Corona Jottings: Intermittent Speculations(#23)

A new paradox has announced itself: we’ve gone from a so-called president with no political experience to a president with almost too much political experience. Well, we’ve been all experiencing a topsy-turvy life for a year now, so that doesn’t seem as strange as it could be. The world hasn’t changed that much, though, especially for older people, except those in various “retirement” homes who caught the virus and died, but for the rest who survived, including the many who are retired, but still living independently, Covid created an atmosphere that in weird ways mimicked their own reduced experience. What the pandemic cut out for the elderly, more or less, was travel. Seeing grandchildren, etc. It’s as if the world as we knew it retired – no more offices to go to, restaurants to eat at, bars to hang out, trips to take, so many enduring forced retirement of all sorts. A nation of shut-ins ensued. Schools tried to insinuate themselves into households, though with limited success. Parents became teachers, of a sort. A population of millions seemed to age quickly, far too quickly, given their sudden taste of redundancy, as the Brits call it. Most states are vaccinating their older populations, those who fit the numbers game. The logic is also somehow inverted: closer to death, the easier it is to become immune, age-wise. Soon it will be the middle aged, finally, come summer, even reaching those who can be considered young. Watch out for variants! Yearly flu shots, yearly Covid shots? 1.9 trillion to the rich under The Donald, during his first year, 1.9 trillion to Covid relief and all it spawned under Biden’s first months. If 1.9 seems familiar, it’s because it’s Covid-19. How quickly the Republicans accepted their amnesia vaccinations, acting as if the last four years were a dreadful mirage, and carry on as if nothing had happened. The usual suspect GOP Senators (Collins, Romney, etc.) are being courted by Democrats, to the same fatuous affect. Biden bides his time, content, it seems, to step back, even as president, since he is so used to that posture. Put, what, the People, Country, Cause, first? The Trump echo, the hallucination that will not entirely fade, still struts across the media landscape, though some outlets attempt to boycott, at least, his name. Like the wife of the Rumple of the Bailey show, where from J. K. Rowling adapted the tag line, She Who Must Be Obeyed, into He Who Must Not Be Named, The Donald lives on in air waves’ spectral space.    The current movement to rid our government of the filibuster, the 19th century afterthought (little used back then) that was wielded as an effective cudgel in the late 1950s when taken to civil rights legislation and has become the chief tool to thwart majority rule, is sputtering. Only super-majorities now please, claim, of course, all Republicans, and a couple of Democrats known for their very old-fashioned views. This crew champions the filibuster, a word which has a very strange etymology, befitting the ones who love it. Down with the filibuster, up with the number of justices on the Supreme Court, which has been stacked with conservatives under Trump, because of the luck of the, what, draw? Only death and Mitch McConnell, the real grim reaper, have served up the imbalance. Why not hasten the possibility of a few more Democrat Senators? The Dakotas have four Republicans to serve their minimalist populations. There’s also the linked and divided Virginia and West Virginia. How about South California and North California? If new states can be created whole cloth at the end of the 19th century, why not at the start of the 21st? Recall Hawaii and Alaska became states in 1959. Why not Puerto Rico in 2021? Questions, questions. I’ve always been appalled in the past at how so many who voted for a Democrat for president care so little about the Supreme Court makeup. It brings back to mind how Republicans are really the grass-root people, individuals who will get themselves on school boards and other minor civic offices, in order to create mayhem, stalwarts who are willing to be very local, to do the boring work of running insignificant bureaucratic offices that ultimately police peoples' everyday lives, whereas Democrats are ethereal, thinking only large thoughts, championing huge movements, thinking big ideas, but more reluctant to take on the minor, tedious tasks that small-town GOPers seem happy to do. See the many state governments run by Republicans (thanks to gerrymandering) even though there is a Democrat governor. It’s appalling, as I said. But Biden appears to have a bit of that DNA in him, the nuts and bolts guy, comfortable taking the back seat, now, much to his and a lot peoples’ surprise, presently sitting in the top job.

Halftime in Pink America

The Super Bowl was, well, super. The game had its moments: the first “free” touchdown in the big game that was, supposedly, not meant to happen (but once a running back turns around in a sitting position on the goal line, he’s only gonna fall in backwards, pushed by all the momentum he already generated) and Tom Brady’s last-second Hail Mary pass that was almost caught by a Patriot, but not quite.

But there were other Hail Mary(s) thrown that night. First there was Madonna, the original Hail Mary, her namesake that is. The present earth-bound Madonna, all 53 years of her, did the cougar world proud. All those hours working out over the years paying off big. Now there was a production! Those folk know how to put on a show. I kept wondering how many of its participants were in the Actors Equity union, but it was abundantly clear this sort of spectacle has replaced the Broadway Musical in the hearts of the younger generation, used to these sorts of extravaganzas at the concerts of pop singers for at least two decades now.

Madonna’s performance might have been aimed at her faux protégé, Lady Gaga, showing Gaga who’s who and what’s what. But there were also echoes of other, older grand dames, for instance, Elizabeth Taylor in “Cleopatra,” given all the beef-cake “slaves” supposedly hauling Madonna onto the Lucas Oil field’s fifty yard line. After the Material Girl’s exhortation of capitalism unbound, she signed off with World Peace. Ho, ho, ho.

But it was another halftime performance that seems to have more legs: Clint Eastwood and his Chrysler commercial. It was instantaneously clear that it would be taken as an Obama endorsement. From Chrysler, which we, the people, more or less, still own. But, what struck me was that this commercial may be the first time the word “halftime” was used, or understood, politically to stand for a second term presidential election.

I wrote a book about the ‘96 second term election, Clinton v. Dole (Campaign America ‘96: The View From the Couch), which covered how the campaign was covered, and I don’t recall any of the hundreds of commentators I heard ever use the term “halftime” that way, meaning the pause between a possible two terms for a sitting president. But its usage was unmistakable in the Eastwood commercial.

Which is why Republicans are complaining. But, it’s been another bad week for the GOP, because of yet more Hail Mary(s). The Susan G. Komen for the Cure pink ribbon flap, defunding Planned Parenthood and, consequently, the women of America reacting and Komen’s decision eventually reversed. This, too, was a commercial of sorts, but one aimed at Mitt Romney, not Barack Obama. The Komen “charity” had managed all these years to avoid scrutiny the way anyone not running for president avoids scrutiny.

But, defunding Planned Parenthood put them in the election season spotlight and what was seen was not very pleasant. It was like seeing Mitt Romney’s 2010 and the “summary” of his 2011 taxes: all those Swiss and Cayman accounts. In Komen’s case, it was the ratio of what was raised yearly and what was given to breast cancer research, roughly 20%, while around 80% went into the fund raising itself. It was the same, it appeared, as the salaries and bonuses of the 1%, because the Komen foundation was run like any Wall Street hedge fund. The lion’s share in expenses, a pittance for the disease in question. Komen is certainly a job creator, since it does employ a lot of lawyers suing people who want to use the word “cure” in their fund raising.

Those who were paying attention learned more about the Komen foundation in the last ten days than they ever knew the last ten years and what they had known was next to nothing: How Republican it was, how its new, and now resigned, V.P., Karen Handel, was a GOP losing candidate running for governor in Georgia, like Romney is currently doing, on the I hate Planned Parenthood GOP platform.

Karen Handel carries on the GOP tradition of calling black white when she said, in her resignation letter, “no one’s political beliefs” were involved in Komen’s decision to defund PP. This is all an election period neurosis, an emperor’s new clothes phenomenon. The naked truth is clothed. What everyone can see is false I will claim as true.

But, back to the Super Bowl: Madonna said there would be no “wardrobe malfunction” in her show. Maybe not, though that malfunction had to do with a breast, and, thanks to the Komen foundation and Karen Handel, the malfunctions have been many and frequent and now Komen world stands as naked and exposed as poor Mitt Romney.