Post 246 - November 12, 2020

Day 246…

And we wait.

There are countless things that have needed to be done around this place since before the election. Clothes are draped over the backs of chairs all over the apartment. Receipts are in messy piles on the dining room table. Halloween decorations need to be put downstairs in our storage bin. We need to vacuum. And we certainly need to dust.

I gave myself another haircut yesterday. I’ve really gotten pretty good at it. And more efficient. Even my new beard got its first much-needed trim.

Between finishing up the West End Woofs! event and the Presidential election, I have been busy over these last few weeks. Busy and distracted.

Not anymore.

The election is over. The President has lost. And still, he will not concede.

More Republicans are starting to urge him to accept the results.

Karl Rove, a policy advisor to the Bush White House, in an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal said that the election will not be overturned because of the President’s lawsuits. That was the actual blaring headline, “This Election Result Won’t Be Overturned.”

Most of the President’s lawsuits are just being thrown out.

In one case, one of the President’s lawyers tried to claim that Republicans had been barred from observing results at a polling station in Philadelphia. The Judge in the case kept trying to get to the actual evidence that the lawyer had for his allegation. Finally, the lawyer was forced to admit that the Republicans had “a nonzero number of people in the room.”

Kellyanne Conway, who gave us the President’s “alternative facts” couldn’t have said it any better. The overwhelming majority of these suits are just as ridiculous.

Republican Governor Mark DeWine of Ohio who supported the President for a second term said, "I think that we need to consider the former vice president as the President-elect. Joe Biden is the President-elect."

As all of this just drags on endlessly and pointlessly, the President-elect is still being kept from access to people and resources he needs to get his transition under way. He is not being given access to any of the nation’s intelligence briefings.

Independent Senator Angus King of Maine said, “Right now, America hangs in the balance of a precarious moment – mere weeks before a presidential transition, with dangerous national security threats as foreign adversaries monitor our resolve and look for vulnerabilities. Now especially, it is vital that the Department of Defense’s core mission remains stable and focused on the tasks at hand: protecting our citizens, defending our national security interests, and conducting a seamless transition to the Biden Administration.”

Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who stands behind the recounts, nonetheless believes that the President-elect should be given access to intelligence briefings. Even one of the President’s most toadying enablers, Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina said this morning that the President should allow the transition to begin.

This nonsense is putting all of us at risk. We are, as a nation, leaderless at a moment when we need somebody to guide us the most. The man who is ostensibly our leader for the next two months, is not leading. He is sulking. And tweeting. And golfing. The man who is going to be our leader is being kept, from nothing more than pique, from being able to start his work.

One of the projects that I was meant to start working on in the spring has been postponed. I don’t have official word on it, but some of the people working on it were told to hold off. There are several other possibilities ahead but it’s hard to say just how far away they are.

Like walking through a desert, that distant promise of a job on the horizon could be just over the next dune or it could be countless miles away. Or it could just be a mirage. The only thing to do, really, is to keep heading slowly towards it.

The reason for the vagueness around whether or not I and all of my fellow theatre professionals will get back to work any time soon, is, of course, the soaring COVID-19 numbers. The numbers are astronomical and almost impossible to process.

Here in New York City, our positivity rate has risen to 2.93%. The goal was to keep us below 1.5%.

The state has initiated a three-tiered warning system and divided us into zones. Rather than legislate broad stroke mandates across the state, what they are doing is targeting restrictions to those areas where numbers are rising. Of the five boroughs, Manhattan currently has the lowest positivity rate at 1.9% which is still too high, but only just. The highest is Staten Island which is at 3.8%.

Thanksgiving is two weeks away. In anticipation of that, Governor Cuomo has tightened restrictions on gatherings of more than 10 people.

The Staten Island council minority whip, Republican Joe Borelli tweeted yesterday, “I’ll be having more than 10 ppl at my house on Thanksgiving. Some family will come from (gasp!) New Jersey. Kids will see their grandparents, cousins will play in the yard, sis in law will bring strawberry rhubarb pie, & a turkey will be overcooked.”

As the saying goes, this is why we can’t have nice things.

Back in the spring, the rest of the country looked down on New York and Seattle and San Francisco with a mixture of pity, disdain and revulsion. As COVID-19 raged through our communities, the feeling that we got from middle America was that we deserved it in some way. Our liberal enclaves had brought it on ourselves.

Well, now the tables have turned. While we are fretting about Staten Island getting up as high as 3.8%, Wyoming and Idaho are experiencing a 40% positivity rate. South Dakota is clocking in at a whopping 55% positivity rate. The mask-less motorcycle rally in Sturgis back in August suddenly doesn’t seem like it was such a great idea anymore.

Yesterday, we as a country broke a new record, for the umpteenth day in a row for new infections. 143,231 people tested positive for COVID-19 yesterday, alone.

That’s all of Syracuse, NY. Or McAllen, TX. Or Savannah, GA. All of the people who live in those cities. In one day. ALL of them.

18 states have a positivity rate of new infections of above 50%.

There were 65,000 people admitted to hospitals around the country yesterday, alone, because of the coronavirus. As of this morning, we have had over 10 million cases of the virus. That’s more than the total population of Israel.

242,073 have died.

The graphs are terrifying to look at largely because the spike that we are seeing, that is already so much higher than anything that we have ever seen before, is still rising. We aren’t anywhere near the top of it yet.

The extended unemployment benefits all run out in seven weeks. The Senate is back in session but already the Senate Majority Leader is signaling his reluctance to pass any sort of sweeping stimulus legislation. Even if the two sides come up with something in the next few weeks, it seems unlikely that the President will pay any attention to it.

The Save our Stages Act is a part of the Democrats’ bill. If passed, the Heroes Act would include $10 billion of relief aid for independent venues and agencies and others associated with both the music industries and the other performing arts industries. Another $5 billion was subsequently added to it to also help small independent cinemas around the nation.

Despite the massive demonstrable effect that these types of businesses have on local economies, the Republicans are balking.

All eyes are on the Senate run-offs in Georgia. If both of those seats go Democratic then there will be a chance that some meaningful stimulus legislation will be able to be passed. If they don’t, then this endless stalemate that we are slogging through will just continue until the midterms. Get used to hearing about this Georgia run-off because everything hangs on the outcome.

You think you were sick of hearing about the Presidential election? Take a deep breath.

So, we wait.

And we keep trudging through the desert towards that distant point ahead of us that may or may not prove, in the end, to be something real.

More and more Republicans will begin to distance themselves from the President because they are all starting to accept that they have four years of having to work with Joe Biden ahead of them. It is in their best interests to start to work with him now.

I mean, if Lindsay Graham of all people is starting to put pressure on the President, then it is just a matter of time before the rest come around.

In the meantime, the cat needs brushing and the rugs need vacuuming. And the receipts need filing. And everything needs to be dusted.

We need to clean up and move forward.

Whatever the future holds, it's ahead of us and not behind us, so let's get going.