So clearly the last eleven months or whatever have sucked. But for most of that time, I have mostly been able to keep my chin up. I tried not to think too far ahead, not to wonder how long the pandemic would be squatting on our lives. I tried not to think too hard about what might have been, how my sons’ school years would have been better, my job would have been better, how Shanon would have been able to see her friends more.
And I’ve been pretty fortunate up to this point. Shanon and I both got sick with something covid-like back in May, but nobody went to the hospital. I can work at home. As usual, it’s advantageous to be white. Etc.
But, my friends, this whole pandemic existence is wearing on me, as I am sure it is wearing on you. My older son’s first year of college has been sub-optimal. My younger son’s sophomore year of high school has been completely obliterated and I fear he’s significantly depressed.
Slightly paradoxically I feel like my anger, irritation, ennui has only worsened since the announcement of the vaccines. One the vaccines were available I started to actually try and envision going back to normal. And that was a big mistake.
I mean, six months ago I might have thought, “once the vaccines have been available for a few months maybe we won’t have to wear masks everywhere anymore.” Instead this shit is trending:
My fucking mask needs a fucking mask.
Watching
Freaks and Geeks streaming on Hulu. Shanon and I watched this when it first aired, but we were apparently the only ones so it went the way of My So Called Life and Firefly. This show has such a good cast, such good writing, and I laugh at basically every other line. You might have to be a white, middle-class, suburban, Gen-Xer to love the show, but I am and I do.
Listening
Arlo Parks’ Caroline is my first favorite new song of 2021. Eugene is at least as good.
Reading
Bring the War Home:The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (2018) by Kathleen Belew. Having read this book, it’s no surprise to me that military veterans and active-duty members were overrepresented in the Capitol insurrection. Belew charts out the history of white power and militia movements from the late 1960s, when participants justified their ideology and action as a continuation of the war against communism they’d fought in Vietnam, through the 1980s turn to anti-state revolutionary violence, ending with veteran Timothy McVeigh and his bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995. Compelling and pretty readable.
What fascinates/horrifies me is that “bring the war home!” was also a rallying cry for Weatherman (and some similar and offshoot anti-imperialist groups) who were in favor of overthrowing the government (via symbolic acts of violence) and turning power over to third world people.
They were, of course, people who did not fight in Vietnam but rather fought against it, in increasingly desperate and ineffective ways (at least, of all the things that possibly ended the Vietnam War, I don’t think anyone thinks the placement of pipe bombs in induction centers and assorted government buildings by an underground organization of a handful of people who were convinced that doing so would cause a spontaneous uprising by marginalized blue collar workers and black Americans, who would come together to hand power to the NLF et al. was one of them). (Probably trying to levitate the Pentagon didn’t do much, either, but I love that people tried to levitate the Pentagon.)
Anyway, before I get completely lost in parentheticals, it’s bizarre that the folks who ended up doing an armed robbery of a Brinks truck ended up in the same place as the white power people.