In this episode, we talk with Ojai's Mayor about the local response to the pandemic, the shock to the economy and the subsequent strain on the city's "rainy day" fund. We also talk about the dilemma of promoting social distancing and healthy activities such as hiking in our beautiful backyard, as well as pockets of resistance, herd thinning and his "embers" metaphor linking the pandemic to the Thomas Fire. We talk about our new favorite oxymoron, "disciplined freedom," and the concept of social insurance. We talk about the probable impacts of the pandemic on the elections this coming November.

We also talk about the lessons of Henrik Ibsen's play, "Enemy of the People," Plato's parable of the cave, the invasion of Los Angeles hikers, my son's bout with the novel coronavirus, Johnston's stage management of the OJ Simpson "trial of the century," as a courts administrator in Los Angeles, as well as his pension battles as the chief executive officer of Ventura County. Then the discussion takes several discursions into Jim Thorpe, Dwight Eisenhower, General Grant's differing opinions on Robert E. Lee (overrated) and Joe Johnston (underrated, who could have achieved the Confederacy's goals had he not been fired by Jefferson Davis), and the Great Toilet Paper Shortage of 2020. 

In the monologue, Bret Bradigan talks Johnston's stint as city manager in the early 1970s, and the existential threats to Ojai that cropped up every month or so during that time, which leads into Stephen Pinker's "Enlightenment Now's" counter-intuitive premise that things are better now than they ever have been.

We do not talk about Ventura River's once-abundant steelhead runs, the Decembrist Revolution of 1825 or the Strokes' new album, "The New Abnormal."