It’s really difficult to take it all in.

Not just the 340,146 deaths. All of it.

There was a news story making the rounds that the covid toll is so high now, it’s beyond human comprehension. This has not been a problem for us. We check the numbers every day.

Time was, not so long ago, that a typical weekday might see a thousand or fifteen hundred new corpses on the books. Lately, more like three thousand. One recent day the number jumped by more than four thousand.

Not hard to comprehend at all.

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• The First Mohel
• Angels We Have Heard While High
• I Saw Mommy Kissing Daddy’s Boss

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We must admit, we were surprised on Saturday. We were expecting others to join the Texas GOP’s call for secession — that being the logical next step in the Republican Passion Play — perhaps even a series of tweets from the top suggesting that the faithful take matters into their own hands.

Instead, they started turning on each other.

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We noted with pleasure the other day that there are now enough certified state elections to give Joe Biden 270 electoral votes.

We will probably make the same observation when members of the Electoral College cast their votes on December 14.

And again when their votes are counted by Congress on January 6.

We have been voting in presidential elections for forty years. Never before did the steps between election day and inauguration matter to us, or anyone, really. They were just part of the paperwork.

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We apologize for the language in advance, but this has been on our mind a long time, and there’s really no other way to get the point across.

It’s a story we first heard in the Eighties, but it must stretch back generations, perhaps forever. It’s a story of Poor White Trash seemingly happy with their miserable lot, fundamentally resistant to attempts to help them. Why? Why settle for that shack, when life can be so much better?

And the profane response, which explains for us America’s Original Sin as much as anything:

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• A constitutional republic famous for its peaceful transitions of power.
• The spirit that as Americans, we’re all in this together.
• The civic belief that all Americans should vote, and all votes should be counted.

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Memo to the Future:

We don’t know what horrors you’ll be seeing — American pandemic deaths just passed a quarter-million here, and what was frozen on our planet is rapidly thawing — but we’d like to tell you about our week.

Remember the United States? The federal republic version, not the warring fascist and socialist versions, each claiming the name? Yeah, still here, this moment, anyway. But it came close!

That was our week, seeing how close it would come to falling apart.

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