Art is 80

It’s quite a different experience, I’ll tell you that. We had tickets to see Dominique Morisseau’s play Paradise Blue at the Studio Theatre yesterday. You may not be familiar with either the play or Morisseau, but even if you were, this production would differ greatly from whichever earlier one you had seen. Whether this is for the better or not, I am not really sure. But this production was worth seeing not only because the acting was terrific, but because it was so unique.

First, a few sentences about the plot. From the plot, you will see that this is a play that Donald Trump would certainly not want to have performed at the Kennedy Center. That’s because it is about Black folks and their place in America, and it does not show that they are treated as well as others, and have equal success rates. The setting is the Paradise Bar, located in the Black Bottom section of Detroit. The year is 1949. Black Bottom is just what it is called – its residents are Black, and many of them are clearly at the Bottom. In fact, Black Bottom is believed by the city leaders to be so bad that the city itself wants to buy out some of the landowners and redevelop the area into something more upscale.

The Paradise is owned by a guy known as Blue, a trumpet player who inherited the club from his father, who was even a better trumpet player. There is a small combo that plays there and includes Blue, and there is Pumpkin, Blue’s girl, who takes care of the club and of the rooms upstairs that are rented out for $5 per day (except to the  band members who get it free as compensation).

Blue’s mother was killed by Blue’s father after his father had gone mad; he spent the rest of his life in an asylum. Blue is showing similar mental problems, and wants to escape the Paradise and Detroit, thinking that he can get a fresh start in Chicago. Pumpkin wants to stay where she is, the city she has always lived in.

P-sam, the band’s percussionist (I am simplifying the story line a bit) wants to buy the Paradise from Blue in order to keep the city from changing the neighborhood. So does Silver, a sophisticated “woman without a man” who has sauntered into town from Louisiana (where she might have killed her husband) and rented a room from Blue.

The story plays out in two acts. I won’t tell you any more, except about the plot, except I will remind you that if you see a gun in the first act, it will be used before the play ends. And the same can be said about a bright red rayon dress.

This is a very good play, bringing up a lot about neighborhood “gentrification”, the problems of being a “Negro” even in prosperous Detroit in 1979, and about not only white dominance, but male dominance. The Blacks are trying to hold off the  whites, and the women are trying to outsmart the men.

So what, you ask, is different? What is different is that the Studio has taken all the chairs out of one of its main theaters, and turned the entire place (now looking more like a large black box theater) into a cabaret, a club, the Paradise, complete with live music. There are 30 or so tables, each seating two or four people, the bar is open, and the actors roam the floor of the club, coming within inches of many, if not most, of the patrons. Your instructions are not to stick your feet out, not to touch the cast members and not to talk with them. They are not going to break character. (There is, in one corner of the theater a raised platform holding the room Silver is renting, with a boundary curtain closed when the room is not being used in the show.)

It is like being a part of the show, but not quite. As Edie said, we are in the cast; we are playing “audience”. But really, we aren’t in the cast; we are just sitting at tables, as the show goes on around us. It is great fun, no doubt about that, but does it add anything to the play to do it this way? I don’t think it does, and in fact think that more traditional direction might wind up with better showing off the writing. The main reason is that while the majority of the show does take place in the club in which we are sitting, no part of the show takes place in the club during an actual show, when there would be an actual audience. So our being part of the audience in the actual club is artificial; it makes no theatrical sense. Just as a contrast, we have been to at least one show where we were similarly part of the audience, but also had a role to play in the show. It was years ago (like most things we have done) in a black box performance of Julius Caesar in Stratford-upon-Avon, where our role was to play the citizens of Rome. It was very effective as we moved across the large stage as the scenes changed.

But, as I said, this is a good play. It’s part of a three play trilogy by Morisseau, called the Detroit Plays. Studio, in 2017, put on one of the others, Swing Shift, in a more traditional way. I remember seeing that and, at the time, thinking that this was an extraordinary play. Because I thought that Paradise Blue was a really good play, but not an extraordinary one like Swing Shift, I couldn’t help but wonder if a traditional presentation would have made it seem to me to be extraordinary, as well.

The acting was universally good – this was not one of those plays where the actor you remember most is the one who was not up to par. They were all well over par. (Don’t think golf where over par is bad; I guess that is obvious.)

Special shout out to Kalen Robinson, who plays Pumpkin. She was spectacular from her acting, her facial expressions, and her singing voice. But this it not to take from anyone else.

I am sure I am not the only one, but Morisseau’s Detroit Plays remind me 100% of August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle, consisting of 10 plays, each set in a different decade. We have seen most of Wilson’s cycle and all are perfect (okay, some more perfect than others). Does Morisseau’s Detroit Plays compete with or complement Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle. I think so. As I remember my reaction to Swing Shift, I would conclude they are brothers from different mothers, as they say. I don’t know if I think that Paradise Blue reaches that level or not, and part of my ambiguity is that the club setting takes some of your attention away from the play itself. I’d like to see it more traditionally. Then perhaps I could answer my question better.

One last thing. From our table, we could see probably two thirds of the audience, and because you were constantly looking in different directions as the actors moved from place to place, you also got to see the audience differently from when all you see are the backs of their heads. And I will say that it was fascinating to see how some people were paying strict attention to everything going on, while others didn’t seem to know where they were or why they were there. And one prominent table had a woman who spent most of the play looking sad as she tried for an hour to adjust her hearing aids. From the actors perspective, rather than looking over the heads of and ignoring a darkened audience out in front of you, wandering through this one with full lights on, they must be able to see the same things I was seeing. I just wonder if it was at all disconcerting. Certainly, that was not obvious if it was disconcerting, but I have to wonder.

Do I recommend you see it (it’s about half through its run, and will keep being performed until early July)? Absolutely. Why?, you ask. Jeez. Didn’t you read what I have said?

Every Sunday, the question is the same. Which comes first, the Times crossword or the blog post. Today, the crossword won.

In part, that is because our two grandchildren spent the night with us, to give their mother (their father is away for a few days for a family bar mitzvah) get some serious packing done for their Tuesday move to their new house.

Neither Edie nor I slept much last night, being sure that four year old Izzy, sleeping not in an available bed, but in his sleeping bag on the floor, would wake us mid-night. Of course, he didn’t,  sleeping from about 9 until 6:30.

This morning, until his mother arrives, he is “wrestling” withhis giggling sister, and watching Wonderland, a children’s math ccartoon program, which he alternates with Numberblocks, another. Both seem to be instructive, and his ability to work with numbers seems pretty good. He also likes to quiz the adults: “and what is 78 and 31 and 269?” On Wonderland this morning, while seemingly skipping only one or two numbers, the show taught him how to count to a googolplex. He tells me that googolplex is the biggest number, so I ask him whether googolplex plus one isn’t bigger.

He thinks a bit, and reluctantly tells me “yes”, but then 10 year old Joan intervenes and tells me “no, because in theory a googolplex doesn’t ever end.” This stops me in my tracks, and I accuse her of engaging in philosophy, not mathematics.  But I assume she is correct.

Yesterday, we took them to Michelle and Josh’s boat, on a cool and windy day. The boat didn’t leave the slip, but we all had a good time, even dog Zeke.

We had dinner at Dockside, a short walk from their boat, and Izzy, who is a very active, restless, and determined kid, found a new BFF, Blake, on the restaurant lawn. They seemed to be clones in every way but looks.

As we wait for their mother to pick them up, Joan and I have been told we are now on a mission, that a bad guy has entered the house, and our job is to find him before he finishes his dastardly deed. What is the bad guy trying to do? He is trying to steal our TV connection.

After they go home, hopefully I can close my eyes for a few minutes before our 2 pm theater tickets. We are seeing Paradise Blue at Studio. Then, home in time to watch the Nats sweep their series against Arizona? In their ladt 4 games, they have scored 38 runs. If they win today, they will be only 1 game under .500, back were they were before losing 8 games in a row.

That’s it for today. Gotta find that bad guy.

When historians look back on this period of time, I think they will generally agree on two things. First, that Joe Biden’s mental facilities had declined during his presidency, but that there was little in his actions as a chief executive that negatively reflected on his personal situation. Second, that Donald Trump was totally out of his mind during his second term (partially out of his mind during his first), and that most Americans at the time either didn’t recognize it, or were psychologically unable to believe it or act upon it even if they recognized it at the time.

There are, of course, many of Trump’s actions and proclamations that can be named to evidence his mental decline, but the one that should make it clear to everyone is his latest diatribe against Leonard Leo, the long time employee and chair of the Federalist Society, and its public face for much of that period. Wikipedia defines the 70,000 member Federalist Society as “an American conservative and libertarian legal organization that advocates for a textualist and originalist interpretation of the U.S. Constitution.” It was founded in 1982 in part to check federal power and protect individual liberty (according to its description of itself), and to counter liberal thinking at American law schools. It now has chapters at most of those law schools, and has been relied upon by Trump in choosing candidates for federal judgeships. Again, according to Wikipedia, 43 of the 51 Trump nominees to the federal courts of appeal during his first term were members of the Federalist Society, and six of the nine Supreme Court justices have been members of, or have had other connections with, the organization. During the first Trump term, Trump acknowledged that he was no longer going to rely upon the reviews and recommendations of the American Bar Association for his judicial nominees, but was going to rely on lists provided to him by the Federalist Society, which would do much of the vetting for him. At least, this is what I recall.

I don’t have the statistics before me, but the positions taken by Trump during his second term have been widely knocked down by the courts at all levels, frustrating the president to no end. Trump’s reaction to losing cases in court has (even in his first term) been to badmouth the judges who issued the opinions. And, as you know, his badmouthing seems to have no limits. During his second term, he has continued and increased this practice, which of course does him no good. Within the past few days, he has started on a new tactic, which will also provide him with no benefit, by badmouthing, of all people, Leonard Leo.

Now, it is easy to badmouth Leonard Leo if you are someone whose philosophy differs from that of the Federalist Society. You can badmouth him by challenging his positions, the choices he makes in making recommendations to the president, his ways he has wielded and honed his influence. But of course, this is not what Trump is talking about. Trump is taking a different position; he seems to be blaming Leo for the positions taken by judges recommended by the Federalist Society who have issued opinions which are against Trump’s positions in cases brought before them. It is not only to blame the judges; he is now blaming Leo.

In 2016, Trump said “We’re going to have great judges, conservative, all picked by the Federalist Society”. Last week, Trump said: “I was new to Washington, and it was suggested that I use the Federalist Society as a recommending source for judges. I did so, openly and freely, but then realized that they were under the thumb of a real “sleazebag” named Leonard Leo, a bad person, who in his own way probably hates America.”

What, other than a form of mental collapse, would induce Donald Trump to say this?

There are other signs of mental collapse. How can a president in his right mind tell Maine and California that, unless they change their positions on the ability of a very few trans athletes to participate in certain competitions, that they will cut off all federal aid to the state? How can a president in his right mind be involved in all of the family self-dealing that the Trumps find themselves in now? How can a president in his right mind believe he can simply have people, including citizens, picked up off the street and, even though they have never been convicted of a crime, have them indefinitely imprisoned in third party countries out of American supervision? How can a president in his right mind, simply on his own whim, decide to destroy Harvard University, decide to upset the lives of hundreds of thousands of foreign students in this country, and so forth? How can a president, again on an apparent whim, state that tariffs on foreign steel are going to be doubled to 50%?

Donald Trump is 78 years old, an age when some mental changes can be expected, perhaps, although not as serious as the ones he is experiencing. But there is another fellow, whose mental health is just as suspect and that, of course, is Elon Musk, who is only 53. Musk has clearly accomplished a lot in his short life (although some of those accomplishments seem like they have peaked already and that decline has set in), but he leads a strange life, sleeping in his offices, having children with multiple women and wives, and so forth. But now we see what the problem is for Elon Musk, as he ends his tenure as the not-head of the non-agency DOGE, which has destroyed so many government programs and government employees in so short a time. We now see that Elon Musk is a druggie, presumably always high on something – with ketamine being his drug of choice, but not the only stimulant or hallucinogen that he seems to take on a regular basis. At this rate, you would assume that Musk may never make it to 78.

So, for the past four months, the United States has been under the sway of a charismatic narcissist with declining mental capacity, and a brash non-charismatic narcissist entrepreneur who is constantly on drugs. One of them may be gone for now, but the other is still riding high, Icarus-like, with thousands of followers in all branches of government, and millions of other Americans who have been fooled, are themselves a bit out of balance, or who just don’t pay attention.

And guess what? Our problems are just beginning, and the light at the end of the tunnel is rather dim. We don’t know what the future will bring us as the mind of our president continues to decline. What happens if he loses it altogether?

But……hang on.

So, I am a little tired this morning, so let’s just look at some cartoons that have recently shown up on my Facebook page.

And now, a few license plates I have spotted recently.

Okay, now I am more awake.

Today is an important day in the Harvard world. It is both the day of the 2025 Commencement (the 374th Commencement) and the day of the scheduled permanent injunction hearing on the federal government’s attempt to ban Harvard from enrolling foreign students. What do they call it when seemingly unrelated things happen at the same time? The word escapes me.

I read this morning that President TACO might back off the foreign student ban to avoid the injunction. Will be interesting to see what will happen.

But clearly everyone at Harvard has been thrown for a loop. Take psychology professor Steven Pinker, who last week wrote a New York Times op-ed about what he called Harvard Derangement Syndrome (HDS), a disease modeled after another, called Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS). I suffer from TDS, I believe, but don’t consider it a disease, but rather a rational reaction to irrational circumstances. HDS is something else.

HDS is a disease characterized by concluding that whatever Harvard does is somehow Satanic. It is highly transmissible, it appears, but can also lead to a reactive syndrome found in those affiliated with the university, like Professor Pinker.

How can I prove this? Here is a photo of Pinker from his Wikipedia page:

I saw Pinker this morning on MSNBC, talking about HDS. Here is how he looks now from a screenshot during his appearence:

I rest my case.

Things were very different when I graduated in 1964. The night before graduation was quite celebratory, and I didn’t go to sleep until what they used to call the wee hours of the morning. I was not expecting to be roused out of bed at about 6 a.m. by the sounds of bahpipes (I hate bagpipes), drums and fifes in the Kirkland House Courtyard with an “invitation” to come and march  to services at Memorial church. I went and ecumenical (1964 style) they were, and then we all marched again to our seats between the church and Widener Library for the Commencement exercises, tthrough which (in spite of it being an absolutely perfect weather-wise day) I think I mostly slept. Our commencement speaker was a big disappointment. He was an ex-president of Colombia, and I recall him being bald and speaking with a heavy accent. His name – Alberto Lleras Camargo. Here he is:

Ever hear of him?

Then, I remember going back to Kirkland House for lunch and diplomas. My mother, father, sister and grandmother were all there.

I went back for my 25th reunion. The speaker that year was Benazir Bhutto, the daughter of a Pakistani prime minister and a future  prime minister herself, only to be assassinated in 2007. She was a mesmerizing speaker, unbelievably inspirational. Her death was a great tragedy of the early 21st century.

The only other Harvard commencement I attended was at my 40th, where the speaker was Kofi Annan, UN Secretary General. My memory of that is that the 40th reunion class was seated so far back that I could neither see nor hear anything. But I am sure he gave a great speech. Why wouldn’t he?

That’s it for today. Think I will check MSNBC and see what happened at that hearing and who the 2025 speaker was, and what he/she/they said.

Jan Psaki started her show last night with a very interesting segment to which I wish I had paid more attention. She went through a list of things that Trump rails against as horrific waste, fraud and abuse, and then she listed the people guilty of these exact activities whom he has pardoned. It was quite a list. I bet you can see it on YouTube or the MSNBC site. Worth watching.

I did not watch Lawrence O’Donnell last night, but I am sure he was rightfully gloating about Trump’s postponement, once again, of EU tariffs. As he says over and over, don’t believe Donald when he threatens high tariffs. He will back away just before they are scheduled to go on.

This is a lesson that the NYSE has not learned. The Dow climbed 740 points yesterday on the news.

For some reason, it reminds me of Michael Jackson, when one of his kids was a baby and Jackson dangled him/her out of an upper story window to the shock of the crowd below. (Do I have that right?) Everyone was sure he would drop his kid, but then he pulled him/her back. Dangling the tariffs is obviously different  but to my mind, it’s the same thing. Sort of.

Tired of me writing about the president? Okay, let’s move to RFK, Jr. We know his position on flourides and food dyes, and now we know it on Covid vaccines for children and younger adults, but what is this about medical journals? He is forbidding government scientists from publishing in respected journals?  The government will do its own publishing? What do you make of that? Is it a blow against the medical publishing business, or is it a blessing for them? Now, they won’t have to publish false news, and they will be able to criticize what the government publishes at will. But the government’s own published pieces won’t be peer reviewed before publication, just reviewed by Kennedy’s policy folks.

The reason I didn’t watch O’Donnell is that I was watching the pitiful Nats-Mariners game. Nats lost 9-1. Did I say it was pitiful? It was pitiful.

And while I was watching, I was preparing for my Wednesday morning Haberman Institute leadership meeting, for which I have to leave soon. Tonight at 7:30 EDT, we have a free Zoom program on Christian nationalism. You can register at http://www.habermaninstitute.org. We already have over 800 registrants.

And I didn’t even mention Elon Musk’s many failures with SpaceX or Tesla. And what about DOGE? Does it still exist? Who runs it?

And, as the Harvard saga goes on, what is this news about the government stopping all student visa applications. That isn’t just Harvard, you know. It’s everyone.

So, I leave you here for now. I am already late.

On April 4, I wrote about the transition in Germany from the Weimar Republic of the 1920s (post-World War I, lasting fewer than 15 years) to the Nazi Third Reich (lasting 12 years until the defeat of Hitler). I based it on a book When Germany Turned the Clock Back by American journalist Edgar Mowrer, published in the early 1930s, shortly after Hitler’s assumption of power.

You may want to read or reread my April 4 post, both because the subject is so interesting, and because I tried to identify any similarities today with Donald Trump’s rise to power in the United States.

Last night, I started reading another book by an American journalist, published even earlier, in 1920, titled And the Kaiser Abdicates, written by S. Miles Bouton. I am far from finished with the book, but one point made early on by Bouton is worth some thought.

Remember, when he wrote this book, Bouton knew nothing about Nazis. They didn’t exist yet. He only knew that the government of the German Empire was rapidly changing, and he ascribes this to more than the waging of and the loss of the World War. Of course, it was less than 50 years from the time the many separate Germanic states united under Prussian leadership. Prussia remained firmly in control of the new Empire, and Bouton outlines the similarities and the differences (as between Prussia and Bavaria, as an example) of the parts of the German speaking world that banded together.

The radical changes came about, he believes, largely because of the emergence of socialism in the 19th century and the success of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917.

Bouton uses a broad definition of socialism, to include both moderate forms of socialism and the form of socialism that developed into Bolshevism. He traces the development of socialist thought in France, Germany and elsewhere, pointing out the wide variety of socialist programs. But, although all of them do not advocate the destruction of private property like the Bolsheviks do, they all do have certain common elements. And the most important of these common elements is the thinking of humanity as being divided by economic class, rather than by ethnic or national differences. And in Germany, which – in spite of its historic political fragmentation – the concept of ethnicity (and ethnic superiority) had long been strong.

One of the results of dividing humans by economic class was the downplaying of these national and ethnic differences and the development of a much more cosmopolitan outlook, with a thought that at some point in the future (to Communists that point was relatively soon, to most others it was more aspirational), nation states would vanish and all of humanity would work together for the benefit of everyone, equally.

Not only was this anathema to most Germans of middle and upper classes, but it was attractive to the German proletariat and to many German intellectuals. The result was that, immediately after the end of the first World War, the socialist party was the largest political party in Germany, and the threat of its growth and takeover was real, particularly in the mind of those who had watched what was happening in Russia with fear. And, to Bouton, everything that was occurring in Germany was the result of this conflicting vision of a national future, or a socialist future.

Into the mix, Bouton of course throws the Jews. He says (and he is not trying to be critical, I don’t think) that Jews are very prominent in Socialist thinking, not only in Germany, but in Russia as well. He says that this is not surprising, as many Jews are intellectual and even more Jews have cosmopolitan leanings. As they are scattered throughout Europe, and as they naturally interact with each other, Bouton believes that national boundaries are less meaningful to the Jews than they are to members of other ethnic groups. He is undoubtedly correct in all of this.

For this reason (and now I am getting ahead of where I am in the book), it would not be surprising for antisemitism to rise and for Jews to be targeted as enemies of the state.

Let’s now move back to America today, and here I get back on my hobby horse. When you look at Jews today, the picture is different. Yes, Jews are still scattered around the world (and over 5 million are in the US), but now there is a Jewish state, Israel. This means that Jews perhaps are not looked at as anti-state cosmopolitans as they were one hundred years ago. So there is no reason for residents of countries outside of Israel to look upon their Jewish populations are internationalists and socialists who are looking to destroy the political order of the world. Jews have their own state, and they are like everyone else.

Now, unfortunately, the Jewish state is in a terrible neighborhood, so there is a new reason for antisemitism to exist. And for that reason, I don’t think that the antisemitism of the 1920s and the antisemitism of the 2020s are the same. The first dealt with fear that Jews were out to destroy national differences; the second is that Jews have a state in a place where some believe they shouldn’t be and want to oust, or to subordinate, them.

Of course, there are lingering splotches of the old form of antisemitism, just as in the 1920s, there were those who were antisemitic because they thought the Jews killed Jesus. But then, as now, the main reasons were political, and they were different reasons. So, the more conservative forces in the United States can support the Jews because they support the Jewish nation state of Israel, and members of the left can be antisemitic because they believe that Israel is an international trouble maker and a relic of past thinking, of 19th and 20th century thinking, where the results were to hold the nation state as a goal superior to the goal of uplifting the struggling irrespective of national boundaries.

But most people aren’t thinking in these terms and they tend to create a simple definition of antisemitism, such as “they just hate Jews and always will”. I don’t think that is the case. I don’t think that those who are anti-Israel are necessarily broadly antisemitic. This is why most of them can work with Jews who are anti-Israel, or at least who are against the actions of today’s Israeli government, without bashing them as Jews. The fellow who shot the two outside of the Capital Jewish Museum last week. Is he anti-Israel? Obviously. Was he making a political statement? He says so, and there is no reason not to believe him. Is he antisemitic more broadly? Neither you nor I have a clue at this point. The same questions can be asked about Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil, who is being held for deportation. Yes, he was an organizer of pro-Palestinian demonstrations at Columbia. Is he anti-Israel? Certainly, he is at least against the actions of Israel today; beyond that I don’t know. Is he antisemitic? Based on what I have read about what he has said about the dangers of antisemitism, etc., I could not conclude that he is broadly antisemitic. The conflation of broad antisemitism and being strongly anti-Israel is to me both wrong and very dangerous.

According to US government statistics, there have been approximately 1,200,000 military deaths in United States history. We should know that number today, and we should wonder if we, and the country we have brought about, is worthy of the their sacrifices, and those of their families. We should wonder because our government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” seems to quickly have become a government “of the person, by the person and for the person”. The person, of course, is Donald John Trump.

While the list could be interminable, let’s look at some of things things that this Donald John Trump can effectuate all on his own:

(1) He can have people, non-citizens and citizens, picked up off the street and whisked away to prisons far from their homes, both in this country and abroad, without giving them any opportunity to contest their arrest, and he can do this to people who have not been accused of any criminal activity.

(2) He can disrupt the world’s commerce (yes, the world’s) by putting tariffs, high and low, on goods coming into the country from other nations, and can raise or lower, collect or postpone or threaten tariffs at his will, with the privilege to change his mind whenever he wants.

(3) He can attempt to destroy major law firms by denying their attorneys security clearances needed to represent certain clients in disputes with the government, and bribe them into doing pro-bono work that he approves, as a condition of their being allowed to continue their normal practice.

(4) He can attempt to destroy major universities by taking away federal funding of all types (including scientific and medical research funding), by threatening their tax exempt status, and by threatening their ability to enroll foreign students.

(5) He can politicize and direct the Department of Justice (and offices of United States Attorneys across the country) to attack his perceived enemies, and to dismiss litigation against his perceived friends.

(6) He can apparently fire at will members of independent agencies, who have been nominated for terms of a set number of years

(7) He can attempt to eliminate Congressionally established departments and, if he is unable to do that, believes he can simply eliminate all of their personnel and take away all of their responsibilities.

(8) He can dismiss agency heads without cause and assign their jobs to his cronies who already have other jobs, in effect eliminating the positions

(9) He can authorize the wealthiest man in the world to have access, with a select but unvetted group of techies, to all government agencies and allow them to announce the closing of specific offices and the firing of specific personnel on a whim

(10) He can eliminate the country’s soft power by cancelling the programs of USAID, without regard to the effects of such actions on the recipients of USAID programs world-wide, or the thousands of employees of USAID.

(11) He can change government policy, and Constitutional interpretation, by stating that all programs to support minorities in effect discriminate against the White majority and are therefore unconstitutional, and he can eliminate all such programs.

(12) He can deny climate change and cancel any and all programs he deems to be green energy programs.

(13) He can rail against all judges that rule in ways that meet his disapproval, and can threaten them with prosecution.

(14) He can decide that hundreds of thousands of individuals and families from troubled countries (such as Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti and Afghanistan) who are living in the United States under temporary approval should lose that temporary approval and go back to the countries from which they came, irrespective of whether or not they face prosecution or other dangers in those countries.

(15) He can enrich himself and his family by building hotels and golf resorts in various places around the world and adjusting American foreign policy to benefit those countries.

(16) He can enrich himself and his family by creating and selling cryptocurrency to the highest bidders and permit them access to lobby for their own interests directly with the president.

(17) He can accept an airplane from Qatar which will be given to him (okay, his foundation) after his term ends, even though it will cost up to $1,000,000,000 of taxpayer money to refurbish it.

(18) He can undermine the Congress of the United States by threatening the political future of any Republican Senator of member of the House of Representatives who votes against him on any measure.

(19) He can threaten Canada, Panama, and Greenland by saying that, if necessary, the United States will take them by force.

(20) He can cancel the visas of anyone in this country on a student or work visa at will, forcing them to leave the country.

(21) He can ignore the orders of the courts, including the orders of the Supreme Court, while saying his is obeying them.

(22) He can permit his Secretary of Health and Human Services to act in opposition to all medical science, threatening the health of the nation.

(23) He can propose legislation that will have the effect of eliminating health insurance for up to 8 million Americans.

(24) He can destroy our most important alliances, including our NATO alliances.

(25) He can order a military parade on his birthday that will cost the country more than $50,000,000.

Of course, this list only scratches the surface of what Donald John I seems to be able to do, all on his own. Oh, yes, he does have his entire MAGA movement behind him, or so he says. But, guess what? MAGA is not a movement, it’s a cult, and there is a big difference.

We have no idea where this will all end up. I understand that. But we are just four months into a presumed 48 month presidential term. I say presumed because Donald John I is 78 years old, and there is a chance that he will not live out the term, just as there is a chance that his confused mind will grow more and more confused as the months go on, leading to an inability to continue to govern. We will see how this plays out.

In the meantime, as I have said, this is Memorial Day, and we should remember those who died in the service of the country, and ask what we should be doing to honor their sacrifice.

But then again, what is Memorial Day? How much observance of this day is there? It is day off of work for many, it is a day of mega-sales for many more, but is it truly a day of remembrance?

Before writing this post, I did go through this morning’s New York Times. There is one op-ed by former Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust on page A-19, speaking of those who died during the Civil War. That is the only mention of Memorial Day anywhere in the paper that I saw. Certainly nothing on the front page (where there should certainly be something), which talks only of Trump’s graft, increases of police killings of blacks, how law firms are choosing pro-bono work when under agreements with Trump, Israeli strikes in Gaza, questions surrounding Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, and an article about that excruciatingly important subject that is on everyone’s mind (or if it isn’t, it should be), table tennis in Qatar.

Sometimes a crossword puzzle has a theme; sometime it does not. The same, I guess, with a blog post. Today has no theme.

Digresssion: Did you see today’s crossword puzzle in the NYT? Could you figure out what those colored squares were supposed to mean? I couldn’t. Does that make me a bad person? End of digression.

I finished reading George Vecsey’s biography of Stan Musial, called Stan Musial. As a literary work, I wouldn’t rate it very high, but as a biography of Stan Musial I think it serves its purpose. If you don’t know who Stan Musial was, he was a star for the St. Louis Cardinals for about 20 years and is compared in the book with Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams as the best players of their era.

How does Musial come out in the book? Basically, as a salt of the earth guy, nice to everyone, not overly intellectual, a little naive perhaps, and rather simple. A child of Polish immigrants, growing up quite poor in the mining town of Donora PA, getting a chance to play baseball (first as a pitcher) and jumping to the big leagues by the time he was 20.

He lived in St. Louis for over 70 years, ran a restaurant for many years (Stan Musial’s and Biggie’s) and for a period of time with Joe Garagiola (remember him?) a bowling alley (Redbird Lanes). He lived in three houses in St. Louis, two very modest ones in South St. Louis and then a less modest one in Ladue. He lived to be 92, and spent his final years battling Alzheimer’s and cutting not only his grass, but the grass of his neighbors (who knew?).

In addition (also in the “who knew?” category), he spent time campaigning for John Kennedy for president in 1960, traveling around with other Democratic celebrities (it is remarked that Musial was one of the few Democrats in professional baseball – may still be the case). One anecdote, having nothing to do with Musial, struck home.

Two of the other Kennedy campaigners were actress Angie Dickinson, and scholar Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. You probably don’t remember this, but in one blog post some time ago, I talked about when I became “Art”, rather than “Arthur”, and mentioned three people who, for their own reasons, referred to me as “Artie”, which (then, not now) made me cringe a bit.

I quote Vecsey: “Dickinson declined to go by formalities, even toward the august Schlesinger, whom Michenor [author James Michenor, another Kennedy hanger-on] describes as ‘not a man who unbends easily’” Dickinson addressed Schlesinger as “Artie” – probably the only person in history who did.”

Maybe this is just something every Arthur has to put up with.

Michenor, about 15 years older than Musial, and Musial became very good friends for the rest of their lives, by the way. This also is put into the “who knew?” file.

I found the entire book very interesting.

But that’s enough for the Cardinals. On to the Nats.

What kind of season will this be? After starting the season by falling several games below .500 with a bull pen that couldn’t throw a strike, they crept up to just under .500 and it looked like things were going to get better. And then they lost 8 in a row and were 9 below .500 and things looked awful. Now, they have won 7 of their last 9 and are with 3 or 4 of .500 (you can do the math), and we are back in questionable territory.

The thing about the Nats, for those of you who do not know, is that they are now a very, very young team. They have 11 players under the age of 25, and only five (Lopez, Chafin, Williams, Finnegan and Bell) who are over 30. So the future looks okay, but…..it’s baseball.

As I mentioned a day or two ago, I am now reading Being Henry, Henry Winkler’s memoir, and I am enjoying that, as well. The common element between Stan Musial and Henry Winkler is that they were both terrible, very bad, horrible students during their elementary and high school years, suffering from dyslexia, among other things, and they went on to great success because of their innate talent. There is clearly a lesson there, somewhere.

All of this baseball and Fonzie talk is to escape the reality of where we are today.  With all the turmoil our president has stoked in his first four months in office, the question is whether it’s possible he can keep it up for the next 44 months. That will be a tall order.

If he can and does, we may be beyond repair. If he can’t and doesn’t, it’s impossible to guess what that means. It seems we are on a lose-lose path, doesn’t it?

It does to me.

I stopped by the National Postal Museum yesterday. You didn’t know there was such a thing? It’s one of the Smithsonian  Museums, located in the Ben Franklin Post Office, right next to Union Station. It houses permanent and temporary exhibits of (mainly) U.S. postal history and features many postal rarities. What Trump will do to it in his realigning of Smithsonian priorities, who knows. I did take photos of a few special items on exhibit. You will find them interesting, I think.

I also visited Union Station. It’s been a long time since I have taken a train. I used to use it to go to New York or Philadelphia when I was gainfully employed, but am not sure that I have at all since I retired.

I haven’t followed it closely, but there has been a change of management at Union Station, and there is a plan for a major redo, but I must say it looks pretty good as is. It was very busy and you could feel a lot of positive energy. It is true that a number of shops are empty, as are some of the food court stalls. I had spicy chicken at a badly named Wok-aholic restaurant. It wasn’t bad, and at today’s prices, $12 seemed okay. They also don’t give you a tip option on your bill.

Digression: Speaking of tip option, Breads Unlimited in Bethesda, where the sales clerks do nothing but reach to a shelf behind them or in the counter in front of them to get your order and put it in a bag, they now give you the option of giving a 30% (!) tip. Say, what?? End of digression.

Back to Union Station. The DC non-profit,  Turning the Page, which sells used books, records, etc., for the benefit of DC schools, has opened a store in Union Station. The price of hard backs at their other locations has always been $6, but at Union Station, they are marked $12.

I decided to buy one book (it is a charity, after all), but no more. I asked thevyoung clerk why they were charging a higher price here, but he was new and didn’t know. He said he would check into it.

I gave him my book and he rang it up at $5.30, and said, “How is this?” I was appreciative and asked him how he did it. He told me that it was a trick he knew. I think he wrote it up as a children’s book.

What was the book?

Henry Winkler’s new memoir. I read about 100 pages last night and recommend it. It is well written, obviously an easy read, and interesting. And, yes, it has a signature.

And, oh yes, my Friday wandering did get me over 10,000 steps. That was the goal on a beautiful day.

This was what I had planned for yesterday.

I had a hard time sleeping Tuesday night. I don’t know why, nothing unusual on my mind, but I would have had as much sleep if I had stayed up and watched the House Rules Committee’s meeting, which began at 1 a.m.

Luckily, I didn’t have to run around yesterday, so all was okay. My only scheduled requirement was a Zoom Financial Committee meeting, and I was wide awake for that. In fact, I was wide awake for most of the day, and even covered about 2 miles on my treadmill (walk, don’t run!), so all was okay.

The highlights of the day were two Zooms – the first, sponsored by a group called My Jewish Learning, was about the Jewish community of Japan, and the second, a Haberman Institute event, was about the earliest virtually complete Hebrew bible manuscript, called the Sassoon Codex.

When the program about Japan began, I was disappointed. The presenter was Rabbi Andrew Scheer, the leader of the Jewish Community of Japan. Rabbi Scheer is a young American who, after college in the U.S., went to Japan as an English teacher, returned to the US, went to rabbinical school and was trying to decide, along with his wife, where they wanted to live when he got a call from Japan asking him if he wanted to return there. He has been there ever since and it looks like he plans to stay a while.

The reason I was disappointed is that he began by giving us a tour of the building in Tokyo that serves both as a synagogue and a community center. The building did not look very interesting, and I was almost ready to turn the program off, although Scheer is an appealing young man who speaks very well. But I stuck with it and was glad I did.

Here is some of what I learned. The Jewish community in Japan started in the late 19th century, and is still relatively small. The Jewish Center, which I think is the only synagogue in Tokyo (other than a Chabad House) has only 140 or so family membership units, which would make it a relatively small congregation by American standards. They have a religious school with about 50 students. Their congregation comes from all over. Many of the Americans are in the military. About 40% of the congregation are ethnic Japanese, either married to non-Japanese choose, or children of mixed marriages, or individual converts. They have a significant number of European Jews, a few from Israel and a smattering from other places.

They have six Torahs, two need repair, one has ivory handles. They have three sections of seating in their sanctuary – one for women, one for men, one mixed, and that seems to work out well (apparently, this was at one time not uncommon elsewhere, although it is uncommon now). They have their own prayer book, based on the ArtScroll prayerbook.

There is no kosher restaurant in Japan (there is one New York Jewish-style deli; the rabbi has never been there), and kosher meat is flown in from the United States. They fly in the kosher food for congregants to use at their houses. Chabad hosts meals for tourists, etc., but the Jewish Center does not.

There is no visible antisemitism in Japan, although books like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion can be bought in the history sections of some book stores.

Scheer looked at the yahrzeit wall in the Center and told the story of some of the people on the wall, each of which was quite interesting. When asked to say one thing that Jews outside Japan would not know about Jewish Japan, he thought a minute and then answered: Dave Spector. He said that Spector is the most famous TV personality in Japan and if you walk down the street with him, he will besieged constantly by locals wanting to take a selfie or say hello. He is originally from Chicago and, according to Scheer, no one in Chicago has ever heard of him. I see that Spector does have a Wikipedia page that describes him as a “gaijin torento” and goes on from there. I did not read beyond that opening description.

That was this morning. This evening, Haberman had a terrific program featuring Sharon Liberman Mintz, who is a curator at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York and also has a consultant on Jewish manuscripts for Sotheby’s. The program was on what is known as the Sassoon Codex (named for the early 20th century manuscript collector David Sassoon) and is the oldest existing book on parchment containing all 24 books of the Hebrew bible. It is owned by the ANU Museum in Tel Aviv (formerly known as the Museum of the Diaspora), and was donated to the museum by Washington DC lawyer and philanthropist (and formerly Ambassador to Romania) Alfred Moses, who purchased it at Sotheby’s for something like $39 million.

Mintz, who seemed to know absolutely everything about this manuscript and any other Jewish manuscript you could mention, told the story of this book and put it in historical context, explained how its history can be gleaned from notes and marks contained on its pages, and talked generally about how these books were put together. She also referred to the Aleppo Codex, now I think at the National Library of Israel, which is older and which served as a model for this book, but which – in its current condition – is far from complete. (If you are interested in the Aleppo Codex, you can read the book by the same name by Matti Friedman, which I read several years ago and found fascinating and easy to read. She also talked about the Afghan Quire, which is even older, but is not a bible, but a prayer book, and which is now owned by the Museum of the Bible here in Washington, but will be on display through the summer at the JTS Library in New York.

Mintz’ was a terrific presenter and if you are at all interested in this topic (and why shouldn’t you be?), you will be able to see her presentation as early as tomorrow or Friday either on the Haberman website (www.habermaninstitute.org), or on YouTube (just search Liberman Mintz Haberman Sassoon, or something like that). I high recommend it.

Today I hope will be a quiet day. Daughter Hannah and family are closing on their new house on Kansas Avenue NW this afternoon, we will pick up the kids after school and bring them back here, and will join Hannah and Andrew (and hopefully, daughter realtor Michelle) for a celebratory dinner.

Last night, I wrote the blog post that I was going to publish this morning, but as a result of the shootings last evening outside of the Capital Jewish Museum, I am going to hold off on that one (I will use it either tomorrow or never) and post something different.

As you probably by now know, yesterday at the very civilized hour of 9 p.m., as a program for young professionals and young diplomats sponsored by the American Jewish Community was ending at the Museum, a man who had apparently been pacing back and forth in front of the museum approached a group of four individuals and shot and killed two of them, one Israeli and one American, both Israeli embassy employees, and a couple planning on getting married. A major tragedy, to be sure.

The shooter has been identified as a 30 year old man from Chicago, who was apparently involved in left wing activity and who, after killing the two embassy personnel, entered the Museum, shouting “Free Palestine, free Palestine”. He was quickly arrested and it appears offered no resistance.

For those who don’t know the museum, it moved to its current location two or three years ago. It’s in a rather placid part of the downtown area of DC, near to, but away from, the hustle and bustle, especially at night. When there are night time activities at the Museum, my guess is that most people find street parking, and that when you leave the building and walk to your car, or to the nearest Metro stop, you do not feel any danger.

I will say one other thing. The last time Edie and I went to the Capital Jewish Museum to see their exhibition on delicatessens, it was a Sunday afternoon and we parked a few blocks away. We walked into the lobby, which is glassed in, and relatively unprotected. There was a single young woman sitting at the reception desk and, if there was a security guard, he was not very noticeable. In fact, I remember remarking to Edie as we left something like “I am surprised they don’t have better security here. I think anyone could just walk in.”

Truth is, I don’t know what type of security they provided. I assume there are cameras all over, and maybe there is a security guard and he had just stepped away when we were there, but it certainly was not overwhelming. No metal detectors or anything like that. But, as I said, the neighborhood is rather quiet, and maybe there was a feeling that whatever security they had was enough. I don’t know. And, although I know a number of people deeply involved with the museum, I never did ask the question.

I am not sure that any level of security might have stopped last night’s killings. I don’t know what level was present. If someone was pacing back and forth in front of the museum (as I have read), perhaps that person should have been confronted. I do not know.

In addition to grieving, the natural reaction (you already hear it) is that security must be increased everywhere where Jews are likely to congregate. And perhaps that is a correct response, particularly if it turns out that there are attempts at copy-cat attacks elsewhere. But in Washington DC, with its visible array of institutions and organizations, and where an estimated 300,000 Jews live, you may not ever be able to achieve the type of security that some would want. And, of course, the more security you have, the more attention you call to yourselves, and the less pleasant life can be.

We don’t know enough about this particular attack to know why it occurred, except that the shooter wanted to make a point about the war in Gaza. We don’t know, for example, if he knew that he was shooting Israeli embassy personnel, or he was just looking to shoot some people leaving the Museum, or leaving that particular event. We don’t even know if he knew that the two that he shot were Jewish (the event was not limited to Jews).

And – and I want to emphasize this – we don’t know if the shooter was anti-Israel, anti-Israeli policies in Gaza and other neighboring Palestinian lands, or antisemitic. We don’t know if he was making a political statement, or a broader cultural statement. We don’t know what he thinks generally about Jews. Does he equate all Jews with Israel or Israeli policy? He obviously has grievances against Israel, but does he have grievances against all Jews because of his perceptions of what Israel is, what Israel has done, or what Israel is doing now?

I know I repeat myself too much on this topic, but both the Israeli establishment and the opposing Palestinian leadership and supporters want to conflate Israel and Jews. Israel is now officially “the Jewish State”, and Palestinians throw the words “Jews” and “Israelis” around as if they refer to the same thing. In order to try to establish a universally accepted definition of antisemitism, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) has developed a definition which provides examples of antisemitic actions or statements which include certain types of attacks against Israelis, Israel or Israeli policies. While there have been objections to this definition (especially among progressive Jewish groups that are adamantly against an array of Israeli policies), the definition has taken old in many places and been adopted by many governments and international organizations. I find the conflation dangerous.

I said this when the attack on the Pittsburgh Tree of Life Synagogue occurred seven years ago, and when attacks occurred at other synagogues. There will be such attacks, it appears, from time to time, and certainly security concerns are very important, but they are not a sign that everything is falling apart and that it is dangerous for Jews or Jewish institutions to live their normal lives. Overreaction can be as bad as under reaction.

An example? A young Jewish man shoots a Nazi official in Paris. An isolated incident. The result? Kristallnacht and then the Final Solution. Another? The heir to the Austrian throne is shot in Sarajevo. The result? World War I.

Each of these events were isolated events, even though they were based on much broader social tensions. Neither of them were Pearl Harbor. Yet, like Pearl Harbor, they led to unbelievable tragedy.

Yes, the death of two members of the staff of the Israeli embassy, probably extraordinary nice and talented young adults, with families and ambitions and promise, is terribly tragic. Just like the deaths of 1200+ Israelis living in left wing kibbutzim and attending a Negev music festival were terribly tragic. And, yes, so are the deaths of 50,000+ residents of Gaza, more than two of whom were as young, as nice, as talented, etc., as the two shot in Washington last night.

How to end? The human condition? The war must stop? All of that, and more. But until the underlying problems are solved, if they ever can be, we must work to avoid tragedies such as this but, at the same time, understand that, from time to time, they will happen.

There are so many things that are confusing me this morning. I am just going to run through a few. You are each welcome to straighten me out on any or all.

(1) Deportations. I must not be the only person totally confused about what the Trump administration wants to do to various categories of non-citizens. The administration has taken actions against specific individuals, against specific groups, and against wide swaths of people from specific places. There has been a lot of push back, of course, and a lot of litigation filed. The extent to which the administration pays attention to any of the courts is unclear. The most obvious example is the Obrega Garcia case, where the Supreme Court has said that the administration must attempt to facilitate Obrega Garcia’s return from imprisonment in El Salvador. This is the ruling of the Supreme Court, and it appears it is being ignored by the president who says he always follows the courts. Then, there is the utter confusion on the case of 350,000 Venezuelans who had been given Temporary Protective Status by the Biden administration. The Supreme Court has said that Trump may vacate that TPS, but I don’t think it has set any rules yet as to how that would or could work. In the meantime, the court has said that the U.S. cannot deport specific alleged members of the Tren de Aragua gang of Venezuela without giving them certain specific rights to contest their deportation. But now, if the revocation of TPS for Venezuelans would simply allow the administration to tell all 350,000 goodbye and good luck (which maybe it does), is it possible that the alleged members of Tren de Aragua would have more rights to contest their position than other Venezuelans, or would it mean that, to the extent that the court gave them those rights, they would lose them, as they would be thrown into the overall Venezuelan pot?

And then, of course, there is a question of who has free speech and other constitutional rights. When the constitution gives certain rights to “persons”, does that mean citizens, or legal residents, or everyone? Until now, the thought was that it covers everyone. Is the court going to change that? The court has declared that corporations are people for the purpose of having certain rights; will it now say that corporations have more rights under the constitution that live persons? And what about birthright citizenship, which is another constitutional provision that declares that anyone born in the country and subject to its jurisdiction is automatically a citizen. If a child born to parents who are not supposed to be here is denied citizenship, (in addition to potentially leading to stateless people, or to family breakups) on the basis that that they are not subject to the jurisdiction of the country, how can they be, say, deported which is something that can only happen through the jurisdiction of the country? See my points?

Did you happen to see an article in yesterday’s print edition of the Washington Post by Philip Bump? It was titled “What you – yes, you – should know about interacting with ICE”, and was on page A16. It was basically a guide as to your rights if you are stopped and questioned by someone from ICE, or someone who claims to be from ICE. Basically, when you should cooperate with them, or when you have to. When you can and should stay silent or walk away, and what to do if they restrain you or tell you that you are being detained.

If someone came up to you and told you to get in the car and drive to Lubbock TX right now without missing a turn, you would need to look at your GPS, because otherwise you might not even know which way to turn out of your driveway. And if you were told that you couldn’t use GPS or a map or call anyone to ask them, what would you do? What if you were being given instructions by your abductor, and told to turn right, veer left, go straight, when you had no idea if they were giving you good instructions, or leading you to a place of no return?

After reading Bump’s column, I came to realize that knowing what to do if ICE stops you, knowing your rights, or what the possible results of disobedience might be whether or not you are within your rights, is the equivalent to being forced to drive to Lubbock. The laws and regulations governing the right to stop you on the street, ask you questions, detain you and so forth depends (even when it is clear) on your own personal status, and on the authority of the particular individuals who stop you. They are complicated enough that it is unlikely if you will ever memorize them, or know which rules apply to a particular crisis situation, and it is equally unlikely if the person stopping you knows the rules either, or cares what they might be.

(2) I am equally confused about what is going on in Israel and environs. A friend asked me the other day what I thought, and I repeated what I have been saying for some time now. I just don’t know.

Clearly, what is going on in Gaza is unacceptable. Israel’s actions are unacceptable; Hamas’ actions are unacceptable. The only man who can fix things turns out to be powerless, and the leaders of “moderate” Arab countries turn out to be only partially interested because they know that any solution might adversely affect them. For Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, the UAE, etc., it is NIMBY writ large. Not in my back yard. For Israel, it is Stand Your Ground writ large. I can do anything so you won’t destroy me. For Hamas, it is catch me if you can (and if you do, I don’t really care, someone else will take over and perhaps I will be a martyr). For the poor folk who happen to live in Gaza and cannot leave, it is more than you would like to admit, the equivalent of Jews in central Europe during the Hitler years, who both couldn’t leave and, if they could leave, had nowhere to go (because no one would take them in) and had to stay where they were awaiting rescue or annihilation.

I understand that I have no control over this situation, and no influence, but I also know that if I ran this particular zoo, it would remain a zoo under a leader who was totally confused as to how he should lead.

(3) I will stop. As usual, we could go on and on. But to what avail?

I want to start today with a brief note about Indian restaurants (of interest only to those who live in Washington or who might be visiting us one day, soon or not so soon). We tend to patronize Indian restaurants because we eat a lot of vegetarian food out of the house, and you can be sure that an Indian restaurant will give you a lot of choices. Here are four that we (read that: I) recommend: (1) The Cafe of India on Wisconsin Avenue is only about a mile from our house and is our standby, especially for carry out. It is always good and always reliable, (2) Maya is an Indian/Nepali restaurant also on Wisconsin, but in Bethesda, maybe three miles from the house. We have eaten here several times over the past few years. Again, always good and always reliable, (3) Tikka, which is only about 3/4 of a mile form the house and which just opened a few months ago (replacing another Indian restaurant which had been there a while, but which we (i.e., I) would not have placed on this list). Tikka is better, but maybe the food is a bit too fancy for a simple Indian restaurant? Maybe, and (4) the one we discovered last night (because – who knew? – Maya is not open on Mondays), Delhi Spice, on Bethesda Avenue in (as you might suspect) Bethesda. This might be the best of them all. And if you go……try to fig curry (no, it is not a dessert), made with figs, cashews, paneer (cheese), and ginger. Now you have our favorites. (Perhaps I should have added Indique in Cleveland Park, but we have not been there for a long time.)

[A digression. I read today on his Wikipedia page that Johnny Mathis has had 9 holes-in-one. You believe it? That got me thinking. Has anyone had more than 9? It turns out that there are two golfers who each have more than 50! End of digression.]

I didn’t pay too much attention to the world at large yesterday, because I spent a day more like the days I spent before my retirement 12+ years ago. I left the house before 9 and didn’t get home until about 4, because I had back to back meetings that lasted about 5 hours. I will explain.

The first week of June is scheduled to bring a couple of changes to my daily activities. On Monday, June 6, I am ending my 9 years as president of the Jewish Funeral Practices Committee of Greater Washington, Inc., and on Thursday, June 9, I am slated to become president of the Haberman Institute for Jewish Studies, Inc., of which I have been serving as vice-president for the past 6 or so years. At age 82, I did not think I could/should do both – we will see how long I can keep doing one.

The Jewish Funeral Practices Committee has been around for more than four decades. Its primary activity has been contracting with local funeral homes to provide traditional, frill-free funeral services for members of the metropolitan area’s Jewish community at prices well below standard prices charged by other funeral homes. Its two funeral homes perform about 200 funerals a year, and the Committee helps by providing some ancillary services in accordance with Jewish tradition. At current rates, the Committee sponsored funeral would cost a family about $3500, which is half or less than what they would most likely pay elsewhere.

The Committee is a staff-less, volunteer run operation, with a few people being paid for specific services. Because there is no regular staff or office, fund raising is not normally part of the activities required, and even the role of president is not particularly time consuming unless there is a determination to change funeral homes, or unless a particular problem crops up. Other than that, it is basically monitoring services, a little trouble shooting, answering questions that families might have, and so forth. The website is http://www.jewishfuneralsdc.org if you want to learn more.

The problem is that there is no one to take my place as president. I gave notice that I was leaving the position about a year ago. We have a board of directors of about a dozen people, only two of whom (plus myself) really spend any time working on the organization’s affairs. One of those individuals, the vice-president, is a very active individual who has long expressed his desire never to become president, and the other is the treasurer, which is a function that does require a substantial about of time and attention to detail. The other board members are inactive and appear to want to stay that way.

Over the past two years, we lost two very active members who have passed away, one after a lingering illness, and one suddenly. We have added a few new members since then with high expectations, but so far the expectations have exceeded the reality. Although I am somewhat uncomfortable about stepping down and leaving our vice president with at least temporary authority, I have decided that if I don’t follow through, I never will be able to, and I will be in this job for the rest of my life. I had given a year’s notice, and I think it is time for it to be someone else’s problem. I have agreed to stay on the board.

On the 9th of June, also as a result of a long time commitment, but without any regret, I am scheduled to become the Haberman president. The Haberman Institute for Jewish Studies also has been around since the mid-1980s, most of the time under the name The Foundation for Jewish Studies. We renamed it after its founder, Rabbi Joshsua Haberman, passed away at the age of 98 in 2017. Haberman has a more active board and a three person staff. It is a bigger operation, although you could not consider it big. Fundraising is a part of the activities of the board because it has a mid six figure annual budget, and most of its activities themselves do not bring in significant amounts of revenue.

Haberman provides lectures and classes on Jewish subjects. It is not a purely religious organization, and its areas of concentration include culture and history, as well as religion and philosophy. It is not a denominational organization (neither is the Funeral Services Committee). The Haberman programs, once all in person and locally centered, now are primarily (but not exclusively) online, and our audiences (which average about 250 per program) are split between residents of the DC area, and people scattered around the United States and Canada, with usually a smattering of Europeans and Israelis thrown in (in spite of time zone differences). The website is http://www.habermaninstitute.org.

Our board is active, our activities are growing,  working with the organization is a welcome challenge, always interesting and rewarding, and I am looking forward to continuing working with it as long as I can.

I have no idea how it has happened that all the activities I spend my time on have something to do with the Jewish community. While I was practicing law, I was involved in the leadership of a number of professional organizations, but even then I had my hands in some Jewish communal organizations. I have been on two synagogue boards and served both as officers, I have been a board member of a local and thriving Jewish day school, and I spent 20 years as a board member (and 6 as an officer) of the American support group for Ben Gurion University of the Negev, in Israel. If you had told me while I was in my 20s that this is the way things were going to work out, I would not have taken you seriously.

But – for sure – no regrets. We will see what happens from here on out…..

After Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and Germany declared war on the United States,  President Roosevelt signed several “Presidential Proclamations” affecting citizens of enemy nations, whether German, Japanese or even Italian. But the severest of his proclamations came a few months later when he signed Order 9066, which had a more limited, but more unjust, scope.

Order 9066 affected residents of western United States were of Japanese, or partial Japanese ethnicity only. It didn’t matter if these individuals were citizens of Japan, whether they were in the United States legally or without authorization,  or even whether they were natural born or naturalized citizens. They were rounded up, forced to abandon businesses and homes, and moved to barracks in isolated “camps” in remote areas of California, Arizona, Idaho and Utah. Altogether, about 200,000 ethnic Japanese were subjected to this treatment. Of these, approximately 120,000 were U.S. citizens. They were kept in these camps for up to four years.

Yes, there were objections. Lawsuits were filed, and the issue went up to the Supreme.  In the well known Korematsu case, the Court ruled 6 to 3 that the dangers created by the war overrode the Constitutional rights of these individuals.

I had long known about this outrage, but paid little attention to it. Then, some years ago, there was a craft show at the Renwick, and a very, very good show, of works created by internees in these camps. It really humanized the situation for me.

Now, at the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum, there is a large exhibit of paintings by three women, two of whom were interned in these camps, and one of which was able to avoid interment by moving to another part of the country. Their names are Miki Hayakawa, Hisako Hibi, and Mine Okubo. I visited the exhibit today and listened to most of a tour given by an excellent museum docent.

This painting was made before the car during the depression, when Okubo worked for the Federal Arts Project.

Here is another by Okubo from the same period.

This is a prewar painting by Hayakawa.

The style of painting changed after they were removed. Here is what Hibi saw when she reached the first camp, a transit camp.

Here is an actual photo of Mine Okubo at the Topaz, Utah camp, where I believe she lived over two years.

In the years after liberation, styles changed again. Here is a work of Okubo from the 1960s.

And a very different work by Hisako Hibi from that same period.

And a final one, by Okubo. It’s simple, but I liked it.

It’s a large exhibit of history and human resilience, as well as art. Try to see it. It will be there until mid- August.

I have a secret, and I am going to tell you what it is. You know the Saudi royal family, and the royal families of the UAE and Qatar? Donald Trump thinks that they are his friends and, believe it or not, not only do they not consider him a friend, they consider him stupid. Believe it or not, that’s the truth.

That’s something that those Arab royals and I share in common, by the way. The difference is that Trump’s stupidity isn’t going to hurt the royal families and might even help them, but it might really hurt my family and friends and everyone else living in the United States.

The royal families of the Arabian peninsula are out to enhance the wealth of the royal families of the Arabian peninsula. Not that one royal family cares about another royal family; each cares only about it self. This is the way royal families are. And this is also the way that wannabe royal families are – wannabe royals like the Trumps, for example.

Hitching the Trumps to the Saudis and the others may be good for the Trumps. It is hard to believe that it is good for the United States. And it seems to be in direct conflict to the concept of America First. The history of Arab peninsula politics should make that clear.

Of course, becoming the leader of a royal family is not enough for Trump. Royal families themselves are internally notoriously unstable, as we know. They have internal rivalries and they tend, from time to time, to witness ruthless goings-on, with people being killed, exiled, and who knows what else? They also spawn members who become very ambitious and consequently stir up enormous amounts of trouble wherever they may go.

So while Trump wants the Trump name to connote royalty, he does not want to share the glory with other Trumps as long as he himself is alive. He wants all the power. So in addition to wanting to become the equivalent of an Arab royal, he wants to be a political dictator. Like Putin, or Xi, of any of the Kim Jongs. But while they, his fellow political dictators, want to control parts of the world that they consider to be within their spheres, Trump would like to control all parts of the world. Well, maybe not Africa – I don’t think he wants to get involved at all in Africa. We can guess why that is.

So, as I have said before, in all of his doings, Trump may be thinking of the Trump family more than he thinks of the United States. America First may in fact be much closer to Trumps First. And, to be a bit less cruel to him, perhaps he thinks that if Trumps come first, his version of America (a Trump creation in the making, to be sure) will just tag along and be all right, too.

But most of America do not seem to think that the Trump version of their country is what is needed. Certainly the polls show that, although about 40% or so of Americans are still Trumpers wearing MAGA hats. The courts have certainly turned against him. Obviously, the Democratic party. More and more Independents and more (if not more, and more) Republicans are backing away from him.

We know that the Arab royal families are playing him (the Qatari palace in the sky being one big example). We know that the Chinese think they are winning the tariff battle. We know that Putin is not moving towards leaving Ukraine. And it looks like Iran thinks that they can use him to their advantage as well. We will have to see how all of this works out, but so far it does seem that MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell has it right: Trump will bark and threaten and rage………and then he will back off. So if he is not only a bully, but a scaredy-cat bully, why should anyone fear him.

Anyone, that is, except those who are subject to his whims. Such as everyone in this country, no matter how they got in or what rights they have been given by the Constitution, the laws, presidential proclamations or otherwise, any of whom can (it appears) be picked up off the streets and shipped to foreign countries like El Salvador, Libya or Lousiana. Or institutions which are dependent on federal funding, which includes every university in the country, every research institution, every state and local government, and every hospital. Their defenses are very limited. It doesn’t matter that the courts will rule for them (or, rather, it doesn’t matter for the most part) because court rulings take a long time and a tremendous amount of resources and by the time they win and Trump loses, they are out of money, out of business and maybe out of the country.

Strong action by Congress (and that means some Republicans are going to have to back away from lockstep backing him) and continued court rulings will have to carry the day until the Congressional elections of 2026. And then it is up to the American people. They will have to realize that, again as I said a few days ago, that Make America Great Again is not a slogan that should be taken literally as a goal of Trump, but rather a slogan that is meant to bamboozle the American population to think that they are his goal, whereas they are simply a means to create the Royal Trump Family, led by the one Great Leader, Donald the Immortal.

That’s it. You may think that everything that I wrote down today is trite or repetitive. But I think it is true. Robert Reich (you know who he is, right?) has been putting out his thoughts on line even more often than I have (he also has about 1000 readers for each of mine) and he answered the question the other day of why he is writing so much, not only every day, but often more than one time a day, and isn’t he just being annoying. He response was simple. Things are so fraught, he said, that he just feels compelled to try to give his readers some context, even if it means repeating things over and over. (I am not quoting him, or even paraphrasing him, and I don’t even remember what exactly he said, but this is close enough. And if this is not what he said (and it might be or it might be not), all I can say is: shame on him. Because this is what he should have said.)

Today is my granddaughter Joan’s 10th birthday.  We celebrated last night with a Shabbat dinner for the entire family.  We will take her to an art supply store this afternoon so she can pick out her present. Tomorrow, she is having an Escape Room party, to which we were not invited.

Joan has always been exceptionally quick and clever, IMHO. Some of you may remember, when she was just a kid, that I used to post things she said on Facebook. To honor her birthday, here is a reprise of some of the postings from when she was 2 (I posted until she was 5):

(1) Two year old Joan’s Massachusetts grandmother came to visit yesterday, bringing her three colorful bead necklaces. She put each of them on carefully, obviously liking them. She looked appreciative at her grandmother and said, “You have any earrings?” Getting a “n, ” she said,”Any bracelets?

(2) We drive 2 year old Joan home. Her snack is a small bag of Cheerios. She drops a few on her seat and tells us they are dirty. Edie says they aren’t dirty, but Joan asks us to roll down the window. She wants to throw them out for the birds.

Edie: you think birds like Cheerios?

Joan: yes, they like Cheerios and they like seeds.

Me: some birds like worms

Joan: G-pa! You are so silly.

(3) So we drive with 2 year old Joan by Ft. Reno Park. It is dark outside.

Joan: Did you see a gorilla outside the window?

Me: A gorilla?

Joan: Yes, a gorilla playing baseball with a tennis racket.

Me: I don’t think so.
Joan: Yes, and an elephant wearing a glove so it can catch the ball.

(4) 2 1/2 year old Joan and her mother are having somewhat of a morning power struggle. Hannah tries to end it by saying: “Look, I am in charge here.”

Joan responds: Only a little”.

(5) I am working with 2 3/4 year old Joan on her counting. I hold up four fingers and ask her to count them. She looks closely at each one but doesn’t say anything. I ask her how many she has counted. She says: All of them.”

(6) After the children’s Purim service last night, Adas served the kids chicken nuggets and tater tots, with catsup the only condiment. I tasted the food and found it inedible. Joan was nibbling at it.

Me: It doesn’t taste very good, does it?

Joan: It does. I LOVE catsup.”

(7) Joan and I are playing with her Legos. I make something and ask her what she thinks I made. She responds: A mistake.

(8) It’s the last day of Passover school vacation, and Joan is at our house. I ask her what she wants to do. She says: Scuba diving.

(9) Joan asks me if I know what she sometimes calls Cinderella. I tell her I don’t. She tells me that sometimes she just calls her Cinder and sometimes Cinderelli. Me: Do you ever just call her Ella? Joan: Not since she was a baby.

(10) Edie, Joan and I have a Mother’s Day supper at Ledo Pizza. Joan starts to talk to the baby at the table next to us. Then she turns towards another table with small children and starts to talk to them. I say: Joan, why don’t you turn around and eat your dinner? We don’t know any of these people.” She responds: Yes, but we can make new friends.”

(11) Her two grandfathers pick up Joan at her preschool. Sometimes, her car seat can be tricky, and her other grandfather was trying to get everything snapped. This is usually her grandmother’s job, and I say: This is when your grandma says ‘I persevere’. Joan says: Nooo. I say: Nooo? Joan: she does not say “persevere”; she says “persist”.

12) Joan’s father tries to each her Spanish. Joan decides to take a pretend photo of her mother. Say “cheese”, she says. Hannah says: Queso. Joan: Mommy, not the cheese you eat, the cheese you say to a camera.

(13) Joan sees a picture of me when I was her age. Her reaction: My, you sure have grown.

(14) Hannah tells Joan that she and Joan’s father are going out for a walk. Joan says, “I don’t want to be alone.” Hannah says: “You won’t be alone. You are with Grandma and Auntie M.” Joan responds: ” WE don’t want to be alone.”

Happy 10th birthday, Joan.

I listened to a Republican Congresswoman from Utah this morning on C-Span. She was asked by a caller why the Republicans kept in lockstep supporting anything that Donald Trump said or even hinted at. Her response was interesting. She implied that she may or may not agree with everything he said or did (note I said “implied”, not “said”), but that he was elected to be a “disrupter” and “disruption is always uncomfortable”, but that the important things were his goals, and not his individual actions or statements. “Ignore the process”, she said, concentrate on the results.

I think that is just another way of saying “The ends justify the means”. Now, when I (and probably you) went to school, we learned that the philosophy behind the phrase “the end justifies the means” was morally repugnant. Maybe we learned that Machiavelli first said it (false) or Marx or Lenin (false and false), but whoever said it, it wasn’t said by us. We believe in having a fair and just process; we don’t believe in ignoring the process. We never thought we would elect a president who thought that the ends justify the means. It was, to put it simply, anti-American. But, maybe here we are.

Following this segment on C-Span, there was another conversation with a Democratic Congresswoman from Wisconsin. She was asked a similar question, but phrased differently. It had to do with whether or not all Republican members of Congress were voting for bills consistently with their opinions of the particular bills. Her response (which I have heard before, of course) is that virtually no part of the MAGA agenda would pass the House of Representatives if Republican members of Congress voted their conscience. They vote (and speak) the way they do in public, she said, simply because otherwise they would be “primaried” out of office by opponents running on Elon Musk’s money, and would be replaced by others who would also vote the MAGA line.

This is, of course, another way of saying the same thing. Or maybe two ways – the individual members vote the way they do to stay in office (the ends justify the means), or the MAGA world will drive them out of office if they don’t vote the full MAGA line (the ends justify the means).

But then you have to ask: what are the ends that are so important that they justify any and all means? Other than saying he will “make America great again”, what is Trump really promising? And in responding to this question, you cannot help but asking the question as to whether his “make America great again” slogan is really the “ends” we should be focusing on, or whether the aggrandizement of the Trump family fortune is the “end” and the slogan “make America great again” is only one of the “means” to get there. This is a serious question, after all, because look: (1) even if Trump succeeds with his goal of making America great again, he knows that the next president or the one after that could unravel everything he is doing, because nothing regarding a nation-state is permanent, while (2) building up his family fortune could support his family for generations and generations, and he would get all of the posthumous credit.

Trump is now ending his trip to Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar, proclaiming it a great success. Perhaps it is a success; I think it’s a bit early to know. (You know the old riddle: when the Chinese sage was asked what he thought about the effect of Napoleon’s defeat on Europe of the 21st century, he responded “it’s just too soon to tell”).

We do know that it is important to the Trump family to maintain good relations with all three countries. After all, in each country, there is a Trump development (hotel or golf course) under development and Trump cannot afford to have any of those ventures go south. In addition, sovereign funds or royal family members have apparently invested over $3.5 billion in son-in-law Jared Kushner’s funds. As a spillover effect, it is important to Trump that each of these countries maintain good relations with the United States.

It is also very important for the United States to do whatever can be done to allow Boeing to be viable. Boeing, after all, is crucial to our national defense, to our commercial aviation business, and to our workforce and the economy of those places where it has major installations. So, the acquisition of a large number of new jets by the Qatari airline is important. What we do not know is whether or not Qatar would have bought these planes from Boeing without Trump’s intervention. We don’t know the terms of the deal – the delivery schedule or what could enable Qatar to change its mind as time goes on. What we do know is that, in typical Trump fashion, in making the deal public, he both overstated the number of planes to be acquired and, even more, the value of the overall contract. We do know that Boeing has had a lot of problems in the delivery of safe planes.

Trump also has announced that Saudi Arabia is going to invest $600 billion in America. This would also be good news, to the extent that it does not also mean that there will be large businesses in America that will be beholden to Saudi control, or that the Saudis will be investing in industries, like defense or information industries, that will provide them with sensitive information that might jeopardize our security.

As to Abu Dhabi, it appears that the world’s largest installation of AI data banks will be built in the Arabian desert. There is clearly much more room there than remains in the historic battle grounds of Loudoun County Virginia, but what does this mean, again, for the security of AI data, something that the future world will be so dependent on? Does it make sense, regarding the security of our own nation and economy, to have essential AI data being stored in another country, much less in another country in the volatile Middle East? How does that comport with Trump’s America First mantra?

All of these pronouncements may help our economy, and any of them may cause serious future promises. They all may come to fruition, or they all may be aborted. But do they add to our security, or do they tie us into connections with places with quite unsavory pasts and very unpredictable futures.

Did you notice that I didn’t even mention the $400 million jet, otherwise known as either the Flying Bribe I or The Albatross for Captain Gullible?

Weather forecasting is, we all know, very important, especially in those regions which are most often subject to dangerous storms and floods. An article in today’s Post talks about the shortage of 500 or so meteorologists at the National Weather Service in locations such as the Louisiana Coast and parts of Alaska. This is the result of the Trump firing of hundreds of employees at the agency and of hundreds of retirements and resignations as a result of the Trump threats.

They are now scrambling for replacements. I have an idea. I think that they need to look outside the box at people with no necessary government experience, but with experience in judging upcoming weather events. I think they should hire people like Judi Barret. Judi Barret, an 84 year old woman, has time on her hands, I am sure, and would love to help out. She lives in Brooklyn (she was born in Brooklyn as well) and I am sure would like to in a more consistent climate, such as that found in Louisiana or in Alaska.

What, you ask, is her particular experience that would make her a good hire for the National Weather Service? Well, I am glad you asked. Judi Barret is the author of the famed book Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.

Now, I know what you are saying. You are saying that meatballs never fall in either of those locations and that Judy Barret would not be qualified to accept employment. But now, let me tell you a secret.

I have a friend who is a meteorologist and worked for the federal government for his entire career. He is now retired (he retired prior to the Trump drama), and I have asked him questions about how about how forecasts are really made. I have asked him this question because sometimes forecasts do seem a bit inaccurate,  as you would have to admit.

He explained to me all of the equipment that meteorologists use to try to determine how the weather will behave. He explained it to me step by step. I don’t remember most of the steps, but I sort of remember part, but not all, of the final step. It involved something about opening a window.

In addition to Judi, by the way, I think that the government should consider me for a position as a weather forecaster. Again, you ask why. It’s because of one of my most consistent character traits. I am (you can Edith, if you do not believe me) a fair weather fan. And, as a fair weather fan, I would tend to forecast fair weather, which is something that we all can use, especially those of us who live in places like Louisiana and Alaska.

There are reasons for this. One is that almost everyone would rather have fair weather than foul weather. Foul weather, they say, may be good for chickens and ducks, turkeys, and geese, but not for people. And, besides that, when we have foul weather, we wind up with weather related damage, which needs to be repaired. And (in case you haven’t been reading the papers), we no longer seem to have an operating Federal Emergency Management Agency, so we are no longer in a position to repair weather related damage. Therefore, fair weather is essential and fair weather fan meteorologists are the best way to get fair weather.

I will end this with a quote from the lady sitting near me here in this room. She says “I don’t think this is your best blog”. She will sorry when I tell her that we are moving to Alaska. After all, be it ever so humble, there’s no place like Nome.

Things are now so confused that it is impossible to know what to do next. Other than putting your left foot in, I feel rather paralyzed. This post will be rather short – I have a busy day ahead. My choice was to ramble a bit now, or wait until late this afternoon. And who knows? By this afternoon, I may think that it’s time to put your right foot, not your left foot, in.

First, let me say that following the Caps and the Nationals is turning into a waste of time. The Caps will undoubtedly lose to the Hurricanes tonight in the NHL playoffs. The Caps had 11 more points than the Hurricanes did in the regular season, but they are down 3 games to 1 in a best of seven series and (no secret here), Carolina looks like a much better team during this series.

As to the Nats, where to start? Is it time to change managers? Martinez has been with the Nats as manager for seven years and the team has done very poorly since their World Series win in 2019. We have been told that the team is “rebuilding”: this means that they work hard to get young prospects who will set the league on fire and they trade away all of their better players in order to get those young prospects. We have traded away Bryce Harper, Juan Soto, Kyle Schwarber, Trey Turner, Victor Robles, and more and, yes, we have a very young and “promising” team. This year was to be the year that the rebuilding showed results and a week or so ago, when the team was 2 below .500, you could have some optimism that things were settling down and at least we would be competitive. But here we are, several days later, having endured a 7 games losing streak and finding ourselves 9 games below .500. The year looks like all our previous years when we dig ourselves into a big hole, and then do okay, but not okay enough to let us climb out of that hole. They need a spark. They need more than a spark. They need a managerial reset, perhaps. The Pirates and the Rockies have already changed managers this spring. Is DC next?

Now to the elephant in the room. Donald the Self-Declaimed Great. I must admit to total confusion. If you are not equally confused, you aren’t paying enough attention. Which leads me to a statistic that I saw the other day. Of sites viewed on the internet, only 4% of them could be described as political. Is that possible? I would say that 75% of what I look at is political. But if you don’t look at political sites on your computer or phone, and you don’t watch cable news, or listen to radio news when you are in your car, and if you certainly don’t read a newspaper, how do you know what is going on? And if you don’t know what is going on, how can you knowingly participate in a democracy? And if you can’t participate in a democracy, what good is a democracy?

We have a president who claims not to know if he is to follow the Constitution, when all you have to do is show him the oath of office he took at his inauguration. We have a president who claims he is following the courts, while he consciously ignores everything they say he must do. We have a president who thinks that “tariff” is the most beautiful word and who reverses most of the tariffs he puts on, causing chaos in the business circles world-wide. We have a president who believes that most immigrants should go back to the countries from which they came (even Afghans with temporary protected status should be kicked out of the country, because Afghanistan is safe again), unless they are white, Afrikaners from South Africa, whom we should welcome here with open arms. We have a president who favors Israel unconditionally, except that he is now in Saudi Arabia, meeting with leaders of all of the regional countries except for Israel. We have a president who wants to take over (militarily if necessary) Panama, Greenland, Gaza and Canada, although even he knows that is not going to happen. We have a president who is being bribed by Qatar to accept a plane (that probably won’t happen either), and who is minting cryptocoins to be sold to the highest bidders, who turn out to be either foreign countries looking for influence, or criminals looking for pardons (which they will probably get). We have a president who believes that his family business is clearly more important that the business of the United States.

In the meantime, his party controls Congress and is coming up with a bill (which they want to call something like The Most Beautiful Bill in the World) that will decrease Medicaid spending and may put an additional 7,000,000 Americans out of the health insurance market. This will of course put more pressure on our hospitals and urgent care centers, which are facing their own financial tightening, and will undoubtedly lead to the the US life span falling even further behind other advanced countries (of which we used to be one).

As I say too often, I could go on and on, but I won’t. We have no idea what is going to happen in any aspect of our lives. And when I say “we”, I include Donald, because he clearly doesn’t either. As my 10 year old granddaughter tells me when she thinks that I say something dumb: That’s not from the left side of your brain or the right side of your brain, that’s from the back of your brain. Everything from Donald comes from the back of his; that is all he seems to have.

Qatar is one strange country. It is our ally, and the ally of many of those who are not our allies. It provides funds to people we like, and to people we don’t like. It houses a large American military base, is the home of Aljazeera, and has attempted to mediate the Gaza War. It has a fiercely independent foreign policy.

It is also a fantastically wealthy country, but its wealth is primarily shared only with that small portion of its population are ethnically Qatari. It has so much money that it doesn’t mind giving some of it away. It has given American universities millions and millions of dollars to start Arab studies programs, which have become the target of many of those who are criticizing the universities for favoring Palestinian over Israeli rights and for focusing on Israel as a settler nation which does not deserve to exist. Qatar, as opposed to the UAE, does not have formal diplomatic relations with Israel.

And now Qatar has given our president an airplane. A fancy airplane. A “palace in the sky”. Now, I don’t know what that means, but I know that it means that it is filled with luxurious fittings and all sorts of impressive gadgets. And this plane, it is said, will become Air Force One, which means that it will be painted on the side with “United States of America” and will replace the two aging jets which have been sharing that role and designation.  The plane is worth, I have read, about $400 million.

But don’t start to wonder whether one country can give another country an airplane. After all, we give things to other countries all the time when we give military and economic assistance, don’t we? But this is, in fact, not a gift to the United States. The deal is that Trump can use it while he is president as Air Force One and that, when his term is up, he can take it and use it as his personal airplane. At least, that’s the way it was first described.

But that seems to be clearly against both the law and the Constitution. It’s a violation of the unpronounceable “emoluments clause”. So, assuming (and this a wild assumption, I know) that the administration does not want to violate the law or the Constitution, another route will have to be taken. And whatever route is taken will have to be blessed by our independent Attorney General (strike the word “independent”) Pam Bondi.

The latest that I heard is that the plane will be given to the Defense Department (that, I guess, is legally OK) under an agreement that, at the end of the Trump presidency, the plane will be transferred by the government to the Trump Presidential Library, which in turn will either let Trump himself use the plane or, perhaps, turn title to the plane itself over to Trump. Thus, her logic goes, Qatar will not be giving the plane to the president at all, and the Constitution will be preserved.

As a legal argument, that reminds me of a case when a Mafia boss wants his goon to kill someone. He points to the target, and the goon says “Shall I kill him”? The Mafia boss does not say “yes” and does not say “no” and simply says “You think I want you to kill him”. And the target is killed. Has the boss broken the law?

Of course, the violation of the emolument clause is only part of the problem we have. The other part relates to national security. You would expect that, before a plane is used to carry the president and his party across the world, you would want to make sure it was safely made, right? And more than that, you would want to make sure that the president could communicate whatever he wants to on that plane without the possibility that it has been bugged.

Now, I do know that, with Signalgate and with Witcoff using his personal cell phone and all of that, it may be that the Trump administration does not really care about this type of security. But guess what….they should. And they should remember that Qatar is friends with some of our adversaries, and we have no control over who has worked on that plane, fitting it out for its new duties.

And, as I understand it, this is not something that can be remedied by having someone walking the plane looking for cameras in the bathrooms. Things are so sophisticated these days that the plane would have to be virtually dismantled and rebuilt to ensure that it is free of devices.

Yes, it is one more example. Add it to the list.

Today started with an unusual Zoom conversation. There were four cousins, all on my maternal grandfather’s side of my family. One of us was in St. Louis (8 a.m.), I was in Washington (9 a.m.), one in Denmark (3 p.m.), and one in Sydney (11 p.m.). It’s the first time we tried this, and it worked out pretty well.

Did I learn anything on this call? Well, mainly it was talking about things I already knew, but….I learned that my St. Louis cousin (second cousin, once removed) and one of my first cousins in St. Louis (not on the call) both studied psychology at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg. That seems random, doesn’t it? These two people do not know each other, even though they live only about 10 miles from each other. One is about 20 years younger than the other. But still…….random.

Studying in Mississippi just seems random, doesn’t it? Especially if you aren’t studying at Ole Miss in Oxford. And Mississippi is sort of an unknown state to most Americans, I guess.

My connections with Mississippi? First (not chronologically), my son in law Josh comes from Columbia, Mississippi, although he left there during high school, and moved to New York. His father Vernon recently passed away and Josh, Michelle, Josh’s two sons, and his mother Gail, took a trip to Columbia to bury his ashes last month.

Second, the first real vacation I ever took with my family (mother, father, sister and grandmother) was a road trip in 1958 to Edgewater Gulf, Mississippi to stay at the Edgewater Gulf Hotel, a 400 room hotel (owned by the owners of Chicago’s Edgewater Beach Hotel) built in 1926, and demolished and replaced by a shopping center in the early 1970s. I remember a number of things about that spring vacation trip. Here goes:

First, I remember staying with cousins in Memphis on the way south (I went to an alcohol infused party with my young cousin, something that at age 16 I had not experienced in St. Louis), second my parents stayed with my mother’s aunt and uncle in their one bedroom apartment and got into an argument that lasted until 3 a.m. about who would sleep in the bedroom and who would sleep on the foldaway couch, and I was surprised, even at a young age, that every shop in downtown Memphis seemed to bear the name of a Jewish shopkeeper.

In 1957, there was no Interstate highway in that part of the country, so we were basically on two lane highways, and it took much longer to get places than it does today. I remember stopping for the night in Granada MS and being surprised how down at the heels the town looked, and how difficult it was for my mother to agree to stay at any of the motels in town. (My mother had a rule then: don’t stay at a motel if it does not have a swimming pool. Why she had this rule none of us knew, because she didn’t swim.)

Then I remember that about 20 miles north of Jackson the road became a divided four lane highway, with a broad green median strip, something that didn’t exist in St. Louis (to my knowledge) and I thought that everything was really up to date in Jackson.

The beachfront in the Gulfport/Biloxi area (Edgewater Gulf only existed as the hotel, as far as I know) was filled with “modern” motels and restaurants, and that impressed me. I didn’t know what to expect. I don’t remember any of the restaurants, but I do know that we went to one, taking my good high school friend Ellen Scheff (also on vacation with her family) to a restaurant located on some water inland from the coast, and the waiter dropped a lobster on her head.

My grandmother wanted to stop and see her former sister-in-law, Sylvia Wrobel, who had been married to her brother Sam Wrobel (he, the former second for Jack Dempsey, and then sought after hand model), but I don’t think we ever found her. At least that’s my memory.

We did find the brother of my Uncle Joe Frey (he was married to my father’s sister Irene; they lived in Dallas). I think his name was Abe, and he had a pharmacy in Biloxi; I remember that my parents went into the drug store unannounced and said hello to him, but their meeting certainly did not generate any excitement.

I think my next venture through Mississippi was during law school, when I drove from St. Louis to New Orleans with a friend (he tells me there were three of us; I am sure he is correct) in my 1964 VW bug. I remember the roadside lemonade stand with White and Colored windows separated by a two by four, with the woman selling the lemonade sitting where she could serve either. I ordered my lemonade at the Colored window and had no trouble being served. I asked her what would have happened if I were Black and went to the White window. She told me that she would have politely asked me to step (one or two steps) over to the other window. Separate but equal.

Then, in the spring of 1998, Edie and I spent a week in Mississippi (we had to go somewhere). I remember a fair amount about that trip. Edie, who keeps kosher out as well as at home, had a hard time finding anything to eat, and had a lot of salad. The only fish was non-kosher catfish in most places, and vegetarianism must have been looked upon as a disease. We went to Jackson (stayed in a nice hotel outside of downtown) and went to a museum which had a special exhibit about (I think) classical Spanish art. We went to Natchez and visited the synagogue where we were shown around and saw a photographic exhibit of old Natchez (we still have the catalog). We went to Canton (speaking of my uncle Joe Frey, who was born in Canton) and found Joe’s father grave in the Jewish corner of the municipal cemetery, and the location on the town square where he had his dry goods store. We went to Port Gibson, where we were able to visit the closed synagogue and the cemetery, where we saw the prominent graves of the grandparents of a St. Louis friend. We saw part of the Natchez Trace. We went to the Vicksburg Battlefield.

And we went to Springfield Plantation, near Natchez. Springfield plantation is known to be the oldest house in this part of the country, built in 1791. It is noted for several things, including being the site of the marriage of Andrew and Rachel Jackson. When we visited, it was lived in and maintained by a man named Arthur Edward Cavalier de LaSalle, and he gave quite a good historic tour. He had taken the house over in the 1970s when it was in ruins, restored it, and operated it as an historic tourist site until his death in 2008 (according to Wikipedia). He was quite a character. He said he loved living at the plantation away from everyone else because everyone but him in the state had what he termed “Mississippi pea brains” and he couldn’t tolerate them. He also had nothing good to say about the United States of America at the time. Was he a Confederate sympathizer? Not at all; he even had less good to say about them. He was, pure and simple, a monarchist and looked forward to the time when the entire of the current United States would again be under the control of the British royal family.

There you have it. The highlights of me and Mississippi.

I have always thought that there was no such thing as an ethnic American. Sure, there were native Americans, but they were in effect pre-Americans. They were barely part of this country, dispossessed and  murdered in great numbers, set out on remote reservations where they were sometimes patronized and sometimes ignored, and – truth be told – barely part of this country.

Then there were the European explorers who roamed the country for over 100 years without really settling here, and then for over 150 years there were the English settlers (and a few wealthy Dutch), who came and stayed, starting on the east coast and moving west slowly, while Spanish priests and their fellow travelers moved north from Mexico. And I can’t forget the many, many Africans brought here in slavery starting in the 17th century and ending in the 19th.

Once we became the United States of America, we opened our doors, at least to anyone we deemed White, not even setting any limits on White integration until the 1920s. Before that, we did have the Chinese exclusion act, and I don’t think members of other racial groups even tried to come here in any significant numbers.

For the last hundred years, our immigration policy has waxed, waned, and grown more and more complex. And for the last 50 or more years, with increases in world populations and in the ability to move from place to place, there has been more and more pressure on our southern border, and greater differences of opinion as to how we should respond.

Everything was magnified during the Biden years, as more and more people flooded our southern border, not only trying to get in, but succeeding. To me, it was very worrisome. We did not have an “open border”, as many on the radical right like to say, and there were attempts to track, and to adjudicate the asylum claims of those who got in, but the border was certainly permeable, the numbers of incomers extraordinarily high, and the system overwhelmed.

Unti the fourth year of his term, although the number of those turned back was large, the number who got into the country and were placed in a collapsed immigration system was enormous.

In my pre-blog days, some of you may remember my saying over and over: immigration will kill the Democrats’ chances in 2024. And there you have it.

Our fluid southern border gave Donald Trump his victory. Effectively closing the border and ruthlessly changing the rules and hunting down those who came into the country seeking asylum, or just hoping to fade into a new homeland, has set thevtone for his presidency. Not only for his presidency, but for his attempt to turn this country into a Fascist dictatorship. Who would have thunk it?

But here we are. Let’s do a quick look at what is happening. ICE and Homeland Security police are rounding up people who either came into the country illegally or who are here having filed valid asylum claims, they are rounding up people who were living in the country under unquestioned temporary permits (such as Haitians, Cubans, Venezuelans, etc.), they are rounding up people who have been living here even with green cards if they are accused (not convicted) of committing any sort of crime (I have read of at least one case where the “crime” was driving with a blown out headlight), or who are living here with a valid visa but have been caught at a protest or writing an article which promotes a policy (most commonly, the policy regarding the residents of Gaza) that our current government disagrees with.

They are rounding these people up whether or not they have lived here a week or 20 years, whether or not they have been productive members of society contributing to social security, paying taxes and so forth. They are rounding them up accusing them of being gang members (whether or not they themselves have committed a crime) and sending them to remote prisons, sometimes out of the country (where they claim they are also out of their control). They are raiding businesses, they are do random automobile checks. These people may be married to American citizens, and may have children who are American citizens. Of course, they want to take the citizenship, guaranteed by the constitution, away from these young children.

And now they are talking about trying to remove both birthright citizenship and the right to be able to face your accusers and state your case, both guaranteed by the constitution, and by law. Law and constitution, be damned.

And, in case you have not noticed, none of these people seem to fit their definition of “White”.

At the same time, as part of its policies of turning day into night, the government has ended (ruthlessly again) all programs developed to give members of minority groups (now, we are talking mainly about citizens) an opportunity to even the playing field when it comes to education, jobs and so forth. They are turning DEI programs from preferred to outlawed overnight. Everyone, they say, should be treated equal and if your race or religion makes it more difficult for you to compete, so be it. Tough. Even if it makes it harder for you to vote. Tough, we don’t want you to vote anyway.

And now, their programs regarding immigrants being set, their disregard of law and constitution being clear, they are out to rewrite history (the head of the Board of Education of Oklahoma thinks you can talk about the Tulsa Race Riots without mentioning race, for example) by banning books, redirecting museums and museum collections and so forth. Will they succeed? Sadly, we don’t know. Back in my high school days, the very conservative Ladue superintendent of schools and board of education required a class titled “American Problems” to be renamed “American Progress” – there is nothing new under the sun.

I could go on and and on, I guess, until they stop me. But here I will stop myself. Have to get to Michelle’s for brunch. Happy Mothers’ Day.

The one point I am trying to make is that the Trump administration has turned an inherited immigration challenge into an excuse to make White racism the cornerstone of this country.

Yes, it is true. The State of Oklahoma intends to put its new high school American social studies curriculum in place next fall, including a segment on the 2020 presidential election to show that Donald Trump would have won that election, but for the fraudulent actions of Democrats (otherwise known as radical woke leftists) to distort the true election results. Yes, you read that correctly. And perhaps you already knew that. Maybe you saw Oklahoma Board of Education head Ryan Walters surprisingly being interviewed on MSNBC last night, where he pulled no punches as to his intentions. Now, it is possible, of course, that the courts will tell the State it cannot teach this curriculum (a case has just been filed), but – America today being America today – it is possible that the State of Oklahoma will simply ignore the Courts.

Walters’ position is that leftists fraudulently influenced the results of the 2020 presidential election, that the left leaning media of the country supported this illegal action, and that students need to get the “facts”. It is time, he says, to teach our kids the truth, rather than the leftist garbage being thrown at them, as supported by those famous terrorist groups, the teachers unions.

Good idea, Ryan. As you say, once they are given the facts, our kids can decide from themselves. They can decide if they want to believe the good old conservatives, like you, or the leftist woke radicals who do not love America, and who are selling the country down the drain. And once you put this new curriculum in place, I suggest some other topics:

(1) How about revising the Civil War curriculum to show that the South would have won, had not those leftist northern woke liberals invaded their homeland, and improperly attacked southern American patriots?

(2) How about revising the curriculum on the Tulsa Race Riots (I’m sorry, the Tulsa Riots), to show that race played no part in these riots and that there is good evidence, hidden from the public eye, that the Black Tulsans simply decided to burn down their own property.

(3) Maybe even going back as far as the Oklahoma Land Rush, to bring to the attention of Oklahoma high school students the fact that the Land Rush was not an open land rush, but was fixed, so that those who won the races had already been promised the land they eventually homesteaded.

Folks, this is serious stuff. Add it to the list.

In the meantime,  Oklahoma isn’t the only place where the 2020 election is back in the news. Right here in the District of Columbia, Trump is nominating Fox “News” commmentator Jeanine Pirro to be the U.S. Attorney. Pirro was a champion of the failed movement to find fraud in the casting and counting of ballots in the election won by Joe Biden. In her deep past, she was the Westchester County NY proscuting attorney, so she does have more experience than super kook Ed Martin, but really……

By the way, according to TV reports, Pirro is the 21st Fox employee hired by Donald. To quote myself, yes, you read that correctly.

Well, to get our minds off that, we are going to the Nationals-Cardunals game today. Last night, the Cardinals barely edged out the Nats, 10 to 0. Sigh.