I made the mistake of watching the 9/11 footage last week. I watch it every year. There are just some things so horrible your brain never absorbs them, and no matter how many times you remind yourself, you still can’t believe it.
Similarly, I can’t count the number of times this year I’ve had to say, “Did you ever think we’d ever be in a global pandemic?” And no matter how often I say it, I cannot believe it.
The double punch of watching the replay of an unthinkable attack, while avoiding an unthinkable virus, just did me in. Evidently I can only absorb one unthinkable thing at a time. Perhaps some people can’t absorb any unthinkable things. Hence 9/11 deniers and covid deniers.
What was the year Bowie and Prince and Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher died? 2016? It was the same year Trump was elected, speaking of unthinkable. They had the Zika virus, too. That was a bad year.
And good god, 1918 – 30 million people died in six months from their global pandemic, and there was an active World War — and evidently someone poisoned people in Chicago restaurants: didn’t know that. Happily, no movie stars died because there were no movies.
But you know what didn’t happen in 1918? Ruth Bader Ginsburg didn’t die in 1918, she died last night. That unthinkable event unleashed such a level of cursing on Facebook that two friends wisely removed their TeddyJ affiliations from their profiles.
Damn it all to hell.
11 responses to “September 2020”
Ginsburg’s death was a shock, even though we were all half expecting it. I’m a tiny bit hopeful that ramming through a new candidate for the court will turn some people away from voting for the Republicans. Maybe, it will effect the Senate race???
KC – the husband was talking tonight that the current fear is that with a Pro-Trump new justice installed the president will try to argue against mail-in ballots at the Supreme Court, like in Bush v. Gore, and then with the court in his pocket we will get four more years. I will riot.Arlene – I hope only the particularly craven hypocritical senators are voted out. I’m sure some are … are good people.
The thing is, the justices really don’t have to vote “his way.” I’d expect there to be more shuffling over against the side of the law by any who would be threatened by impeachment or criminal charges if not-Trump is in office, but as far as I know, that’s only one of them? and even then, ideally, none of them would go for disqualifying mail-in ballots en masse! (especially since multiple states *only do* mail-in ballots!) But the ones he has “seated” do not have to do his bidding and really shouldn’t in this case (although there’s also the possibility of blackmail, as he has “punished” plenty of people for displeasing him – although it’s unclear whether he “warned” any of them ahead of time; but one would hope that all the justices are smart enough to realize that caving to blackmail means that there will just be future blackmail, especially if the individual remains in power?).
That said, it may be possible to simply hold various state counts up long enough (demanding recounts, demanding re-verification that all voters are legitimate and alive, whatever the state and federal laws allow) that conclusions aren’t reached in time for the electoral college limit (https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/09/trump-biden-electoral-count-act-1887/615994/ ) and euuugh and I would also strongly object to that.
KC – Bush v Gore aside, it is surprising that some governor hasn’t tried this in the past – slowing the vote process so it can’t be counted in time. It’s a slick move.
I think it would be a Very Unpopular Move… unless you’ve pre-primed the populace to not trust anything, to believe conspiracy theories, and to be unable to unite. I mean, people get cranky if their vote isn’t counted.
There are lots of weird “tools” that people just *wouldn’t use* until now (or, as with playing chicken with government shutdowns – recently-ish). I don’t know, and also I wish government would just *function properly* rather than doing All The Weasely Things (although I grant that technicalities are sometimes the best answer to technicalities; there’s an old story about a student at Oxford who took advantage of a university statue still on the books to demand a beer while in an exam. They brought him the beer – and fined him the appropriate amount for not wearing his sword while taking the exam. The appropriate amount happened to be in pre-decimal currency, which made it rather more difficult to pay…)(I have no idea whether the story is apocryphal or not, but it demonstrates the general point).
KC – interesting – it looks like Snopes has changed its rating system from “is this urban legend true or false” to either “legend” or not. But here it is:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cakes-and-ale/
I just checked another few things on Snopes, and it looks like the status options are True, False, or Legend – presumably Legend for something adequately popular and that has altered in the telling, but where it’s functionally impossible to rule in or out entirely? (which makes me wonder if they read alllll the old rules from Cambridge and Oxford to ascertain that yes, there’s something in there about demanding and being provided with provisions and yes, there’s something in there about being fined for not wearing even weirder attire than is currently required for exams (sub-fusc!), but no, we don’t know whether anyone actually ever *did* this, with or without retribution… but it has certainly become legendary, whether any version of that actually happened at any point!
KC – I think the change in categories happened when they widened from urban legend check to fact check.
The halloween-candy-poisoned thing and the gang-initiation-headlights-blinking thing are both listed as “false” – but they may not have gone through their archives, and instead may be just using “legend” instead of “false” for urban legends moving forward? Not sure.
(I mean, also, the “someone’s factual statement is false” vs. “conspiracy theory and false” vs. “urban legend and false” would be a kind of muddy line to draw, probably, unless you lumped anonymous/exclusively-passed-along things under the latter two, but put it in the first category if someone states it on record [potentially having relied on their social media/online information source which would be under the latter two, though?]. Anyway. It’s really a mess out there.)
KC – remember back when it was just a woman named Barbara and her husband David and a wooden spoon? So long ago.
I don’t think I knew of it all that way back – you’re one of the Originals. 🙂