September 29, 2024

Reality bites. It really does. I’ve had to come back down to earth as I have spent the last few days getting my life in order for the next few months. I’ve been double checking calendars, looking at rehearsal schedules, trying to figure out a writing schedule to be able to start knocking out chunks of the new book, and trying to cope with all the material that built up from work during the two weeks I was on the opposite side of the equator. I think the pieces are all in place and my personal life should go relatively smoothly. The only performance gig I have is a symphony chorus concert on the 8th where we’re singing a couple of famous opera choruses (all of which I’ve sung before). I’ve missed a few rehearsals but I should be able to get that back in my head in the two we have coming up.

Of course coming back into the country has submerged me into the fever pitch hysteria of the current election cycle. We’ve got a minimum of five weeks left of this crap. Potentially quite a bit longer if the results are not clear cut or if any of the promised chicanery actually comes to pass. The first rule of an authoritarian regime is believe what they tell you the first time and the Republican party has made it very clear between it’s full endorsement of project 2025, it’s interfering in a partisan way with election procedures in swing states, that they have no problem with the end justifying the means to regain executive power. They know they cannot win the popular vote but they don’t have to. All they have to do is prevent Kamala Harris from collecting 270 out of 538 electoral votes and throw the election into the House of Representatives. The constitutional procedures in place for such an eventuality pretty much guarantee a Trump victory.

Given all of the talented politicians in the Democratic party nationally, Kamala is not the one I personally would pick to be the standard bearer but nobody asked me. I am much more centrist in my politics than most people think given my history in progressive politics, especially in a satirical vein. I believe we are strongest when opposing points of view work together and pull against each other, but with comity and compromise to find middle ground. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of that going on these days (thank you Newt Gingrich and Mitch McConnell, the architects of the scorched earth partisanship of the last thirty years). I actually pay attention to issues and position papers and plans, not to stump speech rhetoric. I haven’t seen much on the R side in terms of policy that makes sense. Isolationism is no longer an option in a global economy. Immigration is a distraction, much like the pool table in River City Iowa, a scary thing not completely understood that can be used to gin up the base. The inflation of the last few years is not a result of Democratic policies, but a reaction to a world wide pandemic that unraveled supply and demand, transportation, and a host of other things and would have happened no matter who won the 2020 election. We’re actually in much better economic shape than most of the rest of the world, coming out of the pandemic over the last few years with a robust rebound that doesn’t exist elsewhere. The D side has hard data and facts, rather than talking points to bolster their positions.

Speaking of immigrants, we’re marching right along the ten steps of genocide with the rhetoric and the plans coming out of the Stephen Millers of the world. We seem to be at about stage 7 where we’re prepping the population and the bureaucracy to start rounding up ‘undesirables’. The current rhetoric against Haitians isn’t all that different than one would have found in Mittel Europa in the 1930s. Angry citizens have besieged more than one recent Alabama town council meeting practically ready to break out the torches and pitchforks to run a small number of Haitian immigrants, here legally and gainfully employed, out of town on rails. We seem to have cooled down a bit on the anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and we’re only on stage 6 there. I guess it doesn’t play quite as well as most LGBTQ folk are native born with families and friends who would start asking a lot of unpleasant questions if authorities started rounding them up and marching them off. The only piece of that which seems to be sticking is book bannings and trying to protect children from drag queens. I have never heard of a drag queen molesting a child. I hear about conservative clergy being caught doing that on an almost daily basis.

If you look at actual crime statistics and not if it bleeds, it leads exploitation headlines, violent crime rates amongst immigrants are a good deal lower than they are amongst native borns. If there is a Republican victory and the worst begins to happen and authorities and social pressures make it dangerous for immigrants to continue to live their lives, what will you do? One of the comments I see on right wing news sites all the time is a variation on ‘if you think they’re so great, how many do you have living in your house?’ If things start going from bad to worse, there may be a number of them with me in my condo.

I don’t watch TV news. I haven’t for years. It’s all about grabbing attention, creating low level anxiety, and a need for a continued feeding of those limbic system centers with even more anxiety to keep the ratings up. I won’t participate. I read. I try to read things from both perspectives but I discount anything that has no hard data or fact to back up the opinion. I can tell the difference between the two. Pity that twenty years of No Child Left Behind and teaching to the test rather than critical thinking skills has created a population with some difficulties in understanding that opinions are fine and dandy but they are no substitute for facts and that a Google search is not adequate research on any topic and that you really should trust the people with years of experience and expertise over the charlatan with a good time slot and flashy graphics.

News today has been dominated by the god awful flooding in eastern Tennessee and Western North Carolina from hurricane Helene. The damage there looks to dwarf anything that actually happened on the gulf coast. From what I can tell, there had been a few days of rain storms just prior saturating the ground in the area so when Helene made her Fujiwara effect turn to the left, it dropped ten inches of rain on ground that could not absorb any of it. All that water immediately hit the streams and then the rivers and, as they are constrained in narrow valleys, flash floods, rapidly rising waters, and whole towns gone in a matter of minutes. Never underestimate the power of water. The Appalachians, in the fullness of geologic time, were a mightier mountain range than the Rockies once. Of course, project 2025 gets rid of the National Weather Service and the NOAA which provide us with what tools we have to protect ourselves against such events.

To add insult to injury, UAB announced last week that they are scrapping the EMR system, installed just twelve years ago at great expense, in favor of a completely new EMR system to go live in about two and a half years. I put them on notice that I would adjust my retirement date to make sure it happens before that change. I am not learning yet another data system at my time of life.

I need a drink.

Rant over.