Day 313…
I spent a good portion of yesterday doing what I imagine Republican aides were also doing all throughout Washington D.C. yesterday - shredding.
At the beginning of each year, I pull out the oldest accordion tax files in the storage unit, empty them and relabel them with the current year. 2012 is now mostly consigned to the recycle bin in in decipherable pieces.
As I was getting rid of it all, the things that really stood out and gave me pause were my old airline boarding passes.
I was all over the world that year. We were setting up a production of Jersey Boys in South Africa. I was in Europe several times. We were in the planning stages of Jersey Boys in Utrecht in Holland.
It hit me that one of the casualties of this pandemic lockdown will be my frequent flier status. Delta, has extended my current level through this year, which is great, but where am I going? The likelihood of me getting on enough flights this year to keep it going next year is pretty slim.
To be fair, frequent flier status is really only important when you are flying all the time. For the occasional flight, it’s nice, but it’s certainly just a luxury. When you are at the airport a couple of times a week, however, it’s imperative to have some status to keep you from becoming violent.
Oh well.
The anxiety surrounding the inauguration on Wednesday is truly excruciating. There is now a greater military presence in Washington for the inauguration than there currently is in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan - combined.
When we were doing the show in Sydney, I spent a lot of time walking around the harbor by the Sydney Opera House. In the pavement on the walkways along the wharf are plaques dedicated to various notable Australian writers. I started picking up books by the various authors I was stepping over.
One of those authors was Nevil Shute. I’ve now read two of his books. A Town Like Alice is a beautifully written book about an Australian nurse in Malaysia during the Japanese Occupation in World War II.
The other one I’ve read, On the Beach, is a completely haunting novel about the end of the world. It follows a group of people in Mebourne who are waiting for the fallout from an unnamed nuclear war that has completely devastated the northern hemisphere of the planet. The radiation is moving south, and southern Australia is one of the last places left on the planet where human beings still survive.
They know the end is coming, nothing will stop it, but they go on with their lives regardless. There are no physical signs in the city that anything is wrong at all. Whatever war happened that annihilated the planet happened elsewhere. They can’t see any evidence of it, but they know the fallout is on its way and that they are doomed.
It’s a remarkable book, and one that has stayed with me ever since I read it.
Now, I don’t think we are doomed - far from it - but we are poised for a monumental change in our government that a sizable portion of the people of this country don’t want to happen. On January 6, we saw the depths that those people were capable of stooping to.
We have been told to expect as many as 100 Presidential pardons sometime today or tomorrow. There are multiple reports that anyone who can pay can get one.
One of the President’s former lawyers, John Dowd, and his former campaign advisor Karen Giorno have supposedly collected tens of thousands of dollars from people seeking to be exonerated.
At a recent lunch, when Rudi Guiliani went to the restroom, one of Guiliani’s associates told a former CIA officer that if he wanted a pardon that $2 million was reportedly the bottom-line cost of getting his boss to wrangle one. The former operative, who had been trying to get back his $700,000 pension after being charged with a crime, thought better of it and reported the meeting to the FBI.
Guiliani now says that he does not recall the luncheon.
By this time next week, I think that we can expect that the transition will have happened. In the next few days, though, there are likely to be many bumps.
The Senate is off until tomorrow.
Vice-President-elect Harris submitted her resignation from the Senate this morning. She is going to be replaced by the current Secretary of State in California, Alex Padilla. He will need to be sworn in.
Georgia has until January 22 to formally certify the results of the Senate run-off election so that new Senators Ossoff and Warnock can be sworn in. The hope is that it will actually happen before that so that they can be admitted on Inauguration day. Until all of that happens, however, the Senate remains under Republican control. The two Georgia seats remain empty as the terms of both former legislators have expired.
The current President and Vice-President’s terms are officially over at noon on Wednesday. The President and Vice-President-elect will be sworn in before noon so that there is never a moment when the country is without leadership.
I don’t recall ever being aware of timelines like these, in any prior election. All of this just unfolded while we were distracted doing other things.
Like the characters in On the Beach, I feel like I am aware of every minute that passes. It’s the not knowing what is going to happen over the next 48 hours that makes this all so fraught. I’m on the edge of my seat.
What little bombs are the departing legislators going to leave for their successors?
In the last moments of her tenure as Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos issued a memorandum encouraging further discrimination against transgender students. She did this, literally minutes before she walked out the door.
Among other last-minute moves, last week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo added Cuba to the list of states that sponsor terrorism. This action against Cuba runs completely counter to the work that the Obama administration had tried to accomplish there during his two terms.
This ruling opens Cuba up to lawsuits initiated by opportunists here in the US that they would not be able to defend. Raùl Castro is nearing the end of his time as Cuba’s ruler - a new generation of leaders will be taking over. Pompeo’s move is going to ensure that they hate us. He is salting the earth ahead of the Democratic takeover.
Pompeo was scheduled to make a final trip to Europe this past week but had to cancel it when leaders there refused to meet with him.
The current President is planning on departing Washington on Wednesday morning. The Pentagon has refused to give him a big military send off. His approval rating is currently the lowest that any President has ever had at any point in their administrations since the metric started being calculated.
I can’t get Carly Simon’s song Anticipation out of my head.
As I said, by this time next week, we will know what happened. For now, though, it’s a mystery. We just need to get through this next bit.
It’s like a roller coaster. The big hill is coming and it’s much too late to get out of the car. All of us are thinking, how did this happen? Why am I sitting here? Who thought this was a good idea?
There’s actually a better Carly Simon song to let rattle around in our heads for the next couple of days.
Let the river run
Let all the dreamers wake the nation
Come, the New Jerusalem…
We the great and small
Stand on a star
And blaze a trail of desire
Through the darkening dawn…
Here we go.
We need to trust that the tracks are securely laid and well maintained, or at least maintained enough, that we will eventually coast back into the loading station.
Then, before we get on the next ride, we should get some lunch. I’m starving.
❤️Happy Martin Luther King Day...thank you for keeping his dream alive with your posts 💕