It’s been a bit of a week, so let’s dive right into this bad boy. I have to address last week’s issue right off the bat. When I said this was the world’s dumbest coup I had no idea Wednesday’s rally and protest votes would turn into AN ACTUAL COUP. Wednesday was one of the most surreal days of my life, and I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling this way.
I’m not going to write too much about the insurrection at the Capitol, there are way smarter people delving into it better than I could ever hope to, some of whom I’ll be linking to later on. But as I was riveted to my screens—we had a triple media situation going on here—there were so many questions popping into my head.
What did the rioters actually hope to accomplish?
Were the Capitol Police staggeringly incompetent dealing with protestors for the first time ever or were they complicit in what is happening?
Why aren’t they arresting anybody?
Where was the National Guard?
How much different would this be if the mob wasn’t overwhelmingly white and entirely right wing?
Seriously why the fuck aren’t they arresting anybody?
Why does the scene outside the Capitol look like stragglers being shooed out of a music festival? Why aren’t people being kettled together? Why aren’t gas canisters flying in the air and batons being swung left and right? Why aren’t I seeing the reprehensible shit I’ve seen all year long from law enforcement? WHY ISN’T ANYBODY BEING ARRESTED?
Why does the furry hat with horns look have to be forever ruined before I ever sported one?
And, the one that has stuck with me the longest, what are we going to do when all the instigators of this insurrection go completely unpunished?
Seriously ponder that last one with me, because the wheels are already in motion to let the culprits off the hook to promote “national unity.” I’m not talking about the rioters who were so staggeringly stupid they broadcast themselves commiting federal crimes an their Parler account, the foot soldiers will be punished. They always are.
I’m talking about the people I wrote about last week. Not just Trump, but also Ted Cruz, Mitch McConnell, Josh Hawley, that senator from Kansas who made the rambling speech likening the November election to cervical cancer, the 138 House members who still voted against ratifying the Electoral College results and every right wing ghoul on Fox News and OANN or whatever who has been encouraging this nonsense. All of these people in power used that power to encourage this fantasy that they’d get to subvert democracy and this led to a mob of people actually trying to seize the government. A mob with automatic weapons, molotov cocktails and pipe bombs.
This wasn’t a protest, this was an insurrection. It cannot be compared to the Black Lives Matter protests no matter how hard some people will try. And if you’ve made the mistake of going on to Facebook and interacting with folks from the midwestern farm town you grew up in, people are trying pretty damn hard to make the equivalency.
We cannot let this happen. We need to hold everybody accountable. Not just the yahoos who stormed the Capitol to run off with Pelosi’s podium while wearing the euphoric look that can only be obtained by snorting something through a rolled up twenty, but the people who gleefully sent them on the mission.
Time will tell if there will be some real accountability for Trump and his stooges, but the cynic in me, as well as centuries of precedent, is fairly confident there won’t be. That’s what really disheartens me.
Things to Read
It certainly feels like right-wing protestors are treated very differently than left-wing ones. You know why it feels that way? Because it’s true. FiveThirtyEight brought the receipts. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polices-tepid-response-to-the-capitol-breach-wasnt-an-aberration/?fbclid=IwAR1U9yt0C2v8rXVUix_jUBgV6UmIiZtsyXVsd6Kvk_fzASh56nuoSccmIaU
You must read this terrifying first-person account of the storming of the Capitol from three New York Times journalists. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/us/politics/capitol-lockdown.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage
Trump got kicked off of Twitter on Friday, which would be called “doing the bare minimum” if Facebook hadn’t already been more lenient. This Wired piece addresses the role played by platforms. https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-platforms-must-pay-for-their-role-in-the-insurrection/
It’s been a heavy week in a seemingly unending string of heavy weeks. Enjoy this oral history of one of my favorite movies, “The Jerk,” to some much needed levity. https://consequenceofsound.net/2019/12/the-jerk-oral-history/?fbclid=IwAR3RmzcbdBMgvjFK_nLt4OdG2JSwT4HIVtIbG2R2dLzqhuVeKbJAZt8KQ3M
The format for this week’s Moronitude is all jammed up. Charlie’s History Corner is going to be taking the week off since I can’t expect anybody, including myself, to read a 7,000 word newsletter. It’s honestly kind of miraculous that I got this far before blowing the format up. Way to go, Charlie.
What I had been planning on writing about before Wednesday’s events was the subject hanging over all of us like the cloud of dust that follows Pigpen around—the pandemic. Specifically, how the pandemic has seeped its way into my dreams.
Most mornings I wake up with no idea what I dreamed about. It’s not that I haven’t been dreaming, it’s that I don’t remember any of the details. I’ll often wake up with a vague feeling I have always associated with dreams I had but can’t remember. Sort of like when you read a book back in high school and you remember really enjoying it, but you have no clue what actually happened beyond the three or four main bullet points. When I’ve had a good dream, I’ll wake up happy and with that feeling of satisfaction, but I have no clue why. The same happens with bad dreams, sexy dreams, weird dreams, boring dreams. At least once a month I week up with no memory of my dream, but I know that the dream was excessively boring. It’s odd and probably a bit different than what others experience, I fact I know because I’ve seen the confused looks when I attempt to explain this phenomenon.
This is all a digression away from the point—I only seem to remember details in my dream when it is profoundly weird and/or troubling. In the last couple of weeks I’ve had a ton of dreams like this, almost every single one tied to the pandemic.
I’ve had panic dreams where I’ve forgotten my mask. I’ve had boring, normal dreams that involve the new normal we live in (masks, drinking outside a bar in the cold, etc.) I’ve had dreams of being on Facetime watching a loved one die alone in a hospital. I do not like these dreams. Unsubscribe.
The impetus for writing about this came from a dream I had last week that I will never forget. It was so vivid that I remember every detail. Beyond that, the dream felt like an invasion of privacy and an attack on myself launched from my very own brain.
This wasn’t a mere dream, it was a rewriting of my own memory.
The dream took place back in the mid-1990s in a podunk town called Morris, Illinois. After doing some hardcore rebel rousing that may or may not involved throwing things out of the back of a pickup truck at a car filled with football players chasing us while screaming homophobic epithets at us, we pulled up to a house where we knew all of our friends would be. A house we had nicknamed Fortress [last name redacted]. Everybody rushed out of the house to settle things down, overwhelming numbers often have a way of doing so. Then we retreated into the fortress to watch Kevin Smith’s “Mallrats.”
Something like 20 of us crowded into the living room. A smattering of people were sitting on every square inch of furniture, whether or not it should be sat upon, with the rest piled on top of each other on the floor. We were watching the movie, laughing uproariously, throwing some jokes of our own at each other, just having a great and relatively wholesome time.
Then, somewhere around the time that Brodie is yelling about the kid getting on the escalator again, I noticed that I was the only person in the room wearing my mask. I was stuck under a pile of my friends unable to get up, each one of them spewing potentially lethal air out of their lungs with reckless abandon. I started to panic. I needed to get out of there.
I tried yelling at people to put their masks on, they called me a pussy. I asked if they would let me up, they told me to stop ruining the movie. I wriggled around to try and get up, they held me down. It’s here that the spitting began. All of my friends, people I love dearly, were holding me down and spitting COVID at me. I woke up with a start, covered in sweat.
My brain weaponized my nostalgia, taking one of my favorite memories and turning it against me. I can’t help but wonder if this was my subconscious telling me that I’ve been letting my guard down too much, that I’ve been getting a little lax.
But I also wonder if this is the kind of nightmare that we’re all going to be having for a long time. How could we be expected to not have COVID enter our dreams? No matter how we’re trying to live our lives—I’m assuming everybody reading this is a responsible, non-selfish adult—the pandemic is hanging over every aspect of that life.
Every day I ride the PATH into Manhattan. And every day I find myself judging people for the way they wear, or more crucially, don’t wear their masks. I find myself making incredibly harsh proclamations about people (only in my head, don’t worry) upon very first glance and while I’m not wrong to judge somebody who refuses to wear a mask in a public space, I don’t like how it makes me feel. I’m not just deciding that some dude with his nose hanging out above the mask is inconsiderate, I’m labeling as a threat to my life. And I’m not wrong, but it still feels crazy to be thinking this way.
These are the sort of things I worry about moving on from the pandemic once we are finally able to. What bits of my humanity have I lost because I’ve been in survival mode for so long? How much anxiety am I going to have about things that I used to do without a care in the world? And how goddamn long am I going to be dreaming about masks or my friends causing superspreader events?
We’re not out of the woods yet but the vaccine is here and, knock on those woods we have yet to leave, we’ll be figuring out how to move on from the pandemic soon. And when we do I’m sure my brain will go right back to crafting some of the most boring dreams imaginable.
Doesn’t a little bit of mental boredom sound pretty good right right now?
Weekly Song to Rock Out To
WTF Is Sleep by Worriers
Worriers are a band that I tend to binge on. I forget about them for a while, then one of their songs will pop into my head out of nowhere and I’ll listen to them pretty nonstop for a couple of weeks. My most recent Worriers binge started on Thursday. I highly recommend you do the same. Some other great songs are PWR CPLE, They/Them/Theirs and Chicago Style Pizza Is Terrible. I can’t agree with the sentiment in that last title but it’s still a jam.
A check in on Charlie’s sports sanity
The Bears season mercifully came to a close today. They are not a very good football team as presently constructed/coached and as such, watching them was not always the most pleasurable experience this year. One thing I learned throughout the season was that as much as I like watching the Bears play football, what I really love is watching the Bears with my friends. It was a real bummer to not be able to go to the bar on football Sundays. It’s just another in a long line of things that we’ve missed out on since the pandemic came to town, hopefully I’ll be able to watch an extensively revamped Bears team with my friends next fall.
That’s it for this week! Let’s hope this next week is a little less eventful. Thank you all for subscribing, I appreciate it so much.