"what digby sez..."
Month: December 2020
If we want it …
This piece about the hell of 2020 by Tim Miller is very well done. His assessment of the horror is stark and visceral and well worth reading in its entirety. But I actually liked his conclusion even more:
Underneath everything that was The Worst were triumphs and connections and lessons and humor—and yes, happinesses that need to be acknowledged and fostered alongside the guttural desire to damn it all to hell.
A friend told me about a memory book he made to mark a romance which began just before the pandemic and evolved into a relationship that was bonded by so much forced togetherness. But in telling me about it he caveated, almost apologizing for this joyful 2020 evocation, as if he felt like he wasn’t allowed to have an oasis amid the vast desert of misery spread around them.
For him 2020 wasn’t just death and loneliness and despair and awfulness and doomscrolling the news and hatescrolling Gays Over Covid and having painful conversations with one’s family about why their formerly devil-may-care child has to be the one to enforce CDC guidelines and ruin Christmas this year. It was all that. But it was also this new wonderful thing.
For me 2020 was also Joe Burrow and Get The Gat and gallivanting down Poydras Street with friends of 20 years, hugging strangers and bumming cigarettes, yelping at no one in particular, blissfully unaware of the virus that had already invaded our shores.
It was 267 straight days without being apart from my child. Watching her become a little human in a year that we might otherwise have been separated for days at a time. It’s knowing every single corner of her life and her brain, hearing her steal me and my husband’s slang and curses. It’s the little picnic tables down by the bay where the three of us could eat a cheeseburger and feel normal for an hour. It’s swimming together, alone on a warm California night as Toots serenades us from the grave about the pressure drop coming for those who have done us wrong.
2020 will always be that little Jiminy Cricket in the corner of my brain, imploring me to say yes, to do more, to embrace others, to appreciate their company (even when it grates), to dine on the world. It will be the network effect of all the people who do the same for as long as they can still feel the pain of having once lost it.
Most importantly, 2020 will always be the year that we joined together and toppled the greatest threat that our fragile union has faced in many decades. Turning out more people to vote against the president-strongman than had ever voted against anyone in American history. Turning out large enough numbers to ensure the victory was clear, to thwart his—and his party’s—attempt to overturn our democracy.
2020 will always be loss. But it will always be that victory, too. Don’t ever let the wannabe sophisticates retcon the last four years to make it seem like the happy ending was inevitable or that there was never any real danger. Because it wasn’t. And there was. Even now, those careerists hold their manhoods cheap for not taking the field to save our republic.
We achieved something important and lasting, something that will reverberate through the decades during a year that was otherwise The Worst.
And so we carry that momentous achievement—and a new presidency with us as we turn the corner to the New Year.
Yes, we all bring the wreckage from The Worst along with us. Yes, the first weeks of 2021 will be some of the darkest we’ve seen. And no, there is no magical cure for the wounds that have been inflicted on society or those that led to us having such a cruel madman at the helm.
You don’t have to be pollyanna. You can recognize all of this and have a very clear-eyed view of what comes next.
But I would caution us all not to go looking for a New Worst in 2021. Not to let ourselves get flattened into an unhealthy digital myopia that makes us addicted to the idea that it’s all The Worst.
If we weather these first weeks, our new annum will eventually see us coming together again, physically. With that togetherness will be an opportunity to open our hearts, to channel all the pain and complexities and lessons and victories and joys and sorrows from The Worst year towards rebuilding things, for The Better, with each other.
Amen.
Life is complicated and it’s a mistake to spend too much time wallowing in the negative when there is always something positive to embrace. You have to let yourself experience it all. I’m going to try hard to remember that.
… but the second largest city in the United States is in CRISIS. I don’t get the feeling that people are actually aware of what’s happening here.
Los Angeles County’s healthcare system was buckling Wednesday under the unprecedented surge of COVID-19 patients, with bodies piling up at morgues and medical professionals resorting to increasingly desperate measures as they brace for conditions to worsen in the coming weeks.
With hospitals overwhelmed by patients and no outlet valve available, doctors, nurses and paramedics are being forced to make wrenching choices about who gets care and at what level.
“No one would believe this is in the United States,” said Scott Byington, a critical care nurse at St. Francis Medical Center in Lynwood. “Everyone is doing what they can do. It’s not that anybody is slacking. It’s just that it’s too overwhelming for everyone.”
Hospital morgues are so full that the National Guard is being called in to help county workers as corpses are moved into storage at the L.A. County Department of the Medical Examiner-Coroner. The overcrowded crypts at hospitals are a result of private mortuaries running out of space and staff to handle the unprecedented number of COVID-19 deaths.
The deteriorating conditions came as Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that a new, potentially more contagious variant of the coronavirus identified in the United Kingdom had been found in Southern California, though officials said the findings were not unexpected and should not cause undue alarm.
Los Angeles County on Wednesday tallied its 10,000th COVID-19 death. On the same day, it recorded 262 deaths, breaking the single-day record for COVID-19 deaths for the second day in a row. L.A. County is now averaging about 129 COVID-19 deaths a day over the past week, a figure that has never been higher
While officials have not provided details on patients who suffered because resources were not available, it’s clear the crisis is taking a terrible toll on care.
Dr. Christina Ghaly, the L.A. County health services director, said Wednesday, “There have been some unfortunate outcomes from patients in hospitals and ambulances across the county who couldn’t be offloaded into an emergency department in a timely manner.”
County officials have been concerned about patients suffering from things such as strokes, heart attacks and seizures waiting in ambulances outside hospitals, said Cathy Chidester, director of the county Emergency Medical Services Agency. “The early intervention, in some of these cases if you don’t get it, may lead to worse outcomes,” she said.
The crush of patients has led the county to allow certain types of ambulance patients to be offloaded into the waiting room instead of the emergency room, according to memos issued by the EMS agency.
Additionally, 911 patients who have a do-not-resuscitate directive will not be taken to acute-care facilities such as a hospital, nor will certain trauma patients whose hearts have stopped.
On a recent shift, Byington, the critical care nurse at St. Francis Medical Center, cared for 12 patients in crisis. On the overhead speakers, he heard near-constant calls of rapid response and Code Blues as patients crashed.
“I’m upstairs in a COVID room, he’s coding, and then I go downstairs to a COVID room, he’s coding, and then there’s a problem and I go back and forth and back and forth,” he said. “It’s all night long — it’s crazy.”
Watching COVID-19 patients suffer is horrifying. Their eyes widen with panic as they struggle to take in enough oxygen and gasp for breath. It is a process much like suffocation.
“You hope for some of these patients who are not going to survive, that they actually become unconscious before this, because it’s very scary,” Byington said. “It’s no different than probably drowning.”
On a recent shift, there were more than 40 patients in the telemetry units — some with heart attacks and others with COVID-19 — but staff couldn’t find technicians to watch their heart monitors, because employees also have fallen sick with COVID.
Some nurses and doctors have been hospitalized with severe cases of the disease, he said.
Hospital staff are also dealing with non-COVID patients in crisis who have put off urgent medical care for fear of contracting the coronavirus at the hospital. A patient might have had shortness of breath and chest pain for a few days, but doesn’t come into the hospital for treatment for a heart attack until it’s nearly too late, Byington said.
“We had a lady who walked in and had a stroke in the lobby,” he said.
On a recent shift, seven patients died in the hospital within six hours, Byington said. The hospital morgue is often at capacity. There have been patients passing away who were in their 20s and 30s, he said. Recently, a sick patient was cared for in the ER hallway because there was no more space in the hospital.
The patient could not be saved, and died there, Byington said.
“When it came time for them to pass, they passed in the hallway.”
Byington, who has worked at the hospital for nearly 30 years, said medical staff are trying as hard as they can. The situation is equally bleak at other nearby hospitals, he said.
“They give 110% and come back the next day to start all over,” Byington added. “It’s like a MASH unit, everywhere in the hospital. This is a situation where people come in and it’s like rolling the dice.”
At different times, the hospital has run out of high-flow oxygen as well as BiPap machines, a mask that helps push oxygen into the lungs, often a last resort before placing ill patients on a ventilator.
The choices are often grim. A patient might require a BiPap machine, and there may be only one left, just surrendered by a patient who died, Byington said. Once the machine is given to the patient in need, it could be just minutes before another might need one — but there aren’t any left.
“You have to pick and choose,” he said. “That’s where we really are — we’re really at that point.”
That sentiment was shared by medical professionals across the region, who fear that as bad as the conditions are now, they would get worse.
“I have never been in the position in my career where I couldn’t offer lifesaving care to someone who needed it,” said Dr. Marc Futernick, a Los Angeles emergency room physician who also serves as regional medical director of VEP Healthcare. “That is literally what we are talking about. If there is no space, no ventilator and no oxygen. … We are going to have to sit on our hands. Just saying it out loud, it is so frightening. None of us want to face that.”
At Greater El Monte Community Hospital, staffers were trying to squeeze as much space as possible out of the small facility but conditions were becoming increasingly difficult.
“The chatter you hear … is very grim,” said Dr. Victor Lange, the hospital’s clinical epidemiologist and director of quality and risk management. “It’s pretty common to see someone crying in the hallway.”
While both California and L.A. County have seen some easing in the net daily increase of ICU patients with COVID-19 — probably related to the stay-at-home order that began rolling out across the state on Dec. 6 — L.A. County is seeing less relief than other parts of the state.
At its peak in mid-December, L.A. County was averaging a net daily increase of 44 ICU patients for COVID-19; by Tuesday, L.A. County was averaging a net additional 35 ICU patients every day over the past week.
The rate at which coronavirus test results are coming back positive continues to climb. The daily positivity rate is now at 20% — five times worse than the comparable figure from Nov. 1, when the rate was less than 4%.
“And we’re not even accounting for the incoming Christmas surge,” said L.A. County Supervisor Hilda Solis. “From what we saw with so many people who attended gatherings and travels, we remain very concerned about another surge on top of the current surge.”
Solis implored the public to cancel New Year’s parties to reduce the intensity of the forecasted January surge.
Guard troops are stationed at 13 medical facilities in the state, including Adventist Health White Memorial in Los Angeles, Methodist Hospital of Southern California in Arcadia and Pacifica Hospital of the Valley in Sun Valley.
“It’s such a grim reality,” Solis said.
But she added: “Please don’t give up. Widespread access to the vaccine, as we know, is coming in a matter of months. And don’t be a casualty to this pandemic.”
I received this alert yesterday:
Dying of COVID now, when the vaccines are on the way, is horrifying. And yet they are saying we can expect that tens of thousands will succumb.
People are dying unnecessarily, and not just because of COVID but from other problems, because COVID has overwhelmed the health care systems. That is very frightening.
Stay home, people. You may be asymptomatic and spreading it without meaning to. It might even be the new variant which is much more contagious. Or you may get it and get very sick, even if you are young. That Louisiana congressman who died wasn’t elderly — he was 41. And they have found that 30% of the athletes who contracted COVID have heart damage. It’s just not worth it. Don’t take any chances.
It’s Happy Hollandaise time here at Hullabaloo. If you’d like to drop a little something in the old Christmas stocking you can do so here (or at the P.O. box shown in the sidebar):
Dear Posterity,
I just want you to know that the year 2020 really was as fucking awful as we said it was at the time. I know that’s hard to believe, given that so much time has past, but it’s true.
Ambitious historians, anxious to have their work stand out in a crowd, have surely staked out revisionist positions to the effect that the pandemic really wasn’t that dangerous. Believe me, it was.
Apologists for dictators have certainly worked hard to rehabilitate the reputations of Trump and the scoundrels who enabled him. Don’t believe them for a second.
By now, racists have buried the numerous state-sanctioned murders, the family separations and the officially sanctioned abuse of non-whites that happened in 2020. I am telling you to get out your historical shovels and dig it all back up. Just be sure to take a deep breath before you look because what happened this year will make you sick.
Please, Posterity, before you keep an open mind when some ignorant meathead who wasn’t alive then describes 2020 as some kind of glorious time-out— that 2020 was a time when the world joyfully rediscovered the pleasures of sourdough and solitude — please take this insignificant blog post to heart:
Anyone who says 2020 wasn’t that big a deal has no fucking idea what the fuck they were talking about.
Love,
tristero
It’s Happy Hollandaise time here at Hullabaloo. If you’d like to drop a little something in the old Christmas stocking you can do so here (or at the P.O. box shown in the sidebar):
I mentioned the new Gallup poll in my 2020 retrospective piece yesterday, musing that he would no doubt find comfort in it. I didn’t have room to talk about the fact that there was a time when Glenn Beck was the second most admired man in the world in the same survey. The Daily Beast reports:
In the midst of his building despondency, Trump is seizing on little, unexpected joys where he can find and get them. This week, Gallup announced that its public polling shows that Trump now ranks as the “Most Admired” man in the United States, ending his predecessor Barack Obama’s 12-year stretch as the most admired man. According to Gallup, that would make Obama “tied with Dwight Eisenhower for the most ever.”
The “Most Admired” man and woman surveys that Gallup conducts annually lean heavily on name recognition and national fame, and it is incredibly common that the sitting president, no matter who it is, emerges as a winner. Given that metric, it actually took Trump an unusually long time to topple Obama from the top spot, as the former Democratic president bested Trump for most of the years of the latter’s term.
To some presidents, that might come off as embarrassing. But not to Trump. According to a source with direct knowledge of the matter, soon after the president was informed of how he, in Trump’s own words, “beat Obama” this year, Trump specifically instructed aides to publicly promote it far and wide.
It would be downright sad if he weren’t such an ass. Only stupid stuff like that and the idea of revenge is keeping him going right now:
As his days in office come to a close, President Donald Trump has hinted to those close to him that he’s worried his influence within Republican circles may be waning.
Fearful of party stalwarts growing comfortable crossing him, the president has pushed to keep up the pressure and plot possible revenge scenarios against potential turncoats, according to three people who spoke to him as he unwound at Mar-a-Lago and elsewhere over the holiday weekend.
“Why aren’t they just listening [to me]?” one of the sources recalled Trump asking during a diatribe against prominent GOPers who the president felt weren’t fighting for him on his current battle lines: from nullifying the 2020 election outcome, to torpedoing liability law for Big Tech, to sending out $2,000 checks for COVID-19 relief.
The comments came during Trump’s Christmas getaway in Florida this past weekend and for those who heard them they were some of the clearest indications to date that the president has reached an inflection point. Outwardly insistent that he was robbed of a re-election victory, he has privately groused that too many in his party are acknowledging the reality of his actual loss and showing signs of tiptoeing away from him.
At other points during the long Christmas weekend, the president continued bemoaning the perceived lack of fealty from various elected Republicans, the sources recounted. He rattled off names such as Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Rep. Adam Kinzinger (for being, in Trump’s estimation, a “wise guy”), and even his own VP, Mike Pence.
“He is keeping a running [mental] list of Republicans who he believes have wronged him since the election,” a source close to Trump said. “The president certainly wants it out there that he’s capable of holding a grudge, and that he has campaigned against [some] Republicans before and could do it again.”
Trump’s musings evoke a president at once eager to portray himself as mighty and tacitly fearful that his aura of political power may be breaking.
He is so dumb it’s painful. He still has tremendous power but not in terms of getting the Republican congress to do his bidding. He’s never really had that. In fact, when it comes to legislation Mitch McConnell has been running the country (or, rather, not allowing anything to get done) for the past four years. And his power as president is certainly waning. He lost the election! He’s a lame duck!
But he still controls the cult and if he wanted to put a scare into the party and exert his power he would be on Fox and OAN and Newsmax every day, calling out names. He doesn’t understand that his power is in the cult. It’s not him, it’s them.
That’s a good thing for the country and the world. He may flub his post-presidential plans simply because he doesn’t really understand how to strategically leverage his power.
The real problem is that he’s having a great, big, sad:
The president keeps insisting to his supporters that he could somehow still cling to that power—with President-elect Joe Biden’s Jan. 20 inauguration in Washington, D.C., fast approaching—through increasingly anti-democratic efforts to nullify the election results.
But privately, the president has begun losing faith in the work of even some of his most diehard surrogates and allied attorneys. Last week, Trump had informed the conspiracy theory-spouting lawyer (and former member of his legal team) Sidney Powell that he did not intend to appoint her “special counsel” to investigate election “fraud,” as the two of them had once discussed. And in recent days, he’s acknowledged to some confidants, with apparent disappointment, that Powell keeps “striking out” in court and overpromising but underdelivering in her crusade of wild allegations of a massive conspiracy, two people familiar with his admissions said.
As Trump and many of his MAGA devotees look to the Jan. 6 session in Congress for certifying the Electoral College vote as a potential last stand, the outgoing president’s already limited attention to the responsibilities of the office he holds has dwindled even further. Limited resources and attention are now being paid to even his primary objectives.
After weeks of trumpeting his administration’s coronavirus vaccine rollout as one of the crowning jewels of his time in office, Trump has tried this week to shovel as much guilt as possible onto the states for the slower-than-projected rollout. He has pushed publicly for Congress to pass $2,000 checks to Americans for COVID relief. But he’s done little to work Republicans on Capitol Hill to support the measure, save the occasional Twitter excoriation for potentially bucking him. Although his White House has gone to great lengths to pretend as if it is readying for a second term, members of his staff have quietly begun leaving.
[…]
Individuals close to Trump and several of his senior aides say that in recent weeks, the president has struggled behind closed doors to hide his feelings of loss, frustration, and disappointment. Often, he has reverted to his old habits of sheltering himself from voices of mild dissent in his own ranks, ones who would tell him to let it go with even a modicum of grace.
Trump has decided to skip his annual New Year’s Eve Party at Mar-a-lago and while he’s ostensibly coming back to DC to strategize his triumphant comeback on january 6th, the speculation is that he just doesn’t feel like mingling with people because he’s so depressed.
I’ve never understood how anyone could admire this whiny little baby. How they could stick with him after this infantile tantrum is beyond me. Nonetheless, I think they will. But he’s better stop pouting and start to communicate with them or they’ll start to fall away. I honestly can’t believe he doesn’t understand that.
It’s Happy Hollandaise time here at Hullabaloo. If you’d like to drop a little something in the old Christmas stocking you can do so here (or at the P.O. box shown in the sidebar):
In case you were wondering about this bogus argument that “the Democrats did it first” regarding the planned objections on January 6th:
In announcing that he will join a challenge to the electors, Hawley cites Democrats who did the same in 2005 after George W. Bush won reelection. He is right that a small number of Democrats in both houses objected then and forced a debate in both chambers only the second time that had happened since the rules were adopted in 1877. The difference is that objectors said unambiguously that their goal was not to overturn the results but merely to prompt a discussion of what they saw as irregularities.
And in that case, the losing candidate, John Kerry, disavowed the effort, conceding that he lost the election and acknowledging that the irregularities were not substantial enough to have changed the outcome even though he was closer to Bush in both the popular vote and the Electoral College tally than Trump was to Biden.
https://www.cnn.com/2005/ALLPOLITICS/01/06/electoral.vote.1718/
Originally tweeted by Peter Baker (@peterbakernyt) on December 30, 2020.
John Kerry had conceded the day after the election!
Secretary of State John Kerry, who lost a close election to President George W. Bush in 2004, believes he was right to make a timely concession for the greater good of the country.
“I believe today I did the right thing. It was important for our nation to not question that and to move forward,” Kerry told David Axelrod on “The Axe Files” podcast, produced by the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and CNN.
Kerry, whose narrow loss to Bush in Ohio cost him the presidency, said there were some who advised him to withhold his concession of defeat.
“You know it was very hard, obviously…because it was so close,” he recalled. “It was one state and we weren’t sure how many thousands of votes had been cast…and counted.
“But what I decided is that it was important for the country to know who their president was and to be able to move forward.”
Kerry had far more reason to raise a fuss than Trump did. There were a lot of questions about Ohio. But in the end he realized that he would not be able to successfully contest it and rather than have a hissy fit he stood down. Maybe he should have fought harder but he wouldn’t have won. And frankly, most of us backed him because Bush won 3 million more votes in the popular vote. Clearly Republicans can’t understand such deference to democracy.
It’s Happy Hollandaise time here at Hullabaloo. If you’d like to drop a little something in the old Christmas stocking you can do so here (or at the P.O. box shown in the sidebar):
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The outgoing president is a coward, not a fighter. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts is the fighter. Since the presidential election, she has maintained a low profile, but that does not mean she is idle. It is nice to see her back in the news.
“No one should be surprised about what I fight for, or how hard I will fight,” Warren tells Politico of private conversations with Joe Biden. “For me, it’s always about finding the way to be most effective.”
Under a Biden presidency she is looking at how Democrats can deliver visible, dramatic results for constituents. That will be a a tall order if Republicans retain control of the Senate over the next two years. But Warren is charged up for effort, more pragmatic than she was when first she won her seat, and willing to play the inside game if it advances the ball (Politico):
Along with a seat at Schumer’s leadership table, Warren now has a presidential run under her belt plus a progressive record that includes hard-fought battles both with her own party and the GOP.
She even secured language in a critical defense bill to rename bases honoring Confederate soldiers over President Donald Trump’s opposition; his veto is on the verge of being overridden for the first time of his presidency. It’s not Medicare for All or the Green New Deal, but she says it exemplifies what Democrats can accomplish during divided government: “It’s the right side of history.”
Yet Warren warns her party needs to act quickly on things like student loan debt to make sure anti-Trump voters don’t see Democrats running a gridlocked Washington that does little to improve their daily lives. Biden’s view on this is less clear: he recently told several newspaper columnists that it was “pretty questionable” that he has the authority to cancel all that debt.
“Democrats need to deliver,” Warren said. “No matter what. We have to use every tool, and we need to use it early, boldly, confidently, and unapologetically.”
Warren’s influence seems to have pushed Schumer into more liberal stances than I recall him taking. On student loan cancellation and on pushing for the $2,000 survival checks.
Warren’s occasional jabs at her own party usually stem from her desire to take on Wall Street. Soon after she was elected in 2012, she took on a Democratic compromise on student loan rates. “This whole system stinks,” she declared. Then in 2015 she tanked Antonio Weiss’ nomination to be a top Obama Treasury official because of his ties to the financial industry.
Then she battled with moderate Democrats in 2018 over a banking deregulation bill as they pursued reelection in red states. It resulted in painful internal debates, with Warren publicly lamenting “some of our teammates don’t even show up for the fight.”
It is not surprising that Warren hates Zoom calls. She would rather pace while on the phone. She’s got too much energy to sit still for long periods.
It might not be her accomplishment as senator, but now Warren has a counterpart in the House in Warren’s former student, Katie Porter of California. They both put the fear of God in hearing witnesses.
It’s good theater. But it’s not theater for theater’s sake. That sets them apart from many colleagues in both the House and Senate.
The Happy Hollandaise fundraiser goes through the end of the year so if you’re of a mind to kick in a little something below or at the snail mail address on the sidebar, you will help make 2021 brighter.
Perhaps Donald Trump can in his post-presidency become an advocate for people with ADD. Forming coherent sentences and staying on any topic other than himself for more than a minute or so is a challenge for him. His Tuesday tweet about Republicans’ death wish might have had more bite if he had been capable of developing the thought.
Trying to understand Trumpism is like asking a hoarder why she/he hoards. What are these for? Why are they here? Where did they come from? The questions assume there are rational answers when rationality has nothing to do with it. With Trump, his behavior is about more than psychological damage from his upbringing. It is about how his brain is wired.
For his followers, Trumpism is about how they feel. UC Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild tells The Atlantic‘s Derek Thompson that Trumpism “exists beyond the logic of policy“:
“If there’s one thing I think the mainstream press still gets wrong about Trump, it’s that they are comfortable talking about economics and personality, but they don’t give a primacy to feelings,” Hochschild told me. “To understand the future of the Republican Party, we have to act like political psychiatrists.”
Hochschild wrote in her 2016 book, “Strangers in Their Own Land” that there is a “deep story” playing out with a large faction of Americans:
The deep story went like this: You are an older white man without a college degree standing in the middle of a line with hundreds of millions of Americans. The queue leads up a hill, toward a haven just over the ridge, which is the American dream. Behind you in line, you can see a train of woeful souls—many poor, mostly nonwhite, born in America and abroad, young and old. “It’s scary to look back,” Hochschild writes. “There are so many behind you, and in principle you wish them well. Still, you’ve waited a long time.” Now you’re stuck in line, because the economy isn’t working. And worse than stuck, you’re stigmatized; liberals in the media say every traditional thing you believe is racist and sexist. And what’s this? People are cutting in line in front of you! Something is wrong. The old line wasn’t perfect, but at least it was a promise. There is order in the fact of a line. And if that order is coming apart, then so is America.
Hochschild tested this allegory with her Republican sources and heard that it struck a chord. Yes, they said, this captures how I feel. In the past few years, she’s kept in touch with several of her connections from the Deep South and keenly tracked their philosophical evolution. She’s watched the locus of their anxiety move from budgets (“They never talk about deficits anymore,” she told me) to the entrenched and “swampy” political class. She also witnessed the Trumpification of everything. “There used to be a Tea Party,” she said. “Now it’s all Trumpism.”
The logic of policy has nothing to do with it. Trump is a kind of dancing orange dinosaur who has captured the imaginations of his base. He gave shape to their feelings. He gave voice to them. Hochschild explains, “From his first rallies, Trump’s basic message has always been ‘I love you, and you love me, and we all hate the same people.’”
With the year now ending and Trump’s reign too weeks from now, Trump’s base could experience his political demise as a relationship with him broken up by Joe Biden. Or if Trump never leaves the scene, perhaps his exit will be an extended three days in the tomb after which they look for him to rise again. Either way, they will experience personal loss atop hating people they feel threaten their place in line. At some point it may even dawn on them that the American Dream on the other side of the ridge disappeared long ago. They have been waiting for nothing. They will want someone to blame.
If they have lost family members or jobs to Covid-19, their losses will be even more concrete. The losses of this year extend to people outside the Trump cult, to the 80 million-plus who voted for Biden, and to their families. This has been the worst year most of us have experienced. The lag in Covid vaccine distribution means 2020 won’t really be over until church choirs can sign again safely without masks.
We are all going to need psychiatrists in 2021, and not just political ones.
The Happy Hollandaise fundraiser goes through the end of the year so if you’re of a mind to kick in a little something below or at the snail mail address on the sidebar, you will help make 2021 brighter.
This is how you do it. You say it once, twice, three times. Maybe even Fox viewers will absorb it.
Ossoff often does a very good job on TV. If he manages to win this he will be an effective communicator.
It’s Happy Hollandaise time here at Hullabaloo. If you’d like to drop a little something in the old Christmas stocking you can do so here (or at the P.O. box shown in the sidebar):
These stories of naysayers getting COVID and then wondering how they got it are infuriating. It’s one thing for them to say “oops, I guess I got sick” is tragically unfair to the people who need the health care system they overwhelm and the innocent people they spread it to in their communities:
At least one person has been hospitalized for COVID-19 after attending an indoor Christmas dance party hosted by the Whitestone Republican Club earlier this month, the Eagle has learned.
James Trent, chair of the affiliated Queens Village Republican Club, was admitted to North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset where he is recovering from COVID-19, he said from his hospital room Wednesday morning.
Trent said he first began experiencing COVID symptoms two days after attending the Dec. 9 party, which featured a conga line of maskless patrons dancing to the BeeGees in a widely viewed video first reported by the Eagle.
Trent said he was surprised that he got COVID after attending the party because he “wasn’t doing anything risky.”
“I wasn’t on the conga line. I ate by myself,” he said. “I don’t know how I got this.”
When asked whether he regretted attending the party, Trent said it was an “interesting question.”
“It was a wonderful time and a great party, but I’m not happy I got sick,” he said.
Video of the Dec. 9 event shows about 50 attendees in an indoor catering room, with numerous maskless patrons on the dance floor at Il Bacco Ristorante in Little Neck. Former Queens Assembly candidate James Martinosky and current City Council candidate Vickie Paladino led the conga line through the crowd.
Only one attendee in the video appears to be wearing a mask as dancers go sans face covering in violation of COVID rules at the time.
Trent said he thought he “had a cold and then the flu” until he lost his sense of taste following the party. He went to the hospital because he lives alone and was afraid of growing more sick, he said. He was admitted but is in stable condition and expects to be released Thursday, he said.
Another attendee and his wife also tested positive for COVID-19 after the event, according to three people familiar with the couple. They have not yet responded to phone calls seeking comment, so the Eagle is withholding their names.
I hope that silly party was worth it to them. I just hope they didn’t participate in the spread of the virus to someone who didn’t have the choice.
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