Quarantine, Week 39: The End of the Term and Of Other Stuff

The contrast between the personal and the political could not be greater this week.  At home and in my job, it was a very good, very busy week.  In the larger context, it was a brutal week of death and sedition.  I will talk about the latter so that this post can end on a happier note.

I keep getting reminded of this line from Avengers:

More Americans are dying each day than were killed either at Pearl Harbor or on 9/11.  I don't doubt that the daily number will exceed the combined tolls of those two days.  I have younger relatives posting the top ten days of deaths in the US with many of them now being the past week.  What is so awful, of course, is not just the toll, but how unnecessary it is.  That the governments failed the people and, yes, the people failed the people.  It is not hard to wear masks and socially distance, although it is harder for those vulnerable populations who have to keep working in close proximity to each other.  I haven't heard about meatpacking plants lately--are those doing better?  I am sure the prisons and elder care facilities are still nightmares.  While some look at the continuing border closure with relief, Canada is not doing much better.  The scale is smaller because, well, Canada is 10% of the US population-wise, but we have been failed by our leaders, especially the provincial ones, and by our populations as well.  Too many family gatherings, too many bars/restaurants being prioritized over schools, too much short-term, wishful thinking.

Sure, the Supreme Court threw out the incredible dumb Texas suit about the election.  And then the Texas AG starts talking about secession.  To be sure, that will not get as many states on board, but it is all .. horrible.  As a scholar of separatism, I can pretty confidently say that this is not going to lead to a real secessionist movement that goes anywhere.  But I can also say that this will fester.  That the Republican Party does not accept election results if they lose, and that is a very fundamental ingredient of democracy--acknowledging and accepting defeat with the hopes of returning to power down the road.  The GOP might use this "fraudulent election" thing at every opportunity to block governance.  Which means that the rollout for the vaccine and other pandemic relief stuff may get blocked, that Biden's cabinet may get blocked, and so on.  And, yes, 2022 and 2024 are going to be mighty ugly.  Thus far, we have not seen any of these nihilists in the GOP pay a real price for their behavior--we have seen elites split off, but until the voters for the party choose to reject this path, we are truly and deeply fucked.  

And I spent the week arguing again and again that the Secretary of Defense should not be a retired general or admiral. I get it that the representation here is key--the first Black person to run DoD.  However, I have many, many problems with putting retired senior military folks in that position, as I did four years ago.  The entire civ-mil scholarly community shares this consensus.  A few bent their beliefs four years ago because they thought Mattis might be an adult in the room with Trump, but they were wrong. 

So, let's talk about the good stuff instead.  My daughter's activism and that of her colleagues has paid off--the guy who was being railroaded for supposedly threatening to derail a train amid protests was released by the new LA DA.  Elections can have good consequences!  I am so proud of the fierce social justice warrior that she has become.  It has involved risks to health and freedom, but she so far is doing fine and avoiding paying a high cost for this effort.  

Closer to home, I have been super busy writing up a new grant as the Department of National Defence had a different deadline than I thought, much earlier than I had anticipated.  The good news is that the pieces are coming together because the people I have been asking to join the endeavor have been so generous with their time and expertise.  It will still involve a bunch of work, but I am feeling good about where it is going.  Other CDSN initiatives are also paying off with the positive feedback from last week's Year Ahead conference and the last taping of Battle Rhythm for 2020.  I watched my former students rock at a conference organized by a partner of the CDSN: the Network for Strategic Analysis.  The effort to build a Diversity Council to advise the CDSN is starting to come to fruition.  

Speaking of fruition-ing, I had my last class of the term yesterday.  It was only the second time I had a live interaction with the entire class--the first time since the first day of the semester.  The rest of the class was videos, tutorials run by TAs, office hours, writing assignments, and memes of the week.  It was fun to lecture again and try to weave the entire semester together.  I think it worked ok.  And given stream of comments in the chat at the end, I think it worked or the students were grateful that I was most flexible in giving extensions and other accommodations or they had their expectations lowered by a semester of pandemic classes.  I did love one comment:

 

That was referring to my invoking of the conclusion of Back to the Future 3:

Sure, it is cheesy.  And, yes, the final paper could have used IR theory to argue that Doc Brown is wrong (or right).  But I felt it was a good way to conclude--the present sucks mightily, but the future is up to them.