I’ll warn you all in advance that my cervical spondylitis has been causing left shoulder girdle spasms for well over a week now and the constant pain is making me just a tad grumpy. I have various nostrums to relieve it but the things that work the best, like muscle relaxers, interfere with my cognitive processes so I cannot use them around working hours. If I’m a bit more waspish in my opinions than usual, I plead for forgiveness in advance. I get a new round of steroid shots in the left cervical nerve roots three weeks from yesterday and I am hoping that will bring me some longer term relief. It did this past year when I was awake and able to tell them when they had hit the right spot. We’re trying that technique again. Last night I had a double whammy as I had obviously eaten something that disagreed with me so there was misery all around and at least one of the cats got a free flying lesson off the bed when he sat on the remote and cut off the program I had been watching.
I have, however, been able to dodge the gamut of respiratory viruses that are making the rounds. I am desperately trying to stay out of harm’s way through Saturday night the 17th when I finish my commitments to the Alabama Symphony Orchestra and their concert production of South Pacific. Mine is a speaking, not a singing part but I still get to share the stage as a principal with a number of my favorite local performers including Lucas Pepke, Caleb Clark, and Chris Carlisle plus all the insanely talented musicians in the orchestra under the baton of Chris Confessore. Two performances only – Friday the 16th and Saturday the 17th at Alys Stephens Center – 7 PM. I’m willing to take whatever the cold and flu season dishes out after this is over. I have the rest of my performance season scheduled out. Symphony Chorus for a special concert piece commemorating Selma in Feburary. Chorus in Il Pagliacci/Cavalleria Rusticana for Opera Birmingham in April. Chorus for Carmina Burana with the Symphony and Alabama Ballet in May. Directing The Tempest for Bell Tower Players this summer.
I have looked up the Covid numbers. What else is a plague doctor supposed to do? They’re actually not bad and there hasn’t been a surge in early January as there usually is two weeks or so post Christmas. I suppose that its behaving in a more endemic fashion is good news, but we’re only one unusual mutation away from being back where we were a couple of years ago. The mutation in Influenza A from subclade J to subclade K is a bit of a problem as it’s anitgenically different enough to get around this year’s flu vaccine more effectively than normal. The combination of this and low vaccination rates explains why we’re having a terrible flu year. ERs and hospital wards are full. So far this season, we’ve had about 120,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths from the flu. It’s a fraction of the deaths we were seeing at the height of the pandemic from Covid but it’s still a good deal higher than usual for flu. (We generally have about 20,000 flu deaths a year in the US but we’re on track for more like 50,000 this year).
I really hate to wade into politics as it’s nothing but insanity and bad news, at least from my perspective. In the last few days the president announced he was going to take possession of Venezuelan oil, sell it, and deposit the proceeds in offshore accounts he would manage. I don’t even begin to know where to parse out the illegalities and corruption in that plan. Fortunately, in my remote youth, I took a course at Stanford entitled Introduction of Petroleum Engineering (easy A) so I learned a thing or two about the issues with extractive industries. Given the state of their infrastructure, not to mention their economy and politics, no significant Venezuelan crude is coming to market prior to the 2030s. He also announced that he is going to increase the defense budget from one trillion to one and a half trillion dollars. This from the leader of the party that was taking a hatchet to the government only a few short months ago on the pretext of deficit reduction and we can’t afford it. This is a non-starter as congress would have to figure out where that five hundred billion is coming from and I can assure everyone it’s not being paid to the US by other nations as tariffs. As a corollary to this, the president also sternly lectured the CEOs of the big defense contractors and floated the idea that their companies should be run as he desired and their compensation capped at a limit he determines. This sort of state capitalism would have been roundly derided as communist or Marxist coming from another direction. Then there’s his immediate family members using his control over finanical levers to set up cryptocurrency banks.
We seem to have backed down from invading Greenland (which would completely destroy NATO) in favor of potentially buying it by offering the inhabitants bribes of somewhere between $10,000 and $100,000 apiece to hold a referendum to secede from Denmark and join the US. As there are only 57,000 residents of Greenland, it wouldn’t be that expensive – only 5.7 billion dollars on the high end, but the Greenlanders seem to remain disinterested. If such a harebrained scheme were to go through, I wonder if I might ask Denmark to buy me for $100,000. I wouldn’t mind living in Copenhagen. My guess is all he really wants is the ability to build some new bases there to counter Russia and China via the polar route as Arctic ice continues to melt and the rest is posturing. Speaking of Arctic melt, he is also withdrawing us from all of the international climate change organizations and we will soon be the only nation not participating.
The big story of the day is, of course, the killing of Renee Good yesterday in Minneapolis. Looking through the comments on various news stories and social media channels it is, like so many other incidents of the last few decades, becoming a bit of a Rorschach test reflecting our own personal biases and political leanings back at us. The administration is doubling down on portraying her as some sort of crazed leftist agitator intent on mowing down ICE agents while the picture that is emerging from sources on the ground is that she was an apolitical young mother who had just dropped her son off at school and got caught at the wrong place at the wrong time in a situation that rapidly escalated. The administration is claiming absolute immunity for ICE officers as part of their official dute which is not how policing has ever worked in this country. Murder and manslaughter are state charges but the state is being edged out by the FBI. Unfortunately, the FBI has been so compromised by Trump through Kash Patel and Dan Bongino nothing will come of that investiagation.
There was a physician present who tried to render aid and who was prevented from doing so by ICE agents. I looked up Minnesota’s Good Samaritan law. In an emergency, under the Minnesota statute, a physician is not just protected from liability if they offer assistance, but they are also expected to offer assistance within the scope of their knowledge. In some states, preventing a physician from doing this is an illegal act. I haven’t been able to determine if this is the case in Minnesota. I didn’t go to law school. But it might be another way for the state and local authorities to reign in the bully behavior of ICE goons.
This is not the last person that’s likely to be killed by ICE who are operating outside of law and restraint. The number of detainees who have died in custody in suspicious circumstances is well into double digits and there have been other shootings and reckless force incidents involving protestors and observers. This is just the first one that comfortable white America can’t ignore as she was one of them. Is this a George Floyd inflection point? Probably not. I think it’s going to take a lot more blood on the pavement before the apolitical and the distracted and the narcotized by cheap entertainment start to stand up in enough numbers and demand that things change.
When I heard the news, I immediately thought of the movie, Schindler’s List. Not the horrific concentration camp scenes but a scene much earlier in the film, when a column of Jews is stopped by the Gestapo and made to clear snow from the street and an elderly man with one arm, proud to be an essential worker, is callously pulled out of line and shot in the head. It’s the first act of deadly violence in the film. Steve and I went to see it when it first opened on a Christmas Day showing (meaning that a majority of the audience was Jewish) and as that loud gun crack reverberated through the movie theater, you could feel a collective weight of sadness settling over those gathered. The rustles of weight shifting in seats, the munch of popcorn, all those other ephemeral sounds fell away from that moment through the end of the film some two and a half hours later.
Do I think we’re going to end up in the same place that Germany did in 1945? I doubt it. Too many of our eyes are open and too many of us stand up to be counted. But it’s a reminder that the road to perdition begins with baby steps and that even small acts of violence of the state against the citizenry have enormous power and consequence.
Wash your hands. Cover your mouth when you cough. Stay home if you’re sick. Avoid the obviously ill. Light a candle.
Life, The Universe, and Everything 