Unprecedented: that was people's choice for word of 2020 at Dictionary.com. Fair enough. We were glad to see the back of that crazy year. At least until 2021 began as it seems to mean to go on, setting new records for anti-science, fake news, a dawning new dark age of general headless chookery.
Already we've witnessed… unprecedented scenes at the United States Capitol, stormed by folk, some dressed up as for a grotesque medieval masque, some dressed down in white supremacist T-shirts. The insurrection will be televised.
In the spirit of peace and reconciliation, I've resisted asking a question of people who have endlessly sneered at their Facebook friends' "Trump Derangement Syndrome": who's deranged now? Upside: watching the heads of the commentators on Fox News explode as they try to maintain that it is in any way tolerable for a President to tell followers they need to march on a seat of government to "save America"; that he won an election he lost; that, "if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore."
He didn't join the march as promised. He casually threw his followers under the bus and his Vice President to the wolves. In his quest to discover what most people learn as children — how far is far too far — Trump has now been impeached twice. Un-Presidented.
Fortunately not everything going on right now is such a Trumpster fire. In a world far from his, one that is not an evolutionary cul de sac where rich men can do what they like, we accidentally found ourselves seeing three movies in a row featuring strong stories about women, directed by women. One was a devastating masterpiece.