Stuck in time

 I put on the cable news this morning and Governor Cuomo was talking about making the Javits Center into a covid field hospital.  I switched to the other cable news and there was a senate candidate implying that her opponent is a Mau Mau terrorist disguised as a Baptist pastor.  I thought we had flattened the curve and finished with the election.  I thought the normal times had returned.  Isn't it December?

Over on TCM I watched Two Tars.  Laurel and Hardy were sailors in a rented two-seater who picked up a couple of girls and went for a drive.  Chaos ensued, with a traffic jam involving wrecked cars, tomato throwing, fistfights and a climactic chase into the tunnel of an onrushing train.  Finally, something that made sense.

All the analogies -- Moebius strips, Groundhog Day, time warp, Sisyphus and his boulder -- are correct but no use.  We are trapped in incompatible versions of reality, one based on laws, procedures, science and numbers, one created by madness.  A determined botanist could, pointlessly, cross apples and oranges.  There is no way a normal person can even converse with a QAnon Trumpanzee who sees plots and conspiracies everywhere and denies the very existence of a disease which kills more Americans every day than al-Qaeda killed on September 11, 2001.  This is the 79th anniversary of the attack that convinced all Americans except the Amerikadeutscher Volksbund that the Axis was a mortal threat that had to be crushed.  Would that unity even be possible now?  Around anything?

Mobs keep gathering at the homes of elected officials like Jocelyn Benson, the Michigan secretary of state.  State representative Cynthia Johnson got a voicemail that said, "You'll be swinging from a rope, you Democrat."  Michigan certified its election last month and the state's courts have consistently refused to throw out the results ("The people have spoken").  But the circus has left town.

The big top is set up in Georgia, which saw a giant virus-spreading event in Valdosta on Saturday night.  Nominally in support of Loeffler and Perdue, it was really a last hurrah for the lame duck, one more chance in office to hear a mob of morons howl his name.  As a warm-up he tweeted an incoherent demand that the governor and/or secretary of state "permit simple signature verification."  Captain Queeg has decided, with geometric logic, that this is the key to the MASSIVE FRAUD!  When Kemp failed to jump aboard the crazy train, Trump blared, "They [Kemp and Doug Ducey] fight harder against us than do the Radical Left Dems."  Once the show started, it was a barn-burner.  Now the "fake ballots" are coming "out of ceilings" and "leather bags."  In a throwaway, he urged the mob to vote for "two beauties" whose names he couldn't remember, but you know, not the Jew or the Mau Mau Baptist pastor.  They knew.  They thrilled as he cried, "We're all victims.  Everybody here, all these thousands of people here tonight.  They're all victims.  Every one of you."  I believe the evangelicals call that a "come to Donald" moment.  "If I lost I'd be a very gracious loser."  (There's nothing he's not the best at.)  

If the maskless myrmidons are really victims, the culprit is probably covid.  And like the hospitalized Giuliani, they're guilty victims.  The innocent victims are the people this clown breathed, lisped and farted on over the past two weeks.  Is it wrong to hope he kissed Sidney Powell?

Sunday night there was a debate of sorts.  Sticky Fingers Loeffler gets points for showing up, even though her grasp of the issues was limited to repeating the strange term "radicaliberal."  Maybe she thought it would make Raphael Warnock vanish, like "abracadabra."  Since David Perdue is a panty-shitting coward like Trump, Jon Ossoff got to answer all the questions while the camera focused on an empty lectern, which perfectly illustrated Perdue's legislative record.  

"The past is never dead.  It's not even past," said William Faulkner.  So he wouldn't be surprised to see the return, in the face of the novel coronavirus, of an old plague:  Bartonella quintana, better known as trench fever.  This World War I nightmare is showing up in homeless people in Winnipeg and it's still spread by lice.  Not as drastic as typhus, but very bad.  Why Canada?  Why now?

You heard the psycho.  We are all victims.