47. It’s Absurd—or is it “Dada”?

The president is less than two weeks out of the hospital with Covid and is gushing to a packed, scantily-masked Florida crowd that he’d like to rush into them and “kiss everyone in that audience.”

His opponent is crossing the country—masked—to speak to smaller crowds who are also masked and socially distanced, and sometimes even sitting in their cars.

The election is three weeks away. 

The senators drone on about a new Supreme Court Justice and what she has said and might do that make her fit or unfit for the court; the nominee parries that she can’t answer anything [meaningful] because she might be called on later to recuse or to hear the issue in question: ACA, Roe v. Wade, Citizens United, etc. etc. etc.

The Dow is up 200 today—or is it down? Or was that yesterday? 

Thirteen men are charged with a plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, and the Virginia governor was reportedly next on their hit list. 

Close to home, Ada County (Boise) is back in the “red zone,” which means schools are again all remote. Ours are “in person” and attracting far-off grandkids.

Eugene and the U of O—and Michigan State and the State of Nebraska, are full of the Covid.

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There was a 1952 play, “Waiting for Godot,” in which “plot is eliminated, and a timeless, circular quality emerges as two lost creatures…, spend their days waiting—but without any certainty of whom they are waiting for or of whether he, or it, will ever come.” 

They called it “theater of the absurd.” People were still shaking from the Holocaust and the War, McCarthy was ranting about communists and Ike was worried about a military industrial complex, but returning G.I.s and the rest of White America were creating our largest ever Middle Class. 

Some artists wondered what it all meant, if it meant. One wrote Waiting for Godot.

Before that, before the “Absurd” there was the First World War and “Dada.” Dada poems were letters and sounds in no particular order that resembled no real sentences or even words: psss…. Shhhh…chaa…..ughhh.. eee…. And artist Kurt Schwitter’s Dada house was filled with random objects in random order as meaningless as the poems.