2020, What Fresh Hells It Continues to Bring

Dorothy Parker, she must have seen 2020 coming

What fresh hell can this be? -- Dorothy Parker.

It is a question that sums up 2020 rather nicely. It has been especially true here in the San Francisco Bay Area at various times such as today when we have an awful combination of well above average heat and poor air quality stemming from wildfires. On days like today we can't go for walks and windows have to be closed to limit exposure to dirty, ashy, sometimes smelly air. It is as very close to hell as many of us have known, particularly when combined with suffering through a pandemic. 

Further compounding this depressing state of affairs is the state of the country. One hardly knows what to make of Trumpy testing positive for Covid-19 (guess it wasn't a hoax after all, eh prez?). As one person put it, it isn't karma, it's science. This happened two days after Trumpy disgraced the nation (what? again?) with his -- even-horrible-for-his-standards -- debate performance. I only saw highlights (lowlights?) and he came off like the angriest, most obnoxious drunk you've ever seen. As is his custom he spewed lies and added a double dosage of venom and combined that with extraordinary rudeness and lack of decorum. You can't make a guy like this up.

The tales of corruption coming out of the Trump family are never ending as is more evidence of callousness and vitriol. The level of bigotry would make John C. Calhoun blush. Trumpy could not even be arsed to condemn white supremacy. Hell, even notorious bigots like Nixon and Reagan would have pretended to oppose clown shows like The Proud Boys, a Neo Nazi group of wanna-be thugs who are a solid part of Trumpy's base.

It's been debilitating to much of America to live through the nearly four years of the Trumpy freak show. The incivility, the prevarications, the disregard for the environment, the demonization of immigrants, people of color and anyone who doesn't kowtow to the administration. It's all the worse because the Trumpy sickness has been enabled by the Republican Party which is as good an example as you'll find of greed, spinelessness and disregard for the general welfare. (If I had to/could punch anyone in the world it would be Moscow Mitch himself the turtle from Kentucky -- what a grade A asshole). The bastards are going to put a woman on the Supreme Court who Cotton Mather would have found too extreme.

Added to all this is Trumpy's supporters. He has many and they are fiercely loyal (imagine the mentality...). It's gotten to be impossible not to conclude that all these people are bigots and equally difficult to imagine that they have any conception of what a functioning democracy should look like. They are all either saps and suckers or the scoundrels who benefit from his tax and deregulation policies and care nothing for the hot polloi. 

Of course there's hope. The general election is just 32 days away and in addition to giving Trumpy a right proper thumping, there exists the strong possibility that the Democrats will take over the Senate. But even there we have a horrible feeling of hopelessness and despair for Trumpy and his partners in crime (and I mean crime literally) are working overtime to suppress the vote in advance and challenge it in the aftermath. Trumpy even wants thugs at polling stations to do god knows what -- it won't be good. Election Day and its aftermath might not end up being a statement of the people's will and perhaps won't lead to a peaceful transition of power but instead be a chaotic mess that will threaten the very foundations of democracy in the United States. There could be riots and killing and many, many lawsuits. I believe the appropriate word for what may follow the vote is, shitstorm.

So there's that to "look forward to."

On the bright side? Well I'm sure there's something. I'm far too depressed today to think of anything. There is a part of me that believes that it is always darkest before the dawn and things can only get better but those notions are having a hard time being heard among the din of hell that is 2020. Fortunately there are more and more people carrying the fight, determined to rid the country of Trumpiness and from their make social justice and equality realties. There are also entertainers. I'm particularly grateful to those who make me laugh. We all need good yuks in the best of times, now we are positively desperate for them. To name but a few, thank you Daniel Levy, Seth Myers, Chris Rock, George Wallace, Blaire Erskine, Sarah Cooper, Seth Rogen, Chelsea Handler, Trevor Noah, John Cleese, Ricky Gervais, John Oliver, Lewis Black and my good friends at Lonely Island. Also, happy Groucho Marx's 130th birthday. We could use a man like him today.

I close with something only tangentially related. It is an excerpt from an article that appeared in Commonweal Magazine last February and was written by a gent named David Bentley Hart. I think it a perfect expression of this country and how it is -- even in the best of times.

Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth. They know next to nothing as a rule about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know little or nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words like “socialism” and “capitalism.” Chiefly, what they have been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state, than do the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic institutions. This is at once the most comic and most tragic aspect of the excitable alarm that talk of social democracy or democratic socialism can elicit on these shores. An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded to believe that they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete. They are far more vulnerable to medical and financial crisis, far more likely to receive inadequate health coverage, far more prone to irreparable insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory creditors, far more subject to income inequality, and so forth, while effectively paying more in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local, and sales taxes, and then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this country, as almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover). One might think that a people who once rebelled against the mightiest empire on earth on the principle of no taxation without representation would not meekly accept taxation without adequate government services. But we accept what we have become used to, I suppose. Even so, one has to ask, what state apparatus in the “free” world could be more powerful and tyrannical than the one that taxes its citizens while providing no substantial civic benefits in return, solely in order to enrich a piratically overinflated military-industrial complex and to ease the tax burdens of the immensely wealthy?