Day 353…
This morning I drove out to Martin Van Buren High School in Queens and got my first shot of the Pfizer vaccine.
Martin Van Buren was, until the last guy, considered to have been one of the worst, if not the worst President that the United States has ever had. I’m sure that wherever he is, he must be thrilled that he’s no longer scraping the very bottom.
I am supposed to be related to Martin Van Buren in some way. I think that one of my Great-Great-Grandmothers may have been his niece. That’s the family lore at any rate. I’ll have to really track that down on the Ancestry website.
Why anyone felt compelled to name a High School after him, is beyond me.
Some rather distinguished people went there, though. They’ve had a couple of Nobel laureates. Both Madeline Kahn and the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe attended the school. When Kahn was a senior, Mapplethorpe was a Freshman. I wonder if they knew each other.
The vaccine site was extremely well set up and organized in the school’s gymnasium. The whole process couldn’t have been simpler.
Once I checked in there were two rows of chairs set at distanced intervals to wait in. Then I was processed and sent into a cubicle where a health practitioner gave me the shot. After that, I was sent to another area with its own rows of distanced seats to sit and wait for 15 minutes to confirm that I wasn’t going to go into anaphylactic shock,
They scheduled my second shot for three weeks from today and sent me home.
As I was leaving, I saw that across the street from the school was a bar called Winchesters. I noticed it because that’s the name of the two lead characters on Supernatural. Then, I saw that on the side of the building was another sign that said, “Hester’s Pub.”
It seems that, as inconvenient as it was, that my appointment was in exactly the right place.
This weekend, the Conservative Political Action Conference is meeting in Orlando. If there is any confusion about where the far right of the Republican Party stands, this should put an end to it.
Twelve Republican lawmakers chose to skip the vote for the COVID relief bill in Washington and, instead, traveled to Florida to participate.
Last year, Representative Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina was furious that Democrats were choosing to stay at home and vote by proxy rather than showing up in person. He tweeted, “Leaders show up no matter how uncertain the times are. The Democrats are cowards for not showing up to work.” This year, with his party no longer in power, it is apparently fine for him to miss the session and attend the conference. How much hypocrisy is too much? Wherever the line is, I think they’ve passed it.
The Nazis were masters of branding. They combed through the world’s religions and appropriated symbols that were simple, stark and effective. Their followers did not need to be smart enough to read, they got all the information that they needed from an emblem like the swastika. That the swastika was ever used by other cultures to represent something else was largely forgotten.
It is so powerfully associated with what the Nazis stood for that Facebook will not let you sell anything at all with it on it.
In the early 1900’s tobacco companies created a kind of felt collectible package insert to encourage customers to keep buying their brand. Some months ago, I was trying to sell one of these tobacco felts. Despite the fact that it was made long before the Nazi rise to power, it incorporated a traditional swastika into its native American design, so I was forced to take it down.
Another symbol that the Reich appropriated was from Scandinavia. The Odal rune looks a bit like the Christian Jesus fish standing on its tail. A diamond with two bent legs. The rune became the symbol of the Waffen SS, the SS’s combat arm. It was also used by the Hitler Youth.
The stage for the CPAC convention this weekend was designed in the shape of the Odal rune.
That is not an accident. Far right groups all over the country see that and know exactly what they are being told: These Republican leaders are right there with them.
These white supremacist leaders are also firmly pledging their allegiance to the ex-President. Astonishingly, they even installed a golden statue of the ex-President that greets attendees as they arrive. An actual shiny gold statue of the man. The significance of worshiping a false golden idol seems utterly lost on these people, most of whom claim to be Christians.
In a particularly shocking moment during one of the addresses, Ted Cruz had the gall to make a joke about his trip to Cancún. Orlando is nice, he said, but not as nice as Cancún. The crowd roared with laughter. He said this as some of his constituents are still in Texas without heat or water.
A week ago, ¾ of all GOP respondents to a Quinnipiac poll said that they want to see the ex-President continue to play a major role in the party.
The Senate Minority Leader, after having voted to acquit the ex-President in the impeachment trial, then excoriated him in a truly blistering speech directly afterwards. Yesterday, when he was asked if he would support the ex-President, were he to get the Republican nomination and run in 2024 he said, "The nominee of the party? Absolutely."
How much further into B-movie Nazi-dom will the Republican Party need to sink before people start to abandon the idea of supporting their “team” good or bad? Honestly, looking at what’s going on in Orlando, I don’t think that there is anywhere further down for them to go.
The further to the right the lunatic fringe of the party pulls it, the more moderates and centrists there are who are going to fall away. If the Republicans couldn’t win the last election when they were united, how do they think they will win the next one divided?
The Senate Minority Leader did not attend the conference and neither, notably, did the ex-Vice-President nor Nikki Haley the former US Ambassador to the UN. Both of them likely have an eye on running for the Presidency themselves. Moderate Republicans who have publicly fought against the former President like Senator Mitt Romney and Representative Liz Cheney were also not there.
If the Conservative Political Action Conference was ever involved in actual conservative policy, it certainly isn’t now. Nobody participating seems to be FOR anything. Instead, it seems to be about the airing of grievances and the spread of misinformation. Everyone involved is fully behind the Big Lie - that the recent election was stolen from them. They appear to be willing to completely destroy our entire democratic system in order to not have to face up to the fact that they lost.
If this radical right carnival repels more moderate Republicans than it attracts, then the party really will have no option moving forward other than to split. If, however, it starts attracting more people, that then puts us back on the track for another populist take-over of the country.
Things do seem to be starting to get better. Will people really choose to go backwards?
With the vaccine finally starting to roll out in a somewhat controlled way, case numbers going down and a major stimulus package on the horizon, there is little to complain about that wasn’t already there. Let’s hope we continue in this direction and not give anyone else a reason to join the circus.
It was a very wet morning. Driving on the Cross Bronx Expressway in heavy rain was no fun at all.
I have a slight ache in my arm where I got the shot, but it’s already going away.
A year ago, I was finishing up a workshop and about to leave on what would turn out to be my last overseas trip before we shut down. There were reports in the news about the virus but mostly they were about how Italy was getting swamped by it. We were fine and England was fine.
A year later, we have all been through it. That there is already a vaccine available would be a miracle if it wasn’t so firmly based on actual science. Nothing supernatural required.
How long will these vaccines last? We will have to see.
As long as Bill Gates has now managed to get his microscopic tracker into my bloodstream, I should go out and give him something to follow.
I will not be watching any of the speeches from CPAC today. Or tomorrow.
I will, instead, be taking a walk. Or eating a meal. Or anything else at all.
Life, as they say, is far too short.
A couple of Martin Van Buren comments...you must be related to one of my co-workers, Jack Van Buren, who's a direct descendant of MVB. Marty's home, Lindenwald, is a few miles from the village of Kinderhook. He's buried in the village cemetery.
Well done, glad you got vaccine!