We’re all living on Maple Street now.
Has there ever been a more sheep-like animal than humans?
The panic over COVID-19 is absurd. Even if it should turn out that coronavirus is as dreaded as the politicians and media claim it is, we will have behaved in an embarrassing way.
What’s next – a lynch mob surrounding an 80-year-old with a cough?
That’s the curiosity about sheep-like humans. They can quickly turn into a pack of wolves.
“The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes and prejudices … in the minds of men. Prejudices can kill. A thoughtless frightening search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own,” says Rod Serling, explaining the sad fate of the residents on Maple Street. “Pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to The Twilight Zone.”
The original air date of “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” was March 4, 1960. The times have changed, but human nature hasn’t.
Serling wrote this episode, which begins on a gentle summer afternoon one Saturday on tree-lined Maple Street. There’s the tinkling bell of an ice cream vendor. Folks are working in their yards, on their cars, doing chores.
In a voice-over Serling tells us the fate that awaits these good people: “This will be the last calm and reflective moment on Maple Street – before the monsters came.”
At 6:43 p.m. there is a bright flashing light from the sky. The residents of Maple Street look up.
“What was that?” they ask each other.
A meteor, they figure.
Shortly thereafter, the electricity goes off in all the homes. The phones go dead. Tools stop working. One man says he’ll walk over to another neighborhood, and see if they have power.
The neighbors gather in the street and try to sort it out. Did it have something to do with the meteor? Was it even a meteor? Steve, kind of a neighborhood leader played by Claude Akins, offers to drive into town and see what’s going on. He can’t get his car to start.
The neighbors’ fear starts to show.
“It’s as if everything stopped,” someone says.
Steve and Charlie, a neighbor played by character actor Jack Weston whose baby face flits back and forth between fright and belligerence, decide to walk downtown and see what’s going on.
“You better not,” warns Tommy, a young boy. “They don’t want you to.”
“Who’s they?” Steve asks.
Tommy has read about them in a comic book. They’re aliens, and they have infiltrated our planet. They’re a mother, father and two kids. They look like humans, but they aren’t.
The adults on Maple Street laugh this off.
Another neighbor tries to start his car, but it won’t start either. When he gets out of his car, though, it starts on its own.
Some of the neighbors decide he’s suspicious. A woman says she has seen him in early morning hours out in his yard, looking up in the sky. Others join in. Yeah, that is kind of strange.
Another man scolds their mob-like tendencies: “You scared frighten rabbits … You’re sick people.”
As it grows darker, they light candles.
“Like going back into the Dark Ages,” Charlie complains.
They huddle in the middle of Maple Street, their arguments turning meaner and more desperate. Then they hear footsteps coming towards them in the dark.
“It’s the monster,” says Tommy.
Charlie grabs a shotgun and shoots towards the figure, killing the neighbor who earlier said he would walk to another neighborhood to see what was happening.
Maple Street devolves into violence.
Beyond in the distance, two figures in a space ship look on.
“Understand the procedure,” one of them says. “Just stop a few of their machines … throw them into darkness a few hours … they pick the most dangerous enemy they can find, and it is themselves. All we have to do is sit back and watch.”
“I take it this place, this Maple Street is not unique,” asks the other.
“Their world is full of Maple Streets. We’ll go from one to another, and let them destroy themselves.”
The reaction to coronavirus seems as overwrought as the residents on Maple Street. Although there were a few calm heads in the neighborhood, they were shouted down by those expecting the worst.
Especially since the election of Donald Trump, our media have warned us the bottom of our world is about to drop. It’s surprising how quickly everything folded – even Broadway.
Schools closed, libraries closed, public buildings and public venues no longer open to the public. The hysteria is contagious.
A friend of mine who is traveling this weekend in California stayed at a near-empty Hilton hotel. A waiter told him that the day before, the hotel’s restaurant did $200 worth of business. That is not sustainable, as environmentalists are fond of saying.
The panic did boost the sale of groceries. A clerk at my neighborhood Fred Meyer supermarket told me the busiest day of their week has always been Sunday. On Friday, they had the equivalent of three Sundays. That, too, is not sustainable.
My neighborhood liquor store also did good business. A middle-aged man staffed one of the cash registers, and a guy who didn’t look old enough to buy liquor staffed the other.
I looked at the lines and said, “I guess these are the last days. Thankfully, Tanqueray is on sale.”
The young clerk was not amused.
“Easy for you to say,” he said. “Some of us haven’t lived our lives.”
And some of us won’t, whether or not there’s coronavirus. None of us are guaranteed a single day of life.
The most sensible media coverage I’ve seen has been in The Spectator, a 191-year-old British publication that this year began an American edition. Their journalists can be critical of President Trump, but their reporting doesn’t betray a gleeful hope that he will fail.
Americans take America for granted. The British don’t.
The Spectator’s Amber Athey looked at differences in how the Obama Administration handled the H1N1 virus epidemic (swine flu) in 2009 and how the Trump Administration is handling COVID-19.
Trump has been far from perfect, she writes, but she also recalls that “a couple of weeks after Obama declared a national emergency, he hosted 2,000 young children at the White House to go trick or treating on Halloween.”
The Spectator’s Sam Leith writes “There’s no sign of apocalypse in North London — yet” and adds that, like terrorism, it’s the reaction to a pandemic that can cause more damage than the thing itself.
“The September 11 attacks took a huge number of lives and caused many more to be lost. They indirectly destabilized the whole of the Middle East. But, in a more mundane way, think also of the billions of hours of time and money lost to the economy from all those people glumly de-belting, taking off their shoes and putting their laptops in trays every time they go through (an airport).”
The Spectator’s Martin Vander Weyer writes that 45 years of working in and observing financial markets has taught him to “hold my breath and wait for the bounce.”
He also admires the coolness of a doctor from Manchester, England, who says we should all remember Voltaire: “The art of medicine consists in distracting the patient while nature cures the disease.”
There are monsters as the folks on Maple Street discovered. Unfortunately, they attacked the wrong ones.
– Pamela Fitzsimmons
Related:
I was able to read the Spectator links without a subscription. I clicked on “not today thanks” and it let me in.
I’m not the paranoid type. This struck me as possible: “the virus panic is all a Democrat plot to derail Trump’s economic locomotive (America generated 273,000 new jobs last month) ahead of the election.” I’m more inclined to trust a British journalist at this point.
Coronavirus is real but so was swine flu and Ebola and AIDS. We didn’t freak out then.
You know, Republicans in Salem came in for a lot of grief for walking out. If this panic had hit a few weeks earlier, they wouldn’t have had to walk. Everybody would’ve fled Salem with Kate Brown leading the charge.
Aviation Gin is the way to go.
I’m over 60 and feel great. I don’t like being treated like a contaminated invalid. In Portland it’s more like a panic than pandemic.
You’re right. Americans take America for granted. The Brits don’t. They don’t want us to fail. We could learn something from them. They held up During the Blitz. Remember keep calm. Carry on.
My office is in downtown Portland. What this “crisis” reminds me of is that Twilight Zone episode, “Where is Everybody?”
Thanks for the reminder. I had forgotten about “Where is Everybody?” and just watched it again. I can imagine what Rod Serling would have to say about lockdowns and extreme social distancing.
Obviously I am referring to the original Twilight Zone. I haven’t seen the new ones.
Well, on the topic of Twilight Zone I’ve just watched a restored print of the 1971 Australian film Wake in Fright.
It reads like the most harrowing Twilight Zone ever.
The screenplay’s author is, coincidentally, the father of Sadie Jones, a woman whose novel Snakes I am currently reading. Blundered into Dad and daughter simultaneously and coincidentally, but a half century apart.
Great commentary track, too. The director had also done an old favorite of mine, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. An adoptation of the Mordechai Richler book.
Nice to see a guy can do for Montreal Jews what he did for Australian men.
Portland and the media? So fucked up I am just ignoring the whole thing. My wife is working from home more frequently and I enjoy that I can spend more time with her.
I wish I could ignore the media, but I can’t. They’re dangerous in their complicity. Just because they’re understaffed doesn’t mean they have to go along with the panic. They have no trouble challenging the authority of police in officer-involved shootings, even if the subject is armed. Yet they immediately cave to the governor’s executive order shutting down private businesses.
What happened to Portland’s famous weirdness? Where is the noisy rabble when there is something worth protesting? I guess they’re afraid of getting sick.
I will have to track down “Wake in Fright.” Before Brown ordered everything shut down, I had planned to go to the Living Room Theater to see a movie called “Beanpole.” It’s about the after effects of the siege of Leningrad. Can you imagine how America would handle a catastrophe on that scale. The post-traumatic stress would be pandemic.
Sebastian Junger’s last book (I think) offers the absolute best examination of PSTD I have ever read. It is a must read.
here’s the gist of it:
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/05/ptsd-war-home-sebastian-junger
Wake in Fright is harrowing. I had to fast forward through one bit. Wonderful detail.
I just want things to go back to abnormal.
Yes, Tom, abnormal is looking pretty good right now.
Our elected leaders have embraced the same approach that worked so well in Vietnam — you have to destroy the village to save the village. In this case, we are saving Oregon from coronavirus by destroying it with economic collapse.
As I mentioned, I’ve been reading The Spectator. In an essay that appeared yesterday, a writer points out that it was no coincidence the U.S. government chose Ellis Island as an immigration station. An island made it convenient to quarantine if necessary.
“What if this becomes normal again?” he asks. “It is chastening to contemplate the extent to which we have built the whole edifice of the modern world on the assumption that no technological gains can ever be lost. Electricity is the most widely cited example of this (with parts of the world perhaps permanently a few gigawatt hours away from chaos and civil unrest). The internet is another. But we could equally claim that much of the world’s tourist and travel industry is entirely dependent on the continued efficacy of vaccines and antibiotics.”
You already have enough to worry about, so here’s something that might make you smile, a piece titled, “Americans Love Living In A Disaster Movie.”
https://spectator.us/americans-love-living-disaster-movie/
We are keeping the world entertained.
Thank you for the link. I did read it. I like to read the “opposition”. It’s like Michael says in Godfather part 2, “Keep your friends close but your enemies closer.”
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/coronavirus-impeachment-crises-necessary-unnecessary/
Here is an example from the National Review. Trump is the crisis. Ignore at your on risk. Please take of yourself I don’t agree with anything you say most of the time but I like to read you. You’re a gifted writer.
Thanks, Tom. I haven’t visited National Review in a while. After reading the Lowry piece, one link led to another link and another, which finally led me to a story saying, “Nerds have been waiting a lifetime to write this headline: NASA confirms there is gas leaking out of Uranus.”
https://www.sciencedaily.com/news/space_time/uranus/
I’ve been checking this site out for years. Everything is funnier with Uranus. This though was a real find.
https://urbigenous.net/library/pkdicktionary.html
I’ve been re-reading all of my Philip K. Dick books and this PKDicktionary is very helpful. I had to look up the word “Homeopapes” which was a newspaper with only the articles you are interested in. In Ubik a character talks to a machine that spits out a newspaper on subjects he is interested in like a Google search engine(Ubik was published in 1969). Finally though I am going to fully understand how people smoke sogum in Counter Clock World.
There is a lot of fascinating news on the sciencedaily site — the kind that doesn’t get picked up by mainstream news. I hadn’t heard about the team of UC Riverside geologists who discovered the “ancestor of all animals” including humans. It’s a tiny wormlike creature named Ikaria wariootia. On April Fools’ Day I sent a link of its picture to a friend of mine and told him I’d found one of his ancestors online.
Hard to go wrong concluding with Voltaire.
The author of the essay I link to below does bang on for a while but substantiates his points:
https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2020/03/29/how-low-can-higher-education-go/
Below from Inside Higher Ed.
Scholars v. COVID-19 Racism
https://www.insidehighered.com/
Anything from the CoHE
https://www.chronicle.com/
Thanks for the mindingthecampus link. It’s hard to believe how expensive, yet worthless, higher education can be in the U.S. It can’t last, especially now with the coronavirus panic shutting down classrooms and forcing students to use online classes. Many colleges aren’t lowering the costs, even though online courses are cheaper.
Progressive politicians rail against the greed of big corporations. They don’t condemn academia’s greed. While some smaller colleges are in trouble and even closing, there are big state universities that have become education factories.
I looked in on Oregonlive today:
Letter from the Editor: Please subscribe to OregonLive
Please Support Responsible Journalism
What color the sky in yours? I ask
I’ve seen those desperate ads. Trying to piggy back on disaster.
I grew up on The O but don’t subscribe to it now. The nanny editors dropped the comments. If they had been smarter, they would have offered commenting to paid subscribers. That’s what The New York Times does. The O’s editors don’t realize that comments are now part of journalism. Some readers get to the end of a story and want to know what other people think.
Anyway, I subscribe to other publications — including the Times. If you want to understand progressive groupthink, the comments at the Times are revealing. New York City is a hopeless place for so many poor people (who can’t afford a Times subscription), but Times readers remain committed to the same progressive politics they have been supporting for decades. Typical of the Times’ comment section are comments wishing that the president and vice president both get COVID-19 and die. (This passes the Times’ civility test.)
Overall, the media’s coverage of coronavirus has devolved into full-blown pack journalism. For all that has been written, it’s amazing how little has been mentioned regarding “wet markets.” Any effort to close them down in China or America? We do have some, although nothing like the ones in China that slaughter assorted wildlife in very unsanitary conditions — and has been linked as the possible source for COVID-19.
Instead, the media seem intent to turn lockdown into a lifestyle. The Times even offered a selection of wines under $15 for the quarantine.
Eventually, the novelty of all disasters wears off. This one will, too.
Here’s a judicial disaster that may never wear off:
https://www.oregonlive.com/crime/2020/04/eugene-teen-admits-killing-sleeping-man-will-serve-at-most-about-7-years-at-youth-authority.html
Yes, I saw that. Later I heard about Kate Brown considering the possible release of up to 2,000 inmates to spare them the possibility of getting COVID-19 in prison. Better that they should be free to hang out on the streets or live with families that may not want them. Instead of spreading germs among their fellow prisoners, they can breath on (and perhaps rob or assault) the general public.
As for the teenager who murdered a mentally ill man in cold blood and then robbed him of $11, because he’s a juvenile, his record could easily be expunged. When he leaves prison in seven years, he could have a clean record. Presumably the news story will live on somewhere. All he has to do is slightly change his name, though, and the story won’t haunt him on Google.
At least former House Majority Leader Jennifer Williamson, a classic Portland progressive who pushed for that law, lost out on a shot at the Secretary of State’s job because of her misuse of public funds. She is very politically ambitious. She will bide her time and try to get back into the game. By then, the public may have had enough of politicians being nice to the wrong people.
And now we have this BS:::,
https://www.oregonlive.com/crime/2020/04/not-even-judge-is-happy-with-short-sentence-given-to-oregon-teen-guilty-of-sadistic-sexual-murder.html
People I know who endorsed this bill (signed only last year) are now doing their best Captain Renard impersonations by being shocked that the bill would be used in such a case. This little monster should be put into a box and remembered only to scare criminal justice reformers that this is the truest fruit of their efforts.
Yes, this was a red-letter week for criminal justice reformers. Not only is this guy going to get out after a few years (his punishment will likely resemble community college behind bars), but the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Oregon’s non-unanimous verdicts are unconstitutional.
The state always required unanimity on murder cases, so what this ruling means is that inmates who were convicted on a 10-2 or 11-1 verdict on other cases will demand their freedom or a retrial.
There are estimates that up to 2,000 rapists and sex offenders currently in Oregon prisons could qualify.
Several Oregon state legislators came out and publicly praised the Supreme Court’s decision. Among them, curiously, was state Sen. Sara Gelser (D-Albany). She’s one of Time Magazines #MeToo stars who accused a colleague, then-Sen. Jeff Kruse (R-Roseburg) of “inappropriately touching” her. He supposedly brushed up against her breast and touched her knee. He was forced to resign.
I have to wonder what Sen. Gelser would think of some of the vicious acts that these possibly soon-to-be-free sex offenders have committed.
Not surprisingly, she also supported Senate Bill 1008, which rewarded that sadistic rapist and murderer a short sentence.
This puts me in mind of a piece Pamela wrote some time back: a powerful giant of a man stopped beating his woman long enough to beat a peace officer to death with some firewood (as best I recall).
I trio of women from the parole board got together and were willing to cut him loose.
https://www.oregonlive.com/crime/2020/04/killer-convicted-in-double-murder-in-central-oregon-argues-for-immediate-release-after-serving-32-years.html
The cop killer was William Dean Porter. (See “Keep the Dean and His Size 13”)
I attended one of Mark Wilson’s parole hearings three years ago. First of all, like Porter, Wilson looked great — probably all those yoga classes in prison. At the hearing I attended, he played the Buddha-head, acting like he was so harmless he couldn’t bring himself to speak above a whisper, let alone hurt a fly. Family members who were there on behalf of victims Rod and Lois Houser kept saying they couldn’t hear him. Parole board members kept asking him to speak into the microphone. He kept whispering.
Yesterday I talked to retired Clatsop County District Attorney Josh Marquis who, as a young Deschutes County Chief Deputy DA, prosecuted Randy Guzek for his part in the murders. Guzek got the death penalty three times; defense attorneys kept appealing; Marquis kept prosecuting.
Wilson, though, pleaded guilty and agreed to 40 years. He then almost immediately started challenging that sentence. So much for being a man of his word. What do you expect from a guy who shoots somebody multiple times in cold blood and then loots their home.
The Housers’ daughter, who found their bodies, has said that if Wilson were truly sorry for causing the family so much pain he would stop trying to get out early. He pretends to apologize, then pushes to get out.
By the way, the current Deschutes County District Attorney, John Hummel, has no problem with Wilson being released. Hummel is a soulmate to Chesa Boudin.
Now social justice warriors can give Wilson a nice welcome home. Maybe one of them will be infected with COVID-19.