Day 337…
A year ago, today, I was clambering over Mayan ruins in Mexico.
The cast onboard the NCL Bliss had a full day of onboard training scheduled, so we couldn’t do anything with them onstage. Instead, we joined a small group of hardy ship passengers and took a bus deep into the jungle and explored several different sites.
I had been to several other Mayan cities in the Yucatan before, maybe twenty years before, but not to these which were further afield.
At one point during the day, somebody climbed to the top of the largest pyramid in the complex and blew on a conch shell. The blare from that shell echoed off of all of the other ruined buildings and spread out through the surrounding jungle.
It was a sound brought forward from centuries before. For just a moment, the ghosts of all of the people who had lived there woke and repopulated the entire city.
That day seems like an experience from another lifetime.
Like all of the numbers in regard to the pandemic, as the number of days, weeks and months that we have been living with this virus continues to grow, they become less and less distinct.
I have kept a scrapbook since I was ten years old. In them, I have put the tickets from every piece of theatre I have ever witnessed. I’ve listed the books I have read and the movies I’ve seen. Every time I go somewhere, I try to find a postcard from that place and add it to the book as well.
In recent years I was traveling so much, to such a disparate group of places, that it seemed to me to be the only way that I would ever be able to remember where I had been. At this point there are probably about twenty books that are completely full. They originally used to last for years, but by the time everything shut down they were filling up every eighteen months or so.
I don’t ever look at them, they are all, except for the current one, in plastic crates in our storage unit, but knowing they are there takes the pressure off my having to worry about forgetting.
The first of the books is a lined paper composition book with the typical mottled black and white cover. As I said, I was ten when I started this.
We took a trip to South Africa to spend the summer and we stopped for a day or two in Lisbon on the way. I kept a kind of travel diary that somewhat documented the trip. In the book are postcards from where we went and entrance tickets to the museums and historical buildings that we visited.
About four years ago (alarming because until I looked it up, I would have said it was two at the most) I went back to Portugal for a couple of days. Nothing that I saw in Lisbon looked remotely familiar to me. I had memories of visiting there 45 years before, but I couldn’t get any of them to line up with what I was now seeing.
I always meant to go back and look through that first book to see if anything connected, but I never did. Now, I’m curious again.
About two months ago, Norwegian Cruise Lines started signing up crew members again from India and the Philippines. That seemed to indicate that they were planning to resume sailing in the spring. Two weeks ago, however, they sent the crews back to their homes.
Financial analysts and port authorities do not seem to think that there is really any way that the first cruises will start up again until midsummer at the earliest. Once they start, it could take many, many months to get up to full speed.
In the early days of the pandemic, cruise ships were one of the places where the virus ran rampant. The combination of tight quarters and relatively elderly passengers created a perfect storm for transmission. Thus far, the CDC has not been able to come up with any real guidelines to make the resumption of cruising possible.
Whatever you think about cruising, itself, there are countless port cities around the world that rely on those passengers visiting to get by. Part of our global recovery depends on those ships getting back out there.
Day two of the impeachment trial has just gotten underway.
While repetitive and, at many times, harrowing, yesterday’s presentation by the Democratic trial managers was, nonetheless, riveting. Whatever the result of this trial, the Democrat’s outlining of events and their arguments connecting the then-President with what happened on January 6th, is devastatingly thorough.
Their organization of footage from the Capitol’s security cameras, tweets and statements from the ex-President as well as video clips from the insurrectionists themselves into a coherent timeline creates a narrative that is nothing short of jaw-dropping.
An anonymous computer programmer, fearing that it all would be lost when Parler was shut down, downloaded nearly 30 terabytes of the posts by individuals who participated in the attempted coup. The programmer describes herself as a “hacktivist” but everything she downloaded was freely available on public platforms. The trial managers have made good use of that footage.
Stacey Plaskett is a Democratic Congressional Representative from the United States Virgin Islands. Because the Islands are a territory and not a state she was not allowed to vote for or against the impeachment of the ex-President in the House. She made history yesterday when she became the first nonvoting delegate to Congress to serve as an impeachment manager. She was also the only Black woman in the room.
As a trained lawyer, she clearly laid out her case that the insurgents believed that they were doing what the ex-President wanted them to do. The ex-President’s repeated claims of voter fraud in the election and incendiary speech created a base of supporters that she said, “…were violent, praising that violence and then leaving that violence, that rage straight at our door.”
As impressive as all of the impeachment managers were, Stacey Plaskett stood out for her intelligence and complete lack of affectation.
Born into poverty in Brooklyn and then raised in poverty in the U.S. Virgin Islands she was recruited by a non-profit called A Better Chance, Inc. They sent her to Choate Rosemary Hall, a select secondary school, where she became a star athlete and even Class President. She then graduated from Georgetown and got her law degree from American University Washington College of Law.
She has said that her time in Choate Rosemary awakened a sense of social responsibility within her. She cited a biblical verse when asked to describe that commitment to public service; "To whom much is given; much is required".
I do not think that we have heard the last from Representative Stacey Plaskett. I certainly hope not.
The trial is continuing today - again with presentations from the prosecutors. Tomorrow, the ex-President’s defense team will be given the opportunity to respond to this deluge of damning evidence.
How do you defend the indefensible? I guess we will see.
During my road trips this summer out west and into the south and the two weeks we spent up in Provincetown, I added a few things to my scrapbook. In November, I put in my “I voted early” sticker.
The physical remains of these last many months, however, are few and far between. Instead, I have these posts. I will probably just write in “Pandemic March 12, 2020 - ______” in the scrapbook and then, hopefully, continue on adding in postcards and ticket stubs.
Remembering the past is important. The impeachment managers were given a huge gift when that dump of salvaged video came their way.
Memory is such a fickle thing. Especially when I discuss him, Michael will often tell me that we need to discuss the timeline of events that I just wrote about.
Having all of this actual footage to pull from is remarkable. Watching the evidence in this trial unfold, I am continually struck by how video taken at the same time but from different locations during the occupation of the Capitol changes what I thought the story was.
Seeing footage of lawmakers inside their chambers from the building’s security system next to footage taken by the insurrectionists themselves at the exact same time is truly chilling. The people attacking the Capitol were out for blood the video shows just how very close they came to getting it.
Representative Diana DeGette from Colorado has spent much of this early hour and a half presenting the timeline purely from the point of view of the insurrectionists by using their tweets and their posts. If they choose to actually look at it, the ex-President’s supporters both in and out of government now have a full recounting of those events.
The impeachment managers have taken us through these events over and over again from multiple points of view - from what the ex-President did to what happened to the lawmakers within the Capitol and now, also from what the rioters who invaded the Capitol did.
The Democrats have created an extremely thorough scrapbook of the events leading up to, during and following the violence on January 6th. Long after clear memory has become clouded and fragmented, what they have amassed will remain to tell the story.
How do you defend the indefensible?
The only way is to refuse to look at the truth. To lie.
Let’s see what happens.
OMG! This is so good!!
Another great piece Richard. The past and evidence of it is so powerful. I remember when we traveled for a year when I was seven (first time I met you) and my mum set a scrapbook competition for my sister and I. It was such a defining part of the trip keeping souvenirs and creating the storyboard. I have no idea what happened to our scrapbooks unfortunately . Wish my mum had been more nostalgic for keeping memories!