Persons – Page 6 – GEORGE ROTHERT

Deja Vu All Over Again

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

Let’s take a ride in the Wayback Machine. Forty years ago, we saw incessant news reports about Mt. St. Helens, kind of like the non-stop COVID-19 reporting today. For months the mountain had been bulging, and expelling steam and ash almost daily.

Scientists said there was imminent danger and the area should be closed off. Washington-state authorities agreed and put a quarantine in effect, blocking access into the danger zone. Right away noise began about infringing on people’s constitutional rights and the damage to tourism and the economy. The mountain’s burping was the new normal and nothing more was going to happen. (This was the era before patriots paraded in camouflage outfits and brandished combat weaponry.)

Interviews with one crusty old-timer, named Harry Truman, who lived on the mountain and said he wasn’t leaving, were a regular feature on the nightly news. According to Truman’s niece, “He thought (the volcano) would just go straight up and that somebody would be able to come and get him.”

Pressure to reopen the area increased. Officials met to discuss what action to take. Scientists expected reaffirmation of the closures and were surprised that the discussions were about plans to reopen the area. Five days later Mt. St. Helens blew. Mr. Truman and fifty-six other people died. Most died from thermal burns or inhaling hot ash. According to some estimates the death toll may be higher, that many unknown victims were swallowed by the debris flow.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Vote-by-Mail Fraud

“… you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

Twenty or so years ago, in California, I signed up for permanent absentee voting. A few years ago I moved back to Oregon, where all voting is by mail and has been since 1998. The Elections Division notify me by e-mail and text message when my ballot has been sent to me and again when they have received and counted my vote. This year, I even received a postage-paid return envelope with my ballot.

In these days of COVID-19 upheaval, the governor of California issued an executive order that all registered voters be sent mail-in ballots for the November election. The state will still have in-person polling places open, although they expect difficulty in staffing. The White House is outraged, stating that people cheat with vote-by-mail ballots and that it is a “corrupt” practice. The president’s re-election campaign sputtered that it is a “wide open opportunity for fraud.” A bedrock Republican principle is that voting fraud by Democrats is rampant. (As with the Republican belief that lowering taxes increases revenue, just because it’s never happened doesn’t mean it’s not true.)

The current occupant of the White House voted by mail. So did Melania. (Hers was not counted in the last election. She mailed it late.) The vice-president votes by mail. (Pence listed his address as the governor’s residence, where he hasn’t lived since 2017.) Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross mails in his ballots. Economic advisor Larry Kudlow and HHS Secretary Alex Azar also vote by mail. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump cast their ballots by mail, too.
What’s fine for them is not OK for us. The problem is that the more people who vote, the worse Republicans do. In an inadvertent moment of candor the coWH said of mail-in voting, “… that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

In actual fact, the only documented case of organized voter fraud was in North Carolina, committed by — surprise! — Republicans. (Technically, it was election fraud.) The state had to have a do-over election for the Ninth Congressional District.

For the upcoming, and all future elections, Republicans will step up their efforts to make it more difficult for citizens to vote.

The First Coronavirus Bankruptcy

J. Crew, the purveyor of preppy fashions and a stalwart in malls around the country, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. (Luxury vendor Neiman Marcus filed for bankruptcy protection a few days later. J.C. Penney’s bankruptcy is expected any day.)

News headlines announce that J. Crew is the first major retailer to fall as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Health experts tell us that those most susceptible to the virus are those with underlying conditions: lung problems, including asthma, heart disease, diabetes and obesity, weakened immune systems. The same is true of businesses. J. Crew carried $1.7 billion debt from a leveraged buyout by private-equity firms.

Private-equity firms are in the business of buying businesses and selling them. They typically have no interest in actually running the business other than what can be done quickly to attract buyers. A leveraged buyout is a purchase of a company with borrowed, i.e. other people’s, money. The purchased company is burdened with debt. To service the debt, new owners usually take measures to make the company operate more efficiently, which usually involves employee layoffs and/or selling off pieces of the business. With every deal made, whether it’s good or bad, the dealmakers pay themselves outsized fees for their genius in dealmaking.

Add to this the relentless long-term pressure from on-line retailers, even for luxury goods. The coronavirus was the final nudge, not the root cause. And somebody always makes money with a bankruptcy; ask the current resident of the White House.

For a fun dive into the leveraged-buyout frenzy of the 1980s, read “Barbarians at the Gate.” It tells the tale of the R.J. Reynolds/Nabisco fiasco and the parasites it attracted. HBO made a movie of it in1993 with James Garner.

Baseball Fun with the Mavericks

Portland’s professional baseball club was a charter member of the Pacific Coast League, formed in 1903. They became the “Beavers” in 1906.

My brother Mark and I would go to the immense — for minor-league — Multnomah Stadium. We paid 25¢ — I think it was 25¢ — to sit on a wooden bench in the bleachers. We were always hopeful, but never did catch a home-run ball. Sometimes we’d go late; the gates were opened up after the sixth inning, so we could sit in the grandstand for free..
The Beavers team was a fixture in the Class-AAA PCL until 1972, when the owner moved them to Spokane. The following year, a new team, the Mavericks, took their place in the stadium and in the hearts of Portland baseball fans .

Television actor and one-time minor-league ballplayer Bing Russell formed the team and joined the Single-A Northwest League. The Mavericks were the league’s only independent team, having no affiliation with a Major-League club. Instead, the Mavericks held tryouts open to all comers. The roster was a collection of has-beens looking to have one more season and never-weres. Bing’s actor son Kurt was on the opening-day roster. Former major-league pitcher Jim Bouton, by then more famous — or infamous — for his tell-all memoir “Ball Four”, joined the team for the 1975 season.

The Mavericks were known and became beloved for their free-spirited, nothing-to-lose approach to the game. They posted a winning record every year and finished first in their division four out their five seasons. They also attracted greater attendance to games than the Beavers did. The Mavericks never won the Northwest League title, but they came so close in 1977, their last season, that Bing Russell ordered championship rings. According to Bouton, the rings were fitted for their middle fingers.

The Class-A Mavericks lasted until a new Portland Beavers club joined the expanded Triple-A Pacific Coast League in 1978. The PCL offered Russell $26,000 to shut down the Mavericks. His response was that the offer was missing a zero. The $206,000 buyout was the highest ever for a minor-league franchise.

Some evenings after work I’d go with my wife and two daughters to the then-renamed Civic Stadium to watch the Beavers play. We brought sandwiches (made by the girls’ mother) and purchased beverages and snacks at the park. We could always find good general-admission seats. Bonnie and Maureen grew up to become hard-core hockey fans. The Beavers left for good in 2010 when Civic Stadium was renovated into a soccer-only facility.

In 2014, Netflix produced a documentary film about the Portland Mavericks. “The Battered Bastards of Baseball” is available to stream. Give yourself some baseball fun in these social-distancing times.

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.