The Fortnightly Rant

Monday was disorienting. A good day? But…isn’t this still 2020? Yes, it is, and so it’s no time to let down our guard. But, as with November 3rd, it was a good day regardless: health care workers began receiving vaccinations against the plague, the worst Attorney General in U.S. history quit, and the Electoral College—perhaps the least-loved feature of that anachronistic contraption we call our Constitution—passed up a prime opportunity to bite democracy on the…posterior. We who have escaped death by the virus—thus far, anyway—and resisted, perhaps, the siren call of the gas stove, bridge abutment, or tall building, owe it to ourselves to hold …

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We are in a theater. We cannot leave; the doors are locked and we’re chained into the seats. On the screen is a horror movie. We’re about 300 reels into it. We should be bored out of our wits. We’re not just the audience, though. We’re the cast, too. Half of us are screaming, “Don’t open that door!” Up on the screen, though…. Someone opened the door. Of course someone opened the door. Not only do they have every right to open it, but you, you hateful, despicable person, have shown yourself to be un-American by questioning their right to do so. Doors flew open …

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In a sane country it wouldn’t have even been a contest, but we live in Freedomland. A quarter of a million people are dead, killed by a plague the incumbent treated as a political opportunity rather than a threat to national health. The infection rate and the Dow Jones are soaring, even as Main Street is collapsing. Despite all that, the election was so close it took four days to get a clear result. That’s OK, it could have been worse. At least, in the end, the challenger beat the incumbent—never an easy trick for that office—and did it by six million votes. He even …

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“I want to thank the American people for their tremendous support,” said a grim-faced President Donald J. Trump to a group of maskless sycophants packed into the East Room of the White House early on Wednesday morning for another in an extended series of illegal campaign events on government property. “Millions and millions of people voted for us tonight…,” Trump observed, conveniently ignoring the fact that several million more had voted against him. “…and a very sad group of people,” he went on, “is trying to disenfranchise that group of people and we won’t stand for it.” Here, yet again, in attempting to report what …

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This fortnight certainly got off to a rousing start. Based on their scrutiny of his tax returns for the past two decades, a team of ten reporters for the New York Times demonstrated that Donald J. Trump has, after a six-pack of bankruptcies, finally stumbled onto a business model that works for him: “turning his own hotels and resorts into the Beltway’s new back rooms, where public and private business mix and special interests reign.” After reading “The Swamp That Trump Built”—only the most recent in a long line of exposés which once might have been sufficient to trigger incarceration—an irate George Washington rose from …

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Like many Americans, we have been struggling. Authoritarian gibberish has an anesthetizing effect on some, but we are not among them. The pandemic has forced us to eschew newsprint. That deprivation, we have found, is less like kicking a drug habit than it is like having a limb amputated—or all of them. We will go on, of course. At our age—having recently begun our 265th year—we can imagine no other course. For the record, though, these conditions are intolerable; reader, forgive us, please, for kicking against our stall. Perhaps we’re being predictable, but we lay the responsibility for this predicament on someone we’ll call, for …

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