2020 will go down as the strangest, most frustrating year I have ever experience in my lifetime, and I am old enough to be certain that the best popular music was produced in the 1970s. I had never experienced anything quite like what had transpired in 2020: although the pandemic was a serious matter, I still don’t know anyone personally who was actually infected by the COVID-19. I continued to work in a near empty downtown office building despite the lockdown, assisting in keeping it from turning into Miss Havisham’s dining room, or an episode of the History Channel's "Life After People."
All around were other mostly empty buildings, along with upscale clothiers, bars and “fine” dining bereft of customers and patrons. There is the downtown Target and Ross stores which have somehow remained in business with mask-wearing requirements, and a couple of 7-Elevens, but otherwise there is simply no reason to even get out of the house, save to walk about and dwell upon what might have been had we not had someone like Donald Trump as president.
To what extent Trump is to blame for this is a matter of debate; all we know is that he did almost nothing to make things better, and with new strains cropping up, it may take years for things to return to “normal,” if ever. The only “positive” is that Trump will no longer be in a position to make things even worse. After being “acquitted” in his impeachment trial, Trump was riding “high” until he was hit by a real crisis, and this time Republicans would not even try to bail him out of it; in fact some—like the governors of South Dakota, Texas and Florida—would only “help” make it worse by following his “lead.”
Trump waffled between claims that the virus would quickly disappear, or it was no more dangerous than the flu or the common cold, or engage in nauseating boasts about what a “great” job he was doing to control something he said wasn’t “real,” or preferring to “lead” by his example that the virus was just “fake news” and no one should be overly concerned about its effects or bother to wear facemasks if it impinged on their “freedom.” Current deaths are at over 330,000; we are now told that this is only a prelude to a January that might be worst month yet. What is Trump doing while the country burns? He’s at the golf course, chipping his slices out of the weeds.
And still Trump won’t leave us alone. His campaign is still begging the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the vote in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, after the court had already turned aside the Texas lawsuit involving those states along with Georgia and Michigan. It’s crazy, yet Trump is still supported in this by a cadre of aides who form the black hole of the Trump universe, so desperate are they to attract and consume all the anti-matter of the fact-based cosmos; perhaps they think as long as they hold on, they can cash in with their own shows on Fox News.
Trump has further solidified his position as perhaps the most corrupt human being ever to be president. The pardons for his rich friends and collaborators in crime are one thing, but those for war criminals and murderers is quite another. The four Blackwater “security” contractors who Trump pardoned for a shooting spree of Iraqi civilians in Baghdad ignored the fact that while 17 Iraqi civilians were killed and 20 were injured, none of the Blackwater personnel from two separate patrols were injured despite their claim that they had been attacked; the incident would not even have happened had not the Blackwater patrol not disobeyed an order to return to the Green Zone, and decided to look for some “action” instead. But these killers were Trump’s “warfighters,” and we know what Trump thinks of Muslims—at least those who don’t make billion dollar weapons purchases, like Saudi Arabia.
Many presidents (like Grant and Harding) were surrounded by corrupt officials, but they themselves were not considered personally corrupt; they were just too “trusting” of what was going on behind their backs. Before Trump, Richard Nixon was certainly regarded as the most corrupt president in history, and he had many collaborators in his administration who aided and abetted his corruption. But Nixon was not an ineffectual president when it came to foreign and domestic policy, and it is incomprehensible why he felt it necessary to engage in chicanery for the sake of his reelection, which he won in a landslide in 1972.
But Trump doesn’t even have Nixon’s fig leaf of a man who took governance seriously and with forethought; for Trump, the presidency was just another television reality show, except that it was our reality and his “show.” He didn’t care if his policies failed; he just went on to the next policy failure, and he didn’t care how his whims or petty personal gripes hurt millions of Americans. His efforts to kill the Affordable Care Act is only the most mean-spirited example of this.
As we observed during the impeachment inquiry, Trump’s stooges repeatedly obstructed, lied or didn’t even bother to show up, so there is clearly much to hide. This explains why his political appointees have been stalling providing the Biden transition team with information, especially in defense and foreign policy; one would rightly suspect that they are busy destroying documentation revealing the extent to which the Trump administration was colluding with foreign actors generally regarded as foes of the U.S., particularly Russia, and why the administration has turned its backside toward North Korea, whose nuclear capabilities have only increased since Trump and Kim Jong Un have become such good “friends.”
And yet Trump still hopes to cling to power, with the help of Congressional Republicans who have not one ounce of self-respect in their beings. As always, it doesn’t matter that their efforts will fail; history will record that for 10 weeks while the country was gripped in the worst phase of the pandemic, Trump’s only concern was to exploit the most crackpot conspiracies to remain in power like any two-bit dictator, and crazed conspiracy nuts and these Republicans were all willing conspirators in this insanity, their personal credibility forever shot, save in the minds of those equally crazed.
But surely there were occupations to keep one preoccupied, right? Even with movie theaters closed and music concerts nonexistent? I haven’t watched prime time network television in years; whether the subject is comedy, drama or crime, there is just not enough “action” or “humor,” and too much political correctness since Married With Children ended its 11-year run. Back in the day, even while he was getting knocked unconscious Joe Mannix always managed to get in a wisecrack or two. And whatever happened to “physical” comedy? Are people afraid of getting an “owie”? Lucille Ball was still doing physical comedy on Here’s Lucy when she was 60 years old. People who never saw Laugh-In during its peak years might assume its humor was on the “silly” side; but watching it today, it is startling how political it was, and its “adult” sexual content would never pass the “cancel culture” test of today.
Fortunately, I have thousands of movies and television shows on disc that I copied to external hard drives to save time and space. I probably will never watch all of them unless I live to 90, but that only means I won’t need to worry about cable subscriptions. I don’t care much for what is “new” anyways; all I know is that there isn’t anything out there that is a fraction as good as Bonanza was (and is). As far as current musical trends are concerned, nothing seems to have evolved (let alone improved) in the last 20 years. From the dawn of time until the mid-1990s, the music that stood the test of time was that which had melodies that “stuck” in the mind; that is a talent which seems to have completely disappeared.
I don’t care for vulgar “plain spoken” repetition with nothing but an electronic “beat” behind it, or the lack of actual “music” in music; if “critics” think that Taylor Swift is a “superstar” not for her Barbie Doll looks but because they insist that she is a “great” songwriter, then that only speaks to the general lack of quality of songwriting in general these days; I know what a “hook” is, and it ain’t no “hook” if it doesn’t “stick.” In today’s social media culture, the music industry is being run by any auto-tuned no-talent who manage to get a few streaming “hits” on the cheap with maybe a computerized backing “band.”
I did however finally get around to watching the year’s one notable film release, The Irishman, which I liked, but I would rather watch Scorsese’s After Hours on Blu-Ray, so I wish someone would get on with that. But although 2020 was devoid of worthwhile filmed content, that is not to say that there wasn’t any “news” on the motion picture front, particularly about who is and who is not allowed to work, and why. Amber Heard’s 2020 Takeaway “Adapt & Survive” YouTube video showed us a despicable, conceited, self-congratulatory hypocrite. This had been aired on CBS All Access as “Amber Heard’s Wisdom,” with her self-conscious mugging and being defensive about how “tough” it is to be accused of what she is: a “husband-beater.”
Let’s not forget that none of Johnny Depp’s previous relationships accused him of domestic violence, in fact wrote court depositions stating as much, while Heard was arrested for domestic violence in one of her previous relationships. That infamous recording of their marital therapy session showed her as a selfish control-freak, and someone who not only refused to take responsibility for her own actions, but expected the other party to just “accept” her abusive behavior because she was, you know, just a woman. Their marriage was clearly dysfunctional from the start, and listening to that recording we hear the laid-back Depp finding it difficult to deal with a person whose behavior was unapologetically irrational. Heard comes off in her video (like Trump) as completely narcissistic. Not surprisingly, this video had the last time I checked only 2,900 “likes” compared to 331,000 “dislikes.” Many of the comments quote Heard’s own words: “They won’t believe you, because you are a man.”
Of course Heard has a reason to act as if everything is still mostly peachy in her world, thanks to the hypocrisy of Disney and Warner; while Depp is out of work, the “Remove Amber Heard from Aquaman 2” petition which has nearly 1.8 million signatories, and yet the studios seem to think that it isn’t politically safe for them to remove Heard, since she is, well, a woman, and women are always the victim and never the abuser. And even if there are those like Heard for whom there is incontrovertible evidence that they are domestic abusers, there is just something not “safe” about talking about it. IMDB notes that Heard is still being cast in another pre-production film project, Run Away With Me, and is to appear in a TV mini-series version of Justice League. For me, she hasn’t been in a movie worth watching because she was in it since The Informers, over a decade ago. The general opinion is that she is not a particularly talented actor, but she does “look” good.
As for Depp, other than an animated TV mini-series currently filming, he has no projects on the horizon—and he has done a lot of films that are watchable for the very fact that he is in them. Again, none of this is surprising; last year I wrote a post in regard to Disney’s “updated” feminist version of the Maleficent character from Sleeping Beauty; as portrayed by Angelina Jolie, she is not really the “Mistress of Evil,” but just another “wronged” woman with a “backstory,” whose actions are “justified” by self-righteous vengeance. She just can’t be “naturally” evil, as men typically would be with such characters.
It’s a good thing then that I am an NFL fanatic, because without it 2020 would have been the dullest year ever for sports. Well, actually, it is still the dullest because of how the pandemic affected the sports scene. We didn’t get a chance to see if Gonzaga might yet become a non-Power Conference team to win the NCAAM championship, because there was no NCAA basketball tournament, and the NCAA saw fit to name no team as the year’s champion. The NBA came back to play its full playoff slate, but it was too close to the beginning of football season for me to care. The MLB season was a complete fraud, with only 60 regular season games played by each team; if all the stats are what fascinates you about baseball, you had to feel a bit cheated. But while the NCAAF stumbled out of the gate, the NFL just ditched preseason and proceeded as if nothing was wrong, save for empty stadiums; being a Packer fan since way before there were names like Favre and Rodgers on the team, I can’t complain too much yet—but a Super Bowl is long overdue for this team.
But if you just wanted to sit back and read a good book, there plenty of those, right? Let’s see: Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House; Trump’s America: Buy This Book and Mexico Will Pay for It; Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever; Fear: Trump in the White House; The Cult of Trump: A Leading Cult Expert Explains How the President Uses Mind Control; Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortions of Truth; Trump: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump; Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers; Liar’s Circus: A Strange and Terrifying Journey Into the Upside-Down World of Trump’s MAGA Rallies.
Well, at least we’ve got the last four years covered. I watched the Burt Lancaster film The Swimmer, about an apparently self-confident, middle-aged man who for some reason finds himself in the middle of suburban America wearing nothing but his swimming trunks, and he decides to “swim” back to his big mansion in the distance from swimming pool to swimming pool. Along the way, we find out that not only is there something not quite right about this idea, but after each stop we find out just a little bit more that suggests that there is something not quite right about the man himself. The film was based on a short story by John Cheever, who won a Pulitzer Prize for The Stories of John Cheever about 40 years ago, back when some writers still qualified as being “literary.” I have that book in battered condition hidden somewhere, so I replaced it with a Library of America collection. It’s always helpful to have books that are actually good handy during a lockdown.
2020 was certainly a chore to get through. Unfortunately, 2021 may not be much better. I suppose that the 1973 oil embargo caused some people to stop going out for Sunday drives, but it was nothing like this, when there is literally no place to go anyways. Still, as much as some people want to prolong the year’s agony past January 20, we at least can be relieved to that 2020 will in fact end when all is said and done; good riddance to bad rubbish.
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