The 7th War Loan drive in 1945. Duke Ellington, America’s great jazz bandleader, helped to promote this drive through radio concerts. So did my own grandfather Stanley Field, who served as a producer for Armed Forces Radio in WWII. http://behindthescenes.nyhistory.org/duke-ellington-wants-you-to-buy-war-bonds/
Hitting the Road in the Wake of the Viral Outbreak
Readers of my blog have been following my rather harried accounts of being caught up in the coronavirus scare for over a month now. To make a long story short, our family was on the way from Shanghai to Singapore for a holiday when news first broke out of the seriousness of this illness. This was during the Spring Festival in China in late January. After spending a few days holidaying in Singapore, my wife and her mom returned to China, and I was weighing the option of staying with my daughters in Singapore for a couple more weeks to see how things went, when news broke out of the closing of flights to China, and so we caught the next flight back to Shanghai. The race to meet the challenge of the virus was on, and it was moving in double time!
We spent a week back in Shanghai settling into the new regime of self-quarantining in and around our apartment—not for fear of having caught the virus, but as a necessary precaution that all people were taking. Shops and restaurants mostly shut down and we scrambled to stock up on our food supply, although there didn’t seem to be any big issues around getting enough food from the local supermarkets and shops, which were still open.
After a week in Shanghai, my wife and I decided it best for me to take our two daughters back to the USA for a spell. This wasn’t so much to avoid the virus—the Chinese were doing a good job already of managing that—but rather to take advantage of the opportunity to see our families here in the USA, while getting some fresh air and sunshine (Shanghai winters are notoriously cloudy, rainy and clammy). Since our schools were all closed and learning had already begun to move online, there was little reason at the time to remain in Shanghai.
Upon arriving in the USA, we settled in the Bay Area for the recommended 14-day self-quarantine period. There, we followed the basic instructions of the CDC, which kept a friendly eye on us through multiple phone calls. After emerging from our two-week isolation period without any signs of illness, we spent a few glorious days with my aunt and uncle in the Berkeley Hills.
Then we flew across the country to Massachusetts, where I grew up, and settled in my hometown of Acton with my parents, who still live here after all these years. Since we come to Acton every summer and sometimes during winter holidays, this is like a home for us, and the girls are quite comfortable and familiar with my folks and with our home town. Of course it is a very different lifestyle to what they are normally used to in Shanghai, which goes without saying.
Anxiety Brewing: Coming to Terms with the Viral Outbreak
We have now been here in Acton Mass. for almost two weeks. When we first arrived, I had hopes that I would be able to visit some friends, and I did see a friend and a colleague over the past few days. Now, as the anxiety mounts over the ominous news of the spread of the virus here in the USA and elsewhere around the world, I am hunkering down and planning to stay in or around our home and only go out when necessary. It’s starting to feel like Shanghai all over again, but here we have a large home and plenty of places to walk around and enjoy nature without being surrounded by other people.
It is sad that I won’t be able to take more advantage of being here in the Boston area for an extended spell. I’d like to see more old acquaintances, but after all the experiences I’ve had thus far, I feel that laying low right now is our best option. I have two elderly parents here in Acton, who are in relatively good shape, but still vulnerable. (Now they are coming around to the seriousness of this illness just as everyone else is doing here, but it is hard to break all the patterns and habits that build up over the years and launch into a new regime.) Also, my own immune system is not in ideal shape, ever since I had a skiing accident in high school that ended up in the loss of my spleen. So for me, there is no reason to take any unnecessary risks or put others in harm’s way.
I hope others here in the USA and around the world are also coming to this realization, that we will have to make some necessary sacrifices over the next few weeks and months in order to save lives. All the evidence is abundantly clear, or else it should be to those who read the news, and I shan’t belabor this point any longer.
Now, given the current situation and the likelihood of this viral outbreak becoming far worse before it gets better, did we make the right decision to leave China and come to the USA? While I am living in a heightened state of anxiety, I still believe the answer is yes. I have had the opportunity to spend time with my cherished relatives, who are now at a vulnerable age, and I have had many conversations with them about the virus, encouraging them to raise their levels of caution as it rises in the USA. I hope we will all fare well, but you never know. My father and step-mother who live in Virginia and my sister and her family are also becoming far more conscious of the seriousness of this outbreak, as all Americans have done in the past few days. I hope we will have a chance to see them too, although for now we are staying put in Acton.
We Shall Prevail
In terms of America’s future, although it will be an uphill battle for some time to come, I am confident that we will prevail over this illness. Rather than looking back at mistakes we made or blaming our leaders for their errors (which is certainly understandable), now is the time to think positive and focus on solutions, and Americans are doing just that. To be sure, there will be some chaotic times ahead as the federal government struggles to get on top of the situation and as states and local governments and health care systems mobilize to face the emergency, and as the economy takes a nose-dive, but we shall prevail.
Already there have been some good signs. Universities were among the first organizations to take action, moving classes online and asking students not to return to campus after spring break. Now other schools are following suit. After dilly-dallying for a long time, the federal government is starting to take actions that may help mitigate the huge crisis—whether and how effective these prove to be we shall see. State governments are also waking up and declaring states of emergency. Pretty soon, local businesses will shut down and companies will be asking their employees to work from home. People are getting nervous and local supplies of toilet paper and hand sanitizer are moving off the shelves faster than they can be replaced.
While I urge people not to panic, this is all good and it is just what should be happening. Ideally this should already have happened weeks ago, but it takes time for large organizations to react to such emergencies, and our top leadership hasn’t been pushing them to do so until now. It’s always easy with hindsight to say that we should have been far better prepared to face this emergency.
As a historian, I like to make comparisons with earlier times, and the one that comes to mind right now is Pearl Harbor. This event found the USA woefully unprepared for a state of war. Nevertheless, within days, the country was mobilizing on a scale never seen before in world history, and ultimately, we prevailed.
My grandfather Stanley Field, who served in Armed Forces Radio as a writer and producer, bringing entertainment to troops across the world in WWII. Grandpa Stan was from an immigrant Jewish family that fled Russia in WWI to make their home in the USA.
My two grandfathers, Stanley Field and Ellsworth Ellingboe, were too old to enlist as soldiers, but still they contributed in their own important ways to the war effort (those are stories for other times). So did my step-grandfather Alan Bodge, who served as a US Army technical engineer in the Signal Corps working with radar, one of the new technologies that helped us win the war. So did the American women, as my Aunt Connie, producer of the film Rosie the Riveter, the story of how American women helped build the ships for the US Navy, knows well. Everyone with a family history in the USA going back to the early twentieth century has been told stories of the heroic achievements of that generation, and the trials and tribulations of those times—not just for the USA, but for the entire world—that make this current crisis look like a stroll in the park by comparison.
Granted, our leadership back then was different to today. FDR was one of the great leaders of the 20th century, but even he was leading the American people in a state of denial and isolationism prior to the events of Pearl Harbor. Hindsight is always 20/20.
Time to Jazz It Up, Americans!
When I think of China’s reaction to this viral outbreak and compare them with America’s, the analogy that comes to mind is classical music versus jazz. While China’s initial reactions to the viral outbreak are certainly worthy of harsh criticism, like a classical musician who plays an elegantly composed piece without any sense of rhythm or melody, the government eventually mobilized the entire nation in both a top-down and bottom-up pattern.
Like a classical orchestra, the central government eventually controlled the effort and orchestrated the entire nation to mobilize against the outbreak. People did so quite willingly, as I experienced firsthand while still in China, making huge sacrifices in the process. People basically followed the lead of the government and trusted in the mandates that were being issued. The result was a brilliant and beautiful if somewhat terrifying orchestration of how to avoid a virus by minimizing social contact, mobilizing vast resources to build hospitals and staff them, following closely cases of infected people, alerting the society to the dangers, and recommending important behaviors to slow or stop the spread of the virus. Had the people of China not taken these desperate actions, who knows how devastating the virus would have been for such a massive country and for the world. Meanwhile, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and South Korea also led strong mobilization efforts, though in different ways, making use of their own strengths and resource capabilities to do so. These actions also helped slow down the spread of the virus, so that other countries could take action as well.
Until now, America’s delayed reactions to this mounting pandemic have been more like a dysfunctional jazz band—perhaps with a heavy dose of heroin or pot thrown into the mix. There’s been a lot of noise, and very little in way of signal.
Even though there’s usually a bandleader helping to shape the overall music of the band, in a jazz band, a lot of the action and initiative comes from the band members themselves. Yet if the leadership and the vision isn’t there, the end result can be disastrous.
America’s great jazz bandleader Duke Ellington in 1945, who pitched in for the war effort, and later became one of our greatest cultural ambassadors to the world. https://cdn.loc.gov/service/pnp/fsa/8d13000/8d13200/8d13230r.jpg
Duke Ellington is a classic example of this. We think of Duke Ellington as a great American composer, but his greatest skill was bringing together excellent musicians and letting them run with their ideas, while admittedly taking credit for most of them. Still, without the Duke, those musicians would not have had such great opportunities to bring their talents together to create something magical through the art of collaboration.
In a jazz band, the members take turns riffing with each other, experimenting, and moving the piece forward in new and unexpected directions. They sometimes make mistakes too, some of which turn out to be ingenious inventions that push the envelope of music. Eventually these “mistakes” become part of the jazz repertoire.
In the case of the USA, like a free-wheeling jazz band, US universities such as University of Washington and Stanford University reacted early on with little direction from above. Other universities soon began to mobilize to move their education online. Unlike in China, where the press is strictly controlled and normally follows the lead of the central government and the Communist Party, America’s press is abuzz with all sorts of opinions, critiques, and ideas. Wechat, China’s all-encompassing social media platform, may be somewhat more similar to jazz than the public media, but it’s still heavily controlled and censored by the government. Facebook, as we all know by now, is only subject to the whims of its participants, who throw up all sorts of stuff, good or bad, into the mix. While this ain’t always good, I much prefer the Facebook model of free and open discourse.
For the past few weeks, as a refugee from China, I felt like the Vox clamantis in deserto—the voice crying out in a wilderness of apathy. My daily Facebook feed is now overflowing with news, info, and ideas about the viral outbreak and how to stanch its flow. Organizations and companies all over the USA are now taking actions and initiatives to stem the flood tide of this viral outbreak. There will be much trial and error, and many false starts and stops as the illness progresses, but out of this seeming chaos will come solutions that will inevitably make their way across the country at rapid speed owing to our open society and our willingness to communicate ideas.
Right now, America is like a jazz orchestra that’s been given a completely new music score to work with and no time to rehearse for the big show. Comparisons to previous outbreaks notwithstanding, the magnitude and severity of this illness is unprecedented, or else hasn’t been seen since 1918 (the inevitable comparison is with the flu that broke globally out at the end of WWI, killing millions in its wake).
There will be plenty of cacophony in the near future, to be sure, but I am confident that our great experiment, the Jazz Orchestra of the United States, will eventually find its rhythm and will come up with new and innovative ways to fight this virus and help mitigate its spread in our country and around the world. But this will happen only if we all do our part to contribute to the anti-viral war effort. And we need to join in the chorus with others around the world, viewing it as a global problem with global solutions, and not a war against a “foreign disease.”
Whatever happens, the world we live in after 2020 will be quite different to the one we exited in 2019.