The Mask and the Corona Virus and the Art of Publicity

THE MASK AND THE CORONA VIRUS AND THE ART OF PUBLICITY
Wed. Nov. 4th, 2020; posted Sat. Nov. 7th, 2020

I try to wear the mask while I am out in public during the corona virus. 

Our nation, and maybe other nations too, had a short time in March to get out the word about wearing masks, and it did not go well.

When you need to instruct the people on what they should do when trouble arises, you have a limited amount of time to instruct them.  If you attain wisdom on what words you should have used to instruct the people after the window of opportunity has closed, the people will reject your revised improved version of what you should have said.  They will say: You completely botched the job when you tried to instruct me the first time.  I will pay attention to YOU no longer.

That is why I respect the art of publicity.

Sometimes, when people think about the art of publicity, their mind goes to damage control.  Damage control is the technique of defending the honor of an organization or group after they have made a serious mistake.

Damage control is an important part of publicity.  But it is not the only part, and it is by no means the crown jewel of publicity.  To my way of thinking, damage control is the dunghole of publicity.  To me the crown jewel of publicity, the part I admire the most (when it works smoothly which is not always) is the work of making instructions understandable and palatable to the people who need to hear them.

That part of publicity is unnecessary in dictatorships.  Do what I say or I kill you.  That's how they do it in dictatorships.  But in democracies, making instructions understandable and palatable to people is very beneficial to society.

There are two parts to instructing the people.  The first part is figuring out what the people need to be reminded of, and what they need to hear possibly for the first time.  The second part is making it palatable.  The first part is like figuring out what active ingredients should go into the pill.  The second part (in a democracy), is like figuring out what to add to the active ingredients to make people willing to swallow the pill.

I cannot do the second part.  I can only do the first part.  Here is my sketch of what the first part (the active ingredients of the instruction) SHOULD HAVE BEEN.

(a) You wear a mask in public during the corona virus to protect other people.  Other people wear a mask in public during the corona virus to protect you.

(b) You obey orders from military officers to avoid being shot.  No one will shoot you if you disobey orders from public health officers, such as the order to wear a mask in public during this virus, but it is still unpatriotic to disobey them.

I have no idea how to make this message palatable.  But your publicity people, if you hire good ones, can transform these active ingredients into a message which will be the corona virus equivalent of ONLY YOU CAN PREVENT FOREST FIRES.

The Centers for Disease Control deserve to have good publicists.

Frank Newton

The Myrrh Verse: an Essay on the Romans and the Jews

 

THE MYRRH VERSE: AN ESSAY ON THE ROMANS AND THE JEWS
Monday, Nov. 2nd, 2020

I have been thinking about the Old Testament.

The myrrh verse of the Epiphany carol We Three Kings of Orient Are (with words by John Henry Hopkins, Jr.) begins like this:

Myrrh is mine, its bitter perfume
Breathes a life of gathering gloom.

I studied the golden age of Latin literature in college.  I can report this: it is a record of the last century of the Roman Republic and the foundation of the Roman Empire -- which was a century of gathering gloom.  A long, long series of civil wars and massacres eventually caused the Romans to despair of and give up on their Republic, whose Senate and vetoes and division of powers were incorporated into our constitution.  The Emperor Augustus commanded the empire when Jesus was born.  He made some effort to do what was right.  But he was succeeded by the Emperor Tiberius, who ruled the empire when Jesus was crucified.  The scandalous details of Tiberius's adult life reported by the historian Suetonius -- Wikipedia calls Suetonius a "sensationalist" -- will not be repeated here.

The Roman poet Virgil glorified Emperor Augustus in an epic poem: the son of my boss said reading it was like chewing on iron filings.  At the end of the epic, the new king kills the old king in hand-to-hand combat in the shadowy story of the founding of Rome -- "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss" as the British rock band The Who so memorably put it (though they were not talking about Aeneas).

In Fayetteville, I plucked from the trash can at the library, and took home with me, The History of the Former Han Dynasty (an ancient Chinese history book) in the English translation.  There, my practical Chinese boss (different boss) decided the library did not need such a gloomy book.  I was grossed out to discover that ancient Chinese history was as devious as Roman history.  In short, the ancients produced great philosophers and poets, but only in the pauses between their multitudinous spasms of violence and wickedness.

The Old Testament partakes in the gloom of ancient history.  To me, the second most appalling story in the Old Testament is the story in the Second Book of Kings chapter 10 in which the evil usurper Jehu has the sons of the previous King Ahab put to death and their heads brought to him in baskets.  The Bible feebly tries to justify Jehu, but you can't.  You might as well try to justify Hitler.  The bishop and missionary Ulfilas or Wulfila, who brought  Christianity to his people the Goths, translated the Bible into the Gothic language before 400 A.D., except for the books of Kings, which a Greek historian says Ulfilas refrained from translating into Gothic "so as not to excite the warlike spirit of his people."  Joseph Wright, the modern grammarian of the Gothic language, tells the story of Ulfilas's reluctance to translate the two books of Kings into Gothic on page 196 of his Gothic grammar, but then he immediately poohpoohs the story, claiming it was dreamed up by the medieval Greek historian.  Stuff and nonsense!  Bishop Ulfilas was a Goth and a Christian, and he knew exactly what he was doing.  The Greek historian has to be right about this detail.  I wouldn't translate the books of Kings into Gothic either!  As the men on television said about the basketball referees, "good call!"  I grew up in a family hearing stories about my grandfather an Episcopal clergyman that bore a striking resemblance to Little Socrates' story about Bishop Ulfilas (the historian Little Socrates is not to be confused with Big Socrates, the teacher of Plato).  The stories about my grandfather were funny and we laughed, but they were true stories.

Back to the Old Testament.  To me, the most appalling story in the Old Testament -- the only story that exceeds the story of King Jehu in violence and wickedness -- is the story of the killing of all the men, women, and children of Jericho which is described in the book of Joshua chapter 6, after Joshua's trumpeters caused the walls of the city to fall down.  Joshua was following the commandment which Moses gave in the book of Deuteronomy chapter 20, beginning at the 15th verse.  That is the Jewish equivalent of the verse of the Koran which the Muslims call the sword verse. -- Again, it is no accident that this commandment of Moses was not included in the ten commandments.  Listen, and look: Deuteronomy chapter 20 is by no means a commandment from Mount Sinai.  In commanding the massacre at Jericho, Joshua misheard and misspoke the word of the Lord.  The Bible is not inerrant.  But as far as I have been able to determine, I am the only liberal Christian who believes that the killing of all the men, women, and children of Jericho is actual history, which really took place exactly as the Bible describes it.

The massacre at Jericho is horribly mirrored by the massacre at My Lai, as reported by the magazine Newsweek in its report on the congressional inquiry into My Lai.  " 'And babies?' The congressman asked.  'And babies,' the witness replied."  The idea that civilians should not hear about the horrors of war is not true!!

The Old Testament is a dive into the deepest waters of our gene pool. -- The song "Brandy (You're a Fine Girl)" (with words by Elliot Lurie) describes the beautiful barmaid who fell in love with a sailor: "When he told his sailor stories, She could feel the ocean fall and rise, She saw its ragin' glory." -- In my poem "After the Massacre" I wrote "There is a monster at the bottom of your heart: Something about your attitude towards weak people, victims, losers. Your assignment is to clear the waters of your heart So you can see the monster."  There is a raging sea inside of our gene pool, and in the heart inside us which the Bible says God looks into!

The Old Testament describes these things, while not neglecting the little things.  Twice Abraham passed off Sarah as his sister, when traveling through God-forsaken lands.  Goofy gosh, Father Abraham!

But the song "Brandy" reminds me of another poem.  In "Noah an' Jonah an' Cap'n John Smith" Don Marquis envisions a debate in heaven between the three sailors (the rock band Steely Dan would have called them the major dudes of the seafaring world).  Jonah silences the other two, saying:

"But this here is my challenge fer saints and fer sinners,
Which one of ye has v'yaged in a varmint's inners?"

The Old Testament is like a long, long ride inside of a whale.  (The King James Version says "a great fish" -- I choose to use the word whale in its most unscientific sense.)

The blood of cavemen runs in our veins.  The Christian saying "Guard your heart" is absolutely correct.  We need to see our gene pool for what it really is.  And after we have seen it, we need to go back to the Sermon on the Mount with our whole hearts.

There are great and beautiful things in the Old Testament.  I will never forget hearing a conservative Christian that I know reading aloud the second half of the last chapter of the book of Proverbs, about the wise and diligent wife.  That Bible passage withstands scrutiny, and is to be ranked with the story of how Abraham's unnamed servant found a wife for Isaac in Genesis chapter 24; with the Book of Job; with the Songs of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah; and with the 130th Psalm, From the depths I cried to you, O Lord; and the other pearls of great price.

The end of today's part of my prophecy.