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A mid-winter’s ramble

Not meaning to summon the Ghost of Fundraisers Past, but this morning Digby’s “The Art of the Hissy Fit” from October 2007 was on my mind and a Christmas pitch from 2012 was the first link a quick search found. It came to mind in pondering how many hissy fits there are to come in the early months of the new Biden-Harris administration. As if the coronavirus death toll and its other torments were not enough.

Timothy Egan at the New York Times likens the winter months ahead to Lewis and Clark’s stay on the Oregon coast in the winter of 1805-1806. The Corps of Discovery hunkered down near what would become Astoria and saw only about a dozen days without rain.

Clark wrote of their winter, “O! How disagreeable is our Situation dureing this dreadful weather.” And so with us:

During the coronavirus pandemic, the number of adults exhibiting symptoms of depression has tripled, and alcohol consumption has risen. We are prisoners of our homes and our minds, Zoom-fatigued, desperate for social contact. As a nation, we are diminished and exhausted, and millions remain out of work.

Further, it has been a long fall from that crude but egalitarian vote at the mouth of the Columbia to one that is among the nadirs of democracy, when 60 percent of Republican House members joined a court effort this month to negate the sovereign right of the people to elect their leaders. Vladimir Putin acknowledged Joe Biden’s victory before Mitch McConnell did.

It’s equally troubling that Biden won the popular vote by 7 million, but came within 43,000 votes of losing the election because of the anti-democratic relic of the Electoral College.

The Corps of Discovery made it back without losing a person (one man died during the westward half of the expedition). They fared well once they emerged from their long winter. We, on the other hand, face a brutal early spring. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation projects that more than 500,000 Americans likely will have died from Covid-19 by the end of March.

This forever is Trump’s legacy “for centuries to come,” tweets Eric Feigl-Ding, Senior Fellow at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington DC. And more.

Misinformation about the disease robotically repeated by Trump’s cult has been one of the enduring irritants. Instant experts in the science of respiration confidently — nay, defiantly —tell us masks are useless, even harmful as they refuse them and spread the disease in their communities. No sooner had the masked vice president received his inoculation on camera Friday to reassure Americans the vaccines are safe than his boss retweeted a right-wing radio host questioning the effectiveness of masks.

Adding to the anti-science tropes from the cult, from Trump’s Republican enablers, and from armchair statisticians is misinformation that COVID-19 isn’t really that deadly compared to flu. They are wrong, of course. It is five times more deadly for hospitalized patients, and 305,000 to 320,000 official American deaths so far this year (depending on who’s counting) lend credence to that. Not including the still-incomplete excess deaths associated with COVID tracked by the CDC. Those might push the death count to 400,000 once factored in.

But Trump supplicants are running out of fingers to stick in the dike holding back the reality of his epic, deadly failure. Beside deaths, the long-term effects for survivors of the virus are still not well understood. Some are irreversible. Kidney (and other organ) damage perhaps requiring dialysis or transplants. Or amputation as happened to a White House staffer. Or permanent brain damage.

All of it dismissed as “not that bad” or a hoax or an infringement on personal freedom by believers committed more to their liege lord than to their country or their communities. What is the loss of a foot or a kidney compared to protecting He Trump from having his makeup smeared?

Even so, FDA authorized a second vaccine to fight the virus on Friday. The rollout will have the major hitches we have come to expect from the Trump administration. And one cannot help but wonder if the unexplained shortages reported this week might have more to do with someone in the administration not getting his kickbacks than with disorganization. Still, the “unprecedented scientific feat” might just be the Christmas miracle the world needs.

Egan concludes his Lewis and Clark reverie:

Still, we look to the spring, as did they. We rely on our ingenuity, as did they. Even as we mourn the dead, we cheer the first people to get a shot in the arm. “I feel like healing is coming,” said Sandra Lindsay, the Long Island nurse who had the distinction of becoming the first to be vaccinated on our shores, after getting her coronavirus inoculation.

We cling to the coming spring because it’s far better than thinking about tomorrow’s dreary sameness. We look forward to a new president and the return of the simple joy of human touch.

The Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center at Cape Disappointment, Ore. is, like so many other government installations, closed until further notice due to the pandemic.

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:


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