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Covid-19 Sentry

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Daily-Dose

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Contents

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From New Yorker

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From Vox

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+America’s long lame-duck period gave Trump supporters months to plan a violent uprising. It needs to end. +

+

+On October 19, 2015, Canadians voted to end nearly a decade of Conservative Party government and elect a new government led by Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau. Just over two weeks later, on November 4, Trudeau was sworn in as prime minister. +

+

+Five years earlier, a very similar series of events played out in Great Britain. On May 6, 2010, Britain held its most recent election where control of its government changed partisan hands — voters tossed out the incumbent Labour Party government and replaced it with a coalition led by the Conservative Party’s David Cameron. Just five days after the election, Cameron became prime minister. +

+

+Modern democracies, in other words, can and do transfer power very rapidly — and much faster than the two and a half months that separate President-elect Joe Biden’s election on November 3, 2020, and his inauguration on January 20, 2021, the official transition date established by the 20th Amendment. French President Emmanuel Macron won election on May 7, 2017, and was sworn in just one week later. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party won his election on May 16, 2014. He became prime minister just 10 days later. Japan’s Abe Shinzo, the last Japanese politician to preside over a transition of partisan rule, also took office 10 days after his party won an election. +

+

+The dangers of a long lame-duck period have come into stark relief in the wake of last week’s storming of the US Capitol. America’s lame-duck period gave insurrectionists loyal to President Donald Trump two full months to plan the putsch that briefly occupied the Capitol and forced lawmakers to flee in terror — and they were egged on this entire time by a president who encouraged them to stage a “wild” protest while lawmakers formally certified Biden’s victory on January 6. +

+

+Meanwhile, as the sitting president, Trump retained command and control over both federal law enforcement and US military forces that eventually helped secure the Capitol. For unclear reasons, the Pentagon was reportedly slow to approve emergency requests to send troops to regain control of the building. And, for as long as Trump is president, the nation’s capital will need to rely on the Trump administration to protect against future violence. +

+

+Even before Trump seemed to cheer on a violent attempt to overthrow Biden’s incoming government, the lame-duck president spent the post-election period doling out pardons to his cronies and handing out medals to his most sycophantic loyalists in Congress. While Trump’s abuse of the pardon power has been particularly egregious, it’s hardly unprecedented. President George H.W. Bush pardoned several former officials involved in the Iran-Contra scandal more than a month after he lost his bid for reelection. President Bill Clinton pardoned his half-brother, as well as wealthy fugitive Marc Rich, during his final days in office. +

+

+American history is replete with examples of outgoing presidents who actively sabotaged their successor during the lame-duck period — sometimes in the middle of a historic crisis. +

+

+The United States, in other words, pays an enormous price for its long lame-duck period. There’s no good reason the US cannot join Canada, Britain, France, India, Japan, and other nations in transitioning swiftly to a new administration after a presidential election. +

+

+Why we have a lame-duck period +

+

+In 1984, Sens. Claiborne Pell (D-RI) and Charles “Mac” Mathias (R-MD) proposed a constitutional amendment that would have moved Inauguration Day from January 20 to November 20 — around two weeks after the presidential election. A long lame-duck period, Mathias said at the time, “made sense during the horse-and-buggy days of our republic,” but it no longer did in an age when newly elected officials can travel quickly from their home states to Washington, DC. +

+

+Among other reasons for such an amendment, Pell noted that the long interregnum between presidents can harm US foreign policy because neither the outgoing nor the incoming president can effectively negotiate with international leaders during this period. As Pell wrote in a 1982 op-ed, while the memory of the Iran hostage crisis was still fresh, “neither President Carter nor President-elect Ronald Reagan possessed the real authority required to deal with the situation” during Carter’s lame-duck period. Reagan did not yet have any formal power to speak for the United States, and Iranian leaders knew that Carter was on the way out. +

+

+The idea that there should be a long waiting period between an election and the day when newly elected officials take office, Princeton politics professor Keith Whittington explained in 2018, stems from an era when “citizen-legislators were often farmers as well as politicians, and the legislative calendar needed to be organized in a way that did not interfere with the necessities of planting and harvesting.” +

+

+In a largely agrarian society, winter was an ideal time for farmers to conduct business and prepare for the growing season. So the government’s calendar accommodated this reality. While Congress determined that federal elections should take place on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November back in 1845, prior to the ratification of the 20th Amendment, newly elected members of Congress and presidents would take office the following March 4 — thus giving them the entire winter to get their affairs in order before traveling to the capital. +

+

+In a nation without railroads, airplanes, telephones, or the internet, moreover, considerable time was needed to complete the formal process of choosing a president. After voters cast their ballots, word of how many votes were counted for each candidate often had to be brought to a central location by horse and buggy. And once all the ballots were tallied, members of the Electoral College needed to be informed of their appointment. And those members had to gather within their respective states — again, frequently traveling by horse and buggy — to get to this meeting. +

+

+After the electors cast their ballots, records of their votes had to travel to Washington, and members of Congress had to also travel back to Washington to formally certify the results — or to choose a president from among the top candidates if none of those candidates received a majority of the electoral votes. +

+

+And looming over all of this was the fact that the new president needed to form a government, often corresponding with potential Cabinet secretaries via letters that took days or weeks to arrive. +

+

+As the country developed new methods of travel and communication, the law evolved with it, but only to a limited degree. In 1933, the 20th Amendment became part of the Constitution. That amendment changed the date when new members of Congress would be sworn in from March 4 to January 3, and it moved the date for presidential inaugurations to January 20. +

+

+While the 20th Amendment explicitly provides for a period of about two months when deposed lawmakers will remain members of Congress, it was in its time celebrated as an end to lame-duck lawmaking. A New York Times article announcing the ratification of this amendment proclaimed that “39 States Ratify Amendment Ending ‘Lame Duck’ Terms.” That same article predicted that the likelihood that Congress would continue to do work in the period immediately after an election, at least barring an emergency that forced the president to convene a special session of Congress, was “one chance in a thousand.” +

+

+As legal scholar John Copeland Nagle wrote in a 2012 article criticizing lame-duck lawmaking, “the universal understanding of those involved with the Amendment could not imagine that Congress would meet after Election Day and before January 3, citing the difficulties of winter travel and the distractions of the holidays.” +

+

+As recently as the 1930s, in other words, the United States remained disconnected enough that the prospect of lawmakers traveling to Washington in the post-election period was unimaginable even to some of the most sophisticated political observers in the country. +

+

+But we no longer live in such a world. Lame-duck congressional sessions are now a regular feature of the post-election period. Presidents can travel across the country in mere hours, and communicate with potential appointees whenever they want. +

+

+There’s also one other way that the United States in 2021 does not resemble the United States in the 1930s. An array of federal laws now allows major party presidential candidates to create a formal transition team prior to the election. Such a law could be expanded to ensure that potential Cabinet secretaries and other close aides to a presidential candidate are fully briefed and prepared to assume their new role the minute an election is held. +

+

+America’s long lame-duck period, in other words, is a relic of an era when the nation needed a considerable amount of time simply to choose a president — much less to allow that president to take office with a full array of lieutenants and advisers ready to go. +

+
+
+ +
+
+

+As we learned during the long week while ballots were still being counted in the 2020 election, the country would probably still need a few days or even a couple of weeks to finalize the election and to swear in the new president. New members of Congress, similarly, might require a little bit of time to hire staff and prepare to do their jobs. +

+

+As Whittington writes, “if the new legislature were to be called into session immediately after Election Day, it would find itself disorganized and understaffed and effectively unable to conduct public business for weeks.” +

+

+But there’s simply no reason this process should take two months. +

+

+Three disastrous presidential transitions before Trump +

+

+The biggest danger from a substantial lame-duck period is that an outgoing president will use their final months in office to sabotage their successor — something that’s happened several times even before Trump’s disastrous transition to the Biden administration. +

+

+
    +
  1. James Buchanan to Abraham Lincoln +

+

+Easily the most tumultuous presidential transition in American history was the pre-Civil War transition from President James Buchanan to President Abraham Lincoln. Seven slave states seceded from the Union while Buchanan was a lame duck. And, while Buchanan purported to be a unionist who opposed secession, he refused to do much of anything to preserve the Union. +

+

+“How easy would it be for the American people to settle the slavery question forever and to restore peace and harmony to this distracted country,” Buchanan claimed in a lame-duck address to Congress. “All that is necessary,” according to the outgoing president, was for the slave states “to be let alone and permitted to manage their domestic institutions in their own way.” +

+

+Among other things, Buchanan denied that he had the power to use force to protect federal forts and garrisons in the traitorous states, so he allowed Southern militias to seize control of many such forts — and of the armaments therein. His hands-off approach gave the Confederacy months to form a government and to begin to organize a military. +

+

+A civil war was probably inevitable once Southern states began seceding. But those states were better organized and far better prepared to wage a war of treason in defense of slavery due to Buchanan’s ineptitude. +

+

+
    +
  1. Benjamin Harrison to Grover Cleveland +

+

+The transition from President Benjamin Harrison to President Grover Cleveland in 1888-89 wasn’t as calamitous as the transition from Buchanan to Lincoln — how could it be? But Harrison and many of his fellow Republicans spent much of the lame-duck president’s final days in office sabotaging the economy and actively discouraging investment in the United States. +

+

+As Boston College historian Heather Cox Richardson recounts in To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party, after Harrison’s loss to Cleveland, Republican-aligned newspapers featured apocalyptic warnings about how Democratic proposals such as a lower tariff and an easier monetary policy would bring about economic ruin. “It remains for the wise man to endeavor so to arrange his personal affairs that he will suffer least from the threatened affliction,” warned the Chicago Tribune. +

+

+Numerous investors, foreign and domestic, believed these newspapers and started pulling their money out of the market. +

+

+Harrison, meanwhile, ignored pleas from banking titan J.P. Morgan and others to reassure these investors. By mid- to late February, the stock markets were in free fall. And yet Treasury Secretary Charles Foster commented publicly that the administration’s only job was to “avert a catastrophe” until Cleveland took over on March 4. As the markets collapsed, Foster spent his last several days in office sitting for his official portrait. +

+

+By the time Cleveland finally took office, the financial sector was in a full-scale panic, and the economy slipped into an economic depression. Then, having worked to sabotage the economy, Republicans ran in the 1894 midterms on the message that Cleveland’s Democrats had tanked the economy. And it worked! Democrats lost more than 100 House seats in the worst midterm defeat in American history. +

+

+
    +
  1. Herbert Hoover to Franklin D. Roosevelt +

+

+President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal represented a sea change in American governance. Before the New Deal, the kind of activist government favored by Roosevelt was widely viewed by American elites as not just unwise but illegitimate and unconstitutional. +

+

+One person who shared this disdain for Roosevelt’s plans was his predecessor, President Herbert Hoover. Hoover lost the 1932 election in a landslide, largely due to his listless response to the Great Depression, but he spent his lame-duck period pressuring Roosevelt to abandon the New Deal policies that the incoming president promised to enact if elected. +

+

+In a letter delivered to Roosevelt during the final weeks of Hoover’s presidency, for example, Hoover warned that bank failures could result unless Roosevelt publicly abandoned his plans and pushed for austerity. +

+

+Roosevelt was unmoved by these pleas, but it is likely that the testy transition from Hoover to Roosevelt played a significant role in the states’ decision to ratify the 20th Amendment and reduce the length of the lame-duck period for all future presidents. As Yale law professor Akhil Amar writes in America’s Constitution: A Biography, when Congress proposed this amendment, +

+
+

+Everyone knew that President Herbert Hoover was unlikely to be reelected in November. Yet everyone also understood that the soon-to-be-lame-duck president would remain in power for four months after being repudiated, with no mandate (and perhaps little inclination) to do anything, despite the widespread view that immediate action was needed to pull the country out of its Depression. +

+
+

+Twenty-eight states voted to ratify the amendment in January 1933 alone, as the lame-duck president hatched failed schemes to get Roosevelt to abandon his campaign promises. +

+

+It may be possible to form a consensus around a swift presidential transition in 2021 +

+

+The Constitution is nearly impossible to amend — amendments require three-quarters of the states to agree, which means that any amendment that is opposed by a meaningful political faction within the United States is all but certain to fail. +

+

+Yet it might be possible to build the overwhelming consensus necessary to amend the Constitution and eliminate the long lame-duck period. Democrats, having lived through a brutal transition from Trump to Biden, are likely to see the wisdom of such an amendment. Republicans, meanwhile, don’t have anything immediate to lose from a shorter lame-duck period, because such an amendment couldn’t possibly be ratified fast enough to shorten Trump’s term. Republicans even might have something to gain if the amendment took effect during a Democratic administration because it would cut the length of that administration. +

+

+If something like the Pell-Mathias amendment, which would have moved Inauguration Day to November 20, were to become law in 2021, the most immediate loser could be Joe Biden. Such an amendment would cut two months off his term and could potentially allow a Republican to take office two months early if a GOP presidential candidate prevails in 2024. Alternatively, the amendment could be written to take effect after the 2028 or 2032 election, so that lawmakers asked to ratify the amendment would have no way of knowing which party would benefit when it took effect. +

+

+Realistically, Congress would probably need to spend some time consulting with state election officials and other experts, regarding just how fast the states could certify congressional and presidential elections, before it decided just how much to cut the lame-duck period. But it should go without saying that a losing president should not be allowed to spend months plotting to undermine their successor. +

+ + + + +

+How a 20-something director made a stunning, uncanny film about The Villages. +

+

+The Villages seems like a place right out of a movie. It’s America’s largest retirement community, a sprawling, gated complex straddling three counties in Florida about 70 miles north of Orlando, and well known for its role in Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential win. As of 2019, the Villages had more than 120,000 residents, as well as a long list of clubs for them to join and activities to participate in: synchronized swimming, golf cart “drill team,” theater, religion, cocktail parties. Shops, restaurants, and a public square modeled after an idealized version of an American small town main street give the Villages a Disney-esque air. For some, it feels like a dream: a positive and peaceful place to retire and be among like-minded people, all of whom want to kick back, have fun, and live a happy life. +

+

+But as with any planned community — like a college, for instance — there are plenty of people who can’t, for whatever reason, buy into the fantasy. They may be lonely, or ill, or feel adrift in a world that is very thoroughly designed, but seemingly not for them. And those people live at the Villages, too. +

+

+Lance Oppenheim was 22 when he first visited the Villages, hoping to make a college thesis film about the place. He ended up crafting the documentary Some Kind of Heaven, a stunning directorial debut and the kind of work that far more experienced directors would be proud to have made. (Darren Aronofsky signed on as executive producer.) Equal parts dark comedy, loving character study, and suburban melodrama, it’s visually startling, funny, and moving. +

+

+Some Kind of Heaven follows several subjects: Reggie, who is experimenting with psychedelics, and his long-suffering wife, Anne; Barbara, who is looking for love after her husband died; and Dennis, who is living out of a van while looking for a wealthier woman with whom he might strike up a relationship. Following these people through months of their lives, the film at times feels like a dreamscape, like a journey through their mental and emotional landscapes, rather than just an observational film. It’s clear that the relentless positivity of the Villages takes its toll on residents, but it’s also a glimpse into an idealized version of America, and the fantasy at its core. +

+
+
    <img alt="A man floats on a mat in a pool, smoking a cigarette." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/SC-WK0a0KNB7SmRoq20QVmijj9g=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22233456/villages4.jpg" />
+  <cite>Magnolia Pictures</cite>
+  <figcaption>People compare The Villages to the carefree life of a college student.</figcaption>
+
+

+To put it mildly, I was bowled over by the film, which made me think about what makes people want to live in an idealized version of America and what communities like the Villages will look like in the future. Ahead of its release, I spoke with Oppenheim about gaining access to the Villages in the first place, living with rodeo clowns, choosing the suburban melodrama as a formal and thematic touchpoint, and what he learned about the elderly from making Some Kind of Heaven. +

+

+So how did you end up making a documentary at the Villages? And did you have an idea of what it would actually be about going in? +

+

+The more I spent time there, the more I realized that you couldn’t just shoot a vĂ©ritĂ© documentary — you know, just become a fly on the wall — for a few obvious reasons. One of them was that I stuck out like a really sore thumb. Anytime I would go anywhere, people would be like, “Whose grandson is that with that camera?” +

+

+But I also wanted to make something that spoke to the spirit of the place. In my mind, the Villages is a place where the reality that [you and I] belong to seemingly does not exist. They have their own newspaper that prints only the good news. They have a radio station that only plays the hits from the ’50s and the ’60s. There’s this deliberate gulf that they’ve created between their world and ours. So I wanted to make a film that could speak not just narratively to that idea, but also stylistically, that could riff off the reality of the place and the reality distortion effects. Not that this is a work of fiction — everything in it is real — but the way we’re framing things. There are reaction shots. I wanted to kind of do things that could play with the form that still spoke to the artifice of the place. +

+

+The four people I follow in the film are not representative of every person who lives there. It’s a city of 120,000 people. It’s hard to find one person who can embody everybody. I was looking for people who were on the margins, who didn’t exist inside of the same marketing brochure that everyone else did. When you train a camera on the Villages, all you really see is artifice. So I wanted to find real people, with real problems, in an unreal place. I thought if I could look at the world through their point of view, the place would come alive in a different way, and it could feel more like the films that I grew up loving. Like Edward Scissorhands, the way suburbia looks there. Or how suburbia looks in Todd Haynes’s Safe. I was thinking more narratively about that. +

+

+But when I first got there, I just was chasing an initial curiosity. I don’t think I was like, “This is the film I’m gonna make and this is how I’m gonna do it.” It was a pretty organic blossoming as I was figuring it all out. +

+

+Many different kinds of connotations were hitting me at once while I was watching it. I felt like I was watching sci-fi, or a movie very obviously shot on a Hollywood backlot. Their whole town feels like a movie backlot, and it’s strange to look at. Did you know anyone when you got there? +

+

+I’m from Florida, but I grew up like four and a half hours away. I was hoping that my grandparents would know someone there, and they didn’t. So I didn’t know anyone. I didn’t have a natural entry point. I asked all of my friends, “Does anyone know anyone who lives there?” I knew it was a gated community, so I ended up just going on Airbnb and looking around. And I found hundreds of pages with people renting full houses or renting rooms, and I was like, “Oh, my God, this is amazing.” I was searching at that point for whoever seemed like the most entertaining Airbnb host. +

+

+I found these two retired rodeo clowns who were renting a room of their house. I lived with them for, you know, several weeks before we started shooting, just so I could get my foot in the door there and understand what the place was like. They were great. I gave them five stars on Airbnb. They gave me a 200-page packet of every club that exists [at the Villages]. From there, I started emailing people, and calling people, and showing up uninvited to places. Every time I would go to a club, I would introduce myself, like, “Hello, I’m a filmmaker, I don’t really know what I’m doing here, I’m trying to make a film, I don’t know what it’s gonna be about. The only way I can figure it out is if you tell me your stories. If you’re interested, please talk to me; if you’re not, that’s totally, totally cool.” It blossomed out from there. +

+

+But it was interesting — I only learned like midway through my stay that the wife had leukemia, and they were trying to pay for the medical bills they normally couldn’t afford. There’s an absurdist quality to this world, and there’s a dark, grounded realism. But when you see it in the context of all the revelry, the constant amusement, the pressure to have fun all the time — I was like, there’s something interesting in that contrast between those two things. +

+

+Whole genres of film have revolved around suburban life in America, and often they use the 1950s or 1960s as a touchpoint, as you said. The Villages is basically the same thing, recreated by people who actually want to live in that reality for the rest of their lives. And it seems like the dark underside is strikingly similar to what those movies often show. There’s the person who feels like they’re on the outside, the person who’s looking for love, the person who’s addicted to drugs. In this manufactured environment, all of those character types are so clear. +

+

+But one thing you do especially well in the film is use images to create comedy and irony. You use wide shots, for instance, that look at people cheerleading or driving around in golf carts for a “drill team,” and it’s just inherently funny to watch. How did you go about getting those images just right? +

+

+A lot of the movies we were looking at, movies I grew up loving, were films that attempted to explore some form of suburban life. When you think of the similarities between the “Morning in America” ad that Reagan put out, and the opening of Blue Velvet — stuff like that really stuck in my mind when I was growing up. There’s a video on YouTube that was one of the reasons I wanted to go make this film. It’s called “Come Visit the Villages.” It felt like all of those movies put together, an unironic channeling of those films. I wonder if the people who actually were contracted to make the videos were like, “We need to do it just like that.” +

+
+
+ +
+
+

+So the visual language emerged organically from the setting of the world there. But I wanted to make something that was able to engage or inhabit that marketing material landscape, down to sometimes using some of the shots that I would see in their marketing material videos. And then find ways to basically invert it, or turn it inside out. Seeing something a little wider, and then punching in on a little detail that seems off. Or looking at someone who, in a place where everyone is supposed to be having the best time of their lives, is having the worst time of their life. I was always looking for moments of disconnect. +

+

+There’s a lot of obvious ways you can make a film about the Villages. We finished this film in 2019; obviously, [a film could explore] all the political stuff going on there. There’s also a film that focuses more on institutions, maybe more of a [Frederick] Wiseman film, that could be done there, too. I feel like I attempted to make [a Wiseman-style film] when I first got there, looking at the institutions of the place, but I realized very quickly that I wouldn’t have the access I needed to do that kind of film. +

+

+I wanted to do something that was different from journalism. I wanted to do something more novelistic, invest in the interior lives of people in a way you would see more in a narrative film or in a novel. That’s how we thought about the visual language. I was looking at the color palette of Douglas Sirk movies. I was looking at the photographs of Larry Sultan. He has a series called “The Valley.” He was doing behind-the-scenes work on porn sets in the in the ’70s and ’80s, riffing off the lighting fixtures and stuff that were set up [on the porn sets]. There’d be a shot that was already set up by the porn director, and he would go in behind the scenes and use their same light fixtures, maybe turn things around a little bit, and take these amazing behind-the-scenes images that call into question the entire fantasy of porn. I liked those ideas of how to do something a little bit subversive, while still making something that any Villages resident could see and say, “Oh, this looks so familiar.” Something that kind of could delight both worlds. +

+

+I was thinking about what it must be like to shoot there. On the one hand, your youthfulness might lead people to let their guard down because they are talking to someone who’s “just a kid.” But on the other hand, especially in a place that’s so famously conservative, you hauling a camera around might mark you as someone to distrust. +

+

+When I first started making this film, it was my college thesis. So I was going there under the understanding that this is my thesis film, and I’m a college student. Then I kept going back. I felt like a child actor. One thing that was interesting about it was that I was a similar age to the age that everyone in the Villages was trying to return to. Someone in the film says that [moving to the Villages] is like returning back to college. That’s the structure of the place — finding your flock when you join a club. Finding fulfillment within a collective unit, rather than through something you do individually. That rang true to my college experience in a lot of the same ways — it gave me a lot of stress and existential anxiety. +

+

+I think the relationships I formed with the main subjects may have come from the fact that I was younger. I was an unexpected outsider to be arriving on their doorstep. And they realized that I was doing everything in my power to not make a film that was criticizing them, or judging them, or doing anything like that. It felt like age didn’t really matter anymore. +

+

+I told them this when we were making the film, but the film we wanted to make wasn’t about elderly people. It was just about people. All too often, I feel like movies about the elderly defang them. They make them look like they’re going on these simple, inoffensive adventures. Not that The Mule is a tentpole of cinematic greatness, but I do feel like very few movies [about elderly people] are like that film. I see [my subject] Dennis like Clint Eastwood’s character in that movie — he’s kind of a trickster, and he uses his age to convince people to give him things. +

+
+
    <img alt="An elderly man wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a fishing cap stands outside a van." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/wDzk_boPObIBVcddFAaCTWMMfvc=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22233459/villages3.jpg" />
+  <cite>Magnolia Pictures</cite>
+  <figcaption>Dennis, who lives in his van in the Villages.</figcaption>
+
+

+When it comes to politics, the Villages is a conservative Mecca. Even the marketing materials, the syntax, is so conservative. The idea of trying to recreate an America of a different time. How white the place is. We never followed a character who was talking about Trump, and erased [Trump] from the edit ... I wanted to make something that didn’t explicitly mention Trump, that hopefully could be more timeless, but I also didn’t want to make something that was apolitical. So I hope that when people see it, they’ll be able to engage more with the ideas behind why this demographic would be obsessed with something like that, rather than making a more explicit political portrait, the kind you kind of see a lot in the news. +

+

+That’s a powerful thought — that the nostalgia they’re putting themselves into is a purposeful bubble. I guess that’s why the movie also feels like it’s playing with the line between what’s utopian and what’s dystopian. To me, it looks very dystopian. I can’t imagine wanting to live there. But other people look at it and see it as utopian, the way they might spend their whole lives trying to recreate their college experience. +

+

+There’s “The Villages” TV [channel, which only plays good news], and when we were trying to decompress and watch it, it really felt like we were in a dystopia. It was very weird. There were scenes where I felt like I was living in a Paul Verhoeven world. You’re totally right: So many people, I think, are attracted to live there because they want to be told what to do and how to live. If you’re able to relinquish any sense of your own individual self to live in this collective bubble, I’m sure, there is probably some kind of euphoria that I don’t personally think I would feel if I were to live there. +

+

+But it’s interesting to think of this as a deeply American phenomenon, too. The images they’re trying to recreate are of a specific time and of a specific sort of American heritage. People trying to be patriotic in a certain way. But I also think it’s this desire to isolate yourself in this picture-perfect paradise, and not think about the consequences that would have on your family or your own mental health. Those are the types of questions that initially drew me to make this film in the first place. +

+

+I wonder if it’s also a Floridian desire. So many people are moving here, especially retirees, but also people who are motivated by a desire to escape to warmer climates and be in the sun. The whole thing with “Florida man” is that there are people who obviously spend too much time in the sun, and their brain chemistry has been completely mixed up. They’ve just been here too long. +

+

+When I was thinking about making this film, I made a short film about a retiree who had been living exclusively on Royal Caribbean cruise ships for the past 20 years. There were similar qualities there. For him, it was a utopia. This floating city, where people were doing, like, Sexiest Man competitions, and eating giant hot dogs and spilling ketchup all over their faces. For him, that was home. For me, as an outside observer, it was easy to be like, “Wow, this would be my worst nightmare.” So there were some elements of this here, too: How do I make something that can soberly show some of these things while resisting the urge to condemn or judge? That’s probably one of the easiest things you can do in a documentary — make someone look foolish, you know? +

+

+Yes. And as you said, it’s especially easy to do that with elderly people. We’re just not good at dealing with or even looking at aging in America. Do you feel like you learned anything about older people as you made the film that you weren’t expecting to learn? +

+

+I feel like if I hadn’t, then I would have made something I wouldn’t have been proud of. Going into it, I initially saw it as being the lengths people, especially the elderly, will go to in an attempt to transcend the downsides of aging. The whole idea of “graceful aging” is not a real thing. I don’t really think there is a way to gracefully do it. If you’re lucky enough to get to that age, and you’ve lived a long life, it’s really brutal. You lose all your friends, you lose your spouse, you lose your sense of self. If you’re not physically able at that point in time, then you’re just kind of waiting. So I do understand why so many people there are very protective of this space, a world in which they can do all those things before they’re infirm and they can’t go out anymore. +

+

+The one thing, which may seem really trite or simple — growing up around my grandparents, they appeared to me as older sort of wise elders who had tons of life experience to impart. And they did. But the thing that I learned here is that you can grow older, but you don’t necessarily grow wiser. There’s something kind of interesting in seeing an 84-year-old guy who’s still acting like he’s a 24-year-old bachelor, and in his mind, he’s still completely the same person. Even when you’ve arrived at those final few chapters of life, it’s totally okay if your life is still just as much of a hot mess as it is when you’re in your 20s. A lot of shit in life is not going to be figured out, ever. It may be a depressing thing. Some audiences who are older who see this film see that as a tougher thing to swallow. Younger audiences find it more hopeful, which is interesting, rather than despair about it. +

+
+
    <img alt="A woman stands in front of a giant painted mural depicting a lush green scene." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/wLhcmkNbBbO_Sqgfn2Evz-M2BF8=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22233463/villages2.jpg" />
+  <cite>Magnolia Pictures</cite>
+  <figcaption>Barbara, one of the residents of the Villages, has not had the experience she’d hoped for there.</figcaption>
+
+

+I’m curious what the Villages will look like after the baby boomers are no longer with us. Will they be forced to recreate another era, like the ’80s or something? Will a younger generation even want to live inside of like an imaginary paradise that reminds them of the nostalgia of the past? Maybe. We’re doing it all online already. So many people are obsessed with Y2K and the nostalgia of early internet days. +

+

+The unfortunate thing about Covid-19 is that a lot of younger people are like, “Oh, it’s only the old people that are getting this thing! Whatever!” It’s unfortunate that that’s how we are treating an entire group of people. The Ok, Boomer thing was another thing; it’s obviously fun to poke fun at people sometimes, when you have different beliefs than an older generation. But it’s still an entire group, an entire body of people. So hopefully, after we come out of this, there will be large-scale kinds of reforms to the ways in which nursing homes work and assisted living centers work. That’s the other thing the pandemic has shown us — how fragile and not great a lot of those systems that we’ve been kind of relying on for so many years really are. +

+

+This conversation has been edited and condensed. +

+

+Some Kind of Heaven premieres in limited theaters and video on demand on January 15. For a full list of digital and on-demand platforms where the movie will be available to rent, see the Some Kind of Heaven website. +

+ +

+A Vox reporter spent the day outside the newly fortified Capitol. Here’s what it looks like. +

+

+The heart of America’s capital looks like occupied territory. +

+

+After the President Donald Trump-incited insurrection of the Capitol last week, a massive force is protecting the building and its surroundings from another possible attack. A sprawling black fence encircles the entire perimeter of the building and its nearby surroundings, with armed National Guard members, Capitol Police, and Secret Service agents standing sentinel on both sides. +

+

+Their mandate, it appears, is to ensure a peaceful transition of power through President-elect Joe Biden’s Inauguration Day. However, many members of the National Guard on duty I spoke to — all on the condition of anonymity to enable them to speak freely and avoid retribution — said they haven’t received any concrete orders regarding when they will leave Washington, DC. +

+

+Until they do, they go about their jobs, staying overnight in nearby hotels or trying to catch a few winks on the floor of the Capitol building, waiting to hear when they can go home — which they expect will be after Biden is sworn in. +

+

+What’s clear, though, is that their presence has brought downtown Washington, DC, to a grinding halt. +

+
+ +
+

+Local police have set up a perimeter throughout the city using flares and parked police cars multiple blocks from the National Mall. Trucks belonging to the DC National Guard have obstructed main roads into the downtown area. Regular vehicle traffic gets shooed away; when a vehicle is allowed to enter the protected space, it must first go through a designated checkpoint for a security sweep. +

+

+All of this has made it hard to access the seat of American power and greatest symbol of democracy, which typically is open to the public. In normal times, one could go inside the Capitol and legislative offices at will — a symbol of how open the nation’s political system is. Now, it’s hard to get within a few blocks of the Capitol complex without law enforcement or troops staring you down. +

+

+Views of the temporary situation differ. I overheard a white woman on her bicycle say what she was seeing and experiencing was “cray-cray,” a slang term for “crazy.” A Black man also rode by blasting N.W.A.’s “Fuck Tha Police,” though it’s unclear if the song was meant as a protest. +

+

+Officer Wendell (she wouldn’t give me her first name), a member of the local DC Police force who was guarding an area outside the fence, told me, “This is a normal day for us.” After all, the city often hosts high-profile, high-security events. The only thing on her mind, which she repeated often and requested it appear in this piece, was her planned retirement on April 10. +

+

+The heavy security presence seems to be working. The usually busy streets are empty, and few people are actually around the Capitol, except to take pictures or videos of what’s happening. +

+
+
    <img alt=" " src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/GYiFcksN1pF6GywS9jpYZKKmo_8=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22234212/GettyImages_1230554997.jpg" />
+  <cite>Andres Reynolds-Caballero/AFP via Getty Images</cite>
+  <figcaption>Members of the US National Guard arrive at the US Capitol on January 12.</figcaption>
+
+

+One member of the Pennsylvania National Guard on duty inside the fence said that right now, “things are slow, very slow,” and that local law enforcement and everyday Capitol staff could handle themselves without any real assistance. (As I approached him and his colleagues, they were discussing their joy over ordering lunch on UberEats.) But, the Guard member made sure to note, they’re all in town “just in case — and you know what I mean.” +

+

+Indeed. That “just in case” is the potential for another attack on the Capitol. Intelligence indicates armed militia groups and far-right extremists are planning to target the inauguration, which will take place on the building’s western platform. The hope, at least for one member of Virginia’s National Guard, is that his and his fellow troops’ presence helps stave off that possibility. +

+

+“We don’t need Americans killing Americans,” he said. +

+

+It’s hard to imagine a crowd of people actually getting through the barrier and overcoming the large force in place. It’s arguably the most heavily guarded area in the city, perhaps even more so than the White House. If anyone tries to fight their way through, chances are high they’ll fail. +

+

+In that sense, having the Capitol area on lockdown is a good idea — it ensures the safety of lawmakers, staff, and eventually Biden’s inauguration dais. In another sense, it’s a bad look for American democracy that it can’t switch from one administration to another without calling in armed reinforcements. +

+

+“It’s not ideal,” said a Pennsylvania National Guard member, “but we’re here now, and we got a job to do.” +

+

From The Hindu: Sports

+ +

From The Hindu: National News

+ +

From BBC: Europe

+ +

From Ars Technica

+ +

From Jokes Subreddit

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