People don’t believe me when I tell them that I don’t plan these pieces out in advance. I simply feel a need to write and then I open up the laptop, chase a cat or two out of the way and set my mind in brain dump mode and out it call comes. Sometimes there’s a theme or a throughline. Sometimes one develops as I sit there for an hour letting my fingers doing the talking. Sometimes it’s a bit of an incoherent muddle. But still I keep it up – nearly 700 long posts/rants/musings/travelogues/history lessons/meditations over the last seven plus years. If I were to collect and publish them all the way I did the Covid posts, we’d be running somewhere in the eight to ten volume range and ain’t no one got time fo’ dat. I’ll just leave them here quietly moldering in cyberspace, of interest to few but myself and perhaps some future historian looking for primary sources on how ordinary folk felt and coped with the extraordinary times in which we find ourselves.
Someone told me this week that I am Birmingham’s answer to Kevin Bacon. you can connect pretty much any two Birminghamians through me in only a couple of steps because my circles of acquaintance are so large and so disparate – aging services, liberal religion, classical music, musical theatre, LGBTQIA issues, patients and their families. I suppose that’s a compliment. I’ve never met Mr. Bacon but he seems to have had a great career, a nice stable marriage, and I’ve never heard anything particularly negative about him through my Broadway and Hollywood connections so I suppose I could do worse. He’s a few years older than I and seems to be keeping his looks better. But then he’s likely got a personal trainer, a photo shoot makeup artist, and doesn’t havve to deal with the absurdities of the American medical system on a daily basis. When I was younger, I looked very like Nicolas Cage (to the point that people who knew him mistook me for him). Now, I just look like me. I think I’m OK with that.
Time for an update on the health system as it pertains to someone like me. RFK Jr. is in the process of firing the entire United States Preventive Services Task Force. I predicted this some weeks ago so I don’t find it particularly surprising. It’s just more of the administration’s war on inconvenient scientific facts which don’t fit their political agenda. The practical result of this is that a packed new board is likely to discount many of the findings and recommendations that have been promulgated in the past. Legislation that was part of the PPACA required that health insurers cover screening tests and preventive services that USPSTF rated highly. If these are downgrated or discarded, health insurers will be under no legal obligation to continue covering them. My guess is the first to go will be vaccine recommendations. There appears to be a multipronged attack on vaccinations happening. They’re opening up vaccine manufactuers to all sorts of liability which will make it economically unfeasible for them to continue to sell to the US market and, by eliminatiing payment mandates, those vaccines that remain will quickly become unaffordable to a majority. So, if you’re behind in any of your shots and boosters, it’s probably best to get them quickly before you simply can’t unless you can afford some medical tourism to a country which still believes in the findings of medical science. Meanwhile, the rest of the Kennedy family are expressing their ire at renaming the opera house at Kennedy Center after Melania Trump. Well, she does seem to have modeled her life on Cunegonde’s Act I coloratura aria.
What’s going on with covid? Numbers are increasing. There’s been a surge each of the last few summers starting in late July and this year is no exception. What drives it? I would guess that the oppressive heat is driving more and more of us into airconditioned shared spaces and therefore we’re simply more likely to run into the virus. Mortality rates don’t seem to be particularly increasing, so that’s good news and there doesn’t appear to be a lot of new mutations out there yet. The right wing propaganda machine continues to try and rewrite history casting the covid vaccine as the cause of the increase in chronic illness over the course of the last few years rather than the virus itself. Most of us caught the virus at least once. The vaccines kept a whole lot more of us from dying of vascular and respiratory collapse. I’ve long predicted that the virus, by its nature, was going to have nasty surprises waiting for us as time went on. I think the increase in general unwellness happening at the moment may be part of that. It’s far more likely than some of the more far fetched ideas I’ve been reading on the site formerly known as Twitter (where millions of people seem to have conspiracy theories over such natural phenomena as clouds).
Of course the big story of the week continues to be the Schrodinger Epstein files and what’s in them which seem to both exist and not exist at the same time. Given everything that’s been known about Trump (and I’ve certainly known who he is and his reputation with women for about forty years now), I can’t for a minute believe that he’s not all through the 300,000 pages of evidence collected on Jeffrey Epstein and his bad behavior. However, by making Epstein a rallying point of an anti-Democrat conspiracy theory (Comet Ping Pong Pizza anyone?) he has painted himself into a corner. If he allows everything to become public and everyone sees the depth of his involvement, he’s toast. If he uses his powers to try and make it all go away, it becomes a massive coverup and he’s toast. The Republican legislators appear to be collapsing like a pile of wet noodles as they’re smart enough to understand the perdicament. And then there was the icing on the cake – this week’s episode of South Park. Parker and Stone know that the way you destroy a narcissist is not to hurl invective and not to try and show fact and reason to counter the narrative, the only true weapon is to laugh at him and refuse to take him seriously.
There was an executive order this week calling for all homeless to be rounded up and removed from the streets, promising federal grants to states who stepped up with plants to execute this. Buried in the language of the order are some very vague terms which would pretty much allow the government to declare anyone they feel is mentally ill an undesirable who could be detained. This could easily be used against the trans or the wider LGBTQIA community. They seem to define ‘woke’ as a mental illness so it could easily drag in minorities and those of liberal political affiliation. Perhaps this is the true purpose of the rapid building out of detention centers. It’s not truly about immigrants. Once they are built, economics will demand that they be kept full with someone. All I can say is that when I’m shipped off to one, I’ll likely meet some interesting people with whom I can have some meaningful conversations.
And this is why I am directing Richard II the way I am. I’m setting it in the holding cell of a detention center that has rapidly been put together in a church basement. It’s not supposed to be America of today. I’m deliberately making it vague. The ideas regarding the abuse of power that led to England tearing itself apart in a four generation civil war whihch Shakespeare so eloquently puts forward in his play are the same issues we are confronting today. My cast are finally getting what it is I’m trying to do and are beginning to play both the Shakespeare history and the framing device of the prison together. Thiis crazy idea of mine, which I dreamed up very early in this second Trump administration, before even a fraction of what we are now dealing with surfaced, appears to have some prescience and traction and I hope audiences leave thinking about how human nature hasn’t changed over the centuries and that we must look to the past if we are going to take control of the future.
I’ve got rehearsal in the morning. Trying to clean up the interactions between prison guards and prisoners and how that highlights certain major themes and plot points. Wish me luck.
Life, The Universe, and Everything 