Who killed Davey Moore?
why, and what’s the reason for..
That’s a lyric from a Bob Dylan song regarding a boxer who died in the ring. The song ponders whose fault that death was, considering a new angle each verse - the crowd, the manager, the other boxer, etc. It is basically a dire retelling of the classic analogy of the straw that broke the camel’s back. No one straw is really at fault, but they are also all at fault too. Personally I’d blame the manager for putting undue pressure on the referee. He should go to prison and the referee should get fired. Maybe consider enacting new legislation regarding boxing safety. It’s still a great song.
I heard a new term this week - Schroedinger’s Asshole. This is a person (asshole) who makes a tasteless or harmful “joke”, and if you tell them their joke perpetuates lies and encourages violence, then they say you are just uptight and can’t take a harmless joke. If, alternatively, you tell them you agree with the premise of their “joke”, then they will open up an assert that they too agree with it and wish to act on it in real life someday. Like Schroedinger’s cat, the asshole’s statement may be a true belief or just a joke depending on who is reacting to it. The tasteless joke can turn into tasteless discourse and tasteless organization and eventually elect tasteless candidates…
I was born in 1982. It feels like the Republican Party has been seeking that Reagan high ever since the eighties. I cannot claim to be an expert on that particular administration, but my guess is he would have conceded gracefully if he lost re-election. If I were a twenty-something in those days, I would have hated Reagan I bet. His offences seem quaint now, of course. He did essentially invent the “dog whistle” feel-good style of sugar coating bigoted policies. Finding one dubious case of a welfare fraud and using it to cast shade on a nationwide social service that benefits millions is some grade-A propaganda.
Did Reagan set the party’s decline in motion?
Maybe, but they have had every chance to remain relevant and squandered them all. He showed the party what was possible and how little effort they had to make with the right guy. They have been looking for the next ‘right guy’ for thirty years. That whole time they should have been working on their party fundamental principles. Those are not clear and they seem to change with the situation.
But what are the pillars of the GOP and how have they contributed to the party’s current state in 2021?
#1 - Warmachine
The GOP claims to be for small government, which means fewer social services. When confronted with raw data that shows how providing healthcare actually reduces costs overall, they reject the notion because it feels antithetical to their credo. Conversely, when companies need bailouts due to housing market collapse or global pandemic, they come begging the Government. It’s all a clear farce that requires deft doublespeak to avoid the flagrant hypocrisy. They want lower taxes overall, but we also need to perpetuate the forever-war with f-35s and armoured personnel carriers. The USA actually does manufacture a lot of things, we just don’t hear about it as consumers. What we make is weapons and we sell them to countries. We also sell them to law enforcement and bill them to the government. But of course, none of this can be reduced at all. The real problem according to the GOP is homeless people receiving shelter and single mothers receiving aide. That shit adds up.
Republicans love the Army and having a strong presence in the world. I used to hate that notion. I still think its a profound waste of money and should be massively downsized, but I believe serving in the armed forces can enrich ones’ life and the country also. I don’t recommend it to everyone, especially not me.
The Republican Party uses the armed forces as a placeholder for American exceptionalism. To quote a friend from high school “at the end of the day, America has most of the food and all the weapons”. My history classes told me that the American revolution was a global inspiration that led to the end of colonialism. In the decades following 1776, most of South America declared independence from Europe. The wave of democracy slowly circled the globe and ended up crashing onto Vietnam. US self-congratulatory politics suddenly came into contact with a catch-22 situation. That situation is still being reckoned with today. I may have to write a separate essay about Vietnam in the future.
The real story of America’s double-think problem with the military began after WW2. The wave of democracy that slowly dismantled the monarchies and liberated the colonies had the added effect of creating a power vacuum. Britain could no longer rule the waves because the nation was bankrupt after two world wars. They remain the cultural kings of the world, but their military control over the world was gone. The US came out of WW2 with an implied mandate to maintain control over the world with a military presence in every corner.
The men who fought in WW2 became deified and military service became a de-facto badge of duty all american males should aspire towards. It is truly challenging for me, an old millennial, to grasp this concept. If my country wanted to draft me at age 20 and send me to Iraq in 2002, I would flee for Canada without a moment’s hesitation, and my father and family would help me do it. Why is that? It is because my father was born in ‘51 and witnessed Vietnam. He is lucky enough to suffer from kidney issues which prevented him from being drafted, thus ending any pressure he may have felt from his father.
This rant is not intended to be about Vietnam, but the GOP. The point here is that the party loves to espouse militaria. It’s all an excuse to keep funding weapon contracts. The weapon cycle is much like the nitrogen cycle in nature: Military orders more bullets -> factories in middle america keep making bullets -> representatives from districts with bullet factories are motivated to keep the military growing. The Republican Party trots out soldiers and their families wherever possible without ever acknowledging the hypocrisy that the majority of the representatives have never been part of the military. They would never advise their children to join the army. The goal has always been money in the end.
I honestly believe Spielberg plays a big part in rekindling the military-industrial complex. “Saving Private Ryan” came at a time when “The Greatest Generation” was approaching their golden years. The future seemed dark and scary, but the past got shinier and more glorious each year. That is a vague quote from The Watchmen. Camera technology had progressed to where we could glorify the achievements of WW2 on a new level of realism. The nation’s history buffs had a good concept of what WW2 was like, but I think the vast majority of Americans who never cared much for history class had a version of D-Day in their heads that looked more like “White Christmas” or “The Longest Day”. These casual citizens respected and admired their grandparents who served, but never conceived of watching people die on beaches under gunfire.
Saving Private Ryan sparked a newfound respect for The Greatest Generation as well as the military in general. It was released about two years before 9-11. Thousands of impressionable kids my exact age enlisted to fight terrorism largely because of the renewed cultural interest in WW2. Unfortunately, all the realistic portrayals of Vietnam came out when we were toddlers. America has spent an immense amount of time trying to forget Vietnam ever happened. Maybe if Platoon was released in 1999 the world would look different today.
I personally witnessed the tonal shift that America made regarding the military after 9-11. Recruitment had been in decline for decades. Ads on television were minimal and somewhat laughable. With new technology and the changing nature of warfare, it really felt as though America was on the verge of adopting a more cost-effective approach to defence. If we aren’t fighting the cold war and Europe is becoming more and more stable with the EU, then why do we need all these bombers? The invasion of Iraq in 2002 changed all that of course. All of a sudden, mid-century military strength was the way forward. Nothing was complicated, just tough american muscle against Saddam Hussein. Nevermind the manufactured connection to 9-11 and the obviously pre-decided course of action in Iraq. Its like Bush told us - We’re gonna find you and we’re gonna get you. That makes sense to voters with 7th grade educations.
So now the GOP’s prime directive (perhaps) is to maintain a strong military presence everywhere. Being opposed to this is equated with being un-american. If you say “we should decrease military spending,” the GOP begs on behalf of the low-income families who join the military to pay for college. “Why do you hate low income families? Why do you want our troops to die?” The American flag itself becomes a symbol of the republican party. Even now all politicians are subject to scrutiny if they aren’t wearing their cute little flag pin. Sometimes I feel compelled to scream at the top of my lungs about how no one in America wore flag pins before 9-11. The nature of recruitment ads changed as well. There was a dramatic and noticeable uptick in all the classic recruitment cliches. It wasn’t subtle.
Nowadays, the armed services seem to have reached some form of balance. The country still funds a presence in Afghanistan and Iraq. The goal all along was to never leave, and maintain a state of readiness in strategically valuable corners of the world. The Suez Canal is essential to global commerce, therefore America must protect its priorities by keeping supplies in the area despite how the sovereign nations in the area feel about it.
In the recent years, the US has enjoyed relative peace in the world of nation on nation conflict. The Middle-East remains highly tumultuous and our troops are often put in danger, however the average American feels no immediate fear of military strike. In the years following 9-11, there was a constant unspoken feeling that, at any moment, news of the next unfathomable terrorist attack would interrupt Friends (or whatever). That fear has waned.
The military may have been worn out as a touchstone for republican ideals. It is hard to call Obama weak on terrorism when he zaps Bin Laden in his first term. He destroys Mitt Romney’s criticism of the decreased military spending by reminding him that we also reduced spending on cannons and horse archers. Future wars are fought on new battlegrounds. New battlegrounds bear little resemblance to Iwo Jima and Normandy, and so it is hard to connect the Greatest Generation to a drone pilot in Virginia. If you have to draw on nostalgia to make your point, then maybe it isn’t a great point.
This is all a meandering way of saying the republican party has deified military service when it is really just a government job with a high fitness requirement. Being a candidate who promises a stronger military is really saying they want more money from the government for their district. This is justified because they will build a weapon factory and profit off the sales, as mentioned above. Pro-military GOP members do not want to help soldier’s education, healthcare, or livelihood. They want to sell weapons and call it protecting freedom. Appealing to the heroics of yesteryear is akin to propaganda. WW2 was complicated and the US contribution was one aspect. I don’t mean to denigrate the achievements of my grandparents’ generation, but America was never subject to the level of destruction England and the whole of Europe endured. America likes to claim it won WW2. We showed up in the fourth quarter at best.
#2 - God Bless America
The GOP also loves religious freedom. Reagan did a great job of tying the Republican Party to the evangelical Christian lot. The party’s guiding principles were now aligned with the bible apparently. Nevermind how completely at-odds Jesus is with the entire history of the party before or since. “Judge not lest ye be judged” does not allow for the death penalty. “Turn the other cheek” does not allow for preemptive strike on a sovereign nation. Even if they went old-school and chose the Ten Commandments as their guiding principles, it still raises several questions. The GOP would effectively be saying all other religions are wrong.
The real issue here is that the evangelical Christians in the USA have gotten much more extreme since Reagan. Standing with Christian values can often be shorthand for anti-lgbtq or anti-Muslim sentiment. Reagan’s administration was casually homophobic, much like all of America in those days. It’s unfortunate and it’s hard to fault him for not being a trendsetter, but the opportunity was there and he did not take it regardless. He did of course, know about the AIDS crisis and felt no urgency to help these American citizens. He probably set back gay relations by a decade, and he probably didn’t feel much remorse.
The Republican Party certainly hasn’t changed their general stance on non-cisgender identities at all. They have dragged their feet and used gay-panic as a wedge issue to win elections. The threat of gay culture on the children of America is essentially the modern day equivalent of communism or LSD. Clearly one of the fundamental principles of the GOP is the deliberate repression of LGBTQ individuals in an effort to shame them into non-existence.
As for religious freedom in general, the GOP pretends to care. I am doubtful that they espoused victim hood so much in Reagan’s era. Nowadays, the Republican Party loves to claim they are being persecuted, repressed, and marginalized. As has been said, any ruling class sees the increased freedom of others as an attack on their freedom. The country with Christian iconography on its money and government buildings is not going to abandon Jesus when a Muslim is elected to office. The GOP has begrudgingly accepted a number of token individuals of various groups to act as justification for sweeping repressive actions. In all honesty, the Christian angle of the Republican Party has become much more subdued ever since W. Bush left office. We still argue over abortion even though it has been settled law for decades, and the GOP trots out the Bible as the reason, but that’s all just symbolic at this point.
As someone who was raised by a protestant and attended church school growing up, the GOP’s relationship with Christianity has always been troubling. The art of preaching a sermon with a clear lesson drawn from a specific passage from the Bible is actually something that takes time and effort to weave together. One cannot simply say “read the bible” as a defense to anything. You must cite and extrapolate meaning. Putting the burden of understanding onto a non-religious person is fundamentally backwards. The Bible is long, dense, and challenging. It requires thought and perspective to derive meaning. This pursuit is what we call “theology”. If you want to argue that women don’t deserve control over their reproductive rights because of the Bible, you need to cite sources and explain the relevance to modern life. You need to convince people. If you cannot do that, then your values will remain part of your religion and not your legislation. The bottom line is that the GOP simultaneously believes in freedom of religion while actively campaigning to restrict representation by non-Christians. They cherry-pick lessons that suits their narrative and elicits emotional responses from voters. A candidate can use their church attendance as a demonstration of morality. They are never required to justify un-Christian behaviour in their daily life.
#3 - Drugs and drug users are evil
When I was in college in 2001, I remember seeing the infamous PSA about how buying marijuana helps fund terrorism. That one was a step too far and was quickly discontinued, but a lot of people within the GOP felt this was an appropriate message to Americans. It was all wrapped up in the Bush administrations’ solution to 9/11 - Tell Americans to keep buying shit especially airline tickets, and quit smoking grass because its un-taxable. Marijuana was always a gateway drug, but the gate it opened was the one that allows cops to violate the fourth amendment on a daily basis. The odor of pot is probable cause to unlawfully search someone. Does the cop know what pot smells like? Maybe. Can you capture a smell and present it as evidence? Nope. Is there any way to define where a smell came from? Not without elaborate machinery and preparation.
The War on Drugs began back in the eighties. This was perhaps the first time the phrase “war on …” was used in regards to an inanimate object rather than a nation. Reagan started the war on drugs, and because of that, it is considered beyond reproach. The war was always an excuse for veiled racism. Drugs are things bad people do whereas medicine is for good people. Nevermind that a lot of elected from both parties actively enjoy illegal drugs and face no threat of being tested. In the year 2021, we have an actual word for the damage caused by this double-think : the opioid crisis. GOP spends decades deriding the morality of drug users while prescription drugs are being abused by every level of republican anti-drug advocate.
It makes more sense to blame the pharmaceutical companies for ignoring the obvious effects of their products, but the GOP is guilty of rampant hypocrisy here. Nowadays, we are developing effective new approaches to addictions. We increasingly recognize that addiction is a disease of the mind, not a moral failure. This comes just in time for modern parasites like Rush Limbaugh to blame the disease for his opioid addiction despite spending decades demonizing anyone with a minor marijuana possession charge.
The war on drugs was always centered on police control. It’s a blank-check for probable cause as mentioned above. In addition, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy to help increase fear among white suburbanites. Your fear of Black people is now justified because they could be drug dealers. It is now perfectly reasonable to have cops come into elementary schools to scare the crap out of kids and reinforce their dominance. I should say most of the kids were not scared of the cops when they came to talk to us about drugs. Most were just distracted and excited by the handguns they carried. Either way, the message about drugs was lost on me because I went to private church school and no one was selling any angel dust to us 3rd graders.
Bottom line is that the GOP pushes the morality narrative hard and being anti-drug is a big part of it. Records have shown that many of the party themselves have dealt with prescription drug problems, thus nullifying the moral failure aspect. They spent half a century asserting that marijuana is a gateway drug and should be grounds for prison time. Now we are on the verge of federal legalization. In the near future the party may shrug and pretend they weren’t all that serious about pot anyway. Nevermind the millions of lives ruined over small amounts of pot.
#4 The culture war is coming for your children
This concept ties the three previous pillars together into a simplified digestible nugget of Colbert-style truth-i-ness. The target of rage changes but the song remains the same. The increasingly diverse world is becoming mathematically more just and fair. Those who have always enjoyed freedom are made to believe that the increased freedom of others is a threat to your own. It can become very tricky to connect these dots however.
in the 1960s, the civil rights movement had reached a tipping point. It had been demonstrated time and time again that Black people deserved equal rights and it was not a threat to society in any way. This was self evident to many people and had been for hundreds of years as it remains today. The wide acceptance of this truth enraged a segment of white Americans who still clung to pre ww2 notions of eugenics. This vocal minority fled to the GOP in direct reaction to the civil rights and voting rights act, signed into law by LBJ, a democrat.
Since the 1960s, the GOP has flirted with the white supremacy movement in various veiled ways. The pro-segregation messages were built around anti-communism sentiment. The soviets were funding MLK to sew discord in American politics, so its not racism its patriotism. This was always a losing battle, threat of communism slowly evolved into a general fear that blacks were up to something. Reagan’s war on drugs signified the general shift away from mid-century conspiratorial demonization into a postmodern direct 1:1 comparison. Black gang members are coming to sell your kids drugs.
In my youth, the threat of Black culture seemed to wane for the most part. I was raised in Birmingham in the 1980s and the legacy of slavery in America was ever present. We began learning about it in second grade and it remained at the forefront of my education throughout. It is hard for me to truly understand the country as a whole when it comes to race relations especially. It was not until I had left my hometown for Chicago that I began to grasp the rest of the nations’ concept of race. I will save the full diatribe about my life as a son of Alabama for another time. My point here is to mention that most of racist-ass America very rarely encounters a Black person. People from medium-size midwestern/northeastern cities are so quick to judge Alabama as being full of bigots, yet they have had about two hours of education on the civil rights movements. The fear of these culture shifts that are characterized as threats is targeted at people who will never encounter them. The GOP’s message isn’t always “The gangs are coming to your hometown”, but rather “the gangs control Chicago, a leftist democratic city”.
If this pillar ended at racial bigotry, then it would have been abandoned decades ago. The unfortunate reality is that the culture war must always rage. The weapons the GOP built to attack desegregation needed new targets. The general intent has always been to establish a shared vision of “normal” and attack anything that threatens to change this vision. No one would outright say they support racial segregation today, but within my parents lifetime it has been outright illegal for mixed race couples to be married, so… clearly a lot of voting people alive today used to support that. They lost that battle, and the next front was women’s liberation in the ‘70s. Obvioulsy this was not a direct change one day, rather a slow diversion of resources towards a new enemy. In my lifetime, this used to be a laughable concept. The very idea that a woman would have any rights restricted based on gender is absurd. Sadly, not so much.
This week we mourn Rush Limbaugh and we revisit some classic popular wars waged by this right wing hero. One that comes to mind is the war on Murphy Brown. This sitcom from the early ‘90s was a sensation that ran for several years. During its rise to prominence, Rush dedicated hundreds of hours of content centered on the audacity of presenting a single mother who is successful. It is amazing to imagine someone could talk about this for more than five minutes. The show apparently touched a nerve for a segment of the GOP who saw female empowerment as a threat to their own power. It was offensive to consider a family that did not consist of a man and a woman plus two children. All sorts of mental gymnastics were displayed in an effort to say that children need this and that, and people can’t be both things, and one parent must work and one must be a wife, etc. All of these arguments are made with the willful ignorance of the millions upon millions of people who were raised in single-parent households, not to mention those raised by other relatives or foster parents, etc. Two loving parents are maybe better than one, but a loving one plus an abusive one is probably worse than just one half decent parent. Also, if we are criticizing single-parent households, does that meant we are going to start offering more social services to them? If this is a group doomed to failure, maybe the GOP should fight on their behalf and win them as voters?
Its easy to see how the pivot from unwed single mothers towards gay marriage and the LGBT movement occurred. In my lifetime I have witnessed the nationwide total shift in attitude towards gay people. Obviously total acceptance has not been achieved in 2021, but it is remarkable to think on how far we have come in my lifetime. With the recent popularity of Raimi Malek’s Freddy Mercury biopic, it feels sometimes that society has a revisionist memory of the ‘80s. Queen’s performance at Live Aid should be played alongside Reagan’s press secretary answering questions about AIDS. When I was a toddler, my government was literally laughing at the idea of a disease that only affected gay people. Later when I was in highschool we had evolved to admit gay people were citizens sometimes worthy of respect. Ellen DeGeneres’ sitcom was popular, although one episode in particular was banned in Alabama. In my college years, the push for marriage rights hit its tipping point. The LGBT community was now recognized as a protected class due to the clear history of violence and institutional bigotry. You cannot fire someone for being gay.
The relatively rapid acceptance of the gay community in America has made it the perfect target for the GOP’s hate machine. Black people are easier to identify than gay people. A big reason for the success of the gay rights movement was the fact that gay people already existed everywhere. Everyone has a family member who is gay. This provided most people with an easy entry point towards acceptance. Unfortunately, this also feeds into the backwards narrative that gayness is a choice. If you convince yourself that people are choosing to be gay, then you can see this as a war to be won. Anyone demonstrating success and happiness while gay is a propaganda artist just like Murphy Brown.
This cycle of gradual cultural acceptance is playing out again now with trans-rights. The right-wing is attacking them with similar fervor and stupid messaging. All of these fights fall under the same broad effort. It is pretty much what our dear departed monster Rush put forward in the 80s - American families should look like a generic Normal Rockwell painting. Any deviation from that is an attack on our core values. But there is a paradox to this idea - the people who hear this message are already living out a modern Norman Rockwell painting. No LGBT people or single mothers will hear the GOP and choose to join the team that has demonized them for so long. If you want to live in a white ethnostate, you can pretty much find it in rural America. As I mentioned with the fear of gang violence, the suburbs are not in any danger of being invaded by the crack dealing gangs.
The threat is not towards the voting members of the GOP, but towards their children. Right now, the threat is that the LGBT movement will indoctrinate your children. Before, it was that feminists will teach your daughters they don’t have to be homemakers. Before that, it was that your children will learn its okay to befriend and date Black people. The target changes but the broad message remains the same. The leftist culture war is coming to ruin your children with ideas.
I have pondered the various generational divides at length, and I can’t stop seeing the Baby Boomer nostalgia directing the most awful parts of American society. The goal is to recreate the feel-good parts of their childhood, and pass on traditions they perceive as being eternal. The reality is that the post WW2 era was characterized by people and nations searching for their true identity. The horrors of that war forced the world to condemn eugenics and start to close down the European colonial era. America, like most places I assume, was aggressively trying to get back to a sense of normality while also flexing on the Soviets. The childhood many boomers experienced was the product of a nation demonstrating its superiority. America was prosperous because it had avoided much of the devastation from WW2. American factories helped end the war, and were easily retrofit to make consumer goods. There was a massive housing boom to sustain the growth.
The baby boom years were unsustainable, and deeply unfair to minorities. These boomers remember playing outside with no supervision but causally forget that four or five classmates died in their gradeschool from biking without a helmet. The generation that tells their kids how no one gave them a participation trophy is literally giving their kids participation trophies. I’ll save my generational rant for later, and conclude by saying that the baby boom wishes the world was the same as it was when they were children. This is foolish because they have a skewed memory of the world that neglects large parts of the population who were suffering under this system.
So, while its clear that anyone who wants to live a baby boom fantasy is well within their rights to do so, they cannot force these values on the nation. You cannot outlaw lifestyles you dislike, such as dating a black person or allowing a single woman to have a bank account. The fourth pillar of the GOP is the culture war that is coming for your children. You should be afraid of teachers and Universities especially. They might teach your kids that other lifestyles are permissible.
5 - Owning the Libs
The prior four pillars have existed my whole life, but this one seems to be a recent phenomenon. There is a much larger essay to be written here about Facebook and online discourse which I will seek to avoid falling into here. Even prior to the social media juggernaut, the 24hr news networks were developing this idea. The core notion is that audience engagement is the one true god. If you can keep eyes on your content longer, then the message or result does not matter. Outcomes, proofs, and good-faith debates are all secondary to continues engagement. This means targeting content towards the most engaging emotions, one of which is rage. This is not limited to one side of the aisle, but the Democratic Party does not build their strategy on audience engagement. They present ideas about government and finance and the future and such. The GOP finds much more values in attacking the opponent rather than presenting better ideas or challenging established law with reasoned debate.
I find it astounding how some of my fellow Americans must be quasi-literate. Any highschool speech class will teach you that it matters more how your audience feels than what you say. I get that idea, but at some point your words still must communicate an idea right? The past four years our failed casino owner president spewed word salad at every official event, not counting rallies. I am not an expert on his rallies but the unregulated nature means he didn’t get so lost in his concepts. He had to remind the audience he was the real victim in every situation. So many jokes were made at the preposterous assertions he made, but I was always more focused on the paragraph long sentences with no discernible subject or object, just a string of semicolons and half formed grievances. Apparently this style of nothing-speak works on some level. The assault on proper English is all part of a general disdain for education.
It is frustrating beyond belief. You cannot debate the merits of nothingness. If your stance is that I am wrong, then you have to posit an opposing idea. That’s what government is. It is not a lawless boxing match.
fin
So the GOP is the anti-drug pro-religion strong defense party that wants to preserve outdated definitions of family structure. Unfortunately, these are all stagnant battles with no real mandate for action or change. I cannot imagine how this is sustainable. My prediction is that the GOP will fracture into the sensible and silly aspects. My hope is that they will cancel each other out and dumbfuck America will go back to not voting, having lost all faith in the process thanks to Orange 45. In an ideal world, they would vote in every election and we might eventually break the two party system into four or more. I’d welcome the Democratic party breaking up also, but right now they seem more cohesive than ever. I honestly don’t think there is a huge difference in the extremes of the Democrats. Trump literally attacked the last two Republican presidential candidates as well as everyone who was in favor of the Iraq invasion. The GOP wanted his supporters so badly that they eagerly embraced his values. I don’t even have to mention Trump’s family values vs the GOP’s. The distance between John McCain and DT is vast. The Sanders v Pelosi divide is nothing in comparison.
God knows what the future holds. I have never witnessed a shift in political parties in my lifetime, but maybe it is time. There have been several in American history, and we live in unprecedented times.
