Yesterday was a day all its own. We could talk about the screaming school board up in Fairfax County. That was fun, what with one of them castigating parents for “wanting their babysitters back.” There is other COVID-related stuff going on, of course. And politics. It seems to me that the plague panic will peter out on its own, now that there are vaccines available and many people are actually getting them. The attitude of the School Board is interesting, though, and accounts for some of the resentment to bureaucrats of many stripes.

The politics is more interesting. The President informed us that “Domestic Terrorism” is a major problem, particularly in the ranks of the Military, active duty nd retired, and of course the dread threat of retired police officers. I checked around at Refuge Farm, but after admonishing the crowd of raffish Irish Americans down by the loading dock, found no evidence of any insurrectionist activity on my pastures.

I completely support investigation of anyone advocating insurrection, so you can imagine there was a moment of confusion at the morning staff meeting as we looked around to find anyone in senior leadership who are uncomfortable with heightened vigilance against what might be imaginary hobgoblins. Anyway, should anyone ask, we have established new standards of constant vigilance.

After the staff meeting we dismissed the policy issues confronting the company and turned to production scheduling. The lead manager had a significant announcement. “Seventy Days has passed!” she said with a grin. “And we have completed the first draft of history!”

She waved a sheaf of ivory-colored manuscript around with a colorful image of the eastern pasture leading down to the bridge to the lunging circle. In it, the sky seemed red. She seemed pleased at the theme and recognition. “Red Sky At Morning!” she said with a grin. “Sailor, take warning!”

She passed around some copies to use as discussion points and I turned the pages past the ISBN and copyright information assigned by the Kindle people to the beginning to see what had got her so energized. I started with a logical place:

Introduction

It was last March that our small group realized we were in for a historic ride. The four years of vitriol being thrown around had us worked up, and there were some interesting aspects in the 2016 election that lingered for years. The disparagement of a President with that intensity was something I had never seen. This year contained a historic event, and was bigger than anything we thought. A lot bigger. It was so big, in fact, that once the 2020 election was sort of decided that the people who did it had a desire to tell everyone how they did it. Our first undisputed look was in a fascinating article in Time Magazine by a journalist named Molly Ball. Maybe “publicist” is a better term, but our language has had so many curious changes that the words now have all become the same.

Molly’s article was entitled “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.” She described the big effort that ran ads in six states, made statements, wrote articles, joined groups once thought to be in opposition, like the Chamber of Commerce and the Teacher’s Unions, and somehow harnessed the dread Corona Virus to change election laws outside what used to be known as the law. The information stream, she claimed, were viewed more than a billion times. There were folkx (that is the new word for them) who were proud of what they did. They didn’t quite get to admitting felonious activity, though part of what they said certainly appears to be. But that did not come until the election had been won, and parts of the big story seemed to worthy of boasting about.

At the beginning of it, I thought we would see something interesting in the frenzy to get rid of Mr. Trump. I began an attempt to capture the daily swirl of emotion leading up through the summer months of the wild Trump rallies, Mr. Biden’s curious basement campaign, and the rising scourge of a virus that provoked a public health response bigger than anything seen in America. The Spanish Flu of a century ago killed 675,000 Americans and as many as twenty million folkx world-wide. That increased my private view that something very much like what Molly later described was in progress, with the stakes being the United States of America itself.

The Seventy Days is an attempt not to analyze or reveal anything but the reality of the time. There are still wild theories flying around, some of which appear to be true. What we attempted to do was take each day as it was, unedited or revised by subsequent events. Historic events have a life we all reflect, like them or not. We all rode the wild media fluctuations in which we were inundated between Election Day and the Inauguration. Hop on. It will be fun.

– Vic

I was relieved that this project seemed to be lurching toward completion. There are a couple others in the stack that will be fun projects. The one about the unusual relationship between official and completely unofficial elements of our society. The biography of the last of the Midway code-breakers, and the establishment of some of the institutions that have recently failed. And a search for the forty units of America’s first public monuments. But there will be plenty of staff meetings to cover those. In the meantime, we hope to have the Seventy Days on line shortly.
Have fun!

Copyright 2021 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com