Art is 80

Let’s start with a digression: I just mailed a book to Oamaru, New Zealand (why someone in Oamaru, New Zealand would want a signed copy of Sol Hurok’s memoirs is another question well above my pay grade). I had never heard of Oamaru, New Zealand, a moderately small port on the South Island. Of course, I read most of what Wikipedia has to say about it, and I learned that the name comes from the Maori and means “Home of Maru”. It turns out that no one knows who Maru was or the Maru were; Wikipedia doesn’t even speculate on the possibilities. So, if you are looking for a fresh area of research, this may be just the topic for you. (By the way, someone from Oamaru is called an Oamaruvian, according to Wikipedia. I wonder if they have misheard this, though. In my imagination, the Wiki research went like this. Question: Are you from Oamaru? Answer: Oh, Ahm a Ruvian, all right. You see – I think they are just Ruvians. Another topic for your research.)

Yes, I understand that everything I have written above borders on the nonsensical. Where else can you hear talk that borders on the nonsensical? You can listen to a recording of J.D. Vance’s rally this afternoon somewhere in North Carolina, parts of which I heard on C-Span radio this afternoon, as I was driving back from the post office.

(Next digression: The question is – what is the commodity in shortest supply at the NW DC Post Office on Northampton? The answer is – post card stamps. There appear to be so many voter-encouragement postcards being mailed to prospective voters in places like Pennsylvania and North Carolina, that the post office is running low. None left today. Tomorrow is another day (duh), but will they have more then? If they don’t know, how can I?)

As to J.D. Vance, I will say this. He has found a group of people in North Carolina to love his every word. If he coughed, they would cheer. So they certainly cheer every time he talks about the failures of the Harris regime. It’s interesting that Joe Biden, still President Joe Biden, has dropped completely from the Vance rantings. It was the Harris regime, the Kamala regime, and Kamala Harris regime. But never the Biden regime, and more likely the Harris/Biden regime, than the opposite. (One thing though, I will give to Vance which puts him in a different class than Sarah Huckabee Sanders – at least he pronounces her name correctly. Sarah Huck yestserday called her k’MAH’la when she accused her of having no humility because she has no children. This from an amoral woman who served as a mouthpiece for President Trump when she was press secretary and who lacks many positive attributes, humility being just one of them.)

And, yes, I do find it hard to speak of people this way. And, yes, I really have to restrain myself not to tell you what I really think.

From what I heard, Vance blames most everything wrong with this country on the immigration policies of the past 3 1/2 years (the “Kamala Harris Open Border Policy”). Now, I happen to believe that the Biden immigration policies have by and large been wrongheaded and that they were going to make it difficult for Biden to be reelected. And, of course, “Border Tsar” Harris (or is it Border Czar Harris?) is being blamed for them as well, and it’s the toughest policy area for her.

But Vance does take it to extremes. Everything wrong with this country is the fault of immigration. Certainly inflation and the housing crisis. And crime? Whether or not immigrants eat cats in Ohio, they have made areas of Springfield so unsafe that regular Americans won’t even venture there for fear of the physical security. Vance, who seems to have pretty much created the cats and dogs story, and admitted so to Dana Bash on CNN (CNN – that’s another topic) last weekend, didn’t really mention (or I didn’t hear him mention) pet food in his rally. But it was on everyone’s mind.

Well, if the the Republicans can say that immigrants in Springfield are eating the pets of real Americans, let me suggest that there are other ways to get your fill on felines and canines. Just step outside in a hard rain – you know, when it’s raining cats and dogs – and hold out a large bucket. No need to go after your neighbors’ soul mates.

Vance bashed Harris a lot for not giving specifics. Question: How will you fix the Harris inflation, Ms. Harris? Answer: Well, I come from a middle class family. Question: How will you bring peace to the world, Ms. Harris? Answer: Well, I was really good at making hash browns at McDonalds.

Yes, that is what he said. Of course, when asked by journalists about the Trump Vance policies – he went right into the “Trump weave” and showed that no one (not even K’Mah’la) can avoid specifics like Vance can. Question: How will you bring down inflation? Answer: we will bring down inflation. [CROWD CHEERS] Etc. Etc.

Or – Question: How will you deport illegal aliens? We will deport them. [CROWD CHEERS]

America should not be relying on other countries for things we need, he says. Okay, I agree with that. How will you see to that, Mr. Vance? Oh, he says, we will not rely on other countries for things we need; it’s simple.

One reporter asked him about the U.S. health system. What’s his policy to reform it? Well, said Vance, (and I paraphrase), “If you are well and don’t need a doctor, our health care system is the best in the world.” (yes, he did say that). “But if you are sick, our health care system fails completely. If you ask people about it, they say the insurance premiums are too expensive and what we get not sufficient. We will change that – for all Americans.” Question: but “How, Mr Vance?” “Oh”, he says, “do you know that we pay more for medicines that Europeans do? What we will do is allow Americans to get their medicines from Europe!!!”

This of course after he said that we can’t rely on getting things we need from other countries.

That brings me back to CNN. I like the CNN liberal (if that’s still a word) and moderate commenters. But they have decided that they need to have “Republicans” or “conservatives” to balance out the others, and they have hired some true loons, who make it difficult to watch their discussion/debates. At least that’s what I thought until last night, when the discussion on Abby Phillip’s show turned to full fledged slapstick. Maybe I just haven’t given it a chance.

North Carolina,  Ohio, and New Zealand.  What do they have in common? They are all mentioned in this post.

From the extraordinary CDepot to the Beltway on Baltimore Avenue (Route US 1) is just about a mile. If you cross the Beltway (which we won’t), the first thing you see is Ikea and its too, too big parking lot.  We will stop just before the Beltway at a shopping center, the College Hill Market, anchored by a large grocery, Shoppers World, and a Home Depot. There is, of course, a Starbucks in the center, but if you want slightly better coffee, there’s a Duncan Donuts across the street. And if you are hungry, there’s an Ihop. And, if you want to bring your grandchildren to the Ihop, I suggest Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday evening, when seniors get a 30% discount.  Kids eat free any time.

Yes, you sense it. We are now in anywhere American suburbia.

And, because we are on Route 1 and near both a major university and the Beltway, there are places to spend the night. I took a picture of a Super 8, but between the Maryland campus and the Beltway, there is also a Marriott, a Red Carpet Inn, a Holiday Inn, a Cambria, a Hampton Inn, and just plain old The Hotel.

There are a few specialty shops, especially for musicians.

There is a psychic.

I only saw three restaurants, one a Mexican restaurant, one another Chinese buffet ($1 cheaper than the one I mistakenly ate at last week), and the other a diner with the following two signs.

And yes, there are apartments catering to students, including one under construction

and one which runs its own campus shuttle service.

Finally, for the civic minded, you will find the American Legion.

The Knights of Columbus used to be next door. But, alas, no longer. Their building now sells cheap mattresses.

But don’t despair. The K of C has a new and bigger facility nearby. But not on our street.

I think that is enough. With the other 17 posts, you can walk any time you want all of this street from Brooks Brothers to Home Depot.  What more can you want?

Thinking about a different street to carry me through autumn. Maybe 16th Street from the White House to the Maryland line. I think we can accomplish that before the first snow. And there is so much to see. So different from Route 1.

Two people have apparently tried to assassinate Donald Trump. Both acted alone. Neither was an immigrant, a racial minority, gay or transgender, or (to my knowledge) even a Democrat.

To listen to Trump, it was because Biden and Harris and Walz have continued to badmouth him as a threat to democracy and otherwise. He thinks they must stop.

In the meantime, he will continue to call them radical leftists, very bad people, Marxists, and people who will destroy our country and lead us into World War III.

Clearly, Trump has only himself to blame for animus against himself. He can’t sluff it off on the Democrats.

I don’t think we know the motive of the first shooter. It seems obvious to me that the second shooter, a strong if misguided supporter of Ukraine, is afraid that Trump would throw Ukraine under a bus if elected. Nothing to do with a threat to American democracy.

It’s a dangerous time. All candidates are at risk. We all hope they will remain safe. And we have to stay on track. We can not let these events skew the campaign.

We can not have Harris and Walz temper their rhetoric, which is by and large accurate, while Trump and Vance continue to spout their knowing untruths. Period. Full stop.

There are over 200,000 Korean orphans who have been adopted by American families. Like adoptees everywhere, many of these individuals as they grow to adulthood are interested in, and sometimes obsessed with, finding their birth parents, and many travel back to Korea, determined to do just this.

About five or so years ago, a talented friend of Hannah’s who was in a playwriting collective with her, and who was born in Korea and sent to a family in America at an early age, wrote a fascinating play called My Name Is….., which told the story of Korean orphans returning to Seoul to learn about their birth families

As I recall Deb Sivigny’s play, it concerned three young Korean-Americans, each of whom had a very different American experience. One was adopted by a middle class family, one by a very wealthy family, and one was never adopted, but had been shuttled from one unsatisfactory foster family  to another. What happened when the three got to Korea? Sorry, my memory is not that good.

(What I do remember is the creative format of this play. It was interactive, with a limited audience, and took place in a house where the audience moved from room to room. I remember a party where I was a “guest” and a flight to Korea where I was a “passenger.”)

Saturday night, we watched another play, a one woman play by Sun Mee Choset, called How to Be a Korean Woman. It was staged last year at Theater J and brought back this month for a reprise. The run goes through September 22, and if you are going to see it (and I recommend you do), you may want to stop reading now. Spoiler ahead.

Chomet was born in Korea and adopted at about six months by a family in Minnesota. She had been told that she had been abandoned on a doorstep in Seoul. That is all she knew.

The play takes you with her to Korea, and you learn how she did locate and eventually meet her birth mother. It is all very interesting and emotional. She learns her mother was 19 and single, and when Chomet met her in 2009, was married with two sons. Her mother’s husband knew nothing about this earlier child, and she knew he would never accept it. So contact had to be secret. (Her father was out of the picture and had been pretty much since the birth.)

But Sun Mee did meet her 80 year old grandmother and two of her aunts, one of whom spoke English. They were ecstatic about the reunion, because they had had no idea as to what had happened to her (or if she was even alive), and they thought about her as much as she thought about finding her birth mother.

But, upon meeting Sun Mee, they became very concerned about her upbringing in the United States, and they were determined to make her into a Korean woman (hence the title). She needed high heels, fashionable clothes, makeup, nail polish, skin treatment, and more. More meaning finding a husband.

The story took some fascinating twists. I won’t write all of them down, spoiler or not. Let it just be said that she was not abandoned on a doorstop at six months, but she was stolen from her birth mother, and that many were at fault in a terrible deception.

Yes, mother and daughter were brought together and they saw a lot of shared identity. But they were products of different cultures. And that wasn’t going to change.

Her mother, her aunts, and grandmother were truly Korean women. She could never be.

In fact, Sun Mee Chomet was an outsider in Korea, and to some extent she felt she was an outsider in the United States, as well. That’s just the way it was, and that’s the way it will stay.

Her adoptive mother is Jewish, and her American grandfather is a Holocaust survivor, originally from Vienna. Something he told her seems to me right on point, and I had never thought of things this way. He told her that her relation to Korea was similar to his relation to Vienna.  You long to go back to a place you clearly love and wish to be identified with, but you can never forgive the people there for what happened to you.

This is perhaps a feeling more widespread than we may think. A longing for a home from the past, but a longing mixed with the memory of tragic events that shape your present. It’s a cliche that “you can’t go home again”. But it’s a cliche for a reason.

And….

WHOA!!   Today’s New York Times print edition lead editorial: “An Adoptee’s Lifelong Seaech for Home”. Read it.

It was a beautiful day yesterday, or so I am told. I spent 3+ hours on the telephone with Verizon; I don’t know about you. Actually, not the telephone. An internet chat, first with Aaron and then, after 40 minutes of visual silence, with David. Actually,  I don’t even know if they are real or artificial.

But after my router extender died last week, I had a shorter chat with someone who told me what I needed, chaged me $10, and sent me to the closest Verizon store to pick it up. At the store, I was told that if, after I followed the set up instructions, I should call customer service and ask them to activate it and all will be well.

After some frustration in trying to pair the router and extender, I called and learned that my old router and new extender were not compatible and I needed a new router. Taking care of this took almost 4 hours.

While chatting, I roamed through some books in the case behind me, including several copies of The Decameron by Boccaccio. One was published in 1924 in Holland, so the text is in Dutch.  But it’s a beautiful book with very nice illustrations.

Using my best Dutch, I see that the illustrations are by G. Schwebe. Looking in the internet,  I find a German artist named Greta Schwebe. I find out veey little about her  except that she lived and died. A single painting by her is for sale. No others are illustrated that I saw.

But I want to give her her due.

You can look at some work by Greta Schwebe today. Her 15 minutes of fame starts….now.

We have passed the University of Maryland. The area between there and the Beltway has some points of interest, but lacks a personality. There is a little of this and a little of that. And the area is changing.

For example, there are new residential developments catering to students  such as

And with those, come restaurants and

The restaurants are varied. A vegan restaurant, and one that doesn’t want a vegan to cross its doors.

There are natural phenomena, such as Paint Branch which runs to the Anacostia, and an historic marker commemorating the former Black community of Lakeland.

For lunch, I stopped at an Asian buffet. It was quite crowded, and had at least 100 choices. Those working there seemed all to be Asian, and many were young women, all of whom were quite slim. How can they remain so slim working at a buffet? Then I tasted the food.

I finished the day with an unscheduled visit to the CDepot next door. Wow! I have never seen such a large collection of music.

I could stay there all day. Much of what they have is totally unsorted. I love unsorted.

Did I buy anything? An LP by reggae singer Johnny Braff (the jacket was autographed) and a 78 rpm album of songs of cousin Al.

This is volume 3. I already have volume 1. Anyone have a 2?

I should have added these three points:

1. For years, even after learning of her father’s criminal activity, out of embarrassment, she told people she met that her father was an anti-Nazi hero, not an active Nazi criminal.
2. When she was involved in her African revolutionary phase, Liesel thought all Whites should be forced to leave Africa. Then, one day, she was startled to realize she sounded just like a Nazi. “Am I my father’s daughter?”
3. She continued to wonder what her life would have been like if she hadn’t met her Jewish neighbor when she was 9. How many of her problems would have been avoided?

It’s easy to find books written by Holocaust survivors, people who have, through luck or skill or both, escaped death and, after the war ended, have been able to build remarkable lives, and I have read many of them.

Their stories follow a pattern: we were a normal family and I had a happy childhood, and then all hell broke loose, and I was sure I was going to die, but then the war ended and, because I had no choice, I built a new life.

But there are other Holocaust memoirs, written from different points of view, such as those written by children of Holocaust perpetrators. There are fewer of those, and the patterns are less consistent. For that reason, when I picked up Liesel Appel’s The Neighbor’s Son, I was not sure what I would find. Having read the book over the past few days, while I can tell you her story, I am baffled what to make of it. It is so unusual.

Lisel was born in a small central German town in 1941 to a mother well into her forties and a father in his 50s. Her only brother was 20, and in the German army, and her parents decided on a second child in response to Hitler’s plea to German women to be fruitful and multiply.

Liesel’s father was an active Nazi, who assisted his old friend Erich Koch (Google him) make East Prussia Juden-frei, taking charge of rounding up children. Liesel’s mother strongly supported her husband’s activities. Liesel was of course too young to know any of this.

When she was nine, Liesel met her first Jew. It was outside her house, he was a young man, and he introduced himself and told her that he used to live in the house next door, that his parents were arrested and deported, but he was saved and hidden. He told her he remembered her parents and she invited him in to see her mother.

Chaos ensued. Her mother kicked him out of the house and punished Liesel for daring to bring “the enemy” in their house. This was 1950.

Liesel’s father had died the year before (presumably of natural causes, although he was awaiting trial for war crimes, something Liesel did not know), and Liesel’s mother was raising her alone. Until the day Liesel met the Jewish neighbor, she and her mother were very close. Never again.

Liesel became a tough kid. Her mother put her in a boarding school in Duesseldorf. She and her roommate had a lot of fun  breaking the rules and ignoring their classes and were kicked out. Liesel at 15 met a law student who was, I think, 24, and had her first romance, telling him she was 18. She was also seduced by her uncle, who was also her gynecologist. She told her mother that, when she was a little older, she planned to marry a Negro.

And that she did. A talent agent from London, whom she met at a house party, whom she really didn’t like that much. But she wanted to get out of hated Germany, and this was her chance.

She moved to London, there were financial struggles, this was not what she imagined for herself, and she had a son. She became involved with London Black society, and she and her husband became very involved with the Congolese ambassador to Great Britain. They became so involved that when Congo’s president Patrice Lumumba was killed and Moshe Tschombe took over, they became very active in the anti- Tschombe movement, leading to her husband’s arrest in Congo, and Liesel’s very, very public campaign to free him.

At this point, she with her blonde hair, considered herself more Black than German, and an active participant in Black revolutionary movements.

Her story then became more strange. She divorced her husband, became involved, had a daughter with, and married another Black man, the third love of her life. They opened a restaurant in London (her revolutionary days behind her), but decided that they wanted a warmer climate and moved to Palm Beach (yes, the immigration problems were overcome with difficulty), opened another restaurant, went broke, and decided to try California. There, her daughter grew up, and she and her husband, after 20 years of marriage, grew apart.

Suffering from depression, she met the fourth love of her life (this one White), decided to marry him about a month after she met him. Shortly before the wedding, her Prince Charming developed a new personality and beat her up. Apologizing, he said he really wasn’t ready for marriage. This led to spending an evening with alcohol and pills in a suicide attempt, and somehow that led to her now ex-fiance getting her admitted to a psychiatric facility, which her daughter helped getting her released from.

Then what? She wrote, for the first time, an article about her experiences in Germany as the daughter of a prominent Nazi, which was published in a major Los Angeles publication.  This led to a call from a rabbi asking her if she would tell her story to his congregation some Friday night. Nervously, never having been in a synagogue and knowing little about the Jewish religion, she did.

And then? You guessed it. She studied and converted to Judaism, became a regular speaker on German-Jewish reconciliation, met a nice Jewish man who became the next love of her life and, as you would expect, quickly married him.

Now, years later, they live a perfect retired life in Asheville,  North Carolina.

What more can I say?

We start today in the commercial area of College Park, the home of the University of Maryland. We are now about 8 miles from our start with about 2 to go until we get to both the Beltway and the end of our journey. So, probably two more posts after this, and this walk is over. You see we have not exactly been speedwalking or working on endurance.

The few blocks south of the campus consist, more than anything else, of places to eat. Some of these places serve burgers, while others provide an overwhelming variety of ethnic diversity.

Yes, they include Colombian cuisine (never thought about that at all) and organic Jamaican (probably the only restaurant around sharing those two characteristics).

In addition, there are many, many apartment buildings catering to students.

And there is street art.

All this stops when you get to the campus.

You only see a few things from Route 1. The semi-circle of fraternity houses (the sororities are in a different area and are not so formally arranged) for one thing, although they are hard to photograph.

You also see the Ritchie Coliseum,  a sports facility which seats about 2000, and the new Thurgood Marshall Hall, housing the School of Public Policy.

Finally, there is the Rossborough Inn, built in 1803 as an inn and tavern, eventually coming under ownership of the university. It has been used for everything and now contains the admission office.

Commercial buildings start up where the campus ends. That is what we will explore next.

I watched a little of Fox and Newsmax after the debate last night. Although I didn’t hear anyone say it, I don’t think anyone thought Trump “won” or did a very good job. I think they all thought Harris did a better job, although they weren’t going to say that, either. I heard complaints about Harris not being specific about what she was going to do (not that Trump was any better in that regard), and I heard loads of complaints about the ABC moderators, that they were simply biased.

I actually thought the moderators did a good job. Their questions were clear, covered an array of topics, and I don’t think the questions were slanted. And they were faced with two problems. First, Trump wanted to get ghe last word on every question, and they let him. And second, after the CNN moderators were criticized for not doing any fact checking, they did try to fact check Trump two or three times.

Although I didn’t spend hours listening to post debate comments,  I did hear the CNN fact checker say that Trump made untrue statements more than 30 times, and Harris perhaps only once.

I might have been most interested in the Hatian immigrants in Springfield Ohio, who are eating people’s pets for dinner. Just, I guess, like they do on special occasions in Haiti.

There is obviously no evidence of this, as the city manager has confirmed, and it is a very racist comment. But I heard Trump trumpet it in the debate, and then I heard Kaitlin Collins ask JD Vance about it and he said (and I paraphrase) “Well, the city manager might be incorrect. We really don’t know. People tell us their pets have been eaten, and they are the ones on the line, so we have to listen to them. This may be happening only a little, or it may be happening all the time, right? And, I must say, I am disappointed in the media. You should be in Springfield investigating this story. But all you are doing is sitting here.”

I admit to being a bit concerned when Harris didn’t answer the first question about why so many don’t sense the improved economy. Instead she simply said (and I paraphrase), “And now, my opening statement….”.

But from then on, she was sharp and right on point, while all he did was “the Trump weave”.

In fact, she grew stronger while the night wore on, and he looked tired, tired and confused. When it came time for the summations, I was frankly shocked. Harris provided an acceptable summation, while Trump appeared to be having a hard time staying awake.

I thought she was at her best on women’s health and on tearing Trump apart. She critiqued his performance, his morals, his lack of plans and everything else about him, making sure to mention all of his former compatriots who wanted him banished from their sight. Trump didn’t critize Harris at all, other than to use his normal adjectives to describe her, and say again and again that the country was falling apart because of her, that her election would destroy it, and that World War III was right around the corner.

She did an acceptable job strattling the Israel Hamas war (what else can you do?) and I don’t remember him addressing it. On Russia Ukraine, he confirmed that he doesn’t care who wins, and that when he is president elect, he will call Putin and he will call Zelenskyy and the war will be over. Why he doesn’t do that today, I am not sure. After all, the war would end and, based on that, hr might be elected president after all.

In conclusion, he lost, she won, and it might have moved those few votes needed in the election.

But there is more to do.

Reading the Yale Alumni Magazine this morning, on page 52, I came upon something exciting.  I doubt that many Yale graduates get to page 52, so – after I tell you this important bit of trivia – you will be a member of an elite group. This revelation came in a review of a new book, Bite by Bite: American History Through Feasts, Foods and Side Dishes.

And I quote: “A history of nachos reveals that the snack is not a venerable Tex-Mex tradition, but rather the on-the-fly creation of a border-town cook during World War II. The cook’s name was Nacho.”

Where can I possibly go from there?

I can go to one more interesting note from the Yale Magazine.  It’s the back cover, equally surprising.

The back cover of the Yale Alumni Magazine is an ad from Harvard.

Sticking for a minute with magazines, did you read this Sunday’s NYT Magazine article on pennies? A long but interesting article, with a couple of points. First, it costs more than a penny to make a penny. Second, while establishments must give out pennies for change, hardly any shoppers use pennies for payment, which means pennies just “disappear” requiring more pennies to be minted. And so it goes.

The article talks about the many ways the government could ween the public off pennies  as Canada did through simply rounding prices to the nearest nickel. The article did not discuss a possible step that I have heard discussed before. That you could turn each of your pennies in and get a nickel back. This possibility is why I have been amassing big jars of pennies all these years. Now, I guess I will just treat them as an art installation. I just need to find the right museum. Imagine: you enter a square room with white walls. It is totally empty except for, say, five large glass jars filled with pennies. The only other item would be a small explanatory posting on one wall:

       “For my retirement”

           Arthur Hessel

        American (1942-    )

               Mixed Media

One other thing about the article. It was published in the Times Magazine of September 8, 2024. But I had read the article on-line on August 30, and expected to see it in print on Sunday, September 1. The fact that it was published electronically and identified as a New York Times Magazine article over a week before it appeared in print sure tells you something, doesn’t it?

But what does it tell you?

By the way, I am sitting here with today’s Times print edition. In the 24 page first section, there are exactly 4 ads. Tiffany, Rolex and something called “deel” (“your forever people platform”) have full page ads. Monica Rich Kosann (a jeweler with a website but no street address) has a smaller ad. That’s it.

Today’s Washington Post’s 18 page front section also has 4 ads. But just one is a full page ad.

That sure tells you something, too.

Grammatical question. Is it “a NYT article” or “an NYT” article? English is so complicated.

You remember we ended our last walk up Route US1 at my old home away from home, the Army Reserve Center.

Today we continue going north through a short residential area, and then we see on the right two odd looking sculptures, flanked by entrances to what looks to be a small, new shopping center with a Starbucks and a Whole Foods.

But, surprise. When you drive into (or in my case, walk into) the Center, you find you are in a different world that you had no idea existed. There are shops and restaurants and playgrounds and apartments, all looking very inviting and comfortable.

Sorry, no pictures of the many midrise apartments. But I do have a picture of the big Blue Bear that stands near the splash fountain.

And then there is something even more intriguing near the front entrances. Here it is:

It’s an airplane perched on top of an old ice house. We learn that ice house, which goes 25 feet below the surface, was built by the Calvert family in 1860. And we learn that the land on which this center now sits was part of the Calverts’ farm, MacAlpine.

But what about the airplane? Well, it turns out that there was at least one interim owner betweem the Calvert time and time present. We learn that this land was the site of the Energy Research Corporation, founded in the 1930s by Henry Berliner to build small single engine airplanes and which then became an important military parts contractor during World War II. In addition to the workspace, there was a large development of publically owned housing units to serve ERCO employees and University of Maryland students on the GI bill. Built as temporary housing, it was all torn down in the 1950s. I don’t know what was happening on this site between the ERCO demolition and the construction of the current shops and instructions.

Continuing north, we see middle class housing, and then we get to College Park.

And then the commercial development begins anew.

Soon, I think, maybe next time we will get to the Maryland campus.

Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, the site of John Brown’s raid, a controlled historic community, a National Park, beautifully located on both the Shenandoah and Potomac Rivers, is only about an hour and a quarter from our house. But you can’t just drop in for a quick visit. You can drive around, but parking is really limited, you have to have a pass to visit places, the terrain is hilly and so forth.

A few years ago, we decided to go to Harpers Ferry, but stopped (I think for lunch) first in Brunswick MD, just a few miles short of our destination.  We had lunch at a delightful, converted old brick church, now a restaurant called Beans in the Belfry, looked at the railroad tracks and C & O Canal, and went to the railroad museum which contains, among other things, an exact model railroad showing the Baltimore and Ohio route between Brunswick and Washington’s Union Station. It’s absolutely worth a trip to see. Weekends only.

We got so involved in Brunswick that we never made it to Harpers Ferry.

Yesterday, we decided to try again. It was a cool day, was to be mainly cloudy, with a 25% chance of light and passing showers through a couple of hours. Buut when we arrived at the twin towns of Bolivar and Harpers Ferry, it was raining and it was unclear that it would stop, and we really didn’t want to get, so we drove out of town, decided to go a few more miles to Charles Town, have lunch (you see a pattern here?),  and see what the weather would be like in an hour or so.

All I really knew about Charles Town is that there is a race track there. We quickly learned there was a Walmart with an enormous parking lot and some Class B or Class C shopping strips. The few restaurants didn’t look particularly appealing, so we said (not the exact words and not in unison) “What the hell! Let’s just go to the Waffle House.” This would be a first.

The Waffle House was very crowded (we thought perhaps it’s the best restaurant in town). You couldn’t call the place clean exactly, and the five or six heavily accented women who worked there were having a grand old time amusing each other. The food was nothing to write a blog about, but the coffee was surprisingly good, the prices surprisingly low  and overall the place gets an A+ for friendliness. If you are ever lonely in Charles Town

and need a friendly smile….

Before going back to Harpers Ferry (and deep down knowing we would never go back), we decided to look more closely at Charles Town. Glad we did.

I didn’t take a lot of pictures, so you will have to take my words for it. The race track is visible from the road and looks to be in good shape. There are 9 or 10 racing days in September and the same next month. But next to the track is (ta-da) a casino open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and a large hotel featuring several restaurants and bars. I really didn’t know all that was here.

Charles Town also has a large historic section, with some beautiful old homes in a very pleasant and large neighborhood. It is a county seat and has the typical old government buildings, it has a live theater, a three story, well maintained old house that is now a used book and record store  restaurants and so forth.

While John Brown’s raid on the federal arsenal was at Harpers Ferry, he was jailed, tried, convicted and executed in Charles Town, and the sites are all appropriately marked. While Brown was not buried in Charles Town (he was buried in upstate NY), those killed in his raid were, and their graves can be visited in a large, well maintained cemetery.

Another thing I had never focused on, and still don’t fully understand. Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863. It freed the slaves in the rebellious states, not those that remained in the Union (i.e. not in the four “border states”. West Virginia did was still part of Virginia in January 1863. It did not become a separate breakaway state until June of that year.

But obviously, the movement to break away and return to the Union was in process. A historic sign says that the Emancipation Proclamation had special wording to except the future state of West Virginia out of its coverage, with one exception.  The slaves in Jefferson County (that is Charles Town’s county) were freed by Lincoln. This one needs a bit more research.

One ladt thing. Who was Charles of Charles Town? Charles was George Washington’s youngest brother whose estate (it is still in existence) was nearby. Charles Washington laid out the town. The main street is Washington. Other streets are named after the Washington brothers, George, Samuel, Charles, and Lawrence, and after Charles’ wife Mildred.

You ever imagine knowing so much about Charles Town WV?

No time to proof today……

There’s a lot on this morning’s New York Times front page. Donald Trump, Kamala Harris, Pope Francis, China, the West Bank. But my eye is drawn to a headline that reads: “Driven From a Crown at Home, She tried in Nigeria. And won.”

It’s the story of Chidimma Adetshina, a 23 year old woman, born in South Africa to a Nigerian father and to a South African mother who apparently has one parent from Mozambique. She was raised in South Africa and has lived there her entire life.

She entered the annual beauty contest and advanced to the finals. But controversy stalked her. You may not know it, but South Africans recognize her last name as Nigerian. Could “a Nigerian” represent South Africa in the pageant? And what about her mother’s Mozambique heritage; how did she get to South Africa after all? The South African government decided to start an investigation.

That was the last straw, and Chidimma pulled out of the contest. But then, as they say, another country was heard from, and Chidimma was invited to join the contest for Miss Nigeria, which she won, although she had never been to Nigeria, except for a visit when she was three months old.

Yes, there were questions raised in Nigeria, but they apparently had no effect on the vote at the contest. And the South African title went to a White woman, who is hard of hearing and had a cochlear transplant.

Although it is not something I know anything about, there seems to be quite an economic and social rivalry between the two countries, and this is just one example of how it can play out.

Tempest in a teapot? Perhaps. But it reminded me of an article I read just yesterday in Tablet, a conservative oriented Jewish centered e-magazine with articles too long to read unless you are in a doctor’s waiting room. That’s where I was yesterday.

The article was by Marc Weitzmann, a French journalist who writes about things Jewish and who gave a presentation for the Haberman Institute a few years ago. It was focused on a new book by Olivier Roy, who he identified as a French sociologist. The book is titled The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms. [a typical French title, which I don’t understand].

I will not try to discuss everything said in this too long article about a book with an impenetrable title. Let’s just say it’s about the clash of cultures, and the adoption of one culture’s identifying elements by another, a topic that often comes up. White rappers. Christian seders. You know what I mean.

The article goes into a large discussion of who gets credit for hummus. At one point, someone in Lebanon railed against those who think hummus is an Israeli food. It’s not Israeli, he maintained, it’s Lebanese. Not so fast, said a Syrian. What do you mean, it’s Lebanese? It’s Syrian.

The gist of the article, of course, is that no one really knows. And, as they might say, hummus is just the tip of the iceberg.

The article or the book (unclear to me which) or both goes on to talk about nationalism and national rivalries, saying that they are not only political, but they are cultural. And that while globalism, in some minds, was the perfect way to create a universal culture, taking the best from each and melding them together, for others, it was a way to steal one’s culture, one’s identity, and for some, as they also say, “them’s fightin words”. And, says Weitzmann/Roy, the loss of cultural distinction may lead to violent reactions, just as loss of political identity might.

Back to Miss South Africa. A sentence in the Times article interested me, a quote from a South African essayist, Sisonke Msimang. She describes Adetshina as being an example of post-apartheid young Africans whose identities defy borders. She decried the lack of open or cosmopolitan viewpoints in South Africa, and prejudice against north African cultures.

It is all pretty much the same thing, isn’t it? As Pete Seeger (famously but not originally) said: Which side are you on?

Apparently,  you can not be on both.

The debate between Trump and Harris will turn out, I am sure, to be important in a race which is so close. Each of the candidates is preparing in their own way. Based on the Trump/Biden debate, we assume that Trump will once again listen carefully to the question being asked, then ignore it completely and answer a question that he wants to answer, even though it will be totally unrelated to the question posed. How should Harris respond?

First, every time Trump ignores a question, I think she should say something like: “There he goes again, ignoring your question because he doesn’t know how to answer it. Well, I will answer your question, directly……” The, she should answer the question.

Second, every time Trump uses a pejorative adjective,  she should say something like: ” There he goes again, talking like a grade school bully, when we should be talking about the future of the United States, and your future.”

These are simple things to be used over and over again. Harris should also have at her disposal a list of facts, such as inflation rates in other countries compared with the US and amounts of oil and natural gas we have extracted in the Biden years compared with the Trump years. And so forth. Fighting back with uncontrovertible facts.

But there is something else that, for some reason, no one mentions.  And I have said this before.

A simple fact. A president can not spin the world around on a dime. A new president takes time, even if he knows what he wants to do, to get his team together and working smoothly, to deal with Congress where needed, and to have his policies implemented. This can take a few years.

An example. The infrastructure bill. This was an early Biden priority and Congress passed it in a timely fashion. But it is only now that construction projects are being started, and they will continue to unfold in coming years.

What does this mean? It means that much of the success of the economy in the pre-pandemic Trump years was a carry-over from the Obama years, and much of the criticism that Republicans levy against the early Biden years are a carryover from the failed Trump years.

It seems to me that this is obvious. Why is it never discussed?

We have been in our house for over 40 years. It’s a good sized house, and while we aren’t packrats, the house is filled with things that no one wants.

While I am pretty good at throwing some things out, I am also by nature a collector of interesting things. And, because I am also by nature at least somewhat frugal, I am by nature a collector of things that cost me nothing to acquire, or don’t cost me very much.

I also am what the French call, I think, a flanneur, or someone who likes to wander aimlessly just to see what there is to see.

Put all this together, and you can see how I collected more than 500 cigarette packages that I have found on the ground. Each different.

A few years ago, I threw out all of my collected domestic packets after some internal debate, along with several dozen cigarillo wrappers. Now, all I have left are my foreign packages. There are close to 200 of them.

There is no reason to keep them, but they are so fascinating.

For example, picked pretty much at random:

What should I do with them?

Of course, there are also the business cards I have found:

And the bookmarks;

But they take up less room.

Does everyone have this dilemma?

I wanted something light to read the other night, and I had recently picked up a copy of Catch Me If You Can, signed by Frank W. Abagnale, the author. It seemed like a good choice.

Actually, to be perfectly honest, I don’t know who wrote this book. A second credit on the cover goes to Stan Redding (in a teeny weeny font), so maybe he’s the author. Or, maybe Stan Redding doesn’t even exist, or is just another name for Frank Abagnale, or vice versa. But I know that Frank Abagnale exists because I saw him once, and he was identified as Frank Abagnale. But maybe that was all for show, as well, and he was really someone else. I am perplexed or, I know nothing.

Okay, let’s step back a bit. Twenty plus years ago, I watched the film Catch Me If You Can, with Leonardo de Caprio playing the lead role of…..Frank Abagnale. You probably saw that film, too, and if you remember, Abagnale was a master con man, who made money by taking on fake identities and conning people and cashing fake checks. He was only a mature 16 when he started impersonating a Pan American airline pilot, a Harvard educated attorney, and a pediatrician taking time off to do some research at Emory, to name a few. He was also a ladies man par excellence and, eventually, also an FBI agent. Not an informer, a bona fide employee. His FBI gig got him out of jail.

The film was great fun. Equally fun was the musical version, which we saw at Arena Stage about ten years ago. The story wasn’t exactly the same, but it was close enough, and the cast looked like they were having a good time. And, I think it was between acts, Molly Smith, the artistic director, introduced a beaming Frank Abagnale, to the audience, gushing over his accomplishments.

I have read about half of the book so far, and have not been disappointed. He is such a likeable crook, he doesn’t really harm anyone (only banks and big corporations, it appears, and of course the many girls he leaves behind), and he really has a good (if anxiety ridden) time. And he is so smart, such a quick learner. He learns everything about being a commercial pilot, except how to actually fly a plane. He learns enough to supervise a full pediatric hospital staff, and he avoids ever having to actually perform any medical services. And I know the same will be true when he becomes a partner (if I remember correctly) in the law firm of one of the men who believe he will become their son-in-law. He is a handsome guy, a charming young man, just the type who can get away with anything.

Reading of his exploits, you can’t help but admire his skill. How could he have done that? How did he get away with that? How did he even think of that? That’s impossible! But as you read on, the doubts begin to march in. All of these things – they are impossible.

It turns out that most of what he says in this book is false. Even beyond exaggeration. Just plain false. Or, as it would be termed in modern political parlance, he just lied. With no remorse. Who cares if something is true or not?  Let’s just create our alternative facts.

How do I know most of the book is untrue? Well, even the quickest internet search will lead you to the many contradictions in the story, the many impossibilities. The downright lies. Google it. You will see.

It is true that young Abagnale was a serial con man, was arrested on a regular basis and served tome in several jails. But he never flew free around the world as a deadheading pilot, never ran a pediatric department, never passed a bar exam with a fake Harvard transcript, never worked for the FBI And all the women? Where are they? Mighty quiet.

Abagnale performed his best act of deception in writing (or co-writing) this book and getting top name actors and producers to tell his counterfactual story.

Abagnale is, I am sure, a rich man today. He must have made a fortune off his book, another one from the film, and a third from the musical. But, wait, there is more…..Frank Abagnale runs a very successful consulting firm. I quote from its website: “Frank W. Abagnale is one of the world’s most respected authorities on the subjects of forgery, embezzlement and secure documents. For over forty years, he has lectured to and consulted with hundreds of financial institutions, corporations and government agencies around the world.

“Mr. Abagnale has been associated with the FBI for over four decades. He lectures extensively at the FBI Academy and for the field offices of the Federal Bureau of Investigation……” And the description goes on.

If you read the Wikipedia entry on Frank Abagnale, where the breadth of his deception is outlined, you would conclude he is the lowest of lowlife. If you read his company’s website (who knows how much of it is true?), you would think he was an angel working for the good of everyone everywhere, helping governments and corporations root out fraud and deception.

Two different people.

Frank Abagnale may not himself be very important. But isn’t his story indicative of a major problem we have? One made worse today by technology? Think George Santos. Think Donald Trump. It seems so easy.

Before we continue up Route 1, here are two interesting things that missed yesterday’s post.

First:

This is the entry pad for a Verizon telephone building in Hyattsville.  Doesn’t it make you want to push 2?

And second:

There is a piercing spot in Hyattsville. This poster is visible from the street. Did you know you could get your tongue pierced in 6 places?

As you leave center city Hyattsville, you go through a short, underdeveloped area, where you are reminded that there is something that all Americans do agree on:

And you can buy a car from the best:

But soon, there are restaurants, such as:

But then I hit two questionable places. The first?

The first is Leslys. It looks like a normal restaurant, and maybe it is, but I have read that it’s a normal restaurant that concentrates on loud music, underclad waitresses, and expensive drinks.

The other?

I don’t know what happens here, but I was relieved it didn’t say “decapitaciòn”.

There was more to see. A few churches, including a Church of the Brethren, about which I knew nothing. Looking at the website, I see three terrific things: members have their choice of Christian theology, they proclaim universal brotherhood, and like the Quakers, they are proponents of peace. I walked by when services were ongoing on Sunday, and it looked pretty quiet. It’s possible that those three things are just not attractive to the masses.

I saw one more bird:

And we ended here:

This is the Riverdale Army Reserve Center. I spent one weekend a month in this building for four years plus. About 50 weekends, 100 days. This after 2 years at a similar building on Goodfellow in St. Louis and that after 5 months training at Ft. Ord, California.  All interspersed with six two week summer camps at Ft. McCoy WI, Ft. Leonard Wood MO (2), Indiantown Gap PA (2), and Ft. Meade MD.

So I was halfway between a Navy Seal and a future president with bone spurs.

For the past two weeks, most of my time has been taken up by grandchildren,  but they are back in school, and I have more time to myself. So, back on the Rhode (as no one calls it) and starting in downtown Hyattsville,  we move north.

We are still on US Route 1, but guess what? It is no longer called Rhode Island Avenue, but is now known as Baltimore Avenue.

After watching the coffee roasting at Vigilante Coffee, we start at Franklin’s Restaurant and General Store, and we look at some of the outdoor murals at their large outdoor space. If you get a chance, wandering through the store is fun.

From the Franklin tables, you see the Northwest Branch Trail heading off, and then, on a public parking lot,  you see a mural dedicated to Black civil rights.

Coming back to Route 1, you pass the Archie Edwards  Blues Heritage Foundation, located in the late guitarist’s old barber shop, where you can learn acoustic blues guitar or jam every Saturday.

Back on the route, you see the transformation underway on the opposite side, where an enormous multifamily apartment development is under construction. It will contain 285 apartments and ground floor retail. I counted the number of double windows facing the front and I came up with 45. Here is half of that development.

Here’s the other half.

The modern shops and restaurants across the street can’t wait until these buildings are occupied. This is scheduled to happen before the end of 2024, but I would not hold my breath.

There are many establishments across the street, by the way, including an organic grocery (Yes!, indeed), a Thai restaurant and Busboys and Poets,  a trendy local chain named after Langston Hughes (the busboy at an old DC hotel) and Zora Hurston (the poet).

And yes, like in Mt. Rainier and Brentwood,  we are still in an arts district, although you have to search a little.

But it was not always an arts district. Apparently, at one time, this area, because of Route 1 traffic, was called the Motor Mile, and was lined with automobile dealerships. The only reminder is the Lustine Center, now a gym and community center, but formerly, a Chevrolet dealership,  I believe.

Our final stop in the center of Hyattsville is the 1918 Maryland Armory, no longer in use as an armory. Now it’s the Crossover Church. From its website, I don’t see anything very exciting about it,  but then again, I am not the target audience.

But Hyattsville, even here on Route 1, always has more to offer. Here is the entrance to the campus of DeMatha High School, one of the region’s biggest Catholic schools.

And we end with both a wall and a bird, dedicated to the town.

And somehow the text and photos got out of sync near the end. Don’t ask me how that is possible. Pretend it’s a puzzle.

Tomorrow,  on to Riverdale.

The Yale Daily News has published a survey taken by the university of the incoming freshman class, Class of 2028, and some of the statistics are fascinating. So I will just list some for today’s post.

1. 51% female, 47% male, 2% something else.
2. 55% White, 30% Asian, 13% Black. 20% Hispanic.
3. 69% straight, 14% lesbian/gay/queer, 12% bisexual
4. 2% transgender
5. 19% first generation college; 17% Yale legacy
6. 34% “extremely religious”, 4% “not at all religious”, remainder in between. Surprise??
7. 57% from suburbs, 30% from cities, 13% rural
8. Of domestic students, 48% speak only English, 44% two languages, the remainder more than two.
9. 56% getting financial aid
10. 43% from families making more than $150k per year, 44% from less, remainder don’t know.
11. 53% call their family upper middle income or upper income
12. 67% have parent with a graduate degree; another 15% with a bachelor’s degree; others no degrees.
13. 43% had early admission; only 2% off waiting list.
14. 56% now planning for a STEM major, 43% social sciences, 21% humanities
15. 58% public high school, 24% private high school, 10% religious school
16. 8% boarding school
17. 95% calculus or better in high school, including 21% beyond calculus 2
18. Median SAT scores about 1520-1540 for all groups, irrespective of income, race, type of high school, etc. A little lower (1480) for recruited athletes.
19. 70% single, 30% in some sort of relationship, 16% in post high school broken relationship
20. 35% have not had their first kiss, but 36% have had sex
21. 65% of those who have had sex have had one partner, 18% two, the rest more.
22. 51% drink alcohol, 21% have smoked tobacco, 31% marijuana, 5% hallucinogens, 1% cocaine
23. Most view themselves as neither extroverts, nor introverts, but in the middle
24. As to politics, 29% are “very left”, 38% somewhat left, only 9% somewhat or very right.
25. 18% have a favorable opinion of Biden, 50% a favorable opinion of Harris, 2% a favorable opinion of Trump. 85% have an unfavorable opinion of Trump.
26. 49% favor affirmative action programs, 18% are against them.

That is pretty much it for the survey. I found it interesting. Would like to see something similar for other universities. Don’t know if they exist or not.

I haven’t posted much about Russia recently, but that doesn’t mean that I haven’t been paying attention to what has been going on there. You can’t do that by looking at the newspapers as easily as you could, say, a year ago, because the coverage seems to have dropped, and the war hardly ever seems to make the first page any more. And there are some aspects of the war that I haven’t read about for months. What, for example, is going on in the Russian controlled areas of eastern Ukraine? What has happened to the millions of people who emigrated from Ukraine at the start of the war, flooding much of central Europe. Are they still there? Are they integrating into new homes? Are they returning to Ukraine, or traveling back and forth? And what about the rumblings of dissatisfaction with how Zelensky is handling the war, or how the Ukrainian military is holding up? Zelensky replaced a number of the top military leaders some months ago. Did that turn out to be a good move? Has anyone been writing about this?

But there are some things we do know. Russia still controls most of the parts of Ukraine that it has occupied during the war. Where Ukraine has pushed the Russians back, the Russians have then pushed Ukraine back. This looks like it could go on forever. On the other hand, in a major surprise, Ukraine has actually invaded Russia, particularly in the Kursk province and near the city of Belgorod, and in another major surprise, Russia has not been able to dislodge them, and in fact doesn’t seem to be trying very hard.

Similarly, Russia still seems firmly in control of Crimea, but Ukraine has absolutely decimated the Russian Black Sea fleet, using drones, not naval engagements. The bridge to Crimea, Russia’s main supply line, seems intact, although Ukraine keeps threatening its destruction (which for some reasons is apparently more difficult than one might think it would be). The Russians have recently blanketed Ukraine with massive air attacks aimed at utilities and infrastructure and shown some success, although Ukraine seems resilient and able to restore damaged facilities quickly. And winter is coming.

The Biden administration (and the potential future Harris administration) is holding fast to its support of Ukraine and, with Congressional approval where necessary) sends more arms and more sophisticated arms, including F-16s, without which, for example, the invasion of Russia may not have occurred. NATO is still holding strong as well, with some faltering potential in Germany, which is having its own budgetary problems. What Trump would do if reelected is unclear, but (like everything else he might do) frightening.

All this we know. But where this is going we have no idea.

I listen to a fair number of podcasts. This is where I get most of the information I get, and the guesses as to the future. Whether this information is reliable is another question, to be sure, and I admit that I haven’t really dug into the bona fides of the sites I am frequenting. One site is Times Radio. Times Radio is related to The Times of London and the Sunday Times, and that means it is part of the Rupert Murdoch empire. The other site is called Silicon Curtain, also out of the United Kingdom, and I frankly don’t know who controls it, but it is a major site on matters concerning this war, and if you look at its ratings on various internet sites, they range from 4.6 to 4.9. Both of these sites have new podcasts daily, usually multiple times a day, so they can keep you busy. The formats are similar – a host and an expert, who is usually a British or American retired military or government expert, or a disillusioned Russian. Both sites are clearly pro-Ukraine and very anti-Russian and anti-Putin.

This last sentence is important. These are not fair and balanced reports, unless you believe (as I do) that being very pro-Ukraine in this instance is a sign of being fair and balanced. But having listened to these podcasts for months, or maybe even well over a year now, I get the sense that there is a lot of wishful thinking involved. The Ukrainians are always viewed as the victim fighting beyond its capacity to save itself, and with important tricks up their sleeves that we don’t even know about yet. The Russians are always on the verge of internal chaos, and Joe Biden will probably still be the president of the United States on the day that Putin is removed from power. A day that will surprise us, but which is definitely coming soon.

You don’t hear much about the economic strength of Russia. Clear economic analysis is not the forte of these podcasters – you don’t hear much about Russia’s relationships with its allies in this fight. You hear that, outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia is a full fledged basket case, and it is only because people are unable to protest that they are not protesting. You hear that Russia’s troops, often prisoners, are untrained for battle and account for nothing. In fact, you learn again and again that Putin, a typical dictator, is in this for his own power, and does not care a whit about the Russian people. You hear that Russia can make ammunition in unlimited quantity, but the quality of weaponry is abysmal, and its ability to increase its weaponry is limited. You hear that the military has not drafted young men from either of the two main cities of the country, and that if this happens there will be real trouble for Putin.

Of course, I am exaggerating a bit in discussing the limits of the comments on these podcasts. They are filled with undoubted facts and statistics, beyond the prognostications and wishful thinking. And this is what makes them so interesting.

There is a lot of focus on Putin himself. The typical stuff. His Soviet/CIA upbringing. His desire to reconstruct a nation that includes as much of the former Soviet Union as possible. His paranoia about the United States and the West.

But yesterday, I heard three new points from a guest on a Silicon Curtain podcast yesterday.

1. Putin, as you probably know, denies the existence of Ukrainians as a people; he thinks they are all Russians. The guest wondered, if Ukrainians were in fact Russians, how the Russians could treat them so badly, bombing them, destroying their cities and so forth. He concluded that Russia could do this because Putin’s (and therefore Russia’s) attitude towards Ukrainians (soldiers and civilians) is the same as his attitude towards Russians (soldiers and civilians)….that they are simply expendable. And, although the commenter was at first speaking about Putin, he extrapolated from only Putin to virtually all Russians. They inherited their willingness to treat people brutally, he said, from the Mongols. This is the way the Mongols captured Asia he said, cutting off peoples’ heads and bringing the heads to the next village to show the villagers what would happen if they don’t surrender. Whether he was saying that the Mongols had taught this to the Russians, or the Russians were genetic successors to the Mongols, was not clear. Maybe some of both. At any rate, it was a rather shocking description.
2. The speaker than talked about World War II, and how the Russians fought off the Nazis to save the world. This is a bit exaggerated, he said, because it was not the Russians who suffered most from the Nazis, it was the Ukrainians. Only 5% of Russia was occupied by Germany, while 100% of Ukraine was for at least two years. And, he says, it was the Ukrainians rather than the Russians who fought off the Nazis. He says that, for the past 80 years, Russia has been taking the credit that Ukraine deserves.
3. Finally, he spoke about the Ukraine takeover of the Kursk oblast and nearby territory. He found it surprising, he says, that there hasn’t been any rebellion from the Russians whose home are now occupied by Kiev. He ascribes this to two related things: first, that the Russian officials are bad governmental rulers, so Russian peasants aren’t sad to see them go, and second, that the Ukrainians are no worse than the Russians in controlling the landscape, so why should the residents care? He spoke about a number of conversations he has had in parts of Russia which were occupied by the Germans in World War II with elderly survivors of that era. He asked them what life was like under German occupation. Presumably, we are not talking about Jewish survivors, but he said that the people he spoke to said that life under German occupation was not bad at all. He concluded that it made no difference to these people who was governing over them, as long as their day to day freedoms were not curtailed.

These last three points all sound more like propaganda than anything else, right? Maybe so. And maybe much of what I hear on these YouTube channels is propaganda. They certainly don’t have guests who favor Russia on the programs. So, I don’t really know what to make of them. Yet, I find them interesting and hopeful. And I do learn from them, and it gives much things to think about. So I keep listening, day after day after day.

When I moved to Washington in 1969, I opened a checking account at Riggs Bank, then the largest Washington based bank, because they had a branch right next to where I worked. Riggs dated from the 1830s and was perhaps the most prominent bank in the city, until it got embroiled in a number of scandals, including aiding Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in hiding his money, enabling some of the 9/11 terrorists to transfer money, and taking in funds stolen from Equatorial Guinea’s oil revenues. With that, and the resignation of much of its board of directors, Riggs was acquired by PNC National Bank in in 2005, and its branches all became PNC branches.

Now, PNC advertises widely on TV that it has been “brilliantly boring since 1865”. It’s an advertising campaign that I don’t understand at all. Who really wants a boring bank? Yet, considering the last years of Riggs, I guess boring is not necessarily bad.

What’s my point? My point is that our PNC branch, the one near our house, is not really that boring. Let me explain:

Twice this summer, Edie and I have met with officers at the bank in order to move some of our PNC funds into higher interest paying programs. First, in July, with the Assistant Manager, and today with the Branch Manager. Our conversations were far from boring.

Meeting with someone at your branch bank doesn’t sound very exciting, I know. When we met with the assistant manager in late June or early July, I expected just a quick meeting and a few signatures. Call it my prejudice, but I just don’t expect people who work at banks to be that interesting.

We learned that the assistant manager, who speaks with an accent, was born and raised in Trinidad. I don’t remember the details of his life, as he told it, but I remember it was interesting enough, and I also remember that he told us he had two children and that one of them (the younger, and a son) was going to start college in the fall. I asked him where his son was going to go to college. Again, my prejudice wins out. I assumed he was going to give me the name of a local community college, or perhaps he would tell me it was the University of Maryland. But, casually, he said: “He’s going to Stanford.” I then asked him about his older child, his daughter. As I remember, she is at Duke. They were both very serious kids, with a lot of promise. How far can an apple fall from a tree?

Today, we met with the manager of the branch. I have seen him over the years time and time again, and even have sat down with him a couple of times, but never really had a conversation. He also speaks with an accent, less pronounced, but clearly an accent. I asked him where he was from, and it turns out that he was raised in Guiana, that his mother was from Guiana and that his father was Scottish, in the British military, and stationed in Guiana, when it gained its independence. They stayed in Guiana, his father became Minister of Education, and his mother a member of the Guiana foreign ministry and, I think, he said Ambassador to Barbados, where they lived for three years. His father, once he retired as minister of education, moved to Montserrat, where he became principal of the only high school.

He also told us about his nephew who, when he was 18, not many years ago, was a student at the University of Maryland who was living with his uncle while in school, and who had a congenital condition which suddenly required him to get a liver transplant on an emergency basis. He was hospitalized at Johns Hopkins, when a 22 year old woman died of a brain aneurysm and whose organs were available for transplant. The operation was a success. They knew the donor was a 22 year old woman, but nothing else.

Until one day, the manager got a call from a good friend who told him he was having dinner at someone’s house and that their daughter had died and they had told them that her liver was donated to an 18 year old boy! Coincidence? Just wait. It turned out that the donor’s family was also from Guiana, and that they lived just about three blocks from the manager’s sister back there.

To add to the coincidence, when the nephew and his new liver came home from the hospital, and his uncle asked him what he would like for his first meal at home, he said that he would like a fish curry. Apparently, they had a lot of curries in that house (Guiana’s cuisine has a lot of curry), so it wasn’t surprising that he asked for a curry. But a fish curry? That is something they never had.

A short time later, the donor’s parents wanted to meet the 18 year old who had their daughter’s liver and they came over to their house. As they were leaving, the donor’s mother said to the boy (I paraphrase): “When you feel better, let me know. I am going to come over and bring you some fish curry. That was my daughter’s favorite meal.”

And they say PNC is boring.

By the way (a mini-digression), ever wonder about the PNC name? PNC itself resulted from the merger of two banks, one called Pittsburgh National Corporation, and one called Provident National Corporation, both known as PNC, who merged in 1983. The current ad campaign says that PNC has been “brilliantly boring since 1865”. I thought you might want to know that Provident National Corporation, headquartered in Philadelphia by the way, was formed in 1865. But Pittsburgh National had been around since the 1840s.

I have to conclude that the Pittsburgh bank was not at all boring, but the Philadelphia bank was, and that when they merged in 1983, it was the Philadelphia culture that survived. Of course, based on the fans of its sports teams, you would never accuse Philadelphians of being boring. Another mystery, I guess.

At the same time as we in the United States are concerned about the possible reelection of an individual who appears to have issues with the American way of government, I have read several books about similar leaders – Fascist, Communist and so forth. In fact, I have been reading books about people like this for the past 60 years. For some reason, I never tire of them.

I am going to suggest you read three books, one fairly recent, one recent and one really recent. They all present pictures of totalitarian leaders that we have some familiarity with, and they all make reference to our current situation. The fairly recent book is called Fascism, and is the last book written by the fascinating former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. The recent book is Strongmen, written by the fascinating NYU professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat. The really recent book is Autocracy, Inc. by the fascinating journalist Anne Applebaum.

Albright and Ben-Ghiat tell the story of all the usual suspects – Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Xi and all the others. And they tell the stories very well. Applebaum, in her short, very recent book, goes one step further.

Okay, here is where I make my confession. I have read Fascism and I have read Strongmen, but I have not yet read Autocracy, Inc. But I have heard Applebaum now three times, and have absorbed enough to be able to write this short post. I hope that I will stumble upon the book soon and read it.

And what gave me the thought to write about these books today is a podcast I listened to yesterday on YouTube. Again, I “listened to it” on YouTube, because I was driving my car and believe that driving and watching are not yet compatible. It’s a 50 minute podcast where Applebaum is being interviewed by Ben-Ghiat at the 92nd Street Y. I am sure you can find it, and that you will find it entertaining, frightening and educational. I should add that the the two participants on the podcast are in total agreement with each other. There was no debate, but each had things to say to support, and to augment, points made by the other. And that, oh yes, I agree with both of them.

Applebaum’s thesis in her new book is that authoritarian leaders are no longer driven by ideology. Or, at least, that they don’t have an “ideology uber alles” mentality. They are driven by other forces: one of course is their personal wealth, security and power. Beyond that, they all believe that authoritarian rule is necessary today, and that democracy is old-fashioned, unwieldy, and terribly inefficient. And they believe that we (“we” means the United States and Western Europe) are their enemy.

Each of these autocrats believe, they say, one other thing. They believe that they can work together to accomplish their goals and to thwart ours. And that they can do this irrespective of ideology. Thus a fascist and a communist and a religious fanatic and an authoritarian of no named persuasion can all work together as allies to support each other. How else can you show how China and Iran are jointly supportive of Putin’s Russia? Appelbaum and Ben-Ghiat describe this as “transactional” totalitarianism. And they show that this is pervasive, pretty much brand new, and particularly dangerous in today’s modern, interconnected world.

As an aside in this discussion, and I think as a way to bring thinking about this back home, Ben-Ghiat brought up Donald Trump’s selection of J.D. Vance as his running mate. Both Ben-Ghiat and Applebaum are concerned about the possible reelection of Trump, and view him as a wannabe authoritarian leader. Hence, his kowtowing to Putin, Xi, Kim and others. He wants to be one of them, they believe, and relate to them transactionally, the way they relate to each other. But how does Vance fit into the picture?

According to Ben-Ghiat, Trump’s selection of Vance is just another example of transactionalism at work (I started to say “at play”, but realized that might be misread), and shows that, with Trump, authoritarian transactionalism clearly trumps ideological or any other considerations. How else, she says, can you possibly explain choosing as your running mate a man who previously referred to you as America’s Hitler?

She goes on to talk about Trump’s followers, who have by now been trained, to think along these same lines. The history of the thinking or the statements of the vice presidential candidate is not important. Nor his experience or competence, apparently. He was a “transactional” choice of Trump’s (and a bad one), and that is fine with the world of MAGA.

The goals of all of these figures, they say, are power, wealth and personal security. (Actually, I am not sure if that is what they say, but that is certainly what they imply and what I infer.) Far down on their list of goals, if it shows up there at all, is the welfare or physical status of the people or the nation they lead. You cannot negotiate with Putin, for example, on the assumption that you can present him with something that would benefit the Russian people. It is not a major interest of his. In fact, if the condition of the general population is negatively affected by some action that will benefit the boss, that is just fine. No problem, whatsoever.

They site the example of Venezuela, once the richest and now one of the poorest countries in Latin America. Maduro, they say, doesn’t care that the country he leads has become an economic disaster (and for sure does not have to be) and that almost 8 million people of a total of 30 million have (at least temporarily) emigrated. He is in power, he is wealthy, and he is trying to remain secure.

This is clearly where the world is in 2024. I am not sure about Ben-Ghiat, but Applebaum wants to make it clear that she believes that nothing in history is inevitable, and that things do change and can change if people will it so. She also makes it clear, however, that she is not an “optimist” and never has been; not in her DNA. But, she says, because you know that things can (even if they won’t necessarily) change for the better, you need to show optimism to younger generations if you want them to try to improve their world. If you just tell them things are inevitably going to continue falling apart, she says, what chance is there?

The “there” that I am talking about is Israel. Israel is facing world wide condemnation. Okay, so that happens now and then, we know. But this time, maybe it’s deserved?

Israel has been engaged in devastating Gaza for 10 1/2 months now, after the horrible invasion by Hamas on October 7 of last year. If Hamas’ statistics can be believed (and no one has proven that they can’t yet), there have been over 40,000 killed and about 100,000 injured out of a population of 2 million. Almost everyone there has been displaced more than once, most homes and businesses have been destroyed, and there is no end in sight. (Yes, I know there are “ceasefire” talks, but gee……)

At the same time, there have been consistent reports that Jewish settlers on the West Bank have harassed Palestinians living there in ways excessive than before (and that is saying something) and now (now being yesterday) Israel has announced it is conducting a large “counter-terror” operation in the northern part of the West Bank, deaths have been confirmed, and some Israeli ministers, including the Foreign Minister Israel Katz, has suggested that Israel needs to tell West Bank Palestinian civilians to move away from their homes, so that Israel can undertake a Gaza-like operation in the Occupied Territories.

Last week, as Israel saw Hezbollah ready their armaments for a fight on its northern border, Israel launched a major, and apparently successful for now, air attack in southern Lebanon, hoping to avoid an attack from the north.

Last month, or so, in its promise to kill major opponents, it orchestrated the murder of a very high ranking Hamas official in, of all places, Tehran. Iran has promised retribution – but on its own terms and schedule.

Decades ago, when Israel was responding to some border provocation in a very strong way, I remember someone asking me: do you think they are right to respond this way? I guess I could today repeat the answer I gave then. If they are successful, everyone will conclude they did the right thing. If they are not, everyone will conclude they took the wrong actions.

My answer then, and my answer today, might be the wrong one. For one thing, they have never been successful, because success can’t be measured in how many bombs you can drop or buildings you can flatten, or people you can kill. Success has to be measured in what happens after you do all those things. And yes, bombing your neighbor can give you temporary quiet, but now we see that, in the long term, it doesn’t really help. You will have to face the problem again and again, and each time it will be more difficult.

And we should also see that not only maintaining, but increasing, enmity between you and your neighboring countries, is not the way to solve a problem. But here we are.

Now, Israel is a small country, so to speak. Fewer than 10 million residents, of whom about 8 million are Jewish and most of the rest Muslim. The Muslims, primarily Arabs related to those living in Gaza and the West Bank, have been quiescent for the most part, but it won’t take much to set them aflame, and to convince the militant Israelis that they, too, are fifth columns in the region who must be disposed of, one way or another. Just wait and see.

Israel is a great country, a miraculous country, able to succeed beyond its founders’ dreams, under terribly adverse conditions. But we are now seeing that even strong Israel might be fragile.

I could write about this all day long, but don’t have time to. And it’s really not what I wanted to talk about today. I wanted to talk about the American presidential campaign and especially the Kamala Harris campaign, and how all of this puts her in a lose-lose situation. What should her position be? She has fourchoices, as I see it:

First, she could take a strong pro-Israel position, try to maintain her Jewish support and antagonize Arabs who would otherwise vote for her, and who are important in several tough states.

Second, she could take a strong pro-Arab position, which would have the opposite effect of the first choice.

Third, she could listen to her advisors and ask them what position she should take which would cause her the least damage.

Fourth, she could take the position that she thinks would be in the best interest of our country.

What would you have her do?

Sorry…….I gotta run.