Art is 80

Pardon me if I don’t understand what is going on in Gaza and Israel. Of course, anything that stops the war and acts to prevent further incursions is to be welcomed, and maybe the 20 point plan does this, but I sure have a lot of questions. Here are some.

1. The return of live and dead hostages.  It is not clear to me that the bodies of all dead hostages can be retrieved. What then?
2. As a corollary to the first question, it was repeated many times during the early stages of the crisis, at least, that some of the hostages were being held by Islamic Jihad, not by Hamas. How does Islamic Jihad fit into the current situation. Does it still exist? Have hostages? Have arms?
3. What does it mean to disarm Hamas? Does anyone really know who is Hamas and who isn’t? Does this mean destruction of only some sort of war weaponry, or also small hand guns and all? How will that be accomplished?
4. As to Hamas, it also exists outside of Gaza. It is powerful in the West Bank. Will it be allowed to continue to operate there? Will it be allowed to participate in (and probably win) and election there? The West Bank is not covered by the deal.
5. And as to the future, is there to be a Palestinean state, or not? And if there is, why isn’t the West Bank part of the current conversation? How could it not be?
6. Of course, Netanyahu will have a hard time selling a Palestinean state, which most of the world has already recognized. And this plan calls for a state, at least temporarily, headed by a commission headed by, of all people, Donald Trump, with Palestinian technical personnel. Excuse me, but that brings to mind two words: occupation and colonialism. What am I missing?
7. And once this new arrangement is in place, Israel will still control the borders? Since war materiel can be brought in under the guise of construction material, how will the rebuilding really take place? And if Israel is policing the borders and has a dispute with the Trump commission, how will that work?

I know I am seeing the glass half empty, but truth be told, I think it is more empty than that. But we will see. It will be interesting.

Busy day.  Will explain tomorrow.

I don’t know anyone who has been arrested by ICE, carried off by ICE, or deported by ICE. I don’t know their spouses, children, friends, or other relatives. I know that many were here legally, many were waiting for asylum appeals to be heard, and many had work permits or active student visas. I know most are honest and hardworking, and many have others dependent on them. I also know that none of them are being treated appropriately or humanely, and some are being treated brutally by my government. And I know that for each person captured by ICE, there are tens of others living in constant, daily fear of being abducted.

Truthfully, I didn’t expect any better from Donald Trump and his henchmen. I also didn’t expect anything better from the bunch of hollow politicians elected to Congress as Republicans.

But I have to admit I expected something better of the Supreme Court, the only governmental body whicch has no other body on top of it which can say, “Whoa.”

I understand that there are six judges who are described as conservative, and only three described as liberal. Putting aside the skullduggery that led to this imbalance, and taking into account that so-called conservative and liberal judges have different philosophies of constitutional interpretation, I didn’t expect that the Supreme Court would rule as it has. I did not expect that the Court would so heavily prioritize narrow, ideological judicial thinking over a set of human values that, up until now, had been widely described as and assumed to be central to the Judeo-Christian or American value system.

But here we are. The six conservative justices seem to be as strongly Trump’s henchmen as are the members of the Republican Party in Congress.

Venezuela is today a failed country. I know no one in the United States that thinks otherwise. After all, the United States is currently using the strongest military in the world to bomb defenseless small Venezuelan boats, and murdering everyone invthem, presumably (but without publicly shown proof) carrying drugs bound for the United States.

During the last administration, this country gave Venezuelans the right to remain in the United States temporarily until October 2026 on the theory that their home country was too dangerous to require them to return.

Their country has presumably only become more dangerous, but the Trump administration abruptly terminated the right of those Venezuelans, all legally admitted into the country, to stay here, even until next October. Not one retains the right to remain, irrespective of their individual circumstances.

Just yesterday, the Supreme Court overturned the decision of the US Court of Appeals, which had granted a stay of that order pending further judicial process.

On what basis did the Supreme Court take this position which will affect up to 600,000 Venezuelans and their family members? The answer is: We don’t know.

We don’t know because this decision was taken by the Court on its Emergency Docket and issued with no opinion.

What makes this an “emergency?” The answer is: We don’t know. There are apparently no standards for this, and no one to tell the Court it is wrong.

The Court has done this in many cases, not only this one and, in some of these cases, it has issued final orders in pending cases under the guise of calling them temporary orders. Orders allowing deportations. Orders allowing firings. It is as if a death sentence case was under appeal, and the Court issued an emergency, unsigned, empty, but decisive order permitting the execution to proceed while the case was still pending.

Yes, we have made some grave mistakes in voting for Trump as president and his Republican toadies in Congress. But mistakes are often made, and when they are, we thought we had in the Supreme Court an institution that would keep us from falling into an abyss. We were wrong.

Where do we go from here?

It has been over a week since the beginning of the year 5786, and it’s already time for another.

I am not going to critique yesterday’s Yom Kippur services, except to say that I left the Kol Nidrei evening service and the morning Yom Kippur services with very different feelings.

I do want to make two important comments about yesterday. First, I appreciated more than before the enormous size of the tent that covers the Adas parking lot during the high holidays. I believe (don’t hold me to it) that almost 2000 people can sit in the tent. Of course, the crowd overflows during part of the services (and there are two other services going on inside the building).

Second, what is a synagogue service without old people? From my earliest memories,  there have always been very old, bent-over men and women at synagogue services, devout, often keeping to themselves, but present. It is still the case. They are still there. But something has definitely changed. These people are now all my contemporaries. Sure, there are some that are a few years older, but not of another generation. I have said this before. Services are now filled with people that I have known for 40 years, who were (say, before the Covid pandemic) still energetic, active human beings, but who now seem to have taken on new roles, the roles of aged men and women.

Of course, I understand that these others must look at me the same way. I know that when my age comes up in a conversation, I expect this response: “What???? 82???? I would have guessed 28! You sure you aren’t dyslexic?”

Instead, I find that people simply start talking to me louder or slower.

I will admit that this might be the proper response, as  sometimes I wonder if my hearing is beginning to fail a bit. This generally happens when I am with a number of people, and someone says something that I don’t quite grasp, but everyone else seems to hear it perfectly. Of course, all the other people seem to be wearing hearing aids. I may be the only person I know who is 82 and hasn’t been fitted for a hearing aid at Costco.

But then there was my old friend/client H_____, who had lost most of his hearing by the time he was in his early 70s. He had to ask you to repeat for him anything that was said, because he couldn’t understand it unless, in fact, someone did speak to him loudly and slowly.

He was, of all things, a psychiatrist, and still practicing. This seemed to me to be impossible, and I commiserated with him, showing that I knew how difficult it must be. “Difficult?”, he said, putting his hand on my shoulder, “It’s a blessing.”

Last night, we had 14 people for Yom Kippur break-fast and a triple birthday celebration for son-in-law Josh, cousin Alison, and (two weeks early, but we couldn’t leave him out) grandson Izzy. The smartest thing we did? Paper and plastic everything. OK, maybe not the smartest.  But definitely the most convenient.

Back to the real world now, I guess. Government shutdown. Escalating inflation, especially with healthcare. All Democratic programs being put on hold. Democratic cities being invaded by federal troops. ICE run wild, terrorizing millions with bodysnatching and long term secret incarceration. Tampering with voting rights. Environmental neglect. Increasing unemployment. Federal layoffs, suspensions, furlough, and firings. All out war against non-military cartels, proposed Trump takeover of the Gaza Strip. Republicans refusing to talk to Democrats. And now FEMA withholding emergency funding.

Welcome to Fiscal Year 2026.

This is the third Yom Kippur for this blog. And only the third day when the post on this blog contains only two sentences.

This appears to be the 13th government shutdown in the 249 years that the United States has been in existence. The first was a 10 day shutdown in 1976, the year of the counbtry’s Bicentennial. Before that, for 200 years, there was never a shutdown of the American government.

But, you ask, what about governmental shutdowns in other countries around the world? At least, that is what I wanted to know. So I asked ChatGPT.

The answer is that government shutdown of the type we have are unique to the United States. Other countries may have governmental crises after no confidence votes, but the underlying bureaucracy has always continued to function.

You might call this an example of “American Exceptionalism”. You might also call it an abject failure of American legislatures, session after session. I have quoted him before and will quote him again. Walt Kelly: We have met the enemy and it is us.

Donald (“Makes Me Vomit”) Trump agrees with Kelly’s Pogo. Trump knows that we are the enemy. That is why he is sending troops into Washington, Portland, Memphis, Chicago, and eventually everywhere but Palm Beach. This is why he is going to use “war ravaged” American cities as training grounds for potential fighting abroad, and thus use American citizens and residents for military target and bayonet practice.

And his Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth knows how to spot  enemies. They are “fat admirals and generals” walking around the Pentagon, troops with beards (no more “beardies” as he calls them) or long hair, women whose bodies don’t look like Hulk Hogan’s, or flag officers who don’t follow an exercise routine “every day”. The only acceptable grooming traits are tattoos, especially those of Crusader crosses.

And, excuse me, we are not to call Hegseth Secretary of Defense any more, even though that is what he is. We are to call him Secretary of War. Why? Because we are not to think of him as being here only to defend the country. We are to think of him as Offensive. I do.

Trump has, of course, hinted that he welcomes this shutdown. What authoritarian leader wouldn’t? He now believes he can himself decide what functions are “essential” and which are not. Anything non-essentiial will be shut down. Some, he will try to cripple so thoroughly that they will never recover. Those functions that shut down will include all those functions that show how the economy is doing. Inflation? Dunno. Job market? No idea. Those functions that benefit blue states? History.

What if Congress gets its act together? (A long shot, I know) it won’t matter because by then, Trump will have destroyed the ability to restart many programs, and besides that, he and his OMB puppeteer, Russell Vought, believe that a functioning Congress is irrelevant anyway. They can ignore anything Congress does (so why should Congress do anything?). As Alexander Haig said when Nixon resigned, “I am in charge here.”

A new adventure is beginning. Donald Trump has further extended his dictatorial control of the country by freezing all government functions that don’t serve his deranged agenda. The courts will try to fight him, but sadly not including the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court will bow down, in most instances by votes of 6 to 3. They will take cases prematurely, rush out decisions too quickly, and will see no need to issue explanations of their thinking.

You know the old saying, “Buckle your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride”? We can’t do that anymore. They have taken our seat belts away.

And, yes, I do hope someone proves me wrong.

When Thomas Stearns Eliot (T.S. to his friends) said that it ends not with a bang, but a whimper, he might not have been talking about the United States under Donald Trump. And when astronomers talk about the Big Bang, they might not be talking only about the creation of the universe; they just think they are.

The United States government is shutting down tonight. Not for three days or three weeks. For much longer. It is not shutting down because Congress has a few difficult issues to iron out. It is shutting down because one party in Congress refuses to talk with the other. The party that refuses to talk with the other is refusing to do so at the specific direction of the President. The President wants to use the government shutdown to give him the opportunity to totally reshape the United States government. It looks like he may succeed.

When Richard Nixon resigned from office, Gerald Ford said, “Our long national nightmare is over.” If Donald Trump suddenly dies in office, it may be that no one will be able to say that. If Trump and his minions/handlers are able to make the changes they desire during a long Congressional impasse, our current, more serious national nightmare may become impossible to wake up from. Governmental functioning may by then be so out of kilter that the concept of status quo ante may remain only a concept.

Everyone seems surprised that no one is fighting back effectively, that so many are just falling in line with Trump’s stated wishes. Why is everyone surprised? This is what happens when a totalitarian leader takes control. Name me a country where the opposition has been able to turn back a charismatic would-be dictator. For those of us who believe(d) in American exceptionalism, guess what? We were fooling ourselves.

Dictators need many things. One is a compliant legislature. Trump seems to have that. Another is a powerful bureaucracy. The shutdown will give his bureaucracy the opportunity to strengthen itself massively. It needs a responsive military. We now have a military willingly marching into Chicago, Portland, Memphis, and Washington DC, a military willing to attack Venezuelan fishing boats and maybe soon Venezuela itself, and a military whose leaders from across the world who are today convening at Quantico to hear about the Newest World Order. It needs a rubber stamp Supreme Court.  We may now have that, as well.

There is more. Attacking political enemies who have no response. We now have a growing paramilitary organization (Code name: ICE) ready to bash people in the head and disappear or secrete them indefinitely and without charges. Or so it appears. We have a government ready to stamp on free press and free media. And a government that thinks it can dictate to much of the outside word to do its bidding, to play its game, or to find itself without any toys.

In the upcoming 2025 elections, I expect the Democrats to do well. But these are not federal elections, but by the time the 2026 midterms occur, the electoral map and electoral rules may have been so changed that the opposition party may not stand a chance.

Are we close to peace in Ukraine? No. Are we closer to peace in Gaza? Probably not. Is our economy on the upswing? No. Are we entering an era of less due process, and less economic equality? Yes. Is our rickety health system falling apart? Yes. Are people more fearful walking the streets? Yes. Are we moving closer to the world of Biff in Back to the Future? Absolutely.

Am I being overly dramatic? I guess time will tell. “May you live in interesting times.” A Chinese proverb, they say, to be wished on your enemies. Is there a God? Has He granted the Chinese their wish?

A voice calls out of the ether: Hey, Art, you better stop and move on with your day!!

Yesterday, we went to the Phillips for the last day of the Vivian Browne exhibition. Browne was a New York based African-American artist who lived through most of the 20th century. I really admired her work. The top painting is part of her series on New York men. The middle painting is one of her many portraits of women. The third is one of her abstracts made not during, but after, a study trip to West Africa. I had never heard of her and, in case you had not either, now you have.

These four oil paintings comprise an entire exhibit at the National Gallery. Two by Titian, one by Cezanne, and one by Iona Rozeal Brown. They are supposed to show you that artists working in different places at different times can come up with similar ideas. I say: appreciate the paintings and don’t try to read too much into their connection.

Shootings where there are multiple deaths are a daily thing now, it seems. And to think there are those who say the problems are that we don’t have enough guns, and that we aren’t everywhere allowed to carry them in public.

And many of those same folks say that the problem is that we have too many radical leftists. Like the radical leftists who committed yesterday’s crime in Michigan. You know which radical leftist I mean, right? Yep, that one. The one photographed in a Trump shirt and with a Trump sign nailed to his home fence. Boy, the extremes to which some people go to deceive.

And, speaking of shootings, will someone let me know when it will be generally accepted that one can badmouth Charlie Kirk without becoming a target yourself? Ta-Nehisi Coates obviously thinks the time has come. His piece last week in Vanity Fair lays it out and should be spread far and wide. People have to realize you can be young and (somewhat) handsome, love your wife and children, be polite, positive, respectful, and charismatic, and still be a villain, a danger to society.

Two days before the government shuts down. Trump, after canceling a meeting with Shumer and Jeffries last week, says he will meet with the four Congressional leaders today. Unless the Democrats cave (and maybe they will and maybe they should), the government will “shut down” tomorrow night.

It seems clear to me that the Republicans want the shutdown. If not, why did Congress go home last week and why did the House, scheduled to come back today, announce they will not convene until Wednesday?

The Republicans will use the shutdown to determine that only MAGA priorities are “essential” and that many other functions they shut down will be terminated permanently, taking advantage of their belief that they never have to spend Congressionally appropriated funds that that they simply don’t want to spend. They think the Supreme Court will back them, and they may be correct, and anyway, once the barn door is opened, you just won’t get the horse back. And it does not appear that a shutdown would be brief. A long shutdown will play right into Trump’s hands.

Trump will control everything, and the Supreme Court will most likely back him until the 2026 midterms. Hopefully, things will change on January 1, 2027, but the electoral system may be so compromised by then through gerrymandering and voter restrictions that the Dems may not have a chance. This is the biggest worry. And the Democrats need new leadership (and new leadership with a potential broad base) to counter it.

Of course also this week, our Secretary of War (ugh!) is calling a meeting of all top brass from around the world for one hour (only) in Virginia. They say it’s a pep talk. I think it will be more than that, but am not sure what the agenda is. Maybe it is more limited than I fear. Maybe there will just be a bunch of buses and a simple instruction: “If your name begins with A through J, get on the bus for Chicago. K through R, the Bus to Memphis. S through Z, you are going to Portland.”

And yes, the Ten Commandments will be posted in each bus.

We started watching Just One Look, a 6 episode Polish miniseries based on a Harlan Coben novel, which is loosely about a missing person, and it got me thinking about all those people I used to see when I was younger, but who have disappeared from my life completely.

I remember quite a number of them, even though I can’t remember all of their names.

There are two, however, that I will mention by name…..just in case they happen to be married to your sister. They were both my friends when we lived in Clayton MO, and I was in 3rd, 4th, and 5th grades.

Does anyone know where Danny Schwartz or Roger McKnight are? Danny was my best friend in those years. We often walked home from school together and we went to Wiggins Ozark Camp together. His parents had a children’s clothing store in Clayton called Lads and Lassies. Danny’s mother died of leukemia in her 40s, and his father closed the shop and moved with Danny and his sister back to his hometown of San Angelo, TX. That’s the last I heard of Danny. (I remember one remark of Danny, at summer camp, when he told me that the two of us were very lucky because nobody could tell we were so smart).  I don’t think that Roger and I went to school together, but we lived on the same block. For two summers, we operated the very successful (some of the time) unlicensed Hessel-McKnight Detective Agency, dedicated to solving the mysteries of the neighborhood. You may have read about the mystery of the slashed lawn chair; I am sure it was in all the top newspapers.  The McKnights moved, too….to Oregon. The detective Agency did not survive.

My list really doesn’t include high school, college, or law school classmates. There are all sorts of ways to figure out where most of those folks are.

When I think back to those days, those who are missing are mainly female. There are young women I was friendly with, and even dated, whose names I can’t even pull up. What does that say about me in the ’60s?

Who was that cute girl I took out a number of times who went to Boston University? I couldn’t tell you if my life depended on it.

When I was at Yale, there were only 7 females in my 175 member law school class and I know what happened to them. But there were also women in the Yale graduate schools (no undergraduates) with whom I associated, some of whom I knew fairly well. With one exception (if you know who I am referring to, you know), they are all lost to time.

But all of that was a long time ago, I guess. During the two post-law school years I hung around St. Louis, I spent time with all sorts of people. Some, I had already known. Many not. Some were in my army reserve unit. Where is Don, my Polish friend from East St. Louis? He had gone to minority heavy E. St. Louis High School and came out quite prejudiced; wanted to make sure his kids went to an all white school, so they wouldn’t be. Where is that woman I dated over that very hot summer when I saved money by renting a St. Louis apartment with no air conditioning? At least I remember her name.

When I was in Army basic training at Ft. Ord CA, Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot. We were on a rifle range when it was announced, and cheers went up. Part of my training company were reservists from Lafayette LA, and they led the cheers. But one guy, my friend, who had graduated high school and was working at a gas station, and was extraordinarily nice, was appalled. What was his name? Where can he be? Or what about the nice young man who could do everything but read? You would never know it if you met him. But our drill sergeant had me work with him intensively, so he could pass a written proficiency test. And speaking of that drill sergeant, where is he? A very genuine man, whose ancestors had, by chance, been slaves on a farm owned by the ancestors of a recruit in the company. I remember (or think I remember) he was from Pine Bluff AR.

When I got to Washington, things got even more confusing. Where is my friend Jeff, who lived with his wife in a Mies van der Rohe building in SW DC, where two of the living room walls were floor to ceiling glass, and other two had multiple doors, so that hanging anything on a wall was not possible? Or my now nameless friend with the very strong Boston accent who bought a new Dodge Dart, but called it a Darge Daht? Where is that nice girl who lived down the street and doubled as my dental hygienist? Where is my secretary at HUD, who was a very nice Prince George’s County country girl, whose father just happened to own several hundred acres of prime future urbanized land? Where is my red-headed friend with the uncontrollable stutter, who could play the guitar and sing with no stutter at all? Where is my friend’s ex-wife who surprised him one day by saying good-bye and running off with the head of the university department where she taught?

For a while , I went out with a GW law student. I know where she is (or was), but what happened to her friend who remained my friend and whose husband’s family (maybe father) had worked in Pennsylvania for the family of one of my law partners?

Edie and I had a lot of friends in the early years of our marriage who have disappeared. Where is the guy who, no matter what the topic, preface each remark with “there is a case about that…” (“Can you pass the salt, please?” “There is a case about that.”) Where is our friend who had no real interest in anything Jewish other than he wanted to study Talmud?

I could go on and on. But I don’t want to overwhelm you. You know any of the people mentioned above? There might be a reward.

Yes, we are certainly a country in distress, part of a world in distress. And sometimes you can’t help but think that things are careening out of control and that nothing can be done right now to change our direction.

But then you realize it could be worse, a comforting thought (or not), and we have Netflix to thank. For example, remember the series Designated Survivor, when, if my memory works, a bomb went off in the Capitol during the State of the Union address, killing all members of Congress, the President and all those Executive and Judicial Branch officials in attendance. That left the designated survivor, a completely inexperienced and recently appointed HUD Secretary in charge of a government that didn’t really exist any more.

And there have been many other shows where the country’s future looks bleak indeed, and films like Back to the Future, which showed the possibility of alternate histories, some of them downright awful.

Well, now Netflix gives us a five part British miniseries titled Hostage, and I hope you don’t waste your time watching it. If you think you will, stop reading here. But if not, read on.

Britain is in an awful, but unexplained, situation where people are dying because the National Health Service has run out of pharmaceuticals. The only answer seems to be for France, apparently awash in pharmaceuticals, to come to the rescue. The future of the UK, and the political future of Prime Minister Abigail Dalton, depend on it.

But French President Vivienne Toussaint has her own problems with an upcoming election. Britain has an open border policy and third-world immigrants/refugees are streaming across France to get to the Channel. Toussaint not only demands a change to British policy, but also wants French troops on British soil guarding the coast, as the price Britain must pay for French pharmaceuticals.  The two arrange a summit at 10 Downing Street. Both seem unwilling to compromise.

But then things happen. Dalton’s husband, a physician with Doctors Without Borders, is on a mission into the depths of French Guiana, when he and several other British doctors are kidnapped (by men dressed as masked ICE agents). They will be freed if Dalton resigns her PM post. Otherwise, they will be killed one by one. This event seems to have nothing to do with the shortage of drugs.

At about the same time, it looks like Toussaint might have to leave politics as well, as she is being blackmailed by someone who found a sex tape of her in bed with (I am not making this up) her 20-something year old step son. Of course, neither woman wants the other to learn of her predicament.

Can’t get any worse, you say? You are wrong. It can. And it does. A rigged laptop, innocently carried into 10 Downing Street, explodes, causing extreme damage, wounding Prime Minister Dalton, but killing President Toussaint. The search for the perpetrators intensifies, it turning out that the two, apparently disconnected, very attractive young women in the cast, one French, one British, are both spies for the villains (and both get their comeuppance) . And it turns out that the leader of this group is the general (think George C. Scott in Dr. Strangelove) who leads the UK military (the equivalent, I think of the head of the joint chiefs in this country), who has cone up with this complicated method to stage a coup because he holds a personal and secret grudge against Dalton for something she did a decade earlier. Something she did innocently, by the way.

Well, the bad guys finally lose, and the better (if not good) guys win. And France gives Britain all the pharmaceuticals it needs.

That’s it.

So it could be worse here, it seems, than it is today. And France just may not give us the medicines we need to survive.

I admit to choosing most of the books I read randomly. That will explain how I just finished reading Harry Golden’s biography of Carl Sandburg, called appropriately Carl Sandburg.

When I think of Harry Golden (something I do every twenty years or so), I think of him as the editor of  The Carolina Israelite, a newspaper I have never read, or the author of Only in America, and You’re Entitle, two books I have never read. I think of a curmudgeon, although I have no idea if he was curmudgeonly at all, and a man smoking a cigar, although I had no idea if he smoked anything at all (it turns out he did smore or xhew on cigars). I did know he wrote from the perspective of a Jew living in North Carolina, fairly unusual at the time, but I did not know he was raised in New York City, was a stockbroker indicted for embezzling client funds, and that he served four years in prison after being convicted before being pardoned by President Nixon.

When I look up Golden in Wikipedia, I see he wrote about 30 books on a variety of topics, largely on the promise of America, Jews’ place in America, and the problem of segregation in the south.

What these three topics have in common is that they are all about this country, and about the uniqueness of this country. So maybe it isn’t surprising that Golden wrote a book about Carl Sandberg. What may be more surprising is that Golden and Sandberg were close friends. And that Sandburg wrote the preface to at least one of Golden’s books.

Carl Sandburg is not at all about Harry Golden. It is not at all about Jews in America. It is only about Carl Sandburg, a writer, historian, biographer, poet, and musician whom Golden portrays as being as American as anyone coukd possibly be.

Sandburg grew up in Galesburg IL, had a fairly typical smallish town Midwest childhood, I guess, but left home at a young age and became a hobo (to be distinguished from a vagrant, a tramp, or a bum), riding the rails across the country, stopping here and there for the odd job. He became a socialist, a champion of the “lower” classes, enrolled in college but did not graduate, and started on a peripatetic career, earning keep as a journalist, but writing and occasionally publishing poetry as the years went by. He gained recognition, especially through his Chicago poems, began to be in demand to speak and recite his poetry, and he always brought with him a guitar or banjo, and played and sang American folk music. Then, he capped his career by writing a massive 6 volume biography of Abraham Lincoln, The Prairie Years and The War Years. Interestingly, he collected material about Lincoln throughout his adult life, but when he started writing Lincoln’s biography, he thought he would write a book for children. But gmhe got carried away.

Golden’s book itself is not a standard biography as much as a collection of anecdotes, some short, somewhat long, all interesting, which when woven together present a good picture of Sandburg. It is a very evocative picture and makes for an interesting book to read. It is like you are looking at the many notes of a biographer before he puts them into standard narrative form. And when he describes how Sandburg put together his Lincoln volumes, you see some similarity of process.

I wouldn’t call this book a hagiagraphy, although the book does not concentrate on Sandburg’s shortcomings, whatever they might be. After all, they were good friends, and Sandburg was very much still alive.

But what is most interesting, perhaps, is the picture of a changing America, and the idea that Sandburg was a symbol of it. Perhaps THE symbol of it. And central to American culture of his time. Destined to be in the pantheon of great American writers from then on.

Carl Sandburg died in 1967 at the age of 89. How many of today’s younger generation ever run into his work?

(Gotta run. No time to proof..)

I have a large number of old friends with whom I stay in contact. One good friend whom I have known since we were three, and friends from elementary school, Sunday school, middle school, high school, college, law school and beyond. These are all my old friends. I also have a lot of friends that I have made since I have been in Washington, and some of them are good friends, but I don’t consider them old friends.

On Friday, I am going to lunch with about a dozen friends with whom I practiced law at my first firm (of three) in Washington. They do not get classified as “old” friends, even though I have known some of them over 50 years and all of them over 35 years.

This coming October 13 will be the 55th anniversary of my arrival in Washington. I still have friends that I met during the first few weeks after I unpacked. But I just don’t consider them old friends. Long-time friends, yes. But not old friends.

Why is that the case? I think it is because they are all friends from this phase of my life. The Washington phase. The others were from past lives.

It is natural to think about this during the high holidays. This is not only because I tend to hear from people from all phases of my life during this period. It is also because when I attend services at a synagogue to which we have belonged for about 40 years, I tend to see a lot of people that I have known for decades. This includes a lot of people that I wouldn’t really classify as “friends”, but people I have known casually for years and years as well as many who are clearly my friends.

Many of these people I see on a regular basis. But some I have not seen since last year’s High Holidays, and others I haven’t seen, or don’t remember having seen, for several years.

What is remarkable about this is that, for the most part, these people look much older than the last time I saw them. Sometimes much older. And it both surprises me and shocks me.

But today is Thursday. My morning breakfast group meets on Zoom. We range in age from our late 60s to our 90s, with one member over 100. I see this group every week. We have not aged nearly as much as those I only see on Rosh Hashanah.

I then go to my list of approximately 600 Facebook friends. I started with Facebook about 15 years ago, I think. I count 45 of my 600 Facebook friends as no longer alive. Yes, time does march on.

I haven’t mentioned my relatives. I was surrounded by them growing up in St. Louis, many of them much older than I was. Some in the generation of my great-grandparents. I see them all clearly.

I have three first cousins remaining in St. Louis (Donna, Bob, and Rich), and one first cousin once removed, with whom I have remained in contact. Three other first cousins elsewhere, one in Oregon (Andy), one in Kansas (Albert), one in Arkansas (Jon). I am older than all of them. In fact, to my knowledge, only two close relatives older than me remain alive, two first cousins of my mother’s. One, five years older, my cousin Natalie in Sacramento, I spoke with on a phone call about a year ago. Her sister Judy in Miami, ten years older, I have not had any contact with for a decade. No one else from my childhood, except for classmates, remain.

I have been very lucky all of these years to have made and kept so many friends, and to have remained in contact with, or met later in life, so many relatives. And to have known so many who are no longer here.

I can recreate within me them all. It was Whitman, was it not, who said something like “I have worlds within me”?

Well, I will do him one better. I have family and friends within me. Societies. Civilizations. They are all there, quietly biding their time. But now and then appearing. Making me who I am.

I have to say that I just don’t understand why Rosh Hashanah is celebrated for two days. I know the history,  and how difficult it often was to determine when the New Moon appeared and therefore when the holiday should be celebrated, and I know the rabbis of old determined to keep it a two day holiday even after the calendar became certain. But that is all I know. I don’t know why that decision was made (i.e., was it unanimous or more of a 5-4 decision), but I do know that, if you follow the Torah, one day is all you get.

Of course, I wonder about a lot those rabbis agreed upon. The best example is taking the Torah prohibition of boiling a young goat in his mother’s milk, and deciding that means you can’t eat chicken with cheese. I just don’t understand it.

There are those, of course, who say that their reasoning does not matter, it’s a matter of community agreement. You want to be part of the community? You abide by the rules of the community.

I understand this perspective. I just don’t agree with it. I think the tent should be bigger than that. (I could expand this discussion to cover my view of American politics, but won’t.)

That takes me to Rabbi Alexander’s sermon yesterday, or at least to one part of it. In olden days, there were two rabbis whom the Talmud always poses as against each other on ponts of doctrine and practice: Shammai (always the loser) and Hillel (always the winner). A good teaching tool, if nothing else.

Rabbi Alexander gave an example (as a lead-in to his sermon, which had a different major point) of three different non-Jewish individuals who first turned to Shammai to seek his aid in converting to Judaism, and whom after being rejected, turned to Hillel who converted them on the spot. Of course, since then, the rabbis have made it more and more difficult to convert to Judaism. I think this is largely because they don’t want to convert people who will eat chicken with cheese or celebrate Rosh Hashanah for only one day. I have long disagreed with this restrictiveness, and now that I can point to Hillel on my side, I must wonder why, in this case only (and without attribution, of course), Shammai apparently won.

Okay, let’s move from the mundane to the even more mundane.

Donald Trump has gone full bananas. After telling 65, 000 people in Arizona, “I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them”, today he told members of the United Nations that their countries are “going to hell” and told NATO members that they should shoot down errant Russian planes. He then met with President Zelensky and then spun around six times and, while still dizzy, issued an X that said that Russia was a paper tiger, Ukraine should get back all their lost territory “and maybe a little more”, and that the US was going to turn over weaponry to NATO with no strings attached. All I can say to that is, I wonder what he will say tomorrow. Probably just the opposite.

In the meantime, the government will “shut down” on October 1. The Congressional Republicans emulated the Texas Democrats of this summer, and left town, to return too late to halt the shut down.

In case you forgot, the Republicans had proposed a 6 or 7 week extension on their terms, and refused to talk to Democrats about certain of those terms the Democrats want to modify. After they left, Democratic leadership asked for a meeting with Trump, which was scheduled. Today, after spinning around six more times, Trump decided not to meet. Who will be blamed for the shut down? And what will Trump try to do during the shut down?

At any rate, whether or not I understand it, it is still Rosh Hashanah. So, celebrate if you wish. But if you are like me, don’t despair. I hear more holidays are on their way.

That says it all, doesn’t it. Donald Trump at the memorial service for Charlie Kirk.

Today is Rosh Hashanah, the first day of a new year. On this day, you want to embrace optimism. But it is hard to do that, when the world feels like it is Rosh Hashanah, 1914, the last summer before World War I when the wheels were inevitably turning and no one knew it, or Rosh Hashanah, 1939, two weeks after Germany’s initial invasion of Poland when the full scope of the war in Europe was still unknown, or Rosh Hashanah 1973, when plans were afoot for a very different Yom Kippur. There are so many places today, on Rosh Hashanah 2025, where things are already going wrong, and when a small brush fire anywhere could quickly envelope us all.

Of all the prophetic voices to be heard over these High Holidays, it is that as adapted by Leonard Cohen that might affect us most: “Who by fire, who by water?…..”

Or maybe it is gentile Kurt Vonnegut (he had a Jewishwife), whose prospect of ice-nine in Cat’s Cradle chills us all. Once thing begin to calcify (as the freezing temperature of water is raised to over 100 degrees), everything stops. Time stops. Everything is finished. It is all over. It can not be reversed. It may not be the book God seals on Yom Kippur, but it’s a book  Vonnegut has written, a book whose story just stops. The book is sealed. Doomsday is here, but no onecwill know it.

Arthur, you are being too pessimistic!! Especially on a day such as today, a day when we are to atone for our past mistakes, so that we can get on with a better, more meaningful life. 

Whoever just said that to me is right, and I will do my best. But it won’t be easy, will it?

So, I ask for forgiveness for all of my shortcomings, including the contents of this post. And I hope we all can join together in rebuking statements like “I can’t stand my opponent”  so that we move on to a 5786 that is much better than 5785 was. No ice-nine, and in fact, no ICE.

L’shana tova to all.

We can start with the Nats: Even if you are in last place, you can still come up with some remarkable baseball.  On Saturday, Daylen Liles hits an inside the park home run to win the game in the 11th inning. And yesterday, Jacob Young makes two amazing catches in center field. For one (believe it or not), even he cannot reach the ball, but he can kick it before it hits the ground, and he kicks it ….. into his glove. And then, in the bottom of the 9th, he leaps over the wall to grab what would otherwise be a home run.

We can move to the restaurant: We had dinner last night with friends at Bistro Aracosia on MacArthur Blvd. If you are up on your trivia, you might know that Aracosia is the name given during the time of Alexander the Great to a portion of Northern Afghanistan. If you knew this, you might guess that this was an Afghan restaurant. And you would be correct. It is also an excellent restaurant, one of the best, and my Chicken Labuan proves it once again. For some old Washingtonians, the restaurant is still Listrani’s. For those, here is a secret. Listrani’s is alive and well. In McLean. And, oh, yes, so is Aracosia – another branch of the one in DC.

If all of this is in McLean, why live in DC? What do we have that they don’t have? Yes, you guessed the answer. We have the National Guard.

Okay, let’s go next to the National Guard. Why do we (still) have members of the Guard strolling DC, spending their time talking on the phone to their spouses? They are forbidden to assist in law enforcement. So what is their job? It seems like their biggest job is picking up trash. In fact, that may be their only job. And it is a helpful one. It keeps the city cleaner and it gives them experience in bending, so that – when they are called out to do it – they will feel able to pick the tomato crop with the best of them.

Finally, for today, the Charlie Kirk memorial ceremony, which I did not watch. I am going to look at what some of the speakers said, and I am not worried about the religious references, I don’t think, at this type of event. It seems like Erika Kirk did herself proud. Unexpectedly so, when she said she forgave her husband’s killer.

On the other hand, Donald (“I hate my opponents”) Trump disgraced himself once again.

My current vision? Donald is arrested, dressed in a white shirt, too long tie, and a suit jacket. He is not wearing trousers. Just white boxer shorts. He is forced to kneel and put his head in the stakes in the town square, his arms tied behind his back, a target tattooed on his forehead. Each of the 349 million Americans (or at least all those 3 years old or older) slowly walk by him and throw a ripe tomato at his face. Each time he is hit, he has to say, “I love my opponents.”

When the final American has thrown the final tomato, he is set out to pasture and allowed live out his final days in solitude.

What is your vision? And can you get mine out of your mind?

I want to make sure I understand what has transpired in the last 24 hours that is new. Tell me if I am wrong about any of this.

1. Funding for all non-time sensitive,  non-essential governmental functions expires on September 30. The Republicans want to kick the can down th road until November 21. The Democrats are willing to kick the can if they can obtain some lessening of the legislated reductions to health care coverage over that period of time. The Republicans refuse to even talk to the Democrats about this, and the Republican leadership has shut down Congress until the currently funded period has ended and the government has shut down. Each side will blame the other, but it is the GOP which sent everyone home.
2. The president wants Congressional approval to order the death of presumed “narco-terrorists”, wherever in the world they may be, without having to involve anyone else, demonstrate any proof at any level, or provide any due process whatsoever.
3. The Pentagon wants to have journalists sign a pledge not to report any news not approved by the Pentagon for reportage, on fear of losing their credentials.
4. Anyone coming into this country on an H-1B work visa will be admitted only if their employer pays a fee of $100,000, maybe annually.
5. The US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia has been forced to resign because he has not found sufficient basis to indict New York Attorney General Letitia James for mortgage fraud. Meanwhile, the government case against Fed Governor Lisa Cook on mortgage fraud charges seems to have fallen apart.
6. The president has attacked his attorney general Pam Bondi on not moving fast enough in going after his perceived enemies.
7. It has been reported that the administration shut down a bribery investigation against Border Tsar Tom Homan, and kept the existence of the investigation secret. Homan, it is said, kept a $50,000 cash payment made so that the payor would get special access and favors.
8. Trump pledges to take back Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan, whether or not Afghanistan approves.
9. The National Parks confirmed that all references relating to climate change, Japanese internment, and slavery are being removed.

This is all within the past 24 hours.

We ignored everything yesterday by having lunch at the Kountry Korner in Thurmont MD, visiting Ft. Ritchie in Cascade MD, and wandering through the Antique Mall in Emmitsburg MD.

Ft. Ritchie, located just south of the PA line west of Emmitsburg was a Maryland National Guard training site, taken over by the US military in 1942. It served as a prisoner of war holding site, and as the training site for bilingual and multilingual American military personnel to learn, among other things, how to translate for and interrogate prisoners, both from Europe and the Pacific. A lot has been written about the Ritchie Boys, and a museum dedicated to them was opened about 18 months ago.

The site now includes as well an art studio, a restaurant, a bakery shop, a wellness studio, and former barracks now converted into residential units. The military had closed the facility in 1998. It is well worth a visit.

Last night, Joan, my ten year old granddaughter, paid me a big compliment. She told me that she really liked talking with me……because my conversation was so random. I responded: “Thanks. That is really nice. Do you have any idea how many sea lions live off the coast of San Diego?”

In this era when it is always difficult to read through the morning newspapers, I had a particularly hard time yesterday morning with the Washington Post’s front page.

Let me quote: “Sulma Martinez had just left the dentist’s office with her 14 year old twin daughters when an unmarked U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement vehicle pulled up behind her and flashed its blue lights. The officers asked for her papers.

“Martinez, a 35 year old originally from Honduras, had a work permit, a pending asylum claim and a pathway to a visa for crime victims. But none of that mattered, she said the officers told her.

“They gave her a choice: she could head to a hotel and be deported with her daughters, or she could contest her removal and try to stay in the United States. If she chose the latter, she’d be arrested an the twins would be sent to a shelter for child immigrants.”

[See article: Deportations Drive a New Wave of Family Breakups, Sep 19, WAPO]

I then looked at another front page article, this one about the aftermath of the death of Charlie Kirk. I quote just one paragraph:

“Vice President JD Vance urged supporters to drum those ‘celebrating Charlie’s murder’ out of their jobs and said the administration may strip tax-free status from two prominent foundations he accused of underwriting an article’ about Kirk. The State Department embarked on a global effort to identify foreign citizens ‘praising, rationalizing, or making light of” Kirk’s death and put them on a list to prevent them from ever receiving US visas. Attorney General Pam Bondi vowed a sweeping crackdown on ‘hate speech’”

[See article: Push to Police Speech Breaks with GOP’s Typical Rhetoric, Sep 19, WAPO]

Of course, there are so many things that I am upset about that they all can’t be listed here, and they certainly wouldn’t all fit on the front page of the Post. Just this morning, I saw VP JD’s comment on the strikes on the Venezuelan boats in the Caribbean. He said: “I wouldn’t go fishing right now.” Or his other comment on the military strikes on the boats when it was suggested to him that this was a war crime: “I don’t give a shit what you call it.”

I don’t know whether these boats are carrying drugs to the United States or not. Perhaps the president and vice president have irrefutable evidence that they are, but obviously there are other ways to top boats than blowing them up and killing all on board. Even Israel, when it goes against flotillas on their way to Gaza, does not resort to this extreme.

And who are the men on the boats? Are they all drug runners? Do they all even know what their cargo is? So many questions could be asked, not even including the ultimate question of whether or not the United States has the legal right to attack boats on the high seas.

So I have asked this before, and I will ask it again: Was the life of Charlie Kirk more valuable and more worth mourning than the life of the Venezuelans who were killed in these military attacks? If someone answers “yes”, shame on them.

I can put the same question a different way. Is it more tragic that Charlie Kirk’s children are without their father than that the children of these Venezuelans are without their fathers? If someone answers “yes”, shame on them.

And let me multiply the question. There have been at least 15 Venezuelans killed so far. Does that make the actions of Mr. Trump 15 times as bad as the action of Mr. Robinson? If not, why not? Both Robinson and Trump believe they are fighting against evil. Both took action and took lives without any due process. Yes, one is president and one is a troubled 22 year old. But our president appears to have once been a troubled 22 year old, and now he is a troubled 79 year old. A 79 year old not with a classic Mauser rifle, but with the American military at his disposal. How big of a difference is there, really? Really. Think about it.

I had a busy day yesterday. I had two meetings in connection with the Haberman Institute for Jewish Studies – a lunch meeting with a young rabbi whom we hope can help us reach a younger audience, and an afternoon meeting with a major donor (and board member) to talk about ways he might be able to connect us with people he knows who might be able to help us. I took extensive notes and part of my tomorrow will be trying to understand at least half of what I wrote down.

I also found out that my friend who sent me a message yesterday that he had fallen, broken his leg and having surgery, wrote me again today saying that he was hacked. I guess that could have meant that someone broke his leg while trying to hack him to death, and that he hadn’t fallen at all. But I assumed he meant that he had neither fallen or broken his leg. If you wonder what he and his wife were doing while all of his friends were feeling empathy (that emotion that Charlie Kirk didn’t approve of) for his condition, it turns out that they were (are) spending a week in Paris. And no, not the Paris in Texas. (By the way, it turns out that there are 10 cities in the United States called Paris. How many have you been to? As for me, I think the answer is zero.)

Mayor Bowser of DC, DC Attornet General Schwab, and City Council Chair Mendelson were called before a House committee to answer questions about the District today. I got to hear a good deal of it driving to my first meeting (40 minutes) and from my first to my second (35 minutes), and frankly I did not know if I should laugh or cry. The witnesses didn’t really have any time to answer any questions. The reasons were simple. As for the Republicans, all they wanted to do was to yell at the witnesses and make sure that they couldn’t get any answers on the record. As for the Democrats, they had nothing to ask, and they just wanted to use their time to talk about how great Washington is and how hard Trump appears to be trying to destroy it. It was all pretty embarrassing and I dare anybody to air the hearing for a group of middle school kids and tell them this is how the government runs. Everything wasn’t bad. I am not familiar with Cong. Shontel Brown from Cleveland OH, but she gave a super explanation of every way Trump is destroying America. She was the winner. The loser, not surprisingly, was an Arizona Congressman who was the first questioner and who simply yelled at the top of his voice for his five minutes about how dangerous Washington was until Mr. Trump came to town. He did berate the AG for the terrible statistics that came out of his office, giving Schwab the chance to say that he was quoting statistics frim the US Attorney’s, not the DC AG office. As Rosanadanana would have said…..”Nevermind”. (I saw on the news last night that a large number of surge arrests are leading to immediate dismissal, and that the US Attorney’s office is short 70 lawyers.)

Actually, this Congressman might have been the biggest loser, but there were others. One was Nancy Mace, who asked Bowser a series of questions such as “What does DC Code Section 12-9303(a)(vi) say?” “Oh, you don’t know? You are the mayor of the city and you have no idea what the laws say?” And then she asked her questions like: “What is a woman?” Bowser’s answer to that was “I am a woman. Are you?” I thought that was pretty good. And then there was a third Republican whose name I didn’t get who kept talking about how dangerous DC was and how its murder rate was greater than a dozen or so foreign cities he listed. “Do you know”, he said, that if DC were a country of its own, the murder rate would make it the 5th most dangerous country in the world and that the State Department would issue a travel warning advising Americans not to go there?” Unfortunately, Council Chair Mendelson didn’t respond by saying that if DC were a country, it would have restrictions on the gun ownership that leads to 80% of DC’s violent crime.

All this made Michigan Congresswoman Talib apoplectic, as she yelled at her Republican counterparts for talking down DC in a ridiculous manner and scaring Americans from visiting, while each of the worked and most lived in the capital and were able to walk around with their families, enjoy the sites, eat at the restaurants and not worry about anything. How, she asked, could they make such ridiculous statement that, by their own lifestyles, they knew were untrue. This led to a retort by one of the Republicans and then they got into a shouting match. No, then they got into a SHOUTING MATCH!!!

At any rate, it was one big mess of a hearing, although perhaps the District got some sort of a commitment that the House would look at the $1 billion of DC taxpayer money (some of which was my money) that Congress forced out of DC’s budget this year and which certainly impacts DC’s efforts to hold down crime.

The Washington Post, several days ago, had an interesting article which showed the results of surveys as to the effect of the federal surge on things like pedestrian traffic, restaurant business, and so forth. Generally, it showed that DC’s economy has been hurt all around (in spite of President Trump’s unsubstantiated claims to the contrary).

Meanwhile, I need a new plumber. But that’s a long story.

The Supreme Court better get its act together. And soon. It is the only entity able to save American freedoms. And so far, it has given no indication that it wants to do so.

Unless the Court changes its direction (and I have no thought that it will), here is what we might be facing in Congressional elections in 2026: (1) Gerrymandered Congressional districts designed to ensure that minority groups have minimal ability to secure representation in Congress, (2) additional ID requirements for voting difficult for some to obtain, (3) polls being located far from Democratic voting neighborhoods, far from public transportation, and not open hours convenient for people who work for a living, (4) drastic restrictions on, or abolition of, mail-in voting and early voting, (5) limitations on provisional voting, (6) selective challenges to voting rolls, (7) threats directed at certain campaign workers and poll workers, (8) challenges to vote counting methods and practices, (9) limits on distribution of selective campaign materials, (10) pressure on media whi h support non-MAGA candidates, (11) false accusations brought against Democratic candidates, and more.

In other words, our elections will not be free or fair, and will be aggressively attacked by Trump as his roadies. It will be virtually impossible for anyone not MAGA affiliated to run, much less to win.

The pro-gerrymandering campaign is in full swing. So is the campaign against centrist or liberal (or even centrist right) media. Trump’s ridiculous litigation against the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, and the threats against the broadcast licenses of CBS and ABC. We now hear that the tax exempt status of non-MAGA not-for-profits may be attacked. And that Tik-Tok will now be run by Trump allies.

If you think, without strong reaction from the Supreme Court, the 2026 elections will be like previous elections, guess what? You will be wrong.

I am interested if the reaction to Kimmel’s firing will be forgotten in a few days, if NBC will now fire Jimmy Fallon, or if there will be sufficient pressure on ABC to reverse what they did. It could any which way.

And, of course, Trump can “fire” late night hosts, he can certainly fire newscasters, and close down entire networks.

We ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Yes, the Court better get their act together. And so better the Democrats.

I always miss the good stuff. I watched quite a bit of the hearing yesterday when FBI Director Kash Patel was testifying before the Senate Government Oversight Committee. But I didn’t see it all, and naturally, I missed all the fireworks when Patel was being questioned by (or was it berated by): Adam Schiff and Corey Booker. I did not get to hear Patel inform Schiff that he was “the biggest fraud to ever sit in the United States Senate”, and a “political buffoon at best.” Or to hear him tell Booker that “you are an embarrassment to the division of this country”. (No, I am not sure what that means, but I am sure it isn’t a compliment.) And, yes, I know that the two Senators were not throwing praise at Patel. So much for civil discourse.

Patel is still the same smooth talker he was at his confirmation hearing. He came loaded with some pretty impressive arrest statistics, assuming they are accurate, and if you listened just to him, there were no politics under his leadership, and morale was as high as it could get. The Republicans on the committee only asked him the softball questions he knew were coming, interspersing their questions with diatribes against radical left wing Democrats and especially the crime ridden Biden family. As to the Democrats’ questions, either Patel disagreed with the premise of the question, couldn’t answer a question because it was connected to an ongoing investigation or involved a personnel matter, decided to answer a different question altogether, or just plain couldn’t remember.

Tyler Robinson’s name was raised a couple of times, not only as the killer of Charlie Kirk, but as a bona fide radical leftist,  undoubtedly qualified to be a spokesman for the Democratic Party.

Robinson’s name was mentioned more on the snippet of the Newsmax show I watched last night. I watched it purposely because I wanted to see how he was being portrayed by the right.

It was as bad as I feared, and considering that most Newsmax viewers see no other sides to most issues, they would have no reason not to believe the description they heard:

Robinson was a nice young man, ruined like so many others by the evil leftists on the dark web. And not only was he tricked into adopting leftist thinking, he began to take the sides of the LGBT community and worse than that, the trans community. The trans community causes so many problems, destroying our societal values, and the Democrats know that and are just spreading lies when they say otherwise. I only lasted about 2 minutes on Newsmax.

Something on a more positive note? Next week may be Rosh Hashanah, but I am told that my four-year old grandson Izzy is looking forward to Hanukkah because he likes it after dinner when the children have to find the mozzarella.

I have been reading through Armageddon in Retrospect, a book containing twelve pieces by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., which were unpublished during his lifetime. They are mainly satirical pieces about the folly of war, and sadly, the all too often folly of life.

Vonnegut, a member of a prominent Indianapolis family, did not appear to write about Israel, although he lived until 2007. He was not Jewish by religion but would fit right into the Jewish world by his attitude towards things and he was married to a prominent Jewish writer, Jill Krementz, for 30 years.

Of course, he wrote about World War II in Slaughterhouse Five, and elsewhere, based on his experience in that war as a German POW, who by chance survived the Allied firebombing of Dresden in 1945, shortly before the war ended in Europe.

In Armageddon, compiled and edited by his son, you can read the letter Vonnegut sent to his parents from France after he was evacuated from Germany, and while he was waiting for a berth on a naval ship to come home. His letter, proving that fact and fiction can be much too close to each other, displays what will become one of his hallmarks, his more than skeptical attitude towards war.

I don’t think that it was Vonnegut who coined the thought, “We had to destroy the village in order to save it”, but he could have. To him, the destruction of Dresden was inexcusably cruel and unnecessary, destroying a beautiful, and civilian, city of culture, and murdering tens of thousands of Germans caught in a war, but not fighting the war, and just trying to maintain their lives. As a witness to this destruction and to its aftermath, he was appalled.

What would he have thought of Gaza, where the Israeli ground offensive is apparently beginning today?

What would he have said about the loss of life and property, and about the cruelty being shown survivors? What would he have said about the possibility that this exercise will even begin to achieve two of its goals – the release of hostages and destruction of Hamas? You can imagine what he would have made of Netanyahu’s comment that Israel would have to become a Sparta. Remind me – how did things turn out for Sparta?

I know a large number of Israelis. Some live there. Some live here. All are horrified by the actions of their government and are shocked that even though they live in a “democracy”, it turns out they are powerless. And that they are so deeply tarred internationally, as individuals and as a community, by actions they abhor.

The United States has, over my adult lifetime, caused more than enough wrong-headed damage to other parts of the world. It has also spent dollars and energy trying to stabilize lands far and near, and for this, it is rightly praised. A mixed bag.

But we are now having our own existential crisis connected to our own imperfect form of democracy. We are in a period of great instability, our basic, constitutional freedoms imperiled. We sit by while wars are waged around the world, and we spend what little energy we seem to have bombing little Venezuelan boats on the high seas. What kind of superpower does that?

In the meantime, free speech is threatened by the apparently random killing of Charlie Kirk by a random young man.

I have a question for Mr. Trump. Was the life of Charlie Kirk more precious than the life of any one of the 14 Venezuelans whose deaths you ordered on those little boats on the high seas? Depending on how you answer that question, Mr. President, I will have several more.

I await your response.

I am far from expert on religious details, but here is my take.

We are now approaching the High Holidays, Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, and the general idea is that we atone for our sins and hope for a fresh start. A more folksy thought (I know this is not the adjective normally used) is that there is a Book of Life, and that God, after examing your sins and your repenting, determines who shall live and who shall die. The Book of Life is closed when the sun goes down on Yom Kippur.

The period over which one should begin to examine his life and start to atone, in preparation for the ultimate decision to make at Yom Kippur, does not begin on Rosh Hashana, however. It starts earlier. Last Saturday night, we attended an inspiring Slichot service at Adas Israel that begins a four day spiritual preparation period. Before that, their are seven weekly readings at Shabbat services which are to console Jews for the destruction of the Temple by the Babylonians and putvthem in a contemplative mood, and before that, the commemoration of Tisha B’Av, the memorial to the day of destruction itself.

If you go to the Haberman site (Habermaninstitute.org), and look under Program Recordings, you will find a talk by Rabbi Lauren Tuchman that ties the introspection needed for Yom Kippur into the full time period beginning with Tisha B’Av. I really recommend her presentation if you have a spare 90 minutes.

At the Yom Kippur services, there are several long recitation of sins. As a congregation, these sins are recited aloud, and forgiveness is prayed for/asked for.

These recitations usually bore me in large part because, in my humble opinion, almost none of them personally relate to me. I really don’t think I did those things, so why should I beat my chest over them?

But I miss the point. These recitations of sins are not meant only to be individual. They are also meant to be communal. You are praying for forgiveness of sins committed by you, by other Jews, and by the Jewish community as a whole.

Now, in most years, I will acknowledge this, but not find it particularly meaningful.  But this is not most years.

Jews like to kvell about Jewish accomplishments. You know what I mean. Einstein was Jewish. So was Freud. Maybe even Columbus. And Nobel Prizes? Jews, who are about 0.2% of the world’s population, have won over 20% of all Nobel Prizes!

But this year, we also have to think about Netanyahu, and Smotrich, and Ben Gvir. We have to think about Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. We have to think about Stephen Miller. We can not rest on our communal laurels when we also have more than our share of communal shame.

So maybe this High Holiday period should be a little different than most. Maybe it has to be.

You may know that I have collected books for a long time. Maybe “collected” is too mild of a word. A better word might be “amassed”. I don’t think “hoarded” is a good word because I am pretty discriminatory in what I purchase.

The books have to have one of three qualities. They have to be signed by the author, be old or rare, or be of particular interest to me.

It started decades ago when I used to walk during a lunch break from my office to Second Story Books at Dupont Circle. They always have a few hundred books outside that they sell for $ to $5, and I liked rummaging through them. I always figured that these books were at their last hurrah. If no one bought them, they were to be trashed or recycled. Now and then, I would see a book that the author had signed, and those copies, I thought, should be rescued. So I bought them and took them home. Sometimes, I read them. Mostly, I didn’t.

They really began piling up, and that’s when I decided that I should try selling them. I set up a separate bank account and eventually decided that the proceeds of the book sales should go to pay for the education of grandchildren. So far, funds have been used (upon request) for preschool and summer camp.

At any rate, I keep going from book store to library sale, etc., and, truth is, I buy more than I sell, although I pay, on average, about $4 a book, and I sell books for an average of about $30 each.

But some books sell for much more, in the hundreds or even thousands (I usually regret selling these after they have left the house). Of course, finding a book worth, say, over $100 doesn’t happen every week for all sorts of reasons. But, the past two weeks have been different. I have paid a total of $36 for the following valuable signed copies (all in excellent condition):

(1) Keeping At It by Paul Volcker

(2) Hit Refresh by Satya Nadella (president of Microsoft – I did not know that)

(3) Working by Robert Caro

(4) The Sense of Reality by Isaiah Berlin

(5) Why Orwell Matters by Christopher Hitchens

(6)  Conflict by David Petraeous

(7) When the Center Held by Donald Rumsfeld

Maybe this doesn’t interest you, but it fascinates me. Just like it fascinates me that I can look at a bookcase in our family room and see 7 books signed by Clinton, 5 signed by Nixon, 10 signed by Carter, and one each by each of the Bushes, Lyndon Johnson and Donald Trump.

And, in the same book case, Lech Walesa, Ehud Barak, Margaret Thatcher, and Nicholas Sarkozy, among others. I just find it all fun.

When the governor of Utah said yesterday that the killing of Charlie Kirk would probably be a watershed in American history, my eyes rolled. But I have been thinking about it, and maybe they rolled too soon.

First, while we don’t know a lot about Tyler Robinson yet, we do know some things: he is not an illegal alien, not an immigrant, not Black or brown or Asian or Jewish or any other type of American minority, not gay, not trans, not loaded down by a criminal history, not poor, not from a broken family.  We know he was white, straight, a Mormon, and from Utah. And, oh yes, he was not a Democrat.

Many of these same characteristics can be found in those who attacked the Democratic politicians in Michigan, those who attacked President Trump, and others.

If larger numbers of people begin to see that our dangers from those who are not White and straight is no greater than those who are, this could indeed be a watershed moment. So the question is: how do we get the word out in an impactful way?

Next, people on all sides of the political spectrum seem to believe that what I will call “hate language” contributed to an atmosphere that made this event possible. Among the people raising this concern, of course, are individuals who regularly expouse hate speech. Of course, they would disagree with me (or at least claim to disagree with me).

Two of these people are Donald Trump and Charlie Kirk himself. Their outrageous comments are readily available online.

But defining hate speech is very complicated. Finding the boundary between fact and opinion is hard enough. And can the transmission of facts even constitute hate speech?

And what about opinion?”I hate Nazis!” That is an opinion. It’s an expression of hate. Is it hate speech?

Can speech, which a speaker does not believe to be hate speech, in fact be hate speech? And where does the right of free speech run into roadblocks trying to navigate around any of this?

Take Kirk’s statement about Martin Luther King, Jr. Kirk thought King an “awful person”, and said that the country should never have enacted the Civil Rights Law of 1964. Do either of these statements rise to the level of hate speech? What about his statements naming certain female and Black women, whom he said got their jobs unfairly. Is that hate speech?

Or is “hate speech” the wrong standard? Some people say that we just need “civil dialogue”. And those people are forced to continue with “and I know it when I hear it.”

Take calling Democrats “Marxists, Communists and radical leftists”, for example. It is not fact. It is so unfactual that it is hardly legitimate opinion. It is not civil dialogue. But it is free speech.

People like Charlie Kirk and Donald Trump are not going to stop using these terms, are they? So who will stop? Those who hardly usecl these terms at all.

Without rules or standards, and with a Constitution that protects free speech, we have few tools at our disposal. Like with so much else, leadership has to start at the top, and our leadership is comprised of bottom feeders.

Perhaps the media could help. But all the media could do is call out and spread the speech we want to suppress.

Maybe comics, entertainers, other public officials? School teachers? Parents?

How do you civilize speech with Donald Trump in the White House? You can’t. You can only talk about how important it is to do it.

That seems to be all.