Mouths will foam

Nightmarish images on all news media:  

That horrible man with blood on his jaw from his clipped ear, pumping his fist as if in victory.

A roaring sea of red and white - unsettlingly like Hades on Canada Day, except with twisted faces topped with scarlet baseball caps, torquing their hands into one-finger salutes, while their contorted mouths form "F*** YOU" through snaggled teeth, over and over at the news cameras.  (We didn't get much of that in Ottawa, not even on Canada Day.)

The shooter, some foolish young man, apparently a registered Republican, with an automatic rifle so beloved of Republicans these days, is dead.  The report from the Secret Service sounds so damn American:  "neutralized and now deceased" - as if those are two different things.  Someone killed in the crowd and already hailed as a hero; two others seriously injured.

And all this on the eve of the Republican convention.  Mouths will foam.

I will find other things to occupy what passes for my mind.  And, just for the record, I'm not in favour of anyone getting shot.  The last thing we need are martyrs.

Throwing stones

For several months, I had only a vague idea of what happened at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021.  I'm a Canadian, for one thing.  For another, I found it unutterably depressing.  I do remember thinking at the time:  Holy Cow, my cousin was right.

Said cousin lives in California, and was sending me distressed texts in late 2020, saying that democracy in the US was in severe danger.  

I have awoken deeply concerned. None of Trump’s many minions who now fill the seats in the Senate and House have in any way acknowledged the validity of the results of our free and fair election. Their silence is ominous. Ignoring the votes of the American people is outrageous.  He is calling for Civil War. Many of his most ardent supporters are heavily armed.

Democracies around the world need to stand up for the sanctity of the democratic process. This slide towards authoritarianism  must be stopped. Globally, we cannot afford to lose American democracy. The American people have done our job and voted him out in a free and fair election. We urgently need our international partners to speak up.

Back in December 2020, I thought she was overreacting.

It was only when Home Box Office came out with a documentary entitled Four Hours at the Capitol, that I sat down to watch and listen.  It's still unutterably depressing, and I'm still a Canadian, although events in Ottawa earlier this year make trying to understand what went on in Washington DC more pertinent.  No country, after all, is immune to populism, and I'm getting worried about democracy in Canada, to tell you the truth.

Four Hours at the Capitol, which tells the story with no narration other than interviews, and follows events through phone footage (mostly by marchers and attackers), security cameras, and police vest-cams, has been criticised for giving screen time to insurrectionists, but I don't really see how a documentary on the subject can leave them out.  Besides, to someone like me, who has only a faint idea of the various factions involved, it was of some help, although I was quite confused at first.

Early on, I had to sort out just who the interviewees were.  They are identified, of course, as they speak, but the protesters are often described in rather vague terms. I was particularly interested in the testimonies of journalists, whom I ended up having to Google -- which also worried me, because it makes my search history look peculiar.

The three journalists that we hear the most from - mainly because they were in the thick of it - are Taylor Hansen (The Gateway Pundit), Brendan Gutenschwager (described as an "Independent Videographer"), and Ashley Gilbertson (an Australian photographer for the New York Times).  Hansen and Gutenschwager are youthful; Hansen looks as if he's only recently begun shaving.  Gilbertson has the air of a grizzled news veteran.  All of them give clear and articulate accounts - a relieving counterpoint to the mob's limited cache of simple slogans (ie. "1776!" "F*** Antifa!" "Stop the steal!", etc.) but it's only as the documentary progressed that I got a handle on Hansen's sympathies - I'd never heard of the Gateway Pundit.  He uses the words "patriot" and "patriotic" a lot, and he uses them as a synonym for "Trump supporter".  Gutenschwager is harder to nail down, he apparently has documented many demonstrations in the US, and sells footage to major news outlets.  Gilbertson just sounds incredulous, someone who followed the crowd into the Capitol, and couldn't believe what he was recording.

For me, the most unsettling witness is a guy called Nick Alvear, a young, pretty, bearded guy who looks like he could have stepped through a time portal from the late sixties and early seventies. 

He was filmed firing up a joint in the great hall of the Capitol, after members of the mob broke in. Apparently, it occurred to him that he had seven additional joints on him, so he passed them out. Months later, in his interview for this film, he beatifically contemplates this gesture, commenting on how he toned the energy down and perhaps stopped some serious s*** from happening. 

He looks like several of the young men I knew at the Unitarian church when I was a young woman (a hotbed of liberalism), so it's jarring to hear him earnestly declare that Trump is speaking out against the enslavement, rape and torture of children. 

He's referring to the truly bizarre "Pizzagate" myth, which has become part of the overarching "QAnon" conspiracy theory. Our soft-spoken alt-right quasi-hippy somehow misses the irony of thousands of children separated from their parents at the Mexican border under Trump's "zero-tolerance" policy towards illegal immigration (i.e. refugees) -- something that is actually documented, unlike Pizzagate. 

There's further irony: Alvear was born in Venezuela, under the name Eduardo Nicholas Alvear Gonzales.      

The violence is difficult to watch, and I'm not the first one to wonder how violent it would have been, had the crowd been anything but predominantly white.

Particularly gripping are the testimonies of those inside: the woefully outnumbered security personnel, the senators, and staff members.  A young woman on Speaker Nancy Pelosi's staff, who is clearly the same age as my daughters, describes the hours of hiding under a table in a locked room, not daring to text her parents for fear of weeping and telling them goodbye.

We see insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt shot, by a clearly terrified Capitol Police officer. (Taylor Hansen describes her as "so patriotic".) She died almost immediately. We see a policeman hauled out into the crowd, beaten and tasered repeatedly.  He survived, but was badly injured and traumatized. We hear of the four police officers who committed suicide in the weeks following the attack.

Mostly, I was left with an impression of lasting damage, both physical and emotional - and a frightening revelation of how much damage was there before this march got out of hand, and how deeply much of America is in the grip of delusion.

It's the long weekend of the Canadian Thanksgiving.  I could be grateful for being a Canadian - and I am - but, about the same time I first saw this documentary, the truck convoy invaded Hades.  I have a painful story about that, which will have to wait until I can bear to tell it.

Holy cow.  My cousin was right.

Don't hold your breath

When Donald Trump got hired four years ago, I trudged out to my favourite neighbourhood Hades coffee shop to numb myself with chocolate and caffeine. 

Four years later, I was sitting in my favourite coffee shop in Victoria about 8:30 on a November Saturday morning. I needed to check something on my phone, and was ambushed by my FaceBook feed. 

I texted elder daughter in England: BBC is saying that Biden got it. She confirmed that CNN was saying the same thing, and I staggered over to the counter to gasp at the barista: "BBC and CNN are saying that Joe Biden has won the American election." 

She said something like "Thank goodness!", and outside, a car flew down Cook Street, honking like a wedding day.

I found myself fighting back tears; it's like I've been braced and tensed since November 2016, and could finally breathe. 

Of course, this doesn't solve everything. However, this latest Randy Rainbow offering is fiendishly clever, and parodies one of the most fiendishly difficult Sondheim songs. Which is saying something. And here is the song on which the parody is based, sung, in this instance, by the late great Madeleine Kahn. Don't hold your breath.

"I'm not a doctor." "No kidding."

Apparently, Julie Andrews sent Randy Rainbow a message of approval about this video -- via Carol Burnett. That's got to be Gay Guy Cloud Nine.

For all you Mary Poppins fans, who don't mind the occasional cuss-word. (I gather Julie Andrews is one of those.)

A person could develop COVID

Journaling in the half-empty coffee shop this morning (where I'm not sure I should be, anyway), it occurred to me that my daily entries are rapidly turning into a plague diary.

Thank goodness, Randy Rainbow had something new on YouTube. It's about coranovirus, unavoidably, and neatly itemizes many of my concerns (I even have a pink bathrobe), but hell, you gotta laugh!



Don't you?

Over the rainbow

I'm tired. I'm taking the Randy Rainbow escape. Because he is an escape. A big, campy, over-the-top escape - with a spot-on parody of the opening of Disney's Beauty and the Beast.

(Am I the only person who thinks William P. Barr looks like Elton John?)

A horse in a hospital

This is not new.

Nothing on my blog is, it seems.

Elder daughter posted this on my Facebook wall last night.

It was only when I went looking for it this morning that I realized that this has been around for about a year and a half - long enough for people with loads of spare time to actually make animated YouTube videos of it. I've decided to stick with the video elder daughter shared.

Please be aware that it is rife with F-bombs and other salty language. Oh, and it may not be clear from the posting, but the comedian here is John Mulaney.

Trump is a horse in a hospital from Rich Porter on Vimeo.

A little fight music

Not long after the current President of the United States was inaugurated, Bernice King, daughter of the late Dr. Martin Luther King, posted a list of guidelines for coping with the coming chaos. She evidently wasn't the originator, as she speaks of "wise advice circulating", but she was definitely taking the high road.

So, the following is definitely not the high road, but halfway through that man's administration (which is probably a misnomer in itself), I can't help but find this - oh, I dunno - a relief?

Be warned, the lyrics are simple, but profane:

If I only had the time

Today, the Resident Fan Boy is celebrating his first birthday in Victoria in 19 years.

Younger daughter has informed me by text that she also wants to light the candles this year, because she is "22 years old!". Pray for us.

While she was meticulously baking and decorating the cake yesterday, I entertained her with this latest Randy Rainbow concoction. I swear the man has the tidiest eyebrows on YouTube.

Not wanting to know

Oh, but last week was balmy, fading away into evenings of gentle shades of mustard and rust. We didn't know Leonard Cohen was already dead.

Down by the Rideau River, the pathway seemed to glow in a deep aquamarine. It all reminded me, a little uncomfortably, of an evening eight years ago, which also happened to coincide with the American election.
I slipped off to the Bytowne Cinema for a movie, but returned too soon, so tuned into one of the few television channels not covering the events south of the border, before scooting off to bed early.

The next morning, I awoke at 5:26 and thought:  I don't know who won.  Let's keep it that way for another hour.

So I guess my heart knew.

In the coffee shop, a young fella told us that his American girlfriend had voted Libertarian in the advance polls, being a Bernie Sanders fan.  They're planning to immigrate.

"The Canadian Immigration web site has crashed!" he said, the air of someone delivering astonishing news.  I knew; I'd been standing in horror by the radio speakers in my bedroom.

A man fixing his coffee at the creamer and sweetener station by the door, looked up.
"Trump got in?"

He must have been the last person in Ottawa to know.

A couple of days later, the young fella was seated with his girlfriend in the coffee shop.  He recognized me but thought he'd seen me the day before.  I reminded him it had been the morning after the election.  His girlfriend was a bit taken aback that he'd been discussing her vote with strangers.

"I didn't vote for Trump," she muttered.

I decided it would be unkind to point out that, if she hadn't voted for Hillary Clinton, she had essentially voted for Trump.

Every morning, for the past week, I've woken up with a feeling similar to that when I first learned that younger daughter was special needs.  I feel depressed, trapped, and rather terrified about the future.

At the very least, I don't know how I will be able to face seeing and hearing the likes of Newt Gingrich and Ann Coulter in the media again.

I don't care to discuss the very worst.

Avoiding the issue

You may have noticed that I haven't said anything about the American election.  It's not just because I'm Canadian.  It's also because what has been going on for the past few months has been as scary as all get-out.

One thing the American election has over other scary things such as ISIS, North Korea, and global warming:  there has been a helluva lot of satire.  In fact, the only way I've been able to bear finding out about what happened in each presidential debate is by tuning into John Oliver or Samantha Bee.

Or by searching out viral videos.

The following give pretty good synopses of the first and third debates.

For you Mary Poppins fans:


And you Weird Al Yankovic aficionados:


Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm just going to dig a large hole and hide in it.  Will you come get me after November 8th?  (If Trump gets in, don't bother…)