Dear President Biden,
We’re shaking up our routine a fair bit this evening in getting the grocery shopping done tonight rather than waiting until tomorrow morning. We’re having some friends over for lunch and the morning will be given over to cooking so shopping for said cooking must be done tonight (getting up super early on Saturday mornings is just not an option). The major bonus in all of this is that the sunset is really incredible – lots of very pink, very strange shreddy clouds complete with sunbeams shooting up through them like people are being beamed up on light shafts. As you might have guessed, I’m still not going into grocery stores so dog Buddy and I are waiting in the car while Laura gets provisions for us.
And lest you worry about the prospect of us having friends over for lunch, we’re doing our entertaining mid-day so that we can easily be outside. The family that will be visiting consists of parents who are vaccinated and elementary school-age children who are not vaccinated so being super careful is the order of the day. Still.
Circling back to the light shafts and the “beam me up” idea – on the way here we passed the Apostolic Church near-ish our house and the ever changing billboard out front said something like “Nothing on Earth Can’t Be Healed by Heaven.” Well, Laura agreed with me that it’s surpassingly easy to think of several dozen things down here in reality land that heaven won’t be healing – ever. And not just because heaven is a (dangerous) fiction. Even if heaven were a real thing, the shit that’s happened here in reality land has already happened and has had its effects and there’s no magic anything that’s going to bring gun victims or COVID victims or interpersonal violence victims back to life.
You’ve probably gathered that illogic bugs me.
You’ve probably also gathered that I am uber sensitive to it.
As such, I copied the following two passages from the WP the other day in anticipation of a day when I didn’t have much to say – like today.
“Today, the Republican Party has gone full-MAGA and seems not a bit concerned by a former president who set off a violent insurrection. It is startlingly clear that the two parties are in no way comparable. Democrats honestly believe in constitutional government and democracy; the GOP believes believe in power.”
and
“Thomas’s work has long been associated with the Washington Color School and, more generally, abstract expressionism, embracing the color psychology of the former and the action-packed canvases of the latter. Yet, she does so to different ends: She paints not the nothingness of abstraction, but nature.”
There’s so much that’s illogical (and beyond dangerous) about the whole GOP “full-MAGA” deal that the “believes believe” typo is just ridiculous icing, but the use of the present tense to describe Thomas’s paintings is totally absurd since Thomas died in 1978. It’s not as bad as when DJT talked about Frederick Douglas as though he were alive, but it’s still quite bad.
To put us back on a positive for the endnote, I’m linking a picture of tonight’s sunset that Lara G posted on Twitter. It doesn’t show the light beams but it definitely captures the chaotic gorgeousness that was our sky for a little while this evening.
May we all be safe to enjoy sunsets.
May we not overlook the fact that reality land has some up sides.
May those of us who need to muster the courage to get rid of the damn filibuster do so.
May we accept that our little “d” democracy experiment cannot survive if they fail in this.
Sincerely,
Tracy Simpson
The Biden Letters 