Day 257…
And another spin of the globe is underway.
If the news coming into our living rooms today came in this past March, it’s possible we would have taken to the streets in response. Today, however, in late November, we are staying on our couches and just flipping the channels.
We’ve become numb to it.
The President, undermining Democratic norms by refusing to concede, is putting all of us at risk. He is behind in the popular vote by over 6 million votes. He has lost the electoral college. He is not appearing in public. He is not governing. He is attempting to pressure State officials to overturn results claiming fraud without any evidence whatsoever. His lawyers are being rebuked by judges in many states and seeing their baseless claims thrown out.
It’s a travesty.
Only five Republican Senators have acknowledged that President-elect Biden has won. The rest are standing firmly behind the President even as he disintegrates.
There are well over 12 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the United States. Three million of those infections - a full quarter of them - have occurred in November alone. For the last two weeks, each day has seen the daily record for hospitalizations, broken.
Around the world, we are approaching 60 million cases of the virus with close to 1.4 million deaths. The United States is still the leader, by a long margin. Contract tracing is almost impossible because cases are exploding at such a high rate everywhere.
Yesterday saw a record number of people traveling through the nation’s airports to gather for Thanksgiving celebrations despite warnings from almost all health experts. There’s going to be a massive spike on top of an already massive spike.
We’re not listening anymore. We’re truly switched off.
Even as I write those statistics, I know that most everyone will have just skipped over that part. It’s not that people don’t want to hear it anymore, it’s that they can’t. The numbers simply don’t mean anything. They are so big and have been repeated so often that they’ve just become scribbles on a page. When somebody begins to speak about them, their voice becomes less distinct until they start to sound like an adult in a Peanuts cartoon.
Today… wah wah wah… virus… wah… infections… wah wah… deaths… wah… distancing…wah wah wah.
There’s a story this morning that management at one of the Tyson meatpacking plants in Waterloo, Iowa was playing a game by placing cash bets on how many of its workers would test positive for the virus.
So far, five of the workers at that plant have died. Five people who were working long hours in one of the worst jobs imaginable just to put food on their family’s table and clothes on their kids back.
Gone. And management treated it all as a joke. Looking at the reports from all over the country, so are a lot of other people.
A third company, AstraZeneca, in conjunction with Oxford University, has just announced that they, too, now have a viable vaccine. They claim an average efficacy of 70% in large scale trials.
That so many companies seem to be creating vaccines with such a high rate of success should be a case of some cautious optimism. It is possible that some people could be given one of these vaccines as early as next month.
Initially, average people will have no access to any of them. Frontline healthcare workers and those most at risk like elderly patients in nursing homes would likely be first in line.
Getting these vaccines out to the rest of us is not going to happen during this President’s term in office. The average American may not be able to get one until May.
As things stand now, however, most States do not have the funding or infrastructure to distribute the vaccine at the level required to make even that happen. All of the vaccines need to be stored in chilled conditions. One of them will require complex refrigeration units to keep it at the proper temperature. The others will require dry ice which is currently experiencing a shortage.
This requires national coordination at a level that this Administration has proven to be incapable of.
This is no longer about the President. We all know his pathologies by heart now. His niece is on television every day outlining them for us. This is about the Republican lawmakers who are not allowing the transition to continue.
In siding with the President in his pathetic temper tantrum over his hurt feelings, they are almost guaranteeing that the distribution of the vaccines will be delayed.
This Administration has done nothing whatsoever to curb the spread of this virus. The President-elect won the election largely because of his vow to begin the fight. The GOP leaders who are standing in the way of this transition are going to have blood on their hands. The longer this delay continues, the more people will lose their lives and the longer it will take for our jobs and lives to be able to resume at anything close to a normal level.
It is that clear.
Last week, when I was on Roosevelt Island, I noticed on my map app that across the river in Long Island City was Isamu Noguchi’s studio. The studio is now a museum dedicated to the sculptor who died in 1988.
The very first apartment that I lived in by myself was also in Long Island City. It was a strange apartment in that the front door opened right onto the street rather than into a hallway.
It was right near the tollbooths leading into the Queens midtown tunnel. Many of the buildings around me were abandoned or converted warehouses and workshops. They weren’t the solid industrial-looking brick buildings of areas like Dumbo or Soho, but rather more cheaply built late century utilitarian buildings. Ugly. There are, indeed, areas where there are rows of houses, but none of it is very attractive.
The 7-train used to let me off very near my building. It was the first stop out of Manhattan. I could get to Times Square in about 15 minutes.
IF the train was running.
If the train wasn’t running, I needed to take a long hike over to another line that was near the 59th street bridge. It could take me over an hour or two to get to work when that happened.
Noguchi’s studio was north of the bridge. I knew it was there, but I had never been. He died, I think, a year or two before I moved there.
After I went to Roosevelt Island last week, I went back the next day and crossed over the bridge into Queens so that I could finally visit the museum.
As a sculptor, Isamu Noguchi, was interested in the natural world. His work was often monumental in size. His pieces were usually abstract. He used a lot of stone some of which was highly polished and carved and some of which was left raw.
On Friday, the First Lady unveiled a piece of his entitled “Floor Frame” in the Rose Garden. It marks the first time that an Asian American’s work has been included in the White House collection. In 2020, that’s hard to comprehend.
“Floor Frame” looks like a series of long rectangular black steel shapes on a white stone platform. Noguchi described it as the "intersection of a tree and the ground, taking on the qualities of both an implied root system and the canopy."
Noguchi’s father was Japanese, and his mother was American. During World War II, when Japanese Americans were being interned in camps, he went into one voluntarily in support. While there, he used his skills to help redesign the camp to be more efficient.
He spent much of his life attempting to promote better relations between the two countries, even when hostilities were at their worst.
It’s just a coincidence that I went to his studio the day before his sculpture was unveiled at the White House. It was a museum that was open that I could get into. I’ve spent a lot of time at the MET, MOMA and the Whitney in recent days, so having a different art museum to explore was a treat.
Yesterday, Michael and I went to the Whitney with a friend to see some new exhibits.
There is a spectacular showing of photographs by a group of African American artists who are part of the Kamoinge Workshop. Founded in 1963, the photographers were committed to portraying their communities as they saw them rather than as the world at large depicted them. It is a beautiful and truly moving collection of photographs and well worth a visit.
As cases continue to rise all around us, it may only be a matter of time before some of these museums start to shut down again. For me, museums have become a refuge where I can be in a world that hasn’t been compromised by COVID-19.
There will be a whole wave of art that will come out of what we are all experiencing now. Look at all of the art that was created around World War II, the Holocaust, the war in Vietnam, and every other period of strife and tension in our country.
What would our lives be like had we had somebody else at the helm during this crisis?
We will never know. We will know, however, what recovering from this pandemic will be like with somebody else at the helm.
The day of transition cannot come too soon. I’m ready to start looking back on all of this. Being in the middle of it has lost its novelty.
I’m ready for us all to just sweep up the ashes of this misguided Administration and start again. It’s unfortunately taking longer than it should for the embers to cool. They will.
Someday we will all be able to walk around a museum looking at the work that artists are creating now. Maybe some of what is happening now will make more sense with that perspective.
We will have to wait and see.
Patience and deep breathing!
I adore the Noguchi museum- a little gem and the garden is the Spring is stunning! I find it odd that the current occupation of the WH has done anything cultural except destroy that garden
❤️yes, we are still and must continue to do our art. In any way we can.
Staying connected to ones we love is art
❤️