Podunk Pundit

Man does not live by bad news alone, or shouldn’t have to. As the Bille Holiday song suggests one should try “getting some fun out of life.” What with a pandemic and Trumpism the last several years have made many of us anxious to flee a world full of quarantine and chaos in favor of something entertaining, whether comedy, tragedy, melodrama or farce. Here are a few things I’ve enjoyed watching more than the latest depressing bad news report on the decline of the west.

From the people who brought us “Band of Brothers,” we now have “Masters of the Air” on Apple TV. It takes us aloft with World War II bomber crews stationed in England for attacks across the channel on Nazi German. While not quite as unforgettable as “Brothers” it’s still worth a look. I may be a sucker for it since my Dad before I was born spent World War II as a ground crew chief keeping B-29s aloft.

“Ripley,” on Netflix, is yet another reboot of Patricia Highsmith’s series of novels about the talented serial killer Mr. Ripley. In this version the lead is played by the Irish actor Andrew Scott whose ability to inhabit various characters is impressive. You may remember him as the taunting Moriarty to Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes and as “Fleabag’s” hot priest.

“Sugar” is the name another Apple series and of the protagonist played by Colin Farrell. It is too early to say whether Sugar will hold up alongside such L.A. noir private eye peers as Sam Spade, Lew Archer, Phillip Marlowe, and Jake Gittes, but it appears promising so far. Especially fro those who are hooked on the genre. Also among crime stoppers is Jodie Foster, whose been busy lately. This time she’s an Alaska law enforcement officer chasing a murderer in a fourth season of “True Detective” on HBO.

The alien invasion series “3 Body Problem” from Netflix is adapted from a Hugo Award winning sci-fi novel by the Chinese author Lin Civin. The show begins when a group of young radio astronomers are recruited to undertake a project to detect and identify unexpected noises in the vicinity of earth. They eventually suggest the possibility of alien creatures with malign intent nearby. This turns out to be a cruel cliffhanger that leaves viewers waiting for the arrival of chapter two.

In HBO’s “The Regime,” Kate Winslet stars as the heiress to the throne of minor Mitteleuropan country when her father dies. One might expect the glamorous Winslet to be a princess charming but she is in fact a spoiled twit who is completely out of her depth, ignores the advice of her father’s loyal advisors, alienates her subjects, crashes the economy, and falls under the spell of a thuggish colonel who she soon puts in control of her body and state which leads to an armed insurrection. Once again, viewers will have to wait for season two to learn whether the ship of state will be righted or the mess gets even messier.

I’ve managed to miss a number of movies that made news this year but have finally caught up with several. Emma Stone stars as a sex-crazed Frankenstein’s monster in “Poor Things” which despite a cast that includes fine actors is deeply peculiar from beginning to end. The plight of Nick Cage in “Dream Scenario” is also weird but at least it intends to be funny. He’s a frumpy college professor who suddenly finds himself appearing in the dreams of his students, then strangers, then people all over the world. As a result every time he shows his face people recognize him, and not in a good way. It is possible to regard this as a kind of parody of the dangers of over-sharing on social media.

“Anatomy of a Fall” is one of a pair of films that made German actress Sandra Huller much better known in America. In it she is a wife and mother whose pleasant life is suddenly turned upside down when her husband falls to his death from their alpine chalet. She is put on trial for his murder and separated from her child.  For her performance she was nominated for an academy award. I’m still waiting to catch up with a second performance in “Zone of Interest”

that won an Oscar for best foreign film. In it she plays Hedwig the wife of Rudolf Hoess the Nazi commandant of the Auschwitz death camp. They live with their children, gardening and picnicking, on the other side of the wall from the ovens and pits where a million jews were murdered. 

I’m also anxious to see Andrew Scott again in “All of Us Strangers” and the always-worth- watching Jeffery Wright in the comedy “American Fiction” in which his college professor character, who feels he gets no respect for his serious novels, writes a satire of inferior works by black authors who traffic in racial tropes he scorns. What could go wrong? I can’t wait to see.

The covid plague, which has killed over a million Americans so far, is a reminder that history is one plague after another. When my generation was young the plague du jour was polio which crippled and killed some of our contemporaries and terrified our parents. When a vaccine was discovered there was a great sigh of relief.

We also forget how hard life was for our ancestors doing harsh manual labor in crowded cities and unhealthy environments before there was modern medicine to rely on. All of which contributed to shortened life expectancy. 

The plague that haunted my grandmother’s generation was tuberculosis, also known as the White Death. Her mother died of it at 31, her brother at 32, her sister at 27, her son at 24. The disease was identified as early as 4,000 BC and has been detected in the ancient mummies of Egypt. 

From the 1600s to the 1800s TB was so widespread that it is believed to account for 25% of all deaths, in part fueled by the advent of urban crowding and the coming of the industrial revolution.  But the dead were far from restricted to the working class. It was so pervasive inthe 1800s that frequently appeared in the period’s literature and two operas. 

The list of the famous victims of TB at its height includes Keats, Simon Bolivar, President James Monroe, Chopin, Thoreau, St.Therese of Lisieux, Chekhov, Calvin, Kafka, Anne and Emily Bronte, Robert Burns, Moliere, Whitman, Stephen Foster, Delacroix, Schrödinger, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bartholdi of Statue of Liberty fame, and on and on. 

In 1905 one of the first Nobel prizes was awarded for the discovery of the bacillus that causes tuberculosis. Increased attention to public heath and isolation of victims helped but failed to eliminate the plague until effective medicines were created beginning with the first vaccines in 1921. These finally managed to decrease mortality by 90% in the 1950s. 

We are lucky compared to those who came before the era of vaccines and antibiotics. One by one vaccines were developed that could make previously deadly diseases less terrifying. The targets included rabies, smallpox, measles, mumps, rubella, whooping cough, hepatitis, tetanus, diphtheria, and more recently covid.

Despite being surrounded by TB deaths in the family, my grandmother somehow avoided contracting the plague. And because of the failure of doctors to save so many members of her family she avoided them too, attended services of a Christian Science congregation, and lived to the ripe old age of 95. 

She lived with my parents from the time I was born. While they worked, she cooked the family meals everyday, did the laundry, and read me bedtime stories some from books once owed by her son Richard, dead of tuberculosis of the bone just six years before my birth. In retrospect I suspect I served as a stand-in for him.

She wasn’t wrong to believe that medical science is not infallible. For example, resistant strains of TB threatened a resurgence of the plague beginning in the 1980s. As recently as 2022, largely in Africa, Southeast Asia and India, over ten million TB infections were recorded and 1.3 million deaths. Unfortunately, you have to get the treatment to avoid the infection. WHO (the World Health Organization) reports that TB is still rampant in less developed parts of the world where medical care may be in short supply.

Jefferson said the price of liberty is eternal vigilance but it also appears that the price of survival is eternal detection of the next plague and creation of the next vaccine. The medicines that greatly reduced the threat of tuberculosis, polio, and so many other scourges saved countless lives. 

And yet, the threats never cease. New plagues are continually emerging and waiting to join the long list that has decimated the human species over the course of history. The bubonic plague killed at least a third of Europe’s population in the fourteenth century. As recently as 1918, Spanish Flu killed 50 million people around the world, including 675,000 Americans.

In our time, we have experienced the arrival the such viruses HIV, Ebola, Marburg, Sars, Mers, Zika, and most recently Covid which has so far killed 7 million around the world. WHO scientists have now warned that the next pandemic, dubbed Disease X, could be 20 times worse than Covid. Not exactly something to look forward to, but it may be slightly encouraging to know there are scientific cops on the beat who will try to protect us from whatever comes next.