1.
Covid cases in the United States: 3,165,733; new cases daily: 67,500.
Minnesota’s infection is increasing, but not dramatically in most regions.
In Mower County, where I live, there are about 1000 cases confirmed, a high number due to the meat packing plants. But the count of new cases is declining sharply and there have been only nine deaths.
All borders are porous. The problem is that travel can carry the virus and so the situation remains fluid.
2.
Because only a few of the driver’s license exam stations are open, Angelica, my daughter, will have to take the her behind-the-wheel test in Mankato. That city is noteworthy for a high concentration of traffic circles particularly where Minnesota 14 enters the urban area at its northwest corner. The DMV (Department of Motor Vehicle registration) is located in that quadrant of the City and, therefore, at the end of several avenues that have curlicue roundabouts in them. These roundabouts give the impression of being a traffic free-for-all and so they are a little intimidating to navigate. Angelica is concerned that she will fail the test because of her unfamiliarity with these traffic circles and, so, we drive to Mankato to practice navigating these highway features unique to that place.
The weather has been sweltering with high temperatures aggravated by humidity. Haze hangs over the silent crops, miles and miles of them stretching in all directions along the road to Mankato. As we enter town, a dark green cloud towers over the northeastern horizon. The cloud has its rainy snout dug into the ground and there are little outliers, spirals of wind-sculpted cloud the color of grey stucco. It seems that a bad storm is approaching.
In Mankato, by order of the Mayor, you can’t enter any business without wearing a mask. This notice is pasted to the front of all the stores in town. (Although cases are rising here, probably due to the many students at Mankato State University, the statistics for Blue Earth County are much better than for the county where I live. Mankato’s Blue Earth County has, at least, three times the number of people but reporting confirmed cases at about 550 (and five deaths); by contrast, Mower County with its lower population has about the double the number of cases and almost double the deaths.) As the storm blackens the sky, we finish practice on the roundabouts and stop at Barnes and Noble, the bookstore at the hilltop mall. While inside the store, storm warnings sound and we are told to go into a designated tornado shelter, a service corridor next to a Skechers store. The corridor is about 100 feet long and, then, dog-legs around a corner to a couple of double doors opening out onto the parking lots on the back side of the mall. The corridor is as wide as a lane on the highway, bare concrete underfoot and some kind of plasticized surface on the bare-walls, all things considered not a bad place. With Angelica, I make my way to the double doors on the parking lot and watch the sky. It is now complicated with pagoda-shaped towers of pale grey cloud hovering in front of midnight-black wall clouds, big dark seams hanging overhead. Everything is very still.
We are all wearing our pale blue or dark red or black masks. The storm sprays torrents of water down on the parking lot, flooding it, and there is an iron spout about forty-feet away that drains water off the roof – a lateral pillar of water thick as a man’s waist surges out of the spout. The trees shudder in place along the edges of the parking lot and the smaller evergreen seem to bend in the middle as if paying obeisance to the storm. Falling water shortens horizons: I can’t see to the edge of the parking lot. The water pouring down outside spills into the corridor under the door, a sheet of rainwater that darkens the concrete.
Beyond the dog-leg in the corridor, groups of people, mostly women are sitting together on the concrete, backs leaning against the wall. It is mostly silent. Sometimes, someone whispers through their mask. This tornado shelter is, indeed, protected. From within the corridor, we can’t hear any sound that the storm makes outside. A few minutes earlier, when I stepped out of the double doors, I felt the heavy humid air prickling on my arms and face and heard a continuous cannonade of thunder on the horizon.
The storm alert lasts for about a half-hour. Then, the danger seems to have passed and, indeed, in the sky-lane through which the black clouds have just rumbled, the air is clear and cool and blue to the zenith behind the storm.
We go to HyVee to buy some groceries. Returning to Austin, the storm precedes us, a vast black wave that is toppling ruinously over the flat countryside. Sometimes, wild antlers of lightning sear through the clouds. The warning is always about 25 miles ahead of us, to the south and east. In Austin, branches litter the roads but there seems to be no real serious damage.
(A few weeks later, Angelica takes the road-test in Mankato and fails – she doesn’t navigate the traffic circles correctly.)
3.
The virus is out of control and there is a note of desperation in the television coverage of the crisis. A Harvard doctor has suggested a “human challenge” to the virus – this is a test calling for 100 volunteers to be infected and, then, treated with various antibodies and potential vaccine reagents.
Two obvious obstacles will arise in connection with this proposal.
First, the virus exhibits malign cunning. My suspicion is that the pathogen will simply refuse to infect the courageous volunteers so as not expose its secrets to research. As Heraclitus reminds us: Nature likes to hide.
Second, the call for volunteers to be intentionally infected is ethically questionable. These people will be volunteering for service in which they are merely instrumental means to an end. Human beings should not be used in this way. And the fact that someone volunteers to face this danger is immaterial – every person must be regarded as a end in him- or herself and not a means to an end.
Here is a thought experiment suggested by Dostoevsky’s parable of the Grand Inquisitor. Let’s say that we could eliminate the Covid-19 virus by torturing to death a single child. Would we be morally justified in doing this?
The on-screen talent on TV is uncomfortable with the proposition of intentionally infection 100 volunteers with the virus. But, being ignorant and uneducated, the TV personalities can’t convert their vague sense of uneasiness into a rational argument. I suppose that none of them know anything about Kant’s categorical imperative and they, probably, aren’t conversant with Dostoevsky either.
Analogies won’t suffice. The interviewer mentions soldiers and people who voluntarily scale mountains like Everest, endeavors in which injury and death may be expected. The mountain-climbing analogy is inapposite – people climb mountains for their own benefit and not for the benefit of others. It would be morally wrong to make someone climb a mountain for the profit of someone else. The analogy of the soldier risking his life in combat is more challenging and deserve more close attention. War is a form of human conduct that is subject to complex analysis – most mainstream religions endorse some notion of the “just war”. We might argue that our response to the Covid virus is a form of “just war” and, therefore, merits using human beings as an end to the means of defeating this enemy. But it’s hard to claim that the notion of “just war” applies to responses to an Act of God, as it were, or a force of nature. And, furthermore, the older that I get, the less I believe that any war is just. Over my 65 years, I have seen that all wars result in adverse and tragic consequences that last for several generations and inflict suffering on others far beyond the losses on the battlefield. Once, I subscribed to the notion of the “just war”, but, now, I’m skeptical. War just leads to more war in an endless cycle of revenge. The only war that doesn’t induce seemingly interminable cycles of retaliation is one that results in the annihilation of the defeated combatant – and this can’t be accomplished without horrific slaughter. So I don’t think the idea that defeating the covid-19 virus is the moral equivalent of war will justify the use of people as mere means to an end.
Most fundamentally the problem with using human volunteers as test subjects against the virus is the “slippery slope”. Once you embark upon the path of instrumentalizing humans as tools to an end, where does the carnage stop? If it’s authorized to use ten human volunteers to fight the virus, then, why not a 100,000 or even a million? And if a million victims of human testing makes us uncomfortably, than why should one victim be okay?
In any event, there are financial stakes here and human affairs are never as simple as some would want. First, how do we know that the volunteers for the study aren’t suffering forms of subtle or not-so-subtle coercion. How do we know that they are really. in the truest sense, “volunteers”? And what about the pharmaceutical companies who will make a fortune on any drug that can successfully haul us out of this mire? (A course of treatment of remdesivir, a drug proprietary to Gilead and said to be effective in treating cases of Covid, costs $3,120 for a week-long dose – there is, as they say, “gold in them thar hills.”) Certainly, it would be profoundly immoral, not to say criminal, to profit from volunteers exposing themselves to the virus so that big Pharma can make even more indecent profits. If the scheme of using human test subjects were to be authorized (which I oppose), anyone earning so much as a dollar as a consequence should convicted of some sort of unlawful profiteering and sentenced to life in prison.
4.
The heat hangs over everything like a curse.
In my backyard, innumerable mosquitos helicopter up from the dew-laden grass. The birds are singing. The hovering mosquitos are translucent to the bright sunlight.
5.
The air is charged with water. The sky is a vast battery poised to discharge its lightning. In the day, the clouds are melted to towering columns of haze, milk-colored mist without proper edges or boundaries. At evening, the clouds re-establish their outlines and heap up over the sweltering land.
At 9:00 pm, it’s still 85 degrees with humidity that makes the air feel as if it were 105. Sullen energy is banked in the atmosphere, coiled like a snake and ready to strike. There’s too much of everything – green toppling from the trees and shrubs heavy with flowers and mosquitoes and flies corkscrewing through the air all latent with covid-virus. The extremity of the heat prickles on your skin. You feel invaded by insects and slimy with sweat. The virus is everywhere, a vast, lethal weight suffocating the land.
6.
You sit inside in a gush of air conditioning. There’s a name for it: “doom-scrolling”. This means scrolling down on your cell-phone to find the latest news reports as to violence in the cities, police brutality, Trump’s most recent lies, the advance of the virus and the most recent casualty count. One aspect of doom-scrolling is using your computer to find cell-phone images of encounters between apparently racist White women and people that were once called “minorities.”
It’s hard to avoid the proposition that some people of color are out hunting for “Karens”. A “Karen” is a privileged White lady, sometimes unctuously polite, at other times raging, who has been moved to engage with some non-White person in an egregious and offensive way. The point of the meme is that liberal White women, all of whom would claim purity with regard to racial issues, can be easily triggered into engaging in vituperative racist harangues when their privileges are threatened. Therefore, the social media are lit up with pictures of White women staring down the cell-phones of people of color and making all sorts of dire threats. The most common version of this meme is a claim made by a middle-aged White woman that some person of color doesn’t belong where he or she is standing, usually about a dozen feet from the cell-phone trained on her by the minority victim. “Dirt”, it is said, is merely matter in the wrong place. The people of color recording these encounters are, it seems, being treated as “dirt”, as “schmutz”, by spoiled, entitled White women.
But...it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that many of these much-derided “Karens” have been taunted into their bad behavior. There’s an open season on this kind of woman and, at least, some of the affronted victims seem to have triggered the racist response by some sort of aggressive behavior that is not recorded in that it precedes the offensive tirade. It’s amusing to watch these encounters but they are train-wrecks, car crashes that we rubber-neck with a sort of self-righteous disdain, a spectacle that is damaging because prurient and because we don’t think it applies to us. I don’t have any illusions about this – all people are racist to some extent; everyone has some class of people, organized according to our specific prejudices, that we find (to use Hillary Clinton’s word) “deplorable.” And, so, it is pretty apparent to me that just about anyone, including the righteous folks wielding their cell-phones to expose this sort of behavior, is only a hair-trigger away from acting badly. This is particularly true in this season in which mean and cruel behavior from all sides of the political spectrum is openly celebrated.
7.
On TV, there’s a commercial touting masks. You can buy non-medical grade masks light blue-turquoise in color for one dollar per mask. These are the sort of masks that I have in my car and that are used at my office when clients come to see us. The mask can be fitted over your nose – there’s a wire in the cloth that molded to fit the shape of your face.
There is something abject and depressing about the ad. Masks are uncanny and sinister and it’s absurd to discount people’s aversion to them. The media all pontificates that wearing masks in public is something that is easily accomplished. Nothing could be further from the truth. A year ago, it might have been illegal in many states to wear a mask in public – masked men were guilty of robberies and terrorism. And masks have specifically tribal meanings that might be atavistic but are not so easily outgrown or ignored. One dons a mask for all sorts of reasons: to celebrate the divine, to invite gods to appear, to conceal disfigurement or deformity, to engage in sexual license, to terrorize and set fire to White Supremicist crosses and to commit other crimes as well – the least of these reasons is, probably, for health. (And, we must recall, that experts argued that wearing a mask was not even advisable – the mask just leads you to touch your face more often – as recently as two months ago.)
In the ad, an unmasked man holds his box of masks that is newly arrived in the mail. He beams with radiant joy. That’s why he has to be unmasked: to show us the happiness on his face. A masked woman confidently enters a grocery store. Some masked children are playing outside.
A silver-haired grandmother interacts with her little granddaughter, both of them wearing masks. Then, we see a happy and safe family sitting on their sofa: mother and father are masked as are the two tots. One expects the camera to tilt to the side and show the family dog wearing a mask. Why are these people wearing masks in their own home? Has it come to this?
When you wear a mask, you assume a different identity. The Zuni and the Haida, among many other Native American tribes, wear masks to impersonate their deities. Is this happy family on their couch watching TV from behind their masks impersonating some kind of god? Is it the god of the Covid-19 virus.
The resistance to wearing masks in public places is folly. But this resistance is not without meaning. In other words, it’s based in something and not nothing as the media would have you believe.
8.
As I drove to the grocery store, I noticed a small black boy lying on his side on the asphalt by a storm sewer. The boy was observing intently something small on the tar a foot from his face. Recently, the ants on sidewalks have been hauling around insect carcasses like miniature front-end loaders and, so, I presumed that he was enthralled by a spectacle of this kind. The 17-year cicadas have also just emerged, only to die immediately, and their thumb-size jade-colored carapaces are all around.
Like all children, the boy is a nascent scientist, making careful and precise observations of the world around him. I thought that he would, perhaps, do well, particularly if the forces of oppression in the world were all swept away. For an instant, I recalled that I am part of those forces that obstruct the hopes of little boys like this one. And, so, I am compelled to think, if only for a moment, that the world might be a better place if I were simply swept away, drowned in the tsunami of history.
9.
The sick have no history, no politics, no art or literature. In this pandemic, the sick are not really visible. Confidentiality requires that their features be scrubbed out of images showing chaotic ICUs in big city hospitals. Doctors and nurses in protective suits with visors and face masks hover over complicated beds with rails and flanked by banks of monitors and machinery. Somewhere in the tangle of wires and tubes, there is a someone dying of the virus, a wraith with his or her face blurred into a pink smear that contrasts with the crisp protective gear worn by the health care providers. The virus is about sickness and death and these aspects of the infection are concealed from us.
Ahistorical, apolitical, resisting aesthetics, the unseen sick and dying are the still, vacant center of a hurricane of rhetoric and invective whirling around them.
10.
People imagine that when they retire, they will luxuriate in bed, sleeping late in defiance of all alarm clocks and the sun. Inactivity induced by the virus is a sort of sick simulacrum for retirement and I must report that sleeping late after a lifetime of rising early to go to work is a mirage. Something tells you that it’s time to arise and, when you resist that imperative, obsessive and comminuted thoughts follow, bizarre hypnagogic states in which you are partially lucid and partially dreaming, nightmares that have paralysis as their subject and that turn sleep into horror.
In a national park, towering monoliths rise like shark’s teeth into the sky. ("Sky" or "vault of heaven" in Latin: coelum.) These sheer-sided stone domes are sheathed in scaffolds made from steel girders and plexi-glass panels, transparent walkways and stairways enclosed in cubes of clear plastic that lean against the rock like vast siege-towers. The objective is to descend from the windswept heights through the hundred levels of the steel and plexi-glass tunnels to the parking lot where you have left your car. Unfortunately, the way downward is maddeningly complex and the intricacies of the steel and plastic tower sometimes require you to actually climb so as to reach a platform from which descent is possible. Many passageways in the tower are blocked by chains or metal fences, some of them permanent, others apparently temporary. It takes much effort to reach the bottom and, then, there is no straightforward exit – rather, the stairs descend underground into dimly lit galleries and shafts. It’s better to be lost in the bright sunlight and the heat radiating from the vast sheer rock walls than to venture into that underground labyrinth. And, so, I go upward, following ascending stairs along a precipitous route that leads to a small key-shaped opening onto a ledge encrusted with glittering mica that strikes down the face of the monolith. By this time, I am leading a not inconsiderable number of people, all of them desiring to climb down off the huge stone and reach their cars below. The ledge is very steep, angling down the cliff, and, although I don’t fear for myself, I am concerned that some of the more feeble following me will slip and fall to their deaths from this dizzying height. Nonetheless, I proceed down the sloping ledge, rounding an edge of the monolith where I see that, after this dangerous traverse, the path leads into another tower of steel girders and plexiglass bolted to the side of the precipice, descending into subterranean mazes or rising to the naked, wind-scoured top of the monolith. (Perhaps, I have rounded the monolith, girdled it on the ledge, and simply come upon the same stairwell structure in which I was earlier entrapped.) With a cold and growing sense of terror, I realize that there is simply no way out of the stairwell except at its apex atop the inhospitable granite tower. Furthermore, I recognize that the complex of the stone dome and tower is the coronavirus, a plague from which a multitude of paths seem to lead away but always return to the same place.
Then, I am at the Sales Lodge, a place where the Company holds promotional events. The walls of the Sales Lodge are paneled in grained, grey-brown wood veneer. A friend of mine who recently died is discovered leaning against the wood paneling with his eyes closed and an enigmatic smile on his lips. All around there is gaiety. I lean toward my friend and he whispers a secret to me that it would not be seemly to disclose. He addresses me by my last name. I am sufficiently lucid to recognize that I am dreaming and the part of me that is awake says: “Go to him again and learn his wisdom.” There is song and dance and people are smoking cigars and, at first, I can’t find the dead man in the crowd. But corpses don’t move and he is still in the place where I left him, nonchalantly leaning against the wood paneled wall. I approach but can’t think of anything to ask him.
My friend was a chemist and the names of strange compounds now occur to me. The visual imagery has faded into nothing and I am left with spelling problems, puzzles as to words and their meanings, obsessing over long, complicated names. The swarm of names, each occurring to me, posing etymological and orthographic problems, then, departing, words like flags or banners, one after another and, all of them, it seems, somehow synonymous with hydroxychloroquine.
11.
On the news, someone boasts about efforts to unseat statues of Confederate generals in Portland. Why would there be statues of Confederate generals in Oregon. It’s a case of mistaken identity, similar to the crowd of activists who ripped down the Norwegian flag at one of that nation’s consulates and burned the thing – the banner bears some slight resemblance to the Confederate battle flag.
12.
Ninety-six days before the election, there has been no campaign to speak of. Trump’s Oklahoma rally was poorly attended and resulted in a wave of infections, including one that killed Herman Cain, the former CEO of Godfathers Pizza and a candidate for presidency in 2016. The noisome infomercials into which political nominating conventions have devolved seem to be canceled or much curtailed. Biden releases commercials from a bunker somewhere. Presumably, the campaigns will develop into barrages of negative ads ascribing all species of criminality to adversaries, a media cannonade that will deafen but persuade no one. Everyone’s mind is already made-up. It seems unlikely that there will even be any kind of debate – how to schedule such a thing when all gatherings are presumed deadly. In any event, a debate between Trump and Biden would be nothing more than a braying contest between two asses.
In Minnesota, the “great State get-together” (that is, the State Fair) is a religious exercise. Minnesota prides itself as having the finest State Fair in the country and its enormous fair grounds in Falcon Heights are a fairyland of overhead monorails, minarets, vast concrete livestock barns coupled to small amphitheaters all under the frown of a vast brick stadium over which a Space Needle broods. Some of the concessions are built in concrete block and there are galleries made from stone in which to exhibit crafts and arts. The fair is dependent upon County fairs – each county sends its champion pig, goat, and angora rabbit, the handicraft of its champion knitters and weavers and pickle-makers, the best products of its champion Indian corn mosaic-makers and butter and cheese carvers and its politicians and law enforcement officers and its implement dealers and the manufacturers of mobile homes and ingenious plows and its honey-harvesters and woodworkers who contrive marvelous ships in bottles or miniature Taj Mahals or competing model domes of the State Capitol, the full-sized version visible from the Space Needle and the monorail cars overhead, also visible at the apex of the roller coaster or from the Ferris wheels in the Midway. With the county fairs all canceled, the State Fair has no network of tributaries to channel to it these local champions and best-of-show artisans, and, therefore, this year, there will be no Blue Ribbon pickles or jam, no Blue Ribbon sheep or steers, no Blue Ribbon corn-mosaics of Donald Trump or Governor Waltz, nothing of this sort and the vast fair grounds, acres upon acres of towers and exhibition halls will be deserted, barren until the snow falls and buries the whole place in cold and ice.
In Mower County, the fair grounds are ten blocks from my house and, when the festivities are underway, I can hear from my bedroom window (if it’s not too hot and the airconditioner isn’t running), the sound of music, engines revving in front of the grandstand, the tinkling calliope notes of the carnival, even voices hooting and hollering as the drunk kids come from the beer garden and stagger back over the sidewalks to their cars parked in the residential neighborhood. Next to the oval of the track where the stock car races take place, there is a huge cow, fifteen feet tall, at twilight an effigy that looks as if it were drawn from the pages of the Bible or some heathen epic – this is Buffy the Cow, a fiber-glass idol that stood once atop a local dairy that has now been bulldozed. There is a marquee in front of Buffy written with these words: Mower County Fair is CANCELLED due Covid. Stay Safe. See you next year at the FAIR!
13.
The virus doesn’t offer anything new. It is no longer variable but rather a constant. The reality of the contagion, which remains unreal in the sense that it is invisible, has seeped down into the core of things – it has become a hypostasis, a metaphysical reality that underlies everything and that can’t be displaced. It lurks. Grocery stores, church services, all places of commerce are surreal with people moving about in masks. What would have once been forbidden is now mandated.
Similarly, the protests about racism and police brutality are also now constant. The assumption, even among those inclined to be liberal like myself, is that a protest will rage for a day or two, make all its points and, then, politely withdraw into obscurity. But that’s not how these protests operate: in some places like Portland, they are more or less perpetual and a kind of license exists there to throw rocks and set fires. In other places, the protests are like a fire that has been only scarcely eradicated – embers exist and the protests flare up and, with them, inevitably, some level of rioting or violence. Even those who admired or supported the protests from a discrete distance, assumed that once the point was made, the protests would end – but this is different, the point can’t be made because it would require dismantling of police authority and this is an utopian project that will never succeed and, so, the protests just continue and continue like the plague to which they metaphorically refer: covid lurks everywhere, hidden but always potentially emergent – racism lurks everywhere, usually hidden but always potentially emergent. The world “emergent” is significant – there is an exhausting sense of a permanent state of emergency.
14.
Heat and humidity: pillars of cloud like the smoke from immense explosions on the horizon. The roads are all ripped up in Austin, plowed down to raw clay in which fragments of the trees chopped apart on the boulevards are embedded. If you kick at the wood, you can displace it, creating ghost indentations in the dirt. Going abroad in this scalding wet heat is like waking in clouds of hot urine.
15.
Here is the context for the latest outrage: government subsidies for those unemployed due to the Covid virus have run their course. In most States, unemployment benefits are also exhausted. This means that many people are without income and have no way to pay bills, most particularly rent. Accordingly, the media, always inclined to focus on the most gloomy scenario, predicts a wave of evictions. Evictions and a collapsing consumer economy also are factors that serve the media agenda supporting Joe Biden for president as against Donald Trump. Thus, the media emphasizes factors prophetic of economic catastrophe and earnestly urges that someone take action to restore income to the unemployed (they were being paid at a flat rate of $600 a week) and establish a moratorium on evictions, student loan debt repayment and the like. Predictably, the two parties both over-reach in their negotiations. Republicans point out that the $600 dollars a week is greater than the sum that many people can earn by the sweat of their brows, that is, by full employment. If lost wage replacement continues at $600 a week, no incentive exists for these people to return to work. So the Republicans demand that the wage replacement benefits be radically cut – perhaps to $200 weekly. The Democrats, for their part, want to continue the $600 a week package and, further, demand that a consumer stimulus check be written on the Federal government paying everyone $1200 as a one time stipend. The Republican package costs one trillion dollars; the Democratic package has a 3 trillion dollar price tag. There is an obvious compromise figure, but the partisan negotiators for the two sides can’t reach it. Both parties dig in, cite principle, and refuse to compromise.
Trump’s advisors grasp the opportunity posed by this impasse. They urge Trump to simply cut the Gordian knot by executive order, thereby bypassing the stalemate in Congress. Of course, this action probably violates separation of powers – it’s an unlawful usurpation of legislative authority. But Trump has done this sort of thing before – using executive order, for instance, to divert money for his border wall. He’s too ignorant to even grasp that there are limitations on his power. But his advisors urge him to issue executive orders restoring the $600 stipend, precluding evictions, and granting other relief. These measures are undoubtedly illegal but who is going to sue to enjoin them? if Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic-controlled house act to prohibit these orders, then, they will bear the responsibility of taking bread from the mouths of the starving poor. The Republicans would have no incentive to take any action either. And so Trump could save the day with a stroke of his pen and be praised as the hero who opened the Federal treasury to the worthy poor.
Trump schedules a press conference for early evening, after his golf match at the Bedminster (New Jersey) course that he owns. The prime-time media on CNN and MSNBC are palpably alarmed. Biden is leading in the polls by a tidy sum of 7 to 10 percentage points in most places. But Biden is a terrible candidate, dimwitted, loquacious but prone to gaffes, and, generally, feckless. He’s been waiting out the Covid virus in his basement in Delaware, not even campaigning, and simply winning (up to this point) because he isn’t a dangerous monster like Trump. But Trump’s executive orders, providing precisely the relief that the mainstream media demands from Congress represent a serious threat to Biden’s almost non-existent campaign.
In advance of the press conference, Erin Burnett, the perpetually worried anti-Trump anchor at CNN, pitches in for Biden declaring, by way of a non sequitur, that the faithful assembled at Bedminster aren’t wearing masks. She demands that the camera turn away from the podium where Trump has not yet appeared to show the group of golfers gathered together in the ballroom of the Club House. But when the camera is pivoted to show those golfers, they are all wearing masks. “Someone must have handed them masks just now,” Erin Burnett says. “Just two minutes ago none of them were wearing masks.” But now every one of them is wearing a pale blue surgical mask. Gloria Borger, a rabid anti-Trump news reporter, helpfully says in a bitchy tone: “Well, they may be wearing masks but they’re not social distancing.”
Erin Burnett, then, convenes a panel. She has Gloria Borger and Owen Goulsbee, an Obama economic advisor on screen, together with some minor Trump campaign official. Borger and Goulsbee have been adamantly demanding that Congress act to restore the $600 stipend, pay out stimulus checks, and enact a rent moratorium (or, at least, an eviction ban). Now, they seem stymied. Goulsbee has a long face and his sour puss looks like he’s about to start crying. Borger is blinking so fast that you can barely see her eyes behind those shutters of flapping eyelids. Erin Burnett is also blinking and overtly enraged. They understand the gravity of the moment – Trump is about to sign an Executive Order literally paying voters from the Federal fisc while at the same time daring Nancy Pelosi to sue to take the money away from their constituents. The Trump man smiles like a Cheshire cat and gloats: “It’s a bold move, but the President knows that people are hurting and he must take action.” Both Erin Burnett and Gloria Borger respond with childish pique, essentially repeating the canard that Trump somehow caused the Covid virus and, therefore, is responsible for the misery that he is now about to remedy. Erin Burnett cites the death figures for the day and the total of dead Americans due to the virus. Goulsbee’s lips move but he doesn’t seem to be saying anything. The Trump supporter grins some more and talks about Trump’s heroic boldness. Of course, the tired Uncle Joe Biden is MIA.
Trump starts his press conference, blows most of his lines, and somehow manages to attenuate what should be a clear victory with a digressive and rambling speech. He doesn’t directly say that he is going to pay the voters significant amounts of money, although this is implied. Then, he taunts the media by calling Covid the “Chinese virus.” A day before there was a enormous explosion in Beirut that has killed about 200 people and maimed 5000. The pictures of the blast and its aftermath are astounding and apocalyptic. Of course, this showy spectacle has enthralled Trump who always prefers images over the dull logos and he slips off point announcing a massive aid package to Lebanon. CNN couldn’t care less about Lebanon and isn’t willing to devote even two minutes to that story if this impairs screen-time that could be used to denounce Trump. So CNN cuts away from the press conference at the golf course. Now, the Trump supporter has mysteriously vanished and the panel consists of just Trump-haters, Goulsbee and Gloria Borger. They sound like third-graders: he can’t do this, he simply can’t do this – they repeat although what he is doing is exactly what they previously demanded on behalf of the suffering citizens of the United States.
If the situation weren’t so grim, and if Trump’s violation of the separation of powers wasn’t so disturbing and dangerous, the media response would be hilarious.
16.
Racial activists assert that now “the narratives are changing.” “Changing narratives,” in this context, is supposed to be a good thing. Presumably, the stories of heroic Black people will now be granted priority in the historical narratives promoted by educators and media. As far as I can see, the change in narratives is the replacement of one pack of lies with another. And, the assertion that our “narratives are changing,” of course, is a narrative itself.
17.
Along the alley behind my house, there is a white picket fence and a trellis that is built as a bower. The trellis supports green vines adorned with small white trumpet-shaped flowers and wraps around a bench in that arbor. It’s a pretty place, secret it seems, and, often, when I walk my dog past that bower in warm weather, I can hear voices speaking softly from within that arch of green leaf and white flower. An old married couple live in the house with their middle-aged mentally retarded daughter.
A week ago, a great horizontal limb on the oak tree in front of the house tore free and fell on the sidewalk. This was odd, I thought, because there had been no violent thunderstorm, no pelting rain nor wind. The broad bough, over-freighted with branch and twig and leaf, simply became too heavy to sustain itself and so split away from the broad trunk, leaving a great white rift in the tree, a pale wound that exposed the cream-white wood under the bark, unseamed along the side of the tree. The big bough had fallen onto the sidewalk and formed a soft, green hedge of leaves and branches the length of a car and broader than the paved way. As I walked my dog, I skirted the fallen branch, departing from the sidewalk and walking over the lawn near the home’s front door. The old lady stepped out on her front stoop. She stared at the huge limb of the tree now partly gouged into her lawn.
“It must have just happened,” the lady said to me. “It was okay an hour ago.”
“These kinds of happen,” I said.
She said: “I will have to call the lawn service.”
With my dog on her leash, we rounded the big branch and, then, turned up the sidewalk past the little garage built against the old lady’s house and the alley that led past the flowering bower.
The fallen branch was hauled away before the end of the day, a few ruts left in the grass and a fan-shaped spray of white sawdust where the chain-saws had dismembered the big bough. I was surprised at how rapidly the tree limb was cleared from where it had fallen.
Two days ago, I walked down the alley, passing the picket fence and the hidden bench in the arbor. Beyond the white fence and a bank of hydrangeas, I saw some people unfamiliar to me standing in the backyard. When I turned the corner to walk along the side of the property, I met a long black station-wagon marked with the words Rochester Cremation Service. A well-dressed woman, slim as a post, was directing the station-wagon as it backed into the little garage. The woman had a silvery impervious-looking face. Some other unfamiliar cars were drawn up along curbside.
Across 4th Street, a young woman wearing what seemed to be pajamas was standing on the street corner, smoking a cigarette and watching the hearse back toward the garage. I suppose that she wanted to see the body taken from the house. I walked a block and looked back myself, also, for some reason, interested to see the body removed from the place and put into the back of the long black car. The morning was cool and the dog trotted behind me and I was ashamed of myself for wanting to see some sign of the dead body and, so, I hastened to the next corner and turned it, thus avoiding the temptation of looking over my shoulder.
I walked the dog ten blocks and, then, returned to the sidewalk where the tree limb had fallen. The white gash in the bark was as tall as a man, a silhouette ripped into the side of the tree.
The next day, I took my dog for a walk around 4:00 pm. Some people that I didn’t know were carrying totes from the house where the tree had broken to their cars parked along the boulevard. I suppose these were keepsakes associated with the person who died. Two houses away, a couple of skinhead boys were shooting hoops. My dog barked at a caramel-colored cat hiding under a lilac bush.
18.
You see them everywhere on front yards, now competing with election signs that have also become ubiquitous. These are signs with white letters printed on blue and green backgrounds: May you be calm and May you be happy. These are quarantine signs – admonitions from people sheltering at home to others. The quarantine signs seem to me vaguely offensive, hectoring and intrusive. It’s a little like a distant acquaintance saying that he will pray for you.
19.
The Democratic National Convention is unwatchable. Various luminaries appear in their basements speaking to the camera. During the last forty years, political conventions have been infomercials – indeed, they were canned and packaged infomercials even before the name of this sort of production existed. But they weren’t airless and, since the speeches were shot in real time, they could fail or produce ghastly effects. And journalists could always roam the crowd and interview various kinds of political grotesques, often tricked-out in red, white, and blue paraphernalia. Orations were intercut with reaction shots and the whole apparatus of party politics might occasionally yield an inadvertent moment of truth.
There’s no such possibility with the DNC this year. Everything is contrived and there’s no hint of spontaneity. In some sequences, an array of screens faces Joe Biden sitting alone on a stool at a table – he looks like a criminal mastermind interviewing his henchmen in a third-rate James Bond movie.
During a protest over the killing of George Floyd, demonstrators came close to the White House and, even, set a building on fire a few blocks away. As everyone knows President Trump was briefly evacuated to the Bunker under the White House residence. (Trump resented the implication that he had fled into a bunker, a problematic notion that might lead some to question his courage – being historically illiterate, he doesn’t grasp other connotations relating to the great leader holed-up like a rat in a besieged bunker.) The next day, as everyone also knows, Trump staged an assault on protesters in a nearby park so that he could march to the front of a vandalized church and wave a Bible in the air. (He didn’t exactly hold the Bible upside down but it was equally obvious that he had no idea how to hold a book in his hands – even though he has ostensibly written several – and he tweaked the volume between his fingers as if it were a particularly noxious piece of garbage.) Trump’s actions in Lafayette Park were self-evidently a reaction to the President’s perception that the evacuation to the bunker shortly before was a sign of weakness.
In any event, the speeches delivered during the DNC were all filmed in bunkers or the civilian equivalent, that is, remodeled laundry rooms in the speaker’s basement. This gave the proceedings a particularly airless, stagnant, and claustrophobic dimension. Adding stale rhetoric to grim basement or closet environs created a peculiar sense of paralysis; the fury of the speakers was made impotent by the fact that they were all crouching underground, skulking in their cellars. This was particularly the case with Michelle Obama’s speech – she seemed to be speaking in a large subterranean basement rec room, walls whitewashed and what looked like steel utility shelves in the background on which several forlorn art projects were visible. It’s hard to mount a crusade from a windowless crypt.
20.
Predictably enough, the speakers said that Donald Trump was not merely an aider and abettor of the Covid virus, but the virus itself. Andrew Cuomo said that Trump was the virus of divisiveness that has destroyed American politics, a spectacularly divisive metaphor itself, but, then, what the hell!
The next morning, the coverage on CNN was predictably fawning: Alison Camerata asked one political hack this question: “Tell us why Michele Obama’s speech was so effective?”
21.
Trump has the endorsement of the New York City police union. He flies to Minnesota during the third week of August, dropping out of the sky at the Minneapolis airport to stand next to Air Force One and denounce the Democratic officials in the State for allowing Minneapolis to burn during the George Floyd riots. The blue steel and glass skyline of Minneapolis rises over the concrete prairies of the airport and the humble suburbs as an implicit rebuke to his hyperbole. Then, Trump jets to Mankato. I had no idea that there was an airport near that City. He’s late. A crowd of people stand in the sun looking across the grass to a still and empty runway. Presumably, he will give the same speech that he presented in Minneapolis. The people in the crowd look like retired cops, high school wrestling coaches, insurance salesman, and affable cement and dry-walling contractors. There are probably some farmers mixed in among these people, although Trump’s agricultural policies have been, more or less, disastrous to that sector of the economy. No one is “social distancing” and no one wears masks.
22.
August 18, 2020: 170,000 deaths from Covid. Schools that opened a week before are shutting down again with clusters of infections. The Democrats and Republicans couldn’t reach a compromise on fiscal relief to people who remain unemployed and are now in default on their rent. Of course, no one is speaking about this failure to legislate at the DNC.
23.
It’s the same dream, but with variations: I am strolling along the sidewalk and, then, enter a walkway that descends to a series of meeting halls, cafeterias and rehearsal rooms, and small underground temples and chapels. Below ground, the place is a subterranean, if well-lit, maze consisting of corridors linking different types of religious facilities. The first time I entered this maze, the place was between two ostentatious churches on Summit Avenue in St. Paul except that the avenue (running east-west in real life) had been replaced by a north-south street of the same well-groomed and high caste appearance. My first encounter with this place was primarily architectural – the more deeply I penetrated the space, the more complex and beautifully adorned the chapels through which I passed, small dimly lit niches full of relics and ornate marble carved into forms like soft-serve ice-cream. By contrast, a later exploration of this place is more about the worshipers. I am in St. Peter, a small city near Mankato, where I enter a church that is linked to several other sanctuaries by underground corridors. At first, I am in a kind of gymnasium with galleries overlooking the floor of what appears to be basketball courts. We are gathered to sing hymns and I am supposed to lead the worship, although I doubt whether I am good enough hymn-singer for this purpose. I decide to lead the congregation in a rousing rendition of “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” except I can’t recall the words to the hymn and the hymnals available to me don’t seem to include that song. I wonder if I can get a xeroxed copy of the words to “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” – probably not. I’m afraid that I will disappoint my mother who wants to see me successfully leading the singing in this gymnasium. Then, I am in the dessert hall, an L-shaped space where people sit in morose, sepulchral silence at tables – it’s like a funeral lunch without the jollity. I’m looking for my mother. What kind of grim place is this in which people sit at tables on which there are wonderful-looking pastries and simply stare at them without talking or moving a muscle? In another subterranean hallway, I come to a big space where there are steps leading up to doors on a higher level. One of the steps leads to the so-called “Fun Convent,” a notion that puzzles me. The steps are long and seem to be carpeted. Then, I leave a below-ground chapel that is somewhat ornate and find that there is a railroad that runs in a circle between religious institutions. In the railroad car, I meet two young men, both of them Catholics. I’m still looking for my pious mother. The young men tell me that they are coelibate – a spelling of the word “celibate’ that I imagine to be German. (In fact, the German word for “celibate” is enthaltsam – that is, “abstinent” or “holding back”; coelibate is some combination of “sky” and -bate.) They take tiny pills that dissolve on their tongues to maintain their coelibacy – if that is the word. I get off at a station next to a church. I realize that I have taken the wrong train and will have to retrace my path back to find my mother. Of course, there is a panorama of mountain peaks and cliffs, some of them wrapped in bands of snow, hovering over the city of St. Peter. The high, jagged peaks were always there, I just didn’t see them before. They look like towers and turrets. I’ll have to take the train back some indeterminate distance to find my mother who has been left behind. It’s both disappointing and confusing.
24.
Mike Lindahl, the owner of “My Pillow”, appears on CNN. Anderson Cooper interviews him. The interview doesn’t go well. Lindahl is wearing a cross around his neck, always a bad sign in my experience – men who wear crosses are invariably con-men; this is even more likely if they are bona fide members of the clergy. Lindahl is an appealing figure; he talks like a professional wrestler, a deep voice that is all bluster and threat, although, in fact, he’s probably harmless. The intonations in his voice remand me to my childhood – the Crusher and Baron Ratschke and other villainous wrestlers who used to appear at the old Calhoun Beach Club, all of them invariably losing to the noble, “scientific wrestler” Vern Gagne. Lindahl is an avuncular grifter, a man who claims to have invented a pillow that is specially designed to insure peaceful and salubrious sleep. An aggressive advertiser, Lindahl marketed his revivifying pillows on cable news particularly CNN, hawking the product himself and assuring purchasers that his wonderful pillows are made in the United States of America – in fact, in Chaska, Minnesota. Lindahl’s factory is somewhere in the vicinity of the late Prince’s studio qua home. Lindahl made a fortune selling his pillows – everyone has, at least, one and, of course, realizes that the best pillow in the world is still just a pillow and not an anodyne to all that ails us. (We have several and I can’ distinguish them from our other pillows.) In accord with his righteous tough-guy stance – he also sounds a bit like Jesse Ventura, who was a professional wrestler as well – Lindholm is a mega-supporter of Donald Trump. Fortunately, Lindahl’s ambitions don’t run toward public office or the man would be our ambassador to Germany or Kazakhstan or New Guinea.
Lindahl is fighting with Anderson Cooper. The interview is off the tracks and the two men are speaking (or rather shouting) simultaneously and, so, it’s impossible to understand what they are arguing about. In general terms, I understand that Lindahl has concluded that oleander, a herbal supplement is a cure for Covid-19. Trump has obligingly endorsed oleander as well as a remedy against the virus. Of course, the entire transaction stinks to high heaven. Lindahl is apparently somehow involved financially with producing the oleander remedy. If Donald Trump spoke publicly in favor of penicillin or aspirin, Anderson Cooper would rant that the president knows no science and should keep his mouth shut about these highly suspect therapies and, in this case, there is no FDA approval for oleander as a cure for covid, no known human trials, no scientific studies, nothing other than Lindahl’s anecdotal assertion that he takes the drug and it has cured him. Therefore, it’s pretty clear that Lindahl is a quack offering a quack remedy and, somehow, stands to profit from this remedy, although this aspect of the interview is confounded by all of the sound and fury. Lindahl won’t be deterred and he just keeps repeating that there is a secret FDA approval pending, that this will be issued in a few weeks publicly, and that, he knows, Anderson Cooper will call him up after the show and ask for a bottle of the stuff “just in case it works.” This enrages Cooper and he loses all equanimity calling Lindahl a “snake oil salesman.” Lindahl is probably too dense to understand what this means and, indeed, like makes a memo to self to find out more about “snake oil.” Lindahl acts hurt and says he’s not calling Anderson Cooper any names and, then, proceeds to a further encomium to Donald Trump that just increases the interviewer’s indignation.
Anderson Cooper is so dead-set on humiliating Lindahl that he lets the segment run for almost 15 minutes giving the quack advertising that he could never afford otherwise for his herbal supplement. After failing to force any concessions from Lindahl, and merely enhancing the crook’s credibility, Anderson Cooper, then, asks a doctor named Deutsch to respond to the guest’s assertions. Deutsch is an Emergency Room physician and, truth to tell, knows nothing about the subject either – he’s just as ignorant as Lindahl; Deutsch’s claim to fame is that he can attest to poor bastards who injected themselves with bleach upon Trump’s musings that chlorox, taken internally, might have some efficacy against the virus. Deutsch is handsome; he has the rugged good looks of a TV doctor, but he’s an idiot also. Deutsch says this: “he (Lindahl) is not a scientist and so he can’t state opinions about science. It’s just like me – I’m not an expert in politics and so I can’t state opinions on political subjects.” There are so many things wrong with this remark that it would be tedious to unpack them all. Suffice it to say that if people who aren’t professional politicians aren’t entitled to opinions on politics than I wonder why we are allowed to vote in the first place.
After the shill and doctor are dismissed, Anderson Cooper, who seems to be sweating and dismayed, goes to a commercial. On the commercial, a used-up actor named Tom Selleck appears. (Selleck played a private investigator on TV about twenty years ago.) Selleck looks like the old Marlboro man; he’s also ruggedly handsome although now long in the tooth. Selleck says: “I think you know this isn’t my first rodeo.” Then, he proceeds to extol the virtues of “reverse mortgages” for the elderly – “I want you to know that this isn’t some scheme to get your house.”
By saying that a reverse mortgage isn’t a predatory scheme to defraud old people out of their homes, Selleck, of course, has affirmed exactly what a reverse mortgage is, that is, a scheme to cheat the hapless elderly out of their houses. And what does a millionaire TV star know about reverse mortgages or the plight of the impoverished elderly or anything else other than certain tricks to use before the camera to make yourself look more handsome or more competent than you really are? In comparison with Tom Selleck and his pitch for reverse mortgages, Mike Lindahl’s advocacy of oleander herbal supplements (oleandrin) as a palliative to the Covid virus seems pretty benign.
Everything on TV is a lie or a damned lie.
25.
Obama appears at the DNC’s misconceived convention. He is in an eerie white void with some 18th century handwriting on the wall, apparently somehow entrapped inside the Constitution. Obama’s speech is inspiring and “presidential”. I don’t have any desire to watch this stuff, but one minute was enough to hook me – Obama is eloquent and speaks with sincerity avoiding trashy hyperbole, in other words, the polar opposite to Donald Trump’s deranged harangues.
Obama, in his cream-colored constitutional bubble that is nowhere and everywhere, looks haggard. He’s unnaturally slender and his ears have become even more Kafkaesque with the passing years. All politicians are monsters of egotism and Obama is no exception. But one wonders if he doesn’t lose sleep at night over the concept that he is responsible – in some indistinct, and scarcely articulable way -- for, at least, some of what ails us.
Kamala Harris’ speech is a bridge too far for me. She has a grating voice and the intonations of a privileged Valley Girl. And, she’s a cop or something very similar and I have a lifelong suspicion of the police. She speaks from within a sepulchral tent in which there is one delegate per state sitting under poles naming the places that they represent. The camera operator thinks its stylish to shoot her sermon from several different angles – this just creates the impression that she is too clueless to know where the camera is located and speaking into an empty void.
26.
I can’t bring myself to watch more than a couple minutes of the DNC coverage at a time. The pandering is distasteful and dull as well. But, on the final night, when the audience has presumably declined to nearly no one at all, the thing seems to go “off the rails” entirely. Maybe, someone with the fortitude (or masochism) to watch the whole affair gavel-to-gavel might have a different impression. But such an ideal viewer would have to be a virulent partisan or fool (and, probably, both simultaneously) and the testimony of that viewer would be highly suspect.
Already, there has been an instance of misunderstanding that is amusing since it demonstrates how those designing this convention are misled by past practice – probably, because they have little or no understanding of those past practices or their ceremonial function. Alexandra Ocasio Cortez, the rising socialist firebrand in the Democratic Party, nominates Bernie Sanders as president. This is a vestige of an old and honorable practice – a candidate who has lost the nomination for all practical purposes but, fought the good fight, has his name put into contention for the presidency. The defeated candidate, then, makes a graceful speech throwing his support to his successful adversary. This display is supposed to demonstrate, and enforce, party unity. But, here, NBC apparently doesn’t grasp the meaning of the gesture and reports that AOC, an unruly renegade, has inexplicably thrown her support to Bernie Sanders at the very convention in which Joe Biden is to be nominated. This misconstrues AOC’s nomination and engenders a few moments of actual suspense until the meaning of her nomination can be explicated – and she fires off some fiery tweets, as is her wont, on the subject. (One hopes that the elderly Joe Biden wasn’t confused; it would have been most unseemly for him to suffer a heart attack or, at the least, atrial fibulation over AOC’s ceremonial gesture.)
But at the big climax of the Democratic Convention, the acceptance speech by candidate Biden, there is a sequence of bizarre faux pas. First, the comedian Julia Louis-Dreyfus takes the virtual podium – everything, of course, is staged in an empty studio somewhere in cyber-space. The comely actress is best-known as Elaine on the Seinfeld show, but, more recently celebrated, for her performance as a conniving and vicious politician on the foul-mouthed HBO show Veep. Louis-Dreyfus is an excellent actor and has won many awards, but she specializes in playing characters who are without moral compass, aimlessly hedonistic, and casually treacherous. She is an odd choice to introduce the vapid and cluelessly naive Joe Biden – someone whose main claim to virtue is that he is too stupid to be wicked. Playing the role of Selena Meyer in Veep, Dreyfus’ character had an abortion but, then, imputed the procedure to her long-suffering female aide (later, I recall, that she actually forced the aide to have an abortion); in the TV show, she was casually promiscuous, choosing for her boyfriend, in several episodes, an Arab potentate, a bit like the fellow who had Jamal Kashoggi dismembered. At the conclusion of the show, she nonchalantly has a political rival assassinated. Of course, these are the acts of a TV politician and, indeed, one reputedly modeled off Donald Trump (although the show’s first couple seasons were filmed before Trump assumed the presidency). I suppose there is N alternative universe in which it somehow makes sense to have Julia Louis-Dreyfus introduce uncle Joe, someone too square to have seen any episodes of Veep in any event and, of course, political conventions are the very definition of an alternate universe – but I can’t make head nor tail of the decision to trot out the Tv star to introduce Biden.
But, fairly stated, Julia Louis-Dreyfus doesn’t actually introduce Joe Biden at all. In the twisted logic of this Convention, she actually introduces the introducers – that is, Joe Biden’s two surviving children. Both of these folks are a little long in the tooth, pushing fifty I would suppose, and still not fully independent of the Old Man. Furthermore, Hunter Biden is famously corrupt – somehow, he finagled a position on the Board of Directors of a Ukrainian Power Company and was paid a vast sum for doing... doing something... but what? The explanation for this curious affiliation, of course, lies in the fact that Hunter Biden’s father was the VP for the United States – no other possible explanation exists. So Hunter Biden, whose stewardship on the board of the Ukrainian corporation, will undoubtedly lead to Joe Biden’s tit-for-tat impeachment about two years into his presidency (if he is still alive), is summoned out-of-the-proverbial woodwork to introduce his elderly father as “the best Dad a boy could ever have.” But Hunter Biden is nearly fifty with glittering, deranged eyes and, one would think that prudence would have encouraged the Democrats to keep this grifter out of sight. But Hunter Biden, a specter haunting his father’s candidacy, has to speak to introduce yet another introducer, this time a ghost – the actual introduction being entrusted to Beau Biden, who is a dead man. Beau Biden, Joe’s good son (as opposed to rapacious Hunter), would be the ideally charismatic figure to introduce the Old Man except that he is dead. But Beau introduced his pa earlier at other conventions and, so, by the magic of television, the dear departed can be revived to seem to introduce Joe Biden and his 2020 acceptance speech. This bizarre sequence of introductions seems to be contrived for one purpose only – to remind the audience that Joe Biden, who has never taken a principled stand on anything, has been running for presidency for, at least, 33 years, that is, for most of the lives of the people expected to vote for him. And, it goes without saying, that these 33 years of campaigning have all been in service of lost causes – the electorate, if confronted with Joe Biden as a candidate, has uniformly rejected him.
I don’t know who thought up this series of craven and ill-advised introductions. Joe Biden is a man who supported segregation until he didn’t, tormented Anita Hill when she accused Clarence Thompson of sexual misconduct, and supported a series of foreign wars until he didn’t as well. He has no principles to speak of. And, one wonders if the quality of his advisors is shown by the horrible series of misjudgments on display at the Convention that has nominated him.
(As to Joe’s acceptance speech, I can’t comment – I have almost fifty episodes of Bojack Horseman to watch and so I switched over to that enterprise as soon as he began to speak.)
Of course, Trump vows that his Convention will be more spirited than the ghostly and funereal virtual spectacle presented by the Democrats. No doubt, this will be true. We know that he has already enlisted the couple brandishing machine guns at Black Lives Matter protesters in St. Louis to support his cause. The Republican party at this moment in its history is the party of lynching – not the folks who throw the noose around the neck of the Black man about to be murdered, but the cowardly mob cheering on the assassins. I assume that Trump will recruit Kid Rock and Kanye West and have them compete on stage to see who can produce the largest bowel movement. Of course, everyone will be watching in hypnotized horror.
27.
So almost 250 years after Revolutionary War, the United States of America, in the midst of a deadly pandemic and daily race riots, has come to this crux: you can vote for a cowardly fool or a dangerous psychopathic criminal.
I guess I’ll opt for the cowardly fool, but the choice is disheartening.
August 21, 2020
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