The Bear of Biden

Joe Biden is not demented or senile or any of the other lovely adjectives many nervous Democrats and Never Trump Republicans have been using to describe him.

What Pres Biden is – is 81 years old.

You get older and your voice gets hoarse, you sometimes jumble words (Note: Especially when you have a stutter) and on really bad days, you lose your train of thought.

This happens a lot more when you have a cold, you’ve been flying a lot or when you are tired and haven’t gotten enough sleep.

It’s not as if someone demented and senile can suddenly get up before a crowd of thousands, as he did the next day, and magically become coherent and charismatic. I had a father who died last year at the age of 94. Trust me, it just doesn’t happen.

Do doubters have a right to have a conversation, voice their opinions on his performance on Thursday night and be especially concerned since he’s running against an extremely dangerous, constantly lying, racist, cretinous aspiring dictator, multi-convicted felon like Donald Trump?

Certainly. Of course.

But my God.

And I’m not even religious.

If you simply go by the facts, this POTUS has been one of the most successful presidents in the modern era. He led us out of COVID and got us vaccinated, created more jobs than any of our other leaders in recent memory and presided over what is arguably THE best economy in the world post COVID, not to mention the envy of the world.

Ask Canada and Great Britain.

Yes, there’s inflation and eggs are too expensive. I don’t like it and neither should you. But a big part of that is the sheer greed of corporations and billionaires determined to raise prices to offset even a tiny dent in their record profits.

They don’t like it that there is some modicum of environmental standards put back in place or the slightest increase of taxes they are required to pay to the country that has enabled them to grow their record profits for decades. So they are passing it off to Y.O.U.

I refuse to write any more about how Trump will dismantle democracy and threaten peace in the world by dismantling NATO. Or how he clearly looks down on anyone who is not rich and who is non-white (Note: What exactly are “black” jobs?). Or how he will use the right for women to control their bodies in order to regain the White House and further pack the Supreme Court with conservatives in order to stay out of jail.

You all get that.

The question is how we proceed.

Be clear. President Biden is THE nominee of the Democratic Party. He is not getting out of the race, nor should he.

And if every nervous nellie got their way and the party ran scared, what do you think would happen? Traditional wisdom tells us Kamala Harris, our sitting vice-president, would be our nominee.

I think she’s great but do you think this will satisfy the doubters?

No. They hate her poll numbers, which are far below those of Biden.

So instead a lot of people are playing fantasy football with names like Gretchen Whitmer, Gavin Newsom, Josh Stein, Raphael Warnock, Pete Buttigieg and…Michelle Obama?

Seriously????? Michelle HATES politics, almost as much as she loathes Trump.

And what do you think every non-white Democratic voter would do if the only Black female vice-president in history, who previously was an effective senator from a state that has the fifth largest economy in the WORLD (Note: California, for those who like pop quizzes), was denied the nomination from their party?

They’d walk and it would be justified. Not to mention many white voters, who’d find that scenario at best panic-driven or undesirable and at worst despicable and misogynistic.

So please. I beg of everyone.

Stay with Biden and give this a chance.

I get the concern. But remember how he became the nominee, and in turn president, in the first place. He was the ONLY candidate we could all agree on. He might not have been many or most people’s first or second choice but he had the experience and nose to the grindstone ability to dig us out of the awful ditch the “orange turd” (Note: The term used by Stormy Daniels – the woman Trump said he NEVER HAD SEX WITH straight to your face on the debate stage) gave us.

Biden is factually correct about almost everything he said on that semi-disaster of a debate stage with ZERO fact checking from CNN. Trump was almost 100% aggressively wrong. Optics are important but they are not the sole reason to make a decision.

Most minds were not much changed either way in early focus groups post-debate. And if we all work together with Pres. Biden and all those who loathe and detest Trump and love democracy, the Democratic Party can win not only the White House but BOTH houses of Congress.

Not to mention gain a few seats on the U.S. Supreme Court.

I grew up the son of a bookie so I know in my bones that NOTHING is a sure thing. Perhaps that is why I’m more comfortable with risk and playing the odds. But here’s what I’ve learned after many decades of living:

All of life is risk with ZERO guarantees. Every choice has consequences. Including the choice to do nothing, sit out an election or vote third party, and deny the reality:

There are only TWO people who will win the U.S. presidency by the end of 2024.

Donald Trump or Joe Biden.

Make YOUR choice while you still have A choice.

To do anything.

And after you do watch season three of FX’s The Bear on Hulu. It’s brilliantly done and will get you thinking about choices and other existential questions in life far better than I can.

The Bear – Season 3 Trailer – AKA the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election Metaphor

04.21.24

by notesfromachair

Imagine What?

In the last few weeks more than a handful of friends, family and acquaintances have told me in many different ways that they could never have imagined what passes for politics and news in the U.S. these days.

As is usual for these types of conversations, talk kept going back to the former US president, meaning the guy before Joe Biden, and the deviously gluttonous way in which he manages to devour everything and everyone in his path.

How is it that this happened???…they all eventually ask in various forms.

I know it’s important but if I hear one more word about Him, I’m going to scream… so many confess while simultaneously admitting they find themselves tuning out the news.

Every single day I wish he was dead.

Why doesn’t he just have a heart attack and die?

The fury of those last thoughts often come with an apology for wishing or even imagining them.

Until I interrupt and confess I feel exactly the same way.

But more so.

At which point I mention all of the ingenious ways that my imagination manages to… well, you know.

When they beg me to elaborate I mostly decline.

Though I must admit a few of them are so good that they scare even me. And, after a particularly heinous news day…

Make me smile.

But see, that’s the thing with imagination. It’s an incredible balm to the soul. If you allow yourself to think it up, it can feel real.

It doesn’t have to be real. But it can help you think and process your innermost desires and demons and other stuff that you can’t quite yet categorize and comes from who knows where.

Or it can simply get it out of your head. Maybe never to be heard from again but perhaps to be sorted out.

I’m a writer so I often write it down. And very occasionally, but not often enough, it spawns a good idea for a script or story of some kind. Or a new way to think about an old story I’ve been telling myself for years – either on paper, or in everyday life, or way, way in the past.

This weekend a good friend invited me to a filmed play of what was billed as a radical new version of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya.

And playing ALL EIGHT PARTS in this retelling of a 125-plus-year-old Chekhov story was none other than the actor Andrew Scott.

Netflix’s Ripley.

The tortured gay heartthrob from last year’s All Of Us Strangers.

The hot priest from Fleabag.

Moriarity from the long-running BBC series Sherlock.

Among others.

You watch this guy nimbly jumping back and forth from one character to another, sometimes in mere seconds and other times in minutes, or monologues, as he quips, cajoles, argues, eats and occasionally even, with the use of his hands, shoulder, neck and breath, simultaneously portray two different male and female characters making love to each other, and all you can think about initially is….

How?????

How is this possible? How is he able to do this?

And then… who imagined it?

Well, it was adapted last year by the playwright Simon Stephens, who a decade ago theatrically shed light on and likely helped change the way we thought about autism in the groundbreaking play The Curious Incident of the Dog In The Night-Time (Note: Adapted from the novel by Mark Haddon, it’s won most major playwriting awards).

And he is billed as co-creating it with both Scott and Sam Yates, a 40ish British stage and sometimes television and film director known for his unusual approach to both new and classical material.

Okay.

But then you ask yourself…

Why????? Why do this?

Why do we need this? Why do it at all?

Well, because someone, or a handful of ones, thought of it and needed to think of it. Something about the world they lived in, or events they were personally experiencing, prompted them to think of it. And then move forward with recreating something (and a bunch of fictional someones) from the past that would allow them to understand their present in a different way.

It’s not as if before seeing this filmed version of a play done last year at the National Theatre I was excited about seeing Uncle Vanya done as a one-man show.

Or frankly, any production of Uncle Vanya at all. Nor, I venture to say, is the average person.

But watching Mr. Scott (Note: I so want to call him Andrew, or even Andy)… okay Andrew… throw himself so fully into instantly becoming so many people – with no wigs, no costumes, only a trajectory of mangled feelings, conflicts and eventually emotional outcomes, denials and realizations – well, it was about as contemporary as it gets for me.

It seemed that this film, of this play, had nothing at all to do with Uncle Vanya, or even the playwright himself.

What it addressed were the myriad of emotions, sometimes life and death ones, we are ALL trying to manage as best we can these days. Only to be shown there is no managing.

There is only being truthful about how and what we feel, taking the actions we believe fitting and holding out some hope for a better future when they don’t work out.

And, well, to keep trying.

It might sound a bit trite, but that’s what this new version of Vanya, the one I didn’t think I needed but some other people imagined I might need, did for me.

It made me realize once again that navigating what we call the politics of today is not much different for our generation than it ever was.

And that, lucky for us, back then Chekhov was quite an imaginative fellow himself.

The Temptations – “Just My Imagination”

notes from a chair

Tag Archives: dumpster fire

The Bear of Biden

Imagine What?