KarenWorldUSA: The Reboot No One Asked For

A lot has happened in the 3 years since KarenWorldUSA’s last post.

A year of living boringly gave way to a year of living mourningly. Ten months into lockdown — and 10 days before her assisted living community was due for vaxx shot #1 — we learned Mom tested positive for the plague. On Groundhog Day 2021, after 2 weeks in unconscious, apparently (hopefully?) painless intubated limbo, she was gone.

No matter what anyone says, I know one thing for sure: Tfg murdered* my mother.

It was obvious at the time, and we suspected he was capable of negligent homicide and more long before it happened. Sure, Mom had cancer twice and every minor ailment known to woman. But this? A global pandemic botched in every conceivable way by a venal, shadily installed POTUS* and his pathetic, corrupt enablers, was NOT how she was supposed to go.

As I said in an update to friends and family while Mom lay in ICU limbo, she was meant to die of embarrassment over something I was wearing, not from [gestures broadly at everything] THIS.

I’ve spent the last nearly-a-year steeped in a frothy blend of caustic rage and ugly grief. I can blame myself for thinking Mom would be happy and safe for years to come in a senior-oriented community with 3 meals a day (though, as an inveterate night owl, she never saw breakfast), supervised gym, in-house rabbi and dedicated retinue of kindly staff and volunteers to acquiesce with more genuine smiles than her daughters could muster to her ever-changing wants and needs. That’s how it was supposed to go for the next few years.

But no one expects a global pandemic.

And suddenly, last March, as I said goodbye to her for the last time after a 2-night, 3-doctor-visit trip, everything changed. And the head of our government botched every opportunity to gain control and save lives.

We now know that what we saw with our eyes and heard with our ears was…true: tfg did everything he could to worsen the pandemic, inflicting needless pain and death in the service (or so he hoped) of his platform-less re-election campaign. He lied through his squeaky (false?) teeth to benefit his political fortunes. And he didn’t care how many elderly Jewish ladies he killed along the way.

Future posts for this blog — for which death has always been in our remit, right up there with politics and culture — will address tfg’s democide, the ongoing pandemic and the ways in which life, art and culture address the new normal. We’ll also revisit formative artworks with a modern lens to see how/well they hold up with age (ours and theirs) and, to a lesser extent, when viewed through our pandemic prism.

We’d be remiss in our blogging duties if we didn’t also mention that in the intervening years “Karen” has become cultural shorthand for a certain kind of white woman who flexes entitlement when speaking with service economy workers and fails to mind her own business when she encounters African Americans living life. True to the blog’s prescient name, we’ll have lots to say on this in future posts.

Welcome aboard.