Day 140…
When I was a kid, I remember being terrified that I was going to be drafted into the Vietnam War.
I remember lying in bed at night, not sleeping, and worrying about it. There were so many awful images from the war on TV and in magazines. The 1972 picture of that girl running naked down a road after her village got napalmed was particularly brutal. More horrifying, perhaps, because the girl in the picture was nearly the same age as I was.
That same year that the picture was taken was the last year that anyone was actually drafted. Three years later in 1975, when I was 13, they stopped requiring young men to register with the Selective Service. I missed having to do it by five years.
Vietnam was a pointless and unwinnable war. The US government had no real strategy. There was literally no plan. They just dropped more bombs than had been used in all of World War II on an area about the size of New Mexico. President Nixon started shifting the responsibility onto the South Vietnamese government and then fled, leaving the South and the North to figure it out themselves. It was brutal. And terrifying.
At some point not long after that, my family and I spent the summer in South Africa.
Up until 1993 it was compulsory that all white males there between 17 and 65 spend two years in the military. I think I must have been about 16 at the time. I had gotten tall very early and always looked older than I really was.
We were on a platform somewhere waiting for a train and there was a whole group of young cadets waiting as well. The uniformed guy leading them came over and asked my mother why I wasn’t serving. My mother explained that I was an American and underage. He looked skeptical but walked away. My heart nearly exploded out of my chest.
It took me a long time to believe that the US draft was really over. I imagined becoming a hippie and fleeing to Canada to get away from it all. When tension with another country was reported on the news I thought, OK, here we go, this is it.
The current President of the United States seems to have decided that the only way that he will win re-election is if we are all completely scared.
His television commercials, filled with footage of protestors being tear-gassed, warn of a future that looks like a war zone unless he is elected. The footage, of course, was all taken during his own term in office. There’s another one where an older woman who is alone in her house, hears somebody breaking into her house and calls 911 only to be put on hold because Joe Biden has dissolved the nation’s police forces.
It’s all nonsense and propaganda that is specifically designed to feed upon every single one of our worst fears.
The House Judiciary Committee held an oversight hearing yesterday. During it, Attorney General William Barr was repeatedly grilled by lawmakers over his handling of everything from how he has treated cases involving associates of the President to his actions involving sending federal troops into Portland and Seattle.
Was he acting at the behest of the President? Why send troops to a peaceful protest in Portland and not to a protest in Michigan where armed white supremacists stormed the state capitol?
It was five hours of relentless yelling and acrimony. It remains to be seen what comes of it but watching it did nothing but ratchet up my anxiety. I had to turn it off. It’s much easier to read about it today than it was to watch it yesterday. Watching clips of moments rather than the whole slog is, itself, barely tolerable.
We can all be forgiven for being on edge because the tension is rising all around us.
A few months ago, the video of Doctor Stella Immanuel standing in a white lab coat in front of the US Supreme Court touting the COVID healing properties of hydroxychloroquine, zinc and azithromycin would have been discounted immediately. Yesterday and today, though, it’s gotten some traction.
Back in April, she gave another press conference in front of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in LA wearing a white lab coat with the words “Emergency Dept.” embroidered across one of the pockets. In that speech she talked about her “experience practicing emergency medicine in this era of the COVID-19 crisis.” She reported that “we have been very successful at flattening the curve.”
She didn’t work at Cedars-Sinai. The only connection she had with the place was that for three weeks she did some part-time work for their Medical Network urgent care clinic. In 2015. She was a total fraud. Her claims were debunked, and she vanished into obscurity. Now, in this current maelstrom of misinformation, she’s been resurrected.
This recent press conference was organized by a group called America’s Frontline Doctors. The group’s logo and a letter from its founder were featured on a webpage copywritten by the Tea Party Patriots Foundation. America’s Frontline Doctors website is no longer available for viewing. SquareSpace the platform that hosted it have taken it down.
A little more digging and you can find other videos where she refers to herself as “God’s battle axe and weapon of war”. She believes that many medical issues are caused when people have sex with “spirit husbands” and spirit wives”.
She stated in 2015 that there was an Illuminati plan to destroy the world using abortion, gay marriage and children’s toys.
She has claimed that doctors use alien DNA to treat patients and that lizard-like aliens are involved in the US Government.
Facebook and twitter have taken down the videos. According to her, Jesus is going to destroy their servers unless they are put back up. In April, she was a nut. Now, the level of fear and anxiety in our country is so high that it her ridiculous claims have become an actual discussion.
Conspiracy theorists have latched onto this claiming a huge governmental cover-up. The President’s son’s Twitter account was briefly suspended when he retweeted the video with a “Must watch!” attached to it.
The President of the United States of America said this: “I can tell you this, she was on air along with many other doctors. They were big fans of hydroxychloroquine and I thought she was very impressive in the sense that from where she came, I don't know which country she comes from, but she said that she's had tremendous success with hundreds of different patients, and I thought her voice was an important voice, but I know nothing about her.”
Alien lizards.
We have come to this.
None of us can help worrying about the future. What we have to start doing is living in the now.
I am writing this while comfortably sitting on my couch in our light-filled apartment on the Upper West Side. The windows are open and there is enough of a breeze that the trees outside are swaying a bit. The humidity is not too bad. The sky is blue with only the wispiest of clouds passing through it. The TV is off.
Michael is in the bedroom doing work of his own and in about half an hour will come out and ask me what I want for breakfast.
That is what is happening, NOW.
When will we get back to work? Will there be more PUA payments? Will there be a second wave of COVID-19 in New York City? Will we lose the apartment? Will there be a vaccine? Will the President get elected to another term and start a program to eradicate those who opposed him by tying us to chairs and throwing us off buildings the way the Taliban does to homosexuals?
STOP.
Anything could happen. But it’s not happening now.
All of the energy that we are putting into our fears is taking away our ability to enjoy what we have in front of us. It is also taking away from our ability to do anything constructive in terms of trying to stop any of the bad things we are worried about from happening.
The other day, Michael and I each filled out 100 postcards addressed to all of the US Senators urging them to be Arts Heroes and keep the PUA payments going. It felt good to do that. Will they do any good? If enough of them show up, they might.
A friend of ours sent us a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle. We have to clear off the table a bit to be able to do it, but we can do that.
We are watching a fantastic Netflix series called CALL MY AGENT. Terrible title, but fantastic series. It’s about agents in a talent agency in Paris. (Yes, it’s in French with subtitles).
The cast is incroyable. All of the stars the fictional agents represent are played by actual French film stars as fictional versions of themselves. Hilarious and wonderful.
The future will come.
James Baldwin said, “There is never a time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.
Barack Obama said, “The future rewards those who press on. I don’t have time to feel sorry for myself. I don’t have time to complain. I’m going to press on.”
Nearly 2,000 years ago Marcus Aurelius said, “Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.”
Good things and bad lie ahead. There will be plenty of time to deal with them all when they happen. For the moment, find something to enjoy and let yourself enjoy it.
Michael’s come out of the bedroom. He’s making us scrambled eggs, turkey bacon and toast.
I’m going to enjoy that.
And this beautiful day.
❤️ Call My Agent..... will watch until I actually have an agent to call...
Today is a present
why they call it a gift
I once heard and loved
He is the Alien Lizard of a curve that must be flattened