Tonight I did something I haven’t done in quite a while. I e-mailed my Representative in Congress.
Unfortunately, I happen to live in a district that is currently as reliably crimson as any small town in Alabama, and my current Representative, Chris Jacobs, has thus far in his short career (he was only first elected in a special election last summer) proven to be a pandering empty suit, but today he managed to irritate even me by being not just a rubber stamp for the right wing, but a gutless one. He announced today his intention to join the chorus of Congressfolk who are “objecting” to the Congressional certification of the Electoral College results. Today. On the very day those results were to be certified, and on a day when he knew that there would almost certainly be violence.
Chris Jacobs took a cowardly stance because he knew that his base would demand it, and he took that stance when he knew the light would shine dimly on him if if shone on him at all.
Here’s a rough paraphrase of what I wrote, since I didn’t think to copy-and-paste it until after it was sent (via an email form on his web page):
As a liberal Democrat in your district, I have had no illusions that you would represent my beliefs or values in Washington much at all, but even so I was surprised to learn how cowardly you are in your service to those constituents you do claim to represent. I see that you have waited until the very last possible moment to announce that you, too, will object to the certification of the Electoral College’s ultimate election of Joseph R. Biden as the next President of the United States.
I am sure that you know, as well as I do, that not a single shred of proof or actionable evidence of any voter fraud at all, much less a sufficient degree of it to swing an entire American Presidential election, has been advanced in any court in this country. I am sure that you know that this notion is simply delusional, and I am sure that you know that your endorsement of it is nothing but cowardly pandering to your base. What was surprising in your cowardice is that you waited until today, on the day the votes were to be counted in Congress, and on a day when you surely knew that many thousands of the current President’s supporters would be in Washington to “protest”, to make your announcement. You waited until you knew the light would not be on you, and then you stepped up to bravely say, “Me too.”
Again, I know that there is zero chance of you advocating in Congress for MY values, but know that I will work tirelessly at home to oppose YOURS. While this district is currently as red as it gets, there is no law of nature requiring it to remain that way forevermore, and whatever the future holds, this moment will pass and you’re young enough that you’ll likely live to see at least some of history’s judgment of you and those with whom you have made common cause. Your grandchildren will know what kind of man you were, and people like me will work hard to make sure that they know.
Sincerely,
and so on and so forth.
Maybe this was intemperate? I don’t know. But I do know that what’s happening now is not tenable, and that this country cannot long survive so much of its population being off its collective rocker. And it likely cannot survive so many of its elected officials being in thrall to such pure craven irrationality.
It’s time for my annual wrap-up quiz. Warning: I’m writing about 2020 here. Trigger warnings galore! And some political bluntness, for which I’ll say, if you disagree with me, well…I do not care. For a taste of how I’ve been seeing the year just gone by, consider this tweet:
A lot of folks acting as if 2020 has just been a string of bewildering bad luck, rather than what it truly is: a concentration of widely and reliably predicted and interconnected disasters that advanced nations of the world could have mitigated or prevented but chose not to.
It’s been my view for some time that everything going wrong for America and for the world, all of it, consists of self-inflicted wounds, and I have seen nothing to make me think otherwise for even a second.
But now, on to the quiz.
Did you keep your New Years’ resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
My resolutions never change much: “Read a lot, write a lot, eat healthier, walk more, listen to more music.”
As these go, not bad! The toughest one is “eat healthier,” which is a back-end kind of thing: I have no problem finding newer healthier foods to like. It’s staying away from the less-than-healthy ones that tends to trip me up! This is something I need to work on big-time.
As for the rest, it was a decent year. I wrote a fair amount (though a lot of my writing time this year was spent on editing existing manuscripts, so drafting was on the backseat for a chunk of the year). Reading was a constant, and I really have made effort to listen to more music!
Did anyone close to you give birth?
Nope.
Did anyone close to you die?
I suppose it’s almost miraculous that in the Year of COVID, my answer to this is, No. But I know of people who have died, and people close who have suffered a lot of loss (and not all of it COVID driven, since the rest of Death didn’t exactly go on holiday because of the pandemic).
What countries did you visit?
In my mind? Tons.
What would you like to have in 2021 that you lacked in 2020?
A Federal government that isn’t led by a delusional authoritarian grifter whose appeal is distressingly wide.
What was your biggest achievement of the year?
It was 2020. I got to the end of it without having contracted COVID-19 as of this writing. This was not a year for grand accomplishments, I suspect…though I did get a book ready for release, and more! Detail to come in another post.
What was your biggest failure?
I took entirely too much random delight in chucking rocks at online trolls.
What was the best thing you bought?
I probably bought way too much stuff this year–adding to the overalls collection and purchasing books, of course–but the thing that’s brought the most direct happiness to my ongoing existence is the pair of Bluetooth ear buds I picked up in June. I had watched a YouTube video that was randomly recommended by that platform’s algorithm (why, I’m not sure, it was just someone’s “day in the life” video diary thing), in which a person put on earbuds that had hooks to go over the ear, and I thought, “Wait, they make those?” A bit of Googling turned up my Soundcore buds.
Whose behavior merited celebration?
Anyone who wore a mask and socially-distanced themselves, no matter how hard it may have been to do so.
Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
Not even my skills with the English language can convey my disappointment at how much farther the Republicans can descend in this country. As I write this, a bunch of them in Congress are gearing up to “object” to the certification of the Electoral College results, based on zero concrete evidence of any “fraud” whatsoever. It’s pure banana-republic dictator shit, this business of “We respect the election as long as the guy in charge wins” and it’s just appalling. Add to that the QAnon lunatics, the science deniers, and the ones who refuse to wear masks or maintain social distance because of “FREEDOM!”, and you’ve got a deeply dangerous state of affairs in this country. We can’t long survive this large a percentage of our citizenry being completely off its collective rocker.
I’m also disappointed in what I see as America’s rejection of collective thinking and its growing lack of imagination, but that will have to wait for another post.
Where did most of your money go?
Books, booze, food, gifts, and vintage overalls. And I paid down some debt, which was nice.
What did you get really excited about?
In 2020? Day trips to Ithaca and Letchworth and the Finger Lakes area. New flavors I’ve tried. I’ve made green tea a part of my daily routine of late, and I’m loving it! (I also discovered just this week, when the last of my Christmas gifts came in the mail, just how much tea is in a pound of the stuff. Note to self: order the stuff 8oz at a time, moving forward.)
Compared to this time last year, are you happier or sadder?
Oh, who the hell knows. On a personal level I’m pretty happy and doing fine. When I start thinking societally, though–ugh.
On a political note, I’m really increasingly disappointed by my country. Maybe I’ll write more about this later, but re-electing the Joni Ernst’s and the Susan Collinses and the Mitch McConnells of the world is a staggering failure of citizenship, and the fact that more than 70 million of my fellow Americans looked at the current state of affairs and decided that they were fine with it is horribly depressing.
Thinner or fatter?
A bit thinner! No idea about the poundage, but I own overalls for which I have never been able to fasten both sets of side buttons–and now I can. This amazes me. Now, my progress in that regard has probably taken a small beating the last few weeks, but I did develop some healthier eating habits in 2020 that won’t be hard to replicate. I can still do the “gluttony” thing on occasion, but I’ve finally reached a point where doing so is fun for a very short while, but then my brain goes, “Oooog, gimme salad and fiber and lean protein, please.”
Richer or poorer?
I’m doing better than a lot of Americans. And we all should be doing better, shouldn’t we? I really hope I live long enough to see this country finally start to pivot away from the trickle-down, “If we just let rich people have more and more money they’ll eventually rain it down upon us all” bullshit that’s been the economic wind in America’s wings since 1981.
I’ll say this for American conservatism: when it managed to convince most of America that the major factor holding them back was what government was taking out of their paychecks instead of what their employers were never putting in their paychecks in the first place, it won a rhetorical victory for the ages.
What do you wish you’d done more of?
As always, reading, writing, and walking. (Same as last year.)
What do you wish you’d done less of?
Chucking rocks at right-wing trolls online. Yeah, it’s fun to mute them and watch them reply anyway, but still…it’s not a terribly productive use of time!
How did you spend Christmas?
With family. We used FaceTime to include my sister, which was…well, obviously it’s not the same, but it was actually a fun way to manage to include someone who wasn’t able to be around due to circumstances and shit. Other than that, Christmas was what it always is for us: a quiet time spent with family. I don’t come from a large and close extended family, and The Wife’s family lives far away as well, so Christmas has never been about large gatherings and traveling around to multiple houses to put in appearances. It’s always been about home, and I expect it always will be. I hear people complaining about how their holidays were ruined by COVID, or how they were going to defy the Big Bad Government to go to their giant get-togethers, and I reflect anew on the degree to which this particular crisis has forced an awful lot of Americans into my lifestyle. I haven’t yet figured out to what degree their reactions to this amuses me or depresses me, but it’s definitely some of both.
Did you fall in love in 2020?
She’s from the Niagara Falls area, you don’t know her.
(Yes, that’s a quote from The Breakfast Club.)
How many one-night stands?
Come on. I never had one-night stands when they were an option.
What was your favorite TV program?
ABC canceled Bless This Mess, which was a hilarious fish-outta-water sitcom about two NYC liberal hippie-types who inherit farmland in Nebraska, so eff you, ABC. (The show was not about “Let’s make fun of the hicks!”, if you’re thinking along those lines. It was a collection of zany weirdos and full of character-driven comedy that was some of the funniest stuff I’ve seen in years. If you watch it, the short first season–only six episodes, if I recall correctly–is mildly amusing, but the show didn’t take off creatively until the second season, which was sadly the last.)
ABC also had a cool detective show called Stumptown, set in Portland, OR, that I liked a lot. They renewed it for a second season…and then when COVID shut down production, they ended up canceling it instead. Curse you, ABC!
CBS has a sitcom called The Unicorn which we like a lot. This follows a widower as he starts to emerge from grieving; he has two teenage daughters and a wonderful support system of friends around him. This show is in its second season and is worth checking out. It’s sometimes bittersweet, but it’s never depressing.
Oh, and we like The Mandalorian a great deal. We’re slowly watching Season Two now, rationing it out for maximum enjoyment. Of course, the Internet has already seen to it that I’m spoiled and know what happens at the end, so thanks, Internet. Sheesh.
Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?
I really don’t like hatred and I try to avoid it.
What was the best book you read?
I refer you to my Books Read in 2020 post from the other day, where my five-star reads are highlighted in bold.
What was your greatest musical discovery?
Oh, music! Music might have saved me this year, to the point where this blog was almost exclusively a music blog for a whole lot of the time. Aside from my year-long deep dive into Beethoven, I also did a lot of listening to the work of Black composers, which often featured in my semi-regular Tone Poem Tuesday posts. This was a partial response on my part to the Black Lives Matter movement, because surely one way we can start to acknowledge the importance of the Black lives that we whites have for so long completely marginalized and ignored is to engage with Black art. This will remain a focus of mine, moving forward.
As far as specific Black composers go, I’ve really become a fan of Florence Price, whose music I featured several times.
Non-classical? Well, none of these were “discoveries”, but I’m discovering a real fondness for ELO, which I am starting to consider one of the most underrated bands in history, and Taylor Swift, whom I am starting to consider simply a genius.
What did you want and get?
President-elect Joe Biden.
What did you want and not get?
A United States Senate not ruled by Mitch McConnell, whom I believe to be the single worst American of my lifetime. (Though, if Georgia voters manage to come through, I still may get this.)
What were your favorite films of this year?
2020 was the first year of my life that I never set foot in a movie theater, and I only watched a single movie new to me, courtesy of Netflix. That was Enola Holmes, which I enjoyed greatly.
I love film and I wish I had more time to watch them. I suspect my retirement, when it finally comes, is going to be a big film-fest.
What did you do on your birthday?
I don’t remember specifically what happened on my birthday, but my sister was in town and we did some antiquing and visiting comics stores. The next week was our annual trip to Ithaca and the Finger Lakes, which took on a very different tone given that the annual Apple Harvest Festival was canceled due to COVID.
How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2019?
It’s a struggle, every morning: “Which shirt do I want to wear with which overalls?”
What kept you sane?
Books and music and dogs and cats and overalls. Walks in the woods and by the water. I cope best when I’m allowed to focus my energies inward.
Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
I’ll give a shout-out to author and podcaster Dana Schwartz, who is a fine writer and the host of the wonderful podcast Noble Blood, which focuses on the sordid and grim side of history. There have been episodes on each one of Henry VIII’s wives (not all of whom were beheaded!), and a particularly effective episode about King Leopold II of Belgium and how he spearheaded some of the bloodiest acts of African colonialism. My favorite episode focused on one of my favorite stories from the history of science, the life of Tycho Brahe. Schwartz focuses that episode on Brahe’s life, instead of coming at it from the standpoint of Johannes Kepler, as most commentators do.
What political issue stirred you the most?
God, so many to choose from…but Black Lives Matter remains staggering to me. That a cop could just casually kneel with his knee on the throat of a black man until he died is one of the most appalling things I’ve ever seen, closely followed by the ability of so many white people to argue that there was really nothing at all wrong with this.
And there’s also my country’s response to COVID-19, a response so perfect in its malignant incompetence and rejection of science that it truly makes me believe that whatever greatness lies in store for humanity, America will no longer be much of a factor in driving it.
Who did you miss?
The geeky people who frequent the local cons! I was just starting to get comfortable with the idea of hanging out at local conventions and trying to market myself there (I was even going to release Book Four of The Song of Forgotten Stars at Nickel City Con in May), but that’s gone. I miss festivals–Ithaca’s Apple Harvest Festival, the Sterling Renaissance Festival, various others that we like to frequent. I miss some favorite local restaurants that we pray manage to hold on long enough for the vaccine to finally start beating back this virus.
Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2020:
The same ones as always:
Read a lot, write a lot. Listen to music. Go for walks and look at sunsets. Take all the pictures you want. Learn new things and try new stuff. If you have a dog, take him for walks. Buy books for your daughter, even when she complains that she likes to pick her own books (let her do that, too). Nothing fits your hand so well as your lover’s hand. Eating out is fine, but learn to cook things, too. Have a place to go where they know you and what you order. Don’t be afraid to revisit your childhood passions now and again; you weren’t always wrong back then. Overalls are awesome, it’s OK to wear double denim, and a pie in the face is a wonderful thing!
To all of this I would add something that wasn’t really a lesson I learned in 2020, but which I saw illustrated in events so stark as to have it all be writ large in the fiery letters in the sky: The United States of America desperately needs to re-embrace rational and collective thinking, and ditch its mythologies about rugged individualism and the eternal wisdom of “the Founders”.
I’d sum it up with a quote from the afore-mentioned Enola Holmes: “Our future is up to us.”
If you take selfies, post your six favorite ones:
Yeah, I’m doing eight, because I can.
Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:
Boy, have I been dreading this question. A song that sums up 2020? How could there possibly be a musical expression of how this awful year was and the effect it had…but maybe, just maybe, 2020 was sufficiently calamitous to provoke at least a beginning to a long-needed reassessment of the American paradigm of life, business, and profit?
This made me remember the last episode of House MD, which ended as Dr. House, having faked his own death, took off on a motorcycle trip with his best friend Dr. Wilson, who at this point was dying of cancer and had only months left. As they motor off into the hills, this song played out the end of the show, and if this is a bit morbid (and maybe sexist in one verse), well…these are the times in which we live.
So here’s Guy Lombardo.
You work and work for years and years, you’re always on the go You never take a minute off, too busy makin’ dough Someday you say, you’ll have your fun, when you’re a millionaire Imagine all the fun you’ll have in your old rockin’ chair
Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think Enjoy yourself, while you’re still in the pink The years go by, as quickly as a wink Enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think
You’re gonna take that ocean trip, no matter come what may You’ve got your reservations made, but you just can’t get away Next year for sure, you’ll see the world, you’ll really get around But how far can you travel when you’re six feet underground?
Your heart of hearts, your dream of dreams, your ravishing brunette She’s left you and she’s now become somebody else’s pet Lay down that gun, don’t try my friend to reach the great beyond You’ll have more fun by reaching for a redhead or a blond
Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think Enjoy yourself, while you’re still in the pink The years go by, as quickly as a wink Enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think
You never go to night clubs and you just don’t care to dance You don’t have time for silly things like moonlight and romance You only think of dollar bills tied neatly in a stack But when you kiss a dollar bill, it doesn’t kiss you back
Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think Enjoy yourself, while you’re still in the pink The years go by, as quickly as a wink Enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think
Let’s make 2021 better, shall we? I’d love to be able to post some optimistic and more cheerful answers to these questions in one year’s time. Remember Ms. Holmes’s quote above: Our future is up to us.
Years ago I was driving someplace and an odd segment came on the NPR show This American Life, which was about a libertarian guy who was spearheading what seemed to me a pretty Quixotic notion: rallying a whole bunch of like-minded libertarians to move to a single state, massing enough numerical strength to force through the engines of democracy a large-scale implementation of libertarian policies. Eventually they would be able to show the world entire how wonderful and glorious things are when there is minimal government, minimal idea of public life, and a strong focus on individual freedom.
I remember this very keenly: so strongly did it hit me that I blogged about way back in 2003 (!), when this blog was barely a year old. Here’s some of what I wrote back then:
The story focuses on one particular Libertarian, an earnest and intelligent young fellow who is steeped in Libertarian theory, and yet he strikes me as so steeped in theory that he doesn’t seem to have a handle on some of the more mundane concerns of life. He completely downplays the inevitable local resistance that his movement is certain to face whenever his twenty-thousand brethren arrive in Vermont or Delaware or Wyoming. His faith in the marketplace strikes me as scary — private companies will pick up the cigarette butts and maintain all the roads, for instance. We’re told that since zoning laws won’t exist in Liberatopia, McDonald’s will be able to build next door to your house if they so desire. But it’s all good, because you’ll be allowed to paint your house any color you want. Well, OK…but I fail to see how being allowed to treat my aluminum siding as a Jackson Pollack canvas really compensates for having what goes on behind fast-food restaurants doing so beside my back yard. (I worked in restaurants for years, and I know damn well what goes on outside the back door when the employees are bored. Especially since Liberatopia will have no drug laws.)
Then there is the surreal moment when the guy discusses, as an example of what he doesn’t like about public parks. He breezily says, “We’ll privatize this common area”. He scoffs at all the regulations typical of a town park — no skateboarding, for instance (this one I can somewhat agree with; there should be more places for skateboard and rollerblade use in this world). But he also scoffs at “No alcohol and no glass containers”, which he thinks is Draconian — but any parent who has ever encountered broken glass around the swings at the playground won’t quite share the same view, I suspect. “Parks” equal “theft”, he tells us: governmental funding of parks equals theft. When the interviewer points out that no private company is simply going to want to operate a free public park, he concedes, “Yeah, it’ll be gated”, and then states broadly that there will be no purely public spaces in Liberatopia. I’m glad the interviewer didn’t ask what happens to the library. I probably would have broken down in tears at this guy’s answer to that one.
This Libertarian travels around Vermont, one of the candidate states for Liberatopia, talking to the locals and trying to get them to sign the pledge promising to move once enough folks are signed up. One guy seems to be hearing these ideas for the very first time, and yet signs on the dotted line almost immediately — we get to hear the scratching of his pen — leaving me to wonder if he’s really thought things through. I wonder what happens when some of these people move and discover just how much they really, truly, deep-down love little things like parks for the kids and libraries and not having to worry about some company putting a set of dumpsters on the other side of their driveway. I don’t know, but something about this whole endeavor makes me envision Bart, after one of Homer’s schemes has predictably turned out poorly, saying: “Bet you wish you’d researched this plan a little, eh, Dad?”
After that, I kind of lost track of (and interest in) the Liberatopia Project, because…well, at that time I could claim that I didn’t have a lot of experience with libertarians, but now, I have had a lot more experience with them, and suffice it to say that while my reaction to libertarianism back then was a bemused “OK there, champ”, my reaction now tends to be “Oh lord, get this nut away from me, and somebody open a window once they’re gone.”
Well, earlier today I saw this article, which is an interview with the author of a book about what eventually happened with the whole “The Libertarians Are Going To New Hampshire!” movement. Last time I looked in on these goons, they were imagining taking over an entire state; they seem to have eventually scaled down their idea to taking over a town, and they actually managed to pull this off in the unfortunate burgh of Grafton, NH.
Maybe I should give a spoiler warning, but come on: anyone with a pulse knows that this whole notion was bound to be a shitshow, and a shitshow it was:
By pretty much any measure you can look at to gauge a town’s success, Grafton got worse. Recycling rates went down. Neighbor complaints went up. The town’s legal costs went up because they were constantly defending themselves from lawsuits from Free Towners. The number of sex offenders living in the town went up. The number of recorded crimes went up. The town had never had a murder in living memory, and it had its first two, a double homicide, over a roommate dispute.
So there were all sorts of negative consequences that started to crop up. And meanwhile, the town that would ordinarily want to address these things, say with a robust police force, instead found that it was hamstrung. So the town only had one full-time police officer, a single police chief, and he had to stand up at town meeting and tell people that he couldn’t put his cruiser on the road for a period of weeks because he didn’t have money to repair it and make it a safe vehicle.
Basically, Grafton became a Wild West, frontier-type town.
Sean Illing
When did the bears show up?
Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling
It turns out that if you have a bunch of people living in the woods in nontraditional living situations, each of which is managing food in their own way and their waste streams in their own way, then you’re essentially teaching the bears in the region that every human habitation is like a puzzle that has to be solved in order to unlock its caloric payload. And so the bears in the area started to take notice of the fact that there were calories available in houses.
Yikes. Read the whole thing, but as a writer, I have to note that wonderful sentence: “You’re essentially teaching the bears in the region that every human habitation is like a puzzle that has to be solved in order to unlock its caloric payload.” That’s some good stuff, right there!
This has been a truly ghastly year, and even the weather today as I write this is metaphorically on point: it’s drizzly and rainy and the screen on my library window is filled with raindrops so I can’t really even see outside very well.
I won’t write my usual long list of things I’m thankful for, but suffice it to say that even in a year like this, it’s still quite a long list, when I really put some thought into it.
Stay safe, folks. Please don’t take unnecessary trips and please oh please oh please, keep your masks on. It looks like we might very well get through this all right, but if this pandemic is a baseball game, we’re only in the bottom of the fifth. Let’s play the whole nine innings, folks.
A quite lovely article appears in The Buffalo News by Jeff Miers, describing his struggle with the degree to which the COVID pandemic has disrupted his lifestyle. It’s not just his leisure that’s affected; it is literally his entire life. Miers writes about music and the arts for the News, and with a beat like that, he’s required to be out in the city almost all the time, interacting with music and art and musicians and artists. This has been his life for decades, and now, all of a sudden, he’s been forced to…stay at home.
The Wife and I often comment that it’s strange how this particular pandemic has basically forced so many other people into our lifestyles: we don’t go out a lot at all, and when we do it’s mainly to eat someplace, so getting takeout is just fine with us. My trips out by myself tend to be solo trips to the library, or jaunts to a local park to walk The Dee-oh-gee in solitude. We simply don’t find ourselves often in situations that involve lots of people are in social situations. But our lifestyle isn’t the only lifestyle, and Mr. Miers (who is, by the way, quite a fine writer whose work I usually enjoy) had felt the pinch very keenly:
After months of telling myself that I was far too fortunate to demand such a luxury, I finally admitted that I needed some help, that the ways in which I warded off depression and anxiety in the past – all of them involving music – were no longer enough. I began seeing a mental health therapist, virtually. She immediately pointed out that, in addition to the difficult situation with my parents, I was also quite likely in a state of shock resulting from a core feature of my existence – the live music experience, which has occupied my time an average of five nights a week for 30 years – being ripped away. Allowing myself to admit this, and to mourn it, in a sense, has helped me greatly.
In the course of his article he notes how he discovered that his son’s girlfriend is actually the granddaughter of a noted jazz musician named Roosevelt Wardell. I found an album of Wardell’s on YouTube, and though I am no expert on jazz by any means, I greatly enjoyed it! This record is quite a compelling listen. You never know which direction art will take in reaching us. Some guy asks a girl out, introduces her to his parents; Dad turns out to be a local writer who mentions her grandfather in a newspaper article, and now I’m listening to a jazz record.
Fifty-seven years since President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. I’m surprised to note that I’ve never written a long piece about Oliver Stone’s film JFK, and it’s been so long since I last saw it that I don’t want to try to write one now; maybe next year, after a rewatch. For now, here’s my review of Stephen King’s amazing novel 11/22/63, and here is John Williams conducting a suite of his music for Stone’s film.
I wonder what kind of America would have emerged from the 1960s had Kennedy not been murdered.
So, about that lack of updates in this space for something like nine days…this month has been rough, folks.
First, there was the final run-up to the election, which was nerve-wracking in itself. Then Election Night was its own category of annoying, as a hoped-for Democratic landslide resulting in the defeat of some of the more odious Republican voices in Congress failed to materialize. And then the results of the Presidential race just dragged on and on and on. Granted, we all knew that was going to be the case, given the giant emphasis on mailed-in ballots, but it would have been a lot less of a nailbiter if I wasn’t also disgusted that the likes of Lindsay Graham, Joni Ernst, and Susan Collins weren’t all going back for another six years of being singularly terrible people in the Senate.
Of course, the Presidential result looked more and more favorable as the week went on until finally all the news organizations concluded that yes, Joe Biden had won, and that yes, America had rejected another four years of Donald Trump. Good news, absolutely! That Trump won’t be the one setting the nation’s agenda is an unabashed good thing. But it definitely gives me pause to note that America seems to have said with this election not “We’re rejecting that guy and his agenda,” but rather “OK, we don’t like this guy, but we do like a lot of what he stands for.” Disappointing.
Through all this, The Wife had been suffering some increasingly obnoxious health issues, which finally led to her hospitalization this past Monday when her vitals got seriously out-of-whack. She’s home now, having only stayed two days, and doctors are homing in on treatment options moving forward, and none of it is life-threatening…but still, that was very difficult. And now, as I write this, COVID numbers are relentlessly climbing as millions of my fellow citizens seem to have basically thrown in the towel and embraced life whether they get sick or not, and my government has likewise thrown in the towel in favor of election-related court cases that are not likely to do anything other than get tossed out.
I’m ready for 2020 to be over, folks. This entire year has been ghastly, even as the current crisis seems tailor-made to someone with my particular lifestyle: we’re not particularly outgoing, and when we do go someplace it’s always by ourselves. But still, this level of world-induced anxiety is not something I’m remotely used to. I was reminded just the other day, on the anniversary of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald, that the final transmission from the doomed ship was the Captain saying, “We’re holding our own.”
So, on Monday I made a post here, invoking the Les Miserables song “One Day More”, as did many of my left-leaning friends on the Internet. And why not! It’s a song that so ably lends itself to a Monday before a major election. In the show, all of Act One is building and building and building to a group of events, and then Act One concludes as the entire company gears up for the big day to come:
Tomorrow we’ll be far away, Tomorrow is the judgement day;
Tomorrow we’ll discover What our God in Heaven has in store, One more dawn, One more day, One day more!
Of course, it wasn’t just “one day more”, was it? As I write this it’s looking promising, though everyone on my side of the fence was hoping for more out of this election. There will be time enough to figure out the way forward, but there’s a reason that the first rule of treating injury is “stop the bleeding”. We’ve probably done that. I hope.
What I can say definitively, right now, is that “Three days more!” wasn’t nearly as catchy.
This is the photo I took on the morning of Election Day, 2016. It seemed like a bright and optimistic day. I captioned it on Instagram: “Looks like a nice morning to make some history happen!”
The next morning, in the midst of reeling with the eventual result of that election, the hulking husk of Bethlehem Steel, the old steel plant on the shore of Lake Erie south of Buffalo, caught fire. The blaze was enormous, and I was able to take this photo of the smoke cloud from the roof of The Store.
It was hard even then to not see these two photos, twenty-four hours and some change apart, as some kind of metaphor for what my country had just done…or, maybe if I’m feeling charitable, what my country had allowed to happen through various questionable voting decisions by her citizens and the fact of her simply nonsensical approach to the matter of electing presidents.
I’ve had various essay-ish thoughts in my mind about the nature of the 2020 election, but obviously I haven’t written any of them. Every time I’ve sat down to do so, I’ve checked out. While I don’t feel a great sense of impending doom just now, I know what America is capable of doing and I know that we still have a chance to snatch epochal defeat from the jaws of hopeful victory.
Suffice it to say that I hope every American who can will vote, and that I hope that when the dust settles, not only has America decided to scuttle the ongoing disaster that is the Donald Trump administration, but that it has also decided to harshly rebuke the party that gave him to us, the party that has been stampeding in this authoritarian and irrational direction for more than fifty years. I know that American voters love to balance things out: “I voted for a Democrat for President, so I’ll vote for a Republican for Senate,” for example. This is not the time for that. The Republican Party needs to be ruthlessly quashed at every single level for which it can run for things. Every ounce of what is wrong with America can be traced back to either their ill-advised action or their apathetic inaction, and as a party American conservatism needs to be banished to the wilds for years.
I hope that when the dust is settling, America can start to do things like address climate change, the horrible inequities in our economy, the pandemic that holds our country in its tightening grip, our centuries-long struggle with racial hatreds, and more. I hope that the 2016 election will eventually prove to have been a very strange historical accident, not truly indicative of anything other than the last gasp of a political paradigm that has been far too long in passing.
Specifically, I did the democracy thing the other day, on Saturday, when early voting started in New York State. I got to the polling place (a local community center) about ten minutes before it opened, and at that point there was already a line, which extended into the parking lot. This was strange; the building is big and is surrounded by very ample sidewalks, and yet the people queued up in the parking lot. It took a cop to come along and tell everyone to queue on the sidewalk instead of the parking lot. People are weird.
I waited in line for probably about half an hour before I finally got inside. The attendants looked up my name and printed my ballot on the spot (hooray to New York for not passing some dumb-assed Voter ID law!), and then I voted. It definitely felt a little bit strange to vote early. With the exception of my very first election, when I was in college and thus had to vote via absentee ballot, I have always voted on Election Day at my designated polling place. It does seem odd, having joined with millions of my fellow citizens in having already voted, and yet we won’t have any idea how this all turns out for at least another five days. Here’s hoping it’s only five days, and here’s hoping that we Americans are sweeping the forty-sixth President of the United States into office on the strength of numbers too big to challenge.
We’ll see.
Oh, and this was the first time I ever got an “I voted” sticker, so huzzah for that! That sticker is a nice accessory for my overalls, isn’t it?
