Just tell it to me straight, doc
nce I lead the people into war they’ll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance,” the president, who’d just won a second term on a vow to keep America out of someone else’s war, explained as he prepared to reverse course and throw us into it.
“To fight you must be brutal and ruthless,” Woodrow Wilson told a sympathetic New York reporter, “and the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into the very fiber of our national life, infecting Congress, the courts, the policeman on the beat, and the man on the street.”
It turned out, though, that what infected the man on the street was the flu.
I just learned how the Spanish Flu — which killed 675,000 Americans, including Frederick Trump, Donald’s grandfather — ended up with that name.
It wasn’t that the virulent influenza strain had originated in Spain, or had hit particularly hard there. Rather, it was that Spain had remained neutral in the Great War, and because the king himself came down with it, the press there covered the outbreak extensively while military censorship in the U.S. and elsewhere kept a lid on the news even as the disease ravaged military and civilian populations.
About 500 million people, a third of the world’s population, were infected between 1918 and 1920. At least 50 million of them, including 675,000 Americans, died, many of them suddenly and terribly. In America, in Europe, and across the globe, the Spanish Flu was deadlier than the war that leaders used to suppress reporting on the outbreak.
A century later, the coronavirus is something quite different. The death rate appears to be much lower. News is harder to contain and spreads more quickly now, along with everything else. But there are echoes.
This time, it is Asians who are being associated with the disease, with business down dramatically in New York’s several Chinatowns as ethnicallytinged fear of the virus has, so far, outpaced its actual impact.
This time, instead of censorship from Washington, we’ve had slop. Trump and his team, who sensibly restricted travel from China, have glibly talked about how people who feel sick should just go to work if they need to, suggested that this is just the flu, wrongly claimed we’d have a vaccine in days, and falsely claimed that the virus is contained even as it’s started circulating among people who haven’t been abroad and claimed lives here.
Friday, Trump abruptly canceled and then rescheduled a visit to the CDC in Atlanta, explaining that he’d thought someone there had contracted the virus, but later found out that that was wrong.
That’s not inspiring confidence, which makes competent local leadership that much more essential. The early signs here are somewhat promising.
As I write this on Friday, Gov. Cuomo just updated the total to 4,000 people in precautionary quarantine in New York, including 2,700 people in the city. Cuomo and de Blasio have been reliable public messengers so far, putting aside their bad blood for a few joint press conferences and pressing Washington so we can finally administer our own coronavirus tests. It gave me pause, though, to see the Legislature vote late at night to give the governor broad and ill-defined “emergency powers.”
I’m so old, I remember 2014, when then-reality star Donald Trump, Cuomo’s former client, was railing about how Ebola was going to kill us all (thanks Obama!) and then New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Cuomo’s Port Authority pal across the Hudson, detained and quarantined an American nurse flying into Newark from a volunteer stint in Sierra Leone. That nurse showed no signs of infection, but she did give the governor a way to show he was the man in command.
I’m so old, I remember 2019 and de Blasio’s politicized and inept response to the measles outbreak in the Orthodox community here.
To fight this public health war, we don’t need brutality and ruthlessness but transparency and competence. Fingers crossed, and stay tuned.
harrysiegel@gmail.com