Good Morning All You East Coast Liberals

August 25, 2005

Guest Post by Thomas McKelvey Cleaver

As Michael Crowley, who’s guest-blogging for Josh Marshall over at Talking Points Memo said this past Monday, “I know that discovering a guest blogger at your favorite site can be like showing up at a ball game to find the star player benched with a pulled hamstring.” But then, how else does a Minor Leaguer get brought up to The Show mid-season if some star doesn’t pull a hamstring? Fortunately, our friend The Carpetbagger is merely out of town, no limping involved, and it’s only for two days.

So… now you’re putting up with me, Thomas McKelvey Cleaver: certified Hollyweird Liberal screenwriter, fan of old airplanes , Chief Ranter at That’s Another Fine Mess, former professional political noodge (great basic training for Hollyweird), and Head Litter Box Cleaner for the thundering feline herd here at Le Chateau du Chat in Los Angeles.

Rather than rant about the daily grind as bloggers usually do, I’ve decided I would take this opportunity to go beyond the day’s headlines and the week’s battle and talk about the stories that have the potential to be much more scary for all of us than anything I ever wrote in “The Terror Within.”

Ever watched a dark cloud form – way off on the horizon – and get bigger as it moves closer, bringing a storm you know you need to batten down the hatches for? Growing up in Colorado, I was used to this phenomenon at a young age: one could see thunderstorms out on the horizon – as they grew closer, moving across the plain, it was possible to see the lightning flashes, then to hear the echoing thunder, then to experience the drop in temperature, with the first droplets soon whipped against one’s face by the growing wind, followed by the drenching deluge when you didn’t pay attention to the warnings and seek shelter.

Dark clouds have been forming out over our national horizon for quite awhile now. It’s entirely possible to see the flashes of distant lightning and hear the echoing thunder over the cacophony of voices crying out about the daily news from the war in Iraq.

There’s the possibility of a flu pandemic that could literally alter the state of human existence on the planet; the oil crisis may be asking people to choose between filling the tank and putting food on the table for a long time to come; the coming housing bubble may knock the pins out from under our “growing economy” as I read that housing here in the Lower Left Corner is now considered 50 percent overpriced; four senators – three Republicans and one Democrat – have just returned from Point Barrow, Alaska, and have publicly stated they now believe the Arctic is melting.

Eight hundred-odd years ago, Europe was in the midst of the Hundred Years War. The Catholic Church had rid the continent of cats suspected of being witches’ familiars. Everyone was too busy to notice the Norway rats coming down the mooring lines of the cargo ship just arrived from Istanbul in Rotterdam harbor, and no one thought to pay attention to the rats’ fleas. But within twenty years feudalism was on its last legs as the surviving lords in their castles found there weren’t enough serfs left to bring in the harvest, while the priests found people no longer believed them. The result was the end of the Middle Ages, the coming of the Reformation, and the revolution of the Renaissance that ended a thousand years of religiously-imposed ignorance and superstition since the fall of Rome. All because of the fleas no one could take the time to worry about.

RIIIIIIING! Is that the class bell I hear? It’s time to start worrying about the fleas, folks.

Lucky for you, Mr. Cleaver, I’ll also be out of town for a few days and won’t have much opportunity to comment in real time (I’m sure there are at least one or two here that will be pleased by that circumstance).

In any event, welcome. If Mr. C.B. trusts you sufficiently to take care of his TCR baby, then you must indeed be a character worthy of the big leagues or, as you called it, “The Show.” Enjoy!!

  • You might not agree that it ranks up there with a flu pandemic or the melting of the polar ice cap, but the rise of fundamentalism is certainly dangerous and could, potentially, have a profound effect on how the other problems are addressed. In my opinion, fundamentalism is the flea while the other problems are the rats.

  • Excellent. Glad to see, er read you. Quite thought provoking – too bad for me mah brain cells are usually befuddled with un-equal mixtures of guinness, irish whiskey, and various scotches. 🙂

    Following the link to your blog, my bosses (yes, working in IT, have many, many bosses) will be saddened (if they knew! Gulp!) that yet another website will know be vying for my attention, clamoring to be read.

    One benefit – interestingly enough, my coffee consumption has gone down a bit — must be due to me not wanting to leave the cube and miss any new posts!

  • TMC,

    That’s a lot of different fleas to be worried about. In one sense I agree with you, there are a lot of possibilities that, should they happen, could really be a blow to world economies and perhaps to our way of life. On the other hand, why worry about what’s going to happen…you get spastic enough worrying about what’s happening now.

    While I’m a big fan of political blogs and a self-described “observer of life”, I am definitely of the opinion that now more than ever I am (we are) required to take action, to challenge people’s current belief systems and encourage EVERYONE to get off their butts and start working to make a difference. My hope is that the discussions we have here will lead each of us to have these discussions off-line with more and more people and that the discontent we feel will activate even more people. Whether that means getting them to vote, write their public leaders, run for office or just pull there head out of the sand and pay attention.
    People can be ignorant, dumb and misguided….but with reasonable, intelligent leadership, and an organized sense of purpose, they can move mountains and do it for the overall good of mankind. It’s my hope that we return to that ideal in this country one day soon.

  • According to C.M. Cipolla’s Fighting the Plague in Seventeenth Century Italy, doctors around 1600 began wearing a robe made of linen coated with a wax paste. You can see a picture of these weird robes/hoods here.

    They believed the plague was caused by “venomous atoms” which infected the air, atoms believed to be “sticky” so that they clung to things, the way smoke or perfume does. Waxing the robes presumably prevented the atoms from sticking to them.

    A priest in Italy complained that the robe was uncomfortable and useless against plague, that it “is good only to protect one from the fleas which cannot nest in it.” He didn’t bother to use the robe even though he was “devoured by fleas, armies of which nest in my gown.”

    I think there’s a lesson for us. Unlike the 1600s, we have pretty good ideas about what problems we’re likely to face in the near future, and we have a pretty knowledgeable sense of how to deal with them if they should arise. But, like that priest, we find work along these lines (and paying the taxes needed to support that work, and finding the leadership to direct that work) uncomfortable, inconvenient.

  • wow, it’s hard to know where to start: so many errors in one little paragraph:
    1. Only France & England were involved in the Hundred Years War, hardly all of Europe .. and it started around 670 years ago, not 800.
    2. The idea that the Church got rid of domestic cats (as witches familiars or otherwise) is just ludicrous: amongst other things, 800 years ago the fear of witchery had hardly started; and cats were regarded as pets only by the very rich: they were also on farms, as ‘working animals’ for rodent control.
    3. Rattus Norvegicus didn’t take over most of Europe until the 19th century: and wasn’t responsible for spreading Pestis pasteurelis (sp?) – that was the brown Rattus Rattus.
    4. Neither 800 years ago, nor during the early part of the HYW, was there direct commerce between Istanbul and Rotterdam. There was of course the ugly 4th Crusade (801 years ago) – but that still wasnt a direct naval link.
    5. THere _was_no_ Istanbul until 550 years ago – it was Constantinople (and Christian, btw).
    6. If feudalism was on it’s last legs at the start of the HYW, or even after the first bout of the Black Death (around 620-630 years ago), they were ASTONISHINGLY stout last legs, as it lasted until well after the end of the Hundred Years War in Western Europe, and until the 18th/19th Century in Eastern Europe (and one could say it’s still in existence in Russia, in a modified form).
    7. The idea that the Black Death caused the Reformation is astoundingly stupid, even by this dreadful record. I dont have time or space to get into that here, but for a quick start, examine the accumulation of capital, the (re)invention of banking, insurance, and double-entry bookkeeping, and the growth of merchant princes as a result, as a starting point.
    8. The ‘Dark Ages’ of ignorance were absolutely _not_ a result of religiously-imposed ignorance, but a result of the _fall_of_civilisation. The Church played a significant role in maintaining knowledge and attempting to spread it, in the medieval period.

    Shorter: Less scaremongering, more thought, please

  • THere _was_no_ Istanbul until 550 years ago

    Actually it didn’t become Istanbul officially until 1930.

  • Hey Firefall, were we NOT left with instructions by the illustrious host of this blog to “..be nice to the subs.”? 🙁 🙂

    Suspend the fact-checking to the nth degree and look at “the forest”. IMHO, Thomas’es underlying premise is sound. There is much going on in our world; pay attention and participate.

  • Thank you, firefall. Andy, too. And T.M. Cleaver … errors or no, your contribution raised a very important topic. I do wish our political “leaders” would pay more attention to potential pandemics and developing plans to cope with them (and I don’t mean “bubble communities” for the wealthy and powerful only.

    Opening up what used to be called the “third world” to massive deforestation, corporate agriculture, eco-damaging industrialization and rapid urbanization, together with vastly expanded means of global transportation and migration, opens us all to a pretty scarey panoply of biological wonders down the road.

    When I still taught (Demography) I used to show the class a graph of the US general mortality rate throughout most of the 20th century. It showed a long-term gradual decline (the major drops had occurred in prior centuries, owing to improved agriculture/diet and public sanitation programs. The major exception to that long, slightly declining straight line was a sudden and dramatic spike around 1918-9. I asked them to guess what that was.

    Most knew no history, but some did guess World War I. I said no, actually even very bloody wars don’t show up on graphs like these (there just aren’t enough deaths compared with the annual harvest from the aging process). It was the Spanish flu pandemic which caused that spike. Not something most people think about on a routine basis, which is why our “leaders” ought to.

  • while it’s it vastly more fun (and easier) to play nit-picky with “facts” (I must confess, I immediately did the mental math for the Hundred Years War thing, too) – it is interesting to contemplate this sort of problem.
    These sort of pandemics are certainly nothing new in the human experience, and as with a lot of things, our experience is the exception to the rule, and might well be only a temporary exception at that. Even well into the second half of the 19th century, many cities experienced mass disease outbreaks such as yellow fever, and emptied out during the summertime as a matter of course (one reason why Bush vacating Washington for weeks on end mid-summer [“vacation” or not] really isn’t that unusal in the historical scheme of things).
    Besides the public health consequences of the contraction in the vaccine industry evidenced by the flu shot fiasco of last year – does the “free market” really provide the answer in situations such as this? – there are many very interesting things to ponder considering how this country has changed since 1918 and how people will cope. Will people be afraid or averse to using mass transit and what public policy implications will that hold? Many fewer people now have access to their own-grown fresh produce than in 1918 – or had relatives in the country to go stay with. Even if the workplace and communciation can all be done electronicaly, how long could urban dwellers really quarantine themselves before they need to surface for food and other services? What would happen to all the “big box” retailers if people suddenly stayed home and ordered everything online? Living in the Washington area, it was interesting to see who the anthrax attack in 2001 and the sniper in 2002 changed people’s habits do to fear. Something like this, fear on a much larger scale, is capable of having tremendous consequences.

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