I spent Friday driving down to Iowa, which is a strange thing to do in the middle of a lockdown but such is life.
Back on the 11th of March I asked on my Facebook feed, “Why does today feel like the ‘before’ photo in some future textbook?” and I have to say that I probably should have bought a lottery ticket as well because I pretty much nailed that one. I’ve felt that before, that odd feeling like you’ve just tripped over something and your lower body knows what’s coming but your head hasn’t quite figured it out yet. There has been a very large division this year between Before and After, and all of the plans and concerns of Before can seem rather remote at times.
I picked up Oliver from college in early March, when his spring break started. We packed up a few things to get him through the next week or so before he returned to classes and headed back home.
And then the bottom fell out of the world.
On a very local level, that meant that Oliver’s classes were first postponed and then shifted online, and after a while the college asked us to come back (on a staggered basis to encourage social distancing) to collect all of the stuff that we had left in his dorm room.
It’s not a bad drive, really. A bit less crowded than usual but probably not as much less as it ought to be. And pretty socially distant from the outside world, sitting in the car as we were. We made it there without any real issues and drove up to the front of the dorm. His roommate was there as well, and the two of them set to packing things up while the parents stood outside by their cars a healthy distance apart from each other and passed the time conversing in a rather louder tone of voice than would have been the case two months ago.
We passed a lot of time. Occasionally it snowed.
I’ve seen Oliver’s dorm room. It’s about the size of my parents’ old dining room and significantly smaller than my living room now and I have NO IDEA how there could possibly be that much stuff in there. Seriously. It’s like the room unfolded into a different dimension – one full of closets and storage units and for all I know an entire mall. I helped him move in back in August – a different room, granted, just down the hall, but the same basic size after all – and watching things come out by the dolly-load, one after the other, was an exercise in physics that far surpassed my meagre understanding of spatial dynamics.
Of course, I am an expert in getting a lot of stuff into a small space – I once packed my entire dorm room into a ’79 Mercury, including the stereo speakers back when speakers were things that the guys who built Stonehenge would have envied rather than things you dangled from wires and could stuff in your pocket, and I just about had room to squeeze into the driver's seat and head home. So I suppose it should not have been surprising.
Eventually it all got packed away and off we went.
We hit the same place for dinner that we stopped at back in March – drive-through only now, which we ate in the car in the parking lot – and we stocked up on sauces since who knows when we’ll be back that way again. You find yourself thinking that these days.
We made it back home safe and sound – a bit later than I thought it would be, but with surprisingly little fuss. It’s probably the last real journey we’re going to make for a while unless you count trips to the grocery store or to feed the chickens.
Things change. That’s how the universe is built.
Cherish the Befores, even through the Afters, and perhaps we’ll get to a better After That soon.
Tuesday, April 21, 2020
Saturday, April 18, 2020
A Journal of the Plague Year, Part the Eighteenth - The Madman Ranting on the Street Corner
Well, we have reached the part of der Sturmtrumper’s presidency where the deranged madman starts shouting at everyone and everything in a desperate attempt to deflect attention from his crimes. This is often the best part of a work of fiction. In the real world, not so much.
It’s not going to get any better.
In January and February, while American intelligence was screaming about the onrushing plague and Actual Leaders in other countries were working hard to prepare their nations to survive the onrushing crisis, der Sturmtrumper instead spent his time dodging and weaving, calling COVID19 a “Democratic hoax,” and generally pissing away the vital time this country needed to get ready for the deadliest pandemic in a century in the fond hopes that he could gaslight it just like he did with his well-deserved impeachment and come out the other side with his base still slavishly devoted to him.
It didn’t work, strangely enough. Turns out you can’t gaslight a virus. Who knew?
The plague is here, it has killed more than 30,000 Americans as I write this, and der Sturmtrumper has done everything in his power to rile up the stupid so they’ll do precisely what is necessary to keep the body count rising.
Der Sturmtrumper and his supporters have blood on their hands.
Oh, there was nothing they could have done to keep it out of the US. It was coming here no matter what they did. And people would have died regardless. This much is true.
But their callous and corrupt response to the situation is entirely on them. Thousands of Americans have already died who might otherwise have lived if we had elected an actual human being to lead the country in 2016 instead of a sociopathic grifter incapable of any normal emotion or rational thought. None of this would have happened if Hillary had won, or Bernie, or indeed ANY of the hundred or so Republican candidates who were in the race besides the guy who did win. It's not a partisan issue, really. If literally anyone else had won in 2016 this country would be safer, more prosperous, and less of a morgue. It is Trump and his minions who have made this crisis immeasurably worse through their deliberate cruelty and blistering incompetence. Thousands are dead who did not have to die and thousands more will die for as long as der Sturmtrumper continues to focus on his grasp on power instead of actually leading the nation through a crisis and for as long as his supporters see no problem with this.
Think: has Donald Trump ever once in 2020 offered any words of sympathy for the dead or their families? Ever? Once?
That’s a basic requirement of leadership, by the way, to empathize and sympathize with those you lead.
The answer is no, by the way. Not once. Not ever. Instead he has continued to call people names, deflect attention, deny responsibility, and generally behave in ways that would embarrass a sleep-deprived toddler and are destructively unacceptable from someone who is supposed to be an adult and the leader of one of the most powerful nations on earth.
Has he done anything constructive about this plague?
Hardly. Pretty much everything he’s done, in fact, has been designed to make things worse. At that level he’s achieved his goals, I suppose.
Has he worked tirelessly to make sure that the only person who benefits from this is himself, even at the cost of your blood?
Obviously.
In the grand tradition of would-be tyrants throughout history, rather than work for the good of the people he governs he has instead seized the moment to destroy any restraints on his power and has actively worked to ensure the deaths of countless more people.
He has declared he won’t fund the World Health Organization, the international body that is working to keep this from becoming a second Spanish Flu – you know, the plague that killed more people than all of World War I? That one?
He has threatened Congress with adjournment so he can shove more unqualified nominees into office without check and further destabilize the United States – crippling our response, paralyzing our actions, lining his pockets. I’m not saying he’s a foreign agent out to destroy this nation. I’m just saying that if he were one I don’t know what he’d do differently from what he has already done.
He has vowed to destroy the Post Office – even to the point of vetoing critical relief legislation if Congress dares to fund one of the few government bodies explicitly mentioned in the Constitution itself. In an era of pandemic where package deliveries are critical, of course he plans to destroy the Post Office. We can’t have people voting by mail now, can we? Could lead to free and fair elections and that’s just not acceptable to der Sturmtrumper or his supporters.
He has called on his supporters to undermine basic health and safety rules – an irresponsible and politically motivated assault on the safety of the United States that would be shocking if it came from a responsible leader but which is simply par for the course for this sociopath. And his supporters have responded in kind, because apparently they’re happy to die for his re-election prospects. Honestly, if they wish to auto-Darwinate that's on them but they need to do so in a way that doesn't threaten the rest of us.
He is consolidating power and will likely have to be removed from office by force after he loses in November, if he bothers to have elections at all. If you have ever wondered how Fascism came to power in Germany nearly a century ago, if you have ever wondered what you would do if you found yourself in that time and place, now you know. It’s happening here now, and you’re doing it now.
So long as Donald Trump and his supporters hold power the survival of the American republic is in doubt, both individually and collectively.
The choice is yours, America.
Think fast, because you don’t have much time left to decide.
It’s not going to get any better.
In January and February, while American intelligence was screaming about the onrushing plague and Actual Leaders in other countries were working hard to prepare their nations to survive the onrushing crisis, der Sturmtrumper instead spent his time dodging and weaving, calling COVID19 a “Democratic hoax,” and generally pissing away the vital time this country needed to get ready for the deadliest pandemic in a century in the fond hopes that he could gaslight it just like he did with his well-deserved impeachment and come out the other side with his base still slavishly devoted to him.
It didn’t work, strangely enough. Turns out you can’t gaslight a virus. Who knew?
The plague is here, it has killed more than 30,000 Americans as I write this, and der Sturmtrumper has done everything in his power to rile up the stupid so they’ll do precisely what is necessary to keep the body count rising.
Der Sturmtrumper and his supporters have blood on their hands.
Oh, there was nothing they could have done to keep it out of the US. It was coming here no matter what they did. And people would have died regardless. This much is true.
But their callous and corrupt response to the situation is entirely on them. Thousands of Americans have already died who might otherwise have lived if we had elected an actual human being to lead the country in 2016 instead of a sociopathic grifter incapable of any normal emotion or rational thought. None of this would have happened if Hillary had won, or Bernie, or indeed ANY of the hundred or so Republican candidates who were in the race besides the guy who did win. It's not a partisan issue, really. If literally anyone else had won in 2016 this country would be safer, more prosperous, and less of a morgue. It is Trump and his minions who have made this crisis immeasurably worse through their deliberate cruelty and blistering incompetence. Thousands are dead who did not have to die and thousands more will die for as long as der Sturmtrumper continues to focus on his grasp on power instead of actually leading the nation through a crisis and for as long as his supporters see no problem with this.
Think: has Donald Trump ever once in 2020 offered any words of sympathy for the dead or their families? Ever? Once?
That’s a basic requirement of leadership, by the way, to empathize and sympathize with those you lead.
The answer is no, by the way. Not once. Not ever. Instead he has continued to call people names, deflect attention, deny responsibility, and generally behave in ways that would embarrass a sleep-deprived toddler and are destructively unacceptable from someone who is supposed to be an adult and the leader of one of the most powerful nations on earth.
Has he done anything constructive about this plague?
Hardly. Pretty much everything he’s done, in fact, has been designed to make things worse. At that level he’s achieved his goals, I suppose.
Has he worked tirelessly to make sure that the only person who benefits from this is himself, even at the cost of your blood?
Obviously.
In the grand tradition of would-be tyrants throughout history, rather than work for the good of the people he governs he has instead seized the moment to destroy any restraints on his power and has actively worked to ensure the deaths of countless more people.
He has declared he won’t fund the World Health Organization, the international body that is working to keep this from becoming a second Spanish Flu – you know, the plague that killed more people than all of World War I? That one?
He has threatened Congress with adjournment so he can shove more unqualified nominees into office without check and further destabilize the United States – crippling our response, paralyzing our actions, lining his pockets. I’m not saying he’s a foreign agent out to destroy this nation. I’m just saying that if he were one I don’t know what he’d do differently from what he has already done.
He has vowed to destroy the Post Office – even to the point of vetoing critical relief legislation if Congress dares to fund one of the few government bodies explicitly mentioned in the Constitution itself. In an era of pandemic where package deliveries are critical, of course he plans to destroy the Post Office. We can’t have people voting by mail now, can we? Could lead to free and fair elections and that’s just not acceptable to der Sturmtrumper or his supporters.
He has called on his supporters to undermine basic health and safety rules – an irresponsible and politically motivated assault on the safety of the United States that would be shocking if it came from a responsible leader but which is simply par for the course for this sociopath. And his supporters have responded in kind, because apparently they’re happy to die for his re-election prospects. Honestly, if they wish to auto-Darwinate that's on them but they need to do so in a way that doesn't threaten the rest of us.
He is consolidating power and will likely have to be removed from office by force after he loses in November, if he bothers to have elections at all. If you have ever wondered how Fascism came to power in Germany nearly a century ago, if you have ever wondered what you would do if you found yourself in that time and place, now you know. It’s happening here now, and you’re doing it now.
So long as Donald Trump and his supporters hold power the survival of the American republic is in doubt, both individually and collectively.
The choice is yours, America.
Think fast, because you don’t have much time left to decide.
Wednesday, April 15, 2020
A Journal of the Plague Year, Part the Seventeenth - Things I No Longer Need
1. My glasses.
I’ve been wearing glasses since I was in graduate school. I probably should have been wearing them earlier, given my genetics and the fact that the world had gotten rather fuzzy around the edges by then, but life being what it is that didn’t happen. So it’s been about thirty years now and I’ve graduated from what were essentially part-time glasses to full-time glasses to bifocals and most of the people I talk to probably don’t even know what I look like without them. But for the last several years – through at least three different prescriptions – I have been far more comfortable without them when reading or working on a computer. And since that’s about 90% of my days here in lockdown – and most of the rest of the time I don’t really need to have sharp edges on the world – there have been entire workweeks where I haven’t bothered with them.
2. My keys.
I don’t really drive anywhere anymore, except perhaps to the grocery store once a week. I don’t go to my old office on campus, where I have anywhere up to half a dozen keys that I use on at least a semi-regular basis. I’m usually inside my own house so I don’t even need my house key. I do have a number of fobs that I need to log into various computer systems so I keep the key ring on my desk, but as far as carrying around bits of metal to stick into locks, yeah not so much anymore.
3. Work clothes.
I’m working from home. I’m going to be comfortable. Well, more comfortable – I am the living embodiment of comfort over style, after all, and even my work clothes are things I can hang out in on weekends if necessary. But I haven’t worn a button-down shirt in a month and I suspect I won’t do so again until we’re out of lockdown. I’m still wearing pants, though. Ain’t nobody need to see all that.
4. Shoes.
Again, I’m home. I don’t really need to go outside, especially since Lauren is now comfortable backing the car down the long stretch of our driveway that squeezes between the house and the property line so I don’t have to do that before she heads off to feed the chickens anymore. Other than going to the grocery store I haven’t put on shoes in weeks.
5. Full breakfasts or lunches.
When you go into an office every day, you need to have a breakfast big enough to carry you over to lunchtime, and then a lunch big enough to carry you over to dinner or at least when you get back home. Working from home you can spread that out a bit. Plus I don’t do as much walking as I used to, so I don’t need full-sized meals at all really. I have neither gained nor lost weight under lockdown, to my knowledge.
Tuesday, April 14, 2020
Monday, April 13, 2020
A Journal of the Plague Year, Part the Fifteenth - Notes from Lockdown
1. If you want to feel guilty in a pandemic, go down into your basement and rummage through your old paint supplies until you find the battered old disposable N95 mask – the kind you used to be able to get at any hardware store for a couple of bucks – that you wore when you were sanding the walls in order to prime them, and wear it on your weekly mission to the outside world. On the one hand, speaking as someone who falls into several different higher-risk groups it’s good to have and use. On the other hand, you feel like you ought to be taking it directly to the nearest hospital, paint dust and all. It’s a quandary.
2. The other thing that was odd about the whole experience is that it was like wearing a scarf on a sub-zero winter day in that as soon as you exhale your glasses fog over and you’re blind. So I took off my glasses and spent my entire grocery run squinting at the shelves. Life is ridiculous, even in times of crisis.
3. Kim spent much of the weekend sewing reusable cloth masks for us all so we’ll have those as well.
4. Oliver spent a good portion of Easter guiding me and Kim through the process of character creation for a D&D run, and I have to say I was not prepared for how complicated an endeavor that is. It took the better part of two hours and I still haven’t touched the whole area of my character’s backstory (which is apparently a rather freeform part of the process), but now I have a proud alter-ego as a wood elf ranger. We’re going to go on a quest at some point, because why not. It’s fun to share these things with your family.
5. I don’t really know why I have not been a D&D person prior to this, since I am in almost every respect precisely the target audience for such things, but I have only ever played this game twice before – once in high school back in the dark recesses of the 1980s and once again with friends in New York City a couple of years ago. I like the memes. I understand the jargon, mostly, at least enough to get most of the memes. But somehow it’s never become a regular activity for me. Well, worth a try I suppose.
6. Der Sturmtrumper is now actively working to destroy the Post Office because reasons. Mostly I suspect because that way there will be no vote by mail and the right-wing dream of authoritarian rule will be complete, though Republican Party leaders have been working to destroy it for decades anyway in order to give their oligarch supporters another efficient public service to take over and cannibalize for profit and aggrandizement. Nothing to see here, citizen. Move along.
7. I am not drinking nearly enough for this.
8. After much consideration I have decided that I need to reread the entire Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series because it just needs to be done in these parlous times. It’s actually a nice break from it all.
9. Three cheers for Zoom calls with family and friends, which have been a nice way to keep in touch through it all. I’ve caught up with folks all over the world (the joy of having far-flung friends) and touched base with some people I don’t ordinarily talk to at all, and it has been lovely.
10. One of the things that the current situation really brings home to a person is precisely how much privilege one has in a society. I have a lot of it, and there are ways to use that in the service of others that I try to keep in mind when I am making choices.
2. The other thing that was odd about the whole experience is that it was like wearing a scarf on a sub-zero winter day in that as soon as you exhale your glasses fog over and you’re blind. So I took off my glasses and spent my entire grocery run squinting at the shelves. Life is ridiculous, even in times of crisis.
3. Kim spent much of the weekend sewing reusable cloth masks for us all so we’ll have those as well.
4. Oliver spent a good portion of Easter guiding me and Kim through the process of character creation for a D&D run, and I have to say I was not prepared for how complicated an endeavor that is. It took the better part of two hours and I still haven’t touched the whole area of my character’s backstory (which is apparently a rather freeform part of the process), but now I have a proud alter-ego as a wood elf ranger. We’re going to go on a quest at some point, because why not. It’s fun to share these things with your family.
5. I don’t really know why I have not been a D&D person prior to this, since I am in almost every respect precisely the target audience for such things, but I have only ever played this game twice before – once in high school back in the dark recesses of the 1980s and once again with friends in New York City a couple of years ago. I like the memes. I understand the jargon, mostly, at least enough to get most of the memes. But somehow it’s never become a regular activity for me. Well, worth a try I suppose.
6. Der Sturmtrumper is now actively working to destroy the Post Office because reasons. Mostly I suspect because that way there will be no vote by mail and the right-wing dream of authoritarian rule will be complete, though Republican Party leaders have been working to destroy it for decades anyway in order to give their oligarch supporters another efficient public service to take over and cannibalize for profit and aggrandizement. Nothing to see here, citizen. Move along.
7. I am not drinking nearly enough for this.
8. After much consideration I have decided that I need to reread the entire Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series because it just needs to be done in these parlous times. It’s actually a nice break from it all.
9. Three cheers for Zoom calls with family and friends, which have been a nice way to keep in touch through it all. I’ve caught up with folks all over the world (the joy of having far-flung friends) and touched base with some people I don’t ordinarily talk to at all, and it has been lovely.
10. One of the things that the current situation really brings home to a person is precisely how much privilege one has in a society. I have a lot of it, and there are ways to use that in the service of others that I try to keep in mind when I am making choices.
Sunday, April 12, 2020
Saturday, April 11, 2020
A Journal of the Plague Year, Part the Thirteenth - Death by Ballot
If you aren’t outraged by what the Republican Party did to the State of Wisconsin this week there is no moral hope for you.
The Republican Party is no longer a political party advocating conservative views, and it hasn’t been for nearly a quarter century now. It has shifted further and further into right-wing extremism and authoritarianism, adopted a blasphemous and obscene bastardization of Christianity as its guiding creed, and emerged on the other side as a full-fledged death cult, one that would quite literally threatens you with death for daring to cast a ballot.
Not that this should be any surprise. As someone pointed out in a recent conversation with me, if you’ve looked at the GOP policy on guns or health care in general you already know that advocating mass death is a standard part of their platform.
Wisconsin’s primary election was Tuesday. More importantly, since the two major presidential candidates were pretty much set by then, there was on the same ballot an election for the Wisconsin Supreme Court – a laughably partisan institution that gave up all pretense of judicial independence a decade ago – and there were indications that the preferred candidate of the Wisconsin GOP was facing an actual challenge and might not simply be installed by imperial fiat.
Given that we are in the middle of the COVID19 epidemic and the number of polling places in the state – particularly in the big cities of Milwaukee and Madison – had been reduced by nearly 90% because of a shortage of poll workers, Governor Evers first requested the state legislature to move the election and switch to all mail-in ballots, and then, when the Republican leadership absolutely refused to do anything that might actually allow people to cast ballots without threat of contagion, under the emergency powers granted to him by that same legislature the Governor ordered the election moved.
Naturally Robin Vos and the rest of the GOP legislature sued to make sure that people would have to choose between exposure to a plague or exercising their rights as citizens, because – as der Sturmtrumper happily admitted in public the week before – the more people vote the fewer Republicans get elected. They cannot win free and fair elections, so they do whatever they can to make sure free and fair elections don’t happen.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court dutifully bowed to their political masters, as did the US Supreme Court.
So in the middle of the greatest pandemic in over a century, one that has brought civilized society to a standstill and canceled pretty much every public event in the world, the Republican Party mandated that voters and poll workers risk their lives or concede all power to their overlords.
Fully encased in PPE that should have been on a nurse, Vos declared that everything was perfectly safe.
There is blood on the hands of the Republican Party today. Wisconsin will see a surge in deaths from disease because of the actions of the Republican Party – a surge that was entirely foreseeable, entirely preventable, and absolutely acceptable to them as long as it preserved their iron grip on power.
Make no mistake, folks. This was a dress rehearsal for November. If you think the GOP will allow a free and fair election that they know very well and have already stated publicly cannot go their way, you really need psychological help. I will not be surprised if they try to cancel it outright.
John F. Kennedy once pointed out that “those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
I don’t want political violence in this country. I’m a historian. I’ve seen that movie. Once it starts you have no idea where it will end up, and most of the time it doesn’t end well.
But I won’t be surprised when it happens, and the Republican Party will have nobody to blame but themselves.
The Republican Party is no longer a political party advocating conservative views, and it hasn’t been for nearly a quarter century now. It has shifted further and further into right-wing extremism and authoritarianism, adopted a blasphemous and obscene bastardization of Christianity as its guiding creed, and emerged on the other side as a full-fledged death cult, one that would quite literally threatens you with death for daring to cast a ballot.
Not that this should be any surprise. As someone pointed out in a recent conversation with me, if you’ve looked at the GOP policy on guns or health care in general you already know that advocating mass death is a standard part of their platform.
Wisconsin’s primary election was Tuesday. More importantly, since the two major presidential candidates were pretty much set by then, there was on the same ballot an election for the Wisconsin Supreme Court – a laughably partisan institution that gave up all pretense of judicial independence a decade ago – and there were indications that the preferred candidate of the Wisconsin GOP was facing an actual challenge and might not simply be installed by imperial fiat.
Given that we are in the middle of the COVID19 epidemic and the number of polling places in the state – particularly in the big cities of Milwaukee and Madison – had been reduced by nearly 90% because of a shortage of poll workers, Governor Evers first requested the state legislature to move the election and switch to all mail-in ballots, and then, when the Republican leadership absolutely refused to do anything that might actually allow people to cast ballots without threat of contagion, under the emergency powers granted to him by that same legislature the Governor ordered the election moved.
Naturally Robin Vos and the rest of the GOP legislature sued to make sure that people would have to choose between exposure to a plague or exercising their rights as citizens, because – as der Sturmtrumper happily admitted in public the week before – the more people vote the fewer Republicans get elected. They cannot win free and fair elections, so they do whatever they can to make sure free and fair elections don’t happen.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court dutifully bowed to their political masters, as did the US Supreme Court.
So in the middle of the greatest pandemic in over a century, one that has brought civilized society to a standstill and canceled pretty much every public event in the world, the Republican Party mandated that voters and poll workers risk their lives or concede all power to their overlords.
Fully encased in PPE that should have been on a nurse, Vos declared that everything was perfectly safe.
There is blood on the hands of the Republican Party today. Wisconsin will see a surge in deaths from disease because of the actions of the Republican Party – a surge that was entirely foreseeable, entirely preventable, and absolutely acceptable to them as long as it preserved their iron grip on power.
Make no mistake, folks. This was a dress rehearsal for November. If you think the GOP will allow a free and fair election that they know very well and have already stated publicly cannot go their way, you really need psychological help. I will not be surprised if they try to cancel it outright.
John F. Kennedy once pointed out that “those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
I don’t want political violence in this country. I’m a historian. I’ve seen that movie. Once it starts you have no idea where it will end up, and most of the time it doesn’t end well.
But I won’t be surprised when it happens, and the Republican Party will have nobody to blame but themselves.
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