Post 141 - July 30, 2020

Day 141…

My usual morning routine began as routinely as usual today.

At about 5am, the cat who gets bored in the early mornings, will start walking across the two of us in the bed. Sometimes we can sleep through this. One of us just kicks him off the bed. Usually, though, Michael gets woken up enough that he will get up and change out the dry food that we leave down for most of the day.

It doesn’t actually matter to the cat whether there is still food in the bowl or not. He requires the ceremony of one of us changing it out every day just after the sun starts coming up. Sometimes he doesn’t even eat it. He just makes sure that the task’s been done then wanders off.

All of the activity around that usually wakes me up enough that I go to the bathroom. If something is weighing on either of us, one or the other of us might not then be able to go back to sleep, but on a good day, we both go back to sleep. This morning, we both went back to sleep.

I take four vitamins every day and wash them down with a fizzy vitamin C drink. To remind me to take them, I leave one of the vitamin bottles in full view in the bathroom. When I go in there, I put one of those vitamins under my tongue so the irritation of that reminds me to take the other three which are kept in the kitchen.

Every morning, while I’m drinking the C, I then turn on the electric kettle and unload the dishwasher. Once I’ve made the coffee in the French press and poured myself a cup, then, and only then, do I sit down and turn on the TV to see what is going on and begin writing.

This morning began calmly and regularly enough but when I turned on the TV, instead of the usual discussion about case numbers, every single newscaster across the spectrum of the news was completely on fire leading with the most recent inane tweet from our President.

“With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???”

OMG, the sky is falling! Oh, the humanity!

Let’s be clear. The President has absolutely no authority to change elections.  That power lies within the two Houses. Saying that mail-in absentee balloting is good but mail-in voting is bad makes no sense whatsoever. What is the difference between the two? The President, himself, votes by mail.

But we are living in unprecedented times! The virus!

No, actually, we are not. In 1918, the midterm elections happened despite the raging Spanish Flu. Only about 40% of eligible voters turned up at the polls contrasting with 50% of voters who had turned up for the previous midterms. Remember though, we were still fighting World War 1. The Armistice was only signed a week AFTER the elections. Our guys were across the ocean fighting. Women couldn’t vote yet.

In San Francisco, poll workers and voters were all required to wear masks. The San Francisco Chronicle described it as “the first masked ballot ever known in the history of America.”

President Wilson also ignored the Flu.

When the results of the election were in, President Wilson had lost party control of both the House and the Senate. Two years later he would lose his office to Warren G. Harding.

The current President’s tweet comes as no surprise to anyone who is paying even the slightest attention to what is going on. He is doing everything in his power to delegitimize and undermine these coming elections because, at the moment, he is widely projected to lose.

So, why tweet that today? Well, coincidentally, the US Commerce Department released its quarterly numbers today.

His tweet came just minutes after the announcement came that the US economy has shrunk by 32.9%. It is the single worst quarterly drop in our history. By far.

The United States is officially in a recession.

Cameron Mackintosh announced yesterday that the musical The Phantom of the Opera would close for good in London after a run of thirty-four years. Government assistance for the Arts in England has been too slow in coming. On Tuesday, the British government announced how about $650 million of funding would be disbursed to Arts organizations out of a $1.14 billion lifeline package. For many Arts organizations, the delay in this actually happening is going to prove fatal.

As much as I hate to say it, I think that it is likely that we are going to experience more such closures here, as well.

Earlier this week, I took a walk down Madison Avenue.

At the beginning of the shutdown, all of the city’s stores that did not provide food or other essential products were forced to shut down. We knew that some of them were going to be closed for good, but because of the shut-down we couldn’t tell which ones.

One of the stores on Madison had a living ficus tree in its display window. As the weeks passed, its leaves started turning brown. Then falling off. It died.

Then came the BLM demonstrations and plywood went up covering most of the storefronts from sight.

Well, now the plywood is down. With New York City now in a modified Phase 4 re-opening, real estate offices and retail establishments have been able to reopen. Owners, or creditors, of permanently shuttered stores have been able to clear out the inventory. The ficus leaves got swept up.

Real estate agents have been able to get official “to Let” signs printed replacing the hastily hand-drawn posters that were taped up there before.

Just from what I saw on my walk, I would estimate that fully a third of the store fronts along the retail section of Madison Avenue are now vacant. Many of the remaining stores are advertising sales in the hopes of attracting shoppers. Much of the wealthy population of Manhattan is elsewhere. There are no tourists spending money.

Tomorrow is the last day of the $600 PUA payments. The GOP wants to reduce those payments to $200 for a limited amount of time. Then they would switch over to a rate that, when combined with the state unemployment they are already getting, would bring each person’s weekly payments to 70% of their former salaries.

While some of us can certainly get by on 70% of what we were making prior to the pandemic, an overwhelming majority of Americans simply can’t. Many people were having trouble making ends meet when they had 100% of their incomes. Who is going to be able to shop?

How anyone in our government thinks that this nation’s economy is going to IMPROVE with this kind of thinking is far beyond my powers of comprehension.

Representative John Lewis’s funeral is being broadcast from The Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia as I write this.

The President’s distraction has, in turn, been distracted from. Gloriously. It is a beautiful, moving ceremony.

Martin Luther King’s daughter The Revered Bernice King spoke passionately and eloquently. Jennifer Holliday sang her actual face off. The Reverend James Lawson set the room on fire.

Three past Presidents, Bush, Clinton and Obama were there and spoke.

Republicans and Democrats together.

Speaker Pelosi is there along with Senators Harris and Booker and 50 members of the House of Representatives.

Our current President is not there. He did not pay his respects this past week either as Representative Lewis lay in state at the US Capitol.

It is possible to have differing opinions and still be able to respect each other. George W. Bush and John Lewis certainly disagreed on how this country should be run. They represented two completely different ideologies. When President Bush spoke today, he spoke of Representative Lewis with humor, passion and respect.

Our current President is not a politician. He does not have the understanding that governing is about thinking about what is good for we, the people.

There will always be people who disagree with you. Presidents have been assassinated by people who disagreed with them.

Abraham Lincoln made famous a quote by the poet John Lydgate, “You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time.”

Our current President takes everything said against his actions as a personal attack. He doesn’t understand why more people like Dr. Fauci than like him.

His tweet this morning was solely to divert attention away from the disastrous economic numbers that were announced. He is scared that people aren’t going to like HIM because of them, not that they are going to dislike his policies. He’s not a politician. He has no vision at all beyond his own ego gratification.

None of this is news to any of us. Watching Representative Lewis’s funeral this morning is really driving home just how far off base this President really is.  Nothing that is happening to all of us is about him and yet that is how he is viewing all of it. As I write this, I am watching people who have fundamental disagreements sitting together, united, in the Ebenezer Baptist Church. They are united in the celebration of a truly great American patriot. They will get back to arguing later.

That’s how this works.

The New York Times published, at his request, Representative John Lewis’s final words today. I’ll let him finish.

“Democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build what we called the Beloved Community, a nation and world society at peace with itself… Ordinary people with extraordinary vision can redeem the soul of America by getting in what I call good trouble, necessary trouble. Voting and participating in the democratic process are key. The vote is the most powerful nonviolent change agent you have in a democratic society. You must use it because it is not guaranteed. You can lose it.”