Art is 80

Two topics today:

Topic One: As I have said many times, I have never traveled to the many large Asian cities. None of the cities in Japan, China, Korea or South Asia. My rationale (which is an absurd rationale) is that I didn’t just want to dip my toe into Asia. If I was going to go to one place, I wanted to see them all, and since that was not going to happen, I was better off sticking to Europe and the Americas. Now, as I am nnearing my 83rd birthday (i.e., turning 84 later this month), I have concluded that it’s too late to change my habits (although that too may be absurd).

At any rate, I have been fascinated in recent years by what I have read about urban growth in many of those far-away places, and this morning (you may have seen it), an article about the difficulties of cooling high rise buildings in warm climates being made warmer by climate change got me thinking about this again. The photo on the front page of the New York Times this morning is of several high rise buildings poking their tops atop a heavy cloud layer in Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia.

Kuala Lumpur, a city of about 2 million in a metropolitan area of about 9 million, apparently has between 150 and 200 (I can’t explain the difference, but I assume it has to do with how the measuring is done) buildings that are at least 40 or so stories high. The tallest building, the Merdeka, is 118 stories tall, the second highest high rise on the planet. There are three other buildings over 85 stories high, and the remainder of the 150 to 200 seem to be in the 50 story range (ten stories more, or ten stories less). There are 11 more such buildings now under construction, another 9 in active preparation for construction, and another 32 in various stages of planning (all according to Wikipedia’s article “List of tallest buildings in Kuala Lumpur”.)

Now, if I had traveled to Malaysia when I was going to college, I would have visited a city where the tallest building was the Parliament building, opened in 1963, which is 20 stories tall. I would have been impressed. After all, in St. Louis, my home town, and Boston, where I went to school, a 20 story building would then have been one of the tallest around.

I looked at another list – the cities with the largest number of skyscrapers world wide, with a skyscraper defined at at least 150 meters (492 feet) tall. This list (Gemini AI) says that Kuala Lumpur has 201 buildings which meet that standard, which places it 8th in the world. Only New York City in the US is on the list, at number 3 in the world. Six of the top ten are in China – Hong Kong has 569 such skyscrapers. The others on the list are Dubai and Tokyo.

I’m not really trying to make a point here. Just maybe that American exceptionalism isn’t what it used to be (or never was). But we all know that.

Topic Two: Stephen Miller, recently promoted from Deputy Chief of Staff to President Trump’s Chief of Staff.

Clearly, Donald Trump does not view the November midterm elections as a personal rebuke. He just concludes that Republicans, including MAGA stalwarts, do not have sufficient imagination to have pretended that his name was on the ballots. He has about ten weeks left with his current Congressional majorities to do what he can, and the fact that his last two years will be with Congress controlled by the Democrats is clearly unrelated to his plans for the remainder of his term. While he has looked to Congress for support so far, that support has been hard to come by, and that really hasn’t stopped him from doing whatever he wants to do. And when the new Congress comes into power, he has said (and here I believe him), he will use his veto power on a regular basis. And, since he ignores laws whenever he wants to, thinks he can do absolutely everything by Executive Order, and believes he has the Supreme Court in his pocket, who cares who controls Congress?

To move forward with his plans for the next 2 years, he has named Miller to succeed Susan Wiles as his chief of staff, much to the chagrin of almost everyone else. There is a lot to say about Stephen Miller, but that is not my goal for today. Today, I am interested in how some people are referring to Miller, and with two descriptive names in particular. They say that Stephen Miller is a fascist, and that Stephen Miller is a white nationalist.

Both of those sobriquets (I should have from the beginning kept a record of when I first use certain words in the blog – I am sure this is the premiere of the word “sobriquet”) may be accurate. But what is interesting is that, while they may be accurate, they are being used to describe someone who is not only a fascist and a white nationalist, but a Jew.

To that, I say “Only in America”. Yes, I guess that American exceptionalism may not be dead after all.

Okay, I know. You can say that Israel is filled with fascists and white nationalists. That may be true, but in Israel, at least they have reasons to be fascists and white nationalists. They may not be good reasons, but reasons, they are. But Stephen Miller – what possible reason can he have?

I have long wondered what Adolf Hitler could have accomplished if he had not been such a virulent antisemite. Yes, I guess it is possible that he wouldn’t have come to power, but I think he would have. The economic conditions in Germany were leading to an inevitable massive change. And if Hitler had come to power without alienating the non-Jewish Germans from the Jews, he would have won the war. And many Jews would have been his biggest supporters (just as they were some of Mussolini’s biggest supporters before Hitler required Mussolini to turn against them).

All sorts of people have fascist tendencies, if they have the power. American exceptionalism allows Jews to be fascists in a country where Jews constitute a small minority of the population, and where Jews have traditionally been defined as “white” (just as they were defined as “white” in apartheid South Africa, by the way). So in this country, Stephen Miller is allowed to express his fascist and white nationalist beliefs. Of course, most right wing nationalism in this country can also be termed “Christian nationalism”. How would that movement deal with Miller if it came to power, I wonder.

I am not sure how to say this. Imagine sitting down for a meal, and being served something that just does not look like food. It doesn’t really look like anything else, either, but you are told it is food, that everyone else is eating it and that they love it, and that you should plunge right in. You look at it closer. It is not particularly attractive, to the extent it has a smell, it has a bad smell, and it is so large that you can’t imagine anyone eating that much. But you go ahead, trusting those who tell you how good it will be and how much you like it, you eat the whole thing. But there really isn’t any taste to it.

How should you react? What should you tell all those who have convinced you how good it was? Were they all pulling your leg? Did you just miss some subtlety in it? Is there something wrong with you, that you didn’t appreciate it the way everyone else seems to. Are you simply neurodivergent?

You probably don’t know it, but I am talking about the new film, You Can See Everything, which just ended its run at the Avalon, and which we saw last night. Everything has a 99% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and equally strong ratings everywhere else. It is a “documentary” prepared by “comedian” Nate Fielder, and its central character is Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of Theranos, a company touted as the earth shattering developer of a system and machine that will take a drop of blood, and analyze it in so many ways that if you ever were going to get sick, it would tell you when, how, from what, and how long it would take to recover. And that’s just the start.

Holmes created the company along with Sunny Balwani, a man with whom she had an affair when she was 18 and at Stanford, and when he was almost 40. She dropped out of Stanford, built a company which at its height employed over 800 people, raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors, except that it turned out that their machine didn’t work and, according to the jurors who listened to her criminal defense, both she and Balwani knew it.

But they were obviously super sales people, not only to raise the money, but to attract the following people to join the Theranos board of directors: former Secretary of State George P. Schultz, Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of Defense Gen. Jim Mattis, Former Secretary of Defense William Perry, former U.S. Senator William Frist, former U.S. Senator Sam Nunn, and many more leaders of business and academics.

Both Holmes and Balwani were convicted of assorted crimes and imprisoned. Holmes was sentenced to 11 years in prison; Balwani to slightly more.

The business and romantic relationship between Holmes and Balwani ended, and she took up with a man named Billy Evans, whom she may or may not have married (I am not sure that even they know for sure), and with whom she had two children.

For reasons unclear (you can speculate, you can even ask Holmes or Evans, but the reasons are still unclear), a little over a month before she was to start her prison sentence, Holmes invited Nathan Fielder and a film crew to make a documentary about her life with her family, with 24/7 access to their home. Was this to change public perception, to influence her ability to curb her sentence (she has apparently asked the estimable Donald Trump if he has any pardons up his sleeve), or to set the stage for Theranos 2.0, which she and Billy might or might not be contemplating.

At any rate, this is the video of 34 days at the Holmes-Evans house, with the addition of Fielder and his film crew, and with Fielder seemingly just another member of this family. And this 34 day stretch takes you about 2 hours to sit through. When she was driven to prison, I was happy that I wouldn’t have to watch her particularly uninteresting pre-prison life any more, and that I could go home.

But no, there was an entire hour of the film left, involving Fielder and a different Elizabeth Holmes. The second Elizabeth Holmes was actress Amanda Seyfried, who played Elizabeth (you can call her “Liz”) in a Hulu miniseries. We don’t have a Hulu subscription and didn’t watch the show. Fielder contacted Seyfried and made her a part of his story – he made her the Dr. Watson to his role as Holmes. (Oops, I can’t call him Holmes – that makes everything too crazy. One is enough.)

So, yes, the film is 3 hours long. And, the boring Liz Holmes is a very different persona than the hard driving, conniving, power figure who ran Theranos. She is a calm, controlled, very competent wife (maybe, wife) and mother, who is misunderstood, never tried to fool anyone, is a paragon of honesty, and – like George Washington – never told a lie. Her husband/best friend Billy Evans is her doppelganger. No, obviously, they don’t look at all alike – but they think as one. Mental Siamese twins born of two separate mothers.

So I have two ultimate questions: First, is Holmes lying throughout the film. If you poll the hundreds who have put something online about the film, the answer is a clear “yes”. Do not trust a word she says. Billy claims that Holmes doesn’t lie, but is “neurodivergent”, that she sees the world differently from other people, that her mind works differently from other people, that her perception of truth (and maybe her perception of reality) is different from other people.

When Billy said this, my reaction was : Wow, this film is really about Donald Trump. He is not a liar; he is just neurodivergent. Trump and Holmes – Stephen Sondheim understood them: “We ain’t no delinquents, we’re misunderstood, deep down inside us we are good.”

Let me end with Nathan Fielder, about whom I really know zip, having not seen any of his previous shows or films. All I can say about Fielder is: if I am ever arrested for fraud, and convicted, and sentenced to prison, and if I decide to invite someone into my house to film my family for the month before I report to jail, one of the last people I would select for that job is Nathan Fielder. How droll, how uninteresting, how seemingly awkward, how deadpan, and, yes, how neurodivergent.

Fielder’s persona reminded me of someone else. In this case, not Donald Trump, but Elon Musk. And how unsurprised (not really, I was surprised) to learn that Musk is a big fan of Nate Fielder’s and has spent time with him, just having conversations. This made me realize something else – Elon Musk is another example of neurodivergence.

And then, I thought – well, maybe Elon Musk, not Billy Evans, is Elizabeth Holmes’ mental and emotional doppelganger. Only she got caught before she was too big to fail, and he got too big to fail before anybody could catch him.

Amanda Seyfried (about whom I also draw a blank) seems like a normal person caught in a world of neurodivergency. Let’s hope that, when she was able to step out of that black hole, she was still in one piece.

They say this film is unlike any other film ever made, I hope that is correct. They also say it may be the best picture of 2026 and may win the Oscar for Best Picture. I myself think the Academy could do better job.

I do like Chinese food. Or at least, having never been to China, I like the Chinese food that I have eaten outside of China. I was thinking about that this afternoon, when I was having lunch at Pike Kitchen in Rockville. I guess it is strange that I was thinking about Chinese food today, because my chicken yakitori was Japanese, not Chinese, but Pike Kitchen is an Asian restaurant, where they serve Chinese and Japanese and Korean food. And my thoughts were all about Chinese.

As a young child, I don’t remember ever going to a Chinese restaurant. At some point in my high school years, I discovered the Lotus Room on Brentwood Blvd in Richmond Heights MO, and I went there again and again. I assume St. Louis had other Chinese restaurants but they were never part of my life. And when I went to the Lotus Room, I don’t really remember what I ordered, but I guarantee that it didn’t include anything out of the very ordinary.

My most memorable meal at the Lotus Room was when a cousin of mine was in town from Indiana and we went for dinner. He was a second cousin, my age, and I had only met him once or twice before. I remember when the waitress asked him what he wanted, and he said he would take the “flied lice”. I looked at him with unbelievable shock. He, and from all visible aspects, the waitress, were nonplussed. As you might imagine, I have not seen, nor spoken to, this particular cousin since.

When I was at Harvard, I went out to eat only now and then, and I did go to a few Chinese restaurants in the neighborhood. I remember one called the Hong Kong. I just looked it up and it is still there, 65 or so years later. In fact, it has been there since 1954. Gemini calls it a “no-frills, casual, and energetic neighborhood staple popular with…….and college students”. Sounds about right. Gemini also talks about the popularity of their “communal cocktails”, including their “signature Scorpion bowl”. Glad I knew nothing about that.

Between my second and third year at college, I spent the summer with three (still) friends traveling through Europe. Then, and more recently, I remember wondering why everyone praised the food in Paris. I never found it to my liking – a thin, overcooked steak with “french” fries? It seems that that was what anyone ever ate, except now and then an omelet. I remember one night persuading my friends to go to a Chinese restaurant, where I had by far the best meal of our Parisian stay. To be honest, I also wanted to go to that restaurant out of curiosity. It had never occurred to me that I would find a Chinese restaurant in Paris. I think I thought they were only in the United States. I guess, they also had them in China, but as China was off-limits to Americans (in fact, we did not even recognize China – not sure where we thought we would land if we crossed the Pacific south of Japan and Korea), I am not sure that I ever thought about there being restaurants in China. After all, did people even live there? Didn’t they all grow their own rice?

I remember a small Chinese restaurant near the Yale campus in New Haven, a nice, quiet place in an old townhouse or brownstone, where there never seemed to be very many customers. I don’t remember my first meal there, but I remember my second. It was Thursday, November 26, 1964, both Thanksgiving and my birthday. I had stayed in New Haven, turning down an invitation to spend the holiday with a friend’s family in Boston, in order to study. I don’t remember studying, I just remember being alone, as everyone else seemed to have vanished. No restaurants seemed to be open on Thanksgiving – my breakfast and lunch came from Law School vending machines. But that evening, I found that this Chinese restaurant was open. I went and had a nice dinner (no turkey), and they were happy that I came, because I seemed to be the one and only customer of the evening.

It wasn’t until I got to Washington that I became a regular customer of Chinese restaurants. Since I have been here now 57 years, I can’t say that I remember the names of most of the Chinese restaurants that I ate at on a regular basis. There was the Court of the Mandarins downtown (remember the tall, thin elegant host?), and there was a restaurant on Lee Highway in Arlington. Neither is still in existence.

The Court of the Mandarins was an fancy place for lunch, and the Arlington restaurant became my go-to Chinese restaurant when I was living in Southwest Washington. That requires one piece of explanation. When I moved to DC in 1969, my entire life was centered in Southwest Washington. I lived there on 4th Street, I worked there on 7th Street, and most of my friends lived there. At that time, the newly rebuilt Southwest had virtually no retail or commercial enterprises, so you had to go elsewhere. For reasons I can’t really explain, I did not go into the areas of Northwest Washington with which I am now so familiar, and I certainly didn’t drive through the city to go to Montgomery County or Prince George’s County. Instead, for everything including groceries, I crossed the river and went to Virginia.

How I found this particular restaurant, I am not sure. Why I decided it was the best Chinese restaurant around (I was probably the only one who thought that), I have no real idea. I do remember one trip to the restaurant with my father, who was visiting. I remember that I ordered something that was somewhat exotic, and that my father ordered beef chop suey.

At that time, I was driving my 1968 Pontiac Firebird which, through no fault of mine, became quite dented and scratched. I really liked that car, but my father thought it was an embarrassment. How, he asked, can you ask a girl on a date and then expect her to get into this car and want to see you ever again? I was outraged at his remark (which was probably correct, as far as the facts went), and responded: That is not a problem at all, but I can’t imagine going on a date with a girl to a Chinese restaurant and ordering beef chop suey. No one would accept another date with me if I did that.

The ride home was silent.

In later years, when our children were young, we went to Mr. L’s and Sun, a Jewish/Chinese restaurant located across the street from where Politics and Prose is now located. A unique place indeed, that lasted, as I recall, until Mr. L. himself died suddenly on Yom Kippur, making me ask all sorts of theological questions.

A family-owned restaurant, Shanghai Garden, was located down the street from our house on Connecticut Avenue near Albemarle. With my family, we went there almost weekly. It had opened in 1972 by a Shanghai born chef who had worked at Trader Vic’s (I think, Trader Vic’s, certainly not Trader Joe’s), and his son Ray, and Ray’s two sisters (whose names I don’t remember – yes, I do, one was Lilly), were our waiters and friends. Actually, Ray’s real name wasn’t Ray and Lilly’s wasn’t Lilly, but these were their “American” names that they used at the restaurant. Ray took one day off each week, and ate pizza, his favorite food.

In 2007, when I turned 65, Edie had a surprise birthday party for me at Shanghai Garden. I remember a weird night. Edie said she was going out to a yoga class, but geez, it was my birthday, and Michelle (if I remember correctly) told me she wanted to go out with me on my birthday, and let’s go to Shanghai Garden, because it was quick and she had somewhere she to be later. As we walked toward the restaurant, I looked in the window and saw my cousin Alison inside. “What a coincidence”, I thought. It turns out that we had taken over the place.

Shanghai Garden closed in 2013 or 2014 – not sure what happened to Ray or his family.

Since then, my Chinese restaurant experiences have mainly been lunches (if you want to know why, send me a private message). As Covid was vanishing, and I felt comfortable leaving the house, I decided to find out who had the best kung pao chicken, and probably ate at about 50 Chinese restaurants (most of them were carry outs) over the course of a year. The best kung pao chicken? A restaurant in Rockville. But my overall conclusion? I didn’t like kung pao chicken.

Today, I eat regularly with one friend at Full Key in Wheaton MD, and with another at Shanghai Lounge in Georgetown. When I am in Rockville for my many Haberman meetings, I often stop at Pike Kitchen, or at one of another half dozen or so Chinese restaurants on or just off Rockville Pike. Michelle has introduced me to Yu Noodles on Gude Drive, and they are about to open a closer branch a mile or so from our house.

To end this, I remember one other Chinese restaurant I once stopped in. It was in/on Puerto Rico, and it was inland, north of the city of Ponce, which is on the island’s southern coast. It was in a rural area, poor and under-developed, and it was a most informal place. I couldn’t figure out how it got there. The family that ran it was Chinese and, believe it or not, they spoke virtually no English and virtually no Spanish. They were fishes out of water, to be sure.  It turned out that they were sent there (by whom, I don’t know) to start and run this restaurant. For the first time, I realized that Chinese restaurants are like Chabad Houses – they are run by families, and they are located where some central power tells them to go, and am sure gives them a little seed money at a high interest rate.  Yes, and the menu and the tastes north of Ponce, at the Lotus Room, the Hong Kong, the Shanghai Garden and in Paris……pretty much identical.

Why am I writing about this today? It’s because otherwise I am just twiddling my thumbs, waiting for the results in Alaska and Mississippi.  I bet there are Chinese restaurants in Alaska. But in Mississippi? I can just imagine it. Kung pao catfish….fried kung pao catfish, to be a little more precise.

Good luck, Scott Colom. And will the real Mary Peltola please stand up.

Scott Colom leads by 43 votes with 96% counted. I am not sure whether any more in-person votes remain to be counted. Absentee votes postmarked by Nov 3 which arrive by Nov 10 are counted. The absentee votes will probably decide the race.

In Mississippi, there is no automatic recount and a candidate can not request a recount except through the decision of a judge in a legal proceeding.

With all of the Democratic wins yesterday, one of the biggest victories belong to the Geese! If you want to eat foie gras in DC, you have to stuff yourself by July 1, 2027. By a vote of 3 to 1, force feeding of geese, or the sale of products of will then be illegal. And, by the way, this 3 to 1 vote was the closest vote in the District of Columbia.

It will be interesting to see what our new mayor, Janeese (she will be, by the way, the first mayor in DC history to be named Janeese – no easy feat) Lewis George. She is an avowed Democratic Socialist (who says she disagrees with the DSA position on Israel), and has plans to do all sorts of things, including kicking ICE out of the city. I think that Muriel Bowser has done quite a good job in her 12 years as mayor, and now we will have someone with a different political philosophy, perhaps more in line with most city residents, but certainly not more in line with the president of the United States, who thinks it is he, not she, who runs the show. She is a 38 year old woman, who has been the Ward 4 member of the City Council. I know a number of Ward 4 residents, and they all speak very highly of her constituent services, so we will see what happens.

I don’t have to add my voice to the remarkable Democratic victory yesterday. There are two Senate races still to be decided, in Alaska and Mississippi. In Alaska, where as of now 72% of the vote has been counted, and Daniel Sullivan the First was ahead. But when the New York Times told its political reporters to go home and go to bed at 3 a.m., its unofficial projection was that, when all the votes are counted, Peltola will be ahead. We will see (hopefully today), but the votes to be counted are votes cast yesterday, and so far the in-person votes were more in favor of Sullivan. I am happy to report that all of the places in Alaska which we visited this summer voted blue – not a real surprise, I guess, although I had no idea of the politics when we were there.

Mississippi is the other one, and as of this morning with “virtually all” (I think that is what I read in the Times) votes counted, the Democrat Scott Colom, is 43 votes ahead. 43 votes! Here, we really don’t know what will happen. I assume there will be a recount. I did look at the vote mix. About 75% of the Whites voted for the Republican. But Black women, who constituted 20% of the total vote, voted 99 to 1 for Colom, according to exit polls. Remarkable. Unfortunately, Black men in Mississippi tended not to vote (this is historically the case); had they voted as much as Black women, Colom would have been a shoe-in.

Other contests of interest? Missouri Congressional District 2, most of St. Louis County, in a surprise vote, elected a Democrat, Fred Wellman. Even when I lived in the St. Louis County in the 1950s and 1960s, the district’s representative was a Republican, Tom Curtis.

Digression: Curtis, who had been a classmate of my mother’s, always amused me. He never seemed to vote in favor of any legislation, and he always explained it to his exasperated constituents by saying something like: “I thought that was a great piece of legislation, and I would have voted for it, but I just didn’t like Section 14(B)(ii)(3), which should have said…….” End of digression.

Texas now a blue state? Democratic candidates won not only the Senate race, but the Governor, the Lieutenant Governor and the Attorney General will now be Democrats. The Texas Congressional delegation next year will be just about the same as it has been. And that is after the GOP redistricted five Congressional delegations to make them Democrat-proof. Four of those gerrymandered districts elected Democrats.

I could go on and on, but last night was a very late night for me (and I enjoyed every minute of it), and I have to be in Rockville for a Haberman Institute meeting in about an hour.

So, let’s keep our eyes on Alaska and Mississippi today. And let’s put our eyes on Florida for 2028 – the Democrats came close in Florida, but didn’t get over the line. They say (an interesting thought) that Florida is red because conservative Midwesterners have moved to Florida, and Texas is blue because liberal Californians have moved to Texas. Maybe so.

Of course, for Democrats, the job is just starting. There is no guarantee that the Democrats will repeat 2026 in 2028. The history of the Democrats is that they know how to self-destruct. Hopefully, that will change.

It’s over ten years ago, maybe even 15, but I remember and it still hurts. It was the National League pennant match and the Nats were in a tough series with the Cardinals. The Nats jumped to a 6-0 lead, and everyone felt good. As the game went into the ninth inning, the Nats were three runs ahead, and, as I said, everyone felt good. No one anticipated that the Cardinals would score 4 runs in the ninth to win the game and eliminate the Nationals.

I also remember the presidential election of 2016, when it was clear as can be that Hillary Clinton, in spite of her baggage, was going to defeat Donald Trump for the presidency, as everyone (and then we really thought it was everyone) thought/knew he was a clown. You know what happened, and it happened again in 2024, when the opposition candidate Kamala Harris did not carry the baggage that Clinton carried, but unfortunately did not, in the minds of too many, carry anything else, either.

So, with that in mind, we go into today’s midterm elections, with Democrats leading almost everywhere, say the pollsters. A 90+% chance that they will take the House and a 70%, or so, chance that they will also flip the Senate.

But, as the old saying goes, don’t count your chickens before they cross to the other side of the road.

Now, I really don’t have much fear about the House. But the Senate is another story. I am not convinced that Talarico is going to beat corrupt Ken Paxton in Texas. I am not convinced that Abdul El-Sayed will beat Mike Rogers. I am not convinced that Troy Jackson will beat Susan Collins. And I am not convinced that Mary Peltola will beat one, much less two, Daniel Sullivans. And if I am not convinced that any of these elections will go our way, I am certainly not convinced that all of them will.

For some reason, DC public schools were closed yesterday (teachers had professional development or some such thing) and today (election day), so Joan and Izzy spent the day here. Joan at 11 is very self sufficient, so her day was divided between sketching, reading, and supervising her 6 year old brother, including a lot of trampoline time. Izzy spent quite a bit of time with his new rocket toy (dangerous thing, I think), sending one rocket up into a tree, where it might just sit until the next tornado hits. And he and I spent some time playing games (I really don’t like games) – each of the games (including Sorry and Connect4) is played with Izzy’s rules, rules that have little relationship to the printed rules of the games. Connect4 is simply to fill up the grid with pretty designs, and Sorry is played with Izzy telling his opponent what he should do on his next turn.

Last night, we watched a new documentary film, “Labors of Love”, which tells the remarkable story of Baltimore native Henrietta Szold, who in the early 20th century founded ESL schools for recent Jewish refugees from Russia in New York, and then went to Palestine, helping to create Hadassah and the Hadassah hospital, a program for social workers and youth camps, helped bring children from Germany to Palestine in the early 1930s, and more. In addition, she was a Zionist who, as was Martin Buber and other close associates of hers, believed not that there should be a Jewish nation in Palestine, but a combined Jewish-Arab nation, and said that Zionism would be a failure if Arabs and Jews did not work together. I can’t say that I thought the film was the best documentary I have ever watched, but the story of Henrietta Szold is well worth knowing.

Following the showing, the Haberman Institute had a Zoom program with the director of the film, Abby Ginzberg, which was very interesting. During the program, Ginzberg told several stories about Szold that she chose to leave out of the film. It’s too bad, because she would have had a much better film than the one she wound up with had she put thosev stories in.

I am going to stop here today. In fact, the only thing I am thinking about is the election. We will see how it turns out. We will probably stay up late.

Am I right when I say that there is no language like English for having multiple definitions for so many words? This is what makes it so easy to pun in English, I assume. Okay, so we have two choices. We can talk about tomorrow’s elections or we can look at the word “bar”, just as one of many examples.

Digression: I guess we could also talk about the fallout from Israel’s elections, which is and will be ongoing for some time. I thought perhaps the Israelis could take a lesson from the Alaskans. If neither Netanyahu nor Eisenkot can pull a 61 Knesset member coalition together and another election will be required in a few months, I would suggest to the Eisenkot block that there is one way they could be sure to take control of the country. All they have to do is to find a second Bibi Netanyahu and have him run at the top of the list for one of their parties. Problem solved. End of digression.

Second digression: Speaking of names, I wondered how many Daniel Sullivans actually live in the United States, and I will tell you that I was really surprised. Gemini, which knows such things, tells me there are approximately 1200, that about one in every 288,000 Americans is named Daniel Sullivan. I had actually thought there were more than that. After all, two of them are running for the same political office in Alaska. I, myself, knew only one Dan Sullivan, a very competent high level official at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Truth be told, he would have made a great Senator from the great State of Alaska. End of second digression.

Let’s go back to “bar”. If you go to dictionary.com, you will find the following definitions (among others): a metal or wood piece used as a guard or obstruction, like the bars of a cage; an oblong piece of any material, like a bar of soap; and ingot or lump of gold or silver; a long ridge of sand or gravel; anything that obstructs or hinders; a place where you can get beverages, especially liquor; a place where you can get food, like snacks; the room where the bar stands, like a tavern; the legal profession; the members of the legal profession; a tribunal, like the “bar of public opinion”; a band or strip, like a bar of light; a crowbar; the line marking the division between two measures of music; a barre, as used in ballet; stopping an alleged right of action; a horizontal stroke of a type character (this one is a bit beyond me); a “relatively long and slender upright of stone” in architect-talk; an iron or steel bar used in construction; a military decoration worn by some commissioned officers; the ridges on the roof of the mouth of a horse; the space between the molar and canine teeth of a horse (did you even know that a horse could have canine teeth?); and in heraldry, “a horizontal band, narrower than a fess” (gotcha there, I bet). And these don’t include how the word can be used as a verb or as a preposition, as in bar none (did you know that the bar in bar none is a preposition?).

Is there any language other than English where you can take a simple word like bar, and use it about 30 different ways? And, by the way, there are more ways to use bar than I stated above. Think, for one example, of a bar mitzvah. Well, yes, bar mitzvah did not start out as an English phrase, but either (a) it is now English as well as Hebrew et al., or (b) it is a phrase that has no English translation and is a foreign language phrase used by English speakers. If it is the latter, I ask you: at one point does a foreign phrase, used by English speakers over and over again and for which there is no English equivalent become part of the English language? I would suggest, at least for the term bar mitzvah, that 13 years would suffice. After all, the word “bar” didn’t start out as an English word. Or did it?

Third digression: This reminds me of Davy Crockett, Tennessee Congressman who died at the Alamo. You probably remember this – he killed him a bar when he was only three. I think I am going to write dictionary.com, and ask why this definition of a bar has been excluded from their list of definitions. And, I guess, I can think of one more. A “barr” is a “disappointingly politically inappropriate attorney general who is not as disappointingly politically inappropriate as some of his successors”. That too should be included. And Hopalong Cassidy’s Bar-20 Ranch……

Moving on: Congratulations to Stephanie Ruhle for running the New York Marathon and to Rabbi Lauren Holtzblatt for running the Marine Corps Marathon. I have no idea how either of them could possibly do it. And do Donald Trump for conducting 30 rallies in 30 days (something like that) and throughout the rallies being able to keep his lies consistent. No mean trick, that. And best wishes to Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, recovering from a stroke. May you heal sufficiently to run next year’s marathon.

Okay, all digressions over. Tomorrow is election day. I have already voted. I am very nervous (in spite of the polls). I think I need to find a friendly bar. The drinking kind, not the one in the cartoon.

As we start the next 50 years of married life, I see that we share an anniversary, more or less, with the film Rocky, and that there is going to be a limited re-release very soon. Since, we missed it the first time, should we see it now? I know it takes place in Philadelphia, maybe, and I know that Sylvester Stallone runs up the stairs to the Philadelphia Art Museum, maybe. Ask me any other questions about Rocky, and you will draw a blank.

That’s the story of my life. I think I know and understand so much, and I don’t know the most basic things about American culture, things that virtually everyone else not only knows, but seems to know instinctively. I have never seen any of the Rocky films (I think there was more than one), not any of the Godfather films (there were three?), not The Sopranos on TV. In fact, if I made a list of everything that each of you have seen time and time again, perhaps, that list would take up the remainder of this blog post. I won’t bore you.

Our 50th anniversary went very nicely, thank you. Our big celebration was the trip we all (most of us, at least) went on in July. That was meant to be the big anniversary celebration. And, in a way, it was. But, golly gee, it was so long ago, it hardly counts.

We did think about having a party – but we figured that every time you plan a party, you have to leave someone out, and we didn’t want to do that. It was bad enough that we did that when we got married.

We had a very small wedding, with then very close friends. Today, some of those friends, as you might imagine, are no longer with us, at least one is suffering from a very sad, chronic, long term illness, one we don’t know if we saw at all after the wedding, a couple we haven’t seen in decades, and a few we see quite a bit of. We thought about finding all of them we are alive and kicking sufficiently to join us, and just getting together with those who have survived the past 50 years. We thought about that very seriously…..for three or four minutes, before discarding it as an impractical idea.

So, everything was low(ish) key. We had Shabbat dinner at daughter Hannah’s with Hannah, Andrew, Joan and Izzy. And it was very good, and we got to see Izzy’s Halloween costume. He was “Link” (no, I had no idea), and we had a long discussion about whether Link, a character in Nintendo’s Zelda series (series of what?), was left handed or right handed. This turns out to be a matter of some interest to those who are interested, and if you ask Gemini the question, as we did, you will get a complete answer, with a very complete explanation.

With Joan, we got talking about Pan, Pandora, Pandemonium, and their relationships to each other. Did you know that Pandemonium came from Paradise Lost, so it is a word (actually a location) invented by John Milton? None of us did.

Yesterday morning, Edie and I had an aliyah at Adas Israel, which was very nice. We didn’t stumble (either on our feet or giving the Torah blessing), and Rabbi Lauren Holtzblatt said some nice things about us (really about Edie, but I pretended that it was about me, as well). Our family came and six year old Izzy did sit through a good part of the service, before needing to explore the entire building that he knows so well.

As an extra treat, having nothing to do with us, retired D.C. Circuit Court Judge David Tatel spoke at Adas after kiddush about his book Vision (we already have a copy) and his life as a blind judge. Rabbi Holtzblatt’s husband, Ari, had served as his clerk and he was described as the reason the Holtzblatts moved to DC in the first place. We had heard Judge Tatel speak at Politics and Prose when the book first came out, and it was a delight to hear him again, speak both about his journey and about the unfortunate changes which have taken place in the American judiciary over the past few decades.

Then we had free time until we left for dinner in Bethesda with Michelle and Josh at Aventino, an Italian restaurant where we have eaten a few times before, but not for quite a while. I must say that the food, as well as the company, was superior. We splurged. For an appetizer, we had strips of anchovies on sourdough bread with cultured butter, lemon and dill. Then we had a salad with butterhead lettuce, pears, pecans, feta cheese and who knows what else. Edie and I each then had rockfish with roasted potatoes and baby artichokes. And then we had four desserts – a chocolate sorbetto, a risotto cake with mascarpone cream, a chocolate and roasted almond cake and tiramisu cookies. Could not have been better.

This morning (no longer our anniversary), we, with our good friends Simon and Rosie, set all of our clocks back, and took a walk in Rock Creek Park.

We then had brunch at a restaurant new to us all, Three Whistles, at the corner of Georgia Avenue and Military Road, in the old Masonic Temple building. It opened earlier this year; we had driven by it numerous times (as thousands of people do every day; it is a very busy intersection), and had seen the sign above the door (“Eat Drink Work Gather”), wondered a bit about it, but never had a reason to stop. But today we did, and it turns out it is a delightful place. I had scrambled eggs, hash browns and toast, and the eggs and hash browns were of very high quality. Three Whistles is a restaurant, a cafe, a music venue, and a co-work place. Very, very pleasant. Just right for an informal Sunday brunch.

It is now 1:30 pm Eastern STANDARD time. I have the rest of my day ahead of me.

Fifty years and counting.

I think I will take the rest of the day off.

“I am tired of the upcoming election. I don’t want to hear any more about it.”

That is what part of me says. The other part just can’t let it go. And the New York Times did not help matters when he said that the Mary Peltola campaign for one of Alaska’s Senate seats had somehow searched out all of the Dan Sullivans in Alaska to join the race to replace the existing Senator Dan Sullivan, who is running for reelection. I am not sure if the campaign is still denying that occurred (it seems hard to do that after the detailed article appeared), but I know that Peltola herself has denied any knowledge of it. I don’t think the article said that she was personally involved; but some would find it hard to think that she was unaware or disapproving.

Both Dan Sullivans ran in the state’s open primary. The current Senator Dan Sullivan got 66,684 votes. The other, Dan J. Sullivan, got 4,098 votes. In other words, the other Dan Sullivan got about 5% of Dan Sullivan votes. Peltola beat Sullivan about about 13,500 votes in the primary, so she would have won by almost 10,000 votes even if the votes for the two Dan Sullivans were combined.

Honest Don Trump, of course, says that Peltola should be removed from the ballot (along with Dan J. Sullivan), and put in jail. He has asked his personal Department of Justice to start a criminal investigation (even though it is unclear what crime is being alleged, “ballot stacking” being far from uncommon in American political history). The current Republican governor of Alaska has chimed in by saying that if Peltola wins the election (all of the polls have shown her ahead, although I don’t think there have been any polls since the Times revelation), he just may not certify the state’s vote or her victory.

You see why I am tired of all of this?

I don’t know what constitutes good journalism and what does not. Was the Times acting appropriately in publishing this article when it did? Could they have published in earlier? Is someone going to look to see how long they have been on this story, and whether they decided to withhold it until the election was less than a week away? We all know that a newspaper articles are sometimes accurate, sometimes not, usually in the middle. We all know that articles published by the “fake” mainstream news can not be taken as gospel. (My source for that is Donald J. Trump)

I ask this question in part because of a followup article in the Times where the newspaper seemed to gloat at its success it rattling the Alaska election, in getting the attention of Trump and the Alaska Republicans, and then going on to show how the paper previously reported on attempts to bring straw candidates into elections, although usually not candidates with the same name as a primary candidate. The examples they gave were both Democratic and Republican attempts.

I expect this will all blow over legally, but whether it will affect the vote, I don’t know. But there are self imposed standars (sorry, there were self imposed standards) against much of this sort of last minute stuff. The Justice Department had rules about not doing anything that could be construed to try to influence an election. Pollsters were limited in the ability to take last minute polls. Should journalists have similar restraints? (I don’t mean restraints that would challenge their First Amendment rights, I just mean internal restraints, such as the historic DOJ’s restraints, internal restraints.)

Of course, the Trump DOJ has no such restraints, having just brought a law suit in California and threatened suits elsewhere over non-citizen voters, and the lawsuit in Alaska (filed before the Times revelation). That lawsuit said that if Peltola wins by a margin smaller than the number of votes Dan J. Sullivan gets, her victory should be thrown out. It has been assumed that that lawsuit would go nowhere. But does this newspaper report change that assumption?

If there is going to be a full factual discovery period to determine what happened, this law suit could take years. What happens in the meantime? What if it turns out that Peltola orchestrated, or knew about this effort the whole time? What if her campaign knew about it, but did not tell her? Is she still culpable of something?

There are, I am sure, many in Alaska who were going to vote for Peltola who are now having second thoughts. They think she was trying to trick them, they think she knew about this all along, they think she is lying when she says she did not know about it. This newspaper article may change the results of the election, even though the facts of the case are still so unclear.

It was James Comey who started all of this when he violated the DOJ’s rule against actions right prior to elections, and suggested that Hillary Clinton had been “extremely careless” in handling emails, although the government was not going to pursue criminal charges. That statement, made at a specially called press conference, may be the reason we got Trump as a president in 2016.

The Times article did not come out of the blue. As you would imagine, for months people have been alleging that there was something fishy (and Alaska knows fishy) about two candidates with the same name. The Peltola campaign had previously denied involvement, and Dan J. himself has said that he decided to do this all on his own, that he was a conservative and a Republican and that he would be a better Senator Dan Sullivan than Senator Dan Sullivan.

I have not heard anything from Dan J. Sullivan since the Times article was published. Where is he? Why hasn’t anyone spoken with him? Or have a missed something?

As you know, the Trump DOJ (as opposed to the U.S. DOJ, which is temporarily on sabbatical) has sued the State of Alaska, arguing that, because there are two Daniel Sullivans on the ballot for U.S. Senator (one, Sullivan I, the GOP candidate, the other, Sullivan II, not so), and because Alaskans must be too stupid to tell them apart, if the Democrat Mary Peltola wins the election by a difference less than the number of votes the non-Republican Dan Sullivan gets, she should not be certified as the winner, but the election should go to the other Dan Sullivan. In other words, all votes that go to Sullivan II should instead be assumed to have been voted for Sullivan I.

No one thinks this will get very far any number of reasons – one, that there is nothing to base it on; two, that the state Supreme Court has already ruled that Sullivan II can be on the ballot; three, because Sullivan I on the ballot is identified as the current Senator and the Republican candidate; four, because the two Sullivans can be identified by different middle initials; and more.

Yesterday, the New York Times reported that representatives of Poltala’s campaign were involved in finding a second Dan Sullivan to be placed on the ballot. The Poltala campaign has denied it. But Trump believes it (obviously, no fake news here), and believes that, on the basis of this article alone, both Dan Sullivan II and Mary Poltala should be kicked off the ballot (5 days before the election) and that Poltala should be criminally prosecuted (even though it is not apparent that, even if this proves to be true, that there was a crime involved.)

While this is going on, the DOJ has given to state officials in at least California, Washington State and Nevada lists of persons who are presumably registered to vote in those states that the DOJ (based on who knows what) has determined may not be citizens. They have not offered anything like “proof” or anything to show that any of these people have actually ever cast a ballot, but they want the states to take the lists and make sure that none of those on the lists are allowed to vote, other than perhaps provisionally. The States, and so far the courts, have not shown any support for the position of the DOJ, and it is unclear how this will be used by Mr. Trump to try to overturn the results of these elections (and elections in other states) after Tuesday.

We went through this, of course, in 2020, when Trump lost to Biden, so we do know what to expect this year. And although this country has no history of significant voter fraud, in other countries, especially those we like to call third world countries, illegitimate elections are held all the time.

Another country without a history of voter fraud is Israel. For this reason, I was very disappointed yesterday to hear that Bibi Netanyahu claimed yesterday, as ballots were being counted, that the Arab parties had cheated, and that there needed to be an immediate investigation. The head of Israel’s Central Election Commission responded by saying that they would investigate all complaints, but that there had been no election fraud as far as he could see so far.

The accusation by Netanyahu not only made him sound like his ally, Donald Trump, but in a way was even worse, because he is specifically attacking the votes of the Arabs who make up 20% of Israel’s population of a country which claims to be a full democracy, but calls itself a Jewish state.

The Knesset has 120 members, and there needs to be a coalition of 61 of them to form a government. This week’s vote (not yet fully counted or certified) seems to be resulting in neither Netanyahu and his followers, nor the opposition parties, having 61 votes.

In spite of Arab citizens having a vote, historically there have been no parties represented by a combination of Jews and Arabs, and the Arab parties have not been allowed to participate as members of the coalitions that actually set the policies and control what comes up for a vote in the Knesset. [There have been only very minor exceptions.] In this week’s election, it appears that the two Arab groupings, the Joint List and Ra’am, will combine for about 19 seats in the next Knesset, or about 16% of the seats. This is a higher number by far than ever before, and the Arabs would like to be included in the governing coalition of at least 61 members for the first time. And, as you can imagine, the Arab blocks are violently (not violently violently, just violently) opposed to Netanyahu and have told opposition leader Gadi Eisenkot that they are ready to join the government coalition (something that Arab parties have never volunteered to do before, not wanting to identify themselves with Jewish parties’ policies) in order to make sure that Netanyahu becomes part of the past, not the future. It would be enormously (and perhaps dangerously) controversial to bring Arabs into the government in this manner, but it would seal Eisenkot’s victory over Netanyahu and Israel’s far right, and giving him a working majority in the Knesset. Whether Eisenkot will be willing to do this is so far not clear, and certain of the parties already involved in his coalition have said, so far, that they would not participate in a government with Arab party members.

The bigger problem with all of this is that it brings the Arab minority right smack in the middle of Israeli politics at the highest level. Netanyahu and his right wing supporters are being clear: Arabs have no place in Israeli government. Period. End of conversation. Whether the other side will take a different position to gain political supremacy is unknown.

If questions arise as to the legitimacy of allowing Arab citizens to vote at all, or to serve if elected, it will give Jewish bigots a chance not only to be heard, but to perhaps convince the majority of Jewish Israelis that this would be a good idea. There are a significant number of Jewish Israelis who believe that every Arab is a spy waiting to spy, or a terrorist waiting to create terror. No longer will efforts to exclude Arabs completely from the area be limited to Gaza, the West Bank, and Southern Lebanon. There will now be voices to eliminate Arabs from Israel proper, I believe. Just you wait and see.

Digression: You know James O’Keefe, right wing videographer? Well, he has just been arrested in Minnesota for voter fraud, among other things. Look it up.

I am going to start today by giving you a couple of simple statistics. I went to Ladue Horton Watkins High School in Ladue MO, and graduated in 1960. There were about 250 in our class (maybe a few more). My memory is that, of those 250 or so classmates, we had one Black classmate, 0 Asian classmates and 0 Hispanic classmates.

This year, 2026, Ladue seems to have about 325 students in each class, not really that different if you consider the spread of 66 years. According to statistics provided by Gemini, approximately 50% of those students are described as White, 18% as Asian, 17% as Black, 8% of mixed race, and 5% Hispanic. (I guess 2% or so fall into another category – maybe Native American, or Pacific Island, I don’t know.).

It has been announced that Ladue has 17 National Merit Semifinalists. Their names are: Chen, Chen, Chilakala, Chode, Kaul, Khan, Kim, King, Lee, Lee, Murashita, Sanchez, Shaw, Shen, Shoghi, Yin and Zhang. I saw the names and photos of these students in the latest edition of Ladue Schools Link. The picture of Shaw, he must have at least one Asian parent. In other words, 15 of the 17 Merit Semifinalists (the exceptions are King and Sanchez) are Asian.

When I went to Ladue, the school was maybe 30% Jewish. I don’t think this is the case today. Even if 30% of the White students are Jewish today (and I don’t know what the number is), that would only be 15% of the student body. But none of the Merit Scholarship Semifinalists this year are (appear to be) Jewish.

I was able to find out the names of Merit Semifinalists from some other neighboring St. Louis County High Schools:

Parkway: Abhilash, Chen, Dong, Hermann, Hillman, Kelly, Khatavkar, Kim, Kumar, Lau, Lee, McCurdy, Patrick, Phillips, Vijaykumar, Wang, Yin, Zheng (9 Asian names out of 17)

Rockwood (four high schools): Abraham, Autry, Bairu, Busani, Hardee, Kumpati, Liu, Madhavan, Miller, Nadikota, Nickel, Nidamanuri, Peyyeti, Rajoli, Rao, Singh, Starenchak, Subbella, Sunil, Sureshkumar, Vasireddy, Yanamanamanda, Manda, Zhang and another Zhang. (20 Asian names out of 26)

These are all school systems with a significant number of Jewish students. Where are the Jews in these numbers? What does this mean for America’s future? And for the future of Jews in America?

There has been a fair amount written about the “end” of the “golden age of American Jewry”. It is possible that the next generation of Jewish Americans is less intent on proving themselves, more comfortable in their social situations, financially comfortable, and ready to take a few deep breaths and let the world pass them by. As one friend said, in our generation we knew we had to work hard, it was sink or swim. Now….. they just float.

And maybe that is okay. But one of the answers always given to antisemitism is to point to everything that Jews have accomplished – in scholarship, in business, in science, in the arts. The question is whether or not, fifty years from now, that response will still be available. And it comes at a time when antisemitism, long a characteristic of many on the right, has become more common on the left, where it is Israel driven. So the ability to give that response may be very important.

Israel itself is a divided country. Divided between a right wing which is pursuing a no-holds barred campaign to create Jewish sovereignty over the entire West Bank and eliminate even potential opposition in Gaza (probably impossible to do), an Arab minority which is looking for equal treatment, and the Israeli left, which doesn’t really know what to do other than oppose the Israeli right. Israel yesterday had its first elections since before the Hamas attack, and they proved pretty inconclusive.

Israel is a parliamentary country, and its parliament, the Knesset, has 120 members. In order to govern, there must be a coalition of at least 61, a bare majority, who can then elect a prime minister, generally the leader of the most popular party in the coalition. While votes are still being counted, about 85% have been reported, and the Israeli right seems to have 54, the Israeli left 49, and the Arab parties 17 seats. Now, the bargaining begins, but as of right now, it is impossible to identify any members of the right or left willing to change their positions.

Isaac Herzog, the President of Israel, holds a relatively ceremonial position, but, like the king of England, has the responsibility, after an election, to ask the individual he feels most likely to be able to form a coalition of 61 Knesset members, to do so. He could ask Netanyahu, or he could ask Gadi Eisenkot, Netanyahu’s most powerful (today) opposition figure. The person selected would have a set amount of time to put together 61 votes, or Herzog would ask the other possible leader to try to do so. If the stalemate goes on too long, the only answer is another campaign and another vote. In the meantime, the outgoing leader (Netanyahu in this case) acts as a caretaker, and nothing much has changed (except he has lost his Knesset majority).

The wild cards are the Arab parties. If Eisenkot looks to them to join his coalition (they are about as anti-Netanyahu as you can get), and can hold on to his 49 current partners (some of whom may be uncomfortable with Arabs holding a powerful position in the government), he could form a coalition that would be different from any that has governed Israel to date. But the potential societal repercussions in this volatile country may make it impossible for him to take that risk.

All of this is to say that, whatever happens in Israel is likely to be front page news, and stir up the possibility of even more antisemitism here and elsewhere. If the Jews are in danger of losing the leadership positions in so many fields that they have occupied in the United States during this so-called golden age, concerns about Jewish safety here and abroad may grow.

And of course, in the meantime, we are faced with two more years of Donald Trump here, and some time of a Netanyahu government there, and the talk of another military campaign against Iran is looming in our near future.

All this brings up the old question: “Is it good for the Jews?” This time I have a definite answer, no matter what happens. “No!”

I spent part of the afternoon downtown yesterday, something I don’t usually do. I had to change some tickets at the Shakespeare Theatre, which I like to do in person, although you can also do it online. It’s just easier to talk with the person making the exchange about available seats when you are right there, rather than when you are looking at a screen. Or at least, that is what I think.

So I went down to the theater, which is at the corner of 6th and F NW, and did my business in about 90 seconds. My next stop was at the corner of 14th and I, about a mile away. It was a beautiful day, so I walked.

Digression: You know the British comedian Philomena Cunk? You can look her up. I saw a reel she made, asking a Shakespeare scholar about whether Shakespeare was a good student. She was told he was. But she then pooh-poohed it, saying it was easier to be a good student in those days. After all, she said, he never had to study Shakespeare. End of digression.

While everything was familiar, a number of things did seem out of whack. In the first place, there really wasn’t much traffic. Not much automotive traffic, not much pedestrian traffic. Most people were not waiting at corners until the WALK signals came on, because at least at half of the intersections, there was no traffic to keep you on the sidewalks. When I say “no traffic”, I mean “no traffic”.

Secondly, the shops were all empty. This is an area of office buildings and not a heavy retail area, but there are several clothing shops, and others of various types. I did not see anyone in any of them. As to the restaurants, of which there are many, I don’t know. You can’t see into most of them, and it was about 3 p.m., so not a meal time.

Thirdly, there are a lot of empty retail spaces. Sometimes, two or three on a block. Five years ago, these spaces would all have been filled.

Everything looked good, and the streets and sidewalks were clean, but downtown is still suffering from the repercussions of COVID. Recovery is still not at hand. My guess is that there is a lot of empty office space on the streets of my walk. And if the offices are not filled, there will be no business for the shops, the restaurants will struggle, and no one will rent empty spaces.

Last evening, I watched most of Trump’s speech in Corinth, Mississippi. It was a pretty typical Trump speech. He pretty much ignored the person whose campaign he came down to support, and talked mainly about his own accomplishments, reeling off as many statistics that his teleprompter could hold. Crime down, jobs up, tariffs working, Iran on the ropes, illegal immigrants a thing of the past. You know the drill.

All of these statistics can be fact checked. Some will be accurate, some inaccurate, some accurate but needing context, and some just speculative but addressed as if factual.

I was of course interest in his “facts” about crime in Washington DC, which he talks about in speech after speech. Basically, he says that crime is down in Washington DC, which it is, and he cites the homicide rate, which this year to date is 50% or so below 2025’s. Of course, he doesn’t mention one important statistic where crime rates are sharply up this year — assault with a deadly weapon. But in most other categories, crime is down.

Of course, crime in Washington, like crime in most places, is not spread evenly across the city. Washington has eight wards, and crime is higher in some than in others. Property crimes occur most in commercial area, and homicides in the lower income wards. Ward 3, where we live, has the lowest crime rates in, I think, every category. Trump, however, portrays all of Washington as having been totally crime-ridden when he came into office. He tells the people in Corinth Mississippi (most of whom have never been to DC, I would bet) that people used to be afraid to leave their houses, that restaurants used to be empty and going out of business, that tourists and young people moving into the city were, on a regular basis, cut down, so that DC officials were always calling parents telling them that their beautiful sons and daughters had been shot down on the streets of DC. We are so sorry.

But, no more. DC is now one of the safest cities in the country. Of course that is not yet the case. Restaurants are so busy that you can hardly get a table (in fact restaurants are struggling with high food prices and a smaller group of potential hires), there are not enough space to even open a new restaurants (I can show you seven or eight from my walk today) and every body who lives here, or comes here, is just as happy as happy can be. And it is all because of Donald J. Trump.

He didn’t mention (at least when I was watching) the reflecting pool, the destroyed golf course, the destroyed White House lawn, the gilded statues on Memorial Bridge, the closed Kennedy Center, the proposed 250 foot triumphal arch, etc. He didn’t mention how every one of his “improvements” to DC are hated by the vast majority of residents. Just that Washington was in shambles, that only he could fix it, and that only he did. I don’t know what Corinth Mississippi thinks of this part of his talk.

He also talked about how the White House was falling apart when he moved in and how it is now in super duper tip top shape, thanks to…….him. It’s in better shape, he said twice, than it was in 1792, when it was built. Of course, it was not built until the early 1800s, and in 1792, there was no Washington DC, but maybe those inaccuracies can be forgiven him based on his ignorance. I don’t know.

We will see what happens between now and next Tuesday, when voting is concluded and the midterms decided. Polls really do favor the Democrats, but Trump does still have some of his charisma, is still able to make his partisans wary of anything the Democrats do, and just may be able to pull some rabbits out of his hat.

Speaking of rabbits out of his hat, I did not have hasenpfeffer for lunch yeaterday, but I did have (ta-da!) lamb meatball shakshuka, with two eggs, roasted garbanzos, pomegranate seeds, and za’atar. It was at Silver, on Wisconsin Avenue in Cleveland Park, and I ordered it because it seemed to have so many barely relatable ingredients, and I was curious. Turns out, it was quite good, somewhat to my surprise. So I do recommend it.

One last thing, and on a sad note. You might (probably don’t) remember that I wrote about St. Louis Hawk star Bob Pettit died last month in his early 90s, and the extent to which his death was reported all across the country. I also said that his teammate Cliff Hagen seemed to be the only living member of the Hawks’ teams of the late 1950s, and that was living at age 94 in his hometown of Owensboro, KY. Well, a few days ago, I read that Hagen, a star just as Petit was, had passed away, just one month after Pettit. Now the entire team is gone.

I have read quite a bit of John Steinbeck. I read The Grapes of Wrath when I was pretty young and thought it was the best novel I had ever read. I really liked the stories in Cannery Row. I like Of Mice and Men and Tortilla Flat. I liked everything by him that I read with the exception of Travels with Charley (but maybe I should try that again). But I never read East of Eden. And I never saw the James Dean film, which came out when I was in junior high school.

But we did watch the 7 episode Netflix series that was released this month, and recommend it very highly. You know the story? Adam and Charles Trask are half-brothers, and could not be more different. Their father, a high ranking government official during the Civil War, is a crook, and left his sons with millions of dollars (today’s money) when he died unexpectedly. The brothers try a life together on the family farm in Connecticut. A young, battered woman, half-dead, appears at the farm. They take her in while she heels. Adam falls in love with her, Charles says “watch out, she is only going to be trouble”.

Adam and Kathy marry. He has no idea of her back story, which involves unspeakable acts. He takes her to California and buys a ranch in the virtually empty Salinas Valley. She has twins. She abandons the family, moves to the city of Salinas, changes her name, and works as a prostitute, eventually taking control of the brothel. It is not her first time in this line of business.

Adam, beset with grief, raises the twins with the assistance of his Chinese (but American born) aide Lee. (That isn’t accurate. It is Lee who raises the twins, with the occasional assistance of Adam). The twins, Caleb and Aron, are as different as Charles and Adam. They know nothing about their mother; they have been told that she died. But they find out the truth, and everything changes.

The series was co-written by Zoe Kazan, the granddaughter of Elia Kazan, who directed the 1955 James Dean version. That’s an interesting tidbit, but perhaps only a tidbit. The credit for the story goes to Steinbeck. And what I noted about it, is that it is a Story (with a capital S). Not a plot, not a story-line, but a real story, an epic story. What makes it that, other than Steinbeck’s genius, I don’t know. But it’s a character study of many characters, it is the story of Civil War America and post-Civil War America, about moving West and creating the country’s agricultural breadbasket, about the growth of national commerce, about the difficulties of change. It is also a biblical story – Caleb and Aron, Cain and Abel, brothers who love each other, can not get along, and destroy each other. One generation after another. It is the story of unchangeable fate, or maybe of free will, focusing on one word in Genesis, a word translated differently from the Hebrew in various English language bibles. The word, according to Eden is tamshel, and does it mean “thou shall” or “thou mayest”? Fate or free will.

In Steinbeck’s story, the word means “thou mayest” – this is because Adam’s Chinese aide (who is clearly a Renaissance man if there is ever was such a thing) studied Hebrew and figured it out. Well, obviously that is fiction, but how did Steinbeck know to write any of this, other than he probably stumbled upon the different translations? Luckily, and only by chance, I stumbled on an article in the Jewish Review of Books from 2022, by Sheila Tuller Keiter, a Los Angeles Jewish High School teacher, who tells of Steinbeck having asked his editor Viking Press, who was Jewish, who in turn asked Prof. Louis Ginzberg of the Jewish Theological Seminary, a very well respected authority (to put it mildly). Ginzberg provided his opinion, but, according to Keiter, Steinbeck was not satisfied, and wrote back to his editor that everything depended on the tense of this particular verb: “I will have to have the whole verb before I finish, from infinitive on through past, subjunctives, and compounds and futures. But we will get it. We may have to go outside of rabbinical thought to pure scholarship which may be non-Jewish….Dr. Ginzberg, dealing in theology, may have a slightly different attitude from that of a pure etymologist.” So, there….. (Keiter, by the way, thinks that Steinbeck got it wrong, with all of his searching and analysis.)

At any rate, you should watch the series, and I should read the book.

I was impressed by this story as a real Story when compared to a play we saw yesterday afternoon at the Studio Theatre (where daughter Hannah works, by the way), Wish You Could Be Here. I liked the play and am glad we saw it, but there is such a difference between the strength of Steinbeck’s epic story line, and Sanaz Toossi’s much looser plot line.

The scene is Iran, and the cast consists of five young Iranian women (they look and dress like they could be in Europe or America), the first of whom is about to be married. It is 1978, there are protests in the streets, but the Shah is still in control. The one-act, many scene plays moves on through the years. The Shah leaves (the thinking is he will be back), the rioting continues (the thinking is it will stop), the universities close (the thinking is they will reopen), and time goes on. One of the five friends is Jewish, the other four are Muslim. That clearly makes no difference…..until it does, and the Jewish friend and her entire family disappear. No sign of struggle; no word of them. A second of the five who wants to be a doctor gets a fellowship to study in (of all places) Indiana. She leaves Iran.

Two of the others marry. One, vacationing at a beach resort with her husband, goes swimming covered from head to toe in now appropriate and required clothing. She drowns.

The fifth, a woman who claims she never will marry, marries and has a child. She had been studying civil engineering before the revolution; she has become a seamstress.

It’s a powerful play. How the lives of these five young women, whose futures had all been planned out for them in a modernizing society, have been affected by unforeseeable and unimaginable changes. The one freedom that they retain is the freedom to leave Iran. But even with such tumult in the country, that is a difficult freedom to navigate.

A couple of things. For reasons not clear to me, the conversations that these women have are overly scatalogical, with continual references to obvious body parts. Why Toossi decided on this, I am not sure; I don’t think that in real life the conversation of five women like this would be so extreme, but how am I to know? (As an aside, I thought it a bit weird for these five young actresses on stage to be engaged in these over the top sexualized conversations before a full audience whose average age was probably 70 to 75.)

The other thing is, yes, three of these five young women were married (four if you include the Jewish woman who disappeared but resurfaced years later in California). Yet you hear nothing about their husbands, or anything about their marriages or family life (except that one has a child), of really whether they ever talk to anyone other than each other. I assume that too was purposeful – their husbands (and other family members and friends) don’t matter, they could be anybody, it would be the same. I guess.

It’s a good play. It provides a perspective that otherwise is not typically seen. But it isn’t John Steinbeck.

We started yesterday with a walk in Rock Creek Park. There is a wide, flat trail (much wider and flatter than most) that you can access off 16th Street at Juniper, two short blocks west of Ohev Shalom Synagogue. It’s called the Valley Trail, and it more or less follows Rock Creek for miles. The pictures don’t show it, but there are hikers, walkers, runners, and dogs on the trail. Mainly dogs.

We then ran some errands and had a meal at the Sweetwater Tavern in Falls Church VA. Home in time to see the Caps beat Buffalo in overtime, and the Brewers take a two game World Series lead against Tampa Bay.

While we watched, I was reading Terry Teachout’s Duke, his 2013 biography of Duke Ellington, who grew up in DC’s Shaw neighborhood, just a few miles from here. It is an extraordinarily well researched book with (ready for this?) 83 pages of end notes and a detalied 14 page bibliography. Yet, Teachout is not afraid to say where documentation is missing or where he couldn’t find something. Of course, I won’t remember 10% of what is in the book, but no matter. It carries you right along.

A couple of interesting points made. Ellington, who was untrained, and was a poor sight reader, composed in a way very different from most. Where most composers start with a melody line and work the chords around it, Teachout said that Ellington would begin with the chord progressions. The melodies would come last, and often be based on a tune written by someone else. Ellington also did “band based” composing. By that, Teachout means that his music would be written with skills of the current members of his band in mind. And that there was never a final score for any piece, that Ellington’s compositions were always in motion, always “becoming”. Ellington was far from the perfect human being, he was jealous of his competitors (Teachout thinks that George Gershwin and Jelly Roll Morton were top competitors, each different in their approaches to their music).

He also gives a lot of credit to Billy Strayhorn, who was with Ellington for 25 years and wrote much of his music, although this was prettycwell hidden. Strayhorn was a sad figure – gay, when being gay was an embarrassment, very shy, thin and 5’3″. But an astounding musical talent and first class intellectual (something Ellington never pretended to be). And Strayhorn, to complicate matters, was diagnosed with a fatal cancer at 49 and died at only 52.

Terry Teachout, who you may remember as the Wall Street Journal’s long time drama and  cultural critic, died young as well, in his mid-60s. He had been diagnosed, says Wikipedia, with congestive heart failure while still in his 40s, but perservered in his very active journalistic career.

Just to bring things home, while Ellington grew up 15 minutes from our house, Teachout (like Rush Limbaugh) was born in Cape Girardeau MO, and grew up in Sikeston MO, not too far from St. Louis. Okay, pretty far.

By the way, I am only in 1939 in the Ellington book. Duke is just turning 40.

Gemini tells me that Albert Einstein “revolutionized physics by proving that time is not absolute, universal, or flowing at the same speed for everyone”. I will accept that, having no idea what he is talking about. But let’s take the year 1978, for example.

In 1978, Amy Acton, Democratic candidate for governor of Ohio, was 12 years old. Her parents were divorced, and her mother had remarried a man named Cledith Arthur.

Digression: Cledith is a strange first name, to be sure. According to my smart phone, today there are “about” 81 Americans with the first name Cledith. The majority of them are female. Their average age is 83. This is important to know. End of digression.

Cledith Arthur was accused of abusing Amy Acton over a period of two years, starting when she was about 10. In 1978, Cledith Arthur was indicted and faced criminal charges. He was not imprisoned after the indictment was handed down and, rather than face the charges, he absconded and wound up somewhere in Pennsylvania. He remained a fugitive until he died in 2004. (Perhaps sadly, I assume there is a movie about this that has not yet been made.)

Amy Acton’s mother, Donna, ran away with her husband Cledith, leaving her children behind. She had had custody of Amy and her brother, but in 1978, Amy’s biological father, Gerald Stearns, obtained custody of his children and they remained with him from then on. Amy has not been with her mother since 1978, presumably most of the time not knowing where she was.

Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign team reached out to Donna Arthur and created the now infamous one minute commercial in which Arthur claimed that her daughter was just a plain, old Trump-like (she did not use that term) liar. Why did she make that video? Why would she care, living somewhere in Pennsylvania, that Amy Acton might become governor of Ohio? In other words, does anyone doubt that Ramaswamy’s smarmy campaign paid her for her allegiance? I haven’t seen anything about this (in fact, I haven’t seen that any member of the fake media has been in touch with Arthur, or has unsuccessfully tried to be in touch with Arthur), but I can’t imagine that it isn’t true, can you?

Donna Arthur is clearly a woman with problems. I have read that she has been arrested at least three times, writing bad checks, cruelty to animals and more. At least one of these times she pleaded guilty and was sentenced to time in prison. This also has not yet been fully reported. At least, I don’t think it has. (As I said, wait for the movie.)

Another question is whether, in the video, Arthur is lying. There are three possibilities. One, she is telling the truth. Two, she is not telling the truth, but thinks she is. Three, she is lying. If Arthur is outright lying, it would probably be because she is being paid a good portion of the $4,000,000 that Vivek’s smarmy campaign says it is paying to promote the video. And this is a possibility, of course. A reasonable one.

But it is also possible that Donna Arthur thinks that Cledith got a bum rap, and that he really never did abuse his step-daughter. And that Gerald (along with lying Amy) made all of that up to get his children back and punish her and her innocent husband. After all, there does not seem to be any evidence that she participated in, or abetted, the abuse, and maybe the accusations took her by surprise and she just didn’t believe they were true. She would then have been in a terrible position – the courts, she might conclude, would believe her 12 year old “lying” daughter and the s.o.b. that was her first husband, and Cledith would spend the rest of his life in jail, and she the rest of her life alone.

If that is what she believed, no wonder she chose her innocent husband over her inveterate liar of a daughter(with whom I bet she did not get along with very well anyway) and, because her husband had no choice but to escape and go underground, she had to follow him. And, over the next 25 years, this belief became stronger and stronger as Cledith always maintained that he was framed, and she believed him. (I can picture the movie more and more clearly.) And of course, over the 22 years since Cledith died, there would be no reason for her to change her mind, only reason for her to grow more and more bitter.

Amy Acton is no longer 12 years old; she is now 60. I certainly have no reason to believe that she made up what happened almost 50 years ago, but actual proof would probably be hard to come up with now. So, in effect, it is really “she said, she said” at this point. And since there is no record of Amy Acton being an inveterate liar after she moved in with her biological family, and Donna Arthur’s background and history seems so sketchy at best, it is doubtful that many (any) pro-Acton Ohio voters are going to change their mind based on this video. And more likely that Vivek is going to lose some supporters over his decision to produce, show, and double down on it.

Okay, back to time.

1978:

1. The Shah was in charge of Iran
2. Jimmy Carter was president of the United States
3. The U.S. transferred the Panama Canal to Panama
4. Harvey Milk was assassinated in San Francisco
5. The Camp David Accords were signed by Sadat and Begin
6. Home Depot and Ben and Jerry’s were started
7. Christopher Reeves first played Superman
8. The Jonestown Massacre occured in Guyana
9. Saturday Night Fever and Grease were hits
10. Volodymyr Zelenskyy was born
11. The Blues Brothers and Bob Marley were big
12. Muhammad Ali won the heavy-weight boxing title
13. Cledith Arthur was accused of sexual assault, and disappeared
14. Amy Stearns (Acton) saw her mother for the last time.
15. Albert Einstein had been dead 23 years.

1978 was a long time ago. Even for those of us who think of it as yesterday.

Okay, I am back to ignoring the election that is coming up in 10 days. The Democrats are certain to do very well, everyone says. So what could go wrong? I am assuming that the Republicans are ready to do anything to keep the Democrats out of power, and I assume that they will cause chaos, and that, once again (seems like a mantra) our democracy will be at stake.

I heard a pundit say the other day that even if the Democrats win the presidency in 2028, it will take 20 years to right our now wrong ship. Maybe that’s correct, I don’t know, but my fear is a bit different. I fear that things are so out of kilter that even if the Democrats elect the perfect president, that perfect president will not be able to make much visible change over a four year period, and that his or her inability to do so, will lead to a backlash, resulting in the election in 2032 of another right wing wannabe autocrat who will turn the clock of progress back even further.

But I am going to ignore all of that right now. It has been a while since I have talked about my extensive collection of books (know anyone who wants to buy an extensive collection of books?), so I took a pile of books and set it down here beside me, and we can look at what makes up this pile and see what you think.

As you can see, the first item is in Russian, published in 1960. I know most of you don’t read Russian, so I will tell you what it is: it is the official Soviet government transcript of the trial of Francis Gary Powers, the American U-2 pilot who was shot down over Russia in 1960. He was 70,000 feet in the air, when a Soviet missile shot his plane down. Powers parachuted to safety, but was caught and, of course, arrested. His mission was a secret one, one of a number of U-2 flights over the Soviet Union, flights that President Eisenhower had long denied were happening. Power was tried (no one suggested, I don’t think, that this was only a show trial), found guilty and sentenced to 10 years of a combination of hard labor and imprisonment, but was released after only 21 months, as part of a prisoner exchange for Soviet spy Rudolf Abel. To make matters worse, he was accused of failing to act properly after he was shot down – acting properly would have included committing suicide so that he could not be questioned by the Russians. But he was finally exonerated at home, decorated, and permitted to go his merry way. His merry way included becoming a test pilot for Lockheed, and then a helicopter pilot for a Los Angeles television weather reporting team. When he was only 47, a helicopter he was piloting crashed, and he was killed. The crash occurred after the plane, which had been surveying brush fires, ran out of fuel, was landing safely in a field, but had to divert to make sure that no one on the ground would be hurt. It was apparently because of the sudden diversion that Powers died. Part of my Russia collection.

The second book, not in Russian, but in French was published in Paris in 1914, in the aftermath of the Dreyfus trial. Written by Leon Daudet. Daudet was a French right wing figure, a monarchist who was against the French Republic and against democratic governments in general. The book, an antisemitic and anti-German screed, claimed that Germany and its Jews had infiltrated in the French government in the wake of the Dreyfus scandal, to spy on and weaken the government of France. Part of my antisemitism collection.

The third books is Frost’s Original Letter Writer, published in New York in 1867. For example, do you have a friend who lost his left arm in an accident? “I cannot find words to express to you how deeply I was shocked and pained to hear of your sad accident. [Your brother] writes me that you are recovering strength, and your spirits are buoyant as ever, so we may thank God it is not worse……I am thankful that your right arm was spared, as that is undoubtedly the more reliable and useful.”

The fourth is Watson on Cod-Liver Oil/Chapman on Phosphate of Iron, published in 1868. It gives a full history of the use of cod-liver oil, and recommended doses and the like. As to whether or not it is better to use pale or dark cod-liver oil, it appears that pale oil is superior, as the dark version “is apt to turn the stomach, irritate the bowels, and if long continued, destroy the appetite and seriously impair the digestive powers.” We sure don’t need that.

The fifth book is a 1912 publication of the Library of Congress, titled “Select List of References on Impeachment”. Federal impeachments, state impeachments, even foreign impeachments. One example is the impeachment of Senator William Blount. I know none of us know anything about that, but Blount was one of North Carolina’s signers of the U.S. Constitution and one of the first two Senators from the then new state of Tennessee. He got involved in a plot to conspire with British and Native American forces to attack Spanish territory (in what became ten years later the Louisiana Purchase) including the Mississippi River and land west of it, and to turn it over to the British, in the hope that the British would then open the Mississippi to American commerce. The House of Representatives decided this was treason and impeached Blount, but he was not convicted by the Senate, who decided that Senators were not subject to impeachment under the Constitution. Who knew? The year was 1797.

Finally, I have a copy of the libretto to Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado. Big deal, you say, they are a dime a dozen. True, but this is the the 1885 edition, when The Mikado was “An entirely New and Original Japanese Opera”. The Mikado premiered in March 1885 in London at the Savoy, and ran for 672 performances. It opened in the United States later that year.

Can you see why I have fun doing this?

I apologize for the quality of the picture, but am amused to see this poster around town, as we near the November election. Janeese Lewis George , the Democratic nominee, will probably get 90% of the votes cast for mayor of the District of Columbia. There is no Republican candidate. The Green Party has a candidate, Robert Gross, and there is one Independent who will be listed on the ballot, Rhonda Hamilton. I know nothing about Gross or Hamilton.

I also know nothing about Muhammad. He does have a website, and he comes across as a nice and serious kind of guy, but not with the qualifications you would want in a mayor. And of course, he will not be the mayor. But what interests me is that he thinks that anyone (other than his only son, perhaps – he is divorced) is going to be able to (1) remember his name and (2) spell it correctly to write in a vote for him. Okay, if your name is John Doe or Jane Doe or Jack Jones or something, but …. Talib Karim Muhammad? And I assume that one misplaced letter, and your vote is thrown out.

Voting in DC is not like voting anywhere else, especially in a mid-year election. Because we are a one party city, the mayoral election is not competitive, nor are most others. We are voting to replace DC (non-voting) Congressional Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, and will elect Democrat Robert White over the Republican and Green candidates. For chair of the DC City Council, Phil Mendelson will win his 4th or 5th election as chair; he has been on the Council for over 25 years. His Republican opponent is Abi-Ananiah Prudent. I don’t know anything about her (and I bet the vast majority of DC residents couldn’t tell you if she is male or female), but I see that “with a passion for making Christ’s name known among government leaders,…..Abi-Ananiah has united Bible believing Christians in prayer for those on both sides of the aisle”. (This quote is from her description on the Concerned Women for America website.) Yes, it’s the good old DC Republican Party in action. Talib Karim Muhammad, by the way, is a long term DC resident, who has two degrees from Howard. Prudent moved to DC last year from Tennessee. Her only degree is from Liberty University.

Okay, so we know that Lewis George will be the next mayor, Robert White the next non-voting Congressional delegate, and Phil Mendelson will continue to chair the City Council.

The Council itself is made up of one chair, eight ward representatives and four at large representatives. We live in Ward Three and incumbent Matt Frumin has no opponent, so unless people write in my name, he is sure to be reelected.

But of the four at large seats, two are open. And this is where things get complicated. Beyond complicated. See if you understand this:

In previous elections, you would have a list of candidates, and voters would be instructed on the ballots to vote for two from the list to fill the two open slots. Easy, peasy.

But not now. Now, for the first time in a general election, DC has ranked voting. And for reasons that are unclear to me (but I am sure there must be reasons), rather than having the two positions be on the ballot separately (and I guess they never had been separated before, but before it made no difference), both positions are lumped together. There are four named candidates, and there is a place for one (only one) write in vote.

The idea is that the two winning candidates will be the two council members, but this is only an idea. THE BALLOT NOWHERE TELLS THE VOTERS THAT THEY ARE VOTING FOR TWO PEOPLE!!! The heading is “At-Large Member…..”, not “At-Large Members……”. You are told you have five choices, but you don’t know, unless you know (which most won’t) that you are voting for two winning candidates, rather than one. I think this is a fatal flaw. And this is not what is supposed to be meant as a “secret ballot”.

There is another complication. By law, two of the four at-large members must not be members of the “majority party”. Forget for a moment, how the “majority party” is determined; take it from me, the majority party is the Democratic Party. One of the continuing at-large members, Christina Henderson is an Independent. So is Elissa Silverman, a current member running for reelection.

The four candidates (in the order printed on the ballot – which I believe are still done by lottery) for the two (not defined as two, but yes, two) positions are: Oye Owolewa, Democrat; Darry Moch, Green; Darrell Green, Republican; Elissa Silverman, Independent.

Digression: As an aside, Owolewa’s full name is Adeoye Ibrahim Yakubu-Owolewa (but you can call him Oye). End of unnecessary digression.

It is certain that Owolewa, the only Democrat (okay, so Elissa is a Democrat, but she can’t run that way – that’s another issue for another day) will win one of the seats. But, under the way ranked voting works, if you vote for the winner as your first choice, none of your other choices count at all. That means, for all practical purposes, that Elissa Silverman, last on the ballot and down as an Independent, must receive more first places votes than either Moch or Green (or any write in). If Owolewa gets so many votes, that the remaining votes go largely to the Republican Party candidate or the Green Party candidate, Silverman will be out. In other words, if the 90% of the voters who vote Democratic vote for Owolewa first, and Silverman second, and 10% of the voters vote for Green or Moch, the winner will be Green or Moch, each of whom will receive far fewer votes than Silverman. And that is because the two positions are being thrown together on the ballot, with no explanation or attention being paid to this, combined with the complications of ranked choice voting and the legal requirement that two at large seats be held by persons not affiliated with the majority party.

I know you probably didn’t understand it, but read it again until you do (if you are a DC voter). And yes, there is another complication in that Green the candidate is not running on the ticket of Green the party, but that is the least of our problems.

There are a few other things on the ballot. Brian Schwalb will be reelected attorney general; his opposition is a Republican no one knows, and everyone knows Schwalb has done a fine job. We also elect a Shadow Senator and a Shadow Congressman – I don’t cast a vote in those silly positions which are unpaid and, as far as I can tell, have never accomplished a thing. And then there are two Ward Three candidates for the State Board of Education, another set of positions I don’t vote for since the Board of Education, once a board with power, has some time ago been changed into a board with only a voice and usually no microphone to allow that voice even to be heard.

There is one initiative on the ballot – basically an anti foie gras measure. No more force feeding geese or ducks. I think it will pass easily.

One more overall question. The printed ballots, under each position, have room for one write in candidate. That is fine when the voter can only vote for one candidate. But where, in the case of at-large Council membership, there are two positions to be filled, shouldn’t there be two spots for write in votes. I assume there is no way to write in a spot for a second write in vote. Another flaw.

So, who knows what all of this confusion will really mean. I think it caught everyone by surprise and I expect there will be some changes to the law that will permit some changes to the ballots by 2028. We shall see (I say that a lot).

Let’s talk a little about current events.

Donald Trump endorses Bibi Netanyahu for prime minister of Israel. Will this affect the Israeli election? The Israeli election (which goes by party, not by individual) is said to be very close, with no party going to get a majority, so the question will be which party leader will be asked by the country’s president to try to put together a majority coalition by collaborating with other, smaller parties. But Netanyahu’s Likud Party is, according to virtually all polls, in second place and, of course, wants to wind up in first place. What will Donald Trump’s endorsement do for Netanyahu.

Two things to remember. In Israel (as opposed to in the United States and in most of the world), Donald Trump remains quite popular. And, although the Israelis like to talk about their ability to face the rest of the world with no friends, many or most Israelis believe that American financial and technical support, and American weaponry, is very important in helping guarantee Israeli security. So, to the extent that Israelis know that Trump will be president for more than 2 more years (at least), and that Israelis believe that American support can only be guaranteed by Trump, it follows that their knowing that Trump and Netanayu are so closely entwined would mean that many Israelis would conclude that Israel will obtain more American support if Netanyahu remains prime minister. So, yes, I believe that Trump’s endorsement will be very helpful to Netanyahu and Likud.

I watched the first half of an interview with Yossi Klein Halevi the other day. Halevi. Halevi, who works with the Hartman Institute in Israel, is an American born author and commentator on Israeli politics and society. He is generally respected as a pragmatic thinker. He said a couple of things that surprised me. Three of them were, I think, at least somewhat contradictory.

First, he said that Israel and Jews are not talking enough about morality, that the entire concept of how to act morally seems to have fallen outside of the normal conversation. Okay, I buy that. That is similar to what I have been saying when I ask: where are the prophets?

But second, he said that Israel today is in a terrible situation where it is not permitted to act morally, because it is a question of survival, and in the hierarchy of things, survival comes before morality.

And third, he said (as he has over and over) that he detests the Netanyahu government.

He was not giving a political speech when he said all of this – he was talking to a bunch of American teenagers (?) or twenty somethings who had come to Israel to participate in a Hartman program of some sort. It was, I think, an introductory, welcome program for them. And I don’t know how it ended. I turned it off because of time, not because of lack of interest, and I will get back to it.

But one thing was clear. Halevi was not talking about the upcoming election. He was not touting a particular party or party leader. He was talking about Israeli society. And he was talking about the growing separation between American Jews (his audience) and Israeli Jews, saying I think that he understood why American Jews felt ambiguous about Israel today, but he did not think that American Jews understood the position that Israelis are in.

He also did not (at least in the part I watched) offer any solutions; I think he said that he had none.

Although the Netanyahu Likud party looks to be coming in second in the election to Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar Party, it may be that Netanyahu will be the one asked to form the next government. This is because of a general turn to even the further right by young Israeli voters, and to polls and pundits who predict that Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit Party is growing in strength. The assumption is that it may wind up with as many as 10 representatives in the 120 member Knesset. It is unlikely that Eisenkot (far from a left wing figure) would ally with Ben-Gvir in a government coalition, and the prospective strength of Ben-Gvir gives him a significant influence over another prospective Netanayhu government.

If that happens, morality will be further and further from Israeli government discourse, and the country will continue on its current path, which is to make life for remaining Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza more and more unpleasant, leading perhaps not to genocide (although that might even be Ben-Gvir’s first choice), but to widespread emigration and permanent domination by the Israeli Jews. It might also mean less equality for the 20% of Israel proper’s citizens who are Arab, and growing pressure for Israeli annexation of the entire West Bank, world opinion be damned. All of this bodes bad. Very bad. And will put the large number (but not large enough number) of Israeli citizens who want a different kind of country in a real bind.

As to events in the U.S., remember that in 2016 and 2024, it seemed clear that Trump was going to lose the presidential election. So in 2026, it is unclear to me, although the generic polls now show the Democrats getting 10% more votes than Republicans, and the individual state polls seem to be leaning strongly towards the Democrats, that it is going to be the Blue Wave so many of us are hoping for. But it does seem likely that, at some level, at least the House will wind up Democratic.

So the Republicans, sly devils that they are, are resorting to their own forms of immoral conduct. Two examples that I am sure you have read about.

First, the accusation (baseless, and I think admittedly so) that Abdul El-Sayed has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Well, not that he has any direct ties, but that his Egyptian born biological mother (now a psych nurse in Columbia MO) was active in the brotherhood in the 1970s when she was growing up in Alexandria Egypt, and that she worked as a nurse for the Islamic American Relief Agency (an organization which, in addition to raising funds for movements that we might not approve of, operated many health clinics serving low income persons). I am not sure what her precise activity was comprised of, but there is no basis to think she has been involved in any extremist politics and she was never accused of wrongdoing. The activity in Egypt occurred a decade before her son was born and she and El-Sayed’s father were divorced when El-Sayed was three, and he was raised by his father and step-mother.

The accusation was recently made at an event in Michigan where El-Sayed was speaking. It turns out that the accuser was a paid high level staff member of Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, not a constituent. Gee, Josh, can’t you do better than that?

And then of course there is the latest. The video being circulated by Vivek Ramaswamy (heretofore, Ramaswarmy) featuring the mother of his opponent in the race for Ohio governor, Amy Acton. Acton’s mother left her children behind when Amy was 12, to follow her husband, Amy’s stepfather, who had been accused of serial sexual crimes involving his children. She now says, in this video, which the Republican campaign is going to show again and again and again, that Amy is a liar and always been a liar and just cannot be trusted.

It seems to be a pattern of this year’s GOP. If you can’t beat the Democrat in a clean campaign, attack their mothers. Is this weird, or what?

Whew.

When we got the new car in July, it came with six months of Sirius Radio free, something that we had never before had in a car (and never wanted to have). My usual car radio exercise was to surf between three FM stations, WTOP for news, C-Span Radio for current events, and WETA for classical music. When I wanted to hear something else, I would usually turn on YouTube on my phone and listen from there.

For the most part, Sirius is a disappointment. When I say, for the most part, I mean virtually none of their programming holds any interest for me. They have one-sided political screeds, and a bunch of comedians telling stale jokes, and more music that I don’t like than you can possibly imagine. In fact, there are only two stations that I find at all appealing, Symphony Hall and Real Jazz. The other 75 music stations and an equal number of talk stations I really don’t want to listen to while I am driving, either because the music or content doesn’t interest me, or the sound diverts me from other things I am thinking about.

But those two channels may keep me subscribed to Sirius radio, much to my surprise. I haven’t spent much time analyzing Real Jazz’s programming, but the selections are varied and don’t demand my full attention. I have looked somewhat closely at the Symphony Hall, and I like their selections better, I think, than those played on WETA, our local public radio classical station (of which I am a member and support). Over the weekend, I got to listen to Mahler, and Beethoven, and Mozart, and Brahms, and Vivaldi and all the classics, but I also got to listen to a variety of more contemporary classical music, pieces that I don’t know by composers I have either barely, or never, heard of. And, what is more, you can go on the Sirius website and see what they have played yesterday or the day before, or who knows how long ago, learn more about the piece and recording, and listen to it if you wish. Perhaps you can do this on the Real Jazz channel and all the others, as well. I haven’t tried.

While I am giving a shout-out to Sirius Radio, maybe I should list some other items that are worth telling you about. Most are food items.

For one thing, I have discovered that, for my taste, Greek olive oil is the best, almost always so. So, although we might use other olive oils for cooking purposes, when it comes to salad, it is always Greek. I started with 365 Greek Olive Oil, the Whole Foods brand. But we really don’t go to Whole Foods that much any more (we support Amazon enough in other ways), and I have found a new brand, Dimitri, which has been pressed by the same family in Sparta since 1804 (so they clearly know what they are doing). I get it at Bread Furst, and yes, it isn’t cheap (but what is these days). As to vinegar (again for salad use), the brand that I have found the best to be the Peppercorn fig balsamic vinegar, sold at the Peppercorn Market in Bedford, PA. Of course, the market does not make the vinegar and I don’t know who does, but it is top, top quality. Of course, Bedford PA is not just up the street; it’s about a 2 1/2 hour drive from here. We have never bought enough to last (and I didn’t want to have to add on the high shipping cost to order on line), but we hope to be in Bedford in a couple of months and, if so, I am going to stock up.

I have mentioned Liberty Orchards Turkish Delight, which we discovered this summer in the small town of Cashmere, WA, and which have ordered on line a few times. Now, I will add four more dessert items – Beyond Good Madagascar Chocolate Bars (especially – well, I don’t know all of them – the dark chocolate and the vanilla bean chocolate), Mi-Del Swedish Ginger Snaps, Fruit Bliss dried apricots (actually very moist), and Dolcezza Dark Chocolate, Strawberry, and Mascarpone and Mixed Berry Gelato. We generally get these at Mom’s Organic Grocery.

Moving off desserts, and knowing that processed foods are not the best for you, I will limit myself to two recommendations. First, Amy’s frozen vegetarian burritos, which come in various combinations (southwestern, black beans and cheese, etc) and are all good. Not only that, but you can cook them in your microwave in 1 minute. Can you top that? And then there are EAT frozen pizzas (yes, that is the name of the brand, and I am not sure you can get it outside of the DC area), which come in various flavors, but we get the Classic Margherita and Wild Mushroom varieties. Again, from Mom’s.

I mentioned that we don’t go that often to Whole Foods, which creates a problem for our peanut butter supply, because we like Crazy Richard’s, and haven’t found it anywhere else where we normally shop.

Finally, and I will stop with this. Our coffee is Mt. Hagen organic freeze dried fair trade instant coffee (try it before you criticize me), and while there are always new teas to try, the one I would recommend is Numi Green Jasmine.

I could add to this list, but I will stop here. I am just trying to avoid talking about Donald Trump in the hope that his influence will vanish as a result of the November 3 elections (about which I am very concerned in spite of the polling) and about Bibi Netanyahu in the hope that his influence will vanish after the October 27 elections in Israel (about which I am very concerned, period). Once that day is behind us, I will get back to regular order.

“Falling crucifix kills priest during live-streamed mass in Equador”.

This headline greeted me this morning when I turned on my computer and, yes, it was apparently very legitimate. It was apparently a wedding mass, and the crucifix was affixed to the wall behind the priest, until it wasn’t. The question is: is there a meaning behind this tragedy? Is it part of God’s plan?

You remember Thornton Wilder’s book, The Bridge at San Luis Rey? A rope bridge in the mountains of Peru collapses in the 1700s, and five people are killed. Brother Juniper sees the tragedy, and spends years trying to figure out what the connection was between these five people, if any, and tries to ascertain God’s reason for selecting these five people for joint death. He believes that he may have succeeded in figuring out what God was doing, whom He was punishing and whom He was rewarding. He makes public his conclusions. The church Inquisition determines that it is neither possible, nor appropriate, to try to contemplate God’s actions on a scientific basis, arrests Father Juniper, and executes him.

I better leave well enough alone.

The book won Wilder a Pulitzer Prize in 1927, one of three that he won. Another was for Our Town in 1938, and the third for The Skin of Our Teeth in 1942. These were both for Drama. I have seen each of these more than once. Our Town, showing small town life and small town death, and the relationship between the dead and the living (from the perspective of the dead) is a very nostalgic play, even for someone who has no common background to engender the nostalgia. The Skin of Our Teeth is a fantasy play about how we would react if the world as we know it is destroyed, and replaced by another world. Always one of my favorites.

I have never read The Eighth Day, the novel that won Wilder the National Book Award in 1968. I am not sure why not.

It is even stranger that I haven’t read his The Ides of March, Wilder’s historical fiction about the end of the Roman Republic, another book that is usually highly acclaimed. It is strange because I not only have a copy of this book, but I have a copy that was not only inscribed by Wilder to a Washington governmentalv official, but was annotated by Wilder, almost page by page, for his benefit. One day, I will donate it to the Wilder archives at Yale’s Beinecke Library, I think, but not yet.

The story of this book is interesting. It was years ago, when my law office was a lunchtime walk away from Dupont Circle and I used to take the opportunity to stretch a bit by walking to Second Story Books and looking at the books that they sell outside (then sold for $2 a book; now for $2 to $4 depending on the day of the week). I used to try to go on Thursdays. That was the day they turned over the books.

I have long looked for books signed by their authors – sort of a cross between fly fishing and being actively involved in conservation of rare artifacts. I long ago learned that you can’t judge a book by its cover (I am not have been the original source of that common phrase, but I am perhaps the only one who took it seriously), so will look at books that might be less than pristine.

One day, I picked up this jacket-less book by Wilder and saw that it was briefly inscribed by TNW. The cover page said that the book was by Thorton Wilder (no middle initial), so I didn’t know if this was him or not, but I took the book for $2 and brought it back to my office, quickly discovering that Wilder’s middle initial was indeed N. It was only then that I saw the annotations, and realized that I had found something worth more than $2.

Inside the book was a British Airways boarding pass made out to someone named Catherman, and Wilder’s final inscription said: “all best wishes, every day of his life, to Terry Catherman.” Catherman was an American diplomat and high ranking USIA and Voice of America official, who had died a few years before I found the book. What his relationship was to Wilder, I do not know.

Was I planning on writing about Thornton Wilder when I sat down this morning at the computer? Not at all. It was falling crucifix that led me to think of poor Father Juniper and then poor Terrence Catherman who, had he not passed away, would this year celebrate his 100th birthday.

By the way, over the weekend, we saw The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk, a play about Marc and Bella Chagall at Theater J. Your odds would have been better if you bet on me writing about Marc Chagall this morning. But I hope you didn’t make that bet. The show did not do much for me.

We paid our first visit yesterday to the new National Geographic Museum, which, as you may have guessed, has replaced the Old National Geographic Museum. The old museum looked like it was designed by Rube Goldberg – wherever they could find space to put something on the first floor of the National Geographic headquarters, they would. Not that that was bad, but now they have a regular museum. Here is the foyer:

The museum is very spacious and very comfortable. But there are some negatives, the biggest being the ticket prices – $27 for seniors, $24 for children 5 to 17, and $30 for other adults. Another is that you can’t go into the gift shop or the restaurant unless you have a ticket. You normally don’t see that in a museum, but I guess they don’t want lawyers to crowd out tourists at lunch.

A large portion of the extensive first floor exhibit space is devoted to National Geographic photography, much of which is absolutely beautiful. Here are a few examples.

An illegally poached and killed gorilla, being respectfully carried away from the site of its murder.

This is a dog sled in Alaska.

The second exhibit highlights the work of animal photographer Joel Sartone, who has been working for the past 20 years on photographing every animal species under the control of man. This means, I guess that he is not a wildlife photographer, but a photographer of animals in captivity. There are about 25,000 animal species held in captivity, and Sartone has so far photographed 18,000 of them. This exhibit is very nicely arranged , showing information, including place of residence, of every animal shown, and information about their habitat and conservation status. Here is a photo of an endangered koala (actually three).

The second floor has individual bios of over 400 explorers involved in Nat Geo or related projects, as well as equipment including a bathysphere and a seabed walking uniform.

One thing I realized about the National Geographic Magazine that I remember from years past. I recall the articles divided into four categories. The largest section was devoted to how people lived around the world (e.g., how Laplanders got through the winter). The second would be technology (e.g., how they mine diamonds in South Africa). The third would be geography (e.g., mapping the Sargasso Sea), and the fourth would be animals. No longer. People living in remote places must be taboo. Technology is only relevant if it supports exploration. Almost everything is animals.

We spent a little over an hour, maybe 90 minutes. We didn’t feel rushed, but a longer, slower visit may be better, one with a lunch break. The Eatery is intriguing with separate stations offering American, Italian, Vietnamese, Syrian, and Peruvian food.

Yes, a trip to the museum is worthwhile. It is just not for the feint of purse. That’s too bad.

Looks like No Kings Day was a success not only in this country, but around the world. As Edie said, it must be different to go to a No Kings rally in England.

What else? A personal defeat. I always think it a defeat when I stop reading a book in the middle. Especially when I am not really critical of the book. So I apologize to French author Gil Buhet for two reasons. For shutting his book on page 79 and for having no idea how to pronounce his name. Oh, the book? The Honey Siege. It’s the story of a rural school teacher whose only hobby is bee keeping and whose honey is stolen. The teacher is certain it is one of a gang of his pupils and decides on collective punishment. The pupils are outraged at the teacher’s suspicion and form a bond to suss out the real perpetrator. It reads well, but who cares?

Today, it’s the theater and hats off to my assistant Muse who saw we had tickets and told us we shouldn’t miss the pre-show discussion. We didn’t know about a pre-show discussion, so thank you, Muse.

In the information she gave us about the show, Muse said “One thing I liked…”

Whoa. Muse, “how can you “like” something?”, I asked.

Muse does not miss a beat. She told me “Fair catch.” She said that “like” for me and “like” for her or not the same. She told me that, when she tells me she likes something, it means that it is something I would probably want to see. It is “salience, not emotion”.

I didn’t have a strong sense of what I wanted to write this morning, so I looked up October 17 to see what important events happened on this day, and I learned that October 17, 1814, was the day of the London Beer Flood. I could not just let that go by, because I understand that schools today rarely teach about the Beer Flood, and wonder if its omission is one of the reasons that none of us truly understand what the hell is going on. Perhaps, it is.

It was on the 17th of October in 1814 that eight Londoners (half of whom were children) were killed, five of them at a wake for a two year old who had died, when a 22 foot high wooden cask of porter broke open, and the power of the resulting surge destroyed other vats in the Horse Shoe Brewery, resulting in, perhaps, 300,000 gallons of beer breaking down the back wall of the brewery and spreading into a neighborhood known as St. Giles Rookery. Yes, eight people were killed that night, but a few more died of alcohol poisoning, as the flowing beer was scooped up by neighborhood residents and enjoyed to an extreme. There was an inquest, and the inquest jurors visited the scene and interviewed witnesses, determining that there was no liability, and that the tragedy was the result of an unfortunate accident.

This is the Dominon Theatre in London. Its address is on Tottenham Road in the West End, and it seats over 2,000. It is selling tickets to The Devil Wears Prada through September 2027. If you go to the theater’s website, one of the first things that you read is: “Built on the former site of the Horse Shoe Brewery…..”

The Smithsonian Magazine had a featured article about the London Beer Flood in their August 4, 2017 issue. Perhaps you remember that article? If not, it obviously is not too late to read it. Just go to your pile of Smithsonian Magazines that you have put aside to read later, and count down to August 4, 2017. I know it’s a bit of trouble, moving all those magazines, but you won’t regret doing it. Just make sure when you put the pile back, that everything stays in order.

The article quotes as American visitor in London at the time of the flood: “All at once, I found myself borne onward with great velocity by a torrent which burst upon me so suddenly as almost to deprive me of breath.”

There had apparently been a sort of competition in London as to which brewery could build the largest wooden vats to hold their fermenting beer. Horse Shoe was not, by the way, the winner, but the calamity changed brewery practices and wooden vats were replaced by concrete vats by breweries all over the city. Perhaps the concrete (cement?) facade of the Dominion Theatre pays homage to the new form of brewery vat construction.

Changing topics, I also want to point out that my phone has a sense of humor. What proof can I give? Last night, I wanted to check the weather for the upcoming week. I opened my weather app, and looked. I was a little disappointed, because it was clear that this was going to be a chilly wet weak. The first four days were listed as rainy, with temperatures in the 50s, and the next three days were going to be even colder, with a strong possibility of snow! “Whoa”, I could have said (but didn’t), snow in October in Washington? But then I saw that my phone was playing a trick on me. For whatever reason, it opened the weather report for Juneau, Alaska. Ha, ha! You got me, phone.

Yes, it is expected to snow Tuesday and Wednesday in Juneau. Further north and inland, in Fairbanks, no snow is expected next week, but for several days the high temperature will be in the upper 20s (yes, that is Fahrenheit), so bring a jacket.

Why am I going off on such unnecessary topics? Mainly because the important ones – such as the settler violence in the West Bank which seems to be being supported by the IDF and Netanyahu himself – are so disgusting to think about. It was Barack Obama who said a day or two ago that Israel (I am paraphrasing) has squandered its moral advantage. Boy, has it! And – as I have said before – where are those Jewish (Israelite, Judean) prophets who are exalted in the Bible for publicly condemning the authorities for their sinful actions?

Obama is getting criticized heavily by much of the Jewish community for claiming that the Jews/Israelis are taking land from the Palestinians. He wasn’t talking about Israel proper, but about the West Bank and Gaza. And isn’t this exactly what is happening? It is movement of right wing Israelis (leaders and followers) to claim all the land from the river to the sea. If appropriate leadership does not show up on both sides (in Israel, the election is Oct 27) to change course, suffering and fighting will continue until everyone is either dead or exhausted.

And this is why I wrote about weather in Alaska and the London Beer Flood. By the way, Wikipedia lists an enormous number of people who were born on this day. Let’s pick a couple to honor.

First, Irene di Spilimbergo, an Italian Renaissance poet and artist, born near Venice in 1538. She died at age 21, having written over 300 short poems (published after her death) and painted (her teacher was Titian), but whose paintings have all been apparently lost. But the National Gallery here has a painting not by her, but of her.

And then let’s honor Andrei Nikiforovich Voronkhin, 1759-1814, born a serf in Russia, but liberated at the age of about 26. He became a painter and architect, known for his work on St. Petersburg’s Kazan Cathedral. I found a portrait of him (not by him) as well.

It is too bad that Irene and Andrei never met. They would have made a fine couple.

Until tomorrow.

Do you remember Plato’s Allegory of the Cave? I can’t say that I remember exactly what Plato said, but I know the gist of it. The gist of it is that you may think you know something, but you don’t. It’s like you have lived your life in a cave, and you have only seen shadows on the wall, thinking that you are looking at the real thing. Then, one day you get out of that cave, and see the world as it really is, and you are dumbfounded and can’t believe what you see. At any rate, it’s something like that. And that’s how I am feeling this morning. And it’s all because of Katie Zacharia.

Katie Zacharia is President Trump’s new press secretary, who was booed off the stage after her first, shortened press conference, and whom I think is being treated, not only by the legacy media, very unfairly. As I said before, “Jeez, give the girl a chance”.

But her performance on the stage has been almost eclipsed by confusion as to her credentials. Zacharia is a graduate of the Pepperdine University Law School, took the California bar exam and failed, moved to China with her husband (for her husband’s job), worked at a Chinese law firm for about four years and had four children, and came back to the U.S.

Digression. About 2/3 of first time takers pass the California bar, but a much smaller percentage of those who fail the bar the first time are able to pass it when they take it again. Statistics, and it’s only statistics, would show that if Katie took the bar a second time, the results would have been just as they were the first time, and she would not have passed the bar. End of digression.

But she did not take it again, and that is understandable, as she was moving out of the country. And when she came back to the United States, after a long absence and with four young children, with the odds for passage against her, it is not surprising that she did not retake the exam, and went in a different career direction. I don’t fault her for any of this.

Digression #2. I asked Gemini to name some well known people who failed their first try at a bar exam: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, Kathleen Sullivan (she became dean of the Stanford Law School), John F. Kennedy, Jr., Pete Wilson, Jerry Brown, Benjamin Cardozo (he got to the Supreme Court), Charlie Crist, Ed Koch, Richard Daly, Pat Robertson and even Kim Kardashian. End of digression.

But, you ask, what does this have to do with being in a cave? I will try to show you.

The question is whether or not Katie Zacharia, who graduated from Pepperdine Law School and received a J.D., but who sat for but did not pass the California bar exam, is a lawyer or not. A second question, apparently not the same as the first, is whether she is an attorney or not.

Now, I graduated from law school in June 1967. I took the Missouri bar exam in the fall of 1967, and (by hook or crook) passed it, being notified at the very end of that year. Was I a lawyer in June 1967, or not until I was told that I had passed the bar? Was I an attorney in June 1967, or not until I was told that I had passed the bar?

You may know the answer to these questions, but until yesterday (I mean literally yesterday, October 15, 2026), I must have been living in a cave, because it appears that I did not know the answers.

Because the stink about Katie Zacharia focuses on how she represented her credentials and not on the facts of her situation, I was actually surprised to hear her say that she was a lawyer, because she earned a J.D., but she was not an attorney (or an attorney-at-law), because she never passed a bar exam. In the 59 years since I graduated from law school and passed the bar, I had never heard of that distinction (or at least I certainly don’t remember hearing it).

But, I looked it up, and there are all sorts of websites which do make that distinction. They describe it just as Lawyer Katie Zacharia describes it. She is a lawyer. She is not an attorney. You knew that?

But to practice law….you need to be an attorney. Being a lawyer (under these definitions) does not suffice.

Now obviously, there is a lot of case law discussing whether someone is practicing law without a license. I have never looked at these closely (or, in fact, at all), but my guess is that there are quite a number of messy situations that have been decided in conflicting ways. And I bet that most of these cases do not make a distinction between a lawyer and an attorney.

I tried to look up how this distinction arose, and was not satisfied with what I found from a quick look. The two words have different origins, one from English, one from French, and things just sort of evolved as they have. But the evolution is confusing to me (here I am back in the cave, I guess). Some examples:

1. So I was sworn into the bar in Missouri in late 1967 or early 1968. I moved to DC in 1969 and shortly after that was waived into the DC bar and sworn in there. About ten years later, I stopped paying my Missouri Bar dues (even my inactive dues), and my membership in the bar in Missouri was terminated. From that time on, I was only a member of the DC bar.
2. I retired from law practice in 2012. I decided that I was not going to practice again, so I stopped paying my DC bar dues and was put on “suspended” status, and told that I could reinstate my active membership by paying past bar dues. (That is the same way that Missouri worked, if you were in inactive status, paying reduced dues – I remember when my mother picked up her law practice after some years, and had to pay all of her back dues.)

So what am I?

1. By the Zacharia definition (I will call it that for convenience), I am still, and always have been, a lawyer, and there is nothing that I can do about that. I graduated from an accredited law school and that defines me as a lawyer on my, as they say, permanent record.
2. In Missouri, I am clearly no longer an attorney under this definition; that status has been terminated.
3. But what about DC? I cannot practice law, but my bar membership has only been suspended. Am I still a DC attorney? Is there such a category as a suspended attorney? Or am I not an attorney unless I pay all my past bar dues?

I have been referring to myself as a former lawyer and former attorney (although I never – maybe never ever – use the term attorney). Maybe I am wrong.

The sites that I have looked at contradict each other as to what constitutes the practice of law that requires a licensed attorney. Clearly, appearing in court, or appearing as a attorney of record, does. But what about giving legal advice generally? What if someone who never went to law school helps someone write a will, for example? What if someone who went to law school, but isn’t an active attorney, helps someone write a will. What if Katie Zacharia opens an office called: Zachariah Law Office – Wills and Trusts Exclusively?

Is that practicing law without a license? And is it better or worse if the Zachariah who opens that office has a law degree (and should therefore know better?) or not? Is it clearly wrong if that Zachariah calls herself an attorney, but perhaps okay if she calls herself a lawyer?

Over my 40 year career as a practicing attorney, while I spent some time in court rooms and other formal circumstances, most of my time was spent helping draft documents and letters, trying to negotiate something on behalf of a client, giving advice to clients as to their activities involving various federal agencies, and so forth. There were other lawyers doing the same thing. But there were also “consultants”, who were not lawyers, but were providing advice very similar (in some situations identical) to what I was doing. I often wondered where the line was drawn, if there was any line at all. I have wondered whether, without paying my back dues and reinstating my bar membership, I could go out and start working as a consultant, doing everything I used to do except for those formal settings where bar membership was obviously required.

Doesn’t it seem that, if I know anything, I should know the answers to these types of questions?

And we didn’t even talk about giving someone with no education at all a “power of attorney”, which makes them an “attorney-in-fact”, if not in law.

I am going back into my cave. I seem to have no choice.

And, by the way, what is a “counselor”?