500,000

Last spring, at the start of the covid lockdowns, I ordered some books from Capitol Hill Books, a used bookstore that was offering mystery boxes where you give them a topic or some authors you like along with a budget and they put together a stack of books for you. I asked them to send me books on pandemics throughout history, because I believe that's what an educated person does when she wants to understand the world around her rather than flipping on cable news or reading garbage on the internet. They sent me books about the Spanish Flu pandemic, smallpox, a history of plagues and people, and two works of fiction that are based on real events. 

I started right in on The Great Influenza by John M. Barry and Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks. The Great Influenza, about the 1917-1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, was a real eye opener. Fights over masks, conservatives crying about the economy, and conspiracy theories abounded. Same bullshit we're dealing with now. We may top the 600,000 Spanish Flu death total if we don't get enough people vaccinated and these more contagious strains take over.

Year of Wonders was a fictional account about the real plague in England in 1666. A small town becomes infected with plague and the town's preacher convinced the town to quarantine itself so other towns wouldn't contract the plague. The quarantine worked, but people fought it all the way, just as they fight covid lockdown measures now. One woman was even murdered by a mob for being a "witch" who caused the plague.

I started Alexandro Manzoni's The Betrothed next. This story has it all - police brutality, corrupt and inept politicians, misogyny and piggish men, the rich oppressing the poor, mob riots, religious nonsense, and of course, plague. The year is 1629, but nothing, it seems, has changed today. The setting is Milan and the surrounding areas of what would become Italy, the country in Europe where covid hit the hardest, partly because people wouldn't follow lockdown measures.

The main characters of The Betrothed are a poor couple who just want to get married, but a rich feudal lord sees the wannabe bride one day and decides he will take her for himself. He threatens the priest who is supposed to marry the couple the next day, so they are unable to get married. Then they have to flee their town because his private police force is after them. They split up for safety - he is supposed to hide out in a monastery and she in an abbey. She does get to the abbey, where a nun murders a guy for sexually harassing her. The rich guy convinces another rich guy to help him kidnap her from the abbey and he agrees, but when his own private police force brings her to his castle, he has a spiritual crisis, goes to the archbishop who happens to be visiting the town, and has a religious conversion that turns him from one of the most evil and feared men in the land to one of the most beloved. He releases the girl and arranges for her protection.

The would be groom gets caught up in the mob riots in Milan before he gets to the monastery and makes a series of mostly drunken speeches that suggest the poor should rise up against their oppressors. He is arrested for incitement but manages to escape before being executed, and is on the run.

Then comes the plague. I have 120 pages left of the book, but I've slowed way down because the parallels to covid in America are so striking that I keep stopping to reread passages and think about how so little has changed in four hundred years despite the discovery of germs, DNA and RNA, vaccines, evolution, air currents, and so many other things we take for granted about knowing now.

In The Betrothed, the commission of public health of Milan can be compared to the CDC today. Its members consisted of three administrators and two doctors. Alessandro Tadino was one of these doctors. Tadino, whose full report of the plague still exists, repeatedly pointed out the pressing need to adopt public health measures to prevent plague from spreading, but Governor Don Gonzalo and his successor Ambrogio Spinola ignored him.

Tadino is Fauci. Gonzalo and Spinola are every Republican governor in the US except Hogan and a handful of others.

Chapters 31 and 32 are largely historical descriptions of what actually happened and the characters don't appear at all.

An excerpt:

"...reports came in from Lecco itself and from Bellano; and then the commissioners did take a decision, though only to send off a representative, who was to pick up a doctor at Como and go on with him to visit the places indicated. But both of them, to quote Tadino, either through Ignorance of some other Cause, did let an ignorant Barber of Bellano to persuade them that such maladies were not the Plague, but rather in some places the normal result of autumnal vapours from the marshes..."

"Autumnal vapors!" 

"It's just the flu!"

As the news of more and more deaths came in, Tadino himself went out to investigate and saw that proofs that it was plague were everywhere. Tadino wanted 

"to draw up the Orders to exclude from the City all those who came from Places where the Contagion had manifested itself..."

He wanted to close the borders. He told the governor as much, the second time he had tried to persuade the governor to do something to prevent the plague from spreading. But the governor was preoccupied with other things. Then, a couple of days later, he issued a proclamation, but not to close the borders or order a quarantine. No, instead, he held a superspreader event, a birthday party for Prince Carlos, the heir to the throne of King Philip IV, and the whole city gathered to celebrate.

Until that gathering, plague was mostly affecting the outside villages and Milan itself had relatively few cases. So the Milanese mocked the idea that plague was there.

"Anyone who even mentioned the word 'plague' was greeted with incredulous mockery or angry contempt. The same disbelief, or rather blind obstinacy, prevailed among the senators, the decurions, and all the magistrates."

"It's a hoax!"

Have you seen the videos of people having absolute meltdowns in grocery stores because they have to wear masks? Have you heard people calling others sheep for wearing masks? Have you seen the governor of South Dakota whining about not getting more covid funds because they don't have high unemployment because she refused to implement lockdowns? (One in 500 South Dakotans are dead because of it, by the way.) Have you heard senators Cruz, Rubio, Hawley, and company mocking lockdowns and demanding businesses remain open?

It's the exact same thing.

"The commission of health begged and pleaded for cooperation, but with little or no result. And in the commission itself far too little sense of urgency was shown. As Tadino several times remarks, and as appears still more clearly from the whole context of his story, it was the two doctors who realized the seriousness and the imminence of the danger, and proceed to stir up their fellow-members, who then had to stir up the other authorities."

It's Fauci! And the non-doctors were political appointees! The political appointees and the politicians wouldn't listen, just like in the damn Trump regime that failed to respond to the pandemic with any sense of urgency or concern and that killed half a million Americans.

"The proclamation restricting entry to the city, which was the subject of a resolution by the commission on 30 October, was not finally drafted until the twenty-third of he following month, and not published until the twenty-ninth. By then the plague had entered Milan."

Jesus. The same thing happened here. The borders weren't closed until it was too late despite months of warning. Months. And then, when the borders were closed, they were done in such a way that it actually spread covid. Remember when they flew that plane from China into San Francisco knowing there were covid passengers on board, and they lost track of them when they got here? And how everyone in Europe was allowed a window of time to get into the US before the flights stopped, so everyone rushed to go at once? 

"The infection that had already been distributed...was reinforced by the fresh infections that kept on coming into Milan because of defects in the regulations, of the slackness with which they were administered, or of the skill with which they were evaded. It wound its way slowly and secretly through the city...now in this quarter and that, the contagion would choose its victim, and someone would die. The rarity of the cases itself diverted most minds from the truth, and progressively strengthened the public's stupid, fatal belief that there was no plague in Milan..."

Then there's this bit:

"The main odium fell on the two doctors - Tadino and Senator Settala, the son of the Chief Physician - and it reached the point where they could not cross the squares of the city without being assailed with curses, or even stones. The situation of those two men during the next few months was certainly strange, and worthy of record, as they saw a terrible catastrophe coming nearer and nearer and did everything they could to avert it; and at the same time encountered obstacles where they looked for help, became the butt of popular indignation and were regarded as enemies of their country..." 

Fauci has been called a traitor by Trump supporters and has received numerous death threats. Fauci is Tadino. Tadino is Fauci. Tadino and Fauci are the doctors of every historical pandemic where the idiot masses refused to accept the reality of disease.

When the deaths became too numerous to pretend the plague didn't exist anymore, these people turned to conspiracy theories. They said foreigners were spreading a poisonous ointment on things to kill people. They called them "anointers." Compare that to people shouting "China virus!" and even believing that the coronvirus was engineered as a bioweapon.

When another gathering spread the disease enough that the poisoned ointment idea was no longer plausible, people changed their conspiracy nonsense to it was a poisonous powder blown into the air by foreigners and evildoers. Even on their deathbeds, people denied they had plague. We've heard countless stories of Americans with covid doing the exact same thing.

In the end, a quarter of the population of Milan died. One in four people. There wasn't a family untouched by death.

They didn't have vaccines back then so we can only imagine what the conspiracy nonsense would have been. We see misinformation about vaccines every damn day. It's the same mentality. Conspiracies, egotism, thinking that you know more than the experts, even despising experts. Half of Americans polled say they won't get the vaccine. The vaccines are working, but people just don't care enough to save lives. It's a dereliction of civic duty as Americans, and it's a moral travesty.

We've lost 500,000 Americans to covid. Half a million human beings, dead because we made the choice to let them die. We have countless historical examples from which we refuse to learn. We have science we choose to ignore. And we have a hell of a lot of sociopaths who just don't give a damn.

On Occupied Capitol Hill

I took the trash bins to the curb and stared at the buzzing sky. The winter clouds are hiding the fact that the days are noticeably lighter now, but they aren't hiding the helicopters. The last time this happened I was in shorts and flip flops, but that time, the threat was the helicopters and the police and petty criminal opportunists. This time, six and a half months later, the threat is from homegrown terrorists, and we have to rely on those choppers and coppers to protect us.

I love living on Capitol Hill. I love telling people I live on Capitol Hill. I hate when "Capitol Hill" is used by the national media and Americans from other parts of the country as a substitute for talking about Congress and the politicians they send here. Now, I have only lived on the Hill for six of my eighteen years in DC, but I don't think I will ever live in another part of DC again. I like going to restaurants and spotting congressional representatives. I love walking past senators on the street and giving dirty looks to the ones I don't like. I live for chatting with journos in bars and staffers in cafes and DNC folks in hardware stores. I even loved the one time I got schooled in a bar by a Republican congressman who actually voted FOR the Affordable Care Act, whom I mistakenly criticized for voting against it.

But those are not common occurrences in quotidian life. What's normal is taking the trash bins to the curb on Sunday nights, going grocery shopping at the Harris Teeter, and saying hello to the neighbors walking their dogs while doing yard work. I love living on Capitol Hill because it is a neighborhood filled with good people, a sense of community, and worldly experience. You wouldn't know normal people live on the Hill by reading national media, however, as they generally ignore the people who live here for the fake glamour of politics. The reality is that Capitol Hill is like a small town, where you run into people you know at Frager's Hardware or Tunnicliff's Tavern or Mangialardo's or the post office, dry cleaners, or city park.

Now our lives are in an upheaval, with a cacophony of surveillance and patrol helicopters roaring overhead, the streets to get most anywhere off the Hill closed, and armed troops filling the pizza joints and burrito shops.

The weak-minded lowlifes of this country mired in the pit of their own mediocrity have turned our nation's capital into a conflict zone.

Anyone who knows me at all knows I have spent much of my adult life obsessed with conflict. From the moment in Luxembourg when the school took us to both the American and German WWII cemeteries to Dr. Haag's classes on the Third Reich and Cold War to the trips to Auschwitz, Dachau, and Theresienstadt to working at the peace and reconciliation center in Ireland and working in human rights and democratic governance in the Middle East to living and working in Beirut, I've been on the periphery of it all. Yet I've never been in it. The first time I went to Belfast was the day the Easter peace treaty was signed, and fortunately, nothing happened. I saw Egyptian soldiers patrolling the streets of Cairo the first time I went to the Middle East, but nothing happened there, either.

In Beirut, there is always the threat of conflict, but while I was there, nothing really happened. There were times of increased tension when the threat of conflict was real, but people went about their daily lives because they had to. I wrote this bit about the threat of renewed conflict nearly ten years ago from today:

A taxi sat parked on the side of a normally busy street in Beirut, one of the common beaten up old Mercedes that have somehow survived as everything in Lebanon has somehow survived. The driver, whose face was as worn out as his car, slumped behind the wheel as he filled the vehicle with cigarette smoke. In the backseat were two women passengers whose worried expressions told more tales than an entire library could ever teach you. The three of them were listening to the Prime Minister's speech on the radio. Further down in desolation, another driver sat with his car door open on a darkened corner, listening intently with a hardened face, a facade, for you could sense the truth of what he felt emanating from deep within him. Shopkeepers had televisions or radios tuned in, and you knew the blue lights glowing from the windows of houses had Hariri's oddly bearded face on TV screens.

The tone of the speech was uncharacteristically defiant as the normally weak leader challenged the militia that now threatens the (relative) stability his country. The pulse of the city itself was uncharacteristically slow. This was not the Beirut that has been featured in the travel sections of Western newspapers so many times over the last two years. No, this was the Beirut of history books.

You really have to be here to understand how it feels - the air, the atmosphere, I don't know how to describe it - but it is like there are supernatural forces at work. The feeling is something deep, like the whole universe, all of existence, all of time and space and history is inside you, and you can look inside the souls of people and see their fear in all its nakedness.

During daylight hours, one doesn't notice there is something dangerously wrong here, for the fruit vendors push their carts and the taxi drivers stand on the corners and the shawarma cooks sell their mouthwatering meat. The coffee shops are filled with studying students and elderly elders and housewives both covered and not, and people buy shoes and clothes and belts and other things they don't really need just as they always would. Incessant car horns, diesel-spewing generators, and construction workers shouting from great heights to the ground below still perform the dissonant symphony known as Beirut.

But with dusk come the demons and the ghouls who have haunted this land for many millennia. The streets have been emptier, never more noticeably than last night as Hariri spoke to put Hezbollah in a position where they'd have to take responsibility for any violence that may occur. And they are responsible. No one else is threatening violence. Everyone else is sick of it, sick, sick, sick. Everyone else wants to live normal lives. Everyone else wants a job, electricity, decent internet, and good schools for their kids. It isn't fair. It isn't fair to the innocent Lebanese who have suffered time and time again for the stupidity of a few.

 

And that's kind of what it feels like to live on Capitol Hill at this moment in time, except we don't have the wisdom of experience or the weathered fear; we have a worry cloaked in naivety and a little of that American arrogance that tells us it can't happen here, really, that last week was just an abberation. We try to reason with ourselves that the threat is exaggerated, but with every bit of news that drips out about what happened last week, our brains tell us that the threat is more serious than we know. We remember all the other times, the bombing in Nashville, Charlottesville, the Rittenhouse murders, cops killing Black Americans, the Pittsburgh synagogue, kids in cages, family separations, Muslim bans, the journalist killings, the explosion of hate crimes, and we know this is already a war they are waging.

I used to describe to people that living in Beirut was like "living IN the news" because of everything that happened in and around it. Well, I am definitely living IN the news again. I see their Jesus signs at their hate rallies and think of Hezbollah, the "party of God." I see their Trump flags and think of Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, whose fat face plasters walls across Lebanon. I see their guns and think of the green rifle on Hezbollah's yellow flag, appropriately colored for their cowardice. I see their homogeneity and I think of the tribalism that defines much of the world in conflict.

So we go about our daily lives on Capitol Hill and the rest of DC hoping that the minor security inconvenience is not for naught, hoping that we can nip this Trump-inspired nazi movement in the bud before it flourishes into a permanent part of the American cultural landscape. We're all losing sleep, though some won't admit it. We tell each other to be safe this week when we're purchasing wares in the local shops or passing by on the sidewalk. We've hung lights and signs in our yards professing our joy that the end of a nightmare could be coming to a close. 

But there is a darkness we just can't shake.

Food 101

 I'll never forget the first time I saw a raw egg on a pizza. 

That wasn't even the most horrifying thing on it. No, my seafood pizza, "fruits de mer," had tentacles and prawns with eyes. I am not sure why I even ordered a seafood pizza, as we had nothing like that back in Ohio, USA, and Ohio does have good pizza. But I was in a small town in Luxembourg, which to a twenty year old Ohioan was exotic, and I wanted to try new things.

The pizza place was called San Marino. My housemates and I went there with our host family in the beginning of our junior year in Luxembourg, the first of many times we would eat a San Marino pizza. Us Miami students must have quadrupled their business that year, the first year the school was located in the town of Differdange. We ate so much pizza from there they created a carryout service just for us. 

Pizza was a good starting point for food exploration. In the Midwest, food was, er, rather unadventurous. An average Midwestern cupboard contained salt, black pepper, cinnamon, something generic called "Italian seasoning," maybe a lemon pepper mix, and a handful of stale spices used once in a new recipe that had most likely not been cooked again. Midwesterners put crumbled potato chips on top of casseroles made with cheese, sour cream, cream cheese, and cheese again, often with canned cream of mushroom soup, and called it cooking. The internet has improved Midwestern fare a great deal, but do a Pinterest search for "casserole" and you will see that they are still massacring tastebuds in droves. My mother did better than most. We always had vegetables and I am grateful for that. She also had spices.

Europe was my first exposure to a different kind of food, however. Suburban southwest Ohio in the eighties had Chinese, Mexican, and Italian, but these were blanded up for the American palate. I was exposed to real Italian food early on in that year in Europe - in actual Italy - and a particular meal in Cinque Terre where I tasted pesto for the first time (in September during real pesto season in the area where pesto was invented) showed me all that food could be. To this day it is still one of the best meals I have ever eaten.

I learned that fresh food is the way food is meant to be eaten. I learned that produce shouldn't be as expensive as it is in the US. I learned that frozen meat is a crime against nature. And I learned to respect cheese as a divine gift and not something to smother casseroles with. 

It would be some years before I would cook on my own. I learned about Arab food while studying Arabic in Monterey, CA, but I only ate it, never cooked it. A friend of mine I met there and with whom I lived when I moved to DC taught me about Indian spices. I had never heard of such wonders as cardamom, turmeric, garam masala, corriander, and fenugreek. Still I did not cook.

Then I moved to a house with him and started a garden. It was a small Italian herb garden with a couple of tomato plants, though I struggle to remember exactly what I grew. I know basil and oregano were involved. That's when I started to cook. I had to learn the basics. I had never cooked fresh broccoli. I didn't know how long chicken should cook. I didn't know what a dry rub was. I couldn't identify ginger in a grocery store. Stir fries and soups were easy enough. I made my first Thanksgiving dinner there, and the turkey turned out perfectly. I made my first homemade tomato sauce, too. I had no idea what I was doing, but it seemed to be working. I discovered I had a knack for flavors.

Then came a series of life upheavals - a mouse problem in the house after the pipes froze and exploded, depression, being passed over for a promotion, going to Eastern Europe for three months, unemployment, the Obama campaign, more unemployment. Then I got a job with a Lebanese organization, which changed everything. Living in Beirut exposed me to the best food on the planet and a people who appreciate it. Here is where I would learn that food is a lifestyle, an art, a spiritual conquest.

I grew tomatoes, peppers, and herbs at my next place. I began to collect spices. My life was still in upheaval, as in only three years I went through three jobs, a lot of it due to the Bush recession and budget cuts. The house became a nightmare of pestilence of all kinds, including bedbugs, mice, and a slumlord who stole my tomatoes and peppers. But after all that, a miracle. A recruiter called me out of the blue, and six years later, I am still with the company and am living in a place with enough space for a decent sized garden, where I grow a dozen herbs, tomatoes, peppers, all kinds of greens, potatoes, strawberries, carrots, melons, cucumbers, and whatever else I can fit into the plot. Gardening is the bulk of my free time. I am motivated to provide something nice for my neighbors to look at while also cooking food that I grow myself. The fulfillment you get when eating something you have grown is fantastic.

I have a whole kitchen wall of spices these days and create my own recipes, but I am still learning to cook. Once you stop learning, you probably start making casseroles filled with dairy fats and cans of creamed salt. I'm still trying to get timing down. I still can't poach an egg. My obsession is flavors and the weirder it sounds, the more it is a challenge I want to tackle. I make excellent chili but recently I thought, what if chili, except with shrimp, and what if you cook the chili with the juice of a whole lime, and it was delicious. I put cayenne in fruity drinks and sauces because the universe made them go together. I grind my own spice mixtures in my "kitchen lab" and name them political things like "Rosemary's Babygate" and "Ruth Bader Ginger" because I live and grow things on Capitol Hill. I buy most produce from the local farmers market and use the local butcher and fishmonger when I can. I never follow the recipe if I am using one and I try new and weird things as a rule. 

Still, I would never put a raw egg on pizza.

Goals

I made a list.

Usually I think lists at the new year are pointless. We all say this is the year I will do this or that and none of us ever really does it. We lose steam around the end of January and by spring we have forgotten what we were committed to do.

This year is truly different, though, because of the nature of our 2020. We've had ten months to reflect upon our lives without the usual distractions, and we're going to have another four or five months to continue that reflection under the same circumstances, and that is best case scenario. Many Americans have realized that the things they thought were so important - like sports - really aren't, that maybe civic engagement matters. I want to believe they've realized that, anyway. I'll refrain from haranguing the MAGA crowd right now; it seems they have not only learned nothing, but they've actively fought against learning anything at all.

This year, having nowhere to go forced me to confront my neglect of the many interests I have. Until countries closed their borders to Americans, my life revolved around the one or two trips abroad I got to take each of the last six or seven years. When I wasn't planning the trips or experiencing the trips or looking at my photographs from the trips, I was dreaming of the trips. Perhaps the most productive thing I have done in my personal time is my garden, which is a kind of tiny park my neighbors love. I am motivated by them as much as I am by the plants themselves. The rest of my time I spent watching baseball or hockey and drinking beer in bars and wasting time on social media.

One day you wake up and you realize that half your life is over and you wonder what have you actually done with it because it feels like you have all of these snapshots tucked away in a photo album collecting dust on a shelf. I have always loved living in Washington, DC and I love living on Capitol Hill and I make a good salary at a good company, but I feel unfulfilled. I think of all the pursuits I've had that I have failed to follow through on and wonder why I never let them get anywhere. The books I've wanted to write, the businesses I've wanted to start, the post-graduate degrees I've wanted to pursue...they never get done. Part of the reason is that I get distracted too easily and I jump from one thing to another without ever finishing anything. I don't know if I've always been like that or if this is an age of mobile phone development. I have the attention span of a gnat these days. Even the 500 words of this blog post at this point have taken me an hour to write, because I stare out the window, my thoughts drifting from work to the stack of unfinished books on the table to thinking about my cookbook to worrying about my plants. 

So I made a list. 

Will I stick to it?

 

Interesting Times

The terrorists are planning an attack on my city in the coming days. DC is in a state of emergency until the 21st. Disturbing reports that multiple MPD officers were part of the mob make me worried MPD won't do their jobs. (I mean moreso than usual.) Not to mention the Capitol Police, who let the mob in and took selfies with them. 

Social media corporations, which bear so much responsibility for the rise in extremism, are banning these nazis, including Mango Mussolini himself, and Parler was taken out of the Play and Apple stores so it is harder for the terrorists to organize.

I think I live far enough away from the Capitol to not be personally at risk, but it is just down the street, and the National Guard is nearby. There was a shootout car chase on the day of the insurrection a couple of blocks from me that MPD won't talk about, and there was a suspicious package found about an hour ago in the area.

This threat is not a joke.

I wish I could say I trusted security forces in the city, but too many cops side with nazis these days, and duty to country seems to have disappeared for this invisible threat they think Democrats are. Future historians who study propaganda will look back at this period as a time of mass hysteria. All I can think about is the phenomenon in the Middle Ages known as Dancing Mania where large groups of people would start dancing and wouldn't stop until they collapsed of exhaustion or died. Yes, died. (Historians still don't know exactly why this happened.)

Now large groups of mediocre people with mediocre lives are gathering in mobs and militias for some made up threat because they've been bombarded with propaganda from the wealthy and powerful, who want to use them as foot soldiers for more power. They can't grasp they're getting played. Anyone who voted for Trump who isn't in the top 25% of the wealthiest Americans is getting played. If you got a stimulus check and you voted for Trump, you've been played. 

Propaganda is one hell of a drug.

The next 11 days in DC will be highly stressful. At least many of us will be stuck at home.