Life of Wry

We’ve hit bottom. Again. And with two months left before what’s sure to be a disaster of an election, I’m sure we haven’t found the floor.

I was already depressed today. In six months of daily pandemic horror, today was the worst (the new worst). The pandemic, its impacts on our lives, the no-end-in-sight-ness is numbing and sad. And lately, it has became all the more unbearable because of the heat, the fires, the smoke and that disgusting ash all over everything. That hideous air outside our windows is undoubtedly seeping into our homes and settling into our lungs. It is so ugly. So destructive. I ache for California, the charring of our beautiful hills and forests, the lost wildlife. The lost green.

I was feeling pretty marginal this morning. All I wanted to do was get in my car and drive the hell out of here, somewhere far away from this smoke. If possible, this country.

Instead, I made myself stick to all my routines; I just did my workout and tried to work through my to-do list, imposing order where none was needed, just to feel in control of something.

And I listened to the news. Blockbuster day with blockbuster revelations. The stupid president, on tape, maybe trying to impress Bob Woodward, revealed he knew in early February stuff about this virus he refused to acknowledge publicly and refused to impart to the people in this country. Namely the virus is deadly, it’s highly transferable via breath, it infects children, and is worse than the flu by orders of magnitude. He knew all that, but promoted otherwise, because that kind of news would justify shutting everything down which would mess with the economy and he needed a thriving economy for his reelection. In all his transactional glory, he was trying to fake his way to a different reality.

Blah blah blah. We knew all that. We knew he intentionally politicized it. We knew he knew the risks but didn’t care. We knew that his recklessness of denying it was real, denying masks, denying any preventative effort whatsoever, was purely, intentionally political. We knew the con was part of his perverse calculation to “save the economy” and his reelection. We knew his reelection interests were putting ALL of us at risk. AND STILL ARE. We are in this never-ending mess because of him, him alone, and the power he’s abused as president. We KNEW THAT!!!! 

And now we have proof. 

But the gut-punch is that none of this will matter. I heard Kayleigh McEneny today calling it leadership.. it being his way of keeping everyone calm, not creating panic. The rest of us call it lying and unconscionable. Like, who believes he doesn’t live for chaos?! But, as usual, they’re scrambling.

Anyway.. adding to all the ongoing depression fodder is the realization that nothing he does, has done, or ever will do matters. Even if he kills 190,000 people. And counting. It just won’t matter. His people will follow him right off the cliff. They will not hear anything but what he tells them, what they want to hear. They are so unbudgeable that we’ll divide in the same percentages that we have all along. And because of all the cheating they’ve done thus far, and everything he’ll do to destabilize the election and its result, it’s hard to imagine an outcome different than 2016.

So, that’s all pretty sickening.

The Coronavirus response part of the Woodward tapes today was mind blowing enough. There were other shocking revelations, as well. First off, trump agreed to be interviewed 18 times, and recorded, for Woodward’s book. That surprises me. There may be more to come out, which is intriguing, but again, it won’t matter. I personally found trump’s comments about white privilege to be stomach turning: he literally laughed at Woodward and accused him of drinking the Kool-aide when Woodward spoke of his own privilege and his own efforts to understand the pain of black Americans. And I found these quotes to be kind of shocking, yet perversely satisfying (but holy shit, who wants to know these things about one’s president (not my president)).

All in all, just depressing news on top of depressing news on top of depressing news.