Ten Days Late and a Trillion Dollars Short

We thought for sure that the governor of Georgia was going to issue a shelter-in-place order today.  So sure that, rather than wait to have our groceries delivered, my husband ventured out to the grocery store to buy...all of the food they had, apparently.  We are well stocked, in case of nationwide lockdown, zombies, or bears.

Actually lighthearted zombie apocalypse references are not as funny as they used to be.  One of my lifelong fears...earned when my mother nearly died when I was eleven because a nurse fucked up her IV after gall bladder surgery...is that I will die due to someone else's stupidity.  It's a combination of  that experience plus the fact that as a "gifted" child I often really was the smartest person in the room, including the adults, and that shook my confidence that anyone in charge actually knew what they were doing most of the time.  Plus people often don't listen to me even after I have been proven right over and over again, because sexism probably but whatever the reason it's maddening.  (I'm also a frequent victim of the "That idea sounds to much better now that a man has re-stated what Sara just said" phenomenon).  In other words, the world gaslights me a lot and I identify with Cassandra of Troy to an uncomfortable degree.

I've also been sick a lot in my life, with fairly serious respiratory infections as a regular feature of my childhood.  I've almost died a couple times in my life, and had potentially life-threatening diseases a couple more.  They suck, btw.

I'm having a hard time right now.  I'm literally watching my worst nightmares play out in real time on a large scale.  I am not ok.

So while I wasn't crazy about my husband leaving the house to venture out into a world full of people with no common sense but WITH germs, I thought hurray, at least the governor is seeing reason.  He is about to do something useful.  I'll have to take back half of the disparaging things I have said about him.

Except (spoiler alert) not so much. 

Both Brian Kemp, the governor of Georgia, and Donald Trump, the president of the United States, were scheduled to make remarks at the same time.  I listened to Kemp, because I gave up listening to Trump for my health a while ago.

My thoughts while listening to Governor Shotgun: "He sounds like one of my students reading his paper in front of the class. Not one of my better students. When is he going to get to the point? Why does he call it Cooo-VID? I too am from Georgia, sir, and I don't talk that way. Surely he is about to announce a lockdown. Ah, shit."

My thoughts while listening to Trump: "Why won't he stop talking. Why. Won't. He. Stop. Talking. This is Hell. I got stuck in the worst timeline, I want to get off. SHUT UP. The lack of lightning in this scenario is starting to erode my faith in divinity and the very concept of goodness. I am succumbing to existential despair. Hell is empty and all the devils voted for this sonofabitch. SHUT UP."


Kemp closed bars and nightclubs, and banned all gatherings of more than ten people, but he stopped short of issuing a shelter-in-place order for the general public.  This while our hospitals are already swamped and Grady physicians are weeping on YouTube.

It's not enough.  It's not enough.  It's not enough.
 
I hear Trump is already making noises about lifting the paltry restrictions that are currently in place, rather than imposing a nation-wide lockdown, because something something the economy (translation:  rich people can get tests when you can't, and they can get treatment when you can't, and they don't care if you die, they only care about their stock portfolios).  Except the joke's on them because millions of dead people are also bad for the economy.

Article II of the Constitution, Letter #22

12/10/16

Dear Assailant-in-Chief,


Article II of the Constitution outlines how a President is chosen, what the various duties and powers of the office are, and the reasons for which a President may be removed from office.  I recommend that you read it carefully. 

The tradition of the Electoral College harks from a time when instant communication was not possible; the use of delegates for such things as framing the Constitution in the first place had already been established.  Originally the idea was to send people you trusted to make a sensible choice; the rise of party politics has led to the present situation where party loyalty is held to be the most important qualification. Notably, nothing in the Constitution holds the states to a particular means of choosing electors; the current "winner takes all" method is common but not universal practice.  I point this out because, as we all know, if the Electoral College hewed more closely to the popular vote, not only would you not be the President-elect, but we would have probably had President Gore rather than President Bush.  I know you've made the assertion that if the system were different you would have campaigned differently and won anyway, but you also claimed that millions of people voted illegally.  That is, since you have established that you are full of shit, I don't place any credence in anything you have to say at any point.

There are, you will find, consequences to being a baldfaced liar.  I suppose you've never been held to account very much, what with being born with enough money to cushion you from most anything.  But you are about to step into a role where lying to the public has consequences, lying to your political allies (and enemies) has consequences, and most especially lying to other heads of state has consequences.  I know this is a little hard for you to believe, because it has worked out so far.  But, see...your base might believe you no matter what, but they are not in the majority.  Don't forget that.

Because while laws are not your job, treaties are.  And nobody with any sense is going to believe you when you say you are going to do something.  So that kind of puts you at a disadvantage in the whole treaty-making endeavor.  For much the same reason that nobody trusts you in business (which is why you license your name rather than actually build anything any more), nobody is going to trust you to make deals for this country.  The biggest thing you ran on, like most of the other promises you made, is a thing you can't do.  Not in this case because it's not within the President's responsibilities, but because it's not within your character.

Likewise, your power as President to "recommend" action to Congress, and to appoint judges, ambassadors, and the rest, relies in great measure upon other people's faith in you.  All of the warnings that you weren't fit to hold the office weren't just people being mean; it's also a realistic assessment of how your, shall we say, combative and mercurial style is going to actually work.  That is aside from the epic disaster and transparent corruption of your actual choices.  I don't know whether I should hope that we minimize the damage, or that you fuck up so spectacularly that people will get up off their asses and do something about it. The far edge of that latter scenario worries me quite a bit, as there's no particular guarantee that "doing something" will automatically mean "doing better."  But since President Bush was not a sufficient imperative even though the world economy nearly ran off a cliff, if you must be the herald of transformation, so be it, I suppose.  May we all survive, especially the defenseless and downtrodden...preferably them.  The field mice of this world have my sympathy.  The likes of you, not so much.

All of this would be funny if it weren't so dire.  I love my country.  To paraphrase a friend, I didn't realize how much until presented with the spectacle of a bunch of jackals trying to destroy it.

Yours sincerely,

Sara Amis
Citizen of these United States of America


From Dorine Jennette:

PLEASE JOIN ME IN WRITING THE ASSAILANT-IN-CHIEF
Please join me in bombarding the Assailant-in-Chief with letters: https://www.donaldjtrump.com/contact. I will write to him every day through his first 100 days in office, maybe longer if momentum holds. I am asking others to write just ONE letter. Let's not just vent our grief to each other--let's speak truth to power together. Please WRITE and please SHARE this plan with your friends. Pass it on!
You do not need to be a woman or an assault survivor to address the Assailant-in-Chief as such. If you are a man who has a daughter, a sister, a wife, a woman colleague or friend you respect, or a mother (hint: that last one is all of you!), then you have something to say to the Assailant-in-Chief. Your letter might be a brief one-liner. That's great! Please send it! Women need our allies now. Here's the link to DJT's contact page--this might take you one minute or less! https://www.donaldjtrump.com/contact
Or, maybe you will start a related project addressing any one of the many groups Trump has already harmed . . .
As we talk with each other, let's break the bubble and also send our complaints straight to the source. He won't read them and won't care if he does, so probably this is a placeholder action while we figure out what we're really going to do . . . but it's something.

Dorine's posts can be found here:  https://www.facebook.com/dorine.jennette

PS from Sara:  I've taken to just tweeting these at him.  He's not going to read them anyway, but I might as well use the platform that he actually responds to.  *snort*

Don't Bring Your Hoodie to Town

Geraldo Rivera made an ass of himself on TV today.  This is, alas, not news, which would explain why it was on Fox. He misquoted Johnny Cash.  That wasn't even it, but I had to put that out there.  Sometimes the enormity of a thing is so vast and incomprehensible, you have to pick at something small to try to wrap your head around it.

I mean, yes, Rivera.  On what day is he not a fool? Fox "News," yep.  And yet...just when you think there is no possible way people can be more venal, more callous, more epically and outstandingly vile, they outdo themselves. It was an epiphany of sorts.  Rivera has had a long and storied career as a mystifyingly famous idiot. Today he reached an apotheosis, at least I devoutly hope that's what it was.  That he might have worse in him is too terrifying to contemplate.  It's enough to make a person believe in R'lyeh.

"I think the hoodie is as much responsible for Trevon Martin's death as George Zimmerman was...I'll bet you money, if he didn't have that hoodie on, that nutty neighborhood watch guy wouldn't have responded in that violent way."

Yes, my friends and fellow citizens of Earth, he thinks that an adult man chasing a seventeen year old boy down the street after having been told by a 911 dispatcher not to do so and shooting said child is only partially that man's fault.   The wisdom of neighborhood watch carrying a gun in the first place, or the bizarre application of  "stand your ground" to include a public street and an unarmed opponent doesn't even enter into it.  The hoodie made him do it.

He went on to say that when people see a dark-skinned kid in a hoodie, they think that child is a menace and that we should all be aware of that.  You can't rehabilitate the hoodie, he says.

Oh, Lord.  You know what I think is a menace?  White guys with guns.

I mean, really.  Look at history.  The Chinese invented gunpowder and made fireworks.  Europeans invented gunpowder and made muskets, pistols, cannon, rifles, mortars, derringers, Thompson machine guns, howitzers, and 75 mm anti-aircraft guns.  For five hundred years and counting, the spectacle of some white people coming over the hill or sailing into the harbor or showing up on the doorstep in suits has made people the world over think, "Aw, shit.  Here they come. Are they armed?"

And nine times out of ten, when you hear on the news that someone has killed someone else in a completely bizarre whacknut vigilante way, with or without lengthy manifesto, it's a white guy.  With a gun and a lethal sense of entitlement.  I'll bet you money, if George Zimmerman hadn't gone out wearing a gun, he wouldn't have been able to react in that violent way.

So I'm urging all of you...don't let your white guys go out wearing guns.  Tell them people will look at them as a menace.  After five hundred years of history, you can't rehabilitate the white guy with gun look.  I'm just trying to save lives here.