This is a strange moment. I have the eerie feeling that we are about to see things explode in a number of different ways. This is not a careful fact-based analysis or a theoretical speculation, just a strange gnawing apprehension.
It is caused in the first place by the fact that
hospitalizations and deaths among the unvaccinated, especially in red states,
are about to explode. We learned painfully that a spike in cases precedes by
perhaps two weeks a spike in hospitalizations and that a spike in
hospitalizations precedes by another two weeks a spike in deaths. We are now
beginning to see that third spike just at the time when schools all over the
United States are due to open.
COVID things are not going to get slowly, incrementally worse.
They are going to get dramatically exponentially worse. All over the country
there are going to be school committees and local politicians who defy the
orders of reckless Republican governors.
Meanwhile, a number of court cases are proceeding in a
variety of jurisdictions in ways that will create great political turmoil. And
of course the Afghan government will collapse quite shortly, in all
likelihood.
Is this, taking all and all, a good thing, a bad thing, or
actually nothing at all? I really do not know but I am left with the feeling
that two or three weeks from now the world is going to look different.
Meanwhile, I give warm thanks to all of those who expressed
good wishes at the promising news from my neurologist. I do not want to go all
Sally Fields on you but it touched me.
11 comments:
Going all Sally Fields ain’t all that bad.
Plus, she did it after receiving an Oscar for her role portraying a union organizer, so it would be apt.
(I was sure “orgainizer” was spelled with “orgainize” as its base, but I guess not. Looks strange, though.)
Actually, Sally Fields' "You Like Me" speech was when she won for "Places in the Heart," not "Norma Rae."
Okay, David, I’ve met my match in cinema trivia.
Can you name the movie in which the main character sells Vitajex?
And how are you at chess?
"A Face in the Crowd"
Terrible.
Terrible?! Terrible?!
“A Face In The Crowd” starred Andy Griffith in his movie debut. He gave a phenomenal performance as an egomaniacal would be demagogue.
“One critic who had only praise for the movie was François Truffaut; in his Cahiers du cinéma review, he called it "a great and beautiful work whose importance transcends the dimensions “of a cinema review". Filmmaker Spike Lee credited it with inspiring his landmark film Bamboozled.
“Over the decades, critical opinion of the film has warmed considerably. A Face in the Crowd has an 88% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 32 reviews, with an average rating of 8.1/10. The critical consensus reads, "A raucous Andy Griffith channels the corruptive influence of celebrity in Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd, a prescient critique of American media."
I will let other readers of the blog judge for themselves.
Below are some clips.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RO3mtyHwz0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zzCQLyNnIg
Remind you of anyone?
No, no, no. You misunderstand me.
"A Face in the Crowd" was great. Lonesome Roads was one of the great movie monsters of the era.
I was simply addressing your points in order.
The movie in which a character hawks Vitajex.
What kind of chess player I am.... "Terrible," I assure you.
Okay, you are forgiven.
Andy Griffith’s debut performance was amazing, but he was not even nominated for an Oscar (1957).
He would have had stiff competition: Alec Guinness won for “Bridge On The River Kwai”; Charles Laughton was also nominated for “Witness For The Prosecution,” directed by the great Billy Wilder (“Some Like It Hot”: “The Apartment”: “Stalag 17”; “Sunset Boulevard.”)
"Forgiven"?
The cheek! You're the one who asked the question about chess.
Over at The Atlantic, James Fallows hosts an analysis by Eric Schnurer (not sure who he is, but I find Fallows worth reading) called Crossing the Rubicon. Its pertinence to this blog post concerns timing:
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Not long after empanelment of the special grand jury investigating the former president and the Trump Organization, Maggie Haberman, who has covered Trump for the past half-dozen years for The New York Times, tweeted that he is obsessed with the idea that he will soon be returned to office by the various, multiplying efforts to recount and overturn state-level results from the 2020 election. As Haberman reported, the impetus behind Trump’s restoration fever-dream is the realization that he needs the immunity afforded by the presidency to avoid prosecution for the career that got him there. Just last month, Michael Wolff recounted his conversations with Trump for his new book in a Times opinion essay and concluded that Trump believes that “[r]unning for president is the best way to directly challenge the prosecutors.”
Now the month prophesied in Trumpian circles for his restoration to the White House has arrived—and with it, the intelligence services are reporting increased online traffic on the subject, including calls for violence, not unlike the uptick in advance of January 6th. It is no coincidence that insurrectionists that day carried banners urging Trump to “Cross the Rubicon” and declaring “The Die Is Cast”— Caesar’s words upon alighting on the Italian side of the river—or that they will be with him to storm the forces of the Republic and ignite a civil war over Trump’s potential indictment: Avoiding criminal prosecution is precisely why Caesar crossed the Rubicon with his army and ignited a civil war 21 centuries ago.
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Just in case you thought 2021 was not already sufficiently like 2020, there's more to come! And you thought Groundhog Day was just a movie!
It's FIELD, not "Fields."
Carl,
Okay, got it. I will not make that error again.
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