The Other Side of Apocalypse

It happens in wartime--it happened in World War II for certain, and the Great War, and to some extent during Vietnam.  It happened during the Great Depression.  In the middle of an apocalyptic time, people begin looking beyond it, looking for the silver lining, the changes for the better it might clarify and enable.

The other side of this current apocalypse--of this current revelation--could be a better future.  It's a long way yet to that other side, but that discussion is already beginning.

Anna Marie Slaughter's piece in the New York Times, referenced in a previous post, is one example.  She writes:

"The coronavirus, and its economic and social fallout, is a time machine to the future. Changes that many of us predicted would happen over decades are instead taking place in the span of weeks."

Several of the innovations she mentioned involve increased use of technologies for remote learning, teleconferencing and 3-D printing.  Both remote learning and teleconferencing reduce the need to travel, which helps clear the air and reduces greenhouse gases.  3-D printing is one of the ways communities can reduce dependence for vital supplies on global supply chains. The question is whether universities and businesses go back to the old model or better integrate remote learning and teleconferencing in a new synthesis.

(Other questions are whether any of this stuff works, and how to make them work better.  For those answers, this crisis provides lots of data.)

This crisis, she writes, also increases our awareness of the vital roles of caregivers in our society as well as our economy, she writes, which should lead to valuing them more with better pay.  As for the economy in general, today's crisis argues for more attention to guaranteed incomes, as well as more investment in better broadband capabilities for everyone.  She concludes

"The future is here, whether we like it or not. Although a future dependent on the current federal government looks bleak, we can vote to change that in November. Right now, we can follow the lead of local and regional leaders and step up ourselves. Through the virus, we are rediscovering the dark side of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” But we can also rediscover what is possible and what we are capable of as a nation. We can use this crisis to create a better America."

Another example of this kind of thinking is found in a compilation piece in Politico, in which 34 experts forecast how the coronavirus crisis will change the world.  A surprising number of them speculate that despite the horrors it is likely to inflict this year, the crisis and response to it could change the future for the better.

Some of the topics discussed are: "A new kind of patriotism," "A decline in polarization," "a return to faith in serious experts," new forms of reform, a greater appreciation of government, as well as a host of accelerated changes involving technology, new economic models and a society organized more on empathy than hostility.

Certainly some of these reflect the writer's wishlist, and some of them clearly have a dark side.  And there is a long way to go before we get to the other side, in which we will all be tested.  Already we're seeing racism, misinformation and anger erupting, and we're likely to see more.

But some changes, if not transformations, are inevitable, and some offer particular opportunities.  I can't help thinking that all that's being done that was previously unthinkable, was specifically cited as reasons why we weren't addressing the climate crisis with the required urgency.  Giles Tremlett suggests that those governments that acted comprehensively and with urgency to address the Covid crisis provide models for how to address the climate crisis.

Meanwhile--thanks to the vehicles not on the freeways, and the factories not polluting-- the air quality in Los Angeles is suddenly good.  Air pollution is suddenly declining everywhere.  The water is suddenly clear in the canals of Venice, and wildlife is returning.  Locals are talking about controlling tourism there rather than letting it overwhelm them again.

We've known for years that pandemics were becoming more possible for many reasons, but specifically because of global heating--especially those associated with insect-borne diseases. And while I haven't seen anything yet that links this virus to the climate crisis, it has been causally linked to the other paramount (and related) ecological catastrophe of our time--the mass extinction of life forms on the planet.

“We invade tropical forests and other wild landscapes, which harbour so many species of animals and plants – and within those creatures, so many unknown viruses,” David Quammen, author of Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Pandemic, recently wrote in the New York Times. “We cut the trees; we kill the animals or cage them and send them to markets. We disrupt ecosystems, and we shake viruses loose from their natural hosts. When that happens, they need a new host. Often, we are it.”

This view more than suggests that this is not the last viral pandemic we can expect.  For a better future, and for a longer one, the twin ecological threats to the survival of humanity and all life as we know it--the climate crisis and species extinction--must be addressed with a similar urgency, when we get to the other side of this apocalypse.

Update 3/28: Meehan Crist has an oped in the NYTimes, "What the Coronavirus Means for Climate Change" that is along these lines of looking to the future through this new lens.  But towards the end of this piece is a section about the effects of the suddenly clean air in Chinese cities, usually swamped in smoke and industrial pollution:

"In China, just two months of reduced pollution is likely to have saved the lives of 4,000 children under the age of 5 and 73,000 adults over the age of 70, writes Marshall Burke, an assistant professor in Stanford's earth system science department."  

I'm sure there is more to be said about climate crisis, public health and proportionality.

This Critical Moment

This is not the moment to lose our nerve.  Everything depends on it.

On Monday there were two potentially catastrophic trends.  The first was the wave of stories, prompted by the White House, that social distancing and stay at home orders should be abandoned.  Republicans in particular are losing their nerve about damage to the economy, which translates in their terms to corporate profits.

They are doing so as the number of cases and deaths start to rise, and infection experts (led by Dr. Fauci) unanimously say that social distancing is crucial to slow down and minimize new infections.

Even now, the patchwork guidelines and orders, begun at different times to different degrees in different cities and states, as well as different countries around the world (and they continue) have made effective response a dicier matter than it should be, not to mention the people who are disregarding social distancing guidelines.  These strictures should be strengthened, not ended, the medical experts say.

The medical consequences most likely would be more sickness and death, and especially the implosion of hospitals and the public health system.  All of these would also have economic consequences, worse than shutting things down for awhile.

Jordan Weissmann writes in Slate:

The more sensible approach to taming this virus and saving our economy would be to orchestrate an actual nationwide lockdown for at least three or four weeks while the government essentially pays everybody’s bills (see: the economic aid bill Congress is working on). During that time, the country could ramp up production of tests and ventilators, and put in place measures necessary to set up an effective regime of testing people suspected of being ill and tracing their contacts, which appears to have worked in both South Korea and Taiwan. We’d face a dramatic economic downturn, yes. But we might also enjoy a relatively quick, V-shaped recovery as life returned to some semblance of normality.

The coronavirus crisis is going to create a severe economic hardship. There’s no escaping that. The question is whether it will be a short-lived disaster that we can begin pulling ourselves out of with the help of a serious public health mobilization, or if it will be a long, lingering horror we muddle through as people die. The fact that Trump is already having doubts about the half-measures he took last week unfortunately suggests he doesn’t have the stomach or foresight to pick the right course, because he’s too worried about the daily fluctuations of the stock market. Instead, he’s steering us toward a long pandemic and a depression all at once."

But as sensible as this is, we know we're unlikely to get a comprehensive national policy from this administration.  In the end, however, we are talking mostly about an additional two weeks or so of closed businesses.  The administration's announced policy is to maintain the federal strictures for two weeks in total and then reevaluate.  Medical experts will be consulted, and they are already talking about an additional two weeks at least.

The crucial element is to identify how and where to restart activity. We have to hope the states themselves will be looking at this.  Otherwise with confusion and conflict we risk chaos and an outbreak of panic.

Also on Monday, in the guise of a comprehensive support for the economy, Senate Republicans authored and forced votes on a bill that basically provides bountiful support for those who make millions a year.  In this immense crisis, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell can't seem to get beyond his default position as a partisan bully, trying to get a Trump-controlled corporate giveaway passed as a crisis measure: a classic shock doctrine tactic.  By forcing two votes at high pressure moments, McConnell tried to bully Democrats into voting for a bad--and decidedly not non-partisan-- bill.  They wouldn't.

Meanwhile a more responsible bill is taking shape in the House under the supervision of the only member of legislative leadership I personally trust, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.  A comparison of provisions (though a partial one) suggests that yes, it contains some Democratic wish-list items that could be eliminated in a bipartisan bill, but in general is a much better and more effective response to this crisis.

The news on Monday night was cautiously better.  The Senate minority leader said that a $2 trillion consensus bill should be finalized on Tuesday morning, that includes at least some of the guarantees and protections for workers and the support for the health system that Democrats can support.  Speaker Pelosi was reportedly in the loop, as was the White House.

We're not going to get the national leadership we need from this administration.  But Trump must at least be forced to back away from his cowardly threat, and his cowering to corporations that don't want appropriately strong measures taken.  We still need time to prevent the worst.

Poetry Monday: A Blessing

A Blessing

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their
       happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans.  They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the
       darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
into blossom.

--James Wright

James Wright on horseback with fellow poet Robert Bly, who is
the friend mentioned in this poem

In Memory

     Flora Severini Kowinski   Sept. 13, 1920--March 22, 1974

Our Asshole In Chief--And Actual Leaders

Rather than a leader or even a help, the Chief Executive of the U.S. continues to be an active hindrance to coming out of this Covid 19 crisis short of complete catastrophe and wanton tragedy.

His press conferences are fonts of callous misinformation at a time when clear information is most important, and his indecisiveness at this critical moment is crucially dangerous. (Today's New York Times headline: Trump Resists Appeals for More Urgent Action.) Every time he speaks the stock market drops into freefall.  That's even before we get to his diversionary racism. No wonder that Rachel Maddow suggests the media stop enabling him, and refuse to carry his statements live.

He outdid even himself at his press conference the other day when an admittedly combative NBC reporter ended a series of tough questions with a slow one, belt high, over the plate: he asked what the President of the United States would tell people who are scared.  Instead of taking this opportunity to offer words of compassion, reassurance and leadership--let alone inspiration--Trump let loose with a pent-up tirade attacking the integrity of the reporter and his entire TV network.  So instead of a leader, we've got--at best--the Asshole-in-Chief.

By contrast, the Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, hit all the right notes in her TV address to her nation.  First of all, the event assumed great importance because it is rare--she simply doesn't bloviate publicly, and rarely gives speeches on TV.  So people were listening, and what they heard informed and inspired them.

She did not minimize the situation, but she did so within a noble framework:  “Since German unification—no, since the Second World War—no challenge to our nation has ever demanded such a degree of common and united action.”

Of the speech, which contained no specifics about required actions, reporter Justin Davidson writes: "Yet what gave her address its force was her tone, which was direct, honest, and searingly empathic. She laid bare not just the test we all face but also the solace that leadership can provide. Without accusations, boasts, hedges, obfuscations, dubious claims, or apocalyptic metaphors she did what a leader is supposed to do: explain the gravity of the situation and promise that the government’s help would flow to everyone who needed it.

This is a war without a human enemy, and Merkel lay no blame. She asked for the sacrifice of discipline, for heroic acts of kindness. She acknowledged the paradox in calling for solidarity and apartness at the same time. She understood how painful it is that just when people desperately want to come together, families and friends have to endure separation."

Further, what Merkel did was praise those whose behavior is a model for the needed behavior throughout the crisis.  But not just medical workers, the most obvious. "Those who sit at supermarket cash registers or restock shelves are doing one of the hardest jobs there is right now.”

America is missing this unifying voice.  It is missing this grasp of the situation and understanding of what is necessary that could deploy the power of the federal government.

But the good news is that others are not waiting helplessly for the asshole in chief and a fractured Congress.  They are utterly ignoring the former.  In terms of governance it is the governors of the states who are leading.

Ann Marie Slaughter in the New York Times chronicles some of these efforts: "But if this crisis is highlighting our weaknesses as a nation, it is also bringing out some of our greatest strengths. In the absence of competent national leadership, others are stepping up. Governors and mayors, business owners, university presidents, philanthropists, pastors and nonprofit groups of all kinds have taken the initiative to mobilize, guide and protect those they lead and serve."

These--as well as true medical experts-- are the people we need to be listening to. Not the Asshole in Chief.

Slaughter continues: "These are the hallmarks of a horizontal, open society, one that is often inefficient but ultimately more innovative and resilient than closed, top-down systems. That is not to excuse the absence of national leadership; many Americans are likely to die who could have been protected had the nation been better prepared and better led. When people are suffering and dying and a virus is propagating, high-quality, centralized, top-down direction is critical.

Over the longer term, however, we are better off with as much experimentation and as many leaders as possible, not only to spur the kinds of innovations that will protect us from the virus (vaccines, treatments, cheaper and better medical equipment) but also to guide our transition to a very different world."

This pivot point of Slaughter's piece leads to the subject of an upcoming post--what people are saying about what may await us on the other side of this.

Who Are We? (The One You Feed)

Things are moving so quickly there is little to say that would necessarily survive the week.  There is so much information, and it keeps changing; yet there is not enough real information to define or determine much.

Whether this Covid 19 crisis is leading to unprecedented economic destruction has entered the conversation since last week at this time, and one of the problems is that nobody seems to know (or is able to explain clearly) what will help and what won't.

Social distancing has so quickly become normal that it is jarring to see TV characters shaking hands on shows made just weeks or months ago.  Yet as fast as all this is proceeding, it is also moving slowly in daily life in unknown directions.

But there are perhaps things that can be said in general, that apply to other crises but are becoming very real now, very fast.  And that is the nature of our responses.

We all have to deal with anxieties, with the continual cognitive dissonance of daily lives as the world wobbles.  Today (Wednesday) I was reading about how the US economic crisis could be more severe than the Great Depression, when the back of my chair was pulled by an earthquake under me.  And I mean a literal earthquake--a 5.2 offshore that did no reported damage.

Beyond that, and beyond acting with prudence and responsibility on behalf of ourselves, our loved ones and everyone else, there is the question of resilience.

I published a previous post on people in Italy singing, and the clapping across a city to honor healthcare workers--these practices have become viral in the old good sense, spreading all over Europe.

But an essay in Slate   by Lili Loof Bourow provides an astringent challenge to the idea of American resilience.  For example:

"Our situation is different not just because the Trump administration squandered the six weeks it had to prepare while other countries were modeling more and less effective approaches to their respective epidemics, and not just because Donald Trump has taught his followers that nothing scientists or the press says is true, but because some Americans believe that defying expert recommendations isn’t just their God-given right—it’s courageous and funny and even patriotic."

Bourow reminds us that (apart from unheralded heroics by some to survive the Great Recession) our only conspicuous example of resilience in recent years was the response to terrorism and 9-11, and that was to courageously go shopping (as President Bush recommended) while we meekly allowed ourselves to be turned into a surveillance state. "We have been led to believe that consumerism is the only political power we, the people, really have.... this is how we at home win the “battles” that have become notional and emptied of any ideal but rationalized selfishness. There’s no risk. There’s no sacrifice."

Yet for this crisis, the choice of selfishness v. sacrifice is already present, and may turn out to be defining.  Before this transformative weekend, way back on last Thursday (a whole week ago), when all of this started to get real in a big way, the New York Times online published a relevant array of articles/opinion pieces, as the news veered sharply towards national crisis.

For example, three prominent doctors with experience in disaster medicine wrote a piece headlined  How the Coronavirus May Force Doctors To Decide Who Can Live and Who Dies.  The subhead: "In the face of overwhelming demand and limited resources, health care would need to be rationed, with agonizing decisions." Since then, we've learned this may have already happened in other countries.

The headline on regular Times opinionater David Brooks was headlined Pandemics Kill Compassion, Too.  The subhead: You may not like who you're about to become.

"Some disasters, like hurricanes and earthquakes, can bring people together, but if history is any judge, pandemics generally drive them apart."  Brooks goes back centuries for much of his evidence, but also gave examples from the 1918 flu epidemic that killed 675,000 Americans during and shortly after World War I, in which 53,000 Americans died.  He quotes John M. Barry in his book The Great Influenza that when health care workers in "city after city" pleaded for volunteers, "few stepped forward."  "In Philadelphia, the head of emergency aid pleaded for help taking care of sick children.  Nobody answered...There are families in which every member is ill, in which the children are actually starving because there is no one to give them food."

Brooks exempts health care workers from this failure, including those in Washington state responding to the worst coronavirus outbreak in the US.  "It also wouldn't be a bad idea to take steps to fight the moral disease that accompanies the physical one," Brooks concludes.

But there is another view, also presented in Thursday's Times online, in an article that would appear in its Sunday Magazine entitled This is How You Live When the World Falls Apart.  It is apparently from a new book about how (as the article subtitle says) "The Great Alaska Earthquake of 1964 surprised everyone by showing that natural disasters can bring out more kindness than selfishness."

Author Jon Mooallem found that looting and criminal behavior was almost nonexistent, and the norm was immediate helping.  Individuals organized themselves into effective groups to pull people out of the rubble, to put out fires and take care of the injured.

“It’s there in front of you, so you do it,” a nurse named Dolly Fleming would later explain; she could find no more incisive theory to account for all the cooperation she’d witnessed. During the quake, Mrs. Fleming had found herself on a thrashing staircase and, seeing a teetering child in front of her, instinctively tucked him under her arm and strained to keep them both steady. Decades later, at age 93, the one cogent thought she could remember having through those four and a half minutes was: “I’m thankful I’m here. I’m thankful I’m here so I can hold on to this little guy.”

What was especially striking to me about this account was how it comports to what I read in researching an article  I wrote about local scholars who studied altruism--specifically rescuing Jews from the Nazis.  These were longer term and life-risking efforts, and yet they too were spontaneous, and people seemed surprised when asked why they did it.  (However, the answers that these scholars--Sam and Pearl Oliner--finally came to are summarized in their eight elements of caring, appended to the end of my article. They are worth looking at now.)

There are obvious differences between an earthquake and what looks to be a months-long pandemic.  But Mooallem draws some conclusions:

You’d be forgiven for feeling pessimistic, for dismissing what happened in a small Alaskan city long ago as quaint, and far less possible in our society now. And yet: In the 56 years since the Great Alaska Earthquake, an entire field of sociology, disaster studies, blossomed around the Disaster Research Center, with sociologists parachuting into scores of other communities after natural disasters around the world, and it’s stunning to look back and recognize how much of the resilience, levelheadedness, kindness and cooperation those sociologists saw in Anchorage turned out to be characteristic of disasters everywhere.

Many of our ugliest assumptions about human behavior have been refuted by their observations of how actual humans behave — though we seem tragically slow to shed those old myths...

In 1975, 11 years after their work in Alaska, two of the Disaster Research Center’s founders, Russell Dynes and Enrico Quarantelli, speculated about why they continued to find essentially the same scenario repeating itself: why, rather than encouraging conflict or violence, these catastrophes appeared to bring out the best in people. In ordinary times, they wrote, we suffer alone; any acute experience of our own vulnerability can isolate us, or even make us resentful of others: “The victim often feels discriminated against since there are others who have been spared.” But a disaster affects everyone, and peels us away from “mundane matters” to the “very issue of human life itself.”

When “danger, loss and suffering become a public phenomenon,” they went on, “all those who share in the experience are brought together in a very powerful psychological sense.” An unrelenting immediacy sets in: “Worries about the past and the future are unrealistic when judged against the realities of the moment,” the sociologists wrote, and distinctions between people fall away, leaving only “human beings responding to one another as human beings.”

Thrown all together, in one unrelenting present, we are made to recognize in one another what we deny most vehemently about ourselves: In the end, it’s our vulnerability that connects us."

In the end, it's our vulnerability that connects us.  I think that's partly what's behind what has become my favorite and most basic statement of morality: "You'd do the same for me."  That's a statement about fairness and morality, about faith and hope, and about societal and cultural ties that bind.  But it is also based on a statement of fact: sooner or later, I may need somebody's help.

And as the story of Mrs. Fleming suggests, it becomes a statement of what each of us stands for, what each of our lives means. Even if we don't respond spontaneously, do we want to think of ourselves--or to be remembered-- as someone who tried to help?

This is as true for pandemics as other kinds of disasters.  Author Frank Snowden, who has studied pandemics throughout history, tells a New Yorker interviewer:

"Epidemics are a category of disease that seem to hold up the mirror to human beings as to who we really are. That is to say, they obviously have everything to do with our relationship to our mortality, to death, to our lives. They also reflect our relationships with the environment—the built environment that we create and the natural environment that responds. They show the moral relationships that we have toward each other as people, and we’re seeing that today."

The evidence so far from the current crisis is mixed--stories of ordinary denial and panic, and of almost inconceivable opportunism and evil, and misplaced racial fears. But also stories of generosity, dedication and sacrifice as well as responsibility and resilience.  In the end it becomes another illustration of that old teaching story, ascribed to various Native American tribal traditions.  One version:

An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life. "A fight is going on inside me," he said to the boy. "It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil - he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego." He continued, "The other is good - he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you - and inside every other person, too."

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, "Which wolf will win?"

 "The one you feed," the grandfather replied.

Poetry Monday: Looking for You

Looking For You

Looking for you through the gray rain,
your whole house is a face, windows
for eyes, door for a mouth.  Chimney
breathing, your house waits.  You
come down the street: you get a stare,
straight and slow to change.

No matter how willing and weak your own
face is, you know another face
for you, somewhere in the world: your house,
or a stone you choose on a mountain, or even
the wrinkled sea and its friend the wind.

Far away on an island off Alaska
there's a village gone back to forest,
and there leaning and peering--totem poles,
gray cedar eyes, crest, beak:
all those faces at home, staring from shadows,

Looking for you through the gray rain.

William Stafford

One From the Heart

Italy was the first nation to go on lockdown because of Covid 19, with everything closed but stores selling essentials.  Several news outlets have stories about the response of Italians, which was, in part, to sing.

Many Italians, in big cities and small towns, still live in multi-family dwellings, which in cities tend to be large apartment blocks. Homes tend to be right up against each other.  So Italians are often just a window or a balcony or a building away from each other.  That's the context of these stories, which suggest that the musicmaking began spontaneously but quickly became organized through social media.

Here are excerpts from a New York Times story, which also published the soulful photo above:  

Italians Find ‘a Moment of Joy in This Moment of Anxiety’
Under lockdown to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, song breaks out from rooftops, balconies and windows.

"It started with the national anthem. Then came the piano chords, trumpet blasts, violin serenades and even the clanging of pots and pans — all of it spilling from people’s homes, out of windows and from balconies, and rippling across rooftops.

Finally, on Saturday afternoon, a nationwide round of applause broke out for the doctors on the medical front lines fighting the spread of Europe’s worst coronavirus outbreak.

“It was from our hearts, to say thanks and show that we can get past this,” said Emma Santachiara, 73, who came out onto the terrace of her apartment in the Monteverde section of Rome to clap with her granddaughters.

On Friday evening, at the exact hour that health officials normally update the daily numbers of the country’s increasing infected and dead, Italians from the southern islands to the Alps sang the national anthem and played instruments.

“We’re Italians, and being vocal is part of our culture,” said Giorgio Albertini, 51, an archaeology professor who clapped from his apartment balcony in the university district of Milan, calling it a way “to feel a community, and to participate of the collective grief.”

On Friday, he sang “Oh Mia Bella Madunina,” a traditional Milanese song about city pride, while his 9-year-old son accompanied him at the violin.

At noon in Verona on Saturday, the peal of church bells gave way to the clapping of hands as Cristina Del Fabbro, 53, stood on her balcony applauding with her daughter Elisa, 21.

“We want to thank doctors and nurses,” she said. “They can’t stay safe at home as we do, they are tired and worried but they stay there, for those who get sick and need them.”

In Florence, the opera tenor Maurizio Marchini serenaded the city. Danilo Rossi, who plays first viola at Milan’s La Scala opera house, played music from his balcony, which was adorned with a banner that read, “Let’s not give up, we will make it.”

In Naples, balconies of an apartment complex, dripping with laundry, became stages for residents singing traditional songs in unison. Elsewhere in Naples, a DJ set up turntables on his balcony and played the Frankie Valli song “Can’t Take My Eyes off You” as neighbors sang and played guitar along from their windows.

Back in Rome, Ms. Santachiara spent Saturday teaching her 3-year-old granddaughter, Chiara, the words to an Italian classic, Azzurro, which Italians will sing tonight.

The girl’s father is a doctor who has been putting in extra hours and covering shifts to make sure that people don’t go without primary care. He has been sleeping in his office where he brought in a toaster to heat up food." [end of the Times quotes]

Italians are rightly proud of their public health system, which is generally considered the best in Europe.  But even this system has been overwhelmed, requiring heroic measures.  Through news and social media, Italians are aware of these efforts, and the national moment of applause expresses their appreciation.

But the singing is about more: it is about resilience, it is about, even in crisis, being who they are.

Soul of the Future: War of the Worlds

Let's talk about something else...as this Soul of the Future series continues.

An enemy armed with nuclear bombs, so soon after the realities of World War II, inspired anxieties and fears in the American public.  In addition to the atomic monster movies, these fears were expressed in subtexts to two other types of popular science fiction flicks of the 1950s: the alien subversion films, and the alien invasion films.

The fear of anything Other exacerbated by the focus on atomic adversaries that director Jack Arnold identified and consciously used in his "gill-man" monster films, extended not only to scary Russian supermen and their unknown technology but to other Americans, or at least beings who looked and acted like the folks next door.

This was the 1950s of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, the Hollywood Blacklist and J. Edgar Hoover, perennial director of the FBI, loudly warning of "Communist subversion."  However warranted some concern might have been, historians can point to numerous examples of overreach, much of it deliberate, and the systematic creation and exploitation of hysteria for political purposes.

(One example of the mood may suffice: Louis Armstrong was a beloved musician and iconic American around the world.  When Arkansas officials prevented black children from integrating a Little Rock public school, Armstrong suggested that President Eisenhower should personally take the children by the hand and escort them into the building.  For this, Armstrong was suspected of being a Communist, and an FBI investigation and file was started that lasted for the rest of his life.)

Dana Wynter and Kevin McCarthy in The Invasion
of the Body Snatchers (1956)

There were several 1950s movies in which aliens either disguised themselves as humans and replaced known townspeople, or "took over" actual people.  An example of the first is Jack Arnold's 1953 It Came From Outer Space, in which the aliens turn out to be benign beings only stalling for time while they repaired their spaceship, though their strangeness evokes suspicion and fear.

 The best example of the latter is the now iconic 1955  Invasion of the Body Snatchers, directed by Don Seigel, from a story by Knox College alum Jack Finney.  In this film, aliens "take over" people by duplicating them in large seed pods, turning them into passive but functioning humans.

Jeff Goldblum, Donald Sutherland, Leonard Nimoy
in the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers

This was a movie everyone at the time eventually saw.  Some insisted the alien takeover was a metaphor for Communist subversion, but the prevailing view came to be that "the pod people" represented 1950s conformism. (That's what it seemed to me the first time I saw it, and that's what the director intended.)

 In any case, the movie was as much an effective horror film as sci-fi.  A 1978 remake by Philip Kaufman was unique in being as good--and as scary--as the original.  In many ways, these films are precursors to contemporary zombie stories.

Presaging the generation gap of the 1960s, Village of the Damned (UK) and Children of the Damned (US) were about sinister children taken over by alien influences and given subversive ideas.  The obverse of these movies was one of Jack Arnold's best and least appreciated films, The Space Children, in which unseen space aliens use intelligent children to destroy atomic warheads by mind power.  Along the way, some of the crassness and cruelty of ordinary 1950s domesticity and mistreatment of children are revealed.

Grant Williams in 1957 The Incredible Shrinking Man

Another sort of taking-over with a more direct connection to the Bomb is 1957's The Incredible Shrinking Man, once again by Jack Arnold, in what many regard as his masterpiece. (An exception is John Baxter in his respected Science Fiction of the Cinema, who asserts it's The Space Children.)

In this film, a man relaxing on a boat in the ocean is suddenly engulfed in what appears to be sparkly remnants of a nuclear bomb test.  This begins his physical transformation--his long journey of shrinking and his attempts to cope with it, until he is on the verge of ultimately disappearing.  It's not a big metaphorical leap to see this as suggesting humanity has met its match in the Bomb, and has become as hopeless a victim of it as the smallest lifeforms.

But by far the dominant form of 1950s atomic age sci-fi movies were the space invasion films.  Again, these exploited the facts that there was no face on the Soviet threat, but there were ominous suggestions of secret powers greater than ours.  The imaginative leap to space aliens was a short one.

The best and most interesting of these films was (again) one of the first: the 1953 Technicolor movie of H.G. Wells' famous story, The War of the Worlds, produced by the legendary George Pal.  On the substructure Wells provided, the Pal film built a classic movie that richly expresses atomic anxieties in deeply emotional terms.

After H.G. Wells invented modern science fiction with The Time Machine, and (arguably) modern scientific horror stories with The Island of Doctor Moreau and The Invisible Man, he wrote the first space aliens invasion tale in The War of the Worlds--all in the last decade of the nineteenth century.

The War of the Worlds had a specific inspiration and a moral spine, an empathetic basis that became vital to later science fiction. Wells was walking with his brother Frank in the peaceful Surrey countryside, when the conversation turned to the native inhabitants of Tasmania, an island south of Australia, who were eradicated when the English transformed the island into a prison colony. What if some beings from another planet suddenly dropped out the sky, his brother wondered, and did the same to England?

In the novel's pages Wells’ chief narrator refers to the Tasmanians, who “in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?”

Classics Illustrated were a feature of
my 1950s childhood, and the Wells
version of The War of the Worlds was
the very first--though not the first I saw
(that was Verne's From the Earth to the
Moon.) This comic came out in 1954.

It is a passage laden with Biblical imagery, hinting at the religious fervor that hypocritically accompanied such genocides. Wells extends the analogy to American Indians, even quoting Chief Joseph’s famous “we will fight no more forever” as the Martian invaders lie dying from earth’s bacteria-- the opposite of the fate suffered by American Indians, when it was the indigenous inhabitants whose population and civilizations were largely destroyed by alien diseases brought to them by European invaders.

But the popularity of The War of the Worlds through its various versions seems largely to be its scare factor--and so each version emphasizes, almost helplessly, the chief fears of the time.

In Wells time, it was the fear of a new kind of mechanized war that was in fact approaching in World War I.  Beginning with a novel titled The Battle of Dorking in 1871, a series of stories about armed invasions, usually of England, caught the public imagination.

 Wells melded this kind of story with another popular subject: more than 50 novels were published in the 1890s about Mars or Martians, inspired by new observations of the planets with more powerful telescopes, and imaginative speculation about "canals" on the surface and potential Martian civilizations.

In 1938, with World War II an even closer prospect than World War I was in Wells' time, Orson Welles startled America with an updated adaptation of the story, in the form of radio news reports.  Enough listeners actually believed Martians were invading New Jersey to inspire stories of a nationwide panic.

The effects of the 1938 broadcast proved that Wells' story could be updated to contemporary times, something that Wells himself reportedly doubted.  It could still work in the early 1950s, especially since Mars had still only been seen through Earth-bound telescopes. It was still possible to believe in Martians.

 This contemporary immediacy was perhaps even greater in Technicolor on the big screen in 1953.  All the elements of this film combined to express--at times elegantly--many of the fears associated with the Bomb: fears of sudden attack, of aliens so different as to be inhuman, of overwhelming technology and an apocalyptic outcome.

The War of the Worlds movie was a big hit with adult moviegoers the year it was released--the highest grossing science fiction film of the year, and one of Paramount's biggest overall.  It then joined other science fiction films on the matinee circuit for younger viewers that blanketed the 1950s.  It has since been listed on the American Film Institute roster of the 100 most important films of all time, and the Library of Congress National Film Registry for culturally significant films to be preserved.  The Registry noted that it expressed "the apocalyptic paranoia of the atomic age."

I saw the Pal The War of the Worlds on a local theater big screen when I was nine or ten, probably at a Saturday matinee a few years after it was released.  Before going into the fears that it touched, I emphasize that the movie itself was (and is) suspenseful and scary.  The Martian machines were convincing, and have become legendary.  Before anything like digital imaging, the machines were models and the effects were done on the set (which is technically the meaning of "special effects." Images created by computer and other means away from the set are technically "visual effects.")

The 1953 film was directed by Byron Haskin and written by Barre Lyndon, but it is always associated primarily with its producer, George Pal, because more than anyone else, he was responsible for it.  This was not his first invasion story. Hungarian born, Pal began his animated "Puppetoons" in the Netherlands, and brought them with him to the US, when he escaped the Nazi invasion.  In a 1942 puppetoon he depicted an invasion of Holland by thinly disguised Nazi troops, but his fantasy had a happy ending when the troops were melted by the rain.

Nor was The War of the Worlds Pal's first apocalyptic film.  He'd previously made When Worlds Collide (1951), in which Earth was destroyed by a rogue star, with a small remnant of humanity reaching that star's planet in a rocket, to begin the human race again.  (Some of this earlier movie shots were reused in this one.)  And this would not be Pal's only Wells-based film: in 1960 he made The Time Machine, which included scenes of a future atomic war.

Many 1950s science fiction films began with a narrated prologue--this one actually has two.  The first appears to moviegoers to be a movie newsreel.  This was the first instance of using the 1938 Orson Welles radio broadcast version technique of supposed news reporters on the scene, which helped make these incredible events credible. A couple of later scenes involving radio reporters are virtually duplicated from the 1938 script by Howard Koch.

 As the "Panic Broadcast" of 1938 proved, it is a surprisingly effective technique in making the events real enough to be scary.  I found this out for myself when I was in high school in the early 60s.  I'd read about the 1938 broadcast, and was inspired to write my own version of a contemporary Martian invasion, using the names of then current television network newscasters.  Together with three friends, I created it on audio tape, using whatever came to hand as sound effects.  When the tape was played for a high school class I was surprised at how many students were actually frightened by it.

The faux newsreel that began The War of the Worlds--all in black and white, as the newsreels were that ran before movies in the 40s and 50s--was very short and is worth quoting in its entirety, for it provides a startling point of view that in another context might get the filmmakers a visit from the FBI.

While the screen shows early 20th century images of a biplane and helmeted soldiers on horseback, an urgent newsreel voice explains, "In the first world war, and for the first time in the history of man, nations combined to fight against nations using the crude weapons of those days."

With the title World War II on the screen and images of artillery, ships and planes, the narrator continued: "The second world war involved every continent on the globe, and men turned to science for new devices of warfare, which reached an unparalleled peak in their capacity for destruction."

As a rocket fires from its gantry, the voice concludes: "And now, fought with the terrible weapons of super-science menacing all mankind and every creature on Earth, comes The War of the Worlds!"

At which point the title is stenciled in color, and the full Technicolor movie begins.

The sequence is based on an elegant conceit: from wars of the entire world to the next step, a war of  two worlds.  It's worth noting that neither world war had happened when Wells published the original novel, yet the kind of warfare that novel describes (not confined to battlefields but in countryside, then towns and cities) with powerful technological weapons, and destruction from above--these were all new things to come in these 20th century wars, which over the years Wells foresaw in greater detail.

But there is also a kind of subversive element to this narration, for its last sentence-- the terrible weapons of super-science menacing all mankind and every creature on Earth--describes and clearly refers to not just the Martian war machines but humankind's atomic bomb.

This relates to another theme of Wells' story.  When the Martian inside the machine is described (mostly a huge head, and shrunken appendages), Wells narrator compares their appearance to similar speculation that this is how human beings might evolve, made by his distant cousin named Wells.  In a sense, the humans of the late 19th century are battling their own future.

By the 1950s the developed future had arrived with thermonuclear weapons and related technologies.  Though intercontinental missiles were still a decade away, they had been foreseen and researched at the end of World War II.  The rocket in this montage clearly suggests this future.

Wells was thinking in evolutionary terms, but--especially with the term super-science-- this narration was resuscitating and reflecting the fear that science was treading into forbidden knowledge, such as the secrets of nature used in inventing the Bomb.

The movie used this illustration of Mars created by
artist Chesley Bonestell

After this brief faux newsreel, the urgent American voice (actor Paul Frees, who plays a radio reporter later in the film; in fact a notable number of radio actors had parts in it) is replaced by the calmer, slower and more mellifluous tones of English actor Sir Cedric Hardwicke, reciting H.G. Wells' first pages that describe the plight of the much older and more advanced Martian civilization: their planet could no longer sustain them, and they needed a new home.

 Harwicke departs from Wells for awhile to provide a kind of  astronomy lesson about the solar system, describing impossible living conditions on each planet (except for Venus, conveniently left out, possibly because in Wells' novel, when the Martian invasion of Earth fails, they move on to Venus as their second choice.) This prologue reminds us that this is the 1950s, before satellites and space probes. Except for excited ten year olds in the audience, the public knows very little about outer space and other planets, which have been no more real in their daily lives than Atlantis, and less perhaps than Eden or Hades.

That leads back to Wells and his eloquently chilling words concerning the Martians view of the warm green Earth: "...intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us."   

Then the story itself begins, as Wells' story did, with an apparent meteorite crashing into the Earth's surface.  (Wells may have been inspired specifically by a French astronomer's report in 1994 of "strange lights" on the Martian surface which might be signals.  This caused an international sensation.  Eminent inventors, including Marconi and Edison, tried to devise a way to signal back.  In Wells' novel, the "strange lights" on Mars precede the "meteors" that fall to Earth.)

But this time the meteorite lands not in the English countryside but outside a small town in California.  We see Technicolor townspeople outside a movie theater look up to see the brilliant shooting star.  We are immediately placed in the small town America we recognize partly from experience but mostly from the movies and television.

There are those who see this movie's Martians as a metaphor for the Soviet Communists, and of course that's what evokes the fear: remorseless and technologically superior aliens bent on nothing but destruction, which was the official US position, at least for public consumption, in order to maintain financial support for what President Eisenhower would later call the Military-Industrial Complex.  But it's more complex that this, as the newsreel prologue suggests.  So the sweet, naive townspeople (though some are eager to cash in on this meteor) may represent the American Way of Life threatened by Communism, but they may also suggest the distance between ordinary life and the things "super-science" is up to.

I'm not going to recount the whole story, only make observations about a few scenes.  When the Martians first reveal themselves, they do so to three men from the town who volunteered to watch the meteor overnight.  They are a white businessman in a suit, a young white man who is likely of lesser status, and a Latino man, probably a Mexican-American.  They treat each other with the absolute equality that characterizes Hollywood films and TV of the period more than reality, but they do represent that self-image and yearning.  They provide one of the film's biggest laughs (allegedly a deliberate one) and the film's first moment of horror.

When they realize the top of the meteor is unscrewing and something is emerging, they reason that it is from outer space, and the young men mentions that Mars is particularly close to the Earth at this time (which is also true in Wells' story.) They decide to greet the Martians, but what will they say?  "Welcome to California," they decide, and this invariably got a laugh.  It is also characteristic of Californians that they welcome people to their special state, rather than--in this case--to the planet or even the country.

But their innocence is rewarded only with being turned into ashes in the dirt by the Martian heat ray--one of the iconic images from this film.

This is the first of a series of defeats as the power of the Martian machines is revealed.  Nothing--good intentions, the most advanced scientific weapons, even religion (when a reverend approaches them with the Bible) can either get through to them or stop them.

All the military activity in fact climaxes with what is very likely the first atomic bomb explosion simulated for film, which is dropped on one of the now many nests of Martian machines, but literally doesn't touch them (Martian "super-science" has provided their machines with invulnerable force-fields.) Earth's ultimate weapon turns out not to be so ultimate.

 Until now the military was confident that each escalation--from artillery to the Air Force and finally to the ultimate A-Bomb would prevail.  Hubris--and perhaps the hubris of science above all--is revealed.

But like all these science fiction treatments, there is the other side to this negative portrait of the military and scientists.  The military (of all nations) fight honorably and bravely, and the film's hero is a scientist, Dr. Clayton Forrester (played by Gene Barry in his second film.)  The film follows Forrester and the young woman he just met, a teacher with an interest in science, Sylvia van Buren (played by the 19-year old Ann Robinson in her first screen role--producer Pal wanted unknowns in key roles to add to the verisimilitude.)  Their encounters with the Martians and their escapes provide much of the film's drama, especially when they are trapped in a farmhouse, surrounded by Martians. (This results in another of the movie's iconic images--the Martian hand on Sylvia's shoulder.)  

Eventually the military can do nothing but evacuate Los Angeles as the Martian machines approach, while Forrester and Sylvia retreat to Pacific Tech to confer with other scientists on a method to defeat the Martians.  Forrester suggests that since they can't defeat the machines, they should try to defeat the Martians themselves.  They have a sample of weak Martian blood, and will relocate in a safer area to pursue "a biological approach."

This group of scientists is interesting.  They are more realistic than the usual sci-fi depictions, and older (including an older woman scientist, rare in sci-fi films.) Several have German names and accents but they don't look like ex-Nazi rocket scientists but rather Jewish scientists who came to America to escape the Nazis (as did a number of actors, directors and writers who ended up in Hollywood, including some then on the Hollywood Blacklist.)

In most 50s movies of this kind, the scientists would indeed find a solution, and this is what as a kid in the audience I expected.  But something else happens--they must drive through Los Angeles with their lab equipment, where mobs are attacking trucks and hijacking them.  The scientists are stopped and at least one is seriously injured, their equipment destroyed.  "They're cutting their own throats!" Forrester cries.  These scenes of street violence were to me, even at age 10, among the most frightening in the movie.

The final scenes take place in the deserted streets of downtown Los Angeles while the Martian machines float above, destroying familiar buildings (a perfect echo of the Tokyo scenes in Gojira.) Forrester is alone, searching for Sylvia, who had been driving a bus from Pacific Tech that the mob hijacked.  She had told him that when as a child she was lost, she sought shelter in a church, and that's where he searches for her.  In the churches there are people being led in prayer, as well as people (like the other scientists) wounded by the mob or by the Martians.

The Martian machines are relentless and unopposed.  Forrester and Sylvia find each other (their pushing through crowds to get to each other inspired a similar scene in Spielberg's Close Encounters.) They are embracing in what looks to be their last moments, as the preacher asks divine forgiveness for all that humans had done that they should not have, and all that they had not done that they should have, when the congregation hear a machine crash outside, and then silence.  They rush out to investigate.

It turns out that the machines are falling everywhere, as the Martians inside are dying from exposure to Earth microbes, to which humans are now immune, but are deadly to the aliens.  It is Wells's ending as well, and he deliberately uses vocabulary to indicate he knows it is the reversal of the fate of the Indigenous people of the Americas, who were destroyed by the disease germs of the European invaders.

It is also a prescient observation of an incompatibility which might well make it impossible for humans as well as Martians to live on alien worlds, except in limited situations.  This is the premise for Kim Stanley Robinson's 2015 novel Aurora.

George Pal's movie has many Christian references, and these scenes in churches are followed by church bells ringing as Cedric Hardwick intones that, after all that humans could do had failed, the Martians had been slain by "the littlest things which God in his wisdom had put upon this Earth."   The church bells are Pal's, but the words "which God in his wisdom..." are Wells'.

The Christian themes may seem heavy-handed, though as a nice Catholic boy in the 1950s--when (in my town at least) downtown stores and offices were closed on Sundays and for three hours on Good Friday-- I wasn't bothered.  And despite the likelihood that Wells meant the microbes to be an evolutionary fact rather than a divine intervention, these scenes are both justified in the story, and evidence of another strong set of feelings than the Bomb evoked: that of sin.

The scenes are justified in a practical sense in that people probably would seek refuge in churches at such an apocalyptic moment.  They are justified in a dramatic sense also because the ultimate concerns of such places make them fitting locations for the apocalyptic climax.

But these scenes also suggest the sense that the existence of the Bomb's apocalyptic power is evidence not only of the success of humanity's science but of humanity's failure in other ways, particularly in morality, ethics and common sense.  What sort of a species consciously creates the means to destroy itself?

This response--of horror, of revulsion--was particularly strong in the years immediately after Hiroshima, when a US General suggested contemporary humans were both "nuclear giants and ethical infants." For some this meant a sense of sin, which goes beyond the transgressions of science in areas of knowledge that some believe humanity is not meant to have.  It is an attempt to grapple with the fact that human beings not only devised a way to destroy its own civilization with atomic devices, they went ahead and built them--and kept on building them until there indeed would be enough to destroy the world.

This sense of sin is an undercurrent in The War of the Worlds and recurs in other George Pal films, though Pal himself was known as a gentle and generally cheerful man.  Apocalyptic guilt as well as despair were part of the societal undercurrent as well, but they could not be talked about openly--only in monster movies and alien invasion flicks.

 In fact there was hardly a science fiction film made in the 1950s that did not refer to the Bomb or an apocalyptic war, including silly B-movies like World Without End (1956), an awkward rip-off of Wells' The Time Machine in which astronauts somehow accidentally rocket into the far future, just in time to provide the good old 1950s masculinity needed to re-start human civilization after atomic warfare had destroyed it centuries before.

With the pop culture metaphors of radiation monsters, alien subversion and invasion, the movies were clearing the air for films to deal with nuclear fears and the future more directly. The pressures of history as well as the precedents of these movies were paving the way for the next set of films in the late 1950s and afterwards, into the 1980s.  A brief review of those films next time.

For earlier posts in this series, click the Soul of the Future label here, or below, or in the label list.