Art is 80

It’s hard to write a political blog post right now. We are in the middle of a big transition from business-as-usual to something that may be, and surely will attempt to be, very different. And while people are thinking about what is going on, no one is watching the news with religious fervor (MSNBC and CNN journalists are speaking into the void), and certainly no one wants to read this blog post. They want me to take another shoe box from my closet and see what’s in it. Maybe tomorrow. Plus, I have the next 16th Street post almost ready to go.

Let’s focus on just one thing today, that being the fact that none of Trump’s cabinet and cabinet-equivalent picks are perfect individuals. In fact, each of them seems to be far from it. The question is: does that matter?

Does it matter that the new Director of Intelligence has spoken up for the leaders of places like Syria and Russia? Does it matter that the new Secretary of Education has been accused of running a business where she ignored prevailing child abuse? Does it matter that the head of Health and Human Services has put a dead bear in Central Park? Does it matter that the Secretary of Defense has been accused of sexual and possibly criminal misconduct? Does the matter that the heads of DOGE has egotistic, narcissistic billionaires, and one of them runs businesses totally dependent on the federal government? And of course, does it matter that the President of the United States has a background identical to a fault with that of Donald Trump?

A friend, at last Thursday morning’s breakfast meeting, spoke somewhat about Pete Rose. Pete Rose, who was clearly a Hall of Fame baseball star (no question about that), but who has been denied entry into the Hall of Fame because he gambled on games in violation of MLB Rule 21, and because he hadn’t declared his gambling income was convicted of tax fraud.

I am no expert on Pete Rose, but as I understand it: (1) all of his gambling on baseball came after his playing career was over, and (2) although he bet on games when he was the Manager of the Cincinnati Reds, he never bet against his team. So no games themselves were compromised. The question is should he be kept out of the Hall of Fame because of what appears to have been a gambling addiction?

And of course, we don’t have to keep to politics and baseball. Look at music. Just this week, the Country Music Association’s artist of the year designation went to country singer Morgan Wallen. I don’t know anything about Wallen, so I looked him up on Wikipedia and read, among other things, the following: “On April 7, 2024, Wallen was arrested after allegedly throwing a chair of the roof of Eric Church’s newly opened bar on Broadway in Nashville. He was charged with three counts of felony reckless endangerment and one count of misdemeanor disorderly conduct after the projectile landed near two police officers on the ground.”

This obviously did not deter the Country Music Association.

Yes, it is embarrassing to have a bunch of morally suspect people leading your country. No question about that. But does it foreshadow anything about their competency to do their jobs?

It might. Not because of their past sins, but because these sins show a weakness that will most likely be exacerbated by their loyalty to a man with all of the faults of Donald Trump, so that they will never being able to stand up to him, rather than to do his general bidding, whatever it may be.

Donald Trump wants people who will not be able to stand up to him, and he is probably right, since his agenda depends on loyalty without conflict. He is selecting people with character weaknesses which will probably lead them to give in to his whims. He is also selecting attractive people (“central casting” types, as he calls them), often from Fox News, because he thinks they will be able to sell his programs to the world at large. And he is selecting people whom he believes will outrage his opponents.

We will see how this works out. We know it will be a bumpy ride (perhaps for us less than for most). Let’s hope that that is all it will be.

So many have asked about what else is in the box I described yesterday…..

Well, there is

a checkbook from the National Metropolitan Bank of Washington. This bank, second oldest in the city and now long gone, was founded in 1814, just before the British burned the city.

An unused one year expense and tax record, perfect for the traveling salesman in the family. Available on request.

A conversational French speaking guide, published in 1945. It has 125 pages, and is actually pretty good (as long as you don’t want to refer to anything that has reference to the past 80 years).

If I were a better Catholic (or perhaps any kind of Catholic), I might know what these cards (probably pre-Nazi era) are for. Biblical verses, old script. The photo shows 3 of a total of 7. Maybe they were a church fundraising gimmick.

This St. Louis flag is ready to be unpeeled and placed on the window of your car. My guess is it is about 50 years old. A promotion of Channel 11, KPLR TV. KPLR was established by Harold Koplar, owner and president of the Chase and Park Plaza hotels and father of my high school classmate, Bob, who – for reasons that may be obvious – was voted Most Likely to Succeed.

A never used, magnetized, portable Scrabble set. Have no idea why it was never used.

This is an announcement from my original DC law firm 41 years ago when we had 45 attorneys. 20 were partners, of whom 13 are still alive. The firm disbanded in 1989, but I am still in contact with 11 of those 13 (including Frank H.).

Here’s a good deal from your local S & L. Put in $1 every other week ($26), and they will give you $25 at the end of the year.

And last, but far from least, several blank appointment cards from Leo to get your hair done at Garfinckels, Spring Valley. Leo, if you don’t know,  was Edie’s father. And his name, outside of Garfinckels, was not Leo.

That’s it.

Once again, my schedule today did not permit a thoughtful blog post. But don’t despair. I have gone into one of my closets and pulled out one of my many shoe boxes filled with valuable ephemera.

I then pulled out seven items (out of maybe 30?) guaranteed to educate and entertain you.

With no further ado:

This official Ronald Reagan door mat (no, not this one yet) lists for $20 to $30 on Ebay. It is really more of a small dish towel. Reagan, you may remember was the host of Death Valley Days, the star of Bedtime for Bonzo, and president of the United States.

Yes, an invitation to come to the first concert of the 1920-1921 season of the (Cleveland) Heights Music and Arts Society. Lila Robeson sang at the Met and was, and looked like, a Wagnerian heroine. In 1922, she retired and spent almost 40 years teaching voice in her native Cleveland. She does not appear to be related to Paul. I can not imagine that this card has any value, other than to descendants of Ms. Lila.

If you have been to Krakow recently, you will probably not recognize this bucolic scene. This is a post card actually sent to me from behind the Iron Curtain 46 years ago. Makes Communism look so relaxing.

This is my entire collection of first day covers of U.S. and Israel jointly issued Hannukah stamps. From 1996. And, no, I can not begin to explain the font choice at the top. Well, actually, I can. You?

This is the 1958 program for the conversion of my childhood rabbi, Samuel Thurman, into Samuel Thurman, Rabbi Emeritus. United Hebrew Congregation,  St. Louis. Rabbi Thurman retired that day at age 76 after serving United Hebrew for 44 years. He was a friend and Masonic brother of fellow Missourian Harry Truman, and was the first rabbi to give an invocation at a presidential inauguration.

Here you have 14 stamps (they were in an envelope) from the Emirate of Fujairah, one of the smaller emirates of the UAE. In great Muslim tradition, they each contain a reproduction of an art work featuring a completely nude woman.

As opposed to places like Dubai, Fujairah is quite conservative. I guarantee that you can not buy these stamps at the local post office. These stamps, for collectors only, do not have any value.  Not even prurient value.

This baseball lineup is the treasure of the seven items I took from the box. The teams were the 58th Bomb Group Wingers, and the 73rd Bomb Group Bombers. Players, if you look closely or even if you don’t,  included Howie Pollett of the Cardinals, Vic Wertz and Birdie Tebbetts of the Tigers, and Bob Dillinger of the Browns. The Bombers won the extra inning game by scoring 4 runs in the 11th.

All but one of these items have something in common. I have no idea when or where I got them. The exception is the postcard. It says on the back.

(1) Prayer for the French Republic. Playing through this weekend at Theater J. Let’s do the negatives first. The play is 3 hours long, with 2 intermissions. Second, the plot, while interesting, is relatively ordinary.

Now the positives. First, the 3 hours pass quickly, so you won’t get fidgity. Secondly, “relatively ordinary ” does not mean uninteresting.

The Solomons have been in France forever. Their piano business goes back five generations. Marcelle Solomon’s husband, Charles, was born in Algeria, but forced to leave. Everyone in the play is Jewish. Marcelle’s father is the only one of his siblings to live through the Second World War. Her grandfather spent time in a concentration camp. Her great grandparents were able to stay in their Paris apartment during the war.

Marcelle has a son who becomes religiously observant and, because of his kippah, religiously observed. He is attacked on the street. The question presented: should the family leave France and move to Israel?

More positives. The acting is first class. Some of the writing is masterful. And…you always run into people you know at Theater J.

It’s an age old Jewish  question, right? Where do you belong? What is your identity? Who gets to answer these questions?Where will you be safe?

I am not going to tell you what the family decided. But I will tell you that I think they decided wrongly.

A week or two ago, I wrote about a podcast we listened to after the Amsterdam soccer riot. Aayan Hirsi Ali talked about the growing number of Muslims in Europe living in a “parallel society” and how that would inevitably make life more difficult for Jews in Europe, whose numbers were not increasing. Maybe so.

But for the playwright, I have a suggestion.  Write a second ending for the play. At the end of the second act, poll the audience. Let them decide. Go, or stay? Would be very interesting to see what the observers who are not participants, think.

(2) Centered: Joe Lieberman. Last night, we went to the DCJCC (which is also where we saw Prayer for the French Republic) to watch a new documentary about Senator Joe Lieberman, best known as my law school classmate. The film is premiering in DC this week, and the crowd on the third night of its showing was large. It’s a well done and interesting film, concentrating on Joe both as a Jew and as a centrist Senator, who could reach so far across the line that he wound up being considered as vice presidential candidate for Republican Senator John McCain and being elected to the Senate from Connecticut as an independent.

The film is good history and is presented by and large chronologically. Historical footage is interspersed with what was apparently a 7 hour interview with Joe, and additional conversations with his wife, two of his children (the ones living in this country; the third is in Israel), and many who worked with him over the years.

As the film was being made, there was no thought to the possibility that Joe would not live to see it released. At least, no one thought about that except perhaps Joe himself. For Joe had been diagnosed with a dangerous blood cancer, about which he told no one (at least, he did not tell his children; I do not know whether his wife knew), and when he died suddenly after falling last March, his illness was first disclosed and his fall likely attributed to his weakened condition.

A number of things occurred to me as I watched the film. First, although there was a fair amount in the film of Joe as a Yale undergraduate, there was virtually no reference to his time as a law student. I guess this did not surprise me, as I recall Joe paying little attention to his law school years while he was living them. He married after his first year, and did not live on or (to my knowledge) very near campus, so he had a life beyond the law school classes. And he was working (perhaps volunteering) at the time (again as I remember it) for the Connecticut Democratic Party, so very busy elsewhere.

I also thought about his career before his successful run for Connecticut Attorney General. Joe practiced law in New Haven for a couple of years at what was then, I think, New Haven’s largest law firm. I don’t know what his work there consisted of, but a few years out of law school, he left the firm and ran for and was elected to the Connecticut Senate, where he served for 10 years. And then he became Attorney General. In other words, Joe Lieberman became Attorney General of the State of Connecticut, having no extensive law practice experience, and never having been a prosecutor (and probably his law practice had no involvement with criminal law).

Of whom does that remind you? Yes……Matt Gaetz. Oh, well.

(3) The Nazi Titanic. Robert Watson, a Florida academic, gave his second presentation for the Haberman Institute Monday night. He was talking about the subject of his 2017 award winning book, The Nazi Titanic. I gave the talk an A+ . You can see it either on YouTube or on the Haberman website (habermaninstitute.org) – no cost.

I will give you a very basic outline. The German ocean liner, the Cap Arcona, made over 90 trips between Europe and Latin America between the two world wars. It was perhaps the most luxurious of the many quality German ocean liners.

During the Second World War, the ship was first used as a troop carrier, having been stripped down, and then allowed to rot in the Nordsee; otherwise, it would have been an obvious target. But at one point (hard as this may be to believe), Hitler, who was a big American movie fan, decided that Germany should make its own epic film as a major public relations effort, so that the rest of the world would see how powerful and creative the Nazi regime was. So the ship was refloated, and restored to its pre-war elegance and made to look as much as possible like the Titanic itself, and the very expensive film was in fact made. The subject of the film was the 1912 sinking of the real Titanic, and the remade Cap Arcona was the star of the show. (This film is available to watch on YouTube. It did not do what Hitler expected it would for Germany’s reputation.)

The ship was again mothballed until the very final days of the war, when it was packed with Holocaust victims, of course mainly Jewish, who had survived the death marches from the east back to Germany. And “packed” means “really packed”, no room to move around at all. It was all about getting rid of evidence; the ship could always be sunk so that any remaining prisoners would disappear from potential rescue.

Clearly this was a tragedy, and the tragedy was compounded when the Royal Air Force, assuming the ship was still being used by the German military, bombed the ship and sunk it, killing perhaps 7000 prisoners on board.

This event was not spoken about because everything involving it was declared confidential by the British government, , embarrassed at Britain’s involvement in so many innocent deaths, to be held without release for, I think he said, 100 years. All RAF crew members were sworn to lifelong secrecy. And it was only by accident that Watson got on the trail of the Cap Arcona, and was able to have the British agree to release the previously confidential material. This is part of the story.

“All day, I face the barren waste, without a taste of water….”

At 4:45 a.m. this morning, a 12 inch water main broke on Connecticut Avenue, a block or two from our house.

Back to the song (which will be in my head all day). Written in 1936, it was first recorded, they say, in 1941 by the Sons of the Pioneers. It was later recorded by Vaughn Monroe, Frankie Laine, Marty Robbins, and others.

When I think of Vaughn Monroe, I think of “Riders in the Sky”. When I think of Frankie Laine, it’s “Mule Train”. The Sons of the Pioneers brings me to Roy Rogers and “Happy Trails”. It was also recorded by Hank Williams and Eddy Arnold.

These are all country cowboy singers. But Marty Robbins? I know he was a country guy, but all I think of is “A White Sport Coat and a Pink Carnation” (“Once you told me long ago, to the prom with me you’d go…”), recorded in 1957, and the travails of high school dating. If it is true that high school kids don’t date any more……good for them.

Now, all this information comes from Wikipedia, of course, and I take it as gospel. But another site, Genius.com, tells me it was first recorded by Bob Atcher and Bonnie Blue Eyes. The year before the Sons of the Pioneers. I don’t really care about Bob Atcher, but who was Bonnie Blue Eyes? Maybe an Indian princess? A German refugee whose name was Bonnie Blau-augen? I must find out.

It turns out that her name was Loete Applegate, and for three years, 1939 to 1942, she sang duets with

Atcher. And even though I don’t care about Bob Atcher,  B.B.E. did because she married him.

You may know that, besides singing about his lost prom date and his thirst, Marty Robbins was a Nascar racer. You may know the Gene Autry (how did he get in this mix?) became a very wealthy and overweight oil tycoon. But did you know that Kentucky born Bob Atcher became the long time mayor of Schaumburg Illinois? Go figure

You can see a list of songs recorded by Atcher on Wikipedia, but “Cool Water” is not there. This is a mystery.

But who wrote “Cool Water”? Attention must be paid. It was Bob Dolan! I know you might never have heard of him, but he was one of the founders of the Sons of the Pioneers. And, like I am sure  many American country singers, he was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba. And he also wrote ” Tumbling Tumbleweeds”. Attention must be paid.

Are you one of the few who read this post all the way to the end? Wow!

I am going to check on our water main.

This week I read another interesting book that you probably know nothing about (you can ignore the word “probably”): Around Cape Horn to Honolulu by L. Vernon Briggs, published in 1924, but detailing his seafaring trip from Boston to Honolulu in 1880. Briggs (who later became a prominent Boston psychiatrist), the son of a prominent family, was diagnosed with a serious case of asthma. and his family doctor thought he could use a change of climate to improve his health. He was 16.

Briggs was a curious young man and his family agreed that a trip at sea might be just the thing, and they found a commercial cargo ship which was willing to take him on as its only passenger (although, as the trip went on, he became a virtual crew member) on its journey around the southern tip of South America to the Kingdom of Hawaii. It was by no means a smooth trip. They hit a number of strong and lengthy storms in the Atlantic, and then had to face the terrible storms and waves as the crossed the Straits of Magellen, when it appears as likely or not that their boat would not make it through.

The entire trip took about 5 months, and – this should be obvious – Briggs had not heard anything from or been able to transmit anything to his family in Boston. For this entire time, they were at sea; they stopped at no intervening ports along the way. (The book, by describing the way a cargo ship traveled and how its crew fared in the 1880s, is very interesting, but that is for another day; not the subject of this post.)

When they got to Honolulu, there was mail waiting (the mail was brought on ships that came directly from San Francisco; I assume mail was sent from Boston to San Francisco by railroad. And Briggs was able to write his family that he was fine (actually better than when he left home), and send his mail by ship back to California.

What I am interested here is that his parents sent their son on a dangerous voyage, where communication was impossible, and where – at the end of that voyage – he would be over 5,000 miles from home (and have to get back).

Of course, travel without communication was very common in those days. Men and women, and sometimes children, were leaving the more remote parts of Europe, for example, to come to the New World, and it was very difficult for them to communicate with people back home. Sometimes, they had no contact with them ever again. I was glancing through The Adventures of Marco Polo (should I read it/should I not) the other day, and realized that Marco and his father traveled for years without being able to hear from to communicate with their family in Italy.

I have never been in that situation, although when I took my 3 month long trip to Europe in 1962, I had no contact with family (I did send them a few post cards, I guess) for that period of time. And when I was in basic training at Ft. Ord California (and the base was locked down because of meningitis), I was only allowed one three minute phone call home per week, and no one could call me. But that was far from the same.

And then there was that old joke (certainly neither politically correct not accurate) showing the differences between Italian and Jewish husband. The joke was that Italian husbands would leave in the morning, saying “I’m going. I may come back”, while Jewish husbands would call home as soon as they crossed the street, saying “I’m across the street. I will call you when I get to the corner.”

Today, our ability to communicate is astounding. Virtually everyone, middle school age or older, has a cell phone, and younger people apparently talk to their friends on the phone, or text them, more than they do in person. They even take their phones to school where they can apparently use them (with permission or without) even during class. This has to be terrible for the teachers, and certainly must have a bad effect on the ability of a student to absorb what is being taught.

For some reason, it took the education establishment in many places years before they realized that something had to be done and only now are school districts forbidding the use of cell phones during class. But there are, apparently, many parents who strongly object to this change of policy. “What”, they say, “will we do if there is a shooter incident and we cannot reach our kids?”

How different this is from the parents of Vernon Briggs, who put him on a boat, knowing he had a physical illness, although the trip was ostensibly for his health, knowing they won’t know how, or even if, he is for a half of a year, and maybe longer.

Right, wrong? Better, worse? I don’t know. I am not expressing an opinion. Why? Because both seem right, and both seem wrong to me. It’s hard not to be a helicopter parent, I think, when helicopters are available. It’s impossible to be a helicopter parent, when they aren’t.

Some of my St. Louis friends told me that they really weren’t that interested in 16th Street, Washington D.C. That surprised me, of course. And I don’t understand why. No street in the country is more interesting.

We stopped posting these short walks a few weeks ago, so it is time to pick them up again. We were at the northern end of Meridian Hill Park, at Euclid Street. To give you an idea how far north we are, take a left on Euclid and walk two blocks to 18th Street.  You are now in the heart of Adams Morgan. Yes, they are that close, and so very, very different.

This apartment building on the east side of 16th Street used to be for women only, a place where young women who came to work for the government coukd feel safe. In 1958, on my high school junior trip to Washington,  my memory is that this is where the girls stayed. The boys stayed a block or so down the street.

Across the street, you find the headquarters of the Inter-American Defense Board. This house was built in 1906 and was the home of Mrs. Marshall Field, but has been the headquarters of the IADB since the end of World War II. The IADB is now a branch of the Organization of American States (headquarters on 17th Street, near the White House) and is the parent Organization of the Inter-American Defense College (open to member government officials), located at Ft. McNair in SW D.C.

Next, we find the embassy of Lithuania, an impressive stone building flying the flag of Ukraine. Some years ago, I attended a number of meetings in this building as a member of a group of Jewish Washingtonians trying to help Lithuania better its relations with the Jewish community. At the time, Lithuania had a very liberal ambassador, and Lithuania was engaged in many activities in Israel and had an extensive domestic Holocaust education program. We had just traveled to Lithuania and I was enthused. Then, the ambassador was replaced, the effort died down, and that’s all I know.

The next building is even more impressive.

It’s the embassy of Cuba, maintained in very good condition. The building was built as Cuba’s embassy in 1915. Between 1971 and 2015, there was no diplomatic relationship between the two countries, and relationships were handled through Switzerland.  But, even during this period, I think this property continued to be owned and occupied by Cuba. A statue of Cuban hero Jose Martì stabds at the front door. A separate visa office is located in a small building across the street.

The embassies keep ping on, although there are larger clusters of embassies in Washington. But right next to Cuba, you find the Polish embassy.

The Polish embassy, built as a private residence of Missouri Senator John Henderson in 1910, was purchased by Poland in 1919. I am told that there is a concert grand piano in the foyer, which was a gift of pianist and prime minister Ignacy Paderewski.

We will stop here today with Modera Sedici, at 2700 16th Street.

If Modera Sedici, the main building of an apartment complex, looks like an embassy, that should be no surprise. For about 100 years, it was the Italian embassy (now located on Massachusetts Avenue), but now redesigned as apartments, which seem to rent for $3000 to over $6000 per month.

All this…..and we have covered one block.

Nothing!

(1) This article, republished yesterday by Tablet Magazine, containing a transcript of an interview with Robert F. Kennedy Jr about 18 months ago is perhaps the most fascinating thing I have ever read. Just saying.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/robert-f-kennedy-jr-interview-david-samuels

If the link doesn’t work, Google: Samuels Kennedy Tablet Interview.

(2) We watched the new film “Emilia Perez” last night on Netflix, and it is about the strangest film I have ever seen. Just saying.

The leader of a Mexican drug cartel wants and gets a sex change, wants to atone for all of her wrongdoing, wants to live with her wife and children (who don’t know she is he), falls in love with a woman whose husband had been murdered by a gang (his/hers?), and almost pulls it off. But doesn’t.  Oh, yes, it’s a musical.

If this plot line intrigues you, watch it. If not, watch a rerun of the Mike Tyson fight. By the way, who won?

With all of the talk today about the effect of the election on Russia and its war in Ukraine, and about the relationships between not only Trump and Putin, but the relationship between Putin and Tulsi Gabbard, I thought something I happened upon yesterday was interesting. These are the opening lines of Marvin Kalb’s book, The Nixon Memo.

“On March 10, 1992, Super Tuesday in the presidential primary calendar, and most extraordinary story appeared on the front page of the New York Times. The headline caught my attention: ” Nixon scoffs at the Level of Support for Russian Democracy by Bush”. The lead of the story, written by Tom Friedman, then the paper’s diplomatic correspondent, was equally dramatic. “Nixon has sharply criticized President Bush and Secretary of State James A. Baker 3d for what he calls the Administration’s pathetic support of the democratic revolution in Russia. He says one of the historic opportunities of this century is being missed.” According to Friedman, these views were contained in a memo that Nixon wrote and circulated to a limited number of officials and journalists. There was no doubt Friedman had seen the memo.

The Times quoted the Nixon memo as saying: “While the candidates have addressed scores of significant issues in the presidential campaign, the most important issue since the end of World War II – the fate of the political and economic reforms in Russia – has been virtually ignored.” Nidismissed Western efforts to help Russia as “penny ante” and warned that if Boris Yeltsin and the emerging “democracy” in Russia collapsed, “we can kiss the peace dividend good-bye”.

We now know that Russia is in the hands of Vladimir Putin, a former Communist, former KGB operative, and current strongman. Could we have done something to prevent that? I think that would have been very difficult. After all, how did Putin get into power? He achieved his position because he was the designated choice of Boris Yeltsin himself. It is very unlikely (read: impossible) to believe that Yeltsin thought that the Putin of the 1990s would turn into the Putin of the 2020s; in the early 1990s, Putin did not appear as a future strongman. Perhaps we could have helped Russia by providing options in the transformation of the country into capitalism, but it would have been difficult. The big problem, as I see it, was the manner in which the common elements (talking in condominium language) of the Soviet Union were converted into private property. The method used was to sell some assets to favored future-oligarchs at bargain basement prices, to give all Russian citizens, even the most lowly, chits giving them a piece of the common property but, at the same time, giving them every reason to sell those chits at highly discounted prices to future-oligarchs, and then set up a political system that allowed the oligarchs (now, no longer future-oligarchs) to finance politicians in return for favors and, finally, to allow the politicians to become so powerful that they no longer had to rely on the oligarchs, and in fact could control and manipulate the oligarchs. (There you have it: my 60 second course on the history of Russia from 1990 to the present.)

Are there parallels in our country? We have elected, for the second time, a billionaire, who seems to be powerful enough to control everyone around him. Everyone, that is, except for the richest man in the world, who has become the billionaire’s best friend and boon companion, and who obviously must think that he himself is so strong that the billionaire president will favor him when it comes to government contracts and that in fact, before you know it, the richest man in the world will control the billionaire president the way the oligarchs used to control Putin.

In Russia, Putin outsmarted the oligarchs. He did that by weaponizing the government, including the judicial branch of the Russian government (never an independent branch like ours has always been), against the oligarchs. And he did this out of the personal ambition of a man in his 50s. Can Trump do the same to Musk? Musk is betting that he can’t, that Musk is too powerful, that he is in a league of his own (which means that Trump can’t play one oligarch off against another), and that because Trump is pushing 80, he will not be able to carry on the fight. And I assume Musk thinks that, after Trump leaves the scene, Musk can bully his way around the next president (Vance or someone else) because Muskworld at that time will become so crucial to so many governmental activities that fighting Musk will be all but impossible.

With all his faults, Richard Nixon was a very astute individual, and his post-presidency advice tended to be on point. What would he think of today? I think he would be one of the RINOs, who continues to call himself a Republican, but who be railing against the dangers of Trump II, and who would take seriously the many arguments that can be raised alleging that the Trump playbook could lead to the demise of democracy in this country as we have known it, just as he feared that, without intervention, the nascent Russian democracy under Yeltsin would fail.

And, to top it off, it appears that we may start supporting not Russian democracy,  but rather the autocratic Russian government anout which Richard Nixon was so concerned.

No time for writing a blog post today.

So let’s just look at some examples from my English guidebook collection.

Includes my favorite opening number, “Two Ton Tessie”. You agree?

And ….

This guidebook has many adVERTisments, such as

How do you downsize when your life is filled with treasures?

Donald Trump has just said he is nominating Pete Hesgeth as Secretary of Defense. My guess is that at least 48 Democrats will vote against him. It will be an extraordinary nomination.

What? You don’t know Hesgeth? You can’t even say his name five times quickly without wondering why you are even trying?

If you don’t know him, it means either (1) your memory is not what it used to be, or (2) you don’t watch Fox and Friends on the weekends. Which is it? I understand. If it’s (1), it might really be (2) as well.

Hesgeth has of course never run an operation as large as the Pentagon. The only people who have done that are former Defense Secretaries and Elon Musk’s personal assistant.

And this brings up an interesting point. As Musk will be a co-chair of the new “department” of government efficiency, his goal will be to cut, baby, cut the government deficit. But the task of Hesgeth Hesgeth Hesgeth Hesgeth Hesgeth will be to build up the military, which, under VP Harris, is now weaker than that of, say, Monaco. Who will win this battle?

Speaking of potential battles, I see one coming up at DOGE (Venetian for the Department of Government Efficiency) between the two play-well-together co-chiefs, Musk and Ramaswamy. (When you say his name, by the way, the emphasis is on “swam”, but if you want to say it five times quickly, and you can if you try, put the emphasis on “ram”.)

At any rate, can you imagine Musk saying to himself, “I know what I would like to do, but I want to make sure Vivek agrees before I say anything.”? And can you imagine Ramaswamy even stopping talking long enough to listen to Elon, even if Elon bothered to say anything? My prediction that the marriage of this Odd Couple will be given an annulment soon.

Back to Hesgeth. I have read a little about him and he does seem at least as qualified to handle our defense as the man in the street (or, to put it another way, as the typical Trump voter). And I read two other things about him. First, he doesn’t like NATO. Second, he thinks that Ukraine shoukd defend itself if it wants, but that the US should stay out of European affairs,  and certainly not be provoking Gaspadin (or Tovarich, if you prefer) Putin.

This was not to be my topic this morning. I actually had not been overly upset at some of Trump’s appointees. I am happy to get Stefanik out of the House, and think the UN, meaningless as it is in its most important task of keeping the peace, is a great place for her to spew her venom. And I think Rubio is actually not a bad choice for state.

Noem at Homeland Security gives me  qualms, to be sure, and it certainly scares those would-be asylum seekers who want to bring their pets with them. I think this task will quickly show Noem’s limitations. After all, doesn’t Homeland Security have more employees than South Dakota  has people? I don’t expect her to be long at this job. And, by the way, this is another Department which, to fulfill Trump’s goals, will require more, not fewer, resources. Take that, Elon!

I will stop here (Zeldin is too far down the alphabet to deal with today), but did you read about, or see videos of, the UFO over Michigan? What do you think? Me? I think it’s our only hope.

There is no reason why Donald Trump won the recent presidential election. His vote totals were almost exactly the same as they were in 2020 (just about a million votes more, but the population increased). But Kamala Harris earned almost 10 million votes fewer than Joe Biden received four years ago. And, according to the New York Times, this lowering of voting occurred across all areas and all voting groups.

All I can think of is that, in 2020, people were feeling the problems with the Trump chaos, and in 2024, it had receded. But that doesn’t really satisfy me, nor do the various other possible causes listed in the Times’ front page article today. I also can’t believe that 10 million people felt that Kamala Harris was unqualified, while Joe Biden was qualified to run the country. And I can’t blame it on the way she campaigned which, although there were a few things she said that she should not have, was very professional and, I thought, demonstrated her capabilities.

Of course, sitting vice presidents are often faced with dilemmas campaigning for the presidency, especially when they are vice president to unpopular presidents, as Joe Biden now clearly is. They cannot be disloyal to the president, yet they must show that their administration will not be a continuation of an administration that many found less than successful. When asked what she wished the Biden administration had done differently, on national TV, Harris simply said “nothing”. And, even though she tried to set a more independent course later, this remark stuck. Perhaps fear of another four years hung in the air.

So why did so many people stay home? Why did so many people stay home when, supposedly and perhaps accurately, “democracy was at stake”? Wouldn’t such a dire warning increase the turnout? After all, what is more essential to democracy than voting?

Let me suggest another possibility, one that I have not heard elsewhere (yet). American democracy will be 250 years old in less than two years. 250 years is a long time, and maybe we are tired of it. Maybe we have questions about the effectiveness of democracy (democracy as it is manifest in this country), maybe we think our democratic vote doesn’t really matter. In part this might be because each of us is a very, very small peg in an increasingly large machine. Or it may be that the distortion caused by the Electoral College (why do I capitalize that?) diminishes our vote (even though the smaller vote totals were equally found in the battleground states). Maybe we compare ourselves with other “western” countries, including Canada and much of Europe and see that our lives are shorter, our crime is worse, our infrastructure is well behind those of the others, our income gaps are greater, our internal dissent seems more pronounced, our health care system is messed up, our borders are porous, our economy looks better statistically but not per our bank accounts, and so forth. Maybe we simply don’t think, in 2024, American democracy works.

And if we don’t have faith in our 250 year old (and very hard to change) system, we just sit back and let others take over. We want a parent (father) figure. Someone who will protect us and take care of us, and keep us from making decisions we seem incapable of making. We don’t want democracy – we want a strong leader, so that we can forget about the greater world, and find our individual worlds more welcoming.

This would, in a sense, explain why right wing Christian evangelicals, in spite of the details of their faith, flock to Trump. Just like Jesus, or God, or a combination (or maybe they are the same, I don’t know evangelicals think about that), Trump will lead us; we can look up to him. We can rely on him. He will be our protector and savior.

You (the collective you) and I pay a lot of attention to politics. Most people really don’t. They just want to know that their country is working in their interests. And this is why, for those of us who do pay attention, people often seem to vote against their interests. They just don’t think about how policies that might seem helpful at first glance would, in fact, work out. And they aren’t going to think in those terms; they don’t want to. They want someone else to do that type of thinking.

Of course, we will see how all this works out. Trump inherits some of Biden’s successes, and we don’t know what he will do about them. Will he try to halt the push for infrastructure improvements, or will he try to take credit for them? That is just one question of many. And how serious will he be in letting Elon Musk fire hundreds of thousands of federal employees in order to bring our national debt down?

I look at Trump’s presumptive policies and believe that they will be destructive. We shall see what happens. And we will be able to alter the course of American government once again in 2026 if things look bad. Unless everyone decides to stay home.

From the airplane, you can see what happens. Just north of St. Louis at the confluence of the two rivers. The first time I have been able to get a picture this clear.

I quote Sharon, the Alamo Car Rental shuttle driver, as Edie gets on the bus to take us to the St. Louis airport. How she knew Edie’s pet name I don’t know.

We are waiting for our plane, having breakfast across from Gate C9, getting enough energy to sprint to Gate C24.  Boarding is in 35 minutes. As we left Judy’s gated community, I once again tried to understand the instructional sign at the exit, and once again failed.

We are eating at the Kingside Diner and I give the spinach omelet an A+. It has spinach and onions, they have a sauce on top, and they fold the omelet over a lightly fried egg with a fairly runny yolk (or that’s what it seemed), giving it moisture you don’t normally find in an omelet.

The only downside is that we were sitting next to the winner of the Most Obnoxious Father of the Year, sitting with his quiet wife and his two unfortunate children who were clearly unable to do anything correctly.

Time to board..”and remember a fanny pack counts as your personal carry on item”.

We are on the plane.

What else to report from this morning? We had to fill the gas tank before turning the car in. Anyone know how to open the gas cap on a Mitsubishi Outlander Sport? The obvious lever opens the hood. Thanks to the Internet, I found a 44 second video, made by someone who was very sympathetic, knowing that without his help, the search might take hours.

Regrets from the trip? Sure. First, I didn’t buy any pickles.

And second, I didn’t fill up on detergent.

But we did see the Mississippi from Riverview Park. Bet you never even heard of that park. Bet I am right, too.

Time to stow my stuff, they say.

We are spending a lot of time with our cousins Donna and Ed Karfeld, and our host with the most, Judy Pass. We had an excellent whitefish dinner with good friends Michael Bobroff and Wendy Olk, and last night spent time with friends Pat and Brigid McCauley, Betsy and Stuart Zimbalist, and Jerry Lander. Tonight adding cousins Bob, Simone, Rich and Jacqui Schnidman to the mix. What more could you want?

We return to DC tomorrow, so it looks like we may miss some of our usual stops, like the Art Museum, but that’s life. People are as upset about the presidential election here as much as they are in Washington, it appears, but I have been avoiding unnecessary mourning.

We did go to a new, for us, spot – the Union Station train shed, home to a large Ferris Wheel, carousel, and all the usual accompaniments. It also houses the St. Louis Aquarium. We did not go in – as you know, aquariums (should it be aquaria?) are quite pricey. I think it’s about $30 per person for seniors.

But we did gape at the extensive rope course. The instructions are daunting.

And the reality more so.

And, oh, yes, the gold teeth. In case you forgot:

Grillz (or, to the more conservative,  grills) are removable or permanent gold (or silver, or diamond studded) dental covers or replacements, which Wikipedia says started in the hip hop world and are now “mainstream”. Really?

When we saw this shop, in the 5800 block of Delmar, it hadn’t opened for the day yet, but the owner of the vape/hookah supply store next door told me that the owner was a master craftsman, whose customers included nationally known celebrities, including people as famous as Chris Brown (who he?). I looked up Chris Brown, saw many photos, none with grillz. He also told me that the owner worked with a dentist, who did the actual implant work. Looking at the store’s website, I see you can get a full diamond coated mouth at $900 per tooth. Looks like a steal, to me.

I also had a cup of Blueprint Coffee, which I highly recommend; it’s a very serious place. We had lunch at the sprawling McGurk Irish pub in the Soulard neighborhood, and dinner at Oishi, a Japanese restaurant in Creve Coeur.

At Oishi, I asked our native Japanese waitress about this sign:

What is this? Thinking, I assume, in Japanese, she must have assumed I knew what a hamachi is, so she started, in mime, to show me what part of the body a jaw is.

That is it from flyover country.

So many people I know are not OK after the presidential election results became known. After all, I live in Washington D.C,  where over 90% voted for Harris, and I am now in St.Louis, where Harris got 81% of the vote, and St. Louis County, where she got 61%. And virtually everyone I know in these places voted with the local majority only to find out that nationwide, they are in the national minority.

They are almost all surprised that I don’t seem as upset as most of them do (someone told me I was numb, having a delayed reaction), although I do believe that we are in for the rockiest of rides. But I am willing to sit back for now and see how things play out. I want to see if Trump can make anything better and give him credit for that, while I will of course revile him for things that don’t work out best for the country.

But even now, there are some worrying signs, including threats that have been reported against Blacks, warning them that the reestablishment of slavery is a possibility. Of course, it’s not. But……

As for the Jews, I don’t have much concern at this point, although you can’t take anything for granted. For sure, there are antisemites who are supportive of MAGA. But most of his supporters are not, and you can expect Trump and his evangelical base to be more supportive of Israel, although this might have a backlash effect, especially abroad. The coordinated attacks on Jewish soccer fans in Amsterdam at the Tel Aviv Maccabi game are especially worrisome. This attack was carried out by Muslim men, although many were born and raised in the Netherlands.

We heard a very interesting podcast yesterday.  The host was Dan Senor, and the guests were Omer Bigger, a Jewish/Israeli resident of Amsterdam, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former member of the Dutch  parliament, native of Somalia, and wife of historian Niall Ferguson. She is very vocal about the dangers of radical Islam, a description no longer much heard, and she has been outspoken for some time. I have read her first memoir, which I found very instructive.

Bigger talked about the general dangers of being Jewish in Amsterdam since October 7, and gave a description of what he experienced running back home from the soccer stadium a few days ago during the recent attack. Ali spoke more generally about the problems in Europe resulting from the large number of Muslims allowed into Europe over the past 20 years, about the refusal of so many to integrate culturally and their development of what she calls a parallel society, about the influence of Hamas and other groups often sponsored by the Muslim Brotherhood, and about birth rates and prospective demographic changes and so on. She says that Europe better start working to save Europe, or the Brotherhood will eventually achieve its aims by conquering Europe through peaceful means. She said that as radical, separatist Muslims increase their numbers, all Jews in Europe will be at risk. And, she said, as Muslim numbers increase, so will their political influence.

They both criticized the Dutch government, saying that its strong verbal response to the riots were not sufficient. They said that although there seemed to be intelligence that something was afoot before the violence occurred, nothing was done about it and security at the stadium and real time response was abysmally absent. The podcast, easy to Google, is worth listening to.

Back home, even though only about 25 percent of the Jewish vote went to Trump, the number of Jews in his inner circle, in his family and among his financial supporters will, I believe, be protective of the Jewish community here, and about 70 percent of Israeli Jews think Trump was by far the better candidate for Israel. We shall see.

In the meantime,  back to St. Louis. You need some gold teeth?

There is a story behind this, but that’s for another day (maybe tomorrow).

First, the preliminaries. Reagan National Airport has a Greek restaurant,  Kapnos Taverna, which surprised us by serving really good food (yes, pricey) for lunch. I had a chicken gyro, served with tahini, lettuce and a perfectly spiced slivered red cabbage, and Edie a salad with sushi quality tuna.

Second, I learned an important lesson. Don’t put your cellphone in your pocket along with a poorly wrapped half Snickers bar. And if you want to clean the phone, don’t use a tissue.

We saw cousins tonight, but what happens in St. Louis stays in St. Louis, so we won’t talk about that. Instead? A few favorite cartoons that popped up on my Google feed.

To St. Louis for a few days. So that should be the subject of the next three or four posts. Unless it’s not.

Of course, many here are still reeling from the election results. I have my concerns, to be sure, but have a much more pressing problem that I am dealing with now…..

I wear a watch that tells me how many steps I am walking. In fact, it can tell me more than that. For example, it tells me the time. And other things I pay no attention to. It and I have always gotten along very well. Until now.

Before I detail my problem, I should tell you that the my watch is fine as long as you just let it be. But start fiddling with it, and then you have problems. There are four buttons you can push. You can push them separately, or in various combinations. You can push and let go, or you can push and hold the buttons in for various combinations. Or you can push them (or groups of them) in sequence. But you have to know how to do that, and there is nothing on the watch itself that gives you a clue.

Yes, there is a little booklet (emphasis on “little”) that gives you hints (it’s written in code so you can be equally confused irrespective of the language you speak), and I needed that booklet last week, when I changed the setting on the watch from Eastern Daylight Time to Eastern Standard Time (or Central Daylight Time, if you please). I figured out how to do this. But in doing this, my watch got confused, or perhaps just got angry at me for challenging its accuracy.

The problem? My watch thinks that noon is midnight. That means that it no longer sets by steps back to zero at midnight, but at noon. So when I wake up in the morning and look at my watch, it has several thousands steps marked on it – the number of steps I have taken since noon the previous day. So, I guess I am going to set my watch to 24 hours, rather than 12/12, and then I will move the current time up, or back, 12 hours, and then go back to 12/12. But that will take effort, thought, and energy, all of which are things I seem to lack.

One reason I lack those things, of course, is the election. I am not going to engage in the “she should have” conversations. I think she ran a pretty good campaign, and am not going to look for nits to pick. As to Trump and what will probably be two Republican Houses of Congress, I am going to take a wait and see approach. I assume I will disagree with much that they will do, and I will surely complain along the way, but I am willing to see how it works out. And if it works out well for the country and the world, so be it. And I understand that, as that eminently modest man Elon Musk has said, there may be some discomfort for everyone but him along the way.

I also still think that Musk is the biggest danger. His plan to shrink the size of government will most likely be very disruptive, if it comes into effect, not only for federal employees and their families, but for the economy of the District of Columbia and environs, as well. Washington is in a very good place now (except for the diminution of the tax base as a result of the reduction in value of much downtown real estate), and I would hate to see that momentum turned back. But I understand that is a real possibility.

The thousands of officials at the Department of Education may lose their jobs, and the even many more thousands at the Department of Agriculture may find their jobs being moved to, say, Rapid City, South Dakota. We shall see if any of this happens as a part of Musk’s proposed downsizing.

We shall also see what will happen to electric cars. My guess? Chinese and certain other vehicles will not come into the country, Tesla will be given special treatment, and the electric vehicle capacity of General Motors and other domestic makers will be crippled. Again, we shall see.

It is quite possible that most of the destabilizing positions taken by Trump in the campaign will never come to fruition. But his effect on judicial appointments will be felt for decades, and his emphasis on deregulation over environmental and climate regulations will surely be felt.

As to foreign policy, who knows? The answer is “nobody”, because Trump’s foreign policy will be ad-lib and designed to keep everyone off balance. He believes that this fear of the unknown or unstated will keep otherwise predators on America at bay. We shall see how well this works.

Jeez. Here I go again, immediately after promising not to nit pick now, and letting us see how things will work out. I better stop. Besides…..I have an airplane to catch.

Yesterday, when I wrote about John Grisham’s The Appeal, I suggested that perhaps all novels were about this year’s presidential race. The Appeal focused on a race to become a Mississippi Supreme Court justice that was based on disinformation believed by a large percentage of the state’s voting population.

Last night, as we watched the results of the election on CNN, largely leaving the sound off, I read through another novel that I picked up at random. It was Gallions Reach by H.M. Tomlinson (“there he goes again, how does Art find such obscure titles?”), first published in 1927.

In this book, a young Londoner, Jimmy Colet, trying to find his identity (he has a job he doesn’t like, working for someone he doesn’t respect, and he is very much afraid of becoming trapped by his maybe girl friend), gets into an argument with his unpleasant boss, gets so mad that he finally lets him have it on the jaw, and is then faced with the discovery that he has unwittingly killed his employer.

Jimmy doesn’t know what to do, finds himself on the Thames docks (in a neighborhood known as Gallions Reach), agrees to do someone a favor and take a package to a cargo ship and leave it there, walks onto the ship, and fails to get off before the ship embarks on a long voyage that will wind up in Rangoon, with Jimmy, not exactly a stowaway, becoming a member of the crew. The ship encounters a storm at sea, its rudder somehow is loosened and breaks off, the ship founders, Jimmy and others get into lifeboats, the ship sinks, and they are picked up by a passenger ship which drops them off at their destination. Aboard this ship, Jimmy meets an English prospector for precious metals and agrees to become his assistant in prospecting deep into the jungle. After a series of adventures, Jimmy makes his way back to Rangoon, where he finds a ship heading back to London and decides to board it, go back home, and face his fate.

How does that fit in with the tragedy of yesterday’s election? It reminded me of one of my all time favorite books, African Genesis, by Robert Ardrey, “a personal investigation into the animal origins and nature of man” (from the cover). Ardrey, in his 1961 best seller, looks at the various needs of man – food, shelter, health, love – the usuals. But he concludes that there is one emotional need that trumps (oh, that word again) the others. That is the need to escape boredom.

Jimmy Colet, in Gallions Reach, is as bored as you can get. So he seeks away to escape that boredom. He slugs his boss, he runs away  to sea, he decides to prospect in the Burmese jungle with a total stranger, and he does that until his boredom escaping adventures themselves become boring. And then he heads back home.

The economy may be strong, inflation may have been defeated, unemployment may be low…..but people are dissatisfied, they are bored, they need what they perceive as change. “Let’s vote the bastards out”, they say, not quite realizing that in the fact they are voting the bastards in.

A stretch? Maybe, but that is the way I looked at it.

I should add one more thing. Yesterday, on the outside rack at Lost City Books, in Adams Morgan, I found a $4 copy of Archibald MacLeish’s book from 1940, A Time to Speak, inscribed by the author. It’s a book of essays, published elsewhere in the late 1930s, that all seem to relate, one way or another, to the rise of Hitler and the destabilization of the world.

One essay, published in 1938, is titled The Irresponsibles. I looked at it because I was intrigued by the name (thinking of the “deplorables”, I guess), and saw it was a sad and angry, and well written, diatribe against the writers and academics who saw what was going on the world with the rise of fascism and other things, and just let it go, not using their bully pulpits to fight against it. Of course, MacLeish says, some did try to alert the rest of the world, but in fact, he concludes, not enough did. In fact, very few.

MacLeish says: “Why did the scholars and the writers of our generation in this country, witnesses as they were to the destruction of writing and of scholarship in great areas of Europe and to the exile and the imprisonment and murder of men whose crime was scholarship and writing — witnesses also to the rise in their own country of the same destructive forces with the same impulses, the same motives, the same means — why did the scholars and writers of our generation in America fail to oppose those forces while they could…….?”

You see what I mean? All of the books, no matter which ones you pick up by accident, all of them deal with yesterday’s election.

Now, back to my regular activities.

John Grisham has written close to 40 novels, and until three days ago I had not read any of them. But I had found a signed, perfect condition, first edition of The Appeal for $4, so I picked it up and thought I would give it a try. I don’t think this is one of his better known or best reviewed novels (Goodreads 3.64), but I found it readable, quick, and interesting. I also found it very relevant to the political condition of the United States today, and to today’s presidential election.

The plot is pretty simple. The location is a small town in Mississippi, and a jury awards $41,000,000 (actual damages and punitive) to a woman who claimed that the death of her husband and son from cancer were caused by discharges from a now-closed factory owned by a mega-company headquartered in New York The offending company appeals the case. Hence, the title.

The plaintiff is an impoverished woman, living in a mobile home park, in a town with cancer rates 30% higher than the national average. Her lawyers are a husband-wife team, who have spent every penny they own (and much more) financing this case, and will face financial and professional ruin if they cannot collect.

The appeal of the verdict is going to the Mississippi Supreme Court, which has a record of favoring industry in this type of case, but of favoring industry by a dangerously close margin. For this reason, the CEO (and majority owner) of the company in New York is advised to hire an expensive organization in Miami which tends to operate under the radar to help assure that they will win the appeal. And he does.

Mississippi is one of those states where Supreme Court justices are elected, and two of the least reliably conservative justices are up for reelection. The goal of the Miami firm is to sow questions about one of the justices (the only woman on the Court), and to find someone to run for this important judicial position who will vote the way they would want him to vote. They find a personable young attorney, a partner is a firm somewhere in the south of the state, who becomes excited to run for the Supreme Court, something that his career to date has in no way prepared him for. The campaign, as it turns out, could have been the campaign that the Donald Trump’s runs have modeled themselves after. It was based on a blitz of advertising and the placement of news stories based on lies, half truths and more lies. The candidate himself is not Donald Trump. He is not as evil as he is naive, unaware that his campaign is based on a foundation of lies, and equally unaware that his campaign is being supported and funded by the head of a corporation that is facing a $41,000,000 debt. And, in fact, the $41,000,000 is an understatement, as hundreds of other individual plaintiffs are coming out of the woodwork, and at least two class action suits are in the planning stages.

It is, to be sure, a clever campaign. His organizers are attempting to redefine the current justice, who is often dissenting from the opinions of a very right wing court, and turn her from a moderate into a perceived outright dangerous left wing out of control liberal, clearly out to destroy Mississippi. They look up old cases where she has written dissents, misstate the facts of the cases, avoid all nuances when discussing her written opinions, and promote the misstatements as obvious truths in their media and print advertising. They create two opposing candidates, not just one. The first is the lawyer discussed above, whom they present as a real son of the Great State of Mississippi, and who is able to speak well and put on a credible campaign. The other is a lawyer, who spends his time in casinos, not in courtrooms, and is generally drunk. He is there to cause chaos and make the voters aware of the overall contest for the seat on the bench (they pay him $100,000 to become a candidate, and then $50,000 to withdraw from the race when he has served his purpose).

They attempt to keep other attorneys from filing other cases for other dead and dying plaintiffs by holding global settlement conferences, attended by teams of lawyers, which hold promise to the would-be litigators of settlements without having to file cases, but are designed to go on forever and stall for time, and nothing else.

There are other goings on that I am not going to discuss here, except to say that they are elements which do pull the overall plot together. And, this post is not going to be a total spoiler. I am not going to tell you who won the race for the Supreme Court, or tell you what the Supreme Court decided on appeal. For these you have to read the book. I did it in three sittings of about two hours each. It is an easy read.

But, back to my title. On this day in the real 2024, when one of the real candidates for the real presidency of the United States runs on a campaign that sounds like the campaign run in make-believe (sort of) Mississippi in make-believe 2008, this fictional story is much too real. Perhaps today, even to John Grisham, it seems more real than when it was published more than 15 years ago, in the halcyon early days of Barack Obama.`

And again, I don’t want this to be a 2024 spoiler, either. I am not going to tell you who is going to be the next president of the United States. I am not even going to tell you for whom I voted. All I will say is this: may the best woman win.

One of my college roommates lives in the District of Columbia, in a condominium about fifteen minutes from our house. He also has a summer house in Nova Scotia, and generally goes there for about four months a year. This summer, he asked me to do him a favor and drop by his condo every two weeks to bring mail upstairs and water his plants. I did.

This was not a very difficult assignment, and became rather routine. I didn’t notice anything astounding in his mail (I was surprised that he didn’t get any misdirected mail; we do all the time). One item that came to him sometime in September was the absentee ballot that all registered DC voters receive without asking.

I looked at the ballot envelope and said to myself: “You know, I could simply fill out this ballot, sign his name to the back, and mail it in. Who would ever know?” The system seemed very vulnerable that day.

You may remember when Republican Maryland Congressman Andy Harris suggested that, in that the hurricane damage in North Carolina might affect the ability of residents to get to the polls, that an assumption be made that the majority of those voting in western North Carolina would vote Republican and that the state’s Electoral College vote be approved by the State Legislature on that assumption.

This proposal led to much outrage (and in fact, it seems based on mailed in ballots that western North Carolina’s total vote number is not going to be affected by the hurricane), and was presumably quickly shelved. But then I thought about Jimmy Carter. Carter, now 100, from everything that I have read, is not thinking the way he did when he was, say, 90. So my question is (and I don’t know the answer): is Jimmy Carter mentally competent enough to know or express that he wanted to vote for Kamala Harris? Let’s say, for a moment, that he can’t, or that he is not able to put an X in the box or sign his name.

Jimmy Carter, reports say, voted for Kamala Harris using a mail in ballot. But did he fill in the ballot? Did he sign his name? Or was the ballot handled by one of his relatives or caretakers? Is it any different that it would have been if I had decided to fill out, sign and mail in my roommate’s ballot? How secure really is our system?

The Republicans are probably going to contest certain aspects of the election process if Harris is declared the next president. They have already said as much, and telegraphed even more. And the Democrats, for good reason, belittle their suspicions or their nefarious intentions. But in fact, how secure is our system?

We had supper last night with friends, one of whom is a Montgomery County MD election judge. His volunteer job, as I understand it, is to be convinced that the voting that has taken place at his assigned precinct has been properly performed, and then to take the results on some sort of flash drive and, with another judge, take the flash drive to a location in Gaithersburg, where all Montgomery County precinct flash drives are collected and from where the vote reporting process moves forward.

He didn’t get a lot of training for this job, and he doesn’t think he was ever really vetted. So what would happen if he decided not to take the flash to the Gaithersburg center? Or if he had an accident on the way? And so forth. The system is not perfect, that’s for sure.

So there are potential flaws in mail voting, and with in person voting. Mail voting seems the least secure, since anyone can sign and send a ballot. It is surprising that there are as few problems as there are. But even in person voting can be problematic.

We haven’t yet talked about the problem of identifying eligible voters at the polls, and this certainly is another matter of controversy. Precincts only know if you are a citizen because you say (under penalty of perjury) that you are, for example. And this has become a matter of increasing controversy.

And, since the demise of the Voting Rights Act, many states have been trying to limit voting by the opposition. Or, to put it another way, Republican states try to make it as hard as they can for presumed Democratic voters to get to the polls.

It seems to me that we now have the techniques to avoid most of these questions. All we need is a national ID card, with built in technology, to identify a voter. Why don’t we use these techniques? Why are there stated arguments from the “left” that such national ID cards would unconstitutionally limit privacy rights, and from the “right” unstated arguments that such national ID cards would increase Democratic voters? Why do both say that the question of qualification for voting (for federal as well as state and local elections) is a matter of state law, rather than federal law? (As to the last question, you can point to the Constitution; this is one of the many constitutional elements that could be amended, updated and improved)

We already have a number of ID cards. We have passports, we have driver licenses, we have Medicare cards, we have Social Security cards, we have Selective Service cards. Why not combine all of these into one type of ID card, distributed at birth or naturalization, updated every 5 or 10 years, with built in biometrics and photographs? Over 100 countries do have compulsory national ID cards, and many others have non-mandatory cards which serves as an ID card for voting for those who have it. We could end most of our eligibility questions if we only had national ID cards.

While ID cards would help, and while voting by mail or by drop box clearly has its potential weaknesses, the number of problematic votes historically has been very limited, and our system is apparently about as accurate as a human-created system can be. And we see that most of the questions that are raised are partisan questions, raised generally by right wing Republican groups, or maybe foreign based groups, looking to create chaos in our voting. This of course raises a different range of questions.

When we left this saga this morning…..we were expecting a FIOS representative to come to our house to fix the problems we were having with channels 4 and 9 (504 and 509). The last message we had from FIOS, after the confusion over whether we had Sunday, Monday or Tuesday appointments, was that the Tuesday appointment would be the one.

So, we were a little surprised when, at about 1:30 this afternoon, the door bell rang and Mr. FIOS was standing on the porch. The Sunday appointment, you may recall, was set by FIOS Lady #1, before I was told by FIOS Lady #2 that FIOS Lady #1 didn’t know what she was doing.

At any rate, 6′ 4″ Al (my guess as to his height) was here to help. He was amused by the story I told him about the many contradictory appointments and told me “Yup, that sounds about right.”

He found the problem immediately, saying that we had a unnecessary ether net wire connected to our main TV box, and that this is what was causing interference with some channels. He removed the wire and all was fine. He did not know why the FIOS rep from two weeks ago left the wire connected.

I thought we were done. But then he said: “Look at this splitter. It’s pretty old. I think I should replace it.” And then, “I am going to look all around the house on the outside.” When he was doing that, he replaced another splitter on the outside. Each time he did anything, of course, the TV went out..

He came back in the house and said, “you know, the main main box in the basement that controls TV, internet and phone together, is an old model, too. Let’s replace that and all your equipment will be our most up to date and we know everything will be compatible.” Of course, I said “OK” He then told me that all three would be out of commission for about 30 minutes, and that first he had to check the main main main cable box around the corner, and he left the house.

I didn’t hear him come back in, but apparently he did. When he was finished, he proudly showed me our new main main box in the basement and another new splitter he put in, left me his phone number, and disappeared into the Verizon horizon.

Let us hope all is well. For at least a while. If not, I have his cell number. And he was a very nice guy.

It started during the baseball playoffs, when one of the two channels showing the games was TBS, FIOS channel 552, and it would not come in on any of our three TV sets. I did all the self-correcting work prompted on my screen and, failing to access the station, I contacted FIOS. FIOS makes it relatively easy to get in touch with them. A phone call depends on how many hundreds are in line in front of you, but an on-line written “chat” can happen immediately. And it did.

The nice agent-man did all sorts of things. He gave me instructions, he took over my set, he ran many checks, he captured my phone’s camera so he could look around my house, and channel 552 got fixed. But he also told me my cable boxes were at least four generations old (I don’t know what that means under the concept of time, because we had received new ones within the last five years or so), and that he could send me the latest versions for no cost, and that in fact our monthly bill would be reduced by a few dollars. He asked if I wanted to get them. I asked if there was any possible downside. He said that there wasn’t. I asked if someone would come and set them up and he said they were to be self-installed and the instructions would be clear. The on-line chat lasted a little over 2 hours.

A few days later, I received a box via UPS. I put the box by the front door and looked at it for several days, and finally took a deep breath, opened everything up, found three little boxes, one big box, a lot of wires and some things I could not identify, and nothing that looked like clear instructions. I called Verizon once more and arranged to have a technician come out to help. The person I talked to said that the technician’s visit would probably cost me $99, but that it was up to the technician. The Verizon written confirmation said there would be no charge.

The technician came in a few days, and the installation took him almost two hours. He told me that many of the wires in the box were not needed and threw them out. He told me that one of our three televisions was too old for the new equipment, but that we could use our old equipment for that one, and he moved our old master cable box upstairs to our bedroom. There is no way that I (or anyone else) could have installed this new equipment by myself, although the technician told me that he had confidence in me, that I never would have given up in frustration and that I would eventually have done everything I needed to. I did not respond.

All seemed fine, but the next day, all of our TVs stopped working. I called the technician and he returned that day, and after conversing with the “home office”, told me that the problem was when he connected our old box to the upstairs TV, because he was told that our house could not use both the old and the newer systems at the same time. So he disconnected our upstairs TV, which is now of no value whatsoever, and will need to be replaced. That will happen one day – we hardly ever use the bedroom TV.

All seemed well (more or less) again until a week ago today (i.e., all was well for about 5 days). Last Sunday, I wanted to watch the Commanders game, and I discovered that channels 4 and 9 (or 504 and 509 in HD) were not working. I got the familiar “channel not available” sign with an “error message”, and again followed the on-screen instructions to no avail. I ignored the problem last week, which was a very busy week, and didn’t contact Verizon again until yesterday afternoon.

Yesterday afternoon, for some reason, the Verizon phone lines were clear and I could actually speak with someone without a wait. She was a nice soft spoken lady and, if I had to guess, I would say she was sitting somewhere in Hanoi. We spoke for about an hour and a half and she ran test after test, and nothing helped and she finally said that she had done (working with her “technical people”) all she could do, that there might be a wiring problem, and she would send a technician out. She then told me that the first available date was November 19. I told her that was ridiculous. She said that she might be able to expedite it, and came back on the line and said that a technician would be able to come tomorrow (today is tomorrow) and that someone would call me today (yesterday was today) and give me a time. She gave me a long “call number”. I thanked her.

Ten minutes later, chaos struck and the entire cable system went out. While I could have patiently waited until tomorrow, I called back and got a very nice Verizon lady, who was clearly somewhere in the United States (in my mind, she was in Columbus, Ohio, which is the most American American city I know). She was properly sympathetic and looked at my account, saw everything that went on and said – you do not have an appointment for tomorrow. She said that all the first lady did was request that someone call me to set up an appointment, but that she did not herself set up an appointment, and that she must not understand how Verizon appointments work. She also told me that the idea that the next regular appointment would be the 19th was ridiculous, that if that was the truth, she would advise me to leave Verizon and find another way to watch TV.

I spent another hour or so on the phone with her, running some of the same tests, and some new ones, being given some new instructions on what buttons to push and so forth and, lo and behold, eventually the cable came on and looked fine. But….I still was not getting channels 4 and 9 (504 and 509). She told me she would set up an appointment. We settled on Tuesday morning between 8 and 9 p.m., and I got a new “call number”.

I also got a text confirmation from her, something I did not get from the Vietnamese Verizon lady. But I was now sitting with two call numbers, one telling me that someone would come on Sunday and one telling me that someone would come on Tuesday.

Then what happened? I got a new text from Verizon, telling me that someone would come on Monday. I didn’t know if this was the Sunday time being delayed, the Monday time being expedited, or a third appointment altogether. But I wouldn’t be home for a Monday appointment, so I responded to the text saying that I would be available Tuesday, but not Monday.

I received another text asking me about possible Tuesday times. I selected the same time as the appointment that I thought I already had on Tuesday, and told Verizon in my response that I thought I already had an appointment, and gave them the call number. They responded with “yes”, and told me they would be here Tuesday.

In the meantime, when I was talking yesterday afternoon to the second Verizon lady, she asked me why our long time account was not registered on line with a Username and Password. I told her I just had never thought I needed it on line, and she asked me if I knew that with a Username and Password, by going to TV.Verizon.com on a computer, or by downloading the FIOS app on our smart phones, we could watch any station on the FIOS platform on the computer or phones. I admit I had no idea this was possible (does everyone else know this?), and I set everything up and, lo and behold once again, it works.

This meant that even though channel 4 (504) does not work on our TVs, we could watch Kamala Harris on Saturday Night Live on our computer last night (and – if we wanted to – even record it on the computer to watch later), and that, I think, this afternoon I can watch the Commanders game on the computer, even though I won’t be able to watch in on the TV. Who knew this was possible?

That’s it. That’s my story. And I’m sticking to it.