THE OLD FOLKS AT HOME
Harry Truman famously said, “The only thing new in the world is the history you do not know.” Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear, to a time when powerful natural force put American lives in danger – and incompetence at the top of the chain of command led to disaster.
I’m talking about the World War II incident that inspired Herman Wouk’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1951 novel, THE CAINE MUTINY, and the Humphrey Bogart film three years later. Wouk based his story on a near-mutiny aboard the USS Hull in December 1944. In Wouk’s fictionalized account of the Hull tragedy, the crew does indeed mutiny, but they’re acquitted when the mentally unstable Captain Queeg has a breakdown on the witness stand.
The real story is much worse. It began when Lt. Commander James Marks was placed in command of the Navy destroyer USS Hull in Seattle in the fall of 1944. Marks’ reputation for bad judgment preceded him, and as many as twenty sailors reportedly jumped ship in Seattle rather than sail to the South Pacific under his command.
Marks’ leadership issues were compounded by those of Admiral “Bull” Halsey, who had been tasked with deploying the Navy’s Third Fleet in support of General MacArthur’s imminent invasion of the Philippines. December 17, 1944, Halsey decided to test his officers, to “see what they were made of.” He ordered the Third Fleet, including the Hull, to hold their positions in the Philippine Sea, despite the approach of a massive typhoon.
Typhoon Cobra (or Halsey’s Typhoon, as it became known) featured wind gusts of 140 mph and 70-foot waves. To make matters worse, the USS Hull had been retrofitted with 500 tons of additional armament and equipment, rendering it top heavy. When the Hull crossed paths with the typhoon, it began to roll.
The Hull’s crew begged their officers to relieve Marks of his command. But none of them were willing to preside over the first mutiny in the history of the U.S. Navy. The Hull and two other destroyers capsized and sank. Of the Hull’s crew, 41 were rescued, while over 200 were lost. The overall death toll was 790 men. The Navy held a court of inquiry, and Halsey came in for some mild criticism. He kept his command, though.
That was all long ago and far away. I bring it up now because I have a feeling that Donald Trump is getting the urge to see what the rest of us are made of.
Trump has run out of patience with safety measures that hurt the stock market (and thus his re-election chances). “We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself.” Yesterday, he targeted Easter, April 12, as the day he’ll likely declare the COVID-19 emergency over.
No sane person thinks the emergency will be over by Easter, but with Donald Trump, sanity isn’t part of the calculus. He’ll fall for any outlandish scheme that the talking heads on Fox can dream up. The Outlandish poster boy du jour is Dan Patrick, the Lt. Governor of Texas, who suggested that old people should just go ahead and die so that their grandchildren can have a healthy stock portfolio.
Right. And if that doesn’t work, we can go Old School and toss a few virgins into volcanos. Desperate times call for desperate measures.
Friends, please believe me when I say that I like a healthy stock portfolio as much as the next guy. That’s where I parked the money I expected to live on for the rest of my life. But the trial balloon that Lt. Governor Patrick floated represents a false choice. Lots of elderly will die, he got that part right. But a mass sacrifice of Boomers and Silents won’t bring back the boom economy of 2019.
Even if you’re a hard-nosed, data-driven kind of no-nonsense Very Stable Genius who isn’t inclined to let mere sentiment mess up your bottom line, the fact is that we don’t know enough about the virus to make a rational cost-benefit analysis. Trump’s failure to begin testing in a timely manner means that we don’t even know how many people are infected, which in turn means that we can’t project fatality rates. His failure to acquire or manufacture the equipment needed to fight the virus means that its impact will be more severe than it might have been under, say, President Hillary Clinton.
Even well-known radical Liz Cheney, Wyoming’s Republican Congresswoman, is alarmed: “There will be no normally functioning economy if our hospitals are overwhelmed and thousands of Americans of all ages, including our doctors and nurses, lay dying because we have failed to do what’s necessary to stop the virus.”
If the economy bounces back at all from a premature attempt to restore normalcy, the recovery will be short-lived, and it will play out over a soundtrack of a few hundred thousand old geezers like me gasping for our last breaths. Remember when Republicans pretended to believe that Obamacare meant setting up death panels to take health insurance away from grandma and grandpa? Trump’s death panels will be all too real, as exhausted doctors will be forced to decide who gets treated for the virus, and who gets to die.
Here’s a rhetorical question. If Trump and his enablers were actively trying to spread COVID-19, what would they do differently? The allegedly pro-life Republican Party should admit that it just a death cult with a fetus fetish. (But if they really cared about fetuses, they’d insist on isolating pregnant women for as long as a threat from the virus remains.)
Trump is still trying to talk his way out of the crisis, although it doesn’t appear that the virus is listening. He may not realize that he doesn’t have the authority to open or close schools, factories, and theaters. His political strategists get it, though, and it’s clear that their strategy is to give Trump credit for anything that goes right, and blame local authorities – governors and mayors – for anything that goes wrong. You can bet that Trump is furious because people are praising New York’s Governor Cuomo crisis leadership. It wouldn’t shock me if we started hearing references to “the New York virus” pretty soon. Turning the pandemic into another Red State/Blue State battleground would be entirely consistent with Trump’s divide and conquer philosophy.
At the height of the Dust Bowl, California set up barricades at its borders to discourage Okies and Arkies from overwhelming the state’s infrastructure. Woody Guthrie wrote a song about it: “the police at the port of entry say, you’re number 14,000 for today.” My father was one of the “discouraged,” which is why I grew up a Kansan rather than a Californian.
I wonder if Blue State governors will try something similar in order to keep Red State travelers from importing the virus. If states begin setting up armed checkpoints with guards in hazmat suits taking everyone’s temperature and ordering everyone with a fever to turn back – well, you read it first here. Unless you read it first somewhere else.
There are better ways to get through this, and here’s one of them. First, stop framing the issue as a choice between health and wealth, or between the lives of the young and the lives of the old. This doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game.
The questions we should be asking are, what can we do now to minimize the economic fallout while we get through the pandemic, and what can we do then to make people whole again? People mutter darkly about “throwing money at problems,” but when the problem is that people are out of money, then the judicious application of cash seems like a reasonable first step.
I’d start by sending everyone $2000. Even Donald Trump. Establishing a means test would require Congress to debate where the cutoff line should be, and then build a bureaucracy to administer the process. We don’t have time for that. People need money now. Give them money now, and then re-assess in two or three weeks. If people need more money, give them more, until the crisis has passed.
Once people are free to congregate again, some bills will come due. Then it will be time to tax the rich.
And that means taxing me. Bring it on, please! I’m enthusiastic about paying taxes to build a better society. My goal is to live long enough to pay those taxes.