Christmas Day.
Hip-deep in a pandemic.
Nope. Gen X didn’t see that coming, way back in the 80’s.
Criminal tomfoolery poured forth from the White House like a busted pipe, even as the incumbent retired to Mar-a-Lago for the Christmas break. Lieutenant General Michael Flynn and Arizona Republican Chairwoman Kelli Ward were dogging him to declare martial law and rerun the election under military rule. They wanted him to ‘cross the Rubicon,’ a reference often used by alt-right sects in recalling Julius Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon River in Italy after the Roman Senate told him not to, that decision leading directly to the Roman civil war and ultimately Caesar’s dictatorship.
That Guy’s supporters no longer bothered disguising their abandonment of any measures of democratic principles. “Q,” the anonymous poster who fanned the flames of nationalist discontent on the extremist website 8chan/8kun, continued to post baseless prophetic predictions, which uniformly failed to manifest, up until Election Day when the account went underground again. His silence didn’t deter Q followers, who continued to advocate the dismantling of our entire government system and propped up That Guy as a holy disciple from on high. Many of them admitted they weren’t interested in the Republican Party any longer, and only adhered to the dogma of That Guy, whatever that was, in the ongoing fight against Marxist encroachment, Satanism, pedophilia, and media corruption.
At one point, they started barking about China sending tanks into Maine through Canada. A small earthquake in Maine prompted Q followers to interpret that natural phenomenon as an aerial assault from invading Chinese artillery. Another paranoid theory hyped the idea that Chief Justice John Roberts intimidated all the other justices to refuse to hear election fraud lawsuits. It was incredible a single troll account whipped up that much anti-intellectual rhetoric.
For all any of those folks knew, “Q” was a pimply, teenage Russian hacker possessing a working knowledge of shadow IP addresses and the ability to access any random, clickbait Huffpo sociology article outlining base fears of a media-saturated, blue collar working class. Not one shred of evidence has ever been produced to substantiate any Hollywood satanic rituals, no vials of bio-drawn adrenochrome drugs. There is literally no legitimate proof of any deep state structures, at least, not the kind the alt-right is talking about. We won’t get into CIA black ops or Area 51 cabals around here. At least, not yet. ; )
And the best part was, That Guy didn’t care about any of that. He was too busy wondering how many fire alarms he might pull on his way out. At the time I wrote this entry, he used what little executive leeway he had left and pardoned almost 50 people, most of whom were directly or indirectly connected to his corrupt ascension to power. He first pardoned or commuted the sentences of 20 folks, including two subjects of Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, four Blackwater security guards involved in the 2007 killings of Iraqi civilians, and three Republican congressmen fallen from grace. The next day, he granted another 26 pardons, several to higher profile associates like Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulus, Alex van Der Zwaan, and Charles Kushner. The dude was on a clemency high, giving a pass to those who might’ve been persuaded to testify against him once he left office.
Here’s the obvious thing about accepting a pardon. If someone accepts a presidential pardon, they’re basically admitting guilt without having to say it out loud in a court of law, and certainly in the court of public opinion. Nixon did it when Ford pardoned him. In theory, pardoning power was given as a check and balance against the judiciary system, mostly backed by Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist Papers, wherein he extolled the dangers of convicting innocent men. There’s really nothing in the Constitution providing guidelines as to when and in what manner a president can pardon people, save for the sole exemption that they can’t pardon their own impeachments. In application, it seems to be a luxury afforded to the executive in a supposed democratic republic, so that the Big Cheese can feel, on rare occasions, like a king. Everybody who accepted those pardons was in essence alluding to their role in his web of corruption. A few people even refused his offer of pardon, for fear of looking guilty of crimes for which they might never be charged.
Did I really give a rat’s ass about how the president was scrambling to cover his ass, on that day of all sacred American days?
Not really. It was expected. I was far more preoccupied with the bug outside. Like clockwork, the viral shit show ramped up to Nth degrees as predicted. The Thanksgiving crush was in full swing and the Christmas boost wasn’t going to be far behind, topped off with a special delivery New Year’s Eve capper. The new mutated variant coming out of the U.K. was rolling across Europe, already having taken hold in major airport hubs like New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, since we didn’t have the brains to cancel all incoming flights coming from the U.K. Our ‘stringent’ intervention was limited to British visitors needing to have tested negative at least fourteen days prior to arrival.
In Los Angeles County that Christmas week, someone was dying from coronavirus complications every ten minutes, with total reported virus cases at 707,000 and a total of 9,440 deaths. They averaged 14,000 new cases a day. UC Irvine and UCLA facilities set up emergency parking lot field hospital tents outside their main structures. Some people drew their last breaths atop gurneys rolling on street asphalt. Some waited to be treated in hospital gift shop mezzanines and lobbies. That was how short SoCal was on rooms as well as emergency personnel.
All Southern Californian ICUs were rated at 0% capacity, some due to full beds and some not having enough staff to man extra beds. Morgues and funeral homes across the LA basin were turning away bereaved families, inundated with needs for body storage and back order funerary arrangements. The same issues that faced Los Angeles back in the early stages of the epidemic reared up yet again, in a more virulent fashion as Angelenos marking the Christmas season largely ignored public health guidelines, having succumbed to caution fatigue.
My biological mother contracted the virus. She was in a hospital bed in Fort Worth, Texas, low on oxygenated blood. They had her on all the usual high risk, end game interventions, plasma antibody drips, Remdesivir, Dexamethasone, basically the entire kitchen sink before a ventilator. She was seventy plus, with several co-morbidities. She said she was rallying. She did.
My youngest boy caught the bug at the early stages of the pandemic. While he didn’t need any medical intervention, he said it was the worst two weeks of his life. He was quite clear about the Covid side effect of existential dread.
Both my parents-in-law caught it. My mother-in -law was hospitalized and received oxygen, Remdesivir, and intensive care for a week and a half in the ICU down in Riverside County.
We had dozens of extended family and friends catch the virus, to varying effects and degrees. Our network was dumb lucky. To date, nobody we know personally died from Covid, though plenty of them incurred lasting variations of long Covid. I was unsure if that meant the extended family had resilient genetics, or it was just more dumb luck. Considering the research to date at that time, it was likely the latter. My girl and I managed to dodge the bug through stringent adherence to quarantine protocols. As aforementioned, our fluke changed its tune in late 2023 for your author and his wifey.
Across the world, the countries exhibiting the highest mortality rates were Brazil, India, Mexico, Italy, and the United States. There was ample evidence in why those particular countries bore those grim statistics. Brazil, India, and Mexico had obvious third world urban density and poverty factors working against them, and they had many humans living in close quarters, unable to adequately socially distance or properly quarantine. Plus, all five of those countries had their cultural components to navigate, in that they didn’t want to break tradition with their cross-household family events.
By Christmas that year, I really did think I was in sight of the finish line here. I was spent on researching and examining the late term exploits of That Guy, or offering agonizing ally takes on the ongoing plights of peoples of color, or scribing the hills and valleys of an epidemic in Southern California. Facing the reality of the unending well of American vanity was equally depressing. In other words, chronicling this journal of 2020 was itself a trying process. Not as trying as those patients in the ICU struggling to take a breath, mind you.
But same as you all did, in some way or another, I changed while weathering the brutal era of Covid-19.
Exploring the depths of the audacity of whiteboyism, in my own admittedly unique fashion, was both eye-opening and soul-shattering. In terms of wrapping up this tale of woeful musings, I didn’t know yet where my final denouements might declare themselves. Tales spin their own yarn. At the time, I wagered…I hoped… it would be soon. I was thinking after New Year’s Eve, since I wanted to keep the book focused on that year, perhaps a slight way into 2021 to address the distribution and efficacy of the pending vaccines, and the long-waited departure of That Guy from office (again, little did I know what was to be).
At some point, the pen had to be put down, if only to start something else, something ideally a lot more fun than all this dark jazz. Speaking of which, pardon the less-than-soft-sell, but if you haven’t yet bookmarked my other sector hereabouts, The Worldshift Chronicles, you ought to do that and give yourself a pending reward for climbing up all this stark bark on the Tree of Life. It’s going to be a wild ride of sci-fi-fantasy-dystopia young adult fare, and it’ll do your brain good to read a made-up story and give it a break from the likes of this reality stuff. Launching mid-July!
But in the interim, pardons for more of the same.
In the early hours of that Christmas morning, a bomb went off in Nashville, Tennessee. A disgruntled whiteboy named Anthony Quinn Warner suicide-bombed himself, detonating an explosive that injured at least eight people and damaged dozens of buildings in the downtown area of Nashville. A clear motive remained unknown, though a fellow neighbor interviewed by the police told them the week before the event he’d asked Warner in passing if Santa was going to bring him anything good, and Warner replied, “Oh yeah, Nashville and the world is never going to forget me.” The neighbor didn’t think much of the statement, which I found a bit wonky. That sort of reply sounded just a bit ominous.
Thankfully, nobody was killed other than Warner himself. I worked it into this entry not just because it was yet another 2020 Christmas Day bummer, but also because of the strange, pre-planned way in which the bomb was set off. It was prefaced by a prerecorded announcement, warning to anyone in the vicinity that a bomb would soon be detonated, and then the audio switched to a recording of Petula Clark’s 1964 hit Downtown, which apparently played a few bars before the blast went off. Seriously, that’s some Stephen King sinister horseshit, isn’t it? Christmas morning, empty streets in the heart of honkytonk America, a mentally unbalanced whiteboy who’d given away his car and his home for free before executing his plan, the inclusion of an upbeat old time pop tune exactly like the kind of soundtracks that play in films and television shows before something truly awful happens.
The learned media shtick was clear. That dude had seen one too many suspenseful thrillers. On the one hand, he wanted to make a grand public exit. On the other, he didn’t seem to want to harm anyone else, because he arranged to do it when the streets were deserted and included fair warning prior to the explosion. It seemed he just wanted some sensational property damage accompanying his departure into the next phase of his existence. It was still notable he took the risk of some dog walker meeting their unexpected demise because they were early birds.
I was missing Cabo something fierce that day. You remember. My blue Aussie, who we helped pass back in July a week after his pack mate Tara passed. He and I had a tradition of waking early Christmas morning, before the rest of the family was up for festivities, and heading out to visit local homeless encampments. My old un-housed pal Steve was one of the many drifting souls we’d routinely encounter in our Christmas morning exploits, most of which involved bringing good cheer, a smile, a conversation, some blankets or food, some alms. Then I’d wrap up by midday, and usually I’d take him to a local landmark water fountain, snap a shot of Christmas Day Cabo (see photos below and above), then go home. I struggled with the idea of doing it without my buddy. The wound was still open, if scabbing. My girl encouraged me to take that year off, that I need not have subjected myself to the pain of his absence. She reminded me of the pandemic’s scope at the time.
I understand if you’ve come to the conclusion I am overly attached to my dogs. I’ve already admitted I am closer to my dogs than human beings. This whole tale is salted and peppered with references to my furry kids. I understand when people don’t quite understand the attachment, especially if they’re not dog people. Subsequently, I’ve often been exposed to an odd kind of psychological mode some professional therapists like to call disenfranchised grief, a sorrow that tends to go unacknowledged or invalidated by social norms, often minimized or misunderstood by others. For many, that layer of judgment from peers makes grief harder to process and more difficult to find ways to deal with it. Me, I couldn’t care less how other people might choose to marginalize my own emotions. We don’t get to qualify how others grieve.
By the same token, one might wonder if I’m extending a lack of sympathies for the emotional connections to certain outmoded whiteboy traditions. Of course I’m not. I’ve been pretty clear about that. My validations of the right of everyone and anyone to personalize and connect with anyone or anything, including faiths, beliefs, politics, presidents, fellow human beings, or pets is no less respectful simply because I advocate for adaptive change in those principles. Sure, I’m a weirdo dog guy, same as you might be a freaky cat lady, or a commie SJW, or a MAGA zealot. You can be passionate and bonded to whoever or whatever you like as long as it doesn’t directly or indirectly harm others. Disenfranchised grief became prolific around the world that year, what with our restrictions on funerals and gatherings. Most BIPOC folks have lived with disenfranchised grief all of their lives.
Anyway, for the first time in 15 years, I skipped my Christmas morning rounds. We ended up doing a drive-by visit with our boys instead, meeting up half way in a deserted parking lot in Glendale, a northeastern borough of Los Angeles, and exchanged presents from 20 yards away. I put out their gifts first, halfway between our vehicles, got back in the truck, and then they got out and retrieved them, and left ours for me to retrieve once they’d returned to their vehicles. We spoke over Facetime and cells all the while. Both boys were working overtime in their respective nursing careers, taking care of Covid patients left and right, and they knew they had to protect their mother by keeping their distance.
It dawned on all of us we hadn’t hugged nor broken bread nor shared any communal space with them for almost a year. A fucking year! It was insane. But what could we do? Not much, not if we were invested in keeping their immune-compromised mom safe until she could get a vaccine.
This is what I said at the end of this entry at the time.
Merry Christmas, America. You deserve a break. Here’s hoping you get one.
That proved to be a bit optimistic.
*Compiled from December 25, 2020