{"id":20218,"date":"2020-03-25T09:43:05","date_gmt":"2020-03-25T14:43:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/?p=20218"},"modified":"2020-03-25T09:43:05","modified_gmt":"2020-03-25T14:43:05","slug":"o-brave-new-world-etcetera","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2020\/03\/25\/o-brave-new-world-etcetera\/","title":{"rendered":"O Brave New World etcetera"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

So, Andrew Cline of Rhetorica.net, who has like Your Humble Blogger largely given up on political rhetoric as a study, has been focusing on documentaries and the extraordinary tools there are for making them. He advises us all to document our lives<\/a> during this pandemic, with some interesting and useful tips aimed at those using video. Which is not very much not my thing, but the post had stuck in the back of my head a bit waiting for things to connect to.\r\n

One of those things, eventually, was the closing of the theaters\u2014I had been reading a bit before this all started about the closing of the theaters in Elizabethan times (and shortly after), and then I read an interesting article I cannot now locate about the closing of the theaters in the US in 1918 for the influenza epidemic. And the writer of that article had a very interesting point about how this huge, huge event for theater professionals particularly does not result in many plays about it in the years afterward. There are some, but not many and not of the highest rank\u2014really it takes a specialist to name any at all.\r\n

Anyway, between those two notions\u2014the sophistication of our self-documentation and the quickly-fading memory of last century\u2019s plague\u2014it occurred to me that this lockdown is, for US folk, the first where being largely confined to our houses doesn\u2019t interfere much with our access to news. I know not everyone has broadband in their houses (we should be doing something about that as a nation real soon now) but between television and the internet, most people are getting access to lots of information, every day, about what this is like in our neighbor\u2019s homes and in homes of people who aren\u2019t our neighbors. We\u2019re up-to-date, if we want to be, about what\u2019s being done about this thing locally, nationally and globally. And that seems\u2026 normal.\r\n

In 1593, if you fled London (smart thinking) and went to the Shropshire or Lincolnshire, and we\u2019re of course talking now about people of affluence and connections, you would probably get your news from London in a few days. It wouldn\u2019t be terribly reliable, though. You would get letters in a day or two, from your connections around the towns. If you were worried about relatives in Paris or Munich, though\u2026 well, you\u2019d find out eventually. If, like many more people, you were just stuck in your room in a London slum, then you would know only what you could hear shouted in the street.\r\n

And in 1918, in Philadelphia or Baltimore, you wouldn\u2019t really know much more, day to day. There were newspapers, if you could read and afford them, and were willing to go out to purchase them. But you didn\u2019t have a radio in your tenement room, so again if you weren\u2019t able to or willing to go out, your news was what was shouted in the street, or (if you could read and write) letters from people you knew, days old. You certainly wouldn\u2019t know what the government was considering until it happened.\r\n

This isn\u2019t intended to be a note about how Everything is Better Now\u2014things are always getting better and always getting worse simultaneously\u2014but it\u2019s definitely different.\r\n

As for me, I\u2019m not going to plague-journal this Tohu Bohu, but I\u2019ll let you know: I\u2019m well, my family is healthy, I\u2019m still on payroll and there is no immediate risk to my financial stability. I\u2019d love to hear from any Gentle Readers who are still around, and hope you are all well.\r\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,<\/I>
-Vardibidian.\r\n\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Which Your Humble Blogger hopes this finds you as it leaves him: safe, healthy and full of hope.","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20218"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20218\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20219,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20218\/revisions\/20219"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}