The Saturday night after the inauguration, I decided to view some recordings of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. I had watched the January 3 episode, which ended with Amanda Peet in the middle of a game. Since it recorded automatically, I didn’t notice that there were three episodes on January 6. Well, ostensibly.
As it turned out, there was no Millionaire airing that night, but rather three hours of ABC News’ coverage of the siege on the US Capitol. Seeing this news from only 18 days earlier felt almost otherworldly. January 6 seems simultaneously so current – troops are still locking down DC – and in the horrible past. I can’t explain it.
Even then, several of the network reporters indicated how race played a role in the assault. Martha Raddatz compared the armed camp that was summer 2020 DC, where she felt safe with the cocoon of soldiers with concern for her safety in the initial hours of the siege. (She talked about it on The View on January 7.)
It’s not that we’re past January 6. Far from it. But I’m feeling…IDK..less stressed. I haven’t asked my wife if we’ve invaded Iran in over a week, something I feared greatly as recently as January 19.
My TV is even happy
I am really thrilled with catching the CBS This Morning eye-opener and not wanting to curse at my TV set. A recent Boston Globe headline: ‘Boring is a good thing’: A day in post-Trump Washington.
Watching Jen Psaki conduct White House press conferences is like viewing competence. That’s defined as “They know what they’re doing, they know their jobs, and they work to get the job done. Which isn’t to say that there aren’t complications!”
I haven’t become Pollyannic about what the next four years will look like. We’ll have to deal with many of the same problems that we’ve encountered in 2020, not the least of which is COVID. But I feel…dare I say it?… hopeful about the future, and that hasn’t often been the case.
Boring IS a good thing, for now, at least. We need to recover from the nightmare of that past four years, and to prepare ourselves for the work ahead. The Biden-Harris Administration won’t be perfect—we all know that—but I still think that on their worst day they’ll be better than the previous regime was ever capable of being.