This has been a weird week. Work hasn’t been more stressful than usual, but I’ve had more than a few symptoms and indications that I may have something more serious the autumn hay fever going on. I’ve gotten some writing done this week, and started reading the next book in my virtual pile, but haven’t gotten as far as I had hoped on either.
So, let’s jump to this week’s Friday Five. This week I bring you: the top five stories of the week, five stories of interest to queers and our allies, five stories about the moronic thug occupying the Oval Office, and five videos (plus some things I wrote).
“The charge, my fellow council members, is witchcraft.” (Click to embiggen>I’ve written more than once about the fact that actual scary movies give me nightmares. And I’m the kind of sleepwalker who, when having a nightmare, I will go around the house waking up everyone I can find and tell them very emphatically that we are in danger and need to come up with a plan to defeat the killer/monster/demon/alien that is trying to break into the house. So generally speaking (with some big exceptions) I avoid a lot of horror movies. On the other hand, I love Halloween, and I love spooky movies, particularly funny spooky movies. So this next confession will not surprise some of you: when the cheesy parody horror movie, Elvira: Mistress of the Dark came out in theatres very breifly in 1988… I actually went to a theatre and paid full price and saw it. My (now ex-)wife, and a couple of our friends accompanied me, and we all paid for the experience. One of those friends is a mostly-straight friend who said upfront that 75% of the reason he was willing to go was because he had lusted after the horror host Elvira (played by amazing Cassandra Peterson) since high school.
A few years later, one of the few disputes that I had with (at the time my soon-to-be-ex-wife) Julie while we were splitting assets was who would get to keep the VHS of Elvira: Mistress of the Dark. Of all the things to argue over it was one of the dumbest, I admit… I’m just happy that we got through all that and now, 29 years later, we’re good friends and can laugh together about such things.
As it happened, my first husband, Ray, loved the movie, and we owned it on VHS and upgraded to DVD before he died. And my husband Michael thinks the movie is funny and is more than willing to watch it with me about every other Halloween, so, yay!
But, let’s get to the actual movie. Outside of the movie, Elvira is a horror host (played by Peterson) who had a syndicated sci fi/fantasy/horror movie show on various cables for years. The movie proceeds on the conceit that Elvira is a real person, not just a character which Peterson plays, and when the local California station she appears on gets a new owner who sexually harasses her, she gets fired. But she isn’t upset because she’s about to open a show in Las Vegas… except her agent informs her that the show in Vegas will only go forward if she can put up $50,000 of the production cost.
Right after she says she doesn’t have that kind of money, a studio intern knocks on her dressing room door to tell her she has a telegram. According to the telegram, her Great-Aunt Morgana Talbot, has died and that Elvira is a named as a beneficiary in the will (“I didn’t know I had a good aunt, let alone a great one.”). So Elvira drives across country to the quaint town of Falwell, Massachusetts for the reading of the will.
“Listen sister, if I want your opinion, I’ll beat it out of you.” Elvira’s fist confrontation with Chastity Pariah (Click to embiggen)What follows is a parody of several old horror movies (and a few Lovecraft stories), but even more a parody of all those movies about small minded small town people being against outsiders, et cetera. While there is one scene that is a direct take-off on Flashdance, the majority of the movie is a retelling of Footloose with Elvira in the Kevin Bacon role.
And the movie is funny. I mean, Edie McClurg should have gotten an award for her hilarious turn as Chastity Pariah, hypocritical council member.
Elvira’s great-aunt doesn’t leave her any money, just her house, her book of “recipes”, and her pet poodle named Algonquin.
The kicker is that Morgana was a powerful witch, the book is actually a very old and potent grimoire, and the poodle is actually a familiar. Elvira spends much of the rest of the movie figuring this out, and slowly learning the Morgana’s brother, Vincent, is the evil warlock who killed Elvira’s mother, Divana, and that possession of the book is going to decide the balance of supernatural powers for the next century.
In between, Elvira tries to iniiate a romance with the very hunky but virginal owner of the local movie theatre, becomes a hero for the town’s teen-agers who wish the town was less backwards, and has various misadventures trying to use the mystical book. I know the movie is set in Massachusetts, but some of the more jokes in the sequence where she mistakes a potion to conjure a demon for a casserole recipe resonated extremely deeply with my southern Missouri/Oklahoma soul, okay?
Part of the meta of the movie is that Elvira, despite being played by a cisgendered woman, is essentially a drag queen. And while what little other queer subtext is very, very sub, that 80s drag queen/queer camp vibe is extremely strong in the movie. All of the villains are either defenders of the old Traditional Family Values notions or the even more ancient Toxic Masculinity tropes, while Elvira and her supporters are champions of Everyone Is Valid, and Being True To Your Self is More Important Than Pleasing Societal Expectations.
Which is very queer. So even though the vast majority of the sex and innuendo in the film is quite hetero, there is simultaneously an extremely strong non-hetero message being promulgated throughout.
At the time when the movie came out, I was still trying to pretend I was bisexual, which I very dysfunctionally saw as being half-heterosexual. I was trying to walk an extremely difficult tightrope. And this movie seemed to walk a similar tightrope… but when I re-watched it, I began seeing that the tightrope was as false as Chastity Pariah’s moral superiority.
Eventually, the camp sensibilities and the sex-positive subtext of this movie was one of the many examples that helped convince me to stop trying to compromise my true self.
And years later, it’s just an extremely funny movie to watch during Halloween season. And what more could you ask for?
Click to embiggenFor quite some time now I’ve been, of necessity, thinking an awful lot about coping mechanisms. Because we’re living in high anxiety times, there is a lot of uncertainty about everyone’s health, livelihoods, and so forth. Many more people than usual are facing an existential threat directly caused by certain politicians and their base supporters. Many of us have been facing existential threats at the ballot box our entire lives, but no matter who long we’ve been doing that, it still adds to the load of anxieties and worries one has to keep track of.
Even though I am an introvert, this current situation has made me acutely aware of just how much regular contact with friends has, in the past, contributed to my ability to cope. We’ve been able to mitigate that in a couple of ways. Every month we have continued to have Writers’ Night, for instance, we’ve just been doing it virtually in a voice chat on my Discord server. Even those months when no one has anything new to read (and it is difficult being creative when you’re dealing with all this very justified anxiety), just getting to hear familiar voice and chat has been a blessing.
My gaming group had been meeting on Discord for much longer (some of the players live about an hour and a half drive north of my place, one lives nearly a five hour drive south) than the pandemic. Previously once or twice a year some of us would make a road trip out of game day, so we could play in person, but we’d been pulling it off online fairly well. Again, it’s a time I get to chat and laugh and otherwise spend time with some dear friends, and I’m really appreciating it.
I’ve been quarantining since mid-February (before the first identified case in the U.S., but while the threat was in the news, I woke up one morning with a cough — by the time the cough went away just a bit over two weeks later, the corporate overlords had issued the directive that everyone who could work from home should do so as much as possible), but there are still aspects of it that surprise me.
For instance, how fast I go through a bag of coffee beans.
Before the quarantine I only made coffee at home on the weekends and on work-from-home days. I was only scheduled to work from home twice a week, so that meant at least three days a week that I was exclusively drinking the company coffee. In theory, that should mean that I’m using up coffee beans almost twice as fast as before, right?
Nope.
I was going through coffee almost three times as fast. When i mentioned that to an acquaintance online a few months ago, they pointed out that (at that time) my husband was also at home full time, and I wasn’t taking that into account.
I hadn’t laughed so hard in months. Seriously.
My husband doesn’t just not drink coffee. My husband positively loathes coffee. (Which doesn’t stop him from buying me big lattes to deliver to me if we’re at a convention together and I’m staffing a table or something, but that’s another topic).
I wound up in a discussion about coffee with a group of coworkers about two months ago and thats when I actually thought about it and realized something that I should have noticed but just hadn’t. When I’m in the office I drink at minimum one mug of coffee or one mug of tea every hour (and there are a couple of hours in most day where I’d slip an extra mug in for reasons). Typical mug holds 8 ounces of coffee, that’s 64-80 ounces of caffinated beverage per office day.
But at home I would usually make one pot of coffee, and that was it. That’s only 60 ounces of coffee on those days. Similarly, I usually only made a single pot per day on weekends.
I think part of the reason I was able to get by on only 60 ounces a day on work-from-home days is because they were usually less stressful. Even on infuriating days, the fact that I could step away from my desk and step outside on my veranda made the stress easier to manage.
Now what I typically do is make a pot on the morning of the first day of work, then some point in the afternoon I make a second pot, and drink as much as half of it. One the second work day of the week, I first reheat and drink the leftover from the second pot (a notion I know makes a lot of people shudder, sorry), then I make a fresh pot and finish it off.
And I think the reason is that being able to step out on the veranda or whatever is no longer a novel or special thing. So the stresses of work (more than some of which have gotten worse during the pandemic) just pile up exactly the same way as they used to only do when I was stuck in the office.
And if I’m feeling frazzled on the weekend and reach the end of the coffee pot early in the afternoon? Guess what? I make a second pot on those days, too.
So, before the pandemic, working from home two days a week and then making coffee at home on the weekend, I was usually making four pots of coffee a week. Now I’m making at least 9 pots a week.
I’m trying to mitigate this is some ways. Some months back I stopped making coffee on Sundays at all, switching to making tea in my infuser pot (this also gave me a regular opportunity to run the coffee carafe and other washable parts of the coffee maker through the dishwasher instead of only doing just a perfunctory rinse each day). Tea is still a caffinated drink, but it’s generally lower in caffeine, so that helps me back off the weekly total a bit. I’ve also sometimes stopped myself from making a second pot and instead turned on the electric kettle to switch to single cups of tea made from bags.
I can’t cut it out completely, because I’m sure you’ve seen the memes that say that coffee is a warm, delicious alternative to hating everyone in the morning? Well, sometimes, “hating” is a euphemism for “murder” — so, don’t even think of suggesting that I give up the coffee altogether… because I know how to hide a body.
I had a very busy weekend, and never managed to sit down to do a Weekend Update, even though there were a lot of things worth posting. Particularly since I thought it was a better use of the blog to post something for National Coming Out Day and for Indigenous Peoples Day. So I started assembling a post-weekeng update, and realized that my collection of memes and political cartoons to use in future posts is overflowing, again, so today you get a subset of those surplus images, as I post those that apply to the news links below.
Indigenous Peoples Day “Today we celebrate the people who first called this land home. We remember the struggles and tragedies they endured. We honor their place in and contributions to the shared story of America.” (click to embiggen)
Today is National Coming Out Day. If Ray were still alive, it would also be the day we’d be celebrating the twenty-seventh anniversary of our commitment ceremony (he promised to stay with me for the rest of his life, and he did). My (very-much alive) husband Michael and I don’t have any anniversaries that are close to this date, but this is the twenty-first National Coming Out Day we’ve lived together.
I’ve written many times about how important it is that queer people (lesbian, gay, bisexual, pansexual, asexual, nonbinary, trans, aromantic, genderfluid, two-spirit, questioning, intersex, and so no) be out if they safely can be. Studies show that being closeted has several deleterious effects on one’s mental and physical health. When you’re in the closet, you aren’t being yourself. You are pretending to be someone who others wouldn’t guess was part of the LGBT. When you’re in the closet you’re in a constant state of anxiety—the very real fear that if some people knew your secret, they would reject you, shun you, or maybe even physically assault you.
That takes a toll.
Studies have also shown that the more LGBT people that a straight person knows, the less likely they are to harbor bigoted beliefs toward the community. And queer young people who have out role models in their community are far less likely to attempt suicide.
So there are many, many good reasons to get out.
There are reasons to be wary of being out. For instance, 40% of homeless teens are homeless precisely because they have been kicked out or driven from their homes when their families found out they were queer. And there are bigots in every community who pose financial, social, and physical threats to queer people. So I understand why staying in the closet sometimes feels like the safer option.
But I have to say from personal experience, that not living with that constant burden of fear is such a relief. Now, the relief don’t always come right away, because sometimes the people closest to you — even those that you are absolutely certain will be okay with learning this about you — don’t react positively. When I came out, several friends and relatives I thought would at least be tolerant absolutely flipped out. Two that I was certain had just been waiting for me to admit it categorically denied that they had ever suspect at all — and one of them insisted that the mere fact that I thought they knew already was somehow proof that I had been brainwashed into thinking I was gay.
On the other hand, there were family members and friends who I had thought wouldn’t take it well who turned into my fiercest defenders against the other.
The sad fact is that you aren’t going to know who will stand by you until you come out.
But the flip side of that is, the ones who reject you? The ones who through the worst fit when you come out? They never loved you. No matter how much they insist that they did, the truth is that they didn’t love you, they loved the straight person they imagined you to be. And their rejection demonstrates that their love had always been conditional.
Coming out was scary. But once the initial difficulties blew over, I made an amazing discovery: since I was no longer expending all that energy pretending to be something I wasn’t and scared to death people would find out I was pretending, I had a whole lot more time and energy to spend on the things I love. And the more time I spent doing the things I love, the more new people who were ready to accept me for who I was came into my life.
If it is safe for you to come out, you should. You’ll find that standing proud in the opne, being true to yourself, is so much better than hiding in the dark!
Please, please..And here we are at the second Friday of October, getting closer to Halloween, and yet the most frightening things most of us encounter day to day are found in the headlines of major news organizations, because we are trapped in a hellscape which is being mode worse—both intentionally and through gross incompetence—by people who have sworn oaths to protect us.
I can’t write a scarier story than the headlines that are so low on the page most people can’t get to them, let alone the much worse ones higher up.
Let’s jump to this week’s Friday Five. This week I bring you: the top five stories of the week, five stories of interest to queers and our allies, five stories about deplorable people, five stories about the fight to save my homeland, five stories about the moronic thug occupying the Oval Office, and five videos (plus notable obituaries and some things I wrote).
Eddie Van Halen, Hall of Famer Who Revolutionized the Guitar, Dead at 65. “I don’t know shit about scales or music theory,” he told Rolling Stone in 1980. “I don’t want to be seen as the fastest guitar in town, ready and willing to gun down the competition. All I know is that rock & roll guitar, like blues guitar, should be melody, speed, and taste, but more important, it should have emotion. I just want my guitar playing to make people feel something: happy, sad, even horny.”
Same, my friend, same.I wrote recently about the Bury Your Gays and Gayngst tropes and why they aren’t just tiresome, but also hurtful. That particular post was inspired by a conversation I almost joined elseweb on the subject. Since then at the same location the topic has veered over into a discussion of queerbaiting. When someone there gave an excellent example, other people jumped in to say the show in question shouldn’t be criticized because while it did engage in a lot of queerbaiting, it also had a couple of token recurring supporting characters at various times. Which wound me up a bit about how tokenism and bad representation are additional sins to lay at the feet of the creators—three wrongs don’t make a right—and don’t excuse actively misleading your audience (and publickly mocking them for falling for it again and again)…
But I’m tired of explaining why so many bigoted stereotypes, bad representations, tokenism, and the rest are both bad writing and immoral behavior. I’ve written about them before and I’ll surely write about them again, but I’d rather talk about a show that treated its gay character right.
So let’s talk about Julie and the Phantoms.
If you’re not familiar, Julie and the Phantoms was recently released on Netflix, and it’s about a high school girl whose mother has recently died. An aspiring musician in a music program at school, Julie has been unable to bring herself to perform. After getting dropped from the program, she decides to clean out her mother’s music studio as a step in trying to move one. Among her mother’s things, she finds a demo CD for a band she has never heard of. When she puts it in the player, three ghosts are summoned from limbo.
The ghosts are three members of what was a four-member boy band. The three boys died in 1995 after eating bad street food on the night before they were supposed to debut at the Orpheum Theatre.
At first it seems that only Julie can see and hear the boys, but they soon discover that if she is singing with them, everyone can see them and hear their music. With a cover story that the boys are holograms, Julie embarks on a journey to find her voice.
Yes, it’s cheesy, yes it’s a teen musical show. But it is well done and in these troubling times, a story with a big heart is exactly what some of us need.
Warning: There are some spoilers below…
One of the three boys in the band, Alex, is gay. We learn this very early on when one of his bandmates mentions how Alex’s parents weren’t exactly supportive when he came out. That one line is the only point in the show where anything approaching the usual cliched approaches to handling a queer character happens.
Early on the boys meet another ghost, a skateboarding cutie named Willie. It is clear in just a few lines of dialogue the Alex and Willie are attracted with each other and awkwardly flirting. Alex’s two straight bandmates take it in stride. “He is totally into you!” “And he’s cute!” They treat their bandmate’s queerness very matter-of-factly. The dialogue would not have sounded out of place in a more typical show if the object of Alex’s flirtation had been an opposite sex character.
Which is how it should be.
The subplot that Willie is involved in (he is under the thumb of a villainous ghost who is trying to enslave the three band members) doesn’t cross into any of the gay cliches, either. Their roles in the story are based on their personalities, not their sexual orientation. Their orientation is just another fact about them, not the defining characteristic of everything they do and say.
None of the bad things that happen to either of them have anything to do with their orientation. Not even the villain says anything even vaguely homophobic about either one. Neither is killed (I realize they are ghosts, but it is made clear that bad things can happen to ghosts in this fictional world) at the end. Neither of them realizes it would be better to be with an opposite sex person.
If you don’t happen to be queer, none of those statements may sound extraordinary—but trust me, having all of those things be true about a queer character in most works of fiction that aren’t explicitly aimed at a queer audience is an extremely rare event.
Furthermore, neither the show runners nor the network said anything in advance about how “and we have gay characters!” and then expecting to get congratulated on their open-mindedness. That is extremely rare, as well. In fact, that other show I mentioned in the opening paragraphs, not only did the network and people running the show keep crowing about their gay character–they even put such crowing into the mouth of one of the straight characters in the opening episode.
Now, all of this isn’t exactly an accident. The director of Julie and the Phantoms is Kenny Ortega (who is also one of the producers). Ortega is probably most well-known at this point as being the director the first High School Musical TV movie and several of the sequels. You might also recognize his name as the director of 1993’s Hocus Pocus. He in much less famous as being one of a couple of actors who—in 1972 when this was a very risky thing to do in any career, even theatre—came out in the pages of The Advocate, one of the nation’s oldest gay and lesbian publications.
During the press interviews after the release of Julie and the Phantoms, when asked about the characters of Alex and Willie, Ortega has said, “Alex is the character I wish was there for me when I was growing up, and who never appeared.”
Which makes sense. Speaking for myself, as a scared closeted kid growing up I was not interested in seeing stories about gay bashing or coming out and being rejected or the other usual queer story lines. I wanted—needed—to see queer characters living ordinary lives, facing the same challenges and triumphs as all the other characters in those stories.
Which is what Julie and the Phantoms gives us. And I’m so glad it does.
Someone’s getting ready for Halloween!I like to decorate. I like to put up blinking lights and cheesy window decorations and other tacky wonderful things for virtually any holiday. My late husband, Ray, was just as bad as I was about that, and we amplified the tendency in each other. Since our birthdays were in late September, we would usually start decorating for Halloween right after our birthdays. And then shortly after Halloween we would take down most of the Halloween decorations and put up the Thanksgiving decorations. Then the weekend after Thanksgiving we would take all of those down and start in on Christmas. Then on New Year’s Day we’d take down the Christmas decorations and put those away, but it would be only a few weeks later that we’d get out the Valentine’s Day decorations. And then we’d pull out the St. Patrick’s Day decorations and finally the Easter decorations…
And once we put the Easter decorations away things would look mundane on the outside of our place until it was time for the Halloween decorations to come out.
The process fell apart the year Ray died. He passed just a couple weeks before Thanksgiving. I wasn’t going to decorate for Christmas at all, until I woke up one night with this overwhelming certainty that Ray would be very unhappy with me for not decorating, and I figured out how to put up a few things without pulling out the many, many, many large storage containers full of Christmas decorations (I was quite certain if I started looking at them I’d break down crying and might not be able to stop). I didn’t decorate for Valentines Day or the others afterwards.
Michael and I were dating by the following Halloween, and I put some of the Halloween decorations up. He helped me decorate for Christmas that year, and I think I only cried about two dozen times while getting decorations out and putting them up.
It took a couple more years before I pulled out any boxes of decorations other than Halloween, Thanksgiving/Harvest, and Christmas. And I usually didn’t go all out for the others, only pulling a few decorations out of the boxes for the others. Since Michael was less invested in everything but Halloween and Solstice, I had less motivation to dig boxes out of the basement and hang things up.
When we got the notice that we would have to move out of the place I’d lived in for nearly 22 years (we got the notice barely a week before Christmas, but it was a five-month notice, so it wasn’t undoable), one of the first things we did was go through a bunch of the decorations and get rid of anything that was questionable. The silly string of light up Easter Eggs was about 24 years old and had spent at least a month each time the were put up hanging in sunlight, so it wasn’t really a surprise when we examined the wires that the were obvious stress signs on the insulation.
We started moving into the new place Easter weekend and got mostly unpacked by July of that year. When October came around, I had no Halloween decorations at all. We also have significantly less storage for such things at the new place, and after reducing 34 boxes/tubs of Christmas decorations to 8 smaller boxes, I didn’t relish going overboard on the other holidays.
I picked up some cute window clings to put in the front windows (though since we’re not on the ground floor I’m not sure anyone but me can tell what they are), a jack-o-lantern thing to hang on the front door, but I couldn’t find any LED pumpkin lights or the like for the windows. If I had lights in the windows, they would be visible to folks on the ground. But I couldn’t find any.
I happened to mention it on Twitter. And for unrelated reasons a few days later I was dropping some things off at the home of my dear friend Kehf (I don’t remember what the things were–since her housemates include two other equally long term friends and my goddaughter, it could have been almost anything). The important part is that Kehf surprised me by handing me a string of pumpkin lights that were exactly what I had been looking for. “I noticed these in the store after seeing your tweet and picked them up for you.”
So I had lights in the windows for the next three Halloweens and it was great.
About mid-September I had the foresight to look check the decorations to see if any ought to be retired (the window gels lose color as they are exposed to sunlight)… and I couldn’t find the pumpkin lights. As mentioned above, we don’t have a big storage unit, so it shouldn’t be that hard to find them, but there you go.
Some of the window gels definitely need to be retired, so when I found some new ones I liked while I was out shopping, I bought them. And I bought some silly Bat lights for the veranda (they are on stakes that can go in the planters and use a battery pack and timer chip)… and I noticed some LED pumpkin lights that were quite inexpensive and grabbed them.
That weekend (still back in mid-September) I put up some of the Harvest-themed gels, intending to not put out the Halloween decorations until after my birthday at the end of September. Which turned into last weekend…
…and I couldn’t find the new pumpkin lights. Nor the old ones. So the bat lights went up, and the new gels and the older gels that were still okay… but no pumpkin lights.
Tonight, while I was putting away some of my birthday presents that I’ve left out where I can look at them fondly, I found the new pumpkin lights. So I’ll be putting them up this week.
Who wants to take a bet that I’ll find the old ones when I take down the Halloween stuff and put up the rest of the harvest decorations?
It wasn’t long after the news that the pussy-grabber-in-chief had tested positive for COVID-19 that I saw the messages praying for his swift recovery, et cetera. All of which that passed through my social media streams I carefully avoiding replying to, lest I say something wrong. I did retweet a person wishing that the almighty show trump exactly the same compassion and grace that Trump has ever expended to others. I made a similar comment myself as a follow-up. But at no point did I say I was glad he was sick or express any hope for a bad outcome.
And honestly, I haven’t seen much of that at all. I’ve seen a lot of people talking about why they are having trouble mustering any sympathy. And I’ve been one of the people explaining why I have virtually no sympathy in this case. I’ve even seen people explain how much they don’t want him to die precisely because they want him to live long enough to face criminal prosecution for at least some of his crimes.
But this has not stopped his supporters from wailing and screaming at all of us “evil libs” for not showing the compassion and respect they think he observes.
Here’s why I’m barely restraining myself for tracking them down to laugh in their faces: just last week they were cheering and metaphorically dancing in the streets over the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. That’s only one of the reasons, though. Just to list a few more:
President Super-spreader put thousands of children in cages at the border, and has let diseases run rampant through the camps,
his minions are asking the Supreme Court to overturn Obamacare even while he himself is getting treated in a government hospital, every penny of his care paid for by the U.S. taxpayer,
the Russian president put out and has paid several bounties to terrorists for killing U.S. soldiers, and Prez Super-spreader has refused to even broach the topic, let alone express any sympathy to the families of assassinated soldiers,
when, at a white supremacist rally, one of the Prez’s supporters drove his car into a crowd of counter-protestors and killed a young woman, the Prez was too busy trying to say that there were many fine people among those white supremacists to ever express sympathy to the family of the slain woman,
also while arguing with reporters about those same rallies, he kept using the word “us” while referring to the white supremacists,
over 214,000 Americans have died in this pandemic, most of those deaths could have been prevented if the Prez hadn’t decided that the disease was only killing people in Blue States so it didn’t matter,
over 214,000 Americans have died, and just two weeks ago the Prez was saying that the disease hurts virtually nobody.
he knew he was positive for the virus before the Presidential Debate, but he didn’t warn anyone who was at the debate, he attended a fundraiser and a rally afterward during which he refused to wear a mask, and even when his symptoms became bad enough to scare him, it never occurred to him to call his opponent in that debate and inform him (you know, the thing that any decent human being would do),
et cetera
et cetera
et cetera
I could keep going and going.
The simple fact is that the man responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths and counting (and that’s only Americans who have died of the pandemic, he’s responsible for a lot more) does not deserve one fucking iota of pity for getting a disease which he allowed to run rampant across the country. A disease he pretended didn’t matter. A disease he claimed could be cured if people drank bleach. A disease he insisted would magically disappear any second now.
The other thing that’s driving me to distraction on this is the reaction of the professional pundit class. As soon as they learned about Prez Super-spreader’s diagnosis, suddenly all of the non-Fox news outlets had dire warnings about a constitutional crisis if the Prez is incapacitated—because there are a bunch of gaps in the process laid out in the 25th amendment for dealing with the incapacity of a president. One of the biggies being that there is no process for what could happen if the Veep gets seriously ill, too.
And I’ve listened to one podcast where some experts are dismayed that all the non-trump-cultists aren’t reacting to their dire warnings of a constitutional crisis.
You know why? Because we’ve been in the middle of a constitutional crisis for nearly four years now. We, the ordinary people on progressive side of the political spectrum have been screaming at the news media, our congressional representatives, and anyone else we thought might help—some for only the last few months, some of us for years.
Day one he refused to obey the Emoluments Clause of the constitution as well as the The Federal Anti-Nepotism Statute. He repeatedly suggested that he should be able to serve an extra long term because people were supposedly mean to him the first couple of years in office. He then switched to suggested that the coming election results can’t be trusted. He has repeatedly claimed that he would not be bound to accept a loss at the ballot box if he decided the process wasn’t fair. He has repeatedly (and in official communications) threatened to illegally send troops into cities and states where he believed officials and citizens oppose his policies. He has illegally sent troops into at least one such city. He was repeatedly refused to say that there would be a peaceful transition if he loses the election.
All of those were constitutional crises that should have been engendering dire headlines long, long ago.
The only people who care about his blatant violation of the very foundations of our form of government at all have been worrying about this for years while the pundits have been acting as if it’s all some kind of game or horse race.
I’m glad something finally got their attention, but I have lost all respect for those that took this long to start pulling their heads out of whoever’s orifice they’ve been stuck inside.
Catch up, guys. The rest of us have been dreading and bracing for the chaos.
And here we are at the third Friday of October.
Font Folly 