Post 236 - November 2, 2020

Day 236…

I took a long walk yesterday in the cold and the rain.

The thing about getting wet when you don’t have anywhere in particular to go is that it just doesn’t matter. Instead of having to sit around in wet jeans all day at work, once you get home, you can just take them off and put your cozy sweatpants back on.

The city is starting to prepare for the election.

Stores have begun putting up plywood over their windows in anticipation of the election results tomorrow. Several stores in Times Square have covered up. So has Macy’s and some of their neighbors in Herald Square.

Downtown in SoHo, which was hard hit by the post George Floyd murder protests, the sound of sawing and hammering was coming from every direction. The trendy Louis Vuitton store down there has put up what seems to be a permanent outer covering to the store. Corrugated iron panels, painted bright yellow, sheath the entire ground floor.

The plywood elsewhere is so fresh, that nobody has painted on it yet.

Michael sent me out yesterday to look for a new lint-roller.

It would never cross my mind to buy a lint-roller on my own. Cat hair has been a part of my life ever since I can remember. Certainly, it’s great to have one at hand when we are about to go to the Tony Awards and we are in our black tuxes, but these days we aren’t actually going much of anywhere, let alone the Tony Awards.

I hope that moths haven’t gotten at my tux.

Michael and I are living in black sweatpants these days. It’s chilly enough that the cat gravitates to one or the other of our laps to keep warm. My sweatpants are somewhat covered in his fur, Michael’s on the other hand, thanks to the lint-roller, are pristine.

On my walk, I stopped into Bed, Bath and Beyond and found an open space on the shelf where the lint-rollers should be. When I finally located a salesclerk, I was told that COVID had interrupted the international supply line of lint-rollers and that they didn’t have any in. That seemed to me to be a conveniently created excuse for bad management.

As I continued my walk, though, I went into several stores and they were out of lint-rollers too. I then found one in a CVS and a few stores later found two more in a Duane Reade. We now have three, and hopefully they will last us until spring.

In the last week or two, I have tried to stock up on everything that we ran out of during the lockdown in spring. I think that we now have about a three-month supply of paper towels, toilet paper, rubbing alcohol and hand sanitizer. I even found a few cans of spray sanitizer. We still have a lot of wipes left over from the sudden post-shortage surge during the summer. We’ve kind of stopped using them.

I would like to think that there is a difference between stocking up and hoarding and that what we are doing is the former. We will eventually use everything that we now have. There may actually be no issue with any of it, but given what happened a few months ago, I figured it couldn’t possibly hurt to be prepared.

Michael and I are also having discussions about having an overall escape plan just in case. Michael thinks I am being a bit extreme, but I can’t help but think about all of the people in Germany who didn’t try and leave before the War until it was too late. Better, it seems to me, to have a plan that we don’t ever use than to be caught unaware.

I didn’t see them myself, but friends reported yesterday seeing pick-up trucks covered in flags driven by radical supporters of the President riding around the city. A group of them shut down the Tappan Zee Bridge - parking their trucks to block traffic and getting out and waving flags.

The comments from the right all applaud the actions of these protesters. To be clear, these people aren’t protesting anything - they are just rallying.

On Friday, a whole fleet of MAGA trucks, flags a-waving, surrounded a Biden/Harris campaign bus in Texas and tried to force it off the road. This group of trucks have been following the bus all around the country.

The President praised this group in a rally speech saying, “I LOVE TEXAS!”

The Left is not engaging in this kind of terror-based intimidation. This is solely coming from the Right.

As Hitler was coming to power, he encouraged a group of supporters who came to be known as the “Brown Shirts”.  Made up of mostly disaffected lower-middle class Germans who had lost their jobs, they were put into place to guard Nazi meetings, but they eventually turned into the Nazi army. They were antisemitic and anti-democratic and being a part of Hitler’s army gave them a purpose and a focus. They terrorized Germany for two decades and Hitler adored them and they him.

I honestly cannot see any difference between these “Red Hats” and those “Brown Shirts”. Their tactics are the same and their endgame is the same.

“These patriots did nothing wrong,” the President tweeted yesterday.

Right out of the Nazi playbook.

In another of his rallies yesterday, the President threatened to fire Dr. Anthony Fauci, the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and also, the nation’s top infectious disease experts, after the election. Fauci has been extremely critical of the President’s coronavirus response in recent days. The crowd at the rally chanted, “Fire Fauci!” as the President smiled.

The President’s own trusted health expert, Dr. Scott Atlas, who has no expertise in epidemiology at all, recently did an interview with a Russian state broadcasting unit called RT.

RT and its subsidiary RT America is registered with the US Justice Department as an agent of the Russian government. The Kremlin uses the English-speaking channel as a means of spreading propaganda to American audiences.

Dr. Atlas, in a 27-minute uninterrupted broadcast, did just that. He spread the President’s anti-science rhetoric.

Twitter labeled his interview as election misinformation.

The President, by the way, does not have any power to fire Dr. Fauci.

70% of the total number of people who voted in 2016, have already voted. Over 95 million people have cast their ballots.

Throughout the country, the Republicans, who fear losing, are resorting to intimidation and cheating. Countless legal challenges to specific county’s early-voting methods have been lodged by the right. Most of these actions are just designed just to delay and obstruct. They are heaping them on.

I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow. Obviously, none of us do.

The people who are covering their stores with plywood here in New York have no idea what is going to happen, either. Whichever way the election goes, we could see people out in the streets over the next few days. They are trying to cover their asses either way.

Plan for the worst and hope for the best.

That’s what they are doing. I’m not confident enough in how any of this will go to say that they are being foolish.

I’ve never felt this way before. I have truly never envisioned the collapse of our Democracy before this. I have never worried about what would happen if our country drowned in a sea of radical populism.

The continued influence of the Russians on this Administration would have been unthinkable before 2016. In 2020, it is a given.

It seems as if minute to minute I am veering between cautious optimism and deep despair. I know that I am not alone in this. There really doesn’t seem to be anything to do except to plan for the worst and hope for the best.

The Right is as scared of living in a country run by the radical Left as the Left is of living in a country run by the radical Right. The relentless disinformation campaign that has been pushed upon the country by the President and his supporters have genuinely convinced many Republicans that the Democrats are a satanic-worshiping coven of liberal pedophiles. The next few days are going to be no easier for those poor people who are in the process of making escape plans of their own.

We all just need to chill the f--- out. This atmosphere of terror that we are all experiencing no matter which way we are voting has been created by the man who is currently occupying the White House.

None of us felt this way four years ago. Democrats went into the last election worried, certainly, but also over-confident. This election feels nothing like that at all.

Whatever tomorrow brings, it is probably not going to be anything that we are expecting. We won’t know until we know.

So many people have spent the last months working towards nothing else but winning this election. Whatever happens over the next few days, that energy is what we are going to need to get through.

Nobody should give up. No matter what happens.

The President could win again but lose the Senate and the House. He could win all three. He could lose all three.

For what it’s worth, he thinks he’s going to lose. He keeps saying it - over and over again. What will happen when I lose? Can you imagine me losing to Joe Biden? Where will I go? What will I do? He’s clearly planning for the worst, himself.

We will know when we know and not a second before.

In reality there is no real way to plan for the worst, so why don’t we all just spend today hoping for the best.

Hope is what President Obama ran on in 2008 and that worked out pretty well for him.

Here’s to hope.