November 13, 2020, Friday the 13th of the Plague Year
It is now ten days after the November 3rd election, and six days after the major television networks and the Associated Press called the Presidential election for Democrat Joe Biden, by a 306 to 232 margin in the electoral college (and now well over 5,000,000 more popular votes, and rising). Nonetheless, "President" Donald Trump still refuses to concede the election, including a refusal to cooperate in the transition process.
Former Vice President Biden is pressing on with the transition, as best he can. Today, the last two states not previously called by the major news services-- North Carolina for Trump and Georgia for Biden-- were called. Trump called a news conference at 4:00 p.m., not to concede of course, but to congratulate himself over dubious COVID-45 vaccines that he had little or nothing to do with, to make false claims about COVID and to threaten (my home state) of New York with non-delivery of the vaccine to spite New York's Governor Andrew Cuomo for being critical of him.
In short, a presidency that has seemingly defied time and space by making time slow to a crawl as the entire nation (because of a media model based on increasing the stress levels of everyone via the speed of the internet) is going into exactly the scenario everyone anticipated after the election. As expected, Mr. Trump lost, though hardly in a landslide, by exactly the same margin in the electoral college by which he won four years ago, and his Republican Party has, for the moment, held control of the Senate pending two run-off elections in Georgia in early January and closed the gap in seats in the House of Representatives (and did far better in state legislatures). Nonetheless, despite all this, Mr. Trump continues to claim that an election in which his party did well was nonetheless fraudulent simply because he did not win it and election officials of both parties unanimously deny this claim, even as Mr. Trump's legal challenges to the election have, thus far at least, gained him nothing.
But of course, at the same time, as cold weather descends on North America, the COVID-45 pandemic is reaching new heights, each day setting a new infection record, now over 160,000 new cases in a day, with well over a thousand new deaths a day as the nation approaches 250,000 deaths from the pandemic. All while Mr. Trump continues his media circus lamenting the election he lost as "stolen from him." Which, of course, 70% of Republicans believe.
So here we are. The country has moved on. A certain media figure and the broader media who depend on his nonsense for their high ratings, has not. And we are not adjusting our behavior for a pandemic that is already straining hospital capacity in numerous states, even as we blithely approach Thanksgiving, Black Friday and beyond with our bullshit white privilege refusal to mask up and maintain distance looming to make infection and death numbers go off the chart... we will be looking at Spanish Flu or Black Death kind of numbers, and will blithely wonder what the Kardashians are up to, and decry how uncomfortable paper masks are, because America.
This has been, "Friday the 13th of the Plague Year."