“Why,” Candice Holdsworth asks at British web site spiked, “aren’t more artists standing up to lockdown?” “The lockdown has completely decimated the live-performance industry,” she writes. “And yet we hear very little from leading people in theatre, music and the arts criticising the lockdown and what it is doing to their industry.”

There are exceptions. Probably the most prominent is Van Morrison, who’s recording lockdown protest songs (with, among others, Eric Clapton) and using the revenues to fund grants for working musicians left unemployed by government mandates.

But the exceptions prove the rule. Most entertainment celebrities have gone along with, and some have even actively promoted, government shutdowns of everything from movie theaters to nightclubs in the name of fighting the COVID-19 pandemic.

Even if one supports such measures, it’s important to understand that they impose costs on all of us.

As both closures and non-closure restrictions stretch on month after month, some performance venues will doubtless close permanently. They can’t pay rent, keep the lights on, and feed their owners forever without generating revenue.

How many musicians, dancers, and stage actors — aspiring, up-and-coming, or long-working but without financial resources to wait the pandemic out — have already given up and sought work that neither utilizes their talents nor brightens our lives nearly as much? How many will never return to entertainment?

Technology helps.  Music can be recorded, videos produced, shows live-streamed to home viewers. But for many artists and many fans, there’s just no substitute for live, in-person performances.

And speaking of audiences, the lockdown measures cost us as well. Missing those evenings out at the club or theater may not be Oliver Twist level deprivation, but it’s definitely a quality of life downer.

In late November, my wife and I went out to a club to see a band for the first time in ten months. Same club (the High Dive in Gainesville, Florida) and same band (The Grass is Dead — a fantastic combo melding bluegrass musicianship with Grateful Dead and related music) as the last time, in January.

The difference between the two gigs was stark. Masks, of course. Severely reduced audience size. No dance floor (you could stand next to your chair and dance, but not mix). Drinking outside only.

I’m not complaining as a customer, mind you. It wasn’t just better than nothing, it was fantastic. There’s nothing like joining fellow fans in a room to hear great musicians doing their thing and doing it well.

But with an audience of maybe 20 or so (The Grass is Dead can pack a venue in normal times), I have to wonder how either the band or the club made enough money on the show to keep going for very long. And in many places, that show couldn’t have happened at all, even with social distancing, masking, etc.

Politicians and bureaucrats, whose paychecks continue to arrive in full and on time, are doing terrible and likely long-term harm to both performers and fans in the name of fighting COVID-19.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

A November 23 headline at ABC News reads: “Joe Biden’s presidential transition allowed to proceed after 16-day standoff.” The 16 days in question, ABC tells us, are the 16 days since Biden “clinched the presidency.”

“Clinched the presidency” is ABC News-speak for “the media decided he won.” In point of fact, the 2020 presidential election isn’t over yet and won’t be for another three weeks.

No, I’m not referring to Donald Trump’s campaign of vexatious litigation, which is going, and will go, nowhere.

On November 3, American voters chose electors. They’re called “electors,” and constitute the “Electoral College,”  because THEY elect the president.

Those electors are set to meet and vote on December 14, after which Joe Biden will, one assumes, become the “president-elect.”  But that hasn’t happened yet, and while the law is somewhat unclear on the point, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that 270 of them could decide between now and then that they prefer Kanye West and Ted Nugent to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

And regardless of what happens on December 14, Donald Trump’s presidency doesn’t end until January 20.

So, what’s the hurry, Joe?

Well, ABC tells us, officially launching the transition process “unlocks more than $7 million for Biden’s team and allows his top advisers to begin outreach to counterparts with every federal agency preparing for the transfer of power.”

Joe Biden’s spent the last 50 years in national politics, serving in the US Senate, running for president three times, and serving for eight years as vice-president.

Yet he’s spent the last three weeks supposedly in a complex process of mulling over just who he plans to appoint to what position, with media breathlessly announcing each momentous leak about his decisions.

If Biden couldn’t even get his act together enough over the course of half a century to have a cabinet picked before the election, why should we believe that a few weeks, $7 million, and some “outreach” will magically prepare him for the job he’s been seeking that whole time?

Cue scary story time: “Biden and his aides had warned that the delay could endanger the lives of Americans amid the coronavirus pandemic.”

Joe Biden raised more than a billion dollars for his presidential campaign, at least some of which was spent generating and hyping his plan for dealing with the pandemic.

But unless he gets $7 million and his staffers get to spend the next eight weeks holding  college dorm style bull sessions with the people they’ll be replacing, we’re all gonna die, see?

Not buying it, Joe.

The only thing Donald Trump and his administration owe to Joe Biden is to get their stuff packed and have it and themselves out of their offices before noon on January 20, 2021. The rest is just theatrics.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

It’s Thanksgiving week in the United States. Since 1942 by act of Congress, and intermittently before that since the arrival of British settlers in North America, Americans have enjoyed a Thursday holiday around the end of November.

This year, the words of President Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 proclamation ring especially true: “I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to [God] for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to his tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged …”

It’s been a rough year, hasn’t it?

As I write this,  the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports nearly 12 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 and more than a quarter of a million deaths in the US.

Operating on Rahm Emanuel’s “never let a crisis go to waste” principle, politicians in cities and state capitals across the country jumped on the pandemic as the go-to excuse for seizing powers never before contemplated in our nation’s law or history, placing millions of Americans under de facto house arrest without charge or trial and, in the process, cratering the national economy.

We’re also going through a bruiser of a presidential election. No, it’s not over. The electors we chose on November 3 won’t meet and cast their votes until December 14.

The loser in the November 3 contest, in which those electors were chosen, continues to engage in public posturing and vexatious litigation for the purpose of creating an alternate history in which he was robbed of an honestly won victory. We can expect Donald Trump and his party to hype that myth for political gain in coming years, just as his Democratic opponents used the “Russiagate” fairy tale to dispute his own victory in 2016.

So, what’s there to be thankful for?

Well, the pandemic is going to end sooner or later. Sooner if the politicians let it, later if they continue playing their power games. We’re probably not going to “beat” COVID-19. The more likely outcome is that its weaker strains will become endemic. But humanity has survived far worse, and will survive this, and may even hold its Andrew Cuomos and Gretchen Whitmers and Gavin Newsoms legally culpable for their crimes.

And while a Joe Biden administration is nothing to celebrate in advance, the end of the Donald Trump administration is certainly worth being thankful for in retrospect.

Also worthy of thanks: More than one in every one hundred Americans who voted in the November presidential election supported Libertarian nominee Jo Jorgensen instead of either of the two creepy, handsy, senile, corrupt authoritarians put up by “major” parties. Yes, a plurality would have been nicer, but it comforts me to know that in any random crowd of 100 Americans I’ll likely find at least one who’s not a freedom-hating death-cultist.

Maybe “better than nothing” isn’t the most inspiring slogan for Thanksgiving, but it’s what we’ve got.  Selah.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY