A Horrible July

This month has been horrid, just like the year has been so far.  Over 1,000 Trumpvirus deaths in America for the fourth day in a row yesterday, with no end in sight thanks to NO national leadership from the Republicans with a stranglehold on the country even though, in the Senate as a representation, they represent about 20% of the population.  Two days ago the Pacific rim of countries like Australia and South Korea, with a conglomerate population of 325 million, recorded four such deaths, the US with a population of 330 million had over twelve hundred deaths.

Woodrow Wilson was a racist president, it turns out (he segregated the Federal bureaucracy which till his first term had been integrated), and he presided over the 1918-19 Spanish Flu pandemic (it actually arose in America and was given to the world by us) with 640,000 American deaths due to Wilson's absolute hands-off what-are-you-talking-about role.  Trump is on track to produce an even greater death count if Americans turn out to be so ignorant or blindly cult-driven (addictive personalities, you know, like druggies, or alcoholics, or gambling-addicted wrecks who lay down their last chip to turn their luck around to start winning back the thousands they've lost) to return him to power in 100 days.  Meanwhile, the red hinterland is now burning up, just as the blue states did months ago with much Fox News condescending clucking about the "radical left" controlled states.

The country is burning up, not the Democratic cities as Trump falsely claims in his bid via the secret and anonymous DHS Palace Guard to give him the mantle of authoritarianism, but the country's Covid-19 infection rate (we lead the world in confirmed infections, with over four million).  My region's rate of positivity is climbing again.  And the weather where I live has seen a record-breaking string of 90-plus temperature days, made to feel like over 100 degree days due to the humidity.

These months I hang out in my bedroom with its twenty-year old dilapidated window AC unit that cools the room a little (the rest of my non-airconditioned house feels like 100 degrees at all times) and read The Liberation Trilogy by Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Atkinson, having enjoyed volume one on the American war in Africa, and plowed through the penultimate volume covering the excruciatingly interminable Italian campaign, and now in the final volume the Allies, having broken out of Normandy, have sprinted to the German border where their armies have been rebuffed, having smacked headlong into stout resistance at the West Wall (the Siegfried Line) while suffering from an acute lack of critical daily combat supplies and munitions like winter clothing and artillery shells.  The spring flowers I planted are all dying or gone, I shirk from any human contact closer than twelve feet, and I wish I had more than two or three people I could call who will answer their phones.  The month of July has been horrid, as has been the year, and I can't wait for the opening of early voting in Virginia, on which day I will don my mask, drive or walk down to City Hall and cast my vote for a return to a formerly great America.