Lo, did I travel far into the hills of Virginia, where even the U.S. highways are single-lane, and from that calm and serene place along the James River did I engage in the taking of many photos.
Most of which are not fully uploaded yet, so hold yer horses, I ARE TIRED AND NEED A NAP FIRST. I will get to the Appomattox Courthouse photos in another entry.
Oy, my cats are so happy to see me. (angry hissing and mewls) Oh, wait, you're asking for dinner ALREADY?
Just to document how things stand right now:
The hospitals and ICUs handling the high number of serious COVID cases hasn't let up yet, and it's causing serious burnout for nurses and doctors who've been fighting this pandemic for almost two years now.
The trumpian Far Right are intentionally going out of their way now to ignore safe vaccination in exchange for utter denial thanks to political and religious ideology. 'Course, they've been doing that for months, but the evidence is so obvious now you'd think these deranged morans would get Baker Acted for it.
Schools are not any safer today than they were in August. Vaccines for kids older than 5 may be available by November.
And there's idiots out there going out of their way to travel for vacations while not enough of us are vaccinated and not enough places are enforcing CDC guidelines like masking and social distancing.
Idiots like me.
I admit it. I'm being a hypocrite here. I've gone quite mad like millions of others across the globe, unable to enjoy some of the things I did before the pandemic shut down the world. Instead of going to bars and movie theaters, I am making the risky move of going on a trip to Virginia to hang out with some of my online friends from the golden era of TNC'S Open Threads.
I will do my best to reduce the risks: I will be masking extensively, probably even while I'm driving in my car (I decided against airline travel because of the risks of both COVID and anti-maskers being assholes on airplanes. That's a thing now). I will be making at least one hotel stop, and I'm 90 percent sure the hotel website says they're following CDC cleaning protocols (I still will be washing my hands every ten minutes). The place my group is gathering is following those CDC protocols, and we're planning on keeping it a small group (no super-spreader bike rallies!). Everybody's vaccinated, except for the younger kids, but we'll all still be masking and social distancing where we can.
Still, I admit this is reckless of me. I know I'm vaccinated, but COVID can still infect me (the Moderna vaccine should reduce the risks I will spread to others) and I have certain health factors that can become a danger to me.
But I also admit I need the break. Even with my introverted, social anxiety ways, I need to get out of the daily grind of work and crashing at home. I've gotten cabin fever y'all, and I've decided to take a risk that with all my precautions the trip should go 80 percent okay (I'm guessing here, I got a C in college-level Statistics).
Knock on Unitarian-crafted tabletops for luck.
If things go well, I shall return with pictures. And a couple of negative COVID tests when I get back.
...A bit of background on Black Panther: He’s a king from a fictional, extremely technologically advanced African nation called Wakanda. He has some slightly mystical powers but mostly relies on his blinding intellect and high-end weaponry. He was co-created in 1966 by comics legends Stan Lee and Jack Kirby — oddly enough, before the founding of the Black Panther party just a few months later. He’s remained a staple in Marvel stories ever since, and will be first appearing in cinematic form in next year’s Captain America: Civil War, with a solo movie in 2018.
And a bit of background on Coates: He's a giant superhero geek. I spoke with him about caped crusaders for more than two hours earlier this year, and I’ve never encountered an ostensible comics-industry outsider who was so intelligent and insightful about the subject. As of then, he’d never written a comic (though he vaguely alluded to overtures from people within the industry about such a project)...
...Which leads us to today’s news about the Coates-penned Black Panther. We don’t know how long the series was in development, but it’s certainly a major reversal for Marvel’s optics. Indeed, although other leading publishers like DC and Image have their own laudable pushes on diversity, none of them have the kind of momentousness and crossover potential of this hiring. This isn’t just bringing a writer of color onto a book about a character of color — it’s bringing the leading voice on race in America onto a book about one of the most important characters of color to ever appear in comics. There have been politically charged and progressive stories about the character in the past (most notably, the incredible turn-of-the-millennium run from African-American writer and outspoken anti-racist activist Christopher Priest), but this is a period in superhero history where, more than ever, diversity is a clarion call for fans. Coates is answering the call, and it will be fascinating to see what he has to say.
The system isn’t working. But even as the two parties agree on little else, both still venerate the Constitution. Politicians sing its praises. Public officials and military officers swear their allegiance. Members of Congress keep miniature copies in their pockets. The growing dysfunction of the government seems only to have increased reverence for the document; leading figures on both sides of the aisle routinely call for a return to constitutional principles.
What if this gridlock is not the result of abandoning the Constitution, but the product of flaws inherent in its design?
When, in 1985, a Yale political scientist named Juan Linz compared the records of presidential and parliamentary democracies, the results were decisive. Not every parliamentary system endured, but hardly any presidential ones proved stable. “The only presidential democracy with a long history of constitutional continuity is the United States,” Linz wrote in 1990. This is quite an uncomfortable form of American exceptionalism.
Linz’s findings suggest that presidential systems suffer from a large, potentially fatal flaw. In parliamentary systems, governmental deadlock is relatively rare; when prime ministers can no longer command legislative support, the impasse is generally resolved by new elections. In presidential systems, however, contending parties must eventually strike a deal. Except sometimes, they don’t. Latin America’s presidential democracies have tended to oscillate between authoritarianism and dysfunction...To Appelbaum, the flaw is that there exists the possibility of deadlock. The Founders did intend, from what we've read of their arguments on the matter, to use deadlocks as a means of putting the brakes on reckless legislation or executive actions that would otherwise occur in a parliamentary system. Also, to use the threat (or reality) of deadlocks to enforce compromise between the sides to ensure enough people are satisfied (or dissatisfied, which also works) with the results.
Until recently, American politicians have generally made the compromises necessary to govern. The trouble is that cultures evolve. As American politics grows increasingly polarized, the goodwill that oiled the system and helped it function smoothly disappears. In 2013, fights over the debt ceiling and funding for the Affordable Care Act very nearly produced a constitutional crisis. Congress and the president each refused to yield, and the government shut down for 16 days. In November 2014, claiming that he was “acting where Congress has failed,” President Obama announced a series of executive actions on immigration. House Republicans denounced him as “threatening to unravel our system of checks and balances” and warned that they would cut off funding for the Department of Homeland Security unless Obama’s actions were rolled back. For months, the two sides faced off, pledging fealty to the Constitution even as they exposed its flaws. Only at the 11th hour did the House pull back from the edge.
Strikingly, in these and other recent crises, public opinion has tended to favor the president. As governments deadlock, executives are inclined to act unilaterally, thereby deepening crises...Appelbaum is correct in that our current political malaise is based on the structural flaws of our Constitution: there are no emergency powers to override one branch of government when one party driven by reactionary dogma controls that branch and abuses the rules into a paralyzing gridlock.
- It is difficult to overstate how deeply Europe’s leaders betrayed the ideals of European integration in their handing of the Greek crisis... Regulatory mistakes and agency issues within banks encouraged poor credit decisions. Spanish banks lent into overpriced real estate, and German banks lent to a state they knew to be weak. Current account imbalances within the Eurozone — persistent and unlikely to reverse without policy attention — implied as a matter of arithmetic that there would be loan flows on a scale that might encourage a certain indifference to credit quality. These were European problems, not national problems. But they were European problems that festered while the continent’s leaders gloated and took credit for a phantom prosperity. When the levee broke, instead of acknowledging errors and working to address them as a community, Europe’s elites — its politicians and civil servants, its bankers and financiers — deflected the blame in the worst possible way. They turned a systemic problem of financial architecture into a dispute between European nations. They brought back the very ghosts their predecessors spent half a century trying to dispel. Shame...
Last Thursday, I took my son to meet Lucia McBath, because he is 13, about the age when a black boy begins to directly understand what his country thinks of him. His parents cannot save him. His parents cannot save both his person and his humanity. At 13, I learned that whole streets were prohibited to me, that ways of speaking, walking, and laughing made me a target. That is because within the relative peace of America, great violence—institutional, interpersonal, existential—marks the black experience. The progeny of the plundered were all around me in West Baltimore—were, in fact, me. No one was amused. If I were to carve out some peace myself, I could not be amused either. I think I lost some of myself out there, some of the softness that was rightfully mine, to a set of behavioral codes for addressing the block. I think these talks that we have with our sons—how to address the police, how not to be intimidating to white people, how to live among the singularly plundered—kill certain parts of them which are as wonderful as anything. I think the very tools which allow us to walk through the world, crush our wings and dash the dream of flight.
I told her that I was stunned by her grace after the verdict. I told her the verdict greatly angered me. I told her that the idea that someone on that jury thought it plausible there was a gun in the car baffled me. I told her it was appalling to consider the upshot of the verdict—had Michael Dunn simply stopped shooting and only fired the shots that killed Jordan Davis, he might be free today.
She said, "It baffles our mind too. Don’t think that we aren’t angry. Don’t think that I am not angry. Forgiving Michael Dunn doesn't negate what I’m feeling and my anger. And I am allowed to feel that way. But more than that I have a responsibility to God to walk the path He's laid. In spite of my anger, and my fear that we won’t get the verdict that we want, I am still called by the God I serve to walk this out."
She stood. It was time to go. I am not objective. I gave her a hug. I told her I wanted the world to see her, and to see Jordan. She said she thinks I want the world to see "him." She was nodding to my son. She added, "And him representing all of us." He was sitting there just as I have taught him—listening, not talking.
Now she addressed him, "You exist," she told him. "You matter. You have value. You have every right to wear your hoodie, to play your music as loud as you want. You have every right to be you. And no one should deter you from being you. You have to be you. And you can never be afraid of being you."
She gave my son a hug and then went upstairs to pack.
Coming in via the subway from JFK.
The Flatiron building, also known as the operational HQ of Damage Control!
I'm a librarian. A visit to the New York Public Library is freaking mandatory.
En route to The Cloisters. That's the Hudson. The picture does not do the scenery any justice.
One of the gardens at The Cloisters. It's a museum of classical Catholic architecture and artwork.
