Science fiction always has been literary
snack food for me. The very first novel I ever read (other than kid-lit) was
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World.
The second was H.G. Wells’ War of the
Worlds. There was no turning back after that. Scifi includes quality lit,
and more of it (beyond Brave New World
and 1984) deserves to be recognized
as such, but there is no doubt that the bulk of it is popcorn. This past week between weightier meals
I’ve snacked on short stories by veteran scifi author C.J. Cherryh, whose prose
and characters I like well enough to tolerate the large portion of her work
that is fantasy rather than scifi proper. In general I don’t care for fantasy.
Why do I balk at elves and wizards while being fine with ETs and warp driven
star ships? I could rattle off a list of whys and wherefores, but in truth they
would be more rationalizations than reasons. Let’s just say it is a matter of
taste. (Yes, the magical elements of Star
Wars bother me too, despite the whole midichlorian explanation for them.)
But the well-presented motives, flaws, and moral challenges of Cherryh’s characters (when she
is on her game) are all-too-human enough for me to simply sigh and accept the
setting. The social setting (quite aside from witches and enchanted woods and
so forth) is generally medieval, as is the case in most fantasy by other
authors.
This once again reminded me of how often
scifi proper has the same social setting. Apparently democracy doesn’t have a
future either on earth or in space. Instead, whether in A Princess of Mars written by E.R. Burroughs more than a century
ago or in The Last Emperox (despite
the gender neutral term) by contemporary author John Scalzi, we have monarchs, empires,
noble houses, trade guilds, and feudal fiefdoms in which people vie for power
through treachery and family connections with the tactics and ruthlessness of
Richard III. There is little ideological in any of the plots: there are good
nobles and bad nobles, but that is all a matter of personality and personal
morals. For example in Frank Herbert’s classic Dune, the difference between heroic Duke Leto Atreides and evil
Baron Vladimir Harkonnen is that Leto is a nice guy while Vlad is a sadistic
creep. They are both hereditary despots (nominally serving the emperor) who
never consider undermining their own aristocratic privileges.
The cheesiest adaptation of the ERB novel - and not in a good way
I understand why so many scifi authors
fall back on this trope. It simplifies world-building. We are all familiar
enough with these arrangements to grasp the implications for a character at any
place in the social order. In such a system the personal is political. This in
turn simplifies storytelling, particularly when the characters are of the
ruling class. Democracy is messy and writing about it is hard. It can be done.
Take Gore Vidal’s eminently watchable and readable (non-scifi) play The Best Man first staged in 1960 and
turned into a movie in 1964. Though much has changed since the early 60s in
both the electorate and the specific policy debates, the process of choosing a
candidate is much the same, and this play successfully makes it exciting. Nonetheless,
trying to incorporate something like this into a tale of space battles and
colonizing planets can be challenging. It may distract from the main plot. I can’t claim total resistance to the
temptation. One of my own scifi short stories about a planetary colony in
another star system (The Lion's Share) features aristocratic arrangements,
though I didn’t go full-on medieval. (Descendants of officers from the
interstellar ship that brought the first colonists retained hereditary privileges.)
Still, I admire scifi authors who try something completely different such as
the anarcho-capitalism that turns up in Vernor Vinge’s novels or the
anarcho-communism that turns up in Cory Doctorow’s or the globalist socialism
of H.G. Wells in Men Like Gods. The
point is not whether one likes or hates their visions as a reader – only that
they didn’t surrender to the medieval trope. By the way, I suspect the scifi popcorn
authors may be right about democracy not having a long term future, though I do
not anticipate a revival of medieval institutions. The outer trappings of
democracy are likely to remain, but mostly as window dressing. The extent to
which real power already resides elsewhere is widely debated though exactly
where and with whom (the permanent bureaucracy? the 0.01%? the Bilderberg
group?) is disputed largely along preexisting ideological lines. My favorite
theory though is the one about interdimensional reptile aliens running the
world – not because I remotely believe it but because at least it is fun. I
couldn’t resist penning a short story (The Reptile Way) about that, too. If I’m wrong, however, and feudalism
does return, either homegrown or imposed from the stars, let’s hope our planet
gets a nice guy Duke Atreides and not a Baron Harkonnen.
There aren’t many movies that I choose
to watch based on an actor rather than the director or a plot description, but
Aubrey Plaza movies are an exception. She has a knack for appearing in low
budget indie movies with fresh and unusual scripts. (The same was once true of
Juno Temple, but lately her cable TV career has kept her too busy.) Not all of
them work. I hated An Evening with
Beverly Luff Linn and had a mixed reaction to the oddball zombie film Life after Beth. But when they work
(about half do) they work well. The quirky scifi Safety Not Guaranteed was marvelous as was Ingrid Goes West, an all too credible film about the intersection
of social media and real life for a troubled young woman. So, I’m willing to
give Aubrey’s movies a shot regardless of critical reviews one way or the
other. I’m glad I did in the case of the 2022 Emily the Criminal.
Emily (Aubrey) embodies Millennial
disillusion. She belongs to a generation told as kids that wonderful fulfilling
futures lay ahead (though, oddly, also told the world would end in a dozen
years) only to face-plant on reality after college. Emily carries $70,000 in
student debt for a degree that landed her nothing more than a food service job
that doesn’t pay enough to keep up with the interest on her loans. She shares
an overcrowded apartment, has no time for her art, and is offered an unpaid
internship that she is told is an “opportunity.” A felony assault on her record
(she had a fight with her ex-boyfriend) further damages her chances of
employment. In consequence, we understand (if not sympathize) when she accepts
a $200 per hour offer from a fellow named Youcef to be a dummy shopper and buy
high end electronics with stolen credit card numbers. By increments she gets
ever deeper into the fraud schemes of Youcef until she becomes the one goading
him to do more. In his initial interview with her,
Youcef says that no one will get hurt. Anyone who has been a victim of fraud
knows this is untrue. Even if personal losses from credit card fraud are
covered by the credit card provider, recovery is a hassle at best. Many – in
fact most – types of losses are not covered at all. In these cases savings,
credit, and lives of victims can be destroyed. Many fraudsters are simply sociopaths.
They have no empathy for others and think narcissistically only about their own
gain. They believe it is their victims’ own fault for letting themselves be
cheated. Others, however, are like Emily, who is not without empathy in a
general way. They go down the slippery slope to crime in incremental slips and
slides. They may start with something as simple as misstating income on a loan
application without an intent to fail to repay the loan. Embezzlers at first
typically intend to pay back improperly “borrowed” cash… but when they get away
with it, keeping the money and taking more become tempting. Humans – including
those who regard themselves as “good people” – are very good at rationalizing
unethical behavior, e.g. “Hey, I didn’t create the system in which you best can
get ahead by cheating. I’m just playing the game as I found it.” It is a game
that all too frequently ends tragically for oneself and others. So, it is a big Thumbs Up for Emily the Criminal. The film once again
demonstrates that high budgets, fancy fx, and extreme stunt work are unnecessary
for a good picture. All you need is good writing and a competent cast.
Earlier today I entered the pantry off
the kitchen, paused a moment, and then had to admit I had no idea why I was
there. I had wanted something, evidently, but whatever it was escaped me. At my
age I would be worried about that but for the fact that I commonly did the
exact same thing at age 12. Since my memory in academic matters was (as it still
is) pretty good, my mom called me “the absent-minded professor.” She was being
polite. My mind was simply occupied by something else at those moments, and
that something else crowded out the original intended task. By the way, I was
after a garbage bag as I remembered the next time I looked at the bin by my
desk and noticed it needed a liner. We all have had similar experiences.
Suppose you wish to stop at a convenience store that is located a short
distance beyond a left turn that you commonly take on your drive home. If your
mind is preoccupied you are very likely to take that left turn before you
realize your mistake. (A friend was once so preoccupied he drove to a local
hospital and parked in the parking lot before realizing that there was no
reason for him to be there – there hadn’t been for a year. “I’m losin’ it!” he
said to me on his return. He wasn’t. It was just a glitch he never repeated.) There
is more to forgetfulness than just distraction, whether by our own thoughts or
the world outside. It long has been known that there are separate mechanisms
for short and long-term memory. To kick something into long-term memory you
either must think about it for a little while or have some emotional response
to it. Otherwise it vanishes. As an example we again can use that route home
you commonly drive. Odds are that ten minutes after you get home you won’t
remember most of the drive – only the parts that concentrated your attention
for some reason. By tomorrow you will have forgotten most of those parts too.
This is one reason (among many) why eyewitness testimony is so notoriously
unreliable; we usually don’t know until after the event that what we saw was
important, so our attention probably wasn’t concentrated on the scene as it
happened. These two tiers of memory have been
recognized for decades. But until recently the fading of long-term memories was
regarded as serving no useful purpose. In recent years, however, mechanisms of
active forgetting have been found to exist in the brain. Our minds
“deliberately” (non-consciously but by normal function) weed out memories they
tag as useless. This would not have evolved unless there was an advantage to
selective forgetting. In his book Forgetting:
The Benefits of Not Remembering Scott A. Small explains what they are.
Dr. Small is the director of the
Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at Columbia University. His studies of
patients suffering from pathological forgetting – not just from Alzheimer’s but
from other causes such as injury – led him to examine the difference between
this and “routine” forgetting. We are deluged with information from our
five senses constantly. Were we to remember all of it there would be too much
data for our brains to process. We would freeze up and would have trouble
generalizing as we are overwhelmed by details. “As our brains intrinsically
know, not everything we store is worth remembering, and there is a real
advantage,” Small writes, “to forgetting details of the world we temporarily
encode.” Many autistic people have excessively detailed memories and consequently
get upset by minor changes in the environment – a book out of place in a
bookcase for example – that most of us never would notice. They notice because
they remember exactly the way the bookcase looked yesterday. PTSD is another
condition of remembering too much – in this case obsessively. Much of the memory pruning occurs during
sleep when important memories are reinforced and trivial ones are discarded. Our
nonconscious minds are pretty good at determining which is which. This is why
it is useful to sleep after cramming for a test. Small goes to some length to
detail the neural processes by which memories are either strengthened or
destroyed. In recent years technology has advanced enough to view these
processes directly. In an interview with Psychiatry News Small explained, “The
ability to forget helps us prioritize, think better, make decisions, and be
more creative. Normal forgetting, in balance with memory, gives us the mental
flexibility to grasp abstract concepts from a morass of stored information,
allowing us to see the forest through the trees.” So the purpose of forgetting is
remembering – remembering what is important. As with every other trait, humans
fall along a spectrum in their capacity to remember and forget. There are super-rememberers:
actress Marilu Henner, for instance, who might remember what color dress she
wore on some randomly named date in 1982. Thanks to her job in front of a
camera, many of these memories can be verified. Then there are super-forgetters
who don’t remember what they wore yesterday. But both forget. Both forget most
of their lives. The super-rememberers (the condition is called hyperthymesia)
typically don’t even perform better on standard memory tests (e.g. reciting
lists of numbers or words) than average people. Their minds don’t tag these
lists as important and therefore memorable. Their memories instead tend to be
autobiographical: to whom they talked and what they had for breakfast on, say,
September 7, 1992. One still can see how this would be an advantage, though I
suppose “forgive and forget” is off the table. So, all of our memories are edited: a
balance of the forgotten and the reinforced. I have the forgetting part of the
equation down pat. How much that assists my remembrance of the rest is debatable.
But maybe it would be a good idea to write myself a note before going into the
pantry.
The purpose of most clickbait on social media
sites is to expose the clicker to additional ads. We all know this, but we
sometimes take the bait anyway. Nowadays AIs creepily choose bait specifically
tailored for each user based on his or her online activities. Mention on
Facebook that you are looking for a new car and auto ads will appear. Recently I’ve mentioned dumpsters online. It is
perhaps no surprise that a link appeared to an article in A Lot Finance titled 50 Things
Retirees Should Throw Out. The AIs also obviously know my age. I clicked. I’m
a fan of uncluttering, so I was willing to wade through additional ads to see
if there was any genuinely useful advice. These were the 50.
Dumpster by my barn last year
1.Your Home. Um, I don’t think so.
The time may come when selling my home and downsizing is necessary for
financial reasons. We do what we have to do. But as long as I can pay the bills
on it I’ll keep it. It was built by my dad. It is home. 2.Your Children’s Old Stuff. I don’t have kids, so
there is nothing to throw out. My parents’ old stuff is a bigger issue. 3.Business Clothes. As a real estate
broker my attire was semi-formal at the best of times. There are still uses for
a tie and blazer or sport jacket, so I’ll keep them for now. My clothes closets
don’t overflow anyway. 4.Collectibles. If this means coins,
stamps, butterflies, 19th century clocks, or other such hobby-like
collections, I don’t collect sets of anything. I have random individual artifacts,
each with some family history attached, but they are not collections. 5.Exercise Equipment. I never have bought
exercise equipment. 6.Fine China. I don’t have any. My
good plates look a little nicer than my everyday microwavable plates but are by
no means special or valuable. I don’t cringe when one breaks. 7.Storage Unit. I have no storage
unit to empty. I do have a barn and have done pretty well at cleaning out my
excess stuff from it since 2020. However, the space was then filled by the
stuff of friends and family who due to special circumstances have needed a
“temporary” place to put it all. I am not free to throw that out. 8.Old Spices. I do need to keep a
better eye on expiration dates, though this is not a major space issue. 9.Cars. The article suggests
I no longer need two of them. True, I don’t need
two, but I like having them because they serve different purposes. I have a
very basic Chevy pickup for hauling lumber, gravel, brush, and whatnot. I have
a Trailblazer (a smallish SUV) for…well…a car. The latter also has All Wheel
Drive (the truck does not), which makes it a good winter vehicle. Besides, I
suspect if one of my garage bays went empty it would be filled in a week by
more of my friends’ stuff. Temporarily. 10.Old Linens. I don’t have a closet full of these. Do
people keep more than two per bed – one spare for when the other is in the
wash? 11.Kitchen Equipment. I presume this means portable equipment such
as blenders and fryers rather than the built-ins. I don’t have these. (I’m a
single male for whom cooking is not a hobby.) I do have a coffee maker but I’m
not getting rid of that. 12.Dirty Old Shoes. I don’t let these pile up anyway. I do have
some nice shoes that I seldom wear because I don’t dress up much anymore, but
for the occasions when I do I’d better keep those. 13.Sentimental Items. OK I have some of these but I keep them
because they are…um…sentimental. 14.Expired Makeup. Not an issue. 15.Home Décor. Wouldn’t ridding the existing décor just mean
getting new? I don’t see the decluttering advantage. 16.Antiques You Don’t Care About. I wouldn’t still have
them if I didn’t care about them. However, if I ever downsize as urged in point
#1 I can cut them loose then. I don’t collect antiques for their own sake. Each
has a family history of some kind, so they probably should be meted out to
cousins (the closest blood relations I have remaining) if and when I need to
get rid of them. 17.Old Computers. Because of the special disposal rules for
electronics, these do tend to accumulate in basements and closets until
“later.” As it happens, though, I’ve caught up on ridding myself of these. 18.Bulk Items. That is pretty vague. The article clarifies,
“However, most people find in retirement, there’s no need for all those
groceries!” Given the exclamation point, the prospect seems pretty exciting to
the author. Once again: single male for whom cooking is not a hobby. Except for
Thanksgiving and the occasional cookout, I never bought groceries in bulk
anyway. 19.Extra Furniture. I wouldn’t call any of my current furniture
extra. I’ve already gotten rid of the excess – from my old office for example. 20.Phone Books. Not a problem. I’m aware of the internet and
have been for quite a little while. I have a prodigy email for goodness sake.
(Prodigy predated AOL.) 21.Old Files. I do dispose of most files more than seven
years old. 22.Anything That Is Too High Maintenance. Again, pretty vague.
This begs a dating joke but I won’t make it. 23.Jewelry. Not really my thing. 24.Missing Pairs. Well, yeah. Why would I keep an unmatched
shoe? 25.Holiday Décor. I never tried to outdo the neighbors with
holiday decorations so I merely have two modest boxes with lights and bulbs for
the tree. I’ll use them again so I’ll keep them. 26.Books. Them’s fightin’ words. 27.Expired Medications. Not an issue. 28.Luggage. “You probably don't need a 10-piece luggage set.” Maybe
not. I actually hadn’t considered that. 29.Knick Knacks. Like the artifacts and antiques mentioned
above (in fact they are the same items), I keep only the ones with sentimental
family history. 30.OldPhones. Do
people keep old phones? 31.Sports Equipment. Don’t really have that. 32.Musical Instrument. “But let's be honest--that guitar hasn't been
out of its case in years.” The only instrument in the house is a piano. I don’t
play it (my mom did) but for weight reasons alone it is staying where it is. 33.Outdoor Equipment. I live on 5 acres. Admittedly 4 are woods,
but nonetheless I’m keeping my lawn equipment. 34.DVDs and CDs. “If you're no longer using them, why not get
rid of them?” I’m using them. 35.Power Tools. Don’t touch my tools! 36.Magazines. I don’t save back issues of anything. 37.Board Games. The board games in my house don’t belong to
me. See #7. 38.Film Projector. There is one of those stored in the
crawlspace. Perhaps I should project the 8mm reels in the box next to it before
disposing of it though. They are probably just home movies of myself and sis as
kids on a Florida beach, but you never know. 39.Musty Towels. I replace these as needed anyway. 40.That Old Camera Recorder. I don’t own one of those old VHS
models. 41.OldVHSTapes. I don’t store these. 42.Everything in That Junk Drawer. Everything in that
junk drawer is there for a reason: paper clips, spare keys, carpet tacks,
notepads, magic markers, etc. 43.Servingware. OK, I rarely use the big serving platters,
but I do use them on Thanksgiving and other occasions. 44.Anything That’s Not Yours. See #7. 45.Miscellaneous Cords and Chargers. I’m pretty good at
disposing of the ones that don’t fit my current equipment. 46.Office Supplies. I still find use for files, envelopes, reams
of paper, et al. left over from business days. They’ll whittle down simply from
regular attrition. 47.FakePlants. I do
have some of these. (They were mom’s.) They are the only plants I can keep
green, but I suppose they could vanish from the house without causing any
angst. 48.LunchBoxes. I don’t
own a lunch box. 49.Keepsakes You Don’t Care About Anymore. Well, they wouldn’t
be keepsakes then, would they? 50.Bulky Old TV Sets. Already long gone.
So from all that came the mildly useful
suggestions to dispose of fake plants, old luggage, and maybe a movie
projector. Well, that is something I suppose, but not enough volume to justify
ordering another dumpster. If a link shows up with the bait 50 More Things Retirees Should Throw Out,
I think I’ll leave it unclicked.
All dates since January 1, 2000 have
seemed unreal to me. I was born near the middle of the last century (1952) and,
although intellectually I know this to be silly, to this day it feels to me as
though the current year should be written Nineteen-something-or-other.
I still sometimes hesitate when dating a check or document lest I start the year with
the wrong two digits. Though I seldom can put a specific date
to recollected conversations, I can assign January 1, 1970 to one, simply
because the date was the reason for it. After the turbulent 1960s, a new decade
seemed to offer a fresh start. (It really didn’t: culturally the “1960s” as we
usually think of them continued another four years; they transitioned into the cultural
“1970s” over the course of 1974 as former hippies swapped their headbands for
disco shoes.) “1970” itself had a futuristic ring to it on that day, which
probably prompted the dinner conversation with my dad, mom, and sister about
the far distant year 2000 when not just a new decade but a new century and
millennium would arrive. I remarked that I would be 47 – older than my dad in
1970. This seemed so ludicrous that we all laughed at the notion. My dad said
he didn’t think he would last that long. (He did: he died on July 12, 2000 at
74.) Age 47 and the year 2000 both arrived on
schedule of course. While I didn’t laugh at the latter event it nonetheless
still felt ludicrous. Tomorrow will be 23 (!) years later yet. Perhaps the
reader can imagine just how ludicrous that
feels. So, for Auld Lang Syne I’ll fire up the Wayback machine to recall life
23 years before 2000 on January 1, 1977. The radio played a bigger part in my
life then than it does today, so it likely was playing. Playlists are easy to
recreate since the Billboard 100 offers a week by week cheat sheet going back
decades on which songs were popular when. The top 10 in the US for the week of
1/1/77 were: 1. Tonight's
the Night (Gonna Be Alright) Rod Stewart 2. You
Don't Have To Be a Star (To Be In My Show) Marilyn McCoo & Billy Davis Jr. 3. The
Rubberband Man The Spinners 4. You
Make Me Feel Like Dancing Leo Sayer 5. More
Than a Feeling Boston 6. Sorry
Seems To Be the Hardest Word Elton John 7. I
Wish Stevie Wonder 8. Dazz Brick 9. Car
Wash Rose Royce 10. After
the Lovin' Engelbert Humperdinck OK, there have been better Top Ten lists
before and since – but there have been far worse, too. I didn’t own any albums containing
any of those songs (in that era I preferred the likes of AC/DC and Bob Seger),
but wouldn’t have changed the radio channel if any of those numbers played if
it meant crossing the room. I might have in my car for a couple since that just
meant pushing a selector button. My personal life was in a fun phase in
‘77, which is appropriate for age 24 in the most hedonistic decade of the past two
centuries. My very special lady was a strawberry blonde named Angela. 46 years
later it still feels wrong to post a pic without her permission, so I won’t, though
she does figure in a nonfiction short story on one of my other blog sites. (We
broke up in ‘79 – it was her idea.)My car was a 1973 Ford Maverick (nothing like
the current Ford with that name) of which I was fond. It served me reliably
wherever I drove it. Two years earlier this included a circuit around the
continental US. I have only one photo of it, strangely enough, and that just by
chance because I photographed a cat. I lived at home with my parents, which is
normal for single 24-year-olds today. It wasn’t actually rare then, but in 1977
it did tend to encourage the judgmental question “Why?” (The reason was money,
of course; I bought a cottage a few years later, which otherwise wouldn’t have
been possible.) I was healthy, young, strong, and stupid. I wasn’t stupid on
the surface. I was bookish (then as now), intellectual, and well-educated in
the liberal arts. I was stupid deep down. The full effects of that wouldn’t
show up for some years, however, so in 1977 I was blissfully unaware of it.
1973 Ford Maverick in background
All in all, 1977 was quite a good year.
I’d be happy to experience it again, either exactly as it played out the first
time around or, better yet, with the classic “If I knew then…” advantage. Now, here we are 23 years after 2000. Assuming
I survive past midnight, I will be as surprised as my dad was 23 years ago on
January 1. It is too early to get a read on what 2023 has in store. For me
personally 1977 would be a daunting act to equal, never mind exceed. But I’ll
totter on and give it a try. Happy 2023! (I didn’t even hesitate on those first
two digits.)
Many of the superficial seasonal
traditions – notably Christmas trees – were introduced into the United States
by German immigrants in the 19th century. One that didn’t catch on,
however, was the myth of Krampus, the malevolent companion to Santa Claus. It is
not clear why. There is certainly no aversion on these shores to scary stories.
One need only look at the way Halloween took off far beyond its Celtic
origins. Santa himself has an ominous
side. “You better watch out,” as the song warns us. Yet there is a difference
between the prospect of getting a stocking full of coal (a threat often made
but seldom implemented) for being naughty and the prospect of being beaten by birch
sticks by a horned goat creature and then kidnapped. BTW, 90 years ago my dad actually got a
coal-filled stocking as a kid, either because my grandparents thought it would
be amusing or because they were making a point. A toy tractor was also in the
stocking which softened the effect somewhat. I still have the tractor.
To this day, although Krampus continues
to be popular in Germany and Austria, most Americans still don’t know who he
is. A fair minority does however. The stories began to get some traction
starting 20 years ago, culminating in the 2015 Christmas-horror movie Krampus. Enough now know of him in the
US to make Krampus-themed cards, tee shirts, ornaments, and games marketable. A
quick look on Amazon will reveal a remarkable array of goods.
The origins of Krampus are far older
than Santa Claus, who can be traced to Nicholas, the third century Anatolian
saint. Krampus pretty clearly derives from the half-human half-goat creatures (fairies,
satyrs, fauns, and demigods) who predate even classical mythology. The best
known version of the goat god is the mischievous Pan (cognate of the Rigvedic
Pushan), who often was associated with Dionysus. Pan, like satyrs generally,
represented the natural wild side of human nature, full of all its lusts. Accepting
this side of ourselves was regarded as better than suppressing or denying it. He
was generally worshipped in the wild or in caves, not in temples. In Athens on
an Acropolis otherwise filled with ornate temples, there is simply a cave for
Pan on the north slope. Today he is a major figure in modern Neopaganism
including Wicca. Over the centuries Church and political
officials have made efforts to suppress Krampus mythology but without effect. He
apparently is too much fun. Now he is too much a part of pop culture to go
anywhere. There is a way to appease him. It is traditional to leave out milk
and cookies for Santa. (This may account for his waistline.) Krampus, as one
might expect, likes stronger fare. He prefers schnapps. I don’t expect a visit from him this this
year any more than I expect one from Santa. There are no kids in my household
and neither takes much interest in adults. But in case I’m mistaken, if there
is a choice between a birching from Krampus or coal from Santa, I’d rather have
coal, especially if it comes with a tractor: John Deere preferably, with a full set of lawn care attachments.
“The pandemic is over,” so we’ve heard.
Yet, three years after the first cases appeared in North America covid
continues to stalk us. Some jurisdictions (LA among them) consider reinstating
mask mandates and other restrictions as new cases rise. I won’t discuss the
merits or flaws of previous and current responses. Enough talking heads do that
and, despite what they say, the argument is never entirely “about the science,”
for even when people agree on the purely medical aspects of the disease, they still
disagree on policy due to differing values of the tradeoffs involved. I won’t
join the finger-wagging on any side. But I am reminded of another endemic
scourge that in the 19th century for a quarter of the population was
(sooner or later) a cause of death: tuberculosis (TB for short) or
“consumption” as they commonly called it then. I don’t know if it offers any
lessons on covid, but it at least puts the matter in perspective. Tuberculosis is an infectious disease
caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis.
Symptoms include formation of tubercles, especially in the lungs, leading to
coughing, fever, expectoration of (sometimes bloody) sputum, and difficulty
breathing. It has been around throughout recorded history, and probably far
into prehistory. Tuberculosis has been found in Egyptian mummies several
thousand years old. It is described in ancient Indian and Chinese texts – and
later in Greek and Roman ones. It is found in pre-Columbian Peruvian mummies,
indicating it was carried across the Siberian land bridge 15,000 years ago (if
not earlier). It remained widespread throughout ancient and medieval times. To
this day about a third of the global population carries the latent infection
asymptomatically. Those with weakened immune systems are most at risk of
becoming symptomatic, but the disease can appear in an otherwise seemingly
healthy person. Unlike covid, it hits the young harder than the old. Unhygienic
conditions common in urban settings (especially before the 20th
century) tax immune systems, and so unsurprisingly are associated with a higher
risk for the disease. In his paper A New Theory of Consumption English doctor Benjamin Marten in 1720 conjectured
that the disease was contagious even though it didn’t spread as rapidly and
reliably as other plagues. He was proven correct in 1882 by Robert Koch who
isolated the TB bacillus. The term tuberculosis had been invented by Johann
Schoenlein in the mid-1800s, though the disease continued to be called
consumption by much of the general public well into the 20th
century. 19th century physicians developed a treatment for TB: rest,
fresh air, and sunshine, preferably at high altitudes. (This isn’t far off from
the prescription of Galen, the Roman medical author who was also the personal
physician of emperor Marcus Aurelius: he recommended the fresh air and sunshine
of a long sea voyage.) Sanatoria popped up in places like Colorado and
Switzerland specifically to treat TB patients. This wasn’t really a cure. The
patients remained infected. Many of them died in these facilities, but others
did see their symptoms abate to the point where they could resume something
close to normal lives.
Huts for TB patients in Colorado
It wasn’t until after World War 2 that
TB cases began to plummet with the invention of effective antibiotic
treatments, which not only cured the ill but thereby reduced transmission to
others. (Those with latent infections do not transmit the disease.) By 1980 the
chance of getting TB in North America and Europe had become small, but in that
decade a spike occurred. Those with HIV were susceptible to TB as were those
with diabetes and other stresses on the immune system. Worse, new strains of Mycobacterium tuberculosis appeared that
were resistant to standard antibiotic treatment. Today in the US the number of cases is still
modest by historical standards but far from negligible. According the CDC there
were 7,882 reported cases of TB in 2021, a rate of 2.4 per 100,000 (historical
rates were orders of magnitude higher) though the agency acknowledges there
probably is significant underreporting. Latent infections are estimated at
13,000,000, which is low by world standards but still a huge population in
absolute terms. The good news from this history is that
it is indeed possible to reduce and control a longstanding dangerous endemic disease.
The bad news is that it is nearly impossible (when not just plain impossible)
to eliminate it. The bugs fight back. Sometimes all we can do (as individuals –
I do not speak to public policy) is judge our risks and act as we see best.
