By Victor Rosenthal
What do I read during an epidemic? What else but books about epidemics, like John M. Barry’s “The Great Influenza,” about the catastrophic 1918 pandemic that killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide.
The 1918 disease, incorrectly called “Spanish flu,” probably first jumped from pigs to humans in the American Midwest, and then spread all over the world. It was both more contagious and more deadly than today’s Coronavirus; and medicine at that time – especially in the US – was surprisingly primitive. Some American doctors in 1918 still believed in bleeding as an effective treatment for various illnesses. Viruses had been known to cause disease – Polio for example – for some time, but most doctors and researchers believed that influenza was caused by a bacillus. There was no preventative medication and no treatment that had a significant effect on the course of the disease.
Epidemics test societies and their institutions, particularly their governments. They exacerbate divisions between groups, expose incompetence and venality among officials, and exact a price for ignorance or stupidity in the population. This was the case in 1918, where, for example, military authorities in the US transferred troops from camps where the virus was active to ones that were as yet free of it, against the advice of their own medical officers. They shipped thousands overseas in crowded troopships, where the majority of the occupants – who appeared healthy when boarding – fell ill during the voyage. Death rates on some ships exceeded 10% of the sick. Hidden incompetence became suddenly visible.
Everyone is familiar with products that look like functional items but are not. For example, you can buy a shiny wrench and find, the first time you try to loosen a tight bolt with it, that it is not properly sized and made of soft metal. You end up with scraped knuckles and possibly a rounded-off bolt that is even harder to remove. In Hebrew, something like that is called “an as-if product” (mutzar ca-ilu). There are also as-if public officials, as-if generals, and even as-if presidents and prime ministers. These are people who are sufficiently skilled in politics (or perhaps related to someone who is) to obtain a public position, but cannot or will not do the job associated with it.
Like the as-if wrench which might look good in your toolbox and even work if the job is not too difficult, as-if public officials can stay in place harmlessly for years in easy times. But when they are tested, as by a war or epidemic, their worthlessness is made manifest. Such was the American Surgeon General in 1918, Rupert Blue, and many military officers. And such are many of the members of the Knesset and cabinet ministers in today’s Israeli government.
When a society is successful – prosperous, relatively at peace, politically stable – there are negative effects on both the institutions and the general population. The longer the period of success lasts, the more serious is the decay. The effect of success is a general decline in fitness to survive; but until something comes along to test that fitness, the decline isn’t easily noticeable. But there are some early warning signs.
One is the increase in the number of as-if officials in various institutions and government. A bloated government (like the Israeli government with its 36 ministers, half of whom are unnecessary) is a warning: many of those are as-if ministers. Sadly, Israel’s Prime Minister, formerly one of the very best, has recently become an as-if Prime Minister.
Another is a continuous increase in the proportion of resources consumed by the public sector. More is not necessarily better, if the “more” just goes to increase the size of bureaucracies without improving service. It’s true that increasing populations require increased expenditures to provide the protection and services they need; but the increase should be in proportion to the population.
Some institutions are grotesquely out of balance. In the US, for example, the cost of a university education has skyrocketed along with the proportion of administrators (many of whom are as-if workers) to teaching faculty. As the cost has increased, the quality has decreased. The system is producing large numbers of poorly educated, frustrated young people who are unqualified for productive work.
Until an epidemic comes along, who cares if the head of your public health service is an idiot? Until your army has to fight, it doesn’t matter if the generals ignore such things as the condition of vehicles and aircraft, equipment stored for the use of reserve units, and the quality of their training. Until there is an economic crunch, so what if the majority of your public officials spend their workdays doing little more than consuming resources and sexually harassing their subordinates?
The general population is also not spared the deleterious effects of sustained peace and prosperity. Often called “affluenza,” one symptom is an ever-increasing desire for material goods coupled with anomie and anxiety, a difficulty in establishing long-term relationships, and an inability to defer gratification of wants.
Israel, despite her precarious location, has been spared real adversity at least since the Second Lebanon War, although the need to maintain a citizen army and repeated skirmishes with our neighbors does add a certain amount of tension. The US, because of its geographical isolation and professional military, lacks this irritant. On the surface, that’s good; but it is damaging to the psychological health of the citizens.
If affluenza continues for a long enough time, the decay in functionality of a society’s institutions plus the built-up pressure in the population, in which all but the top strata of society are frustrated from their inability to get what they want, in material and psychological terms, leads to civil disturbances and perhaps even a general breakdown in order. This appears to be what is happening today in the US. In particular, young people – who are always the point of the spear in any revolution – have been massively frustrated by the failure of the American educational system to provide the promised economic or psychic benefits.
In Israel, we see similar problems, but to a lesser degree. On the other hand, it has become clear that our political system is fundamentally broken – we have an as-if government – and because of this we could be unable to respond to the next serious crisis.
Whether either Israel or the US will make the real and fundamental changes to their institutions, governmental and otherwise, that are necessary to their survival as strong, democratic nations, is beyond my ability to predict.
@ Sebastien Zorn:
Looks like a headless cow on the map, too, if you think about it.
It was also Bloomberg who banned smoking in most public places, as well as fining drivers for every little thing. I really disliked him until I quit smoking and got rid of my car and then I changed my mind. Ha ha. He was right about stop and frisk. It kept gang members in rough neighborhoods from carrying guns. His worst mistake was the Arabic language charter schools. The principal he hired allowed the students to have tee-shirts that read, “Intifida NYC”. There was an uproar and she was fired though I think she later sued the city and won in the same liberal courts that outlawed stop and frisk. Today, there would be no uproar since we have an intifada going on under our noses and even churches have Black LIves Matter in bold letters on their doors. The city has changed. However, I think these things tend to be temporary. America is like a cow. Bovine, chewing its cud, not, seemingly reacting to a thousand cuts and then, one day, POW, no more Mr. Nice Guy. We see this over and over in our history.
Which reminds me of a funny but true anecdote. Here I was walking in Soho in the 80s or 90s with a gas mask on in summer and a Chinese guy, actually from China, he had a thick accent, angrily told me that if I didn’t like it here, I should go back where I came from!
I neglected to mention that Bloomberg really did make the air breathable in the summer. In the 80s, I sometimes wore an industrial gas mask. Seriously. The air quality was that bad. After he left office, he devoted himself to combat smoking. He should have stuck with air pollution. Now, he’s in China’s pocket. He wasn’t corrupt before.
@ Adam Dalgliesh:
No, but getting rid of it would increase the numbers of homeless. NYU and Columbia are two of the worst villains, major landlords/real estate developers who have taken over and replaced whole neighborhoods. Their megalomania is insatiable; they want to expand and expand. I worked for a non-profit and found that they can be much worse than for profits! I don’t see any reason why they should be tax exempt or able to pass taxes onto students, either. The problem began under Koch and continued under Dinkins. Giuliani, Bloomberg and De Blasio actually amerliorated it a little. Another thing pre-pandemic De Blasio did was to make it possible for anyone to call 311 and have a non-coercive team to come out and offer homeless people assistance. Many refused, however, because my understanding is that there is no security in the shelters and they were afraid. But others accepted. Giuliani gave us the Metrocard and Bloomberg the unlimited Metrocard, as well as 511 while keeping the city financially afloat, largely at the expense of drivers, I’m sorry to say. Bloomberg made the buses electric and the cabs hybrids, redirecting air and commercial traffic away from residential areas and putting chairs, tables and bike lanes in places where wider roads were. They all did some good things before though now Bloomberg and De Blasio have become complete monsters. I can’t believe they named a bridge after Mayor Koch. The 16, I think, years he was in office, were horrible for tenants, while crime, corruption and police brutality flourished side by side. The only thing Dinkins did for tenants was to put an information table in Housing Court while he tacitly gave a green light for Black racists to hound the Jewish and Korean communities. He was a one term mayor, but, you know, Manhattan and the Bronx still voted to re-elect him! LIberalism dies hard and is not reality-based.
@ Sebastien Zorn: Thanks again for keeping us informed about present-day conditions in New York City, Sebastien.
Although I was born in New York City, my parents left for upstate whem I was eighteen months old. As an adult I only lived in the city for five years, while studying for my doctorate, living in an apartment complex owned by NYU. I believed my apartment was outrageously overpriced. I don’t know if it was rent-controlled, since the NYU business office handled relations with the city. Individual grad-students were not allowed to on their own. The building was reasonably well-maintained. But you had to step over homeless people who made a practice of sleeping on the steps of the building, or inside it, in the vestibule or lobby. Huge numbers of homeless people slept on the streets and doorways in all the surrounding streets. This was in the 1980s, during the Koch and Dinkins administrations. Obviously, rent control didn’t solve everyone’s housing problems.
@ Adam Dallgiesh:
The problem is compounded by the fact that rents are so high, even with these controls, that people have been constantly moving ever farther and farther away, and as they did so, the rents would go up in those places. It was either Guiliani or Bloomberg or began sending inspectors on behalf of tenants and letting landlords enter their buildings into special programs to fix the violations without being fined. De Blasio, to his credit, made it so that they would come regularly no matter what and whenever you called. All of my violations of many years, serious ones, were fixed quickly last year, or the year before, I forget. On the other hand, he was really unfair and punitive to low income cooperatively owned buildings. He really hates anything privately owned. Most of his policies have been insane but he did keep rent increases low. That’s why he got re-elected. He can’t run again due to term limits unless he pulls a Bloomberg and gets the City Council to vote him an exception next year.
@ Sebastien Zorn: Sebastien, many thanks for explaining New York City politics and economics to us. And for your eye-witness account of what early voting is like in the city.
Rent controls do seem to be necessary in New York City and many other places in order to prevent tenants from being forced to leave the city in order to survive. I live in a rent controlled apartment in exurban New York. Although the landlord gets permission every year from some some state commission to raise our rents.
However, rent control does seem to have some adverse effects. Many landlords retaliate for having to observe them by providing lousy maintenance to their tenants. Many simply abandon their apartment buildings because they are no longer profitable leading them to be abandoned by their tenants as well , and turned into crack houses and hideous eyssores. Some force their tenants out, using brutal methods, in order to turn the property into commercial property, to sell it to large corporations for office buildings. Some burn down their apartment buildings. to collect insurance money. Or they transform abandoned industrial buildings into “gentrified” apartments without rent controls, and rent to higher-income tenants. This “gentrification” makes the tenants in rent-controlled apartments feel threatened.
If there had been no rent controls, landlords might eventually have been foreced to reduce their rents, because so many people people would havebeen forced to leave the city, creating an oversupply of apartments. But it would have been a messy process.
In some states, you can pick which primary you want to vote in regardless of your party affiliation. In New York, you have to change it by early October of the previous year and it takes effect after the November election in order to vote in the following year’s primary which is usually in the summer. Huckabee was the first to throw his hat in the ring in August of 2015 and I read a Times of Israel article in which he said that Israel had more claim to Judea and Samaria than the US did to the island of Manhattan, where I have lived my entire life of 61 years, while Trump was hinting that he had another Two State Solution, albeit a fairer one for Israel, which is what happened.
@ Sebastien Zorn:
And, sometimes, antisemitic BDS advocates run in the Democratic primary, as they did last year. The Republicans are all pretty much pro-Israel so it doesn’t really matter who wins their primary most of the time. The Republican presidential primary matters because some candidates are more pro-Israel than others – Huckabee was my first choice before he dropped out, while all of the Democrats running for President are routinely equally awful. Cuomo ran last year as the anti-BDS candidate, so I voted for him. Now, this year, he’s the most antisemitic governor in the country, teaming up with De Blasio, who also portrayed himself as a friend of Israel and the Jews, at one time, to persecute Chasidic Jewish communities in Brooklyn. Oy.
@ Sebastien Zorn:
I neglected to mention that there were no Republican candidates for local office on the ballot. There was also no Republican primary for local office, as usual. This is why New York City conservatives are usually registered Democrats, as I am I, most years. The Democratic primary is the only actual election. Of course, even in non-Trump years, there is a good reason for that. While, Democrats are the party of crime gone wild, they are also the party of rent stabilized tenants, of whom I am one. The rents went insanely through the roof for the first time in the 400 year history of the city in 1980 and never came back down. There were pro-tenant Republicans in the 70s, like Senator Jacob Javits, but the upstate party has been the party of downstate landlord associations ever since. That may change now that tenant protections have been extended upstate as well this past year. I noticed that the Republican candidate for Congress, though in real estate, I don’t know the details, was advocating for better maintenance of the projects, which is a hopeful sign. There are millions of people living in rent stabilized apartments who would not be able to afford them if they went market rate. Republicans have zero chance of making a comeback here unless they fix this.
@ Edgar G.:
Though, I confess that as I was waiting on line for 2 1/2 hours to vote for him on Saturday, the first day of early voting, I did say to the fellow I had a fun conversation with ahead of me about the way the neighborhood had changed – Columbia built a huge complex in place of what was there, and where we were voting – and classic movies – I did say that they only thing about Trump that irritates me is the way he repeats himself. I was stunned but said nothing when the otherwise intelligent fellow voter said that was why he was voting against him. Though, I think he would have seized on anything negative. Anti-Trumpers are not rational.
They used to have a rule that no campaigning was permitted within a 100 ft. of the polling place but there was a big sign close by, across a very narrow street to another Columbia Building, urging people to vote for candidates for local office because they were for Biden.
I voted Republican for Congress, as well. There were lots of other races for judges, and other local offices I can’t recall. Other than state senate, in which the Republican candidate was a Muslim who had been the director of the mosque they wanted to put right by the attack on 9/11 right afterwards! His bio said he was also involved in anti-terrorism, whatever that means, but I wasn’t having any of it.
So, I just wrote in the names of cats I used to have.
@ Edgar G.:
Thank you! I was thinking the exact same thing.
@ stevenl:
People all the time are saying things like Trump is doing a good job “not that he is perfect”..or.. “well he has his faults.. and other faint praise comments.
These remarks are made in the context of evaluating his Presidency. What the hell do people want from him, angels wings sprouting from his back, or a halo balanced precariously by an invisible anti-magnetic influence… As a President he is triple A++.
And for Israel, and Jews generally he’s next to Moshe Rabenu.
Those who make these comments NEVER explain them….so perhaps THEY find him great, but they are influenced by what others say…maybe a bit easily led, or weak-minded..??
When you put inept people at the helm you get eventually someone like Trump! Not that he is perfect!
But a lot has been done under his stewardship. A lot more can still be done and will be done if he gets 4 more years. By that time someone like N H (potentially the 1st female president, why not?) may be ready to carry the flame further.
And then there’s Effluenza.
Florio’s Italian English Dictionary of 1611 books.google.com › books
Effluenza, an out-flowing orgushing. Effluire, isco, ito, to gush or flow out. Efflusióne, as Effluenza. Effrenáto, vnbridled, as Sfrenåto. Effindere, f?ndo, f?s?, f?so, …
Well, having just fought a war in 1967 didn’t stop the Israeli brass from screwing up in 1973, did it?