Day 349…
I’m starting this sitting across from Lincoln Center having breakfast after having just had my annual physical. This has been the real first disruption to my schedule in months.
The place where I’m eating has indoor dining, albeit at 25% capacity, but it still looks too crowded to me, so I am, instead, eating outside. While it’s not freezing, it’s certainly a far cry away from being warm. The last time I sat out here to write was back in September. I didn’t need fingerless gloves to type then.
It was good to see my doctor. I have gotten to a place where I don’t even really think about COVID risk anymore. I know it’s there and all of my actions take it into account, but I’m not really all that conscious about how I navigate through it.
I wear a mask because it feels strange not to. I just switched tables to one that was further from the door because it felt like too many people were near me where I was. These days, I instinctually avoid people in the same way that I don’t get too close to the edge of the tracks down in the subway or I don’t wander into a busy street. Nobody needs to tell me to keep my distance, I just do it and when I don’t my body nudges me along to where I should be.
There are a couple of people that Michael and I have seen in person this past year but mostly, like everyone else, we have been hanging out with friends virtually.
I like to think that we’ve been responsible and operating within the proscribed guidelines, but now, suddenly I am with my Doctor in his office and he is REALLY paying attention to COVID protocols.
He listened to me wash my hands and THEN blow my nose from outside the bathroom door. I came out and he sent me back in to wash my hands again. Our masks stayed up for the entire examination until he needed to look at my nose and throat and only then, did he ask me to take down my mask, but also asked me not to speak.
While he was the first person outside my immediate circle that I’ve had to deal with in person in eons, to him I was just one, of a steady stream of outsiders, who’ve come into his office. He comes into contact with people all day long.
He told me a story about one of his patients who had gone to see a dentist. After nearly a year of total isolation, this person sat in the waiting room with a couple of other people and, in doing so, contracted the virus.
There are plenty of doctors and dentists, like mine, who are only allowing one patient into the office at a time. There are also many who aren’t. In terms of this virus, Jean Paul Sartre might not have been that far off when he said, “Hell is other people.” I haven’t been to my ophthalmologist or dentist since this started and, barring an actual problem, wasn’t planning to go until after I’ve been vaccinated.
My doctor visit was a good reminder that what’s going on is real.
On Monday, the United States Supreme Court rejected an appeal from the GOP to hear a case that would overturn a Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision that allowed ballots that were received up to three days following the election to be counted. The Pennsylvania allowance had been passed because of the added burden placed upon voters and the US mail due to the pandemic.
Justice Clarence Thomas, however, wrote a dissenting opinion in which he tracked right alongside the ex-President’s claims of voter fraud.
He said that the case should have been heard because while these particular results would not have changed the election that something similar could change results in the future. He used the word fraud repeatedly.
Even though there hasn’t been a single verifiable instance of significant wrongdoing in the 2020 election, Justice Thomas said, "An election free from strong evidence of systemic fraud is not alone sufficient for election confidence." In other words, what he was saying was that people shouldn’t trust that the election was fair just because there is nothing there to say that it wasn’t.
He went on to say, "The decision to leave election law hidden beneath a shroud of doubt is baffling. By doing nothing, we invite further confusion and erosion of voter confidence. Our fellow citizens deserve better and expect more of us."
The very act of the US Supreme Court hearing the case would be an admission to the country that the court felt that there was some question as to the veracity of the results. Dismissing the case sent the clear and unequivocal signal that there wasn’t, until Justice Thomas said that yes, there was.
Justice Clarence Thomas is married to a highly visible and highly vocal loyal supporter of the ex-President. She attended the celebration at the White House following his acquittal in his first impeachment trial. Her support of the ex-President and her support for the January 6th rally created an ideological rift between some of Justice Thomas’s clerks. She subsequently apologized to them for her outspokenness having done that via email.
Mrs. Thomas has broken with a long-standing tradition that the spouses of Supreme Court Justices remain publicly politically neutral. By ignoring that, she is further casting doubt upon the veracity of the Supreme Court’s decisions by making them appear that they are politically biased decisions rather than decisions based upon the interpretation of the rule of law.
Standing by the ex-President and perpetrating his unfounded and completely fabricated claims of voter fraud in his dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas is doing little more than debasing the entire judicial system of the United States. He has just created his own “shroud of doubt” that will be extremely difficult to lift.
This constant stream of election fraud claims from the right seems to be how they have chosen to move forward. The truly terrible thing about what they are doing is that it will work. A lie repeated often enough will stick.
Though, apparently, not all of them.
Jessica Watkins is one of the members of the Oath Keepers paramilitary group who has been charged with taking part in the January 6th insurrection. As part of her defense, she has been arguing that despite it looking like she was storming the Capitol that she was actually there to provide security for the legislators. She claimed that she met with Secret Service agents beforehand who discussed the situation with her and, in effect, deputized her to help them.
On Sunday, a representative from the Secret Service released the statement that, "To carry out its protective functions on January 6th, the U.S. Secret Service relied on the assistance of various government partners. Any assertion that the Secret Service employed private citizens to perform those functions is false."
In light of that truth, Watkin’s lawyers have quickly amended her claim. It seems that she didn’t actually meet with Secret Service agents so much as she may have just talked to them as she went past them on her way through security. Watkins, who is a former Army ranger, is now saying that it was maybe just the organizers of the rally who tasked her with securing the event. We will see if anyone who organized the rally cops to that. The first lie didn’t work so maybe her second one will.
The Senate hearing into the entire insurrection began today. Whatever happens as a result of this, Speaker Pelosi is still advocating for a separate January 6th independent commission to examine the events leading up to and including that day.
It is in the nature of historical truth that the politics surrounding its investigation will influence the final telling of the story. What will eventually come to be accepted as the “truth”, will likely not be exactly what happened.
From here on in, the evidence from that day will be picked at and dug through until not even the people who were actually there will recognize it. Years from now, something will spark a re-examination of it all and by then the time that has past will further distort the outcome because the new politics of the day surrounding the new inquiry will have also changed.
It's like a picture on your iPhone camera. You can make the same place or thing look countless different ways depending on which filter you use.
Take a picture and send it someone. That person puts a whole different filter on it and makes it look like a night shot rather than one taken during the day, The next person then changes something else, and so on down the line, until the original photographer can no longer recognize their own shot.
We will likely never find out the whole truth about what happened on January 6th. “The truth is rarely pure and never simple,” said Oscar Wilde. The best we can hope for is a full accounting of it.
After all, not one person that day was in exactly the same place at the same time seeing the same things. Each person’s account is unique and there are thousands of accounts to sift through and compare.
Meanwhile, it got far too cold to stay outside and it started to drizzle so I went inside. The indoor space had cleared out enough that it felt comfortable enough to stay. After having a cup of coffee, it started to fill up again, so I left and walked downtown. I hung out inside of a gay bar and had sliders and a diet coke while I finished this. Nobody but the server was in there with me. Then it got too late and I met up with a friend and now I am sitting across the street from the Winter Garden Theatre back in the cold again.
Even in this accounting of my day, there are many things that I have left out. Maybe far into the future I might consider them as having been important in some way. At the moment they either didn’t fit into my narrative or I didn’t really notice them.
At best these posts are my “truth”. They are what I am thinking about now. My writing of them is being influenced by the fact that I am cold and because of the diet coke I drank I now have to go to the rest room.
Years from now, looking back at this day, what will I remember of it? Will reading this account of it, currently happening in real time, jog my memory or just make it murkier?
I’m going to head down to Krispy Kreme and think about it.
💞what a perfect day Dr visit and a Krispy Kreme!! ... Truth ... I always trust my instincts....no matter what “they” say is true... 💞🌞