A Memento

Yes, we all know that it has been an abysmal year. A lethal, chaotic, maddening, insane year, so ghastly and crushing that the phrase “2020” will no longer cause people to think about the gauge of perfect eyesight or the TV newsmagazine from the 1980s.

When we hear “2020,” we will think of Trump and coronavirus and George Floyd and fights over facemasks and botched coups and protests in the street and fear and anger and confusion and the days that merged into one another as we huddled in isolation.

Basically, nobody will ever refer to this era as the good old days.

But before you say goodbye to this nightmarish year, grab a souvenir of 2020.

I have co-written a collection of short stories, and the book is now for sale on Amazon and elsewhere.

“Feed the Monster Alphabet Soup” is sort of Edward Gory for adults, with stories about a third grader who confronts the devil, an insecure superhero who can’t handle stress, a newborn who sells her placenta to the highest bidder, and other twisted tales.

So if you want to know what to do if you just start floating into the sky one day, or how to handle it when suburban gossip inevitably morphs into a grenade-heavy firefight in the cul-de-sac, pick up a copy here.

Thanks

Black Christmas

Just a quick note to say Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas and good riddance to 2020 and pleasant thoughts to you, onward and upward, forever and ever, amen.

Of course, this holiday season is a unique combination of depressing, horrifying, frustrating, disorienting, and disquieting. 

It is also a time of great irony. After all, Republicans have long warned us about a supposed “War on Christmas” that mainly consisted of arguments about the wording on Starbucks cups.

But it is a Republican president who has brought disaster and calamity — American carnage, if you will —to Christmas. For millions of Americans, Christmas is cancelled, because they cannot be in the same room as their loved ones. Or the entire season has become a paranoid dance with death, as we dismiss warnings to not gather together and then act shocked when everyone in our family gets infected.

Christmas has never been so bleak — let alone so dangerous — but the Trump Administration has accomplished it.

They have waged the ultimate War on Christmas.

Happy Holidays, everyone.

No Guardrails

Once you’ve attempted to destroy democracy, overthrow the government, and seize power, it’s a little difficult to say, “Just kidding.”

Yes, I’m sure that in future years, many Republican leaders will insist they never intended to break the country wide open. They were just indulging in “political theater.”

However, even political theater is usually principled or symbolic. It is not, in general, a dangerous and delusional maneuver that breaks through “the last level of neo-fascism.”

Now, we have heard apologists explain that the recent actions of Republicans don’t prove that they are actively hostile to democracy. Supposedly, all these conservative leaders are just appeasing Trump. 

But two rejoinders come to mind:

First, haven’t they done enough appeasing for several lifetimes? And to what end? The guy lost and may end up killing off their political party. And still they’re scared of him?

Second, the idea that the GOP is just trying to keep Trump happy is the equivalent of saying, “I punched my kid in the face only because my husband insisted, and I didn’t want to make him angry.” It’s not an excuse.

The truth is that much of the right wing is all for tearing down America, and they need very little provocation to abandon any coherent political philosophy.

You see, the political party that hates judicial activism wanted judges to be active as hell and overrule voters. The party of states’ rights didn’t want states to run themselves, and instead be subservient to bigger states (like, for example, Texas). The party for freedom and against tyranny wanted to nullify an election and install its own president.

And this is not just a few rogue Republicans. It is vast swaths of the GOP and a majority of conservative voters. In fact, “about 64% of the entire House Republican conference supported Trump’s attempts to invalidate Biden's win, using baseless allegations of widespread voter fraud as their reasoning.”

Even today, “three-quarters of Trump voters said congressional Republicans should try to keep Trump in power.” Furthermore, over 80% of Trump voters believe that Biden stole the election by committing fraud so egregious and obvious that you would have to be a moron to miss it. At the same time, the fraud is so subtle and devious that no one can find a single shred of evidence or proof. 

That is one tricky balancing act. Damn those sinister liberals.

In any case, many people thought Trump supporters would snap out of it and come to accept reality.

But they will not.

Hardcore Trumpists have turned on conservatives who question their god’s perfection. They have called for violence and martial law. They have made it clear that they will always follow this sniveling old man who “awakened an authoritarian impulse among the citizenry that was far larger and more rabid, and more easily triggered, than most of us ever imagined.”

The specifics and the level of danger may be unique to our time, but “there is a long history of building community cohesion by encouraging members to ignore the facts of the world around them.” After all, the people who believe the Earth is round don’t need to build a community. Reality handles that for them. But when faith and belief clash with logic, reason, and facts, a massive disconnect occurs. And sometimes, “the disconnect between belief and reality is precisely the point,” because when this gap “gets really large and the community becomes more insulated, cults arise.

And that is where we are today, with a cult masquerading as a political party, and truth up for grabs. And when reality itself is debatable, the world spins into chaos and cacophony.

In other words, it’s all very 2020.

A Long Climb Out

When this horrific era of death and isolation and lockdowns and screaming men with guns and infinitely long Zoom meetings finally ends, I know the phrase that will encapsulate it for me:

“Can I please share?”

That’s what my seven-year-old son says approximately 3,862 times a day. He yells this while he is in his remote-learning class, when he is one of two dozen second graders vying for the teacher’s attention.

“Can I please share?” he will shout while waving his artwork or math sheet or grammar lesson at the computer screen. Of course, many of the other kids in the class also want to share their work, or just be the first one to give the right answer. So they all start shouting, “Can I please share?” or “I want to share” or “It’s my turn to share.”

And then it turns into an online Lord of the Flies, but with arguments about adverbs and improper fractions.

In any case, I’m grateful that my son is doing ok in his virtual classroom. Because the same cannot be said about many American kids.

Although early studies of online learning indicate that “the Covid-19 pandemic and the learning disruptions it caused have been less detrimental than researchers had expected,” it could be years before we know “the true educational toll of the pandemic — and the effects could be long-lasting.”

And we know that for many “Black and Hispanic students, as well as those in schools that serve low-income populations, the situation is more concerning — with marginalized students falling further behind in reading and math.”

This, of course, means that the educational gap between ethnic minority children and White kids is only widening.

Now, that’s grim news, to be sure. But hey, won’t everything get back to “normal” after all those kids get vaccinated and return to the classroom?

Well, this presupposes that Black and Latino kids get vaccinated at the same rate as White kids. And the truth is that “America'shistory of racism in medical research and a lack of trust in the federal government is making some Black Americans and Latinos hesitant to take the vaccine.”

It’s almost like the Tuskegee experiments, the forced sterilization of Latinas, and the unethical testing of procedures “that caused health complications or death” have left ethnic minorities distrustful of the medical establishment. 

I mean, what are the odds?

Currently, only 14% of Black Americans trust that a coronavirus vaccine will be safe. Latinos are more optimistic, with 34% saying they trust the vaccine to be safe. But compare that to the 61% of White people who are eager to be vaccinated.

The result is that “vaccine hesitancy could result in some Black and Latino Americans not being vaccinated as Covid-19 continues to batter their communities at disproportionate rates.”

Latinos have the additional burden of being fearful of the government, which is something that just sort of happens when a president spends his entire term demonizing Hispanics. Indeed, the Trump Administration's “anti-immigration policies, public charge rules that create barriers to citizenship, and threats to the Affordable Care Act have made some Latino families reluctant to receive healthcare.” 

As a final handicap, keep in mind that many ethnic minorities live “in poor and urban neighborhoods that don't have doctors or healthcare facilities near their homes.”

So we have a situation where Black and Latino kids are suffering the most from the pandemic, and are the least likely to come out of it quickly.

For those kids, it will 2020 for years to come.

All This and Worse

In theory, by this time next year we will all be vaccinated against COVID-19. And then we’ll hug and clap hands and laugh about the silly virus.

“That whole killer pandemic thing,” we will chortle. “What was that all about anyway?”

Well, before we banish the coronavirus and the entirety of 2020 into the deep, dark memory hole where we bury all our unpleasant thoughts, let’s take a moment to acknowledge the here and now.

You see, because of the Trump Administration’s unique combination of incompetence, hubris, idiocy, and depraved indifference, we are now at about 14 million Americans infected, with over 270,000 dead. We are seeing higher numbers of death on a daily basis, and soon we will endure the equivalent of “a 9/11 every single day.”

In response, the administration has fluctuated between doing nothing, embracing denialism, promoting quackery, and dismissing the experts, which is “in keeping with their guiding philosophy that there is no problem so great that it cannot be solved by knowing lessabout it.”

Of course, this is not a recent collapse. Months ago, the administration basically gave up fighting the virus and hoped that “Americans will go numb to the escalating death toll and learn to accept tens of thousands of new cases a day.”

And that’s pretty much what conservatives have done. Hey, over half (52%) of Republicans believe that “the U.S. reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic is overblown,” which is double the percentage of Democrats who think the same thing.

So if you’re in the GOP, overflowing hospitals and widespread death is no reason to get all excited. This is despite the fact that “only cancer and heart disease will kill more Americans this year” than coronavirus. In fact, the bug has already “killed more than twice as many Americans as either strokes or Alzheimer’s disease, about four times as many as diabetes, and more than eight times as many as either gun violence or vehicle accidents.”

Again, none of that is reason to be concerned — if you’re a Republican.

If you are not, and you actually respect science, you might be interested to know that recent studies verify “what health officials have been telling us for months: Masks do work by significantly slowing the spread of COVID-19.” In fact, there may be up to “a 50% reduction in the spread of COVID-19 in counties that had a mask mandate compared to those without.”

But of course, our disease-ridden president mocked facemasks for months, and provoked the stupidest culture war of all time, apparently because masks weren’t manly or would hurt the economy or something similarly incoherent.

Oh, and speaking of Republicans and their favorite subject — the economy — keep in mind that mask mandates lead to “greater confidence and spending among consumers,” and “are also linked to higher consumer mobility.”

So if conservatives really wanted to rescue the economy, and not just kill grandma in a futile ploy to boost Wall Street, they would be clamoring for everyone to wear a mask. Also, the conservative insistence that lockdowns would destroy the economy looks even more pathetic now, considering that most economists say “the U.S. would be in a better economic position now if lockdowns had been more aggressive at the beginning of the crisis.”

In essence, the Trumpian approach killed more people and made the economy worse — a win-win only if you are a delusional Republican or a cackling demon from the underworld who loves human suffering.

Yes, the virus was always going to be bad, but this level of calamity is the direct result of an infantile, self-obsessed president and his “incessant destruction of reason, evidence and science in the service of his personal whims, conspiratorial mindset and political requirements.”

In future generations, there will be myriad books, documentaries, and feature films about American life during coronavirus. And they will all come to the same conclusion:

It didn’t have to be this bad.