NYCB Digital Season- Apollo

I saw this ballet when I was about 12 years old at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center (SPAC). That’s where I spent all my babysitting money. It was one of my first experiences with a Balanchine ballet. I think Edward Villela danced the day I saw it live. Not at all what I expected. I thought all ballets involved ballerinas in tutus and crowns dancing to tinkly classical music.

Apollo wasn’t that. It’s spare. There is no plot really. No lavish sets. The costumes are minimal. Stravinsky is an acquired taste. But I was hooked anyway. Pretty soon I was mainlining Stravinksy’s Violin Concerto, Agon and Firebird. I had to keep watching more kids to support my habit. When I couldn’t get to SPAC, I wandered around the house hollow eyed hitting up the parental units for a loan on a matinee. It got bad.

Fortunately for you, oh best beloveds, the NYCB is having a digital season on YouTube featuring some of their best ballets so you won’t need to spend any time watching your mom’s friend’s kids for a quick fix. This week is Apollo dances with his muses. Enjoy!

And now a word from… er… China.

Normally, I would be skeptical of anything from a Chinese news source but in this case, it’s accurate:

China: We discovered a new virus.
America: So what?

China: It's Dangerous
America: It's only a Flu

China: Wear a Mask
America: Don't wear a Mask
… pic.twitter.com/Qxugv8z73J

— China Xinhua News (@XHNews) April 30, 2020

A few things more to say:

First, I’ve been following this Coronavirus since early January. How do I remember this? The f]}%ing JHU tracker has been up since before then. I remember checking the map obsessively in January and seeing a dot at Toronto a few days after Martin Luther King Day. And why is that significant? It’s because I was in Kingston, Ontario Canada that weekend. Hmmm, that’s interesting, I thought. So, the information has been out there for a long time. Early on, you could see the alarming spike in China.

Second, we don’t report to China. It’s true. We are the United States. We are a sovereign nation. We have the power to act in our own best interests no matter what China or WHO was telling us.

We can’t absolutely trust China to report everything openly. And we know this because early on, there were reports that some Chinese doctors who broke the glass and pulled the alarm were reprimanded. That right there tells you that there was something bad about the breakout. Think about it: China locks down a city of 11 million, reports its numbers (which are already horrific even if not complete) and builds emergency hospitals in days. The last time it did that was when it had an outbreak of SARS. So, it wasn’t a good look to begin with even without gagging the doctors.

You don’t have to be a “very stable genius” to figure out that something very bad was happening in China. There were even reports by the WHO that said China was giving it all they had and it was probably still not going to be enough to prevent a pandemic. This was weeks before WHO declared it a pandemic.

But back to the “we are not China” thing. We don’t take orders from China. If China said, “ignore it, we’re fine”, which it didn’t, we didn’t have to take that advice. In fact, all of the evidence was pointing to us acting swiftly and aggressively even if China wasn’t telling us the whole story. Just the parts we knew about were bad enough to take defensive action, get testing in place, play out lockdown scenarios, secure the food supply, train healthcare workers, check the stockpile, trigger the defense production act, etc, etc.

All of that could have been done back in January.

We could have been wearing masks like South Korea. THEY have their outbreak under control.

What did we do? Nothing. No, worse than nothing. We had a big orange dude and his network of lunatics rant about how it was no worse than the flu and make promises they didn’t intend to keep.

I honestly can’t believe there are still people in this country who believe that Donald Trump is some kind of victim in this whole clusterf]{% and that somehow, HE, not WE, needs some kind of sympathy and protection from taking the blame for screwing this up. He’s lazy and has been in denial since January. If you don’t like the fact that you’re stuck at home and out of work, put the blame where it belongs, on the guy who is supposed to defend us “against all enemies foreign and domestic” and that includes a virus.

If he didn’t take his oath seriously, it should come as no surprise that he’s done such a poor job. Jeez, the company I work for did a fantastic job of quickly assessing the situation and putting a plan in place. If some corporate CEO can do it, Donald should have been able to do it.

The thing that pisses me off most about that very accurate ad from China is that now the rest of us are lumped together with Big Orange. We’re now the Statue of Liberty. It’s a joke. And it’s not fair to the majority of us who didn’t vote for him. We warned everyone that he was going to be a disaster and dangerous since before the election. There was no mystery about this. It had nothing to do with hating on poor Donald. It had everything to do with Donald being completely incapable of fulfilling the responsibilities of the job of running what was at the time the most powerful nation on earth.

And who is the most powerful nation on earth now?

It’s going to take the next president to make America great again.