The American Know Nothing Party, which began as an anti-Catholic, anti-immigration, and xenophobic, (and also violently anti-elite) secret society, later formally known as the Native American Party and the American Party, dominated large sectors of U.S. politics in the early to mid-1850s. Its supporters were eerily similar to those Republicans who currently support President Trump, in that their strong beliefs were anchored in values often totally at variance with science.

Over the past three years as President, Trump has exhibited no real understanding of science, using or discarding it at will. He also has demonstrated a total lack of mathematical or statistical ability or comprehension, substituting his “hunches” for judgements based on science and calculations. So far, he’s been wrong most of the time. When he has been correct, and there are times when this has been so, it’s usually been in the political arena [excepting with Putin], not in science, technical expertise, or statistics. The problem isn’t just that he’s weak in those areas, but that he refuses to admit any weaknesses in any of those areas, and he is reluctant, at best, to defer to experts, or, at worst, intransigent and insists on shouting down and denying anyone who questions his failures.

Lately, he’s been insisting that he, as President, has “ultimate authority” over state governors, which he doesn’t. The Constitution reserves a great many powers to the states and their governors, and even extreme Conservatives are balking at this assertion.

What’s even more astounding is that, only a week or so ago, he was insisting that he couldn’t order the governors to issue stay-in-place orders. This is a President who not only knows less and less, but can’t even remember what he said yesterday… or worse, holds the American people in such contempt that he feels he can say anything and never be held accountable.

Remember, he did once say something to the effect that he could shoot someone in plain sight and get away with it. You thought he was merely exaggerating?

Yet the Republicans in Congress blindly back their President Know-Nothing as if it were normal for a chief executive rail on for hours because the media caught him denying statements he made previously… and not just one or two, but scores. Tens of thousands of Americans are dying, many unnecessarily, because, first, he, as chief executive, abolished the pandemic task force. Then, second, in early January, he declared that coronavirus cases would be down to zero in weeks and did essentially nothing for two months. And he throws temper tantrum after temper tantrum on national news when questioned about his continued failures.

This is normal? And we’re accepting it?

When I was a teenager and not old enough to drive, there weren’t many jobs open, first because even back then very few were hiring fourteen year olds, and, second, the places that might hire youngsters were a goodly distance away, and there was no public transportation. At that time, my parents lived in an area that could easily be called ex-urban, rather than suburban. Across the street was a forty acre farm, run by a retired fellow who’d made a lot of money selling pipe to the oil industry, and he had a small herd of cows. What he did with them, I never could figure out.

But there were junior and mid-level executives moving into the area, and I asked my father if I could use the lawn equipment to mow other people’s lawns. He said yes – with two conditions. First, my younger brother had to be part of the deal, and we had to pay for oil and gas… and for any repairs necessitated by our carelessness or incompetence. It wasn’t ideal, but, as the only gig in the area, it was better than the alternatives.

We actually did a pretty good job, but I hated it. First, it was Colorado, and Colorado summers were hot. Second, I had hay fever and had a runny nose most of the time. Third, my brother turned out to be lousy at trimming, and the trimming is what makes a lawn look bad or good. And remember, this was long before string-trimmers and the like, and I often had hand cramps by the end of the day. Now, in terms of today’s services, we weren’t straining. We did one or two lawns every weekday. Did I mention that most of them were an acre in size? And yes, our father held us to paying for the maintenance and the time my brother ripped out a sprinkler head in a customer’s lawn.

But so far as I was concerned, when I got my driver’s license and my senior lifeguard badge, I left the lawn business. For me, the one true luxury was when I finally made enough money to hire a lawn service without stinting anything else in the budget.

We’ve had a very good lawn service here for ten years, and I was always careful to pay the monthly bill as soon as it came in. Those guys were worth every dollar to me.

Except, this spring, when they started mowing, I got an invoice for the first mowing, requesting either a credit card for continuing service or to pay for the mowing before the next mowing was due. At first, I wondered if it had anything to do with coronavirus economic slowdown, but I sent off a polite email asking about the change in billing policies.

The owner answered promptly, saying that I’d always paid on time, but that a lot of people hadn’t, and that at the end of the lawn care season in early November of the previous year, over $5,000 in services were unpaid… and were never paid. So they had to switch to almost a pay-as-you-go service.

I know what hard work lawn care is. I’ve never forgotten. And while it’s easier now with self-propelled mowers and string trimmers, it’s still no piece of cake, especially where certain parts of our lawn have close to a thirty degree slope.

So I find not paying lawn care people particularly reprehensible [not that I don’t find cheating people out of income they’ve earned through hard work reprehensible in all fields]. And whether these deadbeats are cheapskates or chiselers, they ought to spend a summer doing lawn care. But then, most of them couldn’t hack it. Two years was more than enough for me, and I was essentially only doing it half-time.

All large organizations have procedures. They couldn’t work without them. The vast majority of procedures govern routine tasks, and generally work moderately well, but there are also emergency procedures.

When I was a Navy pilot, many long years ago, I had to learn emergency procedures which detailed what to do in each of the many possible ways in which a complex military aircraft could malfunction… or be caused to malfunction. Knowing these procedures was absolutely necessary, because when an aircraft malfunctions, for whatever reason, a pilot has very little time to react. In one of the more noted recent events, U.S. Airways pilot Chesley Sullenberger lost both engines of his A320 due to a bird strike at an altitude of about 3,000 feet. In less than four minutes he and his copilot made a successful water landing on the Hudson, with no loss of life and largely minor injuries. Such emergency procedures are not only useful, but vital, in instructing pilots, or those in other fields, what to do – in situations that are known to be possible and where remedial emergency procedures can be implemented.

But procedures, even emergency procedures, sometimes can’t deal with the situation.

When I was a junior helicopter pilot learning how to become a helicopter aircraft commander of the now antique H-34, a senior lieutenant commander and I were flying over Oahu on our way to Kauai. Sixty-three miles of deep water separate the islands. We were perhaps four or four miles away from the ocean, when the lieutenant commander said, “Something’s not right with the engine.” All the engine read-outs were normal. The sump light [to detect metal] in the oil, a sign that all was not right with the engine, showed nothing was wrong.

The chief mechanic couldn’t hear anything, but the lieutenant commander immediately executed a precautionary emergency landing in a field. Later examination of the engine, once the H-34 was hauled back to base, revealed that the engine was in the early stages of cracking and failing. If the lieutenant commander had followed “procedures,” we likely would have faced engine failure in the middle of the Kauai Channel. As it was, he took a certain amount of flak until the analysis of the engine confirmed his decision. It also saved the aircraft.

I was reminded of this by the recent decision by the acting Navy Secretary, Thomas B. Modly, to remove Captain Brett E. Crozier from command of the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt, because Captain Crozier sent letters to between twenty and thirty senior officials asking for speedier and more effective measures to protect his crew of almost 5,000 from the rapid spread of coronavirus. Officially, Captain Crozier was relieved for failing to follow official procedures and the chain of command, when he felt that the “chain of command” was failing his crew.

Coronavirus is one of the most contagious diseases on the planet at the moment, and one that has no vaccine and no proven treatment for remediation. Every hour and every day that the “chain of command” dithered over what to do meant more crew members would be infected, given the close quarters aboard any Naval vessel. Speedy action would not only have spared more crew members from the coronavirus, but also would have allowed the Roosevelt to return to duty sooner.

Modly’s action is exactly why the military gets ridiculed for being hide-bound and stupid. Most times, the procedures work just fine, but there are times when they don’t, and it’s time to throw out the procedures. This was one of those times.

The state of Utah is currently under a gubernatorial “directive” – rather than a mandatory order – to stay at home, and all schools and universities have closed their physical facilities to students, while restaurants are limited to carry-out and drive-by food service, and non-essential businesses are supposed to be closed. But the mayors of Salt Lake City and Salt Lake County have issued mandatory stay-at-home orders, as has Summit County (essentially Park City).

In our part of the state, what’s an essential business seems rather loosely defined. Gun shops are open, as are dollar stores and at least one or two furniture emporiums, and a significant percentage of university faculty are still using their offices daily. I don’t see large groups in public places, but there’s a feeling that I can only call surreal, because it seems to me that, with the exception of the lack of toilet paper, flour, and pasta in the grocery stores, most people here are acting as if nothing really bad is going to happen.

Maybe, in a state with a great deal of open space, matters won’t get as bad as in New York and all the larger cities – except that the Wasatch Front, a hundred miles of suburban and urban sprawl sandwiched between two mountain ranges containing two million people, doesn’t exactly qualify as open space, as the two Salt Lake area mayors seem to realize, unlike the suburban municipalities surrounding Salt Lake. With a 1,000 known cases and only seven deaths in Utah at the moment, matters don’t seem that bad. Except, only 20,000 people have been tested.

Cedar City and its principal suburb contain roughly 45,000 people, plus whatever college students are remaining here out of 11,000, but St. George, 50 miles south, contains over 150,000 people, and I have my doubts that this part of Utah will remain unscathed, although at present there have only been less than 50 known cases and two covid-19 deaths in the two counties. The first testing locations became available in this area just today.

One aspect of this that I find troubling is that all too many people here have no idea how bad things are elsewhere, as evidenced by something like fifteen commissioners of rural counties here who wrote the governor demanding that he remove the directive and prohibitions because there was no danger of a pandemic here and those prohibitions were strangling the local economies. Or by the university student who couldn’t believe that she wouldn’t be able to attend a summer program in Berlin. Or some friends who continue to live “normal” lives.

And most people don’t seem to realize that, while we have a very new and modern small hospital, it only has 48 beds… and it’s 250 miles to Salt Lake or 50 miles to St. George, a small city with a population containing large numbers of retirees.

It could be that southwestern Utah will escape relatively unscathed, but I’m not betting on it… especially since too many people here seem to think it won’t happen.

The lack of adequate personal protective equipment for medical personnel dealing with the covid-19 pandemic, the lack of adequate numbers of respirators, and the lack of advance planning in the United States is an unfortunate and yet inevitable outgrowth of the “instant internet” and “just-in-time” mindset that has become prevalent in the United States, particularly in the last twenty years. Unhappily, major crises aren’t susceptible to “instant” solutions. Solutions require time and advance allocation of resources, and extreme capitalist societies like the U.S. don’t like setting aside resources that could be “better” used for making more money now.

Unfortunately, that mindset isn’t totally new. It’s just worse, aided by a society addicted to instant satisfaction. The United States has always had a habit of trying to avoid looking at and dealing with unpleasant truths… and not wanting to spend thought and resources on preparation and understanding. I won’t go into all of the examples, but World War II and the Vietnam War were two more recent examples, as was the financial melt-down of 2008. For six years before Germany actually invaded Poland, Hitler broke treaties, annexed other countries, demonized, persecuted and killed Jews and others the Nazis found “undesirable.” By the mid-thirties the Japanese were taking over large sections of China. The U.S. reaction? Zilch. The U.S. Army was at one of the lowest levels ever, and the isolationist America First movement was the predominant political view.

The Vietnam War was largely fought by the U.S., until the very end, on the WW II assumption that massive numbers of men, bombs, high tech and costly weapons, and defoliants could defeat a popular movement using asymmetrical warfare tactics, even though the Vietnamese had driven out the French. Over more than a thousand years, China had attempted to conquer the Vietnam area, but the Vietnamese never gave up and always pushed the Chinese out, and the Chinese always had more men and better weapons. Until the very end, the military and the Washington establishment never looked at that history, or, when they did, they disregarded it.

The 2008 financial meltdown came about the same way. Even though more than a few experts and analysts questioned the over-mortgaging of American and the securitization of subprime mortgages, few policymakers wanted to look at the underlying weaknesses of the system, and no one planned for the future, because everything was about making more money “now.”

Every reputable epidemiologist knows that pandemics happen. They’ve happened throughout history, always with high body counts, economic havoc, and political instability. So what did the Trump administration do? They eliminated the very office created to deal with pandemics, and the result was the loss of at least a month of time for preparation. There also weren’t enough back-up supplies, and it turns out – not to my surprise – that it takes time to retool factories to produce surgical masks and respirators… time, it turns out, that cities like New York don’t have. The just-in-time economy and instant internet aren’t very good at dealing with crises like covid-19. We will muddle through, but more people will die who didn’t have to, and many of them will be medical professionals in the front line… and, also, in the process, a great many workers and their families will suffer unnecessary financial hardship.

There are reasons to know history and to have enough equipment of the right kind ready on standby, even though it’s not “instantly” profitable… but somehow it seems every generation has to learn that truth the hard way… and some politicians and people never do.