Autumnal splendor – Women leaving the workplace – Donald Trump’s methods of wooing voters – Trump admitting to the possibility of losing – Savannah Guthrie victrix – Evening statistics
Another lovely day, autumn scenery at its finest. Everything looked serene today, the mellow October sunlight highlighting the rich assortment of colors from the leaves of maples, sycamores, elms, cherry trees, pear trees, hickories, oaks, birches, beeches – to name some of the bewildering variety of trees in the eastern American forest region, one of the most bio-diverse areas on the planet. I am reminded of the passage in The Handmaid’s Tale when Offred, languishing in a state of semi-slavery, glances outside at night and notices the new moon: “a wishing moon, a sliver of ancient rock, a goddess, a wink. The moon is a stone and the sky is full of deadly hardware, but oh God, how beautiful anyway. “ And so I felt today. Our country is undergoing continual trial and trouble from the pandemic, the levels of racial tension seem to have reached unprecedented heights, the election threatens to be one of the most violent in our history – but how beautiful it was outside anyway.
Margaret Atwood’s book seems unhappily appropriate at the moment, because one of the effects of the COVID virus has been the reduction of women in the workforce in unprecedented numbers. With hundreds of thousands of students being forced to obtain their schooling at home and numerous daycare centers going out of business, someone has to supervise the children during the day and that someone is usually the mother of the family. Sometimes it is possible for a parent to conduct work online, but only about a third of our occupations can be pursued that way. The others (healthcare, education, factory work, truck driving, cleaning services, utility services, among others) require the worker’s physical presence. About 865,000 women have dropped out of the workforce, in contrast to 216,000 men. It’s not only women who will be worse off for this development. There is a strong correlation between companies hiring women executives and their profitability, resulting in 18% – 69% boosts for the Fortune 500 firms with the best records of promoting women. It is going to take a long time for our economy to rebound, even after the virus is brought under control.
Donald Trump certainly has an unusual approach towards attempts at winning people over to him. When asked whether suburban women no longer liked him, he responded that they should like him because he’s in favor of law and order, and he reinforced this remark as follows: “So can I ask you to do me a favor? Suburban women, will you please like me? I saved your damn neighborhood.” For some inscrutable reason, the suburban women here seem for the most part unmoved by such an appeal. Perhaps they are more amenable to these tender persuasions in some other neighborhood.
It does appear that he is at last realizing that losing the election is a possibility. “Could you imagine if I lose?” Trump said Friday evening at a campaign rally in Macon, GA. “My whole life, what am I going to do? I’m going to say, ‘I lost to the worst candidate in the history of politics.’ I’m not going to feel so good. Maybe I’ll have to leave the country. I don’t know.” If it is any consolation to him, many believe that the distinction of being the worst candidate in the history of politics belongs to him rather than to his opponent. As far as his leaving the country is concerned, there are two stumbling blocks to this dire threat: first, he would be hard-pressed to find another country that would accept him (perhaps his buddy Vladimir Putin would take him in?) and second, that he may be somewhat restricted in his movements if he receives a jail sentence after the election for his financial defalcations.
The NBC network is expressing profound gratitude towards Savannah Guthrie, the moderator of Trump’s town hall yesterday. Previously NBC was accused, when it agreed to televise his town hall, of rewarding Trump for rejecting the debate commission’s plan to conduct the second debate virtually. Whatever else might be said about the town hall, presenting Trump with the opportunity to confront Guthrie cannot possibly be described as a “reward.” The Vox website, among others, said her quick line of questioning, pushbacks, and fact checks “probably made the White House wish they had just done the debate.”
Today’s statistics as of 8:00 PM – # of cases worldwide: 39,937,065; # of deaths worldwide: 1,114,183; # of cases U.S.: 8,341,836; # of deaths U.S.: 224,278. Towards the end of March Dr. Fauci predicted that our country would have between 100,000 and 200,000 deaths as a result of the COVID virus. In retrospect this forecast seems touchingly modest. We almost certainly will reach over 300,000 by the end of the year, and to a large extent this is due to the willfully oblivious policies of the administration.