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5 January. COVID hits home. Sadness: S.'s brother, my brother-in-law, died this morning in Illinois after a rapid decline over the past two weeks. He was in a memory unit for the past two years, where he seemed happy until the last few weeks when he had incidents of aggressive behavior, and this past week began to refuse food and drink. The COVID restrictions had increasingly isolated residents, for a time they were confined to their rooms, entertainment activities were essentially suspended. Quality of life and mental health stimulation was sharply reduced as probably is the case in nursing homes across the country during the pandemic. He was a newspaper man for the Danville Commercial News most of his working life: doing layout and doing the rounds of advertisers, he got to know many of the workers in the town. He was a history buff, music collector (vinyl records, tapes, casettes), occasional thespian, Mason, participated in an American Revolution re-enactment group that traveled the Mid-west, and collector. It was just his flair to show up one day in the post office, his meds in his hands asking for help. The bank staff knew him -- virtues of a small town -- called help and with a day he was resettled in the nursing home, where he seemed relieved and happy. My fantasy is that he was simply saying he was done with his house and living alone. He never asked about the house, his car, or much else, except for some favorite Bing Crosby tunes. In the beginning he would simply say his collection of music had fallen through the floor and was gone. S. has spent the last two years taking care of all that needed doing, visiting when that was possible, along with the help of her niece and husband. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, like all nursing and long-term facilities, this one on the outskirts of a small town, went into quarantine mode, preventing anyone but staff from coming in and out. That made visiting impossible; but a judge still required S. to appear in person for him to grant her becoming his legal guardian -- an anxiety filled flight to Chicago and three-hour drive. Virus free for many months, eventually the virus found its way in and infected staff and residents including J., as noted in the Dec. 26 entry. So a combination of the dementia and COVID. It is strange not being able to go for a funeral or the internment, but S. made all arrangements (again small town, knows the funeral home, run by the son of the man who buried her parents), and they will tape the internment for us. Will have to do something with her niece and her family when the pandemic wanes. S. has been so involved with the care taking day by day, it’s going to leave a sudden emptiness; the end came quickly. She was still able this morning to talk to him by FaceTime, though unclear what if anything he heard. I last talked to him on Face Time a couple of days ago as he sat in chair with indiscernible if any responsiveness. COVID ANXIETY. Our weekly Tuesday call today focused on the new variant of the virus which seems much more infectious, if not more deadly foreshadowing further overwhelming of the medial facilities. It seems detection of the variant itself has been a lucky fluke: only one of the testing kits picked up the "S" gene drop; none of the many others do. There seem to be 14-17 mutations. What this means for the effectivity of the current vaccines is unclear. Already in Los Angeles, a friend, an intensivist physician, reports all ICU beds are full, and patients are being handled in other rooms, so far at standard of care. He notes that traditional barriers between departments and even hospitals have broken down, and that at least efficiency and appropriateness of care is increased. Another physician friend who runs a big cancer hospital in Miami says his hospital is now also filling with COVID patients. ANXIETY. We go to bed reasonably assured that the Reverend Raphael Gamaliel Warnock has won the Senate race in Georgia ousting the "piece of work" Kelly Loeffler (robotic repeater of right-wing nonsense, the richest member of the Senate trying to represent herself as an ordinary farm girl — her family, beneficiary of among largest US agricultural subsidies; she herself a corporate executive and married to the Chairman of the New York Stock Exchange — and spokesperson for "the people", read white elites). Jon Ossoff also has a lead over almost equally disingenuous David Perdue (who has spent his single term Senate career on his cell phone sending orders to his broker, and using insider information, has little to his credit, except earlier being a consummate corporate exporter of American jobs to lower wage foreign countries, and having a well-placed cousin, Sonny Perdue, the Trump Commerce Secretary, to get him into politics. Later at night, it is confirmed that Jon Ossoff does in fact win, and McConnell will thankfully no longer be Majority Leader in the Senate and block to any useful legislative action. 6 January. OUTRAGE & SUPER SPREADER EVENT amidst the counting of the Electoral College votes. The world stands agape as white right-wing followers of Trump storm the Capitol and with ease enter the building, smashing windows, enter the floor of the House and Senate and offices of the Speaker and others. Most were not wearing protective masks (which has become a pro-Trump political badge) and there is a good likelihood that they are creating a new super-spreader COVID event. This assault comes in the midst of a joint session of Congress counting the Electoral College certified votes from the states, which had to be suspended for several hours, until it was continued at 8pm until 4am. None of this deterred Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley from objecting to the affidavits from Arizona and Pennsylvania or some hundred Representatives from trying to object to Georgia, Michigan, and Nevada, all not accepted because there was no Senator co-signer. Cruz invokes the 1877 Compromise as a model for a commission to look into irregularities in voting: for blacks this is further insult and evidence of racism since that Compromise led to the destruction of Reconstruction and the establishment of Jim Crow. T had addressed the crowd in the morning, urged them to march on the capitol, suggesting he might join them (he didn't). When finally there were more and more calls by Republicans for T to call his people off, he made a video merely saying, "We have to have peace. So go home. We love you. You're very special." Two pipe bombs were found, and there are four dead, including a Capitol policeman, injured but able to go home then to the hospital where he died, and a white woman shot by a Capitol Policeman as she attempted to climb through a smashed window (Ashli Babbit, 35, Air Force veteran of fourteen years, who had become a virulent pro-Trump and Qanon supporter, vowing that the Storm was coming to set off a civil war (Storm, has echoes of Nazi Die Sturmer). There is now a video clip of Trump and family celebrating to party music while watching the events at the Capitol, both Don Jr and wife face the camer, Kimberly Guilfoyle dances, Don smiles broadly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXM6h9elyTY Jake Angeli, known by followers as the QAnon Shaman showed up in face paint of the flag, fur hat with horns, bare chest and arms tattooed with brick-like patterns, hands in black gloves, and an axe head tatoo on his stomach, posing for pictures with a spear and American flag, and a bullhorn at his waist. In the picture in the NYT, a boy by his side in red Trump hat helds a Trump flag to make it symmetrical with the American flag in Jake's right hand, since his left hand was occupied over his upper chest (heart?). Nick Ochs, founder of Proud Boys Hawaii, and recent GOP nominee for state representative (district 22) which race he lost, was in the crowd [Enrique Tarrio, the 36 year-old Cuban-American leader of the Proud Boys was not among them, having been arrested two days ago.] Richard "Bigo" Barnett, 60, outdid Jake Angeli for visual prominence in a picture snapped by Agence France-Press, by lounging in "Nancy Pelosi's" desk chair, putting his left boot up on her desk (not actually her desk), then boasted to the NYT's Matthew Rosenberg that “I wrote her a nasty note ["Nancy, Bigo was here you bitch.”], put my feet up on her desk and scratched my balls.” As Monica Hesse of the WP notes, the picture and others were arresting for the smugness, the gleeful entitlement on individual faces. Indeed I was stunned at the end of the evening when the protesters were finally being gently pushed back, with some small doses of tear gas to clear the steps and lower balcony, how they slowly walked past police lines waving at the police. It is a bit like the white youth in Kenosha (Kyle Rittenhouse) who shot two people to death and walked by a police car with his rifle saying I just shot somebody, and they waved back at him. (He was arrested two days later due to the uproar.). Black news commentators are not shy in pointing out that had this been a black crowd, the handling of the crowd would have been very different. Former members of the Capitol police express astonishment that aid offered ahead of time by the FBI, DoD (for the National Guard), and Maryland and Virginia police had been declined by the Capitol police, since such back up is normal procedure for big demonstrations, and not even a perimeter had been set up. The Chief of the Capitol police has resigned, but this smells like the infiltration of police forces across the country by white supremacists. How could the Capitol have been so unprotected? More intense calls now for invoking the 25th Amendment to remove Trump. It is reported that when D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser asked for help from the National Guard -- because DC is not a state the request has to go up through DoD to the President -- T refused ("resisted") is the word the press used, but it was Mike Pence who signed off, and it was reported that it was Mike Pence who was in communication with DoD through-out the day and siege, which optimists interpreted as a kind of invocation of the 25th A.; but on 7 January morning Pence refused to come to the phone when Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer were on line (put on hold for 25 minutes) to urge him to invoke the 25th Amendment, and let it be known he was opposed to doing that. Members of the judiciary committee in the House are drawing up articles of impeachment. Finally only today, Jan 7, have some four thousand plus political appointees been asked for their routine resignations in advance of a new administration. Two cabinet members have also resigned, probably to avoid any possibility of being asked to help invoke the 25th Amendment to declare Trump unfit and remove him: Elain Chow, the Commerce Secretary and wife of Mitch McConnell; and Betsy DeVois, Education Secretary and sister of mercenary, former SEAL, Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater (renamed Xe and now Academi) saying she was upset by the violence. (The British Empire is now a clothing store; Academi is a mercenary force of military veterans for hire.)
January 10, 2021