My CoviDiary: 12/302020: Panning for Schadenfreude at 2020’s End

BY MAX BURBANK | Once Upon a Time, we thought there was a very bad year.

Memory has become difficult. I don’t mean it is painful to engage, though of course it is. I mean recently remembering has become hard to do. As if the muscles of recall have become atrophied, or badly bruised.

It’s not surprising. Imagine, say, that you were caught unaware by a Tsunami, that a terrible wave swept you up, tumbled you over and over until the idea of up and down were entirely lost, bashed you against spiraling, bizarre debris; bicycles, garbage cans, chunks of pavement, washing machines, human bodies, park benches, telephone poles; And that against remarkable odds you survived, at least momentarily, dragged yourself up upon an uncategorizable chaos of flotsam, and saw before you a pair of dry shoes, mine, with feet in them, also mine. perfectly dry pants, dry shirt, arms, legs, head; in short, me. And as you gasped for breath I barked at you, “Quick! What did you have for breakfast?”

Could you answer?

It would be difficult to even process the question, and if and when you could, far from sparking memory, it might simply fill you with rage. The wild inappropriateness of such a request in that moment.

This is how the act of remembering feels to me lately. Difficult to process, and wildly inappropriate to the moment.

And yet that is exactly what I am going to ask of you. Because that’s what this entry is. A man in inexplicably dry shoes.

So. Do you remember 2016? How we hated it, how its awfulness built and accrued, like some terrible, tumbling bolus, a snowball of excrement careening downhill, growing in size as more and more shitand debris stuck to it until it became an unbearable avalanche of sewage? How we cursed it on it’s way out the door, how we shook our fists?

I’m not talking about the unexpected defeat of Hillary Clinton and the rise of He Who Golfs, although that of course was the dark, foreboding weather hanging over all of it.

Is it coming back to you? The year the celebrities died?

David Bowie died on January 10th. That was a blow that now I force myself, I can still feel. Alan Rickman four days later, and four days after that Glenn Frey, because it’s always in threes, isn’t it?

Except it wasn’t. It wasn’t in threes at all. It was by the dozen.

Vanity and Harper Lee and Punky Brewster’s dad. Umberto Ecco and George Martin and Gary Shandling, My God, Gary Shandling! For me personally, coming as I do from comedy, that was almost as bad as Bowie, and it was only March! Patty Duke, Admiral Ackbar, Merle fucking Haggard; Dorris Roberts, the guy who wrote the music the Mr. Softee ice cream trucks play, and for God’s sake PRINCE! It was like being pummeled! Billy Paul, Morley Safer, Wilber from “Mr. Ed,” Oh, Wilber! Muhamed Ali, Bernie Worrell, reboot Pavel Checkov, the poor bastard was only 27! Elie Weisel, the first actress to play Lois Lane, Garry Marshall! Stop, stop, just stop! Kenny Baker, Fyvush Finkley GENE WILDER! I’m in pain and I’m wet and I’m STILL HYSTERICAL! W.P. Kinsella, Edward fucking Albee, Shimon FUCKING PEREZ! Steve Dillon who drew “Preacher”, Man from U.N.C.L.E Robert Vaughn, LEONARD COHEN! I played his albums to dust when I was a sulky teen, I taught his kids improvisation, I met him and I shook his hand, I stood there as an eleven year old little Jewish kid from my class told him how much he loved his music and that inhumanly deep voice replied “Thanks, kid. You got a smoke?” When I heard he’d passed I went in my room and shut the door and bawled like a baby. Gwen Ifill, Ron Glass, Carol FUCKING Brady; John Glenn, the dude who wrote “Watershed Down,” Carrie Fisher followed the very NEXT DAY BY HER DAMN MOTHER who sang in the rain, because loosing just Princess Leia wouldn’t have stung enough, would it?! And as the door was shutting on that horrid, awful year, Father Mulcahey slipped out, one last loss before the ball dropped in Time’s Square.

Fuck you, 2016. Fuck you, goodbye, good riddance, whatever comes next, it can’t be worse.

But here we are and now we know that wasn’t true.

As a Jew, I’m genetically disposed to never say things can’t get worse.

One of the only places I ever lived for any serious amount of time beside Massachusetts is Portland, Oregon. The phrase “It could be worse. It could be raining.” was a thing people would say to be funny, because it rains more often then it doesn’t there. A sciencey friend long lost in the mist of memory used to add “And it could still be worse. You could live on Venus. It rains sulfuric acid there.”

I don’t mean 2016 wasn’t tragic. As I looked up shit to write my list, I was keenly reminded of just how tragic it was. But we’re well into a different level of tragedy now. If it doesn’t feel so sharp at times, it’s because past a point, it’s hard to feel anything at all.

And it seems like every year since 2016 we’ve said “Fuck you” at 11:59 on December 31st. Which is not a great way to feel for four years. It’s not a great way for things to be.

But…

I keep seeing posts on Twitter and Facebook saying things like “Say one good thing about 2020.” Like it’s a challenge.

And I can actually say a few. To remind myself that even as I say “fuck you”, it wasn’t all bad.It’s hard to hang on to, but amazingly good things have happened, and we need so badly to hold onto them.

For me, my family is fine so far. None of us have been sick, and our circumstances allow us to be as careful as is feasible. We are not prone to stupidity or conspiracy and wearing a bit of cloth over our faces does not seem too great an imposition on our freedoms. We live in a liberal bubble that limits our exposure to idiots, and when I see someone coming toward me on the sidewalk who isn’t well enough versed in basic human biology to know that the nose is connected directly to the lungs and should be worn inside their mask, I am generally able to cut a wide swath around them without venturing out into the traffic for very long.

Joseph Biden won. That’s good, right? He crushed the popular vote, his electoral victory was the same as Trump’s in 2016, and he got there without James Comey’s help, or Russia’s. The country was offered a clear choice between Democracy and Fascism and we chose Democracy. I felt really good about that, and when I find that feeling hard to hold onto, all I have to do is imagine what we’d be facing if we’d lost.

There are vaccines, and modern science allowed us to invent them more quickly than could have been imagined even a decade ago, so thank God the mathematical inevitability of a plague held off as long as it did. One might wish the president hadn’t fired our entire pandemic response team or insisted the virus was no worse than the flu or claimed we had it entirely under control, but beggars can’t be choosers, I suppose.

And then there’s this; Petty perhaps, but still, it warms my heart during these coldest months. Having achieved heights impossibly far beyond anything his meager abilities might warrant in even his wildest dreams, hasn’t made Trump happy. He is clearly miserable, confused, wounded, angry, alone and bitter, and since from here on in it can only be downhill for him, that is a very bad place to call the top. And lie to himself as he might, in his single term as president he has honestly only one actual achievement; Judges.

I do not mean to diminish their significance. His appointments will do lasting damage to this nation for decades to come, but that will bring him little pleasure, as they turn out to be not at all what he thought they would be, extensions of his will. He has three Supreme Court Justices to his name, more than any president would dream of, and I am certain his limited understanding of the law and the actual independent existence and free will of other living human beings makes it impossible for him to understand how it is possible they have defied him in his desire for a second term. Rejected by the voters, now he finds the judges he truly believed he owned will not rescue him. He could not be more astounded if the Resolute Desk had fired him and the Tiny Desk had kicked his ample ass on his way out the door.

I am like a prospector, panning the sluice for four long years, filling it with gritty runoff and shaking it over and over until at long, long last, after sifting countless tens of thousands of pans that yielded only silt and sand, I have found a glorious, glittering nugget of schadenfreude. It is in now way big enough to pay for all the time and sadness it has taken to find it.

But small as it is, it makes me happy. I will cherish it disproportionately for a long time. And in the hard, cold, dark moments to come, I’ll take it out from time to time, turn it this way and that, let its facets catch the light, and for a moment be warmed.

My CoviDiary: 12/14/2020: The Marking of Momentous Days

BY MAX BURBANK | By any measure, today is a momentous day. The Electoral College met despite pandemic concerns and credible threats of violence that caused the Michigan Statehouse to lockdown and Arizona’s electors to meet at an undisclosed location. In other years this pro forma non event goes largely unnoticed, but 2020 is as surely a bastard at the end as it was at the beginning, and it demands we be riveted by a procedure that by rights ought to be stultifyingly boring. Joseph Biden was officially awarded all the electoral votes he had won despite various groups of random Republicans with no legal standing whatsoever making public claims that they were multiple slates of “alternate” electors. This means Biden is now unarguably the President elect, which will not stop Trump and his coterie or toadies from arguing he isn’t, and also means that Donald Trump has now lost the election some thirty or so times.

William “Bullfrog Richelieu” Barr resigned, oiling his way out the door like an ambulatory sack of reeking, tainted compost. It’s nice for him that he had the foresight to say months ago that he was unconcerned with his legacy, almost as if that prissy, superior debate club bastard universally loathed in highschool had announced his freshman year in four years at graduation he tripped over his robe, went face down, bloodied his pug and soiled himself, it was going to be an elaborate stunt he had pulled entirely on purpose, and when you gasped or pointed and laughed you were just showing you got suckered.

Russia hacked a third major US Government agency, the Department of Homeland Security this time, purely coincidentally just after Trump sacked the leadership there. The president, as of the time of this writing, does not feel this attack from a hostile foreign government rises to a level requiring any sort of public comment.

Unsurprising, as he similarly feels that our surpassing 300,000 deaths from COVID-19 is equally un-Tweetworthy.

You see how I buried the lede there. I did so deliberately, because on this rare occasion I have something in common with the President.

I do not feel it.

It does not seem real.

There we part ways, I imagine. I am fairly certain Trump does not care that he is unmoved, and that he is unmoved precisely because he does not care.

I, on the other hand, am sick that this appalling milestone feels meaningless to me. Certainly something is wrong with me. My emotions tracked in a recognizably human and appropriate way up until 100,000 people had died. That felt like a huge, grand, monument of a number.

They say that crows can count, but only to three. Their numerical system is one, two, three, a lot. Apparently, I am a crow that can count to 100,000. Tragedies larger than that exceed my capacity and all I feel is numbed and confused. I mean, that can’t be, can it? How can any of us keep doing the day to day shit that constitutes our lives after more than 100,000 of our fellow countrymen have died, let alone 300,000? And what’s the world total?

I don’t know. I’ve never known. Shouldn’t I be as conversant with that number as I am with 300,000?

And I suppose I ought to mention that also today, the first Americans received the vaccine. Today we began the process that will eventually lead to the end of the pandemic. And I’m relieved, if one can be said to be relieved without experiencing any of the emotions generally associated with relief.

I’m compelled to let you know I have been quite lucky so far. I have personally suffered very little from the great upheaval we are all a part of, though I am of course aware that could change at any moment. I have been inconvenienced, nothing more. And yet, for the most part, I have come to a point where I feel very little about anything. That feels weak, to be so damaged after suffering so little.

I feel anxious. I’m irritable. I seem frequently to have inordinate difficulty performing simple tasks. Tying my boots is more difficult than it has any excuse to be. The laces slip through my fingers. I open the front door before harnessing the dogs and they stare up at me, like “What the fuck with you man? This is not how we do this. This is not safe.” I walk two blocks toward work before realizing I do not have my backpack on, which contains many of the things I need at work. I say words out loud to myself that there is no need to say. I see a blue car drive by and say “Blue” softly to myself, like I need reassurance I still know my colors. I say “I can do this” about specific tasks and “I can’t do this” about life in general. I’m like a soldier who is already shell shocked from being just close enough to hear the battle in the distance.

Maybe if as a country we’d mourned a little more along the way, maybe if a little less than half of us hadn’t been so committed to poo-pooing the idea that hundreds of thousands of dead people are significant, I mean a lot of them were old or already sick, how can we even know for sure what they died of? And don’t traffic accidents cause lots of deaths, you don’t live in fear of traffic accidents, you don’t let them dominate your life. Maybe if a little less than half the country hadn’t let a spray tanned, carny Hitler convince them that masks and social distance and a Goddamned appropriate level of human sorrow in the face of unimaginable horror didn’t make you a fucking Antifa BLM socialist, NOT THAT THERE’S ANYTHING WRONG WITH THAT, maybe I could have paced myself and not just put my head down and slogged forward like a man with no personal days walking to work through a blizzard muttering “I can do this.”

But it surely was a momentous day. And this is supposed to be a diary of sorts. And I know I’m letting all sorts of things slip by me because I don’t want to set my brain to trying to figure them out. I just want to get  through them. But I’d regret it. I’m certain I’d regret not marking at least some of this shit.

And Joe Biden being president elect is a very good thing. And the vaccine is a very, very good thing. And I can do this.

However I manage to do this is how I can do this.

BY MAX BURBANK | Attentive readers will have noted that I write quite a bit about politics. Over the last four and change years it has grown to be something of a compulsion, often eclipsing all other topics. This perhaps explains why I’ve found it difficult to write lately as we grind toward an almost certainly (thank God) inevitable transition.

I can, have and do write about other things. I have many interests to detail and memories worth describing. This is, after all, My CoviDiary, not My SurvivingTrumpDiary. But you know what they say about staring into a morbidly obese, short fingered, orange abyss. The returned gaze of the void is more an echo, I think, than any sort of direct communication, and lord knows King Donald is far too taken up with what one has to assume is the combination of rampant, long term drug abuse and the escalating symptoms of tertiary syphilis to even be aware of my existence. But oddly, though his antics become ever more bizarre, the fifth act of this collaboration between Shakespeare and Alfred Jarry, (Google him, you’ll thank me) I’m… uninterested?

Because it’s over, isn’t it? I mean, he’s trying his best to generate a coup, but look… if you tase an elderly Walrus, it can still try to bowl, but no bowling is going to take place because A.) It’s a walrus, it cannot even conceive of bowling and B.) Any chance that by some miracle it could ever bowl was reduced to just about zero when you tased it. A coup requires organization and competence, two qualities Trump abhors has labored ceaselessly to eliminate from his circle.

To employ another animal based metaphor, suppose you were fishing off a pier, and you caught a fat, rust colored fish. You reeled it in, removed the hook from its mouth, and set it down not in a creel, but right on the splintered boardwalk planks. It would thrash around as it suffocated, and you could watch, but even if you were very sadistic, even if you were specifically sadistic about fish, even if you had completely legitimate reason to hate this particular fish above all other fish in the sea… watching it thrash about would only be entertaining for so long. And if against all odds, it was still thrashing about hours after you’d set it down; If the sun went down and you left it there, you went home, had dinner, watched some TV, slept, got up, returned to the pier and it was still thrashing, even if weeks after you’d caught it, well past the safe harbor date when all fifty states had certified their vote, that fucking fish JUST KEPT THRASHING… the only thing of interest about what was going on, the sole aspect worth engaging your curiosity over, would be the simple fact that it was taking this long to die. Imagine there was a cable channel, and the only show was just this fish, flopping and flopping and flopping. That cable channel would not be a money making prospect. It would be a terrible business model. If the essay your are reading was simply this one eternally dying fish metaphor, if I wrote paragraph after paragraph about returning to this pier to confirm that this suffocating fish was indeed not yet dead, but also not doing anything new either… eventually, you’d stop reading. In fact, it’s quite possible you already have.

Very little of interest remains about Trump. It tweets. It golfs. It refuses to concede. It gives its Caps Lock key a healthy and regular work out. It posts clips of itself nonsensically raging. One should not discount the fact that President Dying Fish’s thrashing is an unprecedented violation and quite possibly doing irreparable structural damage to our metaphorical pier. It is disastrous, it is outrageous, but it is also, undeniably, boring and pointless. It fails to advance the narrative.

But…

I find him as difficult to quit as I assume Mitch McConnell does, though honestly I do not see what either of us gets out of it.

And so there is one thing he’s said a number of times recently that does rankle me enough it’s worth mentioning. Because it illuminates so brilliantly his staggering lack of self awareness.

One of the bits of evidence he offers as proof that Biden could not have legitimately garnered the number of votes he most certainly got… is that the number of votes is more than Obama got.

His argument is that it is fundamentally impossible that Joe Biden generated more enthusiasm than Barack Obama. And as far as the statement goes, I suppose I agree.

Don’t mistake me. Joe is good by me. He’s better than good. He wasn’t my favorite candidate. I liked Kamala Harris better. I liked Elizabeth Warren better. But more than that, I didn’t want Joe Biden to run at all. First of all, he’s very, very old, and that worries me. But more than that, whatever you may make of Biden’s specific politics and political history, this is a man who has suffered enough. If you don’t know his biography, you won’t get it here, but take my word for it, it’s rough. Life can be very hard, but by any measure, Joe Biden has been through the ringer more than once and worse than most. I felt running against Trump would generate a lot of suffering, which was a pretty easy prediction, and of course it did.

Biden weathered that suffering well, and I think the dignity and character he demonstrated in the process is probably why he won the nomination, you know, once you factor in that he’s a man, he’s white and he’s moderate.

Try as Trump might, and he really tried, Trump could not pull his usual bullshit on Biden. Because he was obviously not sleepy, he wasn’t the least bit radical and he wasn’t terrifyingly female or ethnic. He turned out to be the ideal candidate for the moment.

But you know what? None of that made him Obama. Obama is a frikkin’ rock star and everybody knows it. Obama came so much closer to being the president I wanted so much more than anyone like me could ever have imagined, you just can’t touch that. The United States of America is just not designed to put a man in the White House I could be so on board with, and yet, there he was.

You know what Obama actually winning the presidency was like in its unlikeliness? “Fraiser.” A sitcom that was elitist, erudite, replete with references, and alarmingly twee. It isn’t shocking I liked it. But it turned out, almost everybody liked it, and they liked it a lot.

So, weirdly, Trump is correct. There is no universe in which Joe Biden could generate the passion, devotion and raw enthusiasm Obama did. But, and this is key…

THAT ISN’T THE POINT!

At.

All.

In 2008, Obama ran against John McCain. In 2012 he ran against Mitt Romney. However you feel about either opponents politics, it can be generally agreed upon that both gentlemen were recognizably human beings in the most basic sense, albeit with McCain being the one who did not make a dog ride on the roof of his car or claim to have binders full of women. On the other hand, McCain’s running mate was Sarah Palin, the human test balloon for the Trump presidency, so neither was without significant fault. But if you were asked about either of them “What animal is that?”, you would almost certainly respond “A human being.”

My point is, and there is no research behind what I am about to say, it can be argued that every vote cast for Obama in both elections was for Obama. The majority of Obama voters ranged from enthusiastic about their choice to wildly enthusiastic about their choice. No one thought that… well, wait; I want to approach this next thought from a different angle.

When choosing to vote for Obama, I do not think the main thing on anyone’s mind as they filled in the bubble or touched the screen or pulled the lever if that happens at all anymore, was: “McCain/Romney may look like a person. They may be able to fake being a person with some degree of success for limited amounts of time. But they are not a person. They are a person-shaped leather bag full of bile and venom and unimaginably corrosive acids, malevolent insects, hatred, racism, idiocy, avarice, neediness, and yet, somehow essentially entirely, terrifyingly empty. They are dangerous in the manner a swarm of plague rats is dangerous, both in their collective bite and in the lethal diseases they transmit. They must be stopped at all costs because should they prevail and attain the presidency, American Democracy is done for, the mountain of corpses they have already generated will swell exponentially and there is a non zero possibility that before the end of their term there will be NOTHING LEFT ALIVE ON EARTH!!”

What I’m saying is, the vast majority of people who voted for Biden liked him and found him trustworthy whether he was their first choice or not, but absolutely EVERY person who voted for Biden was enthusiastically, passionately, desperately voting AGAINST Trump. Hordes of people who never voted before, independents, libertarians, republicans, Democrats who considered Biden to be no different from a pre-Trump Republican, any human soul of voting age who ever took pleasure in A Christmas Carol or The Lorax or Mister Rogers” or Arthur could not WAIT to vote AGAINST TRUMP! Millions of Americans made sure they had not been dropped from the voting rolls, mailed their ballots immediately upon receiving them so the Postmaster General’s malevolence was less likely to disenfranchise them, traveled absurd distances to the single drop box left available to them, stood in line for hours to VOTE AGAINST DONALD TRUMP!

Because he is a monster. And a cancer. And it is absurdly clear to anyone with even a shred of conscience that he must be excised. And yes, it is horrifying that he got even a single vote, let alone millions, let alone more than he’d gotten the first time around. But thank the good Lord, almost 8 million more Americans, every single one of whom would have been willing to do the worm naked across a shallow lake of lemon juice and broken glass for the chance voted against Donald Trump. Because fuck that guy.

It’s no surprise that a corpulent, geriatric, burbling dimwit who called himself “your favorite president” is blind to how motivating his complete awfulness is. That it more than accounts for any enthusiasm gap there may be between Biden and Obama.

But whatever. It got the job done.

And you know what? I think that despite his inane and endless protestation, he knows that. I think he’s going to carry that knowledge with him for however many days he has left (and I gotta say, I don’t think he’s looking that good lately.) He lost because the majority of Americans think he is complete shit.

I don’t think he’ll ever understand that the reason people think that… is because he is.

But I’ll take what I can get.

-END-

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