Places – Page 9 – GEORGE ROTHERT

Earth and the Pandemic

Planet Earth is indifferent to the covid-19 breakout. Wildlife has noticed, though. After many generations of human development pushing animals further into the brush, the pandemic-caused sheltering-in-place is giving the animals a chance to creep back into territory that once was theirs. Coyotes have been spotted checking out the Golden Gate Bridge and wandering along Chicago’s storied Michigan Avenue. Monkeys in India have entered homes, opening refrigerators to look for food.

Griffith Park, home of the Los Angeles Zoo, now has opossums, skunks, deer, bobcats and even a lone mountain lion running around unmolested outside its gates. The absence of automobile traffic has reduced the squirrel, rabbit, snake and toad roadkill in the park to near zero.

The world-wide reduction in vehicle use and factory production has cleared the skies. Air pollution has reduced by half in Paris and a third in Los Angeles. Carbon dioxide levels are still rising, but not as fast as last year. If you believe in unicorns, you may even fantasize a world not being suffocated by burning fossil fuels.

Wild animals aren’t alone in taking advantage of now-deserted streets. Police are seeing an increase in drivers traveling at extremely high speeds. A Washington state trooper ticketed one at 122 mph and one at 133 mph in a day. “So driving 127 mph or 120 mph in a 60 mph zone will definitely get our attention and we will be able to introduce ourselves to you!”

And in Orange County California, city officials, fed up with skateboarders ignoring the “Closed” signs at the skateboard park, dumped thirty-seven tons of sand into the troughs. It worked. Skateboarders were unable to use it. So dirt bikers showed up to replace skateboards with motorcycles.

The Potato vs. the Economy

Ireland became part of the United Kingdom in 1801, but as a conquered country. The population was eighty-percent Catholic, the majority living in poverty. Until 1829, Catholics were not allowed to own property. Most of the land was owned by English, many of them absentee landlords. Their agents managed the properties and collected rent with almost no regulatory oversight. Most Irish farmers were tenants “at will,” subject to eviction at the whims of the owner or the owners’ agents. The farmers produced peas, beans, honey, rabbits and fish, most of it exported. The tenants themselves subsisted primarily on potatoes and water.

Epidemics Through the Ages

1157 B.C. — Ramses V, Egyptian ruler, dies, apparently from smallpox.
430 B.C. — Disease, probably typhoid fever, after devastating Libya, Ethiopia and Egypt, reaches Athens while Spartan legions were laying siege to the city. Two-thirds of Athenians died, leading to Sparta’s victory.
162 — Roman legions are infected with smallpox while doing battle with Parthians, near present-day Baghdad.
541 — “Pestilence,” aka Bubonic Plague, breaks out in northeastern Egypt.
542 — Pestilence reaches Constantinople, capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, becomes known as “Justinianic plague” after emperor Justinian.
543 — Justinianic plague arrives in the city of Rome; Britain in 544; Constantinople again in 558; Constantinople a third time in 573; Constantinople yet again in 586.
1347 — “The Black Death” lays waste to a third of Europe’s population in four years.
1518 — Smallpox arrives in Hispaniola, probably brought by Spanish, the first “virgin soil epidemic” in the Americas. The disease takes out a third of the indigenous population, easing the way for Spanish conquest.
1606 — The Globe and other London theatres close because of Bubonic Plague. Performances of Shakespeare’s King Lear and Macbeth are postponed. (The Globe burned down in 1613, when a stage-prop cannon misfired. The theatre was rebuilt and reopened a year later. Puritans closed it for good in 1642, because that’s what puritans do.)
1817 — Cholera breaks out in India, near Calcutta. It spreads east to what is now Thailand and west to Oman and as far down as Zanzibar.
1829 — Cholera again. India to Russia, through Europe and the United States.
1916 — The first epidemic of Polio, a disease around for most of human history, breaks out in Brooklyn, New York and spreads from there. New York City suffered two-thousand deaths. Six-thousand died in the U.S. The disease re-emerges in the 1940s and 1950s.
1918 — So-called “Spanish flu” emerges suddenly in U.S., then Europe, then everywhere. Fifty-million people died during the next-year.
1952 — Salk vaccine begins the eradication of Polio. Eight years later, the Sabin oral vaccine virtually wipes out Polio.
1958 — Vaccine begins eradicating smallpox. More than a billion persons died from the disease over the centuries.
2010 — Cholera breaks out in Haiti. Ten months after an earthquake killed 200,000 Haitians, displaced a million more and damaged sanitation infrastructure, sewage dumped in a river by a U.N. peacekeeping base started the epidemic. The infection struck 665,000 persons, 8,183 of whom died.

Click here for a pandemic overview from Elizabeth Kolbert.

Vignettes from the Pandemic

Palm Springs is overrun with rental cars that have nowhere to go. With the California governor’s shelter-in-place order in effect, tourists and snowbirds have headed home. Car rental companies do not have enough space to park all the returned vehicles. Automobiles line Kirk Douglas Way near Palm Springs International Airport. More are parked on Gene Autry Trail next to the Palm Springs Air Museum. The total rental fleet numbers about seven-thousand, most of them typically in use. Nearly all of them are now un-rented, many more than rental companies have space for.

The Group of Seven nations rejected a draft presented by U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo using the term “Wuhan virus” in a joint statement about Covid-19. Pompeo also wanted the statement to assign blame to China for the virus’s spread. At a virtual meeting, the G7 voted six to one against issuing a joint statement. Instead, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Canada opted to issue their own statements.

A Pennsylvania women is undergoing mental health evaluation after being arrested for purposely coughing on produce, meat and baked goods in a grocery store. The Hanover Township Police Department plans to file criminal charges. Gerrity’s Supermarket, a small family-owned chain, said that it threw out $35,000 of food and stripped bare, sanitized and disinfected all the areas of the store that the woman visited. In New Jersey, a man was charged with harassment, obstructing law enforcement and making terroristic threats after intentionally coughing on a Wegmans grocery employee when she asked him to not stand so close to a display of prepared foods. He told the employee he was infected with coronavirus.

The Redding California Public Works Department dispatched employees on an urgent mission to remedy a backed-up sewer lift station. The clog put the station in imminent danger of a sewage spill onto city streets and overflow inside residents’ homes. The cause? Shredded t-shirts that had apparently been used in lieu of toilet paper. The next day city employees distributed door hangers throughout the neighborhood emphasizing that that nothing but toilet paper should be flushed. “Anything and everything is flushable, but it doesn’t mean that it’s OK to put it down the toilet.”

Annals of Secession

The appeal of seceding from the Union did not die at the end of the Civil War. (Note: the Confederacy lost.) Secession fantasies of leaving the U.S. to form a new country have morphed into schemes to form a new state — the “State of Jefferson” has been agitating for that since 1940 — or separating from one state and joining with another.

The latest is “Greater Idaho.” Denizens in the politically-conservative rural parts of Oregon are gathering petitions to remove themselves from the tyranny of the state’s Democrat-majority government and join with deep-red Idaho. Part of eastern Washington and northern California have joined eighteen Oregon counties in the effort. The proposed boundary for Oregon would be the northwest corner of the state: Portland to Eugene and from the Pacific coast to the east side of the Cascade mountains. Bend, apparently infested with Californians beyond redemption, would remain within Oregon, as would most of the people and economic activity.

The state of Washington suffers the same rural-urban resentment. Not long ago, aggrieved non-Seattle-area voters managed to get Initiative 976 on the ballot. If passed, it would cut funding for voter-approved transit projects in King County (Seattle). The irony is that King County taxpayers subsidize the rest of the state. A recent report documented that sixty-three cents of every tax dollar collected in King County is spent elsewhere. As a Seattle Times columnist put it, “The entire state is mooching off King County, not the other way around.”

On the Federal level, more tax money flows into red states than they pay; blue states pay more tax than comes back into their states. Possibly more lately since the recent tax-cut legislation included provisions inflicting pain on states whose voters preferred Hillary to the current occupant of the White House.

Which brings us to the Cascadia Independence Movement. Various groups propose secession from two countries, the United Staes and Canada, to form the Republic of Cascadia. The new nation, comprising British Columbia, Washington, Oregon and maybe northern California — possibly some of Idaho and Alberta — is based on the idea that as its own sovereign state this bioregion and economic sector would do better on its own. The eastern border might be somewhere between the Cascades and the Continental Divide.

The urban-rural, conservative-progressive, subsidizer-moocher, gun lover-weapons regulator dichotomies are not directly addressed in the various manifestos, though.

Americans Respond to Crisis

Sure, store shelves have been denuded by panic buying of toilet paper, bottled water and pasta.

But in the U.S. anxious citizens are lining up to buy guns and ammunition because… well, because this is America. (News reports have not noted any concurrent surge of people signing up to join a well-regulated militia.)