Art is 80

It is starting, even before January 20.

House and Senate leadership negotiated and came up with a Continuing Resolution to keep the government funded through some time in March. Votes were to be taken today and President Biden (remember him?) was to sign it tomorrow, before large parts of the government were to be defunded and shut down on Saturday.

(Digression: remember when there was a bill negotiated last year by Congress to reform immigration law and it was ready to be passed until then candidate Trump said to the Republicans: “don’t vote for it” and they all said “Yessa”. And remember when Trump told the Congress not to pass a national debt increase bill?)

Yesterday, as the House and Senate readied to approve the Continuing Resolution and took deep breaths of relief, the Tri-presidents Trump, Musk and Ramaswamy (the TPs) said to the Republicans: “Don’t vote for it”, and apparently  they won’t.

So, as of now, the government will partially shut down in two days unless something happens to turn it around. Normally, knowing how Congress acts, you would say: “Well, of course they will come up with something before the Saturday deadline.” But this time, and for the next four years – maybe they won’t.

One of the things that the Tri-presidents want to accomplish, of course, is to cut government spending. So how will they start to go about that? We know that one thing they won’t want to do is increase the national debt, right? Then why are the TPs  By insisting that the debt ceiling be raised now, so far by an unspecified amount. Now, why do they need to increase the debt ceiling now? Answer is simple: they don’t. They want to do it only so they can say – when they will have to increase it later on account of the tax savings extensions they plan on passing to benefit the very wealthy – that “we don’t have to increase the debt ceiling, because Biden already did it.” Pretty dumb, you say? Yup.

But those who voted for Trump don’t yet know how dumb it is. Or don’t care, because they are in a daze, kowtowing to the Great Leaders as after Trump said that he will arrange for rightwing primary opposition for anyone in Congress who does not do what he demands they do.

So the government just might shut down this weekend.

And not only that, as Norm Orenstein said last night on Laurence O’Brien’s show (and I sort of paraphrase): “Mike Johnson is no moderate. He is a Christian nationalist and a very right wing politician. But he isn’t right wing enough for the Republicans in Congress,” and many are saying that they won’t vote for him for Speaker. Will we have another paralytic Speaker battle? Perhaps.

In the meantime, I heard that there are those who want to request, or may have already requested, the FBI to instigate a criminal investigation against Liz Cheney for the work she did on the committee that investigated the impeachment of Donald Trump. Also on Laurence O’Brien’s show last night, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island asked how they think this is even possible since sitting members of Congress have immunity just to make sure something like this doesn’t happen? And, he asked, what kind of prosecutor says: “Let’s go get Liz Cheney. Let’s investigate her and figure out what crime we can charge her with?” And, that is just what is happening. And add to it the attack on the First Amendment that Trump has brought bybsuing thecDes Moines Register for publishing a poll showing he was behind in the Iowa presidential race.

All this before the TPs even take office. Purposeful chaos is on its way.

We have been advised before that it will be a bumpy road and should just buckle our seat belts. But guess what? I think they took our seat belts away.

So, Donald JT wants to privatize the Post Office. I wonder what Ben Franklin would think of this idea. What would this even mean? Would we have one post office, or an unlimited group of post offices? What if no private post office could survive financially? What would happen to current post office employees? Who would carry mail from the federal government or state government? Etc. Etc. And there are too many et ceteras to even think about.

That is “on the one hand”. On the other hand, since most packages now come through pruivate services, and most “mail” comes electronically, do we need a post office.

Yesterday, I went down the street to our cluster box and picked up four days of mail

Our box was jammed.

Here are the groups that are looking for year-end contributions. And remember, this is only four days worth:

1. Anne’s Place
2. American Jewish Committee
3. Camp Ramah of New England
4. Alzheimer’s Association
5. So Others Must Eat
6. Friendship Place (2)
7. WAMU
8. World Wildlife Fund
9. Harvard Alumni for Ashoka
10. Fresh Air Fund
11. Compass Hospice
12. Doctors Without Borders (2)
13. Magen David Adom
14. Leukemia and Lymphoma Society
15. Capital Jewish Museum
16. Central Scholarship Bureau
17. HIAS
18. National Community Church
19. Alzheimer’s Disease Research
20. Toys for Children
21. ADL
22. JSSA
23. Food and Friends
24. USCJ
25. Habitat for Humanity
26. Ronald McDonald
27. Salvation Army
28. Harvard
29. Amnesty International
30. Planned Parenthood
31. DC Public Library Foundation
32. Greater Chicago Food Depository?

In addition, we got about a dozen random advertisements,  three magazines, four catalogs, one new set of credit cards, and one (1!) personal happy holidays card.

Do all of those things we don’t need waste federal resources, or do they stimulate the economy and allow these charitable organizations to pay their staff and do good work? And because on line book businesses like ours can use media mail and save $10:to $20 per delivery, what will happen to us?

And by the way……if there is an attempt to privatize the post office, who could afford to run it on that basis? Maybe Jeff Bezos, but more likely Elon Musk, who only real goals, I am sure , are to become the first trillionslaire and to run the world single handedly.

Let’s start with Facebook. It used to be that I would open up Facebook and see, in rough chronological order, posts from “friends”, of whom I have about 600. I would post something that I thought was interesting or clever, and I would normally get 10 to 30 people who “liked” it or commented on it, and – if it was something personal, like a birthday – I would get over 100 people liking or commenting. That was then; this is now.

I just looked at Facebook, and scrolled down through the first 50 posts that were on my page. Of the 50, only three (yes, three) were from “friends”. The others were from “The Content Comet”, “LongIsland.com”, “American Red Cross”, “Sir Fur”, “Zillow”, “Humor Side”, “St. Jude’s”, “Punny Pete”, “Laugh Unlimited”, the “Wall Street Journal”, “Visit Washington DC”, “Animania Galleria” and so forth. And, oh, yes, there are “reels”, and “people you may know”. Facebook is no longer a place for communication, it appears, but simply a place where unknown groups post, for reasons that must earn them money although I am not sure how, and which Facebook’s algorithm thinks I’d want to see.

(Diversion and nod to George Gershwin, who never knew Facebook:

“Algorithm,

Algorithm,

Algorithm,

Who could ask for anything more?”)

Okay, the algorithm is not necessarily wrong. I do enjoy about 20% of the posts they show me – generally cartoons I think are clever. Rarely do I look at anything else. Well, that’s not right, either. I like the historical photos I see of various places, and I often get posts that have to do with architecture, and I look at those. But…..for this I need Facebook?

So, Mark Zuckerberg, a serious question: what has happened to your business model, and why?

By the way, as to the “people I may know”, I seem to see the same folks over and over, and I know that, even if I “friended” them, they would probably ignore me, thinking I was the product of a hack of some sort.

And as to the reels (and this is my real focus today), some of them are cute and enticing and addictive, to be sure, but beyond that they are worthless and they can be dangerous, and even they are changing, as reels created by artificial intelligence programs seem to be overtaking those showing real people doing real things.

Let’s talk about the addiction. The reels are addictive because they are so short that it is easy to say to yourself, “let’s see one more”. And on and on. They tend to be visually of interest; if not, you just stop watching and scroll down to the next one. They often have extraordinarily attractive people – whether it’s a 20 year old woman in a skimpy bikini, a muscular young man with a winning smile, and so forth. And, although you can assume these people are real, maybe they aren’t. These days, you just don’t know.

But these people do extraordinary things. They jump from the tops of buildings into swimming pools, turning 10 somersaults on the way down; they are so strong that they can carry another 5 people on their backs; their dancing puts Fred Astaire to shame. And then there are the “regulars” – the man who asks the young girl “Tell me your greatest secret”, “Tell me something your parents don’t know”, “What is your body count?”, “Why did you break up with your boyfriend?”, “Tell us one thing about Gabon than n one knows”, and so forth. And there are those that ask questions: “What flag is this? Right….the Seychelles” or “Name six countries in Africa that start with the letter W”. And the stand up comedians who are rarely funny. And I get a lot of Jewish reels – Hasidic weddings, rabbis telling jokes, and so forth. And a lot of boxing or WWE matches, or people slapping each other. Excerpts from Family Feud, and America’s (or Britain or anywhere else) Got Talent, or what have you.

Of course, Facebook is not the only place you can find “reels”, although I don’t tend to look at them elsewhere. They pop up all over YouTube, but I never open them there, and of course there is Tik-Tok.

Tik-Tok is all reels, and it’s been a long time since I clicked on the app, and perhaps its reals are more varied than the ones I get on Facebook, although some of them are, I am sure, the of the same type. But you can’t get your “news” from Facebook reels, and I understand you can, and millions or billions of people do, get them from Tik-Tok.

I totally discount the fear that the Chinese owners of Tik-Tok are using the app to get information about me, and – if I am wrong and they are – I really don’t care about that either. But I do fear that, although for me Tik-Tok and other “reel apps” are just a waste of time, for younger people, they can be dangerous.

For adolescents, whose bodies are not like those on the reels, or who do not have the worldliness of those who they watch, or whose athletic abilities are more limited, or those who fear heights, or who can’t speak Swahili, or whose body counts are 0 rather than 20 and those who have never broken up with a boyfriend or girlfriend because they have never had a boyfriend or girlfriend. For all of these young folks, these reels can be dangerous (and more dangerous as time goes on), as well as addictive and time wasting.

In Australia, as I understand it, you now have to be 18 to legally watch any of this type of app. They may be part of the answer. And another part of the answer would be banning cell phones in schools, something that is beginning to catch on here (why that took so long is astounding to me). But still another may be more extreme, like banning Tik-Tok, and similar “reel apps” altogether. I know, “free speech” and all that. But still. You keep hearing that free speech does not allow you to call “Fire” in a crowded theater. That may be a sufficient precedent to say you cannot place Tik-Tok on an adolescent’s phone.

Let’s leave it there…….

But one more thing: Trump is suing the Des Moines Register for publishing a poll showing that he was trailing Kamala Harris? I have been very quiet about Trump after the election on the theory that we should give him a chance to see how his policies will really affect the world, on the chance that they will make some things better even we disagree with them strongly. That’s an easy position to take during the transition period, when Trump has no control over anything, and is just talking about who he is appointing to what positions.

It will be much more difficult to maintain this position after the inauguration, it seems, since the one thing he has actually done since the election – suing the press for an article he doesn’t like – is so abominable.

I wish I was a bigger opera fan. But, probably because I don’t see or listen to enough of it, I get easily bored. Operas can be so long, you know.

I am thinking about this because I am reading about the opening of La Scala’s season, in Milan, on December 7. Apparently,  La Scala always opens on December 7, Pearl Harbor Day be damned.

…….You know, I think I overstated my case in the opening paragraph. Maybe, in fact, I like opera more than I think I do. The opera opening the season in Milan is Verdi’s La Forza del Destino. This is one of my favorite operas. I hear the name, and its most well-known music rushes through me. And, there are other Verdi operas I like as much. Rigoletto for one. And others.

This takes me back to the early 1960s, when I probably would have started a blog just like I started this one (the word “blog” was yet to be invented). I had decided, in my college years, that I didn’t like opera enough and that it was probably because I wasn’t familiar enough with it. So, one summer I decided to volunteer with the St. Louis summer opera theater, which was I think then in its second or third year, putting on three operas outdoors on the Washington University campus. I was sort of a gofer and I was there volunteering most days.

The operas were Rigoletto, Cosi fan Tutte, and the Tales of Hoffmann. By the time the summer was over, I knew those three inside and out. I still enjoy them and know much of the music.

And there are other operas I am pretty familiar with. The Barber of Seville, Don Giovanni, Aida, etc. The usuals. There are others that I have enjoyed even though I can’t say that I “know” them. For example, Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites. And I have sat through Wagner’s Ring Cycle, pretending to myself that I was having a good time.

But the fact is….I do not seek out opera. I do listen to a fair amount of music. But I almost never select opera. Operas are so long, as I have said.

Yet, I would like to see La Scala.

Reading about the opening in todays Times, I learned that the gala opening is accompanied by a lot of outside protests – again, the usual. The Italian government is too supportive of Israel. Russian soprano Anna Netrebko is too close to Putin. And so on.

But there is one protest subject that was new to me. The fate of Verdi’s home at Sant’agata.

I don’t know the full story. Verdi lived here much of his adult life. It is located near his place of birth. For years, some Verdi heirs lived in much of the house, but the portions of the first floor where Verdi and his wife lived were open to the public as a museum. Something then happened, arguments between his descendants, etc., and the government is in the process of obtaining possession. In the meantime,  the museum is closed, and the building is disintegrating. When the Italian bureaucracy will allow title to transfer, how repairs will be funded, and when the museum will reopen, no one knows.

First, let’s make it clear that, in spite of its name, the Cannes Grand Prix winner at the annual Cannes Film Festival is the film that came in second. The winner gets the Palme D’Or. I don’t know whom to ask about using the term Grand Prix for the second prize, but I am sure that, whomever they are, their answer won’t be acceptable.

Okay, putting that aside, let it be known that the Cannes Grand Prix winner in 2024 was All We Can Imagine as Light, filmed in India, and given a name with its own problem. It is (I can attest to this) impossible to remember the name of this film more than about fifteen minutes. Maybe ten.

If you go to Rotten Tomatoes, you will see that this film gets a 100% critics rating, with over 100 reviews posted, and it gets an 82% viewers’ rating, which isn’t too bad, either. Most of the critics raved about both the film and about Payal Kapadia, a young (under 40, that’s young) Indian woman who both wrote the script and directed the film, her first non-documentary feature. We saw the film yesterday at the American Film Institute in Silver Spring.

It seems to me it is clearly a film for women, which is not surprising, I guess. But it is a unique women’s film (I am not using the word feminist, because I don’t really know what that means today), in that two men in the film, both of whom do have subordinate but important roles, are not bad guys; they are both what they would call in Mumbai (at the Chabad House) mensches.

The three main characters are women, two nurses and a cook, who work at a hospital in Mumbai. I think that isolation, frustrated aspirations, and the subordination of women in India are the main foci. Two of the women, who are roommates in an apartment you would not want to live in, are nurses. One is a young Hindu woman with a Muslim boy friend. The other is a married Hindu woman, but it was an arranged marriage, her husband almost immediately went to work in Berlin and she has not heard from him in over a year; she has a suitor, a doctor at the hospital, whom she has to reject. The third woman, a little older, is a cook at the hospital. She is a widow and is being evicted from her apartment (the building is to be torn down and a luxuriant skyscraper to be built in its place), and she cannot get any relocation help because she cannot find the necessary “papers” that her husband never told her about.

9Mumbai is filled with people. It is filled with poor people, with whom the three women seem to have no relationship, and rich people, none of whom you really see, but who are clearly represented by the Mumbai skyline which always seems to loom in the background. Each of the three women are by themselves in a city to which they migrated from their home villages, and where they never quite feel right or at home.

Towards the end of the film, the cook decides to move back to her home village, and the nurses help her with the move. The young Muslim suitor decides to go as well, and the nurse with the estranged husband resuscitates a drowning man (the village is on the coast), and he turns out to be a good guy, too.

The film ends in the village. What the future holds for anyone, we don’t know.

In spite of the Cannes prize, the critics’ ratings, and many other awards that the film has won or been nominated for, I have to wonder. This is a slow, slow, slow film, without a real plot line, and it really doesn’t go anywhere. We were both surprised at the acclaim. But what do we know?

Oh, by the way, the film is in Hindi and Malayalam and Marathi. The different languages spoken in the film, each with an occasional English word thrown in, adds to the feeling of isolation, as does the quite interesting camera work and lighting.

One more thing: the film doesn’t make you want to plan your next vacation in Mumbai. That’s for sure.

I just read this morning’s New York Times’ article “How the Slave Trade Shaped the World”; you should, too. It’s the story of a major exhibit that just opened at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, located on the Mall about four miles from our house. The museum opened the 2016, over eight years ago. No one that I know who has visited the museum has anything negative to say about it (other than it is exhausting because it is so large and comprehensive), and this exhibit, which will be on display for about six months, will only add to its allure.

Now, let’s try to think of something surprising about this architecturally striking museum, which I probably have driven by several hundred times. What did you come up with? My answer is: Edie and I have never visited the museum. Eight years of talking about how we have to go, and eight years of never doing it. Excuses? I am not sure: well, there were the COVID years, where we really didn’t go anywhere. There were the early years where it was so crowded that you had to get tickets well in advance, or potentially be disappointed that there weren’t enough walk-in tickets available when you showed up. There really isn’t any nearby parking, so you have to either walk a fair way, or take a cab or Uber (or Lyft). But none of these excuses are good excuses, are they? Or are they?

[There has been an interruption in the creation of this post. Edie and her four year old sous chef were busily baking gingerbread men when they discovered that they were low on molasses. So, I – the designated all time driver – was given the task of buying more of Grandma’s Molasses. A quick trip to the nearby Safeway and I learned that “yes, we have no molasses, we have no molasses today”, so I had to reverse course and go to the neighborhood Giant, where they had three jars of Grandma’s Molasses, and where they now have only two. The Grandma’s label says that they have been making quality molasses since 1890. Assuming that Grandma was 65 years old when they started (yes, that’s just a wild assumption), she would have been born in 1825. In 1825, John Quincy Adams was president, and the United States had 24 states, in 15 of which slavery was legal.]

At any rate, it is time for us to visit the African American History Museum.

You know what makes this even stranger? Last April, we drove to Montgomery Alabama just to see the Legacy Museum which documents slavery in America, and the civil rights sculpture museum and even the Rosa Parks Museum. And we had visited the Old Slave Mart Museum in Charleston South Carolina, and more. And other civil rights museums around the country. Go figure.

But, you know what they say. You don’t go to tourist sites where you live. For example, I have never been either to the top of the Arch in St. Louis, nor to the Jefferson National Expansion Museum below the Arch. And, here in Washington, where I have lived since October 13, 1969 (but who’s counting?), I have only been on a White House tour in the Spring of 1958, when I was here with my junior high school class. Just think how many times the White House has been re-decorated since the days of Mamie Eisenhower.

Now, it’s also true that I have only been in the Holocaust Memorial Museum twice, and it has been in operation now for a little over 30 years. And, although I have been to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and the Holocaust Museum in Houston, I have pretty much avoided the others. You can just get too much of a bad thing, you know.

At any rate, the slavery exhibit, titled “In Slavery’s Wake: Making Black Freedom in the World”, looks like a don’t miss exhibit. Apparently it is ten years in the making and, after leaving Washington next June, it will travel to Amsterdam, Rio de Janeiro, Cape Town, Dakar and other places, so maybe you can catch it somewhere else. We have also never been to sub-Saharan Africa. There are a lot of places there I would like to see, but it is probably too late for something that extensive. After all, didn’t I tell you how hard it is just to travel 20 minutes to the Smithsonian African American museum?

Let’s start with another dream (bear with me). I am attending some sort of conference or retreat. I think I know most of the people, but I can’t give any of them real-life identity. We are staying at some sort of facility, it is early morning, and time for breakfast. I am in the dining room of the facility and, even though I am not with strangers, I am sitting at a table by myself, next to a wall. (By the way, nothing on the menu interests me, the waiter suggests I try the “corn bread” and I agree – when it comes, it looks like one piece of Wonder Bread and I don’t eat it…..but this is irrelevant to my story.)

One the wall next to the table is a grated duct of some sort. Nothing is blowing out of it, and I am not sure where it leads or what is its purpose. But I hear a constant buzzing from inside the duct and I look and see a small insect flying around, just too large to be able to exit through the holes in the grating. I see that I can pry off the grating, which I do to let the insect out, and after he leaves, I put the grating back.

The insect, too small and two brownish to be a fly, seems to panic. It flies in circles. It does loops and double loops. It swoops down on me. Its speed doubles, triples. It is clearly having a panic attack.

I reopen the duct. The insect flies back into the duct. I put the grating back on. The insect seems pleased. Its panic subsides.

(The dream goes on with the story of my insect going viral within my group. Everyone tries to open duct gratings to allow insects to fly in. None do. Some even capture flying bugs and put them in ducts. The insects’ reactions are far from positive. But again….that isn’t part of my story.)

The dream made me think about a flea circus. What is a flea circus anyway? Were they real? Can you train fleas? It seems that the flea circuses were very real and were popular from about 1830 to the mid twentieth century. And, no, it does not look like you can train fleas. What you can do, if you are a crafty miniaturist, is make items that are almost as small as fleas – little carts or wagons or whatever. And then you can take thin threads and tie one end of them to the leg of a flea (don’t ask me how; I just read Flea Circus 101) and the other end to your little wagon. The flea will fly and by flying, since fleas are apparently quite strong, will pull the wagon. You have sufficient numbers of fleas doing a variety of things and, lo, you have a flea circus.

Apparently, we don’t have flea circuses today. How can they compete with video games? But, in thinking about flea circuses, I thought about other types of animal life – animals that were not always thinking the best, but had no problem pulling things that others attach to them, believing that they had no choice and that it was a matter of self-preservation. These animals are known as Republicans.

Republicans now seem to be flying everywhere. They are increasing in number and visibility and, yes, certainly in annoyance. If only we could find a grated duct that we could put them behind for a while. Things would be better.

But, no, that won’t happen. In fact, it is the Republicans who seem to be in control of the grated ducts these days and, if we are not careful (and we so often are not), we will be sitting behind those gratings, waiting for the day when we can free ourselves.

End of story.

I just got out of my Thursday morning breakfast group meeting, and have an eye doctor appointment for which I have to leave in less than thirty minutes. My eyes will be dilated after that, and I probably won’t be in position to stare at a computer screen for a while, so I am going to write something now. It will be short, if not sweet (of course, it may be sweet, as well).

I am trying to hold myself back when I look at the Trump transition and see what might be expected over the next few years, and I am not going to let myself go and, instead, wait to see how things will turn out.

I do think that we are in for some big changes, and then some more big changes after that. I agree with the incoming administration that there is a lot wrong with the country; I am only afraid that they will make it worse, and not better.

For example, I agree that government payrolls are probably larger than they need be. But will cutting government employment help or hurt? Will the savings be offset by losses occasioned by so many families losing so much income? And will government job cutting mean that government will be doing less, or does it simply mean that more government work will be farmed out to the private sector, helping people like Musk and “neutral” Jeff Bezos?

We now have a pretty good number of billionaires, and a very large number of millionaires, in this country, and as you drive around and look at all the big houses and all of the big second and third homes in resort areas, you see that. And that is fine for the 10% of Americans that fall into this category. But the other 90%, yes 90%, fall into very different categories, and the wealth differential here is expanding exponentially. That is fine if you want to replicate Southern plantation society – without legal slavery of course, but with the majority of people being, in effect, economically enslaved to the top 10%. But is that what we want.

One of the effects of this, in addition to homelessness and the like, is that differentials in health outcomes, which show the vastly different lifespans of wealthy Americans and those with fewer resources. Is this what we want? If Bobby K, Jr. is our new HHS Secretary, he will be pushing for a large number of initiatives (some good, others awful)k, but equality of treatment and outcome does not appear to be one of his priorities.

I had been saying for three years or so that the Democrats were setting themselves up to lose the 2024 election by their handling of the border and immigration, and I have been proven correct. But splitting up families (ones with a citizen or legal spouse and one who is not in the country legally) can’t be the answer we want, and certainly using the American military (or the state National Guards) to knock on doors and arrest people can’t be what we want either. But I don’t hear any alternative being proposed.

Regardless of whether his goals are laudatory or condemnatory, the goal seems to be the implement a form of federal bullying, to cow people to submit to the whim of the new president, or face dire consequences. And the dire consequences will come through the full politicization of the Justice Department, which will be going after those who fail to comply with legal or questionable orders from the top. We don’t know how the courts will respond to all of these challenges, but what we do know is that those who are targeted will lose not only their equanimity, but also much of their financial resources, in defending claims, whether or not the claims are valid. Once again, the lawyers (many of whom are of course already in that top 10%) will be the winners.

And – though there is much to write about – let me end with pardons. Biden is criticized (unjustly in my opinion, as you may know) for pardoning his son, but Trump will undoubtedly pardon the hundreds in jail for Jan 6 related convictions. Using his immense power, Biden has been said to be considering broad pardons for those whom Trump has announced he is going to target, something never done before (on either side); I hope these pardons don’t happen, and I hope the targeting threats don’t materialize, but one or the other, or even both (leaving it to the courts to sort out) might.

Okay, off to the eye doctor. I believe my eyes may be beginning to catch up with the age of the rest of me. We will see. (But will we see clearly?)

When I was a Harvard Undergraduate,  there were two young (in their 30s) professors in the Government Department who were very popular. Both were Europe-born, Jewish, and spoke with heavy accents. One was Henry Kissinger, the other Stanley Hoffman. I never took a Kissinger class, but I took two from Hoffman. He was the most remarkable lecturer I ever heard. Every lecture was perfect in style and form. As to substance? I don’t remember a thing.

The second class I took from Hoffman was simply titled “War”. There have been many wars since I graduated, starting with Vietnam, and each with its own characteristics. But none have been as unique as the war(s) Israel is now waging.

To be accurate,  Israel has always, every day of its existence been at war. From the day the British abandoned its Palestine mandate, from the day Israel declared its independence, from the days when the existence of the State was blessed by the United Nations and it was welcomed as a member, when it was recognized by the US and the USSR, Israel has been at war. The immediate invasion by all of its neighbors plus Iraq was ended by an armistice, not a treaty, with no mutual recognition and no formally agreed upon borders. Except for later treaties with Jordan and Egypt, a condition of war, usually cold but sometimes hot, has continued to exist with everyone else.

Today, Israel’s wars are quite hot. But none of them are like any of the wars (whatever they were) that Stanley Hoffman taught about in the early 1960s.

A quick look:

The war in Gaza has resulted in what has been said to be 40,000 Palestinian deaths and several times that number of casualties. Gaza has been physically destroyed. What other land has suffered such overall destruction? Yet the war continues because the ruling power in Gaza, Hamas, refuses to hand over the hostages that are being held, and refuses to surrender or even discuss seriously the end of the war. Hamas appears to care not for its citizens or its territory. How do you end such a war? It is unique.

Lebanon is another story. Israel is conducting a war in Lebanon, but not against Lebanon. Israel’s war in Lebanon is with Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy that participates as a political party in Lebanon,  and controls its south but does not rule the country. Its fighters are separate from the Lebanese army, as are its arms and military bases. But Israeli troops are in Lebanon, and have pushed Hezbollah north of the Litani River. Israel is now temporarily occupying land of a country against whom it is not fighting an active war. Unique.

Then, there is Syria. Syria under the Assad regime acted as a conduit of war materiel to Hamas in Lebanon. But Syria under Assad was not actively at war with Israel, and at least temporarily allowed Israel to annex the Golan Heights (taken from Syria in 1967) without active military opposition.

But today, and suddenly, Assad is exiled in Moscow and Syria has a new (still unstable and largely unknown) political leadership. Israel has responded by going to war in Syria, with more than 400 aerial strikes against what had been the Assad military structure. It has destroyed Syria’s military bases, arms depots, military factories, naval equipment, air force, and more. This is not a war against Syria, or against the new government,  per se, according to Israel, but it is a war nevertheless. Again, unique.

And then there is the West Bank (and East Jerusalem), taken from Jordan in 1967 and “occupied” by Israel since. This area, which before the  1967 War had virtually no Jews, now has 600,000 or so. Most of these Israelis live in large settlements near the border of Israel proper (the “Green Line”) or near Jerusalem and, unless you know exactly where the unmarked Green Line is, seem part of Israel itself.  But the remainder of the West Bank houses between one and two million Palestinian Arabs, and only tens of thousands of Israeli Jews in settlements, some “recognized” by Israel, some not. Many or most of these settlers want the Arabs to leave (or at least leave the rural parts of) the West Bank, and conduct a low level war against them, a war which is at least tacitly condoned by the current Israeli government. Again….the U word.

Finally, in addition to all of this, Israel carries out sporatic military attacks on facilities in Iran, and although it has been a while, Iraq, another kind of now and then, but chronic, war, and there are sporatic attacks, as well from as far away as Yemen.

No one knows where this will end up. Will Israel exhaust itself, or face from one or more of these sources an attack that will destroy it the way Gaza has been destroyed? Or will Israel’s military might outlast all of its current enemies, and will the current show of strength wind up creating a situation where Israel can finally live in peace?

It may be hard to conceive of peace as a result of all of this current tumult, but Israel’s brash, right wing government may think it’s been long enough that the country has lived under threat, and, considering the current states of disarray surrounding it, now is the time. Now or never. I for one, profess to know nothing. I am stumped.

But Stanley Hoffman might  have had definitive thoughts about all of this. And whatever his thoughts might have been, there is one thing you can be sure. He would have expressed them perfectly.

I didn’t want to write about Syria (I wish them luck) or us (I wish us luck) or Juan Soto (always been a bit greedy) or Elon Musk (obviously, him, too), so I went to a random shelf in a closet (just a box missing the box) and will report on this particular pile. The pile itself had about twice the number of items I will mention today, but relax: I promise there will be no Part 2.

You remember Grigori Rasputin, the fanatic religious favorite of the last tsar and tsarina of Russia, who supposedly cured their son of genetic hemophilia. He was murdered by a group of young Russian nobles (to eliminate his influence on the royal family) in 1916 at the St. Petersburg mansion of the Yusupov family.

When it is safe again to travel to St. Petersburg, you will be able to visit this remarkable “palace” and see how the nobility lived, even visiting the room that housed their elegant private theater. And you can go to the basement level, where mannequins have been set up to reenact the murder.

After the revolution, the majority of Yusupovs, like much of the Russian nobility, wound up in Paris. And Felix Felixovich Yusupov, the leader of the gang, wrote and published this book in 1927.

Yusupov lived another 40 years and I was surprised to find a rather detailed description of F.F. in actress Kitty Carlyle’s memoir. She and Yusupov’s daughter went to school together in Paris and Yusupov, who often picked his daughter up from school, was quite the character.

I have quite a bit of antisemitic literature hidden away in my collection, including brief book, written by someone I know nothing about.

The book was published in 1947, shortly after the end of World War II. It doesn’t really mention, as far as I can see, the Holocaust itself, but it casts the blame for American involvement in this war and in the first World War on three interrelated factors: British pressure to keep their empire, world financial interests who want to increase their wealth, and “Organized World Jewry, their constant companion”.

The frightening thing about this book is that although it was written over 75 years ago, you can buy new reprints being churned out today.

Grieb has written two other similar books, one with a title that seems especially ominous today: “The Balfour Declaration: Recipe for Genocide”.

This is a cute book which has information about the White House itself, as well as a full page engraving of each president, up to the then current president, Theodore Roosevelt. Each president also gets a full page narrative, which gives (a) basic biographical information, and (b) more importantly, what New York Life Insrance Company was doing during their presidency. For example, you might think that the drift towards secession and civil war were the most important aspects of James Buchanon’s one term. But no! You only think that because you didn’t know that NY Life opened its first San Francisco office while he was president. And their first in the State of Tennessee.

And, although Wm. Henry Harrison was only president for one month before he died in 1841, it was quite a month. New York Life was founded in that month.

Moving forward in time, this brochure shows Milles’ work in Stockholm at his home Millesgarden, now a museum. The black and white photography in the 75 page or so  booklet is excellent.

Of course, Milles is interesting to me because he sculpted “The Meeting of the Waters” in front of Union Station, St. Louis.

I was going to talk about a book accompanying a Cocteau film, a guide to Ephasus, then Greek, now Turkish and a few more things.

But…..you get the picture, and time is short.

As many of you know, the American Film Institute has a three screen theater in Silver Spring. It is on the site of the old Silver Spring Theater, which Edie tells me she went to religiously every Shabbat afternoon growing up. It is a great resource for the area, showing a wide variety of films, some of which (yes) you can also see on your home screens, but others that show up nowhere else.

Right now, the AFI is in the middle of a December film festival, sponsored by the European Union and many of the European embassies in Washington. If I remember my numbers correctly, there are 27 countries with entries, and over 50 films, most being shown only two times.

We decided to see some of these new films, and set about to first determine which films we thought we wanted to see, and then to coordinate them with times when we would be available. We wound up with tickets for three films. The first was yesterday, and the others the next two Sundays.

Last evening we saw The Hungarian Dressmaker, which I guess is a Slovakian film, although its crews come from a number of central European countries. It was perhaps the darkest and heaviest film I have ever seen. Which is not to say it was a bad film; it isn’t at all. But – let’s put it this way. The movie was filmed in very bright colors, but in my mind, it was all done in black and white, or perhaps even black and gray.

It is 1942 in the city of Brataslava, the capital of the Slovak Republic, a government allied with Nazi Germany, created out of a part of what had been the Republic of Czechoslovakia in 1939. The Slovak Republic was to last only until 1945, when the war ended and Czechoslovakia recreated. It was a brutal regime.

This area of the world, before World War I, was of course part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and there were many ethnic Hungarians living in this part of the empire, along with Czechs and Slovaks. One of these Hungarians (in the film) was a young woman named Marika, a dressmaker who worked at a Jewish owned tailor shop in Brataslava.

Her husband had been forced into the Slovak Republic’s army and was somewhere fighting the Allies (he was later reported dead). As you might expect, the Jews were rounded up and sent north to Poland, and the shop was closed. Marika had no work and went to live on an impoverished farm that belonged to her husband’s family. She soon found that she was not alone – the young (10 year old? 12 year old?) son of her Jewish former employer was hiding in her barn. What should she do?

Life was awful for everyone. It was particularly terrible for Hungarians living in Slovakia, and there were continual calls to expel them. And of course, it was impossible for Jews, most of whom had already been expelled and worse. Hiding a Jewish child would put Marika at even greater risk and it was the last thing she expected to have to do, or wanted to do. But what choice did she have? (Her neighbors who had a similar choice, decided to turn the Jews in to the authorities.)

It is unclear that she even liked Simon, but she kept him alive, not in her house, but in the barn, where he slept with the pigs and milked the goat, and was sworn to silence (remarkably, he was able to stay quiet) when anyone else was near. And for Simon, of course, things got even worse in the winter.

But this is just part of the story. The central character is not Simon, but Marika, subject to terrible treatment at the hands of the authorities (who confiscate everything she has of value, making her farm work that much more difficult), terrible treatment at the hands of her husbands’ Slovak parents who accuse her of trying to sell their family land, terrible treatment at the hands of a German general, who engages her to make some dresses for his wife but has other thoughts about her usefulness as well, and terrible treatment at the hands of a Slovak army officer, who covets her land and her body.

Yes, this is one heavy movie that is one more thing. It is very, very ambitious in that it attempts, pretty successfully, to show all of the difficulties of life in the middle of World War II in Slovakia for everyone, and how so many different hard to reconcile conflicts arise: Jews against everyone, Slovaks against Hungarian ethnics, anti-Nazi Slovaks against the government of the Slovak Republic, the Slovakian army against their allies the Germans, internal church divisions (Hungarian versus Slovakian mass, for example) and so on.

This is quite a film. So many awful topics brought up. Each worth thinking about. But I doubt you will see this film. It is really off the beaten path.

Any time that someone says something bad about Jews as a group, or sometimes even about one Jew, they are accused of being antisemitic. I can say something bad about an Italian without being accused of hating the entire race, and the same is true if I say something about a Catholic, for example. One bad Catholic does not condemn the entire religion. But it is different if you say something bad about a Jew. At least, to a Jew, it is different.

Perhaps that is held over from the Holocaust, or perhaps it is held over from a millennium of Christian persecution. I am not sure. But it is an unfortunate fact.

Clearly, there has always been antisemitism (you know what I mean by “always”). As I heard Rabbi Yossy Goldman, a Chabad rabbi in Johannesburg, once say (and I am paraphrasing him to the extent that he probably doesn’t believe this is what he really said): one of the eternal facets of being Jewish is having to face antisemitism; don’t let it get you down. And if this isn’t what he said, he probably should have. There will always be people who don’t like Jews or who don’t like a particular Jew. So what?

Now, of course it’s a bit different if people really DON’T LIKE! Jews; if they, in effect, hate them and want to get rid of them one way or another. But the two types of antisemitism should not be confused.

And when you look at today’s United States, although it is admittedly in some sort of flux, you don’t see (on any scale worth existential worrying) the type of ANTISEMITISM! that would result in expulsion or containment or death. When you compare the life of American Jews today with the lives of Jews in past times and other societies, where ANTISEMITISM! had really taken root, we come out on top. Still.

Now, that does not mean that there aren’t concerns – the biggest concern is the amount of anti-Israel feeling that the current war in Gaza (or is it a “special military operation” like the Russians in Ukraine?) has stirred up. There are those who are appalled by the amount of death and destruction there on its own, and others who are in the “I told you so” mode, having harped at Israel’s now 57 year old occupation (actual or virtual) of adjoining territories. Of course, many of these people think that if Israel just pulls out, the territories will be able to organize themselves, with workable self-government, sufficient propserity, and a willingness to live in peace with their Israeli neighbors. If only this were the case.

And that of course brings up the question: can you be ANTI-ISRAEL! without being antisemitic? To me, the answer is “of course”, and that is obvious. But everyone does not think that way. There are those who believe that Israel’s actions reflect the positions of all Israelis (they aren’t), and that because most (they make think it is all) Israeli’s are Jewish, they reflect the positions of all Jews, everywhere across the world. And this view is made more pronounced because most Jews do identify with Israel (whether or not they support individual Israeli policies or leaders), and because Israel works hard to make sure this is the case, in part by recent law changes to clarify that Israel is a “Jewish State”.

People now comment that there is antisemitism (and ANTISEMITISM!) both on the right and on the left of the American political spectrum. But this is too broad of a statement. On the right, there are the ANTISEMITES! who would like to eliminate the Jews; this group has always been there, and always will be there, but it has long been minimal and there is no reason to think it will grow. On the left, the positions is largely ANTI-ISRAEL, and not antisemitic. And the ANTI-ISRAEL left generally does not harbor antisemitic feelings, and welcomes Jews who share their ANTI-ISRAEL! views. This is why they talk about being ANTI-ZIONIST!, which of course is what seeps into the general issue mentioned above: Jews who support the State of Israel, but not the current Israeli government nor Israeli military actions.

Now, two more things must added. First, Arabs (and maybe Muslims in general) in this country and elsewhere feel about the Muslim middle east the same way Jews in this country feel about Israel, whether or not they support the policies of one or another government in the region. So it isn’t surprising to find that Arabs (and maybe Muslims) are more anti-Israel than most others. That is just a fact of life and will never change.

Second, there are two forms of being anti-Israel. There are those who would like Israel to stop aggressing against its neighbors and support some form of two state, or an overarching one state, solution. Then there are those for whom that is not an answer, but whose answer involves the elimination of the State of Israel. Within that group, there are those who would let Jews stay as some form of second class citizen of an Arab nation, those who would like to see the Jews all move to Florida, and those who would just as soon produce Part II of the Holocaust. But this entire group, in this country, and outside certain Muslim groups, again is very limited.

There are two areas, and important areas, in the United States where anti-Israel, and therefore to an extent, antisemitic feelings are manifest. The first is American universities (and perhaps even some American high schools), where a number of trends have come together. First, a teaching trend where today’s teachers of the social sciences concentrate on the ills of 19th and 20th century colonialism and its demise, and include Israel as a colonial experiment bound to fail. (This is a major topic, not to be discussed today, and as an academic position, one that was both begun and largely propagated by intellectuals from the Middle East who started out with a position to support.) Second, an era when, in many schools, diversity programs have brought more students from Arab and other middle eastern ethnicities into the student body at the same time when some well funded ANTI-ISRAEL! groups have worked hard to support organizations to attract anti-Israel students and to give them a common set of principles to espouse.

Combining these two factors, along with the existence of what is happening in Gaza, has led to student demonstrations, students trying to push Jews (especially those who generally support Israel) out of student organizations, who attempt to get the universities to take certain political positions and to divest from Israel related investments. And, for reasons stated above, these things often have some faculty support.

The second area in which these forms of antisemitism have shown up in this country is within the arts community. Here there have been boycotts or attempted boycotts of Israeli artists and musicians. The arts communities are generally politically left wing, not right wing, and – even more than in the case of universities – the protests tend to be anti-Israel and not antisemitic.

I have read through what I have written so far and must say that, although I think I have put the elements of my thinking in this post, I can’t be proud of the way I organized it, nor do I think it will sway many readers. Of course, I don’t know. But it is very complicated when we are dealing with three interrelated definitions: antisemitic, anti- Zionist and anti-Israel, and we really don’t know what any of those terms means in given situations, whether they are weak or strong, situational or more general, conflated or separate, and so on.

The other night, at the suggestion of two friends, I watched (you can, too) a program sponsored by the Streicker Center at Temple Emanu-el in New York, whether Anti-Defamation League president Jonathan Greenblatt and New York Times columnist Bret Stephens spoke about antisemitism. They both thought the program (and particularly Stephens) were wonderful. I disagreed completely. I thought it was a program completely lacking in necessary nuance. It was all: we (Israel) are right, and no one understands us they way we understand ourselves, and woe are us, but we know we are right and (left unspoken) God is with us. You should listen to the program (on the Streicker website) and see what you think.

In my role as vice president of the Haberman Institute for Jewish Studies, the DC version of the Streicker Center more or less, I get involved in a lot of discussion about the types of programs we should put on, and now of course, how we should be dealing with antisemitism. The Stephens/Greenblatt program was a “preaching to the choir” program – a large Jewish audience hearing what they expected to hear and what they always do hear, without much of a challenge to their own thought process. I think we should be broader in our programming, more educational than partisan, and that perhaps our programming on this subject should not be directed to predominantly Jewish audiences (as all of our programs really are) but to a broader non-Jewish audience. This may be harder for us to arrange, but I think it may be the way to go.

Again, I wanted to write about antisemitism this morning, but that will have to wait until tomorrow, because I am short on time, having spent too much effort on the New York Times crossword puzzle.

So, let’s do a quickie on presidential pardons. As I said a week or so ago, I think that Joe Biden deserves a break about pardoning Hunter. I am not going to repeat all of that again.

I am surprised at the outrage on the Democratic side. There have been several polls, which have shown that more (but not many, many more) Americans disagree with the pardon than support it, and that many are undecided. Obviously, there is a strong partisan divide.

There has also been a lot of publicity about the pardons that Trump issued (including donors, and people like Stone and Manafort, his political allies), and the polls show about the same amount of approval and disapproval.

The Constitution seems pretty clear, I guess. The president has the ability to pardon or commute sentences in regard to any federal crimes, except for those relating to impeachment. I don’t know that the Supreme Court has even had to rule on this topic. The Constitutional language (I do not know the history of this language) is very broad — it doesn’t specify whether you can pardon a crime that has yet to be committed, or yet to be charged. This does give the courts some grounds to rule upon, I guess.

As to pardons for future charges, I think that the pardon of Nixon dealt with that, and I think (I am rushing here) the Hunter Biden pardon does. Maybe this is fairly standard language.

Whether a president can pardon someone for crimes not yet charged or committed is, I hope, an open question, and I hope it will never have to be decided by the courts, since any judicial decision would threaten the independence of the executive branch as set forth in the Constitution.

But I also hope that Biden does not follow through on the possibility of pardoning people like Liz Cheney and others, those on the Trump or the Patel “enemies list”. These pardons would obviously set up the challenge as to their validity and spur Trump on, and would set the stage where a president (think Trump for the moment) could say: “I hereby pardon anyone who has committed or will commit a federal crime, provided that they are registered Republicans” or something to that effect.

Our federal criminal system would be in chaos. Politics and the imperial presidency would rule. The Supreme Court (who knows?) may even allow it, or determine that this was not a subject on which they had jurisdiction, or it was not a subject on which anyone would have standing to sue.

Obviously, I have just slapped this together (under 10 minutes), but I hope there is a real discussion before the President lets this ball begin to roll down the hill.

I intended to write about antisemitism this morning, but I need to give it more thought, so I will put it off until tomorrow or Sunday. Today, it’s back to the box and, although this post won’t show you all of the remaining random material, it will show you enough. Here goes:

We can start with two Russian calendars for 1964 and 1992. Both wallet size. Why do I have these? No idea. I doubt that I got the 1964 calendar in 1964, but maybe I did.

I remember being surprised that I was on George Bush’s list for a holiday card one year. Never happened before. Hasn’t happened since. I remember picking up a date in the late 1950s in St. Louis around Christmas time, and seeing that they had a Christmas card from Dwight Eisenhower on their mantel. I was impressed.

The man who made George W. our president. The year Nader led to our nadir. Of course, back then, we had no idea of how bad things could become. Of course, this was 2004, when Bush was running for his second term. In both years, Nader received about 100,000 votes in Florida as the Green Party candidate. Assuming that most of these votes came from voters who otherwise would have voted Democratic, glGeorge Bush owes his presidency to Ralph Nader.

A Maria Callas book mark. I haven’t seen the new biopic with Angelina Jolie as Callas. Will wait until it streams. I hear she is excellent in the role, and actually does some singing?

Senator Clark of Iowa and his wife were invited to greet the President of Zambia almost 42 years ago at the Four Seasons in Georgetown.  I hope they went and had a wonderful time. Kaunda was a strict vegetarian who was close to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi of transcendental meditation fame. What did that get him? He lived to be 97. Senator Clark was probably not a vegetarian, but he lived to be 95. And Maharishi International University is in Iowa. You connect the dots.

An old passport, back in the days (not long ago) when admittance stamping was the norm. Now, you look at your passport and it looks like you just stayed home.

Want me to write you a prescription? I don’t have a pad, just one sheet. Back when doctors put their home addresses on their prescription sheets. This is from 1951 to 1953, when my grandparents lived on Gannon.

Last one. It’s Jewish Book Month. And it’s 1949. What Jewish books were published in 1949? 75 years ago.

So, there are some serious things going on right now, right?

1. France’s government has just fallen.
2. South Korea’s president is being impeached.
3. Syrian rebels have overtaken Aleppo, and I don’t know who we should root for.
4. The fighting in Ukraine is getting worse and worse.
5. Germany’s government is on life support.
6. Israel and Hezbollah have signed a ceasefire agreement that says that they don’t have to cease their fire.
7. And Gaza? Don’t even ask.

And all that is in addition to every thing that is going on here with the transition to Trump.

Sometimes, you have to think about other things.

Sometimes, you have to read a book. And today I finished one. Daughter of the Cold War by George Kennan’s daughter, Grace. I didn’t think I knew enough about Kennan. I knew he wrote an “anonymous” published letter (signed by “X”) which authored the concept of “containment” for the USSR and Warsaw Pact countries, and because of that became quite famous. I knew that he had been the U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union and to Yugoslavia. I know that he spent years at Princeton. And I knew he lived to be over 100. But those are only tidbits.

I thought that reading a memoir might tell me a bit more about Kennan. I was certainly more interested in him than in her. I thought I would get a unique point of view. And I did. But it was very different from what I expected.

In the first place, the memoir isn’t really about her father, and that is in large part because Grace’s contact with her parents was consistently off and on. Even when she and her somewhat younger sister were very young, their parents pretty well ignored them. They sent them to live with their grandparents in Norway, with more distant relatives in the U.S. Midwest. They boarded Grace at National Cathedral School when she was 10 or 11. They sent her sister to boarding school in Switzerland. Often even when George wasn’t being assigned by the Foreign Service to faraway outposts, he and his wife often chose to leave their children (eventually four) in equally faraway places. They just did not seem to be caring parents. They didn’t attend school events, didn’t come to Grace’s wedding, or come to meet their grandchildren when they were born.

Secondly, while George Kennan looked to the world as the most diplomatic of diplomats, with a demeanor calm in the most tense situations, Grace reports something different, that he was moody, and rigid, and demanding, and selfish, and often emotionally out of control. The Kennans were also continually worried about money, and acted accordingly. None of this did I know.

Finally, and I should have known this, his time as Ambassador to the Soviet Union, right after the end of World War II, only lasted six months. Yes, it should have lasted longer, but on a trip from Moscow elsewhere in Europe, Mr. Diplomat Kennan responded to a question from a journalist that he thought was off the record, but turned out to be very much on the record. He was asked how he liked living in Moscow, in the Soviet Union. And Kennan, thinking of all of the restrictions placed on where he could go and who he could associate with in Moscow, responded that it was fairly similar to being in a prison. The immediate result of this was that Moscow quickly said to Kennan not to bother trying to come back, because they don’t want him in the country. With this, his wife had, I think it was three days, to pack up everything, including the children, and come back home.

As to exactly what Kennan did in his decades at Princeton is not clear. He wrote several books. Did he also teach? I just don’t know.

Grace herself had a terrific childhood if you measure it by the places she got to see, the people she met, and the languages she learned. But it was a terrible childhood if you measure it by parental affection and support, by having a stable homelife, and by staying in one place long enough to make friends.

She was married twice, first to a McClatchy of the newspaper family, which got her involved with San Francisco society and very close to the Kennedys, especially Bobby. She had three McClatchy children (one now head of the company) and plodded along with a life she never expected, until she learned from an acquaintance that her husband was gay (as now are two of her children), something that explained his aversion to sex. She had a second marriage to a man who felt he was in an open marriage, even if she wasn’t.  And she had an extended affair with  a Russian film producer, who just happened to have a wife on the other side of the world, and young children. Her emotional reactions to men she found appealing were not very praiseworthy, to say the least.

She went from one job to another until she was in her late 50s, when she and another woman started a consulting business  for those who needed assistance navigating Soviet bureaucracy, a gamble at first, but then something that got her into all sorts of activities, forst in the USSR, and then in Russia.  Later for four years she ran a women’s empowerment NGO in Kiev. The chapters about these years were extremely interesting.

Her book is very well written and readable. Her life, so different from mine, has been interesting, to be sure, even if often distressed or uncomfortable.

I believe Grace is still alive at 92, living in New York. I am happy I read the book. Learned quite a bit. Icsee there is a video of her talking about the book on the Wilson Center website. I will watch it.

We continue to see what we can learn from this box.

The Harvard Club of St. Louis, 55 years ago. It looks like there were about 350 members. I wonder how many are still alive. It gives names, graduation dates, address, phone number and occupations. There are no women.

My address is a townhouse/apartment in Brentwood, which I remember as having no air conditioning, but a large community pool. My phone number is totally unremembered.

The Kennedys visited Canada in 1961. It was a 3 day visit, and this brochure gives a detailed schedule of activities. Now, think of Dallas two years later. The schedule here tells you which of the 9 cars (each numbered in the order in which they will travel) the President will drive in from the airport, and exactly what route the motorcade will follow, turn by turn. You can bet that doesn’t happen now. Or maybe it does.

Pierre Salinger was Kennedy’s press secretary. He was on the 1961 trip to Ottawa. And 22 years later, he was at a Booz Allen worldwide officer meeting and signed this piece of paper. You now know what I know. Oh, how did I get this? Don’t know. Did I pay $1.50? Doubtful.

Ah, Asitane restaurant in Istanbul. It was my favorite. It got very high ratings. But it looks like the pandemic may have overtaken it, and it might have closed in 2020.  It was an atmospheric restaurant set right next to the Chora Church, an old Byzantine church/museum with wonderful murals, and it served Ottoman food from historic recipes. You can still go to its website and see the menu. Your mouth will water. 

http://www.asitanerestaurant.com.

I don’t remember the Mikhailovsky restaurant, but for some reason, I kept the sugar packet. I do remember some of the St. Petersburg restaurants we went to. Casual ones: Idiot (named after the Dostoevsky book, not the chef, I assume) and Teplo, where we went twice. They are both still in business. Mikhailovsky? Maybe not.

No, I was not at this event. I remember finding this chocolate wrapper on the street. I don’t even know what the Great Arab Revolt was, but I admit that those three words placed together make me a bit uneasy.

Except for my 1958 high school class tour of the White House, this is as close to entering it that I have been. Don’t know where I got this. Or why I still have it.

I must have soaked this off a bottle of Georgian champagne. This must date from my 1974 trip. The food in Russia in January 1974 was awful. The one good meal we had was at a Georgian restaurant where tourists and boisterous groups of important Russians could dine.

Okay, how many of you remember the short-lived Trump Shuttle? Who would have guessed?

And finally, we all remember these glorious days:

Stephen Strasburg, Adam Eaton, Bryce Harper and Victor Robles. Strasburg and Eaton no longer playing, Harper in Philadelphia, and Robles in Seattle. No current Nat was on the team 5 years ago.

That’s it for today. More to come.

I am already tired of all of the criticism that Joe Biden is getting for having pardoned his son Hunter. Hunter is his son, after all, and he is his father. What else would you expect him to do? What would you do?

I understand the Republican reaction. It’s natural since they are looking to criticize Biden for everything and, lo and behold, here is one more thing, unexpected. I don’t understand the Democratic critics, who should be sympathetic to a President in his last months, forced to forego a reelection campaign because of serious and presumably irreversible age related issues, and forced to turn the country over to the man whom he beat four years ago, and a man who will seek to undermine everything he has done over the past four years.

I am exacerbated at those who say that pardoning his son is going to destroy Biden’s legacy; I don’t think it will have much of an effect at all, and I think whatever effect it might have may in fact be positive, showing the humanity of the man. And I am certainly frustrated at those who say that Trump will stand on firmer ground when he decides to pardon some or all of the January 6 rioters. I can not imagine that this move will, in fact, encourage Trump to use his pardon authority, even though he will undoubtedly add it to his list of reasons and excuses.

Biden has stated that Hunter had been treated differently because of who his father is. This may be true; I don’t know. And whether I “believe” it to be true is irrelevant to whether it is true. And whether it is true may, in fact, be never known, although there will undoubtedly be those who will investigate this questions to death, and those who will broadcast their opinions, as if they matter, even without further investigating.

As to Hunter himself, he has clearly led a troubled life for a period of years; we don’t have to repeat all of his shortcomings. But, those years aside, he does seem to be a serious, and a bright, individual who is set on retaining his sobriety and living a moral life from hereafter. He has suffered greatly, both from his addictions and the attacks against him (resulting of course in a criminal conviction), as a very public person. Let’s just hope he continues on the course he is on, and doesn’t give into the pressure he will most likely continue to be under.

As to Trump’s presumptive pardon of the January 6 convicts now in prison, I must admit that I am fairly indifferent. Many of them (most or all of whom have political differences with me, to be sure) are normal citizens, who got carried away one time in their lives, and they too have already paid a price. I don’t think they are going to get out of jail and form an SS-like militia; I think most will just go on with their lives. That’s okay by me. (If Trump is going to use his pardon authority here, I do hope that he would not pardon any of those accused of physically attacking or injury law enforcement officials; that small group deserves whatever they got.)

I don’t think that Biden has used his pardon authority much, yet. I expect, like most presidents, he will use it to pardon a significant number of people before his term ends. This is is prerogative, like it is of all presidents. Sure it is a gift from a president to a convicted criminal, but it is also a gift to a president, guaranteed by our constitution. Unless he lets out child murderers or the like, I would support his right to pardon anyone he wants. It’s a “thank you for your service” to the president.

When he was in office, Trump used his pardon authority to pardon his machuten (I am told that is the male singular for machatunim, which is Yiddish for the parents of my son–in-law or daughter-in-law, for which there is no word in English), Charles Kushner, who not only committed federal campaign violations, and tax evasion, but also witness tampering. The witness tampering was not normal witness tampering, but to encourage his brother in law not to testify against him, he hired a prostitute to seduce him, Charles’ thought being that he could in effect blackmail him to keep quiet. And this man will now be our Ambassador to France. He also pardoned Steve Bannon and Roger Stone. In fact, the website for WTSP in Tampa has an article (dated December 2) that lists and gives a short bio of approximately 180 people pardoned by Donald Trump in his first term. Hunter Biden clearly did not do anything worse than the vast majority of those Trump has freed.

So, let’s not be too hard on President Biden. As someone recently said, “let’s give the guy a break!” Now, who said that? Oh, yeah, it was me.

This is a box that keeps on giving.

This is part (okay, a substantial part) of my collection of St. Louis Browns baseball cards. I grew up, with my grandfather, a Browns fan. Most everybody else rooted more for the Cardinals, but not us. I think this taught me it was alright to be in the minority. When the Browns moved to Baltimore in 1953, I learned something else about what can happen if you are in the minority.

Two thousand Jamaican dollars. I must be rich. Well, they are worth about $13 American. Michelle and Josh are heading to Negril on Saturday. Do I give them these, or keep them in my estate? Hard choices.

No one is going to Russia these days. So I will hang onto my 50 ruble note. Rubles are a dime a dozen these days. Literally. 50 rubles equals 47 cents.

How is your Arabic. The back side of this note is in English, so I know what it says. We stayed at the Golden Tulip when we were in Tunis on a fascinating trip sponsored by Ben Gurion University. I should tell you about it one day. By the way, the header says Carthage, not Tunis. Don’t be fooled.

If you want to fly Air Vietnam 36 years ago, you can borrow my timetable. I have never been to Vietnam and can’t remember where I got this, but in 1988, not very many Americans boarded these planes.

This one actually was from my 1974 visit to Moscow. The hotel was (is?) right off Red Square, as I recall, on the other side of St. Basil’s. Perfect location. The hotel itself, old in 1974, was fairly drab. It was also buggy. No, not the insect kind.

My mother graduated from Washington University Law School in 1936. After giving up practicing to raise two children, she opened an office in Clayton in about 1960 and lawyered on for about 25 years.

I have never flown with either a president or a vice president.  I found each of these in used books I have bought. And speaking of used books….

Those French really know how to make attractive book marks. No pictures of cancer sufferers here.

The final item of the day, but don’t worry. The box has more. As to this card, I must admit something: I have no idea what these words mean.

More, tomorrow. 

“Did he believe all that he said? The question is inapplicable to this sort of personality. Subjectively, ____________ was, in my opinion, entirely sincere even in his self-contradictions. For his is a humorless mind that simply excludes the need for consistency that might distress more intellectual types. To an actor, the truth of anything lies in its effect; if it makes the right impression, it is true.”

This sounds like it was written in 2024 to talk about Donald Trump, doesn’t it? In fact, it was written in the 1930s, to describe Adolph Hitler.

Don’t worry – I am not saying that Donald Trump is a reincarnation of Hitler. But I am saying that there are certain personalities who can gather millions of followers who do share certain traits, and this refers to one trait clearly shared by the two of them.

The quote comes from Edgar Mowrer, an American journalist, who published a book in 1933, with 1937 and 1938 revisions, called Germany Puts the Clock Back. We still remember Kamala Harris’ slogan “We Won’t Go Back”, right? It’s another similarity. It looks like we have.

I just finished reading this fascinating book, which was apparently a best seller when first published. It is primarily about Germany after World War I, the time of the Weimar Republic. It continues through Hitler becoming dictator of Germany in 1934, but ends prior to Kristallnacht in November, 1938 and the start of World War II in September 1939. Mowrer, obviously aware of the difficult position of the Jews in Germany when he wrote the book, had no clue about the eventual fate of the Jews not only in Germany, but throughout most of Europe, that was to come. As to World War II itself, he had his suspicions, but attempts were still being made to forestall armed conflict even at his final revision of the book.

So the book is not about World War II or the Holocaust, but about what happened between the time Germany admitted defeat in November of 1918, and the time that he finished his writing and revising, probably in 1938. We know the general story. Germany admitted it was at fault, it accepted a very onerous treaty developed by the winning powers at Versailles, it adopted a democratic constitution, and for 13 years, until the Nazi takeover in 1934, it became a very different country than it had been before World War I.

Germany in the 1920s and the United States a hundred years later are, of course, very different places, and can’t be compared to each other in any comprehensive way. But there are facets of Germany in the 1920s that may be similar enough to facets of today’s United States that they deserve examination.

Let’s look at some of the features of Weimar Germany, and see what we can glean from them that might be applicable to us today.

According to Mowrer (and I don’t know), the Weimar constitution was the most democratic and liberal constitution ever developed, but it was adopted by a country with no democratic traditions, and even at the beginning of Weimar, was supported by a minority “elite” of the population – well education, Western oriented, cosmopolitan. Most Germans then were not well educated, were certainly not Western oriented, and were very, very provincial. So there was a major gap between the government and the population.

At the beginning, this might not have mattered a lot. After the destruction of the first World War, the Germans appreciated time to rebuild, and the new government, supported many of Germany’s industrialists at the beginning, seemed to be succeeding, with full employment and a return to prosperity. This did not last, however, and soon the country was torn by extraordinary inflation and then massive unemployment. When the economy is failing for the majority of inhabitants, and the government seems far removed and controlled by people very different from the average man on the street or man on the farm, trouble cannot be far away.

At the same time, during the 1920s, there was a remarkable cultural revolution going on in Germany. Whoops. Let me restate this. There was a remarkable cultural revolution going on in Berlin. Avant garde art, atonal music, wild theater and dance, a sexual revolution, nudity on stage. You can imagine. All of this was very different from anything that Germany had ever experienced before. And, as visible as it was, these cultural phenomena did not run very deep at all throughout most of the country.

Germany had no experience of democracy, and most Germans distrusted democracy, did not see it bringing any improvements to their lives, and saw it run by people very different from true Germans. This is where the Jewish issue comes in. The Jews in Germany had been relatively free for a century or so, but not completely. Before World War I, there were always areas in government and levels in the military where they were not permitted to join. But under Weimar, the Jews were completely equal to any other residents of Germany, and they took advantage of it, becoming leaders in the government, and leaders of all of the cultural changes. An easy target, to be sure.

At the same time, even every government official was not a supporter of the Weimar regime. There was no equivalent of a de-Nazification program in Weimar Germany. Members of the pre-war regime were not cleared out of government. Many were allowed to keep, or to regain, their own positions. This was true particularly in the judiciary, where each jurist had, both before and after the war, lifetime appointments. The judges during Weimar Germany were by and large the same judges who presided during pre-war Germany, and according to Mowrer, their decisions evidenced that anti-Republican bias.

And finally, of course, there was the Versailles treaty itself, which put enormous financial burdens on Germany, prohibited the country from providing for its own self-defense (much less potential offense), and caused bitter resentment.

Enter the Nazis. They stood up for the little man, the working class man. At least that is what they said, although Mowrer points out this was strategy, not fact, and that in fact Nazi Germany was very elitist (as pre-war Germany had always been), and the working man was eventually completely forgotten. The Nazis stood up for the German people, the Volk. They showed that the Germans were Aryans and the Aryans were a special and advanced race, much more advanced than anyone else, especially than the Jews and the Blacks. They could blame every thing that was bad on the Jews, and their collaborators in the government. They could envision all the European Germanic people (the Austrians, and those in the Polish corridor and in Czechoslovakia, for example) joining together and establishing a super state. They would end inflation, they would end unemployment, they would end these dangerous cultural changes and revert to historic Germanic themes. They would rid the country of outside influences, including the dangerous notion that democracy was a desirable form of government.

And they would do this under the leadership, the absolute leadership, of Adolph Hitler, a man who could say anything and be believed, and whose oratory was mesmerizing to the masses. They would (and did) follow him anywhere.

Clearly, the United States today is not Weimar Germany. And, in extraordinarily important ways, Donald Trump is not Adolph Hitler.  But some of the points raised by Edgar Mowrer in the 1930s do resonate today.

Kamala Harris might have thought she had a winning slogan in “We won’t go back!”, but she was wrong. For a great many Americans in 2024, as probably the majority of Germans in 1924, going back is just what they wanted to do.

The German desire to go back led to their own eventual misery,  another World War, and the Holocaust. Out of all this, 100 years after Weimar, came a democratic Germany, western oriented, with an active Jewish population, and cosmopolitan. The old hierarchical, provincial, arrogant Germany appears to be no more. That requires another book. Probably been written a hundred times. Probably more.

For forty years, I practiced law in DC. I retired in early 2012, now almost 13 years ago. I have no regrets about my career, and no regrets about retiring. When I stopped working, I was so determined to move away from any temptation to change my mind, that I stopped paying my dues to the DC Bar. I am still classified as “suspended”.

Then why is it, I ask, that I still have “work dreams”, dreams of being a lawyer, on a regular basis, and according to repetitive patterns?

Here are some of my recurrent dreams.

(1) I am told that an out of town client wants me to come to his office so we can move his situation forward. He doesn’t tell me by telephone. In fact, his initial communication is not part of the dream. But somehow, I get the message.

The problem is that I don’t really remember him, and I certainly don’t remember what I did, or should be doing, for him. It’s not his mistake. It’s mine. I know he’s a client. I know I am supposed to be doing something. I don’t know what it is. I feel guilty and very embarrassed.

Sometimes the dream peters out here during my prep for the trip. Sometimes I start the trip, which usually ends in confusion. Like I wind up in Portland ME, and he’s in Portland OR. Or I miss my plane, because I left for the airport too late. Or I get to the airport and can’t find where the gates are. Those sorts of things. In none of these dreams do we meet.

(2) I have retired from practicing, but either because I missed it or because my firm needed me and asked me to return, I returned. I work hard, just like I always did, and am an integral part of the office. The problem is that I neglected to work out any salary arrangements when I returned and the consequence is that I am not being paid. This has been going on for some times (usually several years), and although I am not short on funds, I feel that I should be compensated. I am convinced this situation is the result of my pay being overlooked. I don’t think the firm is trying to take advantage of me. I try unsuccessfully to calculate what I should be paid – how many hours I work a week, how much business I bring in, and so forth. I make plans to talk to those in power to rectify the situation, but the meeting never takes place.

(3) The office is moving, or it has moved. This is the basis of several plot lines. In one, I go to my office and it has been cleared out. In another, I look for my new office, and it doesn’t seem to exist; I am told to sit in the hall. For a third, the office is new, and I can’t figure it out. Where is the door? What building is it in? Where does this hall go? Who are these people? Where is the elevator?

(4) I am at a conference or large meeting of lawyers. It is not the first time I have been here, but I don’t see anyone I know. Everyone is new to me and, I think, very young. Someone is speaking, but I can’t concentrate on what they are saying. I am very uncomfortable. I have to leave. But when I get outside, I don’t know where I am, or which direction is the right one. I look around. The city is unrecognizable.

Let’s see:

The tin also says, “Don’t lose your appeal.” It could have  also suggested that you don’t have to eat them, but you can just open the tin and enjoy dissents.

I can’t tell when this DC package was mailed. But it’s before my time, for sure. And, back then, how did you go into a post office and buy one half cent stamp? “I’m sorry. I just don’t need two.” The stamp is from the early 1920s. I have long wondered whether Nathan would be happy he was honored by a stamp, or disturbed that they gave him the half cent.

I actually have a bunch of these in the box. Boston, Chicago, Grand Canyon, and others as well as these.

A birthday card from decades ago from our friends, the Hammers. None of us knew the definition of “Old Guy” back then.

My grandfather’s luggage, or maybe doctor’s bag,q we Q she decided to go work with him. He was like I won’t be bored. You said you didn’t want a bagel and there’s some child. There’s some ocean chips there. If you want to so and when I said you don’t want to watch people tag. He passed away in 1953.

This is from a wedding of one of the sons of our friends, the Zimbalists. Now and then, I would put it on our table when we had guests. The Vaad never caught me.

This is part of my really random collection. $20 will get you into this event where you will have no idea what is going on.

Finally:

Remember when Bryce Harper was a Nat?

That is enough for a quiet Friday. I have to go to the grocery store. Black Friday, right? I guess I will fill up on licorice.

I am going to try to do the Trump weave today, melding three distinct topics that seem to have nothing to do with each other into an intricate pattern that will appear seamless. My expectation is that I will fail. But who’s counting?

Today is Thanksgiving (you probably know that, at least if you are in this country), and my initial question is to whom is one expected to be giving thanks? Thanksgiving is, in most people’s mind, the ultimate secular national holiday, and certainly it is to the extent that it isn’t typically marked by religious services or rituals. But you can’t give thanks without directing your thanks somewhere, so it isn’t surprising when you look at Abraham Lincoln’s proclamation of 1863 creating the national holiday used words such as “[we]…..fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, tranquillity and Union.” As well as “to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our benevolent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.”

So, at least in its origins, the holiday was not fully secular, although maybe it was – to a great extent – not denominational. There is nothing specifically Christian in the wording, I don’t think. It is wording that religious Jews could endorse (after all, each Shabbat service includes a prayer for the country). And maybe Muslims, although I actually don’t know that, and there were virtually none in the country in 1863. Native Americans who had not been Christianized? That, too, I don’t know.

But, from what I can see, prior to Lincoln’s proclamation, there had been various types of “Thanksgiving” traditions that had developed, and most (if not all) of them were religious in origin.

So, how did Thanksgiving become a secular holiday? I read an interesting take on that, which said that secular Thanksgiving was a product of American education and American schooling, starting in the late 19th century, when the country was suddenly beset (that’s not the right word) with immigration on a scale never before imagined, and the task of American public schooling (which was for everyone then but the elitist of the elite) was to Americanize them. I don’t know if this is a good explanation, but it certainly is a thought provoking and interesting one, and one which I sorta like.

As an aside, it was in this educational secularization of Thanksgiving that the 1621 “harvest festival” of the Massachusetts Pilgrims and their neighboring Indian tribes became connected with the holiday. Until the late 19th century, when the American education curriculum was expanded to include Thanksgiving, it appears there was no connection between this historic event and Thanksgiving. The 1621 meal and meeting was probably held in early autumn, not in late November. And certainly Lincoln, in his rather lengthy proclamation (I should count words – was it longer than the Gettysburg address?) did not mention the Pilgrims.

That takes me to the second strand in my weave. Lincoln also did not refer directly to Blacks in his proclamation. That wasn’t a moral failure in and of itself, although in 1863, in the southern states and the four border states, slavery was still legal and practiced. For Blacks, therefore, was there any reason at that time to celebrate Thanksgiving? Who would they be thanking, and for what?

Last night, we watched the latest Denzel Washington Netflix August Wilson film, The Piano Lesson. I urge you all to watch it. It has received a 90% Rotten Tomatoes critics’ review score, although there has been some criticism for some of the choices made in adapting the stage play for the screen. I liked everything about the film, even when the mysterious “ghosts” of the play were made physically manifest on the screen. And the performances are extraordinary.

The story takes place in Pittsburgh in the 1930s, and the central, though nonspeaking, character is a piano dating from before the Civil War. A beautiful hand carved piano depicting family history, made by the grandfather (great grandfather?) of the current Charles family members. The piano was the property of the slave holding Sutters, but was stolen from the Sutter house by the carver’s son (who was afterward brutally murdered) and moved to Pittsburgh. And just recently, the last of the Sutters was murdered, found dead at the bottom of a well on his farm. The ghosts of both murdered men haunt the Charles family members.

The Charles family in the 1930s was no longer enslaved, but still haunted by slavery. Where was Thanksgiving in their consciousness? They might have believed in God, and this God may have their individual salvation at heart, but certainly not a national salvation. That, I am certain. What they would have done on the fourth Thursday of November, I don’t know.

So the concept of Thanksgiving,  once you get beyond the food, Macy’s parade, the football games, and such, gets very complicated. Luckily, we don’t usually think about all of these things. Let’s keep it simple.

Thing number three? No time now. But look at yesterday’s New York Times obituary for 100 year old Madeline Riffaud. Can you weave her remarkable story into this post?

As I ride my stationery bike, I have been watching, one episode at a time, the Netflix series, “Killing Eve”. I have just finished watching the first half of the third year of the four year series. I understand that there are major problems with this series (starting with the main premise), and that to say that each of the characters is flawed would be to state a world class understatement, but each of them are so intriguing that I seem to keep watching.

OK, you have no idea what I am talking about. Eve is, at the start, a British bureaucrat who works for what appears to be the British equivalent of the American Secret Service, the agency that guards politicians and others who need to be guarded. She soon loses that job, but is picked up by a branch of MI6, the British equivalent of the CIA. The goal is to track down a mysterious assassin who has engaged in a number of seemingly unrelated murders of prominent individuals at various locations in the United Kingdom and Europe. It turns out that the assassin is a Russian woman whose name may be Oksana, but who goes by Villanelle. She is “controlled” by a Russian man named Konstantin, and Eve works under an MI6 veteran named Carolyn. And, oh yes, Konstantin and Carolyn turn out to be old friends. And Villanelle and Eve turn out to have the deepest love of each other and the strongest hate of each other as any conceivable love-hate relationship could hold. And, one more thing: everything that happens seems to relate to a secret organization called The Twelve, who pays the bills for Villanelle and Konstantin, and which is both a target and mystery to Eve and (maybe) to Carolyn.

The murders are all shown on screen, and each one is more gruesome than the others (the most recent I have seen involved a pitchfork on a Polish farm). That in and of itself should make this show off limits for me – I am not a fan of horror movies. But I stay.

My point, though, is not to convince you to watch this series (although you might find it as interesting as I do), but to talk about the characters, who go about their business of chasing killers, and killing themselves, as if it was as normal as getting a cup of coffee. While they all have their own internal struggles of course (and this is crucial to the series), none of those internal struggles involve, say: “Am I doing something wrong here?” These are people who are disconnected in any real sense with any world outside of their own limited world, who totally lack empathy for their fellow human beings, and who just can’t help or control themselves.

Read this last line again. “These are people who are disconnected in any real sense with any world outside of their own limited world, who tally lack empathy for their fellow human beings, and who just can’t help or control themselves.” Does this remind you, as it reminds me, of Donald Trump and Elon Musk (to take two random examples)? Don’t you get the feeling that they would do anything, regardless of its effect on anyone else, without ever feeling a moment’s regret. Don’t you get the feeling that they could easily be Two of The Twelve? I do.

Put Trump aside for a moment. Concentrate on Musk. I have written about him before, you may remember. My question then was (and one of my questions remains) how a man who leads X, SpaceX, and Tesla has time to hang around Donald, and run what might become the most influential government agency of the second Trump term, the Department of Government Efficiency. And, by the way, I now see that, even with that question, I have sold Musk short. I had failed to recognize his role in the new up and coming corporation, XAI, which is going to be challenging Open AI in the race to see who can come up with a way to accidentally destroy civilization first.

The utter brashness with which Musk and his fellow job and money slicer Vivek Ramaswamy describe their plans for DOGE is mind boggling. While it’s easy to brush some of their rhetoric away as overblown, we need to remember who we are dealing with. We are dealing with Konstantin and Villanelle, and they are likely to do anything, ruthless as it might be, and walk away unscathed.

But what about Tesla? Tesla is (duh!) and electric vehicle company bent on controlling that market and the market generally for self-driving vehicles, totally identified with Musk and the basis of his outlandish fortune. Joe Biden is an advocate for electric vehicles. Donald Trump is not. Donald Trump wants to keep gas powered vehicles as the major types of automobiles. The oil business certainly supports this, as perhaps do some members of the UAW. But what about Musk? Isn’t he more in line with Biden than Trump on this issue? How will Tesla weather the Trump campaign against EVs?

And then there is China, against which Trump says he is determined (you note I add the words “says he”) to impose devastatingly strong tariffs. I have read that Tesla has a number of factories in China (four or five, I believe), which make auto parts and full grown Teslas, and that China is Tesla’s second largest market for vehicle sales.

If Tesla can’t make parts in China as it currently does and has to transfer is manufacturing and supply sources elsewhere, won’t that have an adverse effect on Musk? And wouldn’t you imagine that China, which has a number of large domestic manufacturers of electric vehicles, will put the kibosh (is that a word?) on Tesla sales in China?

Maybe, X, SpaceX and XAI are so important to Musk that he is willing to let Tesla go by the wayside. Some have suggested that he might even drop Tesla, sell the company. But he would be selling a company which, for all the reasons stated above (and maybe more), would have a very depressed market value. That doesn’t sound very Musky.

So here I am, watching “Killing Eve”. Am I also watching “Killing Tesla”. But somehow I doubt it. Somehow, whether it’s The Twelve or The Two, I think there are surprising things deep below (okay, if not the Deep State, the Deep Something), that we may never understand. And that, more and more, these are things that will, or at least think they will, control us.

Yes, it’s my birthday, and I’ll cry if I want to. After all, 82 is a pretty big number. I’d much rather be 28 (I think). And, no, I am certainly not crying.

I thought about the birthday parties my parents gave me when I was young, today. Or rather, I thought about thinking about my early birthday parties, but the truth is I really don’t remember them. Did I have birthday parties? I mean real birthday parties, with friends and classmates, not just birthday cake and candles with my family. I am not sure. Michael Bobroff, do you remember?

Actually, I do remember one party. I don’t know how old I was, but I was in elementary school, and my memory is that the party was the party that I wanted to have. My guess is it was a Saturday afternoon, and I think we all went to see a matinee at the Tivoli or the Varsity, the two theaters then operating in the Delmar Loop area in University City, Missouri. And then we went down the street to the Velvet Freeze Ice Cream Store, and had ice cream. My memory is that I became very upset while I was at Velvet Freeze, and that my party was ruined. But I don’t know why I was upset. Maybe because my friends were more interested in the ice cream and in each other than with me. But that’s just a guess. And now that I am thinking about it, maybe there was no movie, just Velvet Freeze. I have no idea.

Since I couldn’t remember much about my other birthdays, and I only remember Velvet Freeze (if you aren’t from St. Louis, or maybe Kansas City, you have never heard of Velvet Freeze), I decided to look up Velvet Freeze. The article I saw at losttables.com, a website devoted to old St. Louis restaurants, was very informative. The article started with the invention of the ice cream cone at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair (an accidental invention to be sure, when someone took a waffle from the waffle man and wrapped it around his ice cream, and everyone said: “Voila, you have invented the ice cream cone.”

Well, in fact, we don’t know the name of the guy who wrapped his waffle around his ice cream (it was probably not Voila), but we do know the name of one guy who decided that this might be a business opportunity, and quickly became a large manufacturer of cones in the city which then supplied most of the cones made in America, and shipped them around the country. His name was Grosberg. Oscar Grosberg.

Now, until today, I didn’t know anything about Oscar Grosberg and his cone factory. I found it interesting that Grosberg was spelled with one “s”, not two, which is not typical. And then I remember that my father’s sister, Mary (I called her Aunt Mary, by the way) had a very good, long time friend named Roz Grosberg, and I just looked her up on findagrave.com, and – lo and behold – she was a one “s” Grosberg. Could she have been the daughter of the cone king? Is this something you would like me to look into further?

Well, back to our story. It turned out that another Jewish immigrant to St. Louis, Jacob Martin, started what he called the Union Ice Cream Company (later the Original Double Dip Ice Cream Company), which operated at the same time that Oscar Grosberg was making cones. And, wouldn’t you know it, Jacob and Oscar decided to join forces and make both ice cream, and they named their new company: Velvet Freeze, Inc.

This was no small company. It had two ice cream factories, one in South St. Louis on Gravois (do you know how to pronounce Gravois?), and another in the north of the city. And, according to the article, by 1936, it had 50 stores in the greater St. Louis area, and then expanded into Kansas City and elsewhere.

The company continued to thrive through the 1970s, under different ownership, but eventually the stores began to close and, in 1986, the Velvet Freeze factory stopped making ice cream. A major St. Louis dairy, Pevely (“white in the bottle, pink on the cheeks”) began to manufacture ice cream under the Velvet Freeze name, but it really didn’t catch on.

Today, November 26, 2024, there is only one Velvet Freeze ice cream store left. It is a homey looking place on West Florissant Boulevard in the suburb of Jennings. You can’t go there today, because they aren’t open on Mondays or Tuesdays, but they should be there tomorrow, opening at 2 p.m. Next trip to St. Louis, I may try it out. They have over 50 flavors, and they make their own ice cream using the original Velvet Freeze recipes, on Saturday nights.

By the way, the “lost tables” website is a great one, if you are interested in old St. Louis restaurants. I did also read the write up of Rinaldi’s Pizzeria, located just a few blocks from the Velvet Freeze on Delmar, where I spent much of my high school years with dates and friends and the likes, eating the square cut, extraordinarily greasy, pizzas with home made (I think home made) sausage. And – and this is true – I tasted every bit of that pizza as I read the article this afternoon. It was that good.

Rinaldi’s is not there anymore either (in fact the block that it was on has been torn down I saw a few weeks ago, getting ready for something big, I assume), and moved from University City west to Creve Coeur in the early 1970s. It’s not there any more either. I don’t think any of Al Rinaldi’s kids wanted to take over a pizza business.