Category: Life, The Universe and Everything

Today is “Summer Bank Holiday.” I have, basically, no idea what that means – but I can’t help but think that it says something deep about British culture that the country all but shuts down on “bank holidays.”

“We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” [1]

I also can’t help but notice – as the days grow slightly shorter, my morning runs cooler, and the afternoon light more golden – that in a few short weeks another Summer will officially be over.

The Earth made another voyage around the sun and all most of us got was this lousy pandemic.

I’m not sure why it matters to me. Dawnise and I rarely travel in the summer – we have no kids, so we’re not bound by the traditional school year, and Dawnise and hot weather don’t get along particularly well, so we usually do our traveling in the Spring and Fall.

Never-the-less, I feel like I’ve missed something.

Life in London is slowly creeping toward normal. More people on the streets. More people commuting to work. The response to the government’s “Eat Out to Help Out” scheme suggests that people are willing to set health concerns aside in return for £10 off their meal bill. The scheme ends today, so soon we’ll see how many of those discount diners remember how much they used to enjoy eating food they didn’t cook, and wasn’t delivered by a guy on a scooter, and keep going out for meals.

Even the theaters have started re-opening, though I’m unsure who’s attending the socially distanced shows. Sitting through a multi-hour performance wearing a mask is somewhere near the opposite of my idea of a good time.

In the midst of all this, and almost certainly because of all this, the case count across the UK is trending up. The hospitalization and mortality rates aren’t following, and while that’s clearly good news, it does raise obvious questions.

In more positive news, thanks to a roughly £1.9 million investment from the UK government, the Cambridge vaccine could be in trials ‘by autumn.’

In mundane news, my BRP is still in the hands of the driver and vehicle licensing agency (DVLA). A polite, but basically pointless, online chat asking when I might have my identity document back ended with “hopefully not too much longer.”

Good thing we’re not planning to go anywhere for a bit.

Long ago, nearly in the before-time, I bought a merino wool base layer from Mountain Warehouse. Since I was ordering anyway, I added a few speculative items to the basket, as did Dawnise. On arrival most of the speculative items were earmarked for return. As the UK was busily shutting down, we put the the stuff in a closet.

(queue time passing)

I thought of that bag, sitting in the closet, on our way home from brunch this morning and decided to see if I could still arrange a return. It was months past purchase, long past their official returns policy. For a while their website had a message about extending return windows, but the message was now gone. So, expecting at least a bit of an argument, I tossed the goods in a backpack and walked a mile to the shop.

Aside from my morning run it’s was the furthest I’ve ventured on foot in months, and in a different direction. A few blocks after setting out I felt like an intrepid explorer. Surely no one has been here for months! I thought. Only to turn a corner and find a few people sitting on benches in park. Hrm. Ok. Clearly someone has. By the time I reached my destination it all seemed almost familiar, and normal. I donned my mask, had a quick chat with the shop attendant who was more than happy to accommodate the return. I took a different route home, arriving just before a sudden cloudburst would have soaked me through.

And now I can tell Dawnise tales of far off lands she hasn’t seen in half a year.

So that was that.

In more serious news, it seems the federal occupation of Portland is extending to more cities, including Seattle. I keep wondering if, one morning, I’m going to wake up to learn our townhouse in the city is under siege. Or is no more.

These are not questions I expect to have to ask about a self-proclaimed first world democracy.

[Warning: Politics Ahead.]

I just finished reading Drutman’s Breaking the Two Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America.

If you’re frustrated, or despondent, at the state of politics in America you should read it.

If you’re not frustrated at the state of American politics – because you’ve stopped paying attention – you should read it, too.

Drutman’s core argument is roughly that despite being two-party in name for the decades when American government was seen as being the most effective it was, practically speaking, a four party system. Factions of conservative-leaning Democrats and liberal-leaning Republicans enabled compromise.

Drutman presents a compelling argument that the breakdown of this “effectively four party” system into two well sorted parties leads directly to our current “lesser-of-two evils” state, and is the root cause of much of the fundamental dysfunction in American politics and government.

What makes his analysis different, and recommended reading, is that he proposes a plausible solution that doesn’t require a constitutional amendment and doesn’t immediately fail the sniff test.

Not to spoil the ending, but Drutman proposes abandoning winner-take-all elections and adopting single winner ranked choice voting for Senate seats and multi-winner ranked choice voting for House seats, while enlarging the house and expanding two-parties into between four and six.*

He supports this proposal with evidence from other countries that have done similar things, and with examples from America’s past where seemingly impossible electoral and political reform happened.

My read of his proposal is that it isn’t particularly partisan – it doesn’t help one party at the cost of the other. It fundamentally changes the election game and makes room for collaboration and compromise in a system that’s lost that ability by choice, accident, and design. He persuasively argues and presents evidence that this has worked in other countries, and that it can work in America.

I found the book well researched, considered and methodical in its approach, and focused on a concrete problem and a potential solution. I don’t know if what Drutman proposes will work, or can work, but I can’t find fault with his fundamental thesis: that American democracy is on a course to tear itself apart.

It’s up to America, and Americans, to find a way to fix it.

Next on the reading list: How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future.

* I’ve been supporting FairVote for several years, but honestly never saw it as part of a larger potential fix for American politics.

[24-May]

** For more thoughts on the subject of how the two party sorting contributes to the problem, consider Rethinking Polarization, by Rauch [nationalaffairs.com].

I’ve been a bit remiss of late in publishing updates. Mea culpa. Things have been simultaneously tumultuous and incredibly mundane.

I started working from home the first week of March. I stood at the stair rail for a week or so – my computer propped on a desk made of a box and a book.

By the time we saw City of Angels on the 10th, it was clear the city – and especially the west end – were running on borrowed time.

We encouraged a friend of ours, whose sabbatical year in Europe was rapidly unraveling, to accelerate her planned transit from Spain by a week and offered up our guest room while she figured out her next move. She arrived on the 16th, the day the theaters closed, and we condensed her planned “London experience” into a meal at The Wilmington, nearly-deserted on the night of her arrival and shut down the following day, and breakfast at our favorite local cafe the next morning.

She managed to see a few sights as the city shut down around her, and by the end of the week on the advice of her University, and a little help from the same, had abandoned her booked accommodation and secured a flight back to the US.

Our cleaning service came the day she departed, right on schedule. It turned out that would be the last visit for a while.

All the local restaurants in our bit of London quickly closed – not having sufficient traffic to support themselves without the daily crowd commuting into The City.

After our guest had departed, Dawnise pointed out that the guest room wasn’t likely to see any guests for a while and encouraged me to make it my office. After dragging my feet for a few days I disassembled the guest bed and took her advice. I bought a “podium-cum-standing-desk” from Amazon and dragged the Poäng in from the master bedroom. I’ve strongly resisted buying anything I can’t easily stash once we can welcome visitors again.

The next few weeks were punctuated with emails informing of us canceled theater bookings and concerts, news about new transport closures, and reminders from Transport for London not to take the tube except for essential journeys.

We live around the corner from the Barbican Waitrose – I’d typically stop on my way home to pickup whatever bits and bobs we needed for dinner that evening. Like everywhere else there was an initial run on stock – with some staples (like flour) only now returning to pre-panic levels. We’ve shifted our shopping to a weekly larger shop, Dawnise typically does the shopping and I meet her there to help mule it home.

In the long long ago I worked from home full time for a few years, and once I had a home office, it didn’t take us long to remember old habits that worked. Punctuating the start and stop of the work day, being conscious to eat an actual lunch on a regular schedule and not just wandering into the kitchen to snack.

I largely spend weekends reading – either short form, often COVID-related, or long form, continuing to alternate between fiction and non-fiction. Along the way I’ve written a couple blog posts I didn’t think worth sending to the mailing list. At some point I found an offer for three free months of Fender Play and pulled the guitar out of the closet. I hadn’t touched it in years, and forgotten most everything. I guess the good news is I forgot all the bad habits, too.

Dawnise has been reading, cultivating sourdough and baking with it, killing unsuspecting alternate-history Brits in We Happy Few, and of late amusing Facebook friends with the photographic adventures of QWar and Tina – if you Facebook, you can search for “#QWarandTina”

The weather has been, on average, frustratingly nice, which hasn’t helped compliance with the “Stay Home. Protect the NHS. Save Lives” directive. We feel very fortunate to have a deck and easy access to the out-of-doors. We bought a stand for an umbrella left by the last tenants, and I have a better tan than I’ve had since our last trip to Hawaii.

Boris Johnson addressed the nation last night to lay out a roadmap for reopening. It was hardly the Saint Crispin’s Day speech, but it was mostly coherent (aside from maybe the “we have a 1-5 scale, and we’re between 3 and 4” bit) and I’m pretty sure he actually understood the words he used.

We both struggle occasionally to keep perspective. We’re both healthy, safe, and mostly as sane as we were when this all hit the fan. That it’s completely fubar’d our travel plans for the year puts us in good company. We try with varying success to not focus on the work it took to get here.

So here we are. Living in London. Aside from when I’m out for a morning run the city outside our windows could be a matte painting.

I can’t throw a rock far enough to tell.

Punxsutawney Phil has seen his shadow. At least three more weeks of lock-down…

Like many of the 7.5 billion inhabitants of this insignificant little blue green planet we call home, we had plans. (Our best laid plans, you might say.)

Funny thing about plans – they’re bets on the future state of the universe. Much of the time, most of the time, reality cooperates. Tomorrow will probably be pretty similar to today, which is pretty similar to yesterday.

I don’t know anyone who’s plans included a global pandemic, infecting 2.1 million people, claiming over 140 thousand lives to date, forcing huge swaths of the population to stay in their homes, shuttering the global economy, and setting us on an uncertain path toward an as-yet-indescribable new normal.

And speaking of “new normal,” I can’t be the only one who’s (already) finding that phrase irritating. We have a deep desire to name things. I get it. And I guess “new normal” is as good a name as I can think of for the current uncertainty. And it seems true that we’re going to have no choice but to rapidly evolve our societal norms. But still. “New normal” is high on my list of phrases I’ll be happy to see the back of. Like “lock-down.”

Like many, I’ve been thinking about why basically all the western countries failed so utterly and completely to prepare for, and respond to, this pandemic. As comforting as it might be to think it was unpredictable, it wasn’t. People have been raising the general alarm about our global susceptibility to pandemic for years, and this specific event has been raising alarms for several months. But like a car in a mall parking lot, the alarm was screaming, and everyone was ignoring it.

I think it has a lot to do with how we learn. And how we don’t. And how a lack of deep scientific literacy among elected leadership became a force multiplier for uncertainty.

You might disagree, but on the whole I think individuals are pretty good at learning from their experiences. It’s generally a good idea not to make the same mistake twice – so much so that we often “over-index” on not doing so (everyone remember taking off their shoes at airports ’cause of that one guy who tried to get something on a plane in his shoes? everyone remember airports? ahh. good times.) It’s also usually sensible to assume that what’s happened (many times) before is pretty likely to happen again – and to assume that extraordinary events are… well… extra-ordinary.

What most of us are not so great at is learning from other people’s mistakes. Especially mistakes made by people we don’t have a high implicit degree of trust in. It’s too easy to convince ourselves that we’re different. That we’re smarter. That they were just unlucky.

Responding in the moment to the pandemic required taking action without direct experience – before, as they say, all the facts were in. It required us to take action based on theory.

It required realizing that novel in “novel coronavirus” was the game changer. That the exponential nature of the spread of infection meant a decision today was literally twice as good as that same decision tomorrow. And maybe most difficult, it meant realizing and admitting that we weren’t different. We weren’t smarter. And that this time we were all unlucky.

Politicians – at least US politicians – rarely have scientific training or backgrounds. They live in the shades of grey – in organizational structures and leadership, and soft power. The good ones have deep experience with the malleable rule systems humans create, negotiating changes to those rule systems is their stock in trade. To those people, the predictions of calamity must have been hard to fathom – and the idea that the counter-measures being proposed were proportional and appropriate must have beggared belief.

It couldn’t have helped that the only choice they were being offered by their scientific advisors reduced to a shut down of their economies. Those who acted quickly and decisively to curtail public activity – with immediate and massive economic impact – must have felt like they were taking a hugely expensive bet.

Consider what might have happened if every country, and ever local leader, had acted quickly. In that alternate timeline, with much lower infection rates and mortality counts, it seems certain that the nagging question would be if we over-reacted.

The key question now, and one I don’t have any answers to, is “how do we get out of this mess?”

And as we navigate toward that “new normal,” how do we learn from our near-global mistake? And how do we apply that learning to other low probability high impact events? How do we convince ourselves that just because yesterday and today are fine, there’s a small but important chance that tomorrow may be the day when our best laid plans gang aft agley.