Thoughts from Nick Carroway —

I talked about this before (“Between a Rock and a Hard place”) but it bears repeating and expanding. We are absolutely rudderless in terms of how we are dealing with this virus. The administration is ignoring it. The incoming administration wants to help, but is powerless. Various states are treating it differently even if the virus is overtaking everyone.

To put this in exact terms, our campus has around 1400 students. Roughly half of them are learning online. Yet, some of them aren’t learning. At least they aren’t producing work to prove they are learning. So, the state has given us the ability to command them to come back. For our campus, that will be up to 200 additional students. In a vacuum it makes perfect sense.

Leaving out the educational aspects of this, this is an interesting microcosm of the current situation. Some people want to move on and some people recognize that we need to be more vigilant than ever before. Which side is going to win? Hospitalizations are at an all-time high. The infection rate and death rate is at an all-time high. In the midst of that we want to bring more students to school? We want to relax restrictions? What in the world are we thinking?

It’s moments like this when we are screaming for leadership. We are begging for leadership. We thirst for it like a week-long bender in the desert. What we get is passing the buck and shirking of responsibility. Focus on the crime, corruption, and grift if you wish, but this is the lasting legacy of the current administration. When we needed leadership we got none. When we needed direction we got fingers pointed in five different directions. When we needed someone to stand up and take charge no one got out of their seat. This is his lasting legacy. 

I guess people need more makeup when they have to look straight into the camera and lie that Trump won the election when he lost by 7 million votes.

And this was back when the Trump campaign was a subsidiary of Fox News.  Tracey is on her own now.

Prior to launching my own company back in June of 2014, I was employed by FOX News Channel where I worked as a Hair & Makeup artist in the Washington DC Bureau Make-Up Room for over 14 years.

They need to let her follow Rudy Giuliani around, bless his heart.

Thanks to Alfredo over at the Dairy Queen for the heads up.

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And here’s a happy story from Nick Caraway — 

Back in the old days, Alcoa used to advertise their product by showing you questionable calls from past NFL football games. The whole idea is they wanted you to weigh in and decide for yourself. I suppose they also wanted you to call Alcoa. Sometimes these messages get lost in the translation.

So, I present to you the star witness for the prosecution. She’s signed a paper saying she could go to prison if she’s lying. So, that proves the fraud. We can close the case and cancel the inauguration. Here comes your dilemma. Is this woman merely drunk? Is she drunk and stupid? Is Rudy using her as a human shield to distract you from his own flatulence? Moreover, is this really serious or are we watching a high form of performance art? Enjoy.

a drunk woman is trump team’s star witness in michigan pic.twitter.com/qGxEI3hp2G

— . (@MarisaKabas) December 3, 2020

And there’s more —

https://twitter.com/travisakers/status/1334641634408017920

And even more than that —

This was written by my friend and frequent commenter here, Elizabeth Moon.  She wrote it as a letter to me and I asked to share it with y’all because she is on the edge of a game changing idea.  

Newsweek has reported that body bags have been left on the steps of two GOP Senators (McConnell & Graham). As you know, I wrote a fictional story back in the summer about a group intercepting trucks carrying corpses from hospital parking lots and parking them in front of Senators’ homes in their states, so I’m definitely in favor of upsetting GOP Senators. But one reason I wrote the story as I did (the trucks had images of the dead inside, along with a short bio) is that making the body bags *personal* is what would work better politically and socially. Because COVID patients are isolated once admitted to a hospital, nobody sees them but exhausted hospital staff…and when they’r intubated and sedated, their faces are obscured as much as the masked and face-shielded staff members are. They’re judged and described by GOPpersons in lumps (elderly, Blacks, Hispanics, health care workers, obese…) and blamed (instead of COVID) for their weight, their existing conditions, etc., anything to avoid facing the reality that they weren’t, for the most part, going to die this year until they got COVID-19. 

Body bags are a good shocking “stop and look” visual, but along with that there needs to be a way to personalize every one of those bags, because every one represents a real person, alive this time last year, who isn’t alive this year, because of this pandemic AND the gross mismanagement of it by the GOP across the country. Not just Trump, not just McConnell, not just the Senate, but every governor and state legislator and mayor and city council that did not push to face facts and do the right thing. We need something that puts faces…not in obituaries in the back pages of newspapers, but up front, in color, with bios, not death-os. Like the AIDS quilt. That says who we lost and what that means to where they came from. Not just health care workers (though that’s a critical group, yes) but all those people in meat packing plants, in warehouses, in big box and no-box stores, bus drivers and taxi drivers, fathers and mothers and aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents, people who opened the store in the morning or closed it in the evening, librarians, teachers, plumbers, electricians, garbage truck workers, students, campers…and right now they’re all being talked about either as just numbers, or as people whose lifestyle choices (hate that term) or “social choices” (ditto) makes them seem to deserve it. 

I haven’t a clue how to do this…I can’t sew, I don’t have a circle of friends who sew, so no quilt-making for me. Right now I can’t get to my Twitter or my Facebook account and I”m trying hard to finish the editing of the new book by the end of the year. You’ve been an actual journalist–how can papers and TV stations be persuaded to personalize the deaths, show how the fabric of society is being shredded? Maybe it’s not doable, but…(going back to chapter seven…muttering to self…just do the damn job, E, you know you’re crap at “platform” stuff, just do what you can do.)

(If you’re not familiar with Elizabeth, she’s kinda a big deal. Go look her up on Amazon and give yourself some stunning guilty pleasure for Christmas.) 

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