absolutely and deeply convinced that a ban on assault rifles… or even a ban on rifle magazines that hold more than 25 cartridges – will inexorably and immediately lead to the repeal of the second amendment. There are a few facts in the way of that development. First, to ban all firearms would require a Constitutional amendment, and such an amendment has to win a two-thirds vote of both Houses of Congress, and then must be ratified by three-fourths of the state legislatures, meaning by 38 states. Right now, Republicans control legislatures in 31 states, and with the polarization in the U.S., there’s no way Congress, even by a simple majority, would vote to outlaw all guns, let alone thirty eight states.

Doesn’t matter. This acquaintance is absolutely convinced that any “weakness” by firearms’ rights activists will lead to the loss of all their guns. And he’s not the only one, and it’s not the only issue where people’s mindsets and what they believe have no basis in the facts.

There’s no reputable evidence or study to support the vast majority of claims by antivaxxers. Doesn’t matter. They’re not about to change.

There’s no recent evidence of massive voter fraud. The Heritage Foundation, an ultraconservative think tank, did its best to dig up voter fraud in the U.S. and documented almost 1,300 cases of voter fraud in all elections in the U.S. for more than 20 years. That sounds like a lot, but virtually all the cases involved individuals, and were spread across multiple elections in fifty states. At a minimum, that involves ten federal elections in 50 states, and with both primary and general elections, that’s 2,000 separate elections. So the average fraud level was less than one person per election. That’s an insignificant number compared to the number of voters and elections. Yet right wing conservatives are convinced massive voter fraud exists… because that’s what their emotions tell them.

So who believes all that shit? People who want to, regardless of solid facts.

The 2018 film, The Green Book , depicts a 1962 tour by Don Shirley, an extraordinary black classical and jazz pianist, who melded jazz and classical music on that tour and in the majority of his public performances. What most viewers of the movie likely didn’t know was that in terms of ability, Shirley was one of the greatest classical piano virtuosos of the 1950s and 1960s. The composer Igor Stravinsky, a contemporary of Shirley’s, said of him, “His virtuosity is worthy of Gods.”

Shirley also wrote organ symphonies, piano concerti, a cello concerto, three string quartets, a one-act opera, works for organ, piano and violin, a symphonic tone poem based on the 1939 novel Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, and a set of “Variations” on the 1858 opera Orpheus in the Underworld.

Although he performed with a number of the great symphony orchestras, including the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony, and the New York Philharmonic, the majority of his income came from his classical-jazz fusion performances and recordings, because, in the 1950s, only a handful of classical pianists could make a living, and many classical venues felt that a black classical pianist would not draw audiences.

Shirley was able to stay in music because he was versatile and gifted enough to shift his focus and performance largely to jazz. It was certainly his decision to do so, but the choice he faced was whether to starve as a black classical pianist and composer or to use his talents in another musical genre. In a real sense, if he wanted to remain a musician, he had to put classical performing and composing on a back burner.

Shirley certainly wasn’t the first musician or creative artist to run into difficulties not of their own making that forced a change in career emphasis. In music, the changes in popular tastes are obvious, and popular tastes dictate who, and how many, can make a living performing or composing in a particular way or style. 1950s style rock and roll is gone. For the most part, so is the folk music of the sixties, etc. Some musicians are versatile enough to shift; others aren’t. Those who aren’t tend to be marginalized or totally unable to make a living.

In writing, times also change. How fast they change depends, from what I’ve seen, on the literary genre. What is published and “popular” in poetry has changed drastically over the past fifty years, largely, I suspect, because poetry is not commercially successful and is effectively subsidized in various ways. Because the “market” has changed, I suspect that it would be difficult, if not impossible, for a “traditional” poet, no matter how accomplished and how talented, who emphasized formal rhyme and meter to be widely published or acclaimed.

On the other hand, F&SF is a commercial marketplace, meaning that it’s big enough to support a range of subgenres, based on the preferences of readers. Even so, I’ve seen that certain of my books sell far less well than others, and that’s one reason why I don’t write many of that type, much as I enjoy writing them, but, like Don Shirley and others, I still need to make a living… and it’s the kind of choice most creative artists have to make, one way or another.

How many people in the U.S. have died of the coronavirus? According to the official U.S. death toll as I write, this, the number is 76,600. Today the Christian Science Monitor reported that, according to the latest Axios-Ipsos poll, 63% of Democrats say that number is an undercount, while a plurality of Republicans (40%) believes the figure is inflated.

Yet a wide range of studies and reports conclude that undercounting coronavirus deaths is widespread.

A New York Times study concluded that in just nine states, in March and April alone, the death undercount was close to 9,000. A study by the Yale Medical School reported in the Washington Post came to a similar conclusion.

Reports from numerous sources indicate that both the number of covid cases and deaths in Texas have been significantly under-reported, particularly among prison inmates and people in nursing homes, and Governor Abbott has refused to address the discrepancies.

According to the CDC and other health organizations, virtually all pandemics have been initially undercounted, for various reasons, partly because not all health workers recognize the signs of a new disease and then because record-keeping suffers when the health system gets overwhelmed.

So why the wide discrepancy between Democrats and Republicans?

One reason for that discrepancy is obvious. All of us tend to believe what we see around us. I live in an overwhelming Republican state with only one moderately large city and a whole lot of space elsewhere. The entire state has less than 6,000 cases, and less than 70 deaths. Needless to say, most Republicans here think the problem is overstated. Republicans tend to predominate in rural areas, and those areas generally, like Utah, are spread out more. Republicans also tend to have a greater percentage of those well-off who live in less crowded and more sanitary areas – which means they don’t see the deaths and the suffering to the same degree.

And it doesn’t help when the Republican President downplays the severity of the situation.

Democrats, on the other hand, are more likely to see the deaths or be personally affected. The coronavirus thrives best in densely populated and connected areas, which is why New York City, New Jersey, and Connecticut, as well as Detroit and Chicago and other dense urban areas, are getting hammered by the virus. In those locales, health professionals and others have been storing bodies in refrigerated trucks and makeshift morgues. New York has discovered funeral homes overwhelmed with bodies. Under those conditions, undercounts are far more likely than overcounts. And those areas are also highly Democratic in their voting allegiance.

No… the coronavirus hasn’t taken a strong hold here, and it may not, given the more rural nature of Cedar City, which so far has only had 30 cases and one death, and the folks here have a tendency to discount just how bad it can be elsewhere. But we have a daughter who’s a doctor at a major medical center in Virginia, and grown children in New York City, Boston, and the Washington, D.C., area, and everything they’re telling me is a far different story than what’s happening in Cedar City.

While we’d like to believe what we see is what the rest of the country is like…sometimes, it just isn’t, and, if you don’t see this, you should consider giving more credence to those media reports you distrust than to your own pleasant surroundings.

Everyone likes “free stuff,” especially if they don’t consider the costs of those “free” goodies, but there’s a cost to the “free” stuff. Facebook is “free” to users, but, as one tech type put it, that’s because the users are really the product. This was brought home to me personally when I installed AdBlock on my computer, and suddenly I couldn’t get access to all sorts of excerpts from publications unless I whitelisted them or removed AdBlock. Mostly, I just don’t bother.

But there are other kinds of “free stuff” that aren’t free, and were never meant to be considered as such, that are targeted by the political extremists on both sides. Right wingers have a tendency to classify social programs such as SNAP ((once known as Food Stamps), Medicaid, and AFDC as free stuff for the poor. These programs are generally considered a social and practical necessity, even though some participants continually abuse the system. The reason why politicians keep funding the system is because of something no one really wants to admit publicly – that without funneling aid to families a lot of children would suffer, if not die, of starvation. So far, no government anywhere has figured out a practical and legal way to feed needy children without also feeding a certain proportion of not so needy adults – and sometimes adults who could work but who’ve discovered that welfare pays better than the jobs they could get paid to do.

What’s more often neglected in the criticism of “free stuff” are other services paid for by taxes where the users of those services get such services at well below costs. Some of those I’ve mentioned before, such as the massive subsidies received from the U.S. Postal Service by charitable or non-profit organizations who can send me a letter for roughly 11 cents, while it costs “regular” users 50 cents… or the massive subsidies for bulk rate mail – and don’t send me refutations unless you include the infrastructure costs as well [because those aren’t included in USPS cost justifications, and using marginal costs is a scam when more than eighty percent of your volume by weight is from discounted service].

For the past several years, banks have been able to borrow money from the Fed almost “free” because of federal fiscal and monetary policies, and that means anyone with a savings account has been screwed, which also resulted in investors trying to get better returns in the stock market, which has caused all sorts of other problems. But I don’t see the financial community complaining about the ills of “free money.”

Nor do I see corporations with healthy profits who pay no federal taxes complaining about that sort of “free money” or wealthy individuals who pocket “free money” in the form of lower taxes because of exemptions or loopholes that the majority of Americans can’t use because they don’t have the assets to do so.

So… when you complain about “free” stuff, make sure you include the free or discounted goodies you get.

Social Darwinism comes in many flavors, most of which emerged in the United Kingdom, North America, and Western Europe in the 1870s, and which attempted to apply biological concepts of natural selection and survival of the fittest to sociology and politics. Basically, Social Darwinists argue that the strong should see their wealth and power increase while the weak should see their wealth and power decrease.

The considerable flaws involved with applying natural selection to explain individuals’ success or failure in society have been documented in depth, but there’s one aspect of the issue that troubles me, and that’s the definition of “the fittest.” Is fitness determined by physical strength, by intelligence, by biological resilience… or by something else?

What if, in terms, of natural selection, fitness isn’t intelligence or strength? What if it’s something we’ve not considered before? And what if it applies to politics?

Over the past seventy years, the voters of the United States have historically been wary of overtly intelligent Presidential candidates, and those of high intelligence who have been elected have, for the most part, gone out of their way to downplay that intelligence. Then, there have been presidents who obviously had no need to downplay their intelligence.

When a President asks seriously about whether there are any benefits to ingesting strong disinfectants – any later fallacious claims that he was baiting the press notwithstanding – this certainly isn’t a display of intelligence. Nor is contradicting himself day after day, or denying he said something that millions have heard and that is recorded world-wide. Nor is asserting “facts” that have consistently proven to be untrue.

So what factor does Trump have that overshadows his considerable and obvious faults? What factor is so great that even when he’s botched the handling of the coronavirus crisis that forty percent of the U.S. population still supports him?

Could it just be that the characteristic that spells out fitness in natural selection, or political natural selection, is simply the ability to convince people of the most improbable and factually incorrect explanations of anything?

That would certainly explain Trump… although it doesn’t say much for forty percent of the American people.

Conservatives tend to be fond of the myth of rugged individualism. So does a certain small subset of fantasy and science fiction writers. The irony of “rugged individualism” is that no individual will long survive out in the wilderness or in the middle of his or her thousand acre spread without the fruits and results of human concentration and cooperative effort.

Even the frontiersmen and mountain men required the products of a citified culture. They didn’t personally forge their rifles, piece by piece, or tan the leather and carve the frame for their saddles, or cast the bullets for their weapons (well, perhaps a few did). They didn’t forge their axes and knives. And against all that city-built technology, agrarian and indigenous cultures didn’t stand a chance.

It’s no accident that the far less cooperative Neanderthals died out. Despite having what appears to have been equivalent cognitive skills and greater physical strength; they couldn’t compete and survive against the fractious but cooperative homo sapiens. Economists and historians have long known that innovations come out of cities and communities, not from lone individuals or single families living alone. Even with modern technology, single family farms struggle…and they certainly don’t create and mass-produce new technologies.

The tiger is the most fearsome of solo predators, certainly an animal analogue to the mythical rugged individualist. A single unarmed human being doesn’t stand a chance against a tiger, but tigers are an endangered species.

And for all the exaltation of great inventors and creators, the vast majority of them were actually only improving earlier and cruder devices in a form of competitive cooperation, hoping to make a better device, and thereby a better life. Sometimes, they even stole each other’s ideas, but they couldn’t have done that without a community from which to steal. History shows that societies that reward cooperative-creators, and, yes, sometimes idea/device thieves, tend to progress and thrive.

So why is there all the nostalgia, all the conservative support, for rugged individualism? Why do so many support the myth of rugged individualism? Why all the ridicule for the idea that it takes a village to raise a child? Why doesn’t anyone champion productive, if competitive, cooperation? Why do so many Americans revere “rugged individualism” and reject the idea of a competitive (if sometimes cut-throat) but cooperative society when that society has created so much for so many?

Here in Utah, as well as elsewhere in the United States, we’ve had demonstrations by generally right-wing individuals, who are demanding that government open up the economy – immediately!

These individuals claim that the government has taken away their freedom to work, to go to school, to travel, to shop, and to do as they please. And they’re correct. Government has largely limited those rights… for a reason. They also cite that our laws allow people to smoke and drink, and those practices kill over half a million people annually. Obesity kills even more, but, with the exception of second-hand smoke [which is now why most public places forbid smoking], all of these practices primarily harm the individual indulging in them. Rights are what we’re allowed to do that won’t harm other people, but laws are restrictions on those rights designed to protect people from harm caused by other people.

And that’s why there are lock-downs all over the country. People walking around with the virus, knowingly or unknowingly, can kill other people. Coronavirus is one of the more contagious viruses to appear. And it kills lots of people. Individuals can spread it for days, if not weeks, without even knowing that they’re doing it. At present, there’s no effective treatment for it, and no vaccine against it. The fatality rate ranges from slightly less than one percent to well over five percent, depending on the age and health of those infected. In just the United States, in less than one month, the coronavirus has killed over 40,000 people – and that’s with social distancing and lock-downs.

In major cities, bodies are piling up faster than they can be buried. Police, firefighters, medical response personnel, doctors, and nurses continue to get sick. Virtually every reputable scientist who’s looked at the data shudders at the idea of “opening up the economy” any time soon.

There’s little doubt that an “open-economy” right now would be a medical disaster. As I write this, the official count of U.S. coronavirus cases is approaching 800,000 known cases, with over 42,000 known deaths. That’s a fatality rate of five percent, or one in twenty people, but, of course, there are likely more than a hundred thousand, if not more, minor cases of coronavirus that aren’t being reported or included. But there are more than 52 million Americans over age 60, and the mortality rate for this age group from coronavirus is running over 5%, as it also appears to be for minorities and those with certain medical conditions.

But what the “freedom lovers” don’t seem to understand is that even a million cases of the coronavirus would only account for 1/3 of one percent of the population. Because this is an extremely contagious virus, if social distancing and lock-downs are abandoned too soon, the virus will definitely reach more than one third of one percent of the population.

Let’s be really conservative and say it that with “immediate freedom,” the coronavirus reaches only 17 million people – five percent of the U.S. population and as half as many people as the seasonal flu infects. Even if fatality rate is “only” two percent, the death toll would be 340,000 people, but given the number of minorities and people over 60, the fatality rate is unlikely to be as low as two percent.

So… the cost of the “immediate freedom” these demonstrators demand would likely start at 340,000 deaths, and require medical care for several million Americans. If the coronavirus really got out of control and infected a quarter of the U.S. population, the death toll would be well over a million, and the U.S. public health system can’t handle anywhere near those numbers… or bodies.

Now… these protestors claim that they just want freedom where there aren’t many known cases. Great. That’s just fine for a month or two… until the contagion flares up in dozens of hotspots… and we have to start all over again.

Then, there’s the basic moral question – should these demonstrators be granted “rights” that can and will kill and or hospitalize hundreds of thousands of Americans, if not more? And if they are, shouldn’t they also be held legally responsible for the deaths they cause?

I know more than a few successful people who are where they are because of privilege of some degree… and who would violently dispute the point. In fact, when I made the point to two of them, to one semi-diplomatically, and to the other more directly, one dismissed the possibility as impossible, given her humble background, and lack of formal education, and in the case of the other it strained the relationship for months. Now these two, as well as many other privileged people [both male and female] I know are basically good people, hard-working and successful people, but they deny that their position in education, business, or society had anything to do with success.

That is, of course, complete and utter bullshit.

Position influences everything. That’s not to say that a few people don’t transcend where they’re born and the economic circumstances into which they’re born – but statistics show that’s at most a handful out of every thousand for those unfortunate to be born into the poorest of circumstances. The odds improve, of course, with the greater degree of affluence and education into which a child is born. Again… this isn’t phony social science. There are very hard numbers behind that point.

Now… I’m not saying that the acquaintance who got so upset with me didn’t work his ass off for years to get to where he eventfully became the head of a small but significant music industry company. He never went to college [but had the advantage of a prestigious prep school education] and started out in the mail room. I have no doubt that he was allowed that mail room job because his father was extremely well known. That was all he needed. But it was in fact a form of privilege.

There’s no doubt in my mind [now] that I got my first paid political job because the man who hired me knew my father and respected him – even though I had no idea at all that they knew each other until several months later, and the man who hired me never talked to my father about it until years later. I thought I’d been hired because of the effective volunteer political organization I’d done and because I’d written some decent briefing papers and speech drafts… and because I was young, desperate… and cheap. And I was good at it, better than most for twenty years… but a certain privileged connection sure as hell didn’t hurt, even if I didn’t know about it at the time.

And who you know, and those who know about you – the connections – are indeed a form of privilege. That’s why networking works. It also might be why all of the current U.S. Supreme Court Justices come from Ivy League law schools.

I’m NOT saying that all success is due to privilege, because it’s not. Privilege often gives one a chance to be interviewed or hired for a temporary position, even a menial one, that can lead to success. I never thought about “privilege” when I suggested that I could handle a paid position on a campaign [and it was a VERY low-paid position]. I just needed a job, badly. If I’d failed, someone else would have been hired to replace me and would have had a chance at the permanent job I was offered in Washington, because the candidate, and later Congressman, I worked for was strictly a pragmatist.

So…where one lives, goes to school, and who one knows can offer certain advantages – or none whatsoever. Yet so many successful people I’ve known have tended to ignore the circumstances from which they benefitted. Some will recognize people who’ve been influential in their lives… and some not even them.

And this cluelessness about unconscious privilege is a real factor in why intelligent, hard-working, and often brilliant minorities just might tend to get angry at clueless successful, “self-made” white males who talk about their struggles to succeed.

The American Know Nothing Party, which began as an anti-Catholic, anti-immigration, and xenophobic, (and also violently anti-elite) secret society, later formally known as the Native American Party and the American Party, dominated large sectors of U.S. politics in the early to mid-1850s. Its supporters were eerily similar to those Republicans who currently support President Trump, in that their strong beliefs were anchored in values often totally at variance with science.

Over the past three years as President, Trump has exhibited no real understanding of science, using or discarding it at will. He also has demonstrated a total lack of mathematical or statistical ability or comprehension, substituting his “hunches” for judgements based on science and calculations. So far, he’s been wrong most of the time. When he has been correct, and there are times when this has been so, it’s usually been in the political arena [excepting with Putin], not in science, technical expertise, or statistics. The problem isn’t just that he’s weak in those areas, but that he refuses to admit any weaknesses in any of those areas, and he is reluctant, at best, to defer to experts, or, at worst, intransigent and insists on shouting down and denying anyone who questions his failures.

Lately, he’s been insisting that he, as President, has “ultimate authority” over state governors, which he doesn’t. The Constitution reserves a great many powers to the states and their governors, and even extreme Conservatives are balking at this assertion.

What’s even more astounding is that, only a week or so ago, he was insisting that he couldn’t order the governors to issue stay-in-place orders. This is a President who not only knows less and less, but can’t even remember what he said yesterday… or worse, holds the American people in such contempt that he feels he can say anything and never be held accountable.

Remember, he did once say something to the effect that he could shoot someone in plain sight and get away with it. You thought he was merely exaggerating?

Yet the Republicans in Congress blindly back their President Know-Nothing as if it were normal for a chief executive rail on for hours because the media caught him denying statements he made previously… and not just one or two, but scores. Tens of thousands of Americans are dying, many unnecessarily, because, first, he, as chief executive, abolished the pandemic task force. Then, second, in early January, he declared that coronavirus cases would be down to zero in weeks and did essentially nothing for two months. And he throws temper tantrum after temper tantrum on national news when questioned about his continued failures.

This is normal? And we’re accepting it?