January 2021 (iv)bye-bye Trump
It’s probably telling that I accidentally dated last week’s issue 2020 instead of 2021, as the first few weeks of January were a rather unfortunate appendix to a rotten year. In the past week, though, we finally saw the departure of Trump (“Have a good life. We will see you soon!”), the brief life of the 1776 Report (a brochure for Trump’s insane sense of history, which I wrote about earlier), and the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Sure, the whole thing felt like a retirement party or a silent auction, but I found myself so starved for banality that it was almost exhilarating—less because I believed that democracy had finally been saved and more because for once a federal ceremony wasn’t going to be some grim hybrid of Jim Bakker and Leni Riefenstahl.
Yesterday the US passed 25 million coronavirus infections and today it is snowing in New York. One of my favorite poems is a one-liner by William Matthews that goes:
SNOW
The dead are dreaming of breathing
ben tapeworm
ben tapeworm’s almanac is amateur apocalypse pamphletry.To get new entries in your email inbox, please email bentapeworm@gmail.com to be added to the mailing list.