Post 206 - October 3, 2020

Day 206…

Quarantine - Day 6

“What is a weekend?”

The Dowager Countess played by Maggie Smith rather drily asked this question of the younger members of the family gathered around the table in Downton Abbey. She didn’t know.

The concept of the weekend as we know it is not that old.

Notes and Queries is a quarterly scholarly journal that was begun in 1849 and is still published to this day. It is a compilation of articles that are related to the English language and literature. It’s primary purpose, according to Oxford University Press, was and still is the asking and answering of reader’s questions.

The first use of the word weekend comes in 1879. A correspondent from Notes and Queries tried to answer the question of what it was by saying that they thought that it was a dialect term from Staffordshire. ‘If a person leaves home ... on the Saturday afternoon to spend the evening of Saturday and the following Sunday with friends ... he is said to be spending his week-end at So-and-so. I am informed that this name for Saturday and the day which comes between a Saturday and Monday is confined to this district.’

By the 1920’s when the word was being more commonly used, the idea had taken on a somewhat more salacious connotation. When Edward, Prince of Wales asked his dad, George V, for permission to use Fort Belvedere at Windsor, the response was, ‘What could you possibly want that queer old place for? Those damn week-ends I suppose.’ It was during one of those wild weekend parties that Edward met Wallis Simpson and sent the entire British monarchy into crisis.

The idea of having a day or days of leisure isn’t new. In ancient Rome, there was a market day every eight days when kids didn’t need to go to school. The French Revolutionary calendar designated every tenth day as a leisure day.

Here in the US, it wasn’t until 1908 that a New England cotton mill instituted a 5-day work week so that its Jewish workers could honor the Sabbath from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday. The Christian workers then could honor their holy day on Sunday. Henry Ford started shutting down his factories on Saturdays and Sundays in 1926.

Sitting here in my apartment for these two weeks of quarantine, the fact that it is now the weekend means absolutely nothing whatsoever. It is merely day 6 and tomorrow will be merely day 7.

The Dowager Countess’s disconnect from the working people and their lives on the vast estates is not that dissimilar from the disconnect we are seeing between the President and his Administration and the rest of us.

After six months of downplaying the COVID-19 pandemic as a hoax, the virus is now raging through the White House and the halls of the Capitol.

It was easy for our politicians to dismiss the super-spreader events like the Sturgis motorcycle rally in South Dakota or in the big Mega-churches as being something that was happening to the hoi polloi. Hoi polloi is a Greek term meaning ‘the many’. John Dryden first used it as an English term in 1668. “If by the people you understand the multitudes, the hoi polloi.” As long as these spreader events were happening to the greater “them” they were ignorable.

Well not so much anymore.

The Rose Garden announcement of the President’s choice for the replacement for Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on September 26, is starting to look like it’s becoming a major super spreader event.

Former advisor to the President Kellyanne Conway who attended the event now has it. Her daughter has been posting about it with disgust on TikTok.

Yesterday, we already knew that Republican Senator Mike Lee from Utah and Rev. John Jenkins the President of Notre Dame had become infected. Last night, Republican Senator Thom Tillis from North Carolina announced that he’s come down with it as well.

Republican Senator Ron Johnson from Wisconsin has also tested positive. He wasn’t at the event, but he did attend a lunch with other Senators from his party earlier this week.

Bill Stepien, the President’s campaign manager announced yesterday that he has it.

Three White House journalists who cover the President have contracted it themselves as well as an Administration press staffer who worked with them.

Then, of course, there is the President and First Lady.

Hope Hicks, a close advisor to the President, was revealed the night before last to have contracted the virus and then a few hours later, the President tweeted that he and the First Lady have it as well.

The President, along with all of those around him, were assuring everyone that he was just experiencing a mild case and doing well. Nonetheless, yesterday, the President was helicoptered off of the south lawn of the White House to Walter Reed Medical Center.

It has been reported that he has been given an experimental Regeneron drug called Regn COV2. It is thought that this drug might be effective in helping patients fight off a COVID19 infection in its early stages.

The White House is not being open about what is really going on with the President’s condition.

Health experts reporting from various outlets seem to be unified in their feeling that the development of his symptoms has been unusually fast. If the President is experiencing symptoms that are as severe as they now seem, they feel that his infection probably actually occurred sometime before it was reported. That could mean that he might have already infected when he debated Joe Biden in Cleveland on September 29 - three days after the Rose Garden event.

Remarkably, the President was not tested before the debate. He arrived too late to be tested. The moderator Chris Wallace said, “Yeah, there was an honor system when it came to people that came into the hall from the two campaigns.”

The City of Cleveland has confirmed that eleven people connected with the debate have now been confirmed to have contracted the virus. They include members of the media as well as people involved in the organization and set-up of the debate. Apparently, none of those people were present during the actual debate.

Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie who was part of the President’s debate prep team just announced an hour ago that he, too, has tested positive.

Just now, the President’s physician, Dr. Sean Conley held a press conference in front of Walter Reed.

Nobody was expecting any real answers from Dr. Conley. What we were expecting was a spin painting a rosy positive affirmation of the President’s health to assure the American public.

And that’s what we got.

Sort of.

In trying to dodge any real answers, Dr. Conley has, instead, led us all to a whole raft of more troubling questions.

The first question he dodged was whether the President was on supplemental oxygen. He would only answer, even when pressed, that the President was not on oxygen now. He avoided saying whether he had needed oxygen at all.

Then in response to another question he started his answer by saying that it has been 72 hours since his diagnosis.

That certainly helps explain the speed at which the President’s condition appears to have deteriorated. All of us, including the folks on the Biden campaign, only found out about his diagnosis 36 hours ago.

Dr. Conley confirmed the 72-hour timeline in a follow-up question. Did he realize what he was saying? He refused to answer when the President’s last negative test had been.

If the President knew that he had been infected with COVID-19 72 hours ago, then that means that when he had his live on-air chat with Sean Hannity on Fox on Thursday night that he already knew that he had it.

On that call, Hannity brought up the Hope Hicks revelation and the President said that he’d heard that and that "I just went out with the test, I'll see, 'cause, you know, we spend a lot of time — and the First Lady just went out with a test also. So, whether we quarantine, or whether we have it, I don't know"

It seems, given what Dr. Conley just said that he did, indeed, know and was just lying.

If that 72-hour timeline is correct, then it also means that he went to the fundraising event in New Jersey at his club and sat indoors with 15 other people without wearing a mask KNOWING that he was infected.

The White House has been spinning the President being in Walter Reed as a move taken out of an abundance of caution. Dr. Conley belied that statement by confirming this morning that the President is actually a patient.

There is a report this morning from a yet unnamed source who is familiar with the President’s health that despite what Dr. Conley just told us that the President is NOT on a clear path to recovery. Whoever that person was, it should be said, would not go on the record saying that.

The White House’s control over their messaging seems to be falling apart.

There is a truly sickening inevitability to all of this. The sheer hubris of the President and his Administration in their blasé response to this pandemic from the beginning has almost guaranteed that this is what would happen.

It is a truly elitist response. It can’t possibly happen to us, because we are up here, and the rest of you are down there. Yes, the general public should wear masks, but we don’t like the look of them, so we aren’t going to wear them. Nothing will happen to us because we are in the White House.

This virus doesn’t care if it spreads through a crowd of bikers at a rally in South Dakota or a bunch of Republicans at an ill-conceived Rose Garden event in Washington D.C. It’s all the same to it. Any group of idiots will do.

The President and his cronies are not victims of this disease. They invited it in.

Their negligence has, for months, put us all at risk. Over 209,000 people have died because of their inattention to the severity of this virus.

Now that very same negligence is threatening all of them personally. One wonders if any of their attitudes towards this pandemic will now change as a result of all of this.

It is beautiful weather-wise outside today. The air is crisp and cool. It is the perfect weekend day.

Michael stopped by this morning and left me some coffee hanging on the doorknob. I left him a bag of used kitty litter in return. That hardly seems fair.

I’m glad that he is able to be out and about on a day like this even if I’m not.

It doesn’t look like the leaves are changing at all yet, but it’s got to be just around the corner. If they could hold off for just another week, that would be great.

Have a great weekend everybody.