My CoviDiary: 01/31/2021: OK, A Few Things

BY MAX BURBANK | I went to our small local grocery store this evening. Between me and the scallions were a young mother and her perhaps 12-year-old boy. They were deliberating over God knows what all and I could not get at the Scallions without getting quite close to them, which was not an option because they were both wearing their masks around their chins.

What’s the etiquette here? Can I tell them, as I want to, “Hey, I don’t mean to be rude, but as you linger over the produce, could you put your masks over the parts of your face involved in respiration? It’s required by law in this state, your chins don’t breathe, and while I really want SCALLIONS, I CAME here SPECIFICALLY for SCALLIONS, I don’t want to DIE FOR A FUCKING BUNCH OF SCALLIONS!!!”

I don’t think Emily Post would say that was OK, and not just because she’s been dead for 61 years, but who knows? Maybe if she’d lived to experience this pandemic she might have sprinkled her conversation with F bombs and endorsed shrieking at people in public places.

I did not yell at them. I stood there thinking about all the things I would yell at them if I were the sort of person who did things like that, and so passed the fifteen years it took them to come to some sort of agreement on what color bell peppers they would be purchasing.

Here are a few other things I took note of today:

One: I’m a little unclear on this whole Jewish Space Laser deal. Does this mean that I personally have one, or that as a Jew, I share with all other Jews, access to a Space Laser? I think that seems more likely. I mean, it’s true, as a Jew I of course have a huge pile of money, most of it coin, which I swim in like Scrooge McDuck (whose real name was Scrooge McDuckawitz, and he only puts on the Scottish accent to fool Nazis. Oh, you never heard him speak in anything but a Scottish accent? Well, what does that tell us about you?) But while I’m extremely rich, I’m not Space Laser rich.

My guess (and I’m guessing because I am SO bad about keeping up with my Secret Jewish Cabal E-newsletter) is that between us, we own a suite of Space Lasers circling the globe in multiple orbits. You know, for efficiency. And that probs there’s some sort of super complicated online sign up app that lets you reserve access to one of them at some specified future point. Like Boca Raton time-share?

It’s odd though, because when you think of the enormous power access to a frikkin’ SPACE LASER would grant you, it seems weird as hell the only time any of us ever used it was to spark massive “wildfires” in California. I mean, hello? Hollywood is in California! That’s where we control the entertainment industry from! Why would we burn that shit up?

The whole thing just seems implausible because if we had a space laser for reals, I just feel like Marjorie Taylor Greene would be… you know… crispier than she currently is?

Two: There was one last potential off ramp on the highway to hell for the GOP, and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy just blew by it on his way to Mar-a-lago to bend the knee and kiss the ring of the most disgraced president in American History. Oh, and also? He appointed the aforementioned Space Laser lady to the House Education and Labor Committee. Because apparently, nothing says “education” like calling deadly school shooting “False Flag” operations, Saying there’s no evidence a plane struck the Pentagon on 9/11 and endorsing the assassination of Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi.

Listen: Shit like this? It’s not a sign that the Republican party is unified. It’s a public announcement that it’s moribund.

Three: Former president Golfy McCombover’s ENTIRE legal team quit yesterday, less than two weeks before his impeachment trial begins. The kindest spin you could put on this is that they left because Trump had yet to pay them anything and there’s nothing to suggest that he ever would, so quitting is just a sensible business decision and does not in any way indicate that their client is a dim-witted loony,transparently guilty and insistent on a defense strategy that depends entirely on things he and his lawyers already know are demonstrable lies. This leaves us with three possible outcomes:

A.) Trump retains the pro-bono services of totally unknown lawyers willing to take on the case strictly for the fifteen minutes of fame it will provide and the historical footnote.

B.) Trump represents himself.

C.) Alan Dershowitz.

All of these possibilities are hilarious, or they would be if not for the fact that the Senate is going to acquit him. The majority of Republican Senators are arguing that impeaching a president who is out of office is unconstitutional, despite the fact that zero actual legal scholars agree. They have made up their minds that Trump will not be held accountable. If whoever agrees to represent Trump stood on the floor of the Senate and said, “My client is guilty” and then showed a video of Trump eating live human babies with a dipping sauce made from ducklings and baby bunnies he had personally run through an industrial juicer, the Senate would acquit, because that’s who they are now. Whatever you’d like to argue the GOP once was, it’s now the party that wants to oust Liz Cheney because she’s not monstrous enough.

My CoviDiary: 01/26/2021: A Path Forward is Now Visible, if Not Certain

BY MAX BURBANK | I would be remiss if I did not note that the inauguration of Joe Biden as the 46th President of the United States went off without a hitch since the last time I wrote an entry. It’s the kind of thing you’d think one would put in their diary on the day of, but I let you know right at the start of this project it wasn’t really a diary in the traditional sense. I need time for stuff to percolate. I only write in the moment when I’m really angry, and I wasn’t. Also, I’m very bad with rules and expectations, even when I put them on myself. Maybe especially.

Kamala Harris became so many magnificent firsts that day it’s hard to even frame the sentence, but since you all know what I’m talking about I don’t have to.

Amanda Gorman was an amazement in no way diminished by the feelings of inadequacy she evoked in me, considering that watching her made it remarkably clear that in my 58 years on earth I have done nothing whatsoever that clears a bar higher than basic bodily functions. I am not fishing for denials and compliments, I’m speculating I am not alone in this feeling. Hands if you agree. Be honest.

Bernie manifested as both the avatar of New England and the Platonic form of all Lefty Jewish Great Uncles Talking Way Too Loud At The Breakfast Table.

Podium wiper guy, who I have yet to identify, wiped the podium on the inaugural downbeats like an like the oldest member of a jazz brunch trio working the snare with wire brushes. I particularly enjoyed when he cut the Reverend Sylvester Beaman off on his way to deliver the benediction like a true New Englander speed walking through the parking lot of Dunkin donuts to get through the door before that other guy who parked his car the same time he did.

I am grateful.

For a number of hours that day I had an odd, unfamiliar, but not unpleasant feeling. I think it may have been happiness. While anxiety has certainly returned since then, it’s edge has been sanded to a relative smoothness I have not felt in years.

Mostly, more than anything else I am tired. I feel like I have spent this last year as a wine-skin full of cortisol masquerading as a person, constantly poised between fight and flight but unable to commit for so long now that experiencing the absence of either desire manifests only as exhaustion.

This is the 140th entry in My CoviDiary. I could have waited ‘til I hit 150 to make a pronouncement, but that’s not me. I got curious about how many and I’d written, so I counted and I told you. That’s the bulk of this diary right there. I wonder about something, I think on it and I write it down.

My first entry was on March 18 of last year in what seems like a neighboring universe. For the first two months I wrote and posted almost daily. Then very regularly for three more months, and then more and more sporadically, until recently it’s been quasi-weekly.

-END-

My CoviDiary: 01/18/2021: 2020 Never Ended

BY MAX BURBANK | Guys. I know it’s not just me. Everybody feels it, right?

2020 isn’t over. I mean, the date for New Years came and went, so 2021 theoretically started, but… It didn’t, did it?

Somehow that bastard-ass year reached out into January and carved a chunk of it off and just sucked it into itself. Just absorbed it. Like some Japanese body horror Manga or some shit.

Like, those threatening, direct-to-video style, poorly executed imitation Mafioso telephone extortion calls to various swing state officials? “Find me 11,780 votes”? “See you all January 6th, it’s going to be wild”? Insisting Pence overthrow the election? The violent siege on the US capitol? The fucking “My Pillow Guy” in the oval office advising Trump to declare martial law? THE MY PILLOW GUY?!? That happened this year but it’s still some seriously 2020 shit, right?

2020 has refused to concede.

I mean, good things have happened, yeah? Even around the point where 2020 was scheduled to end, good things were happening. Biden won. A vaccine exists. even if no plan was actually made to roll it out. And then in January, Warnock AND Ossoff won in Georgia? We got the Senate! With a black guy and a Jew! IN GEORGIA! And Mitch McConnell? The gelatinous, oozing blob fish in a suit Majority Leader is going to be the gelatinous, oozing blob fish in a suit MINORITY Leader! That’s momentous! And we’re going to have a first dog!! And OK, he broke Joe;s foot, but he’s a GOOD BOY! Look at him! He’s a good, good boy!

All decent American humans have a right to be over the damn moon. I want to be over the moon so much! But while I have had “over the moon” moments, I gotta be honest… none of them have lasted more than a couple of minutes. Because of everything else. And because I am so anxious about how much more 2020 there’s going to be before 2021 can actually begin.

The inauguration is in ONE AND A HALF DAYS! And I am trying so hard not to think about the sliding scale of horror that could take place because there is not one damn thing I could do to impact it in any way at all. So dwelling on the fact that the Pentagon feels (and lord knows I agree with them) that every armed soldier who’s going to be anywhere near the capitol needs to be vetted because each one of them poses a potential and credible threat; or that all of DC is locked down like a damn war zone?… Beyond curbing my appetite and helping me lose a few COVID quarantine pounds… it doesn’t help.

So maybe 2021 begins sometime between noon and 1:00 on January 20th. That’d only be a little more than half a month late. Not too bad, right? Baby New Year’s sash would be a little tight, but it would still fit, wouldn’t it?

Except I don’t think 2021 can really start then. Because the “man” who will by then be the MINORITY LEADER of the senate didn’t think the trial of the only president in American history to be IMPEACHED TWICE was reason enough to call a special session, so they won’t be back in town until the night before. Theoretically, Trump’s trial could start the same day as the inauguration.

So the very first thing that’s going to happen during the Biden administration is Trump’s trial. And the rules are, ALL Senators must be present for such a trial, so nothing but the trial is going to get done until it’s over. And there is a shit load to get done. For every minute action is delayed, people are going to die. Not metaphorically.

Don’t get me wrong. I was all for impeachment and it’s not like I thought MItch would be accommodating about a trial date. If Trump isn’t held accountable (and by that I mean forced through this process, not any specific outcome, because it’s not like Republicans in the Senate have magically become better people), future presidents will take the message that as long as it’s close enough to the end of your term, you can get up to any sort of treachery that amuses you with no fear of the consequences. Pardon yourself, launch an air strike on a sovereign nation, eat a living, human baby…

AND there are all sorts of possible outcomes worth holding out for. The Senate could declare Trump ineligible to run again, that would be nice. and maybe necessary for the continued existence of life on the planet. He could be barred from receiving intelligence briefings. I’m less worried about that than a lot of people, because he never wanted them when he was president, he can’t pay attention, and anything he might remember, he won’t understand. It’s hard to sell information when potential buyers know you’re an idiot who lies all the time with the attention span of a concussed goldfish and you know nothing about… well, anything. Besides, why should that corpulent fuck get any briefings at all after he’s president when he generally refused them when he was? It’s the principle of the thing!

But the price is, it’s going to slow things down. It’s going to mean Biden can’t hit the ground running.

And after the trial is over, and Biden can move forward with control of both houses and for the first time in YEARS, something, anything is going to get done, and then… and then…

Who knows,man? Who the fuck knows?

It can’t go back to normal, even if we want it to. Way too much has happened. Normal is over. And here’s what else, here’s what if 2020 didn’t teach you, you’re just too fucking stupid to be worth teaching… the before time? IT WASN’T NORMAL!

The Obama years were the best thing anybody like you or me could have hoped for, it was a miracle that we got it, and it was beautiful, but right under the surface… right under our feet… there was a wild river of insane, awful, burning shit, literal sewage, racing along, eating the ground right out from under us and like it or not… That burning shit river is every bit as intrinsically American as the Obama administration. And now that we know about it, nothing can ever be the same, things can’t go back to normal, because they never were.

And… uh… when I said “we” back there? In “Now that we know about it”?

I meant White people. Because I’m pretty sure everybody else already knew. I’m pretty sure a lot of people have been trying to get us to take it seriously for a long time.

And I did know, of course I did, it’s just… it didn’t ever think it was this bad. I didn’t imagine it was this close to the surface, that in just four years we could get… here. I thought we were a lot better than this. And I was wrong.

Maybe 2021 is just gonna sneak up on us. Like one day you’ll be walking along and realize, well shit, it’s been a while now when I open my computer, whatever bad thing happened a week ago is still the bad thing we’re focused on. It hasn’t been erased by a series of worse and worse things eclipsing it until I can’t recall what that last bad thing even was! I got the first dose of vaccine and I have reason to believe I will get another, on schedule, and I won’t find it got diverted to an elite group of red state evangelical preachers, pillow tycoons, sports heroes and secret society Grand Hoo-Hahs who are at this very moment injecting it into each others asses while they eat braised lark’s tongues and drink that alcohol with the flakes of actual gold in it at a masquerade ball aboard a secret yacht anchored off the outer banks. I’m back working full time, it may be safe to see a movie in a few months… I guess it’s been 2021 for a while and I was still too tense to notice.

Remember that old joke? Doc, you gotta help me, I’m a wigwam, I’m a teepee, and the Doc says, I see what the problem is, you’re two tents.

I always found that joke hilarious, but in the context of the genocide indigenous people almost invariably face when they encounter a society with more advanced technology, it’s less so. On the other hand, pointing out that juxtaposition is some very sophisticated humor. And you get to use the word “juxtaposition” in a sentence.

Shit. Maybe we can just skip 2021 entirely and go straight to 2022.

I have a good feeling about 2022.

I think it’s gonna be a great year.

-END-

My CoviDiary: 01/08/2021: Are You Bored? How About a Steaming Bowl of Hillbilly Coup and a Nice Glass of Insurrection?

BY MAX BURBANK | I am so very tired of watching history unfurl. It’s exhausting. I don’t want any more unprecedented times.

It isn’t all bad. It was good to see the first African American President in my lifetime. That was a nice bit of history to live through. But the unprecedented event before that unprecedented event that was reading the graphic details of what Bill Clinton did with a cigar in the Boston Globe, and then Bush Vs. Gore where Roger Stone executed the dry run for this week’s festivities, and 9/11, and the invasion of Iraq and now?  It’s been pretty much a daily rollercoaster of spectacularly unprecedented fuckery ever since, hasn’t it?

Remember when Sean Spicer’s hissing, viscerally enraged denial that Trump’s inaugural crowd was smaller than Obama’s seemed…  unprecedented? And it was! That a press secretary’s very first official act would be not just to lie about something anyone could see was a lie, but that he’d defend that transparent lie so vigorously?! Sean was ready to throw hands! It seems quaint, doesn’t it? Wouldn’t it be sweet if Wednesday afternoon Trump had just thrown a roll of paper towels at some people who’d just survived an enormous natural disaster instead of instigating a riot?

I was already writing something that day. It was going to be called My Day Measured in Bursts of Anxiety, and it started like this:

“All times and veracity of reporting approximate, as much of this entry was written by recollection, not in the moment, and the entire piece has been rewritten, as has everything in My CoviDiary. I don’t post first drafts. And second (and successive) drafts are subject to poetic license, which is a lovely thing phrase that means lying.”

It wasn’t a bad start. It really could have been pretty good. I had the whole thing mapped out, but it never got written because my eldest daughter was pounding on the door at the bottom of the attic steps (I like to write in the attic, as it helps me to pretend I am an eccentric, enigmatic, attic genius) telling me to come down, because one of the things I was going to write about my anxiety regarding was coming true.

Not precisely. My anxieties are a bit more free floating than that. It was more a general anxiety over what the crowds of lathered fanatical dimwits drawn to DC and looking for trouble might do. I don’t think storming the Capitol building was on my list, and if perhaps some version of it was, storming the Capitol Building successfully was definitely not. And of course that isn’t what she said, she didn’t say “You have to come downstairs because one of your anxieties is coming true!” I wear my anxieties on my sleeve, but that is not the same thing as sharing them specifically.

It took me a bit to get around to writing about it. I don’t feel too bad about that, it’s a lot to process. I didn’t take that much longer to respond than Donald Trump did.

Well. He responded twice before I did. To be fair, his responses were much shorter than mine, the first was entirely unscripted and I’m quite certain it was off the top of his head, first draft only, and his two responses are, you know, diametrically opposed. Like, in his first response he mostly talks about how the election was stolen from him, something he’s as adamant about as Sean Spicer was about the relative size of his inaugural crowd, and for which he has offered the same amount of evidence, i.e. ZERO. You can’t see his video anymore, all the platforms took it down which was the right thing to do, but unfortunately it lets his follow up the next day stand alone, so you can’t see how the two videos say almost exactly opposite things. (SIDEBAR! Between the first and second draft of this piece, Titter banned trump PERMANENTLY and HOLY SHIT, that tiny, distant sequel you hear is the sound of him screaming all the way from WASHINGTON DC, but I didn’t know that when I blocked this piece out, so for the purposes of this article, pretend you don’t know. Unless you didn’t know in which case HOLY SHIT, RIGHT?! I mean, lord knows I don’t care but he must be having a screaming, blue face NOSE BLEED, SIDEBAR ENDS!!)

Ahem.

To be helpful, here’s the full text of the first video:

“I know your pain, I know you’re hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election and everyone knows it, especially the other side. But you have to go home now… This was a fraudulent election, but we can’t play into the hands of these people. We have to have peace. So go home. We love you, you’re very special.”

We love you… You’re… very special.

Jeez, get a room, you… you… president and… huge, angry mob with no regard for life, law, fashion or democracy.

See,  to me this says: “I get you. Busting into the Capitol during a joint session of congress, breaking windows, putting your feet upon people’s desks and shit, terrifying people who justifiably wonder if maybe you’re going to kill them…you’re hurt and confused, it’s a pretty normal thing to do when you feel that way. Hey, you’re mad. Me too. They’re trying to take me away from you, and so you want to kill them, but you’re good guys, so you’ll settle for stealing podiums and as will later be reported by local press, peeing and smearing your poops on the walls like the kind of babies even their Moms want to send back. Probably most of you didn’t do that, but listen, those of you who did… let’s just say I’m going to miss you most of all. If I go. Which I’m not. So stop for now. No harm, no foul, right fellas? Maybe later.”

But nobody rioting or wandering around the building in Duck Dynasty cosplay or bare chested in a fake fur buffalo skin complete with horns and ‘Murica face paint could hear any of that anyone, ‘cause there was zero internet going on. Demand was too high, or the Russians were blocking it, or Antifa had an anti-internet ray or something. And by the time things were up and running again and folks had a chance to check their phones while ignoring the curfew, shoving cops and not getting arrested, you know, just enjoying the lack of beatings that comes along with being white, Twitter had restricted Trump’s video message and then taken it down. They gave Trump a twelve hour suspension and told him they wouldn’t let him back on at all until he deleted the Tweets they felt most encouraged folks to get their terrorism on. Which is honestly probably the most severe consequence Trump has had for anything since his Dad shipped him off to military school for being an impossible little fuck and unbearable to be around.

We’ll never know exactly what went down with Trump before he posted the first video,  after he told the assembled crowd of absurd hooligans to march on the Capitol and that he would be right there with them, shoulder to shoulder and not fucking back off home to the White House instead, which is what he did.  Word is he threw something of a sustained nutty, that he was “entirely out of his mind” and a “complete monster” and this is coming from his closest friends and advisors. We know he initially refused  to issue any sort of a statement as his followers ambled freely about the Rotunda and offices, while the entire rest of the world was glued to their televisions, watching the mob on the steps churning like agitated carpenter ants. We couldn’t look away, it was like it was the OJ White Bronco slow chase but fatter and more toothless and beardy and studded with yellow “Don’t step on my snake, it’s already broken” flags. His allies begged him via Twitter to do something, playing to his ego, saying Trump was the only one the crowd would listen to, the only voice that could restore peace, but he wasn’t listening. All he wanted to talk about was how the next time he saw Mike Pence he was going to pull his spine out through his ass and beat him to death with it. I’m not saying those were his exact words. But I bet I’m close.

I’m not sure of the timeline (I could look it up, but that’s not the sort of person I am or the sort of writing this is), but eventually the DC police arrived and at some point thereafter the National Guard. I know Virginia and Maryland sent theirs, as apparently DC can’t call in their own since they’re not a state, the president has to authorize it, or someone in the executive branch, and the discussion there was more focused on the amount of specific torque and leverage it would take to get Pence’s spine out via his ass, and would the skull pop off and remain behind, or come along liked the spiked ball on the end of a chain. The DC police got there first and were sufficient to clear the building  and secure it with almost no arrests and only, what, four, five fatalities? Whatever the case, it turns out Trump’s bon mots weren’t the only thing that could turn the tide. Once they figured out it was scientifically possible to use tear gas on a majority white crowd, things eventually settled down.

Well, there was quite a bit of hullabaloo over the next twenty-four or so hours. Congress got back to work certifying the electoral count that everybody already knew everything about, but gracious, were some of them mad? Laws, yes they were.

A number of folks had some very unkind things to say about our president, and not just the usual suspects. Why, Senate Majority leader for the next week or so and part time  creature from The Shape of Water  if it spent 40 years in it’s confinement tank on a diet of Frito brand corn chips and white asparagus Jell-O salad impersonator Mitch McConnell had been using some pretty sharp words before the unwashed Visigoth horde made him wet his trousers.

And Lindsey Graham? He was all, like, “Enough is enough! It’s been  great ride since I abandoned every principle and friend I pretended to have right up till the moment you won the presidency; we had a lot of good golf and a whole buncha chuckles about how mad people got over silly stuff like separatin’ babies from their families, and not wearin’ masks ‘cause for a while there we really thought the ‘Rona was only gonna kill blue city Jews n’ Darks, but now that you only got a couple of weeks left on the job, ya’ll have suddenly outa nowhere gone too far! This is one little Remora fish that’s gonna detach its sucker mouth from your giant, pearlescent, shark’s belly and look for the next big ass shark to come a’swimmin’ by! Who’s polishin’ mah Profile in Courage, boys? It was fun, but Lindsey OUT, know what I mean? Ahm kickin ol’ Trumpy to the curb for his wickedness, and I surely won’t change my mind about that  unless by some miracle things start to go the president’s way again. No harm, no foul, am I right, ehvabuddy?”

Well, next thing you know Twitter is all like “We’re deleting your video because your apology wasn’t an apology at all and also we just realized you’re dangerous as fuck and besides, you won’t even be president in about two weeks and honestly, you’ve been pretty predictable and boring lately.” And then some of Melania’s staff resigned, which is super significant in that they don’t honestly matter in any actual way, and no one has any idea what they even do besides say “I know, right?!!” when Melania says something anti-Semitic so there isn’t an awkward pause. And the Elaine Chao resigned, the moral significance of which is in no way diminished by the fact that Trump would no more have allowed Mitch McConnell’s wife to stay in the cabinet then he’d let Tiffany spend the night at the White House. And Betsy DeVos quit because how could she stay when she’s known to have a very strict moral code that she always adheres to except for alternate Tuesdays, which are cheat days on which she can eat one live baby and it doesn’t use up any points. I mean, a lot of major, powerful Republicans people totally know and care about are drawing a line!

And sure, not everybody feels that encouraging missing links to desecrate the halls of Congress and party like it’s 1814 changes everything. I mean, you have to give Josh Hawley credit. I just think he believes strongly that if you get knocked off your Hitler Youth Pony and you don’t get right back up, how committed were you to riding a Hitler Youth Pony in the first place?

And Matt Gaetz (who is engaged, to a woman, so that puts the lie to all those nasty rumors about a grown man with a secret adopted younger but still fully grown son, doesn’t it?!) rightly points out that we don’t know for certain that every single marauder was a right wing, proud boy, Q-anon, incel, meth addicted white supremacist, poorly shaved bigfoot. Some of them could have been secret ANTIFA BLM Socialist infiltrators making it look like super friendly Trump Christian boy scouts were doing naughty things on a perfectly innocent field trip to Our Nation’s Capitol. And the fact that fanatical Trump dead enders have been telling each other on Parler to disguise themselves as ANTIFA for the last month doesn’t change that analysis at all, because everybody knows Matt Gaetz is in no way so blindingly stupid it’s a wonder he doesn’t just die because he forgot you have to do the breathing thing like, all the time.

So Trumpy deleted some offending tweets and made a brand new video in which he said all the appropriate shit about crime being bad and violence never being the answer and all lawbreakers being punished to the full extent of the law even if the were white and not Democrats, pretty much the exact opposite of his first video, the one that was gone now, so even though there were plenty of copies of it out there, he could pretty much pretend he’d never said a bunch of homegrown terrorists drenched in Axe Body Spray and loneliness were “very special.” And then he gave medals of freedom to a bunch of golfers, so it’s all normal again, nothing to see here, we’re all good, right?

Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer tried to get Pence the phone to plead with him to invoke the 25th amendment. After keeping them on hold for almost half an hour, he decided not to take their call. They are now in the process of drafting articles of impeachment. Should the president be impeached for a second time, if convicted he would be ineligible to run for a second term in 2024. If nothing else, that alone might entice a few Republican senators thinking of running themselves to get on board. It’s the kind of thing president Trump might have considered before throwing gasoline on the fire if he wasn’t batshit crazy and completely self absorbed.

I struggled trying to find a tone for this piece. Despite my jokes, I understand there’s nothing at all funny in what happened, what’s happening. It’s stark and desolate, deeply sad and surreal, like Fellini made a movie of a Samuel Becket play and then rubbed your beck with coarse sandpaper while you watched it.

I listened to Robyn Hitchcock’s “I Often Dream of Trains” as I wrote this. It’s by turns haunting and solemn, raucous and absurd, and  it’s one of my most favorite albums. It’s ethereal and dream-like, allowing me to achieve a certain aloof distance that made it possible for me to write about this at all. In closer to the event, watching video of the swarming, screaming mob smashing in windows with their bare, unprotected hands, wandering the statue hall in their Mad Max costumes like the halls of congress were their own personal, poorly executed Lord of the Flies theme park; Taking selfies, livestreaming, everyone maskless and packed together indoors just as if the pandemic wasn’t suffocating 4000 more people to death. This is where we are at right now.

Thirty some odd years ago I stood on a little stage at a summer camp in the Adirondacks where I had gone as a child and then worked as an adult for… well, a decade. Two young ladies I had known since they were children and I performed a song from the same album I’m listening to as I write this. I feel as if I am then and now simultaneously. I can hear our a capella version of a piece called Uncorrected Personality Traits, I can feel the base line vibrating up through my throat.  It’s funny as hell, if a little gloomy in it’s outlook on human nature. It’s laughing at the dark. The harmonies are complicated, disjointed, unexpected and beautiful.

“Uncorrected personality traits,

that seem whimsical in a child,

may prove to Be ugly

in a fully grown adult.”

A decade as a camp counselor, even at a creative arts camp in the Adirondacks, is maybe a few more years than makes a great marker of mental health. When I find something I’m really OK with, It’s very difficult to let go and walk away. The world could be a scary and uncertain place back then, and it doesn’t seem to be getting less so.

The memory of that performance, (and I can hear those harmonies in my head winding around each other like the bristling hemp ropes of a macramé plant hanger woven by a precocious child), is one a touchstone memory, and anchor I can summon and hang on to when I need it. It’s not a long song, just a perfect couple of minutes. I hold that memory in one hand, and in the other there’s the video I just watched of a man about the age I was then in a fake buffalo skin, horns and all. His face is painted a clumsy red, white and blue;  folk tattoos misappropriated and reassigned to signify allegiance to some white supremacist lodge scrawled across his naked abdomen, head back, howling in glee over breaking into the grown up place against the rules and peeing, PEEING in the corner!

If I don’t hold both images at once, I can’t write honestly about either one. They illuminate each other from disparate points on my personal timeline in a way that allows me to make a thing out of what’s happening instead of just staring at it slack jawed, vacant and stunned. It lets me tell the little jokes that transform historical cul-de-sacs like this one into something tolerable. Because it turns out I’m just as inclined to cling inexorably to the most uncomfortable moments as I am brief moments of subtle, unexpected harmony. But if I find a way to make some thing out of them, something I can work on until it feels acceptable, something I can finish as much as anything ever really gets finished… then I can allow myself to set it down and walk away.

-END-

My CoviDiary: 01/04/2021: Breaking News!

BY MAX BURBANK | President Donald Trump today awarded the Medal of Freedom to one of his most vocal political allies who defended him throughout his impeachment, a contractor size black garbage bag of raw sewage, beef offal and rotting vegetables with large googly eyes hot-glued to it.

The bag, a top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, which worked closely with the President to undermine the Justice Department’s Russia investigation by sitting, leaking, stinking, and rolling its eyes when jiggled, was awarded the medal at a ceremony closed to the press, according White House deputy press secretary Judd Deere.

“We went with closed doors because the president didn’t want to be bothered with a lot of questions during such a solemn ceremony,” said Deere, “about… you know… the decision to award America’s highest civilian honor to a bag of garbage. Plus, the… uh… the smell. So we closed the doors.”

A White House statement announcing that the bag of sewage, offal and decaying vegetable matter would get the medal mostly credits the Bag for its efforts defending the President and leaving small but unspeakably foul, greasy little puddles wherever it was set down, even briefly.

Though Medal of Freedom ceremonies have almost always included crowds and press during Trump’s time in office — including during the coronavirus pandemic—the Bag’s medal ceremony was not disclosed on Trump’s public schedule for the day and the media was not allowed to enter the event. Multiple sources who spoke on background indicated Trump did not want a lot of fuss for the bag, since the award was meant primarily to devalue the entire concept, and photos would have just gone to the Bag’s head, encouraging it to think it was something special and not just a big bag of shit kept around because it irritated and horrified people.

Trump is also expected to bestow the medal to another impeachment ally, an old urinal cake he had an aid fish out of a gas station restroom on his way to work, multiple sources told CNN.

Those are just two of the inanimate objects amid a slew of others that have caught the president’s eye by evoking visceral responses of revulsion. Trump has often used the Medal of Freedom to reward his allies, whether they be financial, political or concrete physical props representing his contempt for the office of the presidency and the public in general. He now appears prepared to do so again before leaving office, even though he has not yet publicly acknowledged his election loss to President-elect Joe Biden.

“I’m working on a thing where I’m going to do a medal ceremony, but with a twist,” said the president. “No recipient. Instead I’m just gonna throw the medal on the stage, drop my trousers and take a dump on it. You know, just in case people don’t get where I’m going with this, and so if any future president ever wants to give one of these to somebody, he’s gotta know all anyone will be able to think about is me squatting over it and laying a deuce.”

My CoviDiary: 01/03/2021: Trump Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop

BY MAX BURBANK | This is my first entry of the New Year, and it would have been fun to have fun. Write something amusing and apolitical about New Year’s resolutions and how I’m not going to do them, or make a list of resolutions that I have for other people, or maybe wax a bit on how the planet being in the same location in space it was 365 days ago is true every day, not just New Year’s Day, and it’s seems like a pretty arbitrary and flimsy rational upon which to decide to draw a line and say, “Well this year certainly isn’t going to suck like last year did!”

No such luck. The remains of the GOP are still led by possessed, dehydrated orange rinds sewn together into the semblance of a man, and they have decided not to let up on the jarring, sledgehammer blows they are delivering to the pillars of democracy for even an instant before the White House gets fumigated, sterilized ,and decontaminated in preparation for its new tenants.

I’m not even going to talk about the recording of Trump’s desperate, puling, groveling assault on the Republican Secretary of State of Georgia, wherein he is exposed committing the crime of desperately begging another man to commit crimes for him. I won’t mention that even had he succeeded, even if Brad Raffsenberger could somehow “find” 11,780 uncounted votes for Trump in a credible and arguably legal fashion and throw Georgia’s 16 electoral votes to Trump BIDEN WOULD STILL BE THE WINNER because that would still leave Trump with only 248 electoral votes WHICH ISN’T ENOUGH TO WIN!!

I will only say this about the phone call; It featured Trump saying:

“That’s what  we are working on… very stringently.”

That’s what we are working on…

Very… stringently.

That sentence is an act of barbarism against the English language that cannot be allowed to stand. There is no pardoning that sentence. If I could give the death sentence to a sentence I would sentence that sentence to death. And I mean that with the utmost stringency.

I am more concerned with a letter written to, and published by, the Washington Post this morning. It was signed by all 10 living former Secretaries of Defense, and it declares, quite forcefully, that the election is over and that Joseph Biden is the President Elect of the United States of America.

Dick Cheney, James Mattis, Mark Esper, Leon Panetta, Donald Rumsfeld, William Cohen, Chuck Hagel, Robert Gates, William Perry and Ashton Carter all signed that letter, and  I will be the first to admit, I cannot remember who Ashton Carter is. For an instant pictured former child singing sensation Aaron Carter in the situation room. I looked him up and found that he is now in his late 30s and has upsetting face and neck tattoos that I do not care for. Perhaps you imagined Ashton Kutcher. You sail your mind boat, I’ll sail mine. None of that matters. There are two aspects of this letter that very much do.

There are many Republicans on that list, but two names stand out in particular: Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. These are, and I say this with no hyperbole, two of the most singularly evil men to serve in the executive branch in all of American history prior to the Trump administration. Both these people (and I use the term loosely here) are war criminals. I’d say arguably, but any argument against that statement must be made in the absence of a working understanding of what the words “War” and “Criminal”–and the designation “War Criminal–mean.

Rumsfeld was Secretary of Defense under George W. Bush, a man widely agreed to be the worst president ever until Donald Trump’s tenure recast him by comparison as a kindly if odd old uncle who gives candy to former first ladies and likes to paint. You know who else liked to paint? Hitler. Rumsfeld presided over the invasion of Iraq on the entirely false premise that they possessed and intended to use weapons of mass destruction. It is almost certain he knew this was not true, and when it was publicly established to be false, he publicly did not care. He delighted in mocking the press and the people of America by saying things like, “Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know,” when what he really meant was ,“Death and suffering entertains me. I feast on them and lick their grease from my fingers to better appreciate their succulence.”

Cheney served as Vice President in the same administration, though it is generally understood he was running the country, as W. was a congenital dimwit, who it should be recalled was hard-pressed to defeat a pretzel in open combat. If you’re too young to remember what I am talking about, Google “George W. Bush Pretzel.” You’ll be amused, and I cherish the thought we were ever so innocent as to think things like that were worth focusing on, even if just for grins. While he was Vice President, Dick Cheney shot a man in the face, and when it was clear his friend was going to survive, made him go on national television and apologize for getting in the way of his rifle. Cheney is also notable for being immortal. While he is alleged to be 79, seasoned demonologists and monster hunters can confirm he is thousands of years old, though in his time on earth has suffered over 15,000 heart attacks. He cannot die because he is inarguably damned, and the Devil is terrified of him.

Both these terrible men signed this letter. They signed it because while they used to be two of the most monstrous men ever to work in American Government, they are rank amateurs compared to dozens of people who work directly for Trump or occupy office in the current Republican wings of the House of Representatives and the Senate. If Rumsfeld and Cheney left more of a mark on American history then this collection of motley boobs will, it is because of their competence, not the depths of their soulless depravity.

Both Rumsfeld and Cheney, men who by rights should be used to frighten naughty children into eating their vegetables and going to bed on time, feel strongly that the Trump administration has GONE TOO FAR AND POSES A LEGITIMATE DANGER TO THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. Both these men feel that Donald Trump needs to shut the hell up, get the hell out of the way and hand the leadership of this country over to the duly elected DEMOCRATIC candidate who WON THE ELECTION, Joseph Biden–because these two utterly vile, blood-soaked, walking assaults on human decency place a higher value on the continuance of American Democracy than every single member of Trump’s Dead End, Alternative Fact, Flat Earth, Tin Foil Hat, Kraken-Licken’, White Supremacist, Keystone Klansmen, Penny-Anti Bargain Basement Fascist Coalition.

Suck on that for a while. It’s a weird and unsettling taste, the flavor of just how far off the fucking map this country has gotten.

AND THAT’S JUST ASPECT NUMBER ONE OF THE TWO ASPECTS OF THE LETTER TO THE POST THAT CONCERN ME!! You know, in case you’d forgotten what I was writing about, which, full disclosure, I had until I went back and re-read what I’d written after realizing I had no idea where on my thought train my seat was located.

So, Aspect Number Two: Why now?

I don’t mean to sound ungrateful. I surely am, for history if nothing else. This letter is now a document of record for people to look back upon, assuming Trump and company are thwarted and there are people on earth free enough to look back on letters of record.  But why not weeks ago? Why not after the battle of Four Seasons Total Landscaping? Why not after the release of the Kraken? Why not after all 50 states verified their votes, or after the Supreme Court kicked Trump in his legal nuts, or barring that, why not after the Supreme Court returned to kick Trump’s legal nuts a second time, for good measure?

Former Secretaries of Defense are privy to information, through channels both formal and informal, that others are not. I would speculate that the matters addressed by their letter have become urgent and immediate enough that all 10 of them, one of whom was Trump’s own Secretary of Defense, agreed they needed to speak with one voice right now.

In one respect, their letter was to the American people. But it had a more specific audience, and if it was not clear, William Cohen, a Republican who served as Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defense, went on CNN and said, “We felt it was incumbent on us as having served in the Defense Department to say: Please all of you in the Defense Department, you’ve taken an oath to serve this country, this Constitution, not any given individual.”

I believe they believe that Donald Trump intends to give orders to the military to support his continued presidency. I don’t think, and I do not think they think, it will work. I don’t they believe that Trump’s entreaties will work on the military any more than they did on Brad Raffensperger, or the other Secretaries of State across this country, or the governors, or the courts, or the three Supreme Court Justices Trump himself hand-picked. I think the former Secretaries are making a statement by sending a message to the armed forces saying they believe he is going to ask. They believe that in his role as Commander-in-Chief, he is going to order. And they are reminding everyone in the military, from the stooges Trump has left in charge of the Pentagon, to the joint chiefs of staff, to the generals, to the lowest-ranked enlisted man, they do not have to obey those orders. In fact, it is their duty to disobey them. Because they did not swear loyalty to Donald Trump. They swore it to the Constitution.

Trump lost the election. He lost multiple recounts. He lost dozens of court cases and appeals. He lost his attempt to veto the Defense Spending Bill. He’s lost so many times, he has to be tired of losing by now, but he just can’t quit. And now he’s teeing up his biggest loss yet.

Ten former Secretaries of Defense, from different parties, different walks of life, different political philosophies, and running the gamut from decent, upright citizens to rude beasts only recently retired from slouching their way towards Bethlehem, are pretty sure he’s going to lose this one last, biggest time.

But it never hurts to hedge your bets.

-END-

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