🙄 Good morning, RVA: Trolls, masks, and a petition to sign

Good morning, RVA! It’s 28 °F, and highs today should hit 50 °F—NBC12’s Andrew Freiden says today’s the warmest day of the week. Enjoy today and tomorrow and then bundle up for big temperature drops come Saturday!
 

Water cooler

It’s General Assembly season during a gubernatorial transition, so state-level politics will dominate this newsletter for a bit, despite my deep preference for all things local. Before we sink too far into this Republican-led mire, like Artax in the Swamp of Sadness, I wanted to do a quick level-setting. Nationally, and more and more at the state level, Republicans' guiding principles are whatever makes Democrats the most mad. The live and love to troll, and that trolling will dominate headlines for the next four years. It will make us very mad. Some people are bad at it, like new Speaker of the House Todd Gilbert, who tweeted last night, “Ralph Northam is leaving office as his own lost cause, condescendingly lecturing us all from some assumed moral high ground because he read the book ‘Roots’ and then went on a non-stop reconciliation tour. Saturday can’t come fast enough.” Gilbert lacks subtlety and skill, but, nonetheless generated a bunch of angry responses from liberals—which was the goal. On the other hand, some people are masterful trolls, like Sen. Tommy Norment, who introduced SB 116 which would “Imposes a $500 fine on the operator of a bicycle who fails to stop at a stop sign. The bill also provides that the bicycle shall be impounded for a period of six months.” It’s an infuriating piece of legislation that won’t make it out of committee as written and wastes everyone’s time—and may still generate an angry response from this particular liberal. It’s an A+ troll, though, gotta give him that. I bring up these two specific examples, because I think we should—and will try to do so from here on out in this newsletter—entirely ignore these attempts to raise our hackles and distract us from actual, serious, and important legislation. Because while Republicans live to troll, they also love to pass terrible bills, destroy the government institutions they’ve been charged to lead, and enrich the wealthy whenever possible. That stuff won’t dominate the headlines like a bad tweet, but it’s what we should focus on if we want to protect the better, safer, and more progressive Commonwealth we’ve built over the last four years.
 

“General Assembly Republicans go maskless as omicron surges,” reports Kate Masters at the Virginia Mercury. Dumb and mostly a troll (see above), but one with consequences! With our local hospitals at capacity and hovering on the brink, every Republican legislator that spreads COVID-19 to a coworker, staff member, lobbyist, or member of the public has increased the load on our healthcare system—not the healthcare system from wherever they may hail. Masks are an easy and efficient way to help get us through the current surging demand on hospital beds and to not wear them for the lolz is childish.
 

Somehow I totally blipped on Governor Northam’s final State of the Commonwealth address last night, which you can read as prepared here or watch over on YouTube. Thankfully, Mel Leonor at the Richmond Times-Dispatch has a tl;dr if you don’t want to spend an hour and fifteen minutes of your life watching Northam’s farewell speech—or maybe you do because you’ll miss his folksy charm!
 

Bike Walk RVA has put together a quick petition for folks to sign in support of the trail funding in outgoing Governor Northam’s proposed budget. I haven’t gotten a sense yet of how much—if any—of the outgoing governor’s budget is in peril, so I don’t know if this sort of thing is a nice-to-have or a necessary. That said, it takes literally 30 seconds and is the very smallest civic action you can and should take this morning! Just do it!
 

For Diamond District watchers, Jonathan Spiers at Richmond BizSense has an update on the City’s Request for Interest. The planning team held an informational webinar the other day and over 100 people showed up! With any luck this means we’ll have multiple, competitive bids (unlike Navy Hill), and the City will be able to find something the meets—or exceeds!—all of its goals.
 

This morning’s longread

The Future Will Hunt You Down

I love the Indignity newsletter, and, if you can weather Two Dudes Talking About a Movie, this edition is filled with a lot of really good insights. “Idiotopian” is the word I’ve been looking for this entire time!
 

The other genre, in which The Running Man stood out as a more memorable landmark, is what I call Idiotopian works—those movies and TV shows that do that thing you just described, taking the most debased and moronic tendencies of present-day culture and imagining what happens if everything stays the same, only more so. The Idiotopian vision has quietly had a more productive long tail than the orthodox Schwarzenegger blockbuster, carried on through works like Idiocracy and Sorry to Bother You, but I now realize that 1987 was probably the year for that mood; besides The Running Man, it brought us Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop, which is the definitive masterwork on the theme, and the American network TV premiere of Max Headroom. 
 

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Picture of the Day

Maybe don’t catch and release your pets?