Art is 80

I saw this licence plate while taking a walk this morning. I wondered what prompted someone to put ROACH on their car. Then, I saw that next to the plate was a sticker that says Rescue Mom. So, I thought “Gee. The woman who owns this car rescues roaches! I wonder how she does that”. But then, I thought further. What if the woman who owns this car has been attacked by roaches. What if they have taken control of the car? What if her children have tried to free her in every way they could think of, but all they could accomplish was to send the youngest sibling to the car to quickly put the sticker with the hope that someone would rescue their mom?

I have been told that God puts each of us on this earth to fullfil a particular purpose. What if my purpose was to rescue this Mom from the roaches? If so, I failed. And I know what that means. No heaven for me. Eternity in hell beset by roaches.

When I was in high school, we had a Spanish teacher named Reuben Rochin. (I think we did). I never took Spanish and had nothing to do with him. But I remember that his home room class was known as the Roaches. I wondered if he picked that title, or if his class did, perhaps as an insult. I don’t know the answer to that.

My home room teach was Kenneth Mustain. We were the Mustangs.

Having said that, I wonder why our home rooms had names at all. Or maybe they didn’t and I made them up back then. Maybe the teachers didn’t know we had names, but all the kids did. The names clearly served no purpose.

And, thinking back, I have no idea why we had home rooms. How often did they meet? What did we do there? Did we have them all through high school? I have no idea.

But then I wondered if the Roach car might belong to a relative of Reuben Rochin? Or maybe to the child of one of his homeroom Roaches for whom this identification wa much more important than my identification as a Mustang.

Is that possible? “Neigh!!”

I finished reading all 586 pages of Vassily Aksyonov’s Generations of Winter. You may (but probably don’t) remember that I read another of Askyonov’s novels last month, The Island of Crimea. Crimea is a very novel novel, set in the 1970s (written in the 80s) on the “island” (not the peninsula) of Crimea, which had pulled away from the U.S.S.R. after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, and remained independent and strongly capitalist, the last outpost of the “White” army. As time went by, and as there was a modicum of liberality in the USSR after the death of Stalin, a number of intellectuals created the “One Path” (I think that was the name) movement to incorporate Crimea into the USSR but with its own, separate economic system (a la say, Hong Kong). Fighting with the old guard of Crimea, who wanted nothing to do with the U.S.S.R., they won their battle only to be deceived by the Communists, who had no intention of making Crimea anything other than one more Soviet republic. (Of course, mixed with this was the family drama and love life of the leader of One Path and the novel’s protagonist.)

Generations is a very different sort of novel, meant to be an epic family drama, sort of like, say, War and Peace, or the several generational novels of Thomas Mann. Written more than a decade after Crimea, it was to tell the story of the Russian revolution and life under Communism (by then a thing of the past). 

Did it succeed? I am not sure. Probably not, but it has to be noted that both books were written in Russian, and that I read what is probably the only English translations. Had I read it Russian (had I been able to read it in Russian, had I been Russian, etc.), I don’t know what I would have concluded. And, even if it failed in being the War and Peace of the 20th century, it succeeded in being a highly enjoyable novel, focusing on a very dark period of time.

The book follows the story of prominent Moscow surgeon, Boris Gradov, who lives with his wife and three children in a villa outside of Moscow, far from the general tumult of the city. Gradov, who is himself relatively apolitical, keeps his job and his home throughout the changes in Russian society because of his surgical skill, which is of such repute that he is even called in to tend to Stalin, when Stalin has a digestive problem that he thinks might end his life.

While the Gradovs are able to keep up their pre-war lives, the children face different circumstances. Their oldest son, clearly a talented and charming fellow, enters the U.S.S.R.’s army, and his on his way to a stellar career when he is arrested for (presumably false) accusations of anti-Soviet behavior and sentenced to the Gulag, where he lives for several years under horrific conditions before being released and restored not only to his former rank, but to an exalted army rank during the depths of World War II. His beautiful wife, who was also arrested (because she was his wife) and sent to a different prison camp, is also released, although they found that the spark was gone. They both found substitutes, but neither substitute was appropriate in Soviet society (her new man was an American, his a prison camp nurse).

The middle Gradov son was a by the book Marxist, who was drafted into the army and, for a long time, feared lost. His wife, a Jewish woman who became more and more disturbed as time went on, and their adopted son – who was drafted never to return – also figure in the saga.

The youngest Gradov, their daughter Nina, was a free spirit, an intellectual, a poet, with the knack of survival, who hobnobbed with the most prominent intellectuals of 20th century Russia, married a young doctor, who was her father’s protege, but who didn’t survive World War II. She found a substitute, as well, an old friend she ran into at an intellectual gathering.

There were others, particularly relatives of Boris Gradov’s wife, who – like Stalin – was Georgian by birth, and who had some prominent family members with Trotskyite tendencies, and one family member who became a close underling of NKVD chief Lavrenty Beria.

So, you see, this is quite a complex story. And it flows right along. I could almost remember who was who most of the time. But it did lack something that great sagas do have. Aksyonov is a spare writer. He tells you what is going on, but it is all pretty matter of fact. That’s fine, probably very good, for the story, but it leaves out the scenery. What did the Gradov villa, where so much time was spent, look like. How cold was it during the winters of the war? What was the atmosphere in all of these places on the western front, where Marshall Gradov was leading his troops? The full picture just isn’t there. 

Of course, I shouldn’t complain (and, really, I am not), but otherwise this book would have been 986 pages, not 586. And then I probably never would have picked it up. And picking it up was a good idea. Reading it was far from a waste of time. This is a good book.

“When the U.S. attacked Afghanistan, the casualties were terrible. When the U.S. attacked Iraq, the casualties were terrible. When Russia moved into Georgia, the casualties were terrible. In the Balkans, the casualties were terrible. In Lebanon, the casualties were terrible. In the Sudan, the casualties were terrible. Etc. Etc. In war, the casualties are terrible.

So it is in Gaza. But what if Israel can destroy the Hamas infrastructure? What if the result of all of this is the ability of Gazans and Israelis to live in peace, side by side and even cooperate economically and perhaps culturally?

Is that impossibly wishful thinking? I believe that from the perspective of Israel, it would be possible (once large segments of Israeli society were able to put behind them the fear of possible duplicity on the Arab side), and I think from the perspective of Gazans, it should be possible (perhaps for now only because they would have no choice).

But what about Hamas? Hamas, as long is it is in charge of Gaza, will obstruct that process, namely because it is part of their core position that they will never live with Israel in peace, and that their entire movement is based on the destruction of the state of Israel, and that they will continue to provoke towards that end.

For that reason, the destruction of Hamas is a necessity. Is it possible? That is another question, and it is a question because of the nature of Hamas itself. Hamas does not appear to act like a normal governing organization – it has been able to accomplish virtually nothing for its population, in part because of its refusal to deal with Israel. It would appear that Hamas would want the Gazans to suffer to increase their hatred of Israel, blaming all of their suffering on Israel’s economic blockade, while doing nothing at all about it. And it is easy for Hamas leadership to take this position, because Hamas leadership is not in Gaza, but in Syria. Safe and secure and able to concentrate on increasing its economic strength with the help of its Iranian friends. What kind of state leadership is this? One thing is clear, though. It does not put any pressure on Hamas to say: Enough, we’ll stop the rockets, let’s talk about a solution. The Hamas leadership is unaffected by any of the fighting and may assume that the longer it goes on, the more allies it will gain.

In the meantime, in Gaza, as in much of that part of the world, the education of children with regard to Jews and Christians is abhorrent. And of course, this education is no more than a very successful political tool of the ruling groups and their allies in the religious establishment. Shame on all of them.

Now, I don’t know what reports are accurate, and what reports are propaganda. I have heard that 35 Palestinian Authority supporters have been killed by Hamas in Gaza and dozens of others have been wounded or disabled. I have heard that supplies coming into Gaza (I understand 80 trucks went into Gaza through the Israeli checkpoints yesterday) have been waylaid by Hamas and did not get to where they were supposed to go, and that international groups working in Gaza are almost as frustrated by these events as by the war itself. I have heard, of course, that Hamas continues to put weapons caches and rocket launchers in residential areas and schools. I have heard that Hamas does not want people to leave their residences for safety.

Is all or most of this true? I don’t know, but I do know (look at the intra-Muslim fighting that has taken place or is taking place in various places in the Middle East, including Iraq and Lebanon, that competing Muslim/Arab groups don’t hesitate in targeting each other, at least to date, Jews have not done.

So, the fighting continues. The terrible videos are shown over the world. The Gazans look like innocent victims, which they may be for the most part as individuals, but it is clear that have been victimized as badly by Hamas as they have by Israel.

But this is the Palestinian lot. While 800,000 Jews were kicked out of Arab countries after the formation of Israel and have been taken in and welcomed by Israel, those Arabs who left (involuntarily or not) in 1948 have been purposely marginalized by Jordan and Lebanon and Syria and Egypt and left for generations to boil over in anger, with their anger at least partially misplaced. If the Arab community had the positive solidarity of the Jewish community, what a better world this would be.

This is not to excuse everything that goes on in Israel, of course. It has a very unstable political system, it has too many overly religious citizens with their own weird and uncompromising sense of right and wrong, it has its own problems of poverty amidst plenty. But, perhaps these problems would become less pervasive if the security of the country were more certain.

Israel is used to being a pariah in the eyes of many. In this instance, it appears that they are ready to accept this perspective for the time being while they try their best to eradicate one source of Middle East terrorism, at a great cost to all involved.

This is not my first blog. I wrote one from about 2005-2010. For some reason, I stopped. Don’t remember why. When I wrote the old one (“Arthur Thinks”), I was still working. That meant a number of things. For one thing, it meant I could go into my firm’s work room and print out anything I wanted quickly, and so I did with all those blogs. I haven’t been printing out my 2022-  blog, but…..that’s for another time.

Yesterday, I pulled 2009, down from the shelf. That’s 15 years ago, so Art was 66. The one thing I notice is that, although I did write about Israel and Gaza several times even then, I wrote more about personal activities – where I went, who I saw and so forth. This is probably because I went to more places: I was out at least 5 days a week going to my office, I was 15 years younger, and three COVID had not given us all shell-shock. Or maybe, it was because, during those days, the world was in a better place. And we weren’t so concerned about domestic and foreign and planetary problems.

Today is Feb 1. I decided to see what I had done (or written about) in January 2009 (the numbers below correspond to the date):

1. We actually went out New Year’s Eve. We went to a special performance at Theater J of a group (which may have been a group only for that night) called the Serendipity 4, composed of Theodore Bikel (who was performing at Theater J at that time) on guitar and vocals, his wife Tamara Brooks at the piano, Shura Lipovsky doing vocals and Marima Kljuco, whom I referred to as “an extraordinary Bosnian accordianist”. Eastern European/Jewish folk music for the most part. Followed by a party.
2. A tree fell across the street, closing Davenport St all day; I mused about Israel and what can they do if Hamas does not want peace (Nothing new under the sun?)
3. I bought reading glasses in Turkey a few years before – the frame snapped.
4. Mini-reviews of two Christopher Isherwood books – Goodbye to Berlin and Mr. Norris Changes Trains. (I re-read Mr. Norris last year).
5. There was another Gaza war raging (not as serious as today’s, but no one foresaw what his happening today). My words, though, could have been written in 2024: ”Where is the promise that Gaza will be rebuilt? That there will be compensation to the Gazans for their suffering? Why are food and medical supplies not being let in by either Israel or Egypt?…..”
6. A much longer post about Gaza. I should really copy it and put it in this 2024 blog. You will see how little has, in fact, changed. Maybe I will do this tomorrow.
7. More about Theodore Bikel, and how he can do his 90 minute, one man show, getting up and down, singing, playing multiple characters every day but Monday (but twice on Sunday) at Theater J at the age of 84. I end the blog by telling my readers to be sure not to tell Bikel how old he is.
8. I wrote something that I repeated last year in the current blog. A listing of deaths caused by other wars – 18 wars that each led to over 1 million deaths, including World War II, where 40,000,000 is a conservative number.
9. I wrote about Christopher Hitchens’ article in a recent Vanity Fair, talking about Salmon Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, the resulting Iranian fatwa, the Japanese translator and the Italian translator both being stabbed to death in their respective countries, and the Norwegian publisher being shot three times in his apartment in Oslo.
10. I listed all of the things I did during the first 10 days of 2009 – seems extraordinary now. First, I went to two programs at Politics and Prose – author Steven Johnson talking about the scientific discoveries of Joseph Priestly, and diplomat Martin Indyk talking about his memoir of his activities during the Clinton years. Talking about the Middle East, Indyk said that “there is light at the end of the tunnel. The problem is that we haven’t located the tunnel”. I ate very well at the Iron Gate Inn, and not so well at the DCJCC. I read both Manischewitz: the Matzo Family (Edie’s first cousin has been a Manischewitz for the past 50 years), and then Martin Gilbert’s book about Kristallnacht. I saw a whale exhibit at the National Geographic Society Museum (now closed for renovations), which didn’t impress me much. And – back when my office had tickets – we attended two Caps games that week.
11. I loved the Jan Lievens exhibit at the National Gallery and told those who missed it that they could catch the exhibit in Milwaukee. (I think it has left there by now.) And I bought a yearbook from Soldan High School in St. Louis (my father’s high school) for the year 1925 – my father graduated in 1920, but I thought, as a matter of loyalty (I think it is sitting on a shelf in a closet now. I don’t think much about it. I do think about a St. Louis University yearbook from, I think, 1923, which has a picture of my father as a graduating law student and my maternal grandfather, then on the medical school faculty. It is also somewhere on shelf.)
12. A long review of Diane Middlebrooks’ book, Her Husband: Hughes and Plath. I liked the book, and was fascinated by the story which I outlined on the blog.
13. It looks like I took the day off.
14. I had read a paper from Johns Hopkins University about looming water problems, and outlined what they said, concluding that – although many, many people are working on these problems – they may be beyond resolution.

It’s clear I can’t do the entire month in one post, so I will stop here. But you get the idea. It’s a great way to go back in time. Who says that you live only once?

So much I can say today. But don’t worry. I do know how to control myself. Let’s get started.

Have you ever wondered what is going on in Russia? I listened to two very recent (very, very recent) podcasts today, both featuring Russians now living in exile. The first spoke about political unrest in Russia. He claimed that Putin is in fact very unpopular, and that he expects one day soon he will no longer be running the country. His claim is that there are groups everywhere just looking for a way to combine and remove him from office. He didn’t convince me, and I admit that I don’t remember his name. It started with a P.

The second podcast featured a man named Ilya Samoilov, who apparently at one time served in the Duma and had been involved in the construction of power plants. He was fascinating. Here goes:

First, he said that Russian life had been improving until the war began. Then, he said everything has been going downhill. The majority of the Russian budget is now devoted to military manufacturing and that fewer consumer goods have been made and fewer are available. This means that prices for consumer goods have gone through the roof, inflation is very high and to control inflation that central bank has now increased the borrowing rate to 16%. He also said that there has been an enormous problem this winter with the failure of heating systems (all, but the newest of Russian apartments buildings are heated through regional or city-wide central heating plants), for which he gives several causes. First, a large number of workers have been conscripted into the army, so that there are insufficient employees to maintain and repair systems when they fail. Second, there is a shortage of replacement parts, which normally are manufactured by Siemens and General Electric, and neither company is now supplying them into Russia. Third, in order to make repairs to these old Soviet-era systems, you need to have experts who have experience with the systems, or the international companies send their own experts in to supervise major repairs, and this just isn’t happening. Fourth, the systems are simply aging. And fifth, although new buildings are supposed to have their own heating systems, there can be exceptions if local authorities grant you an exception and local authorities are more than happy to do this if you pay a sufficient bribe. The bribes, he said, are enormous and London, Miami and Dubai are filled with former local Russian officials who have taken their bribes and left the country. How can the bribes be that large? Because building a new power plant is even more expensive. If you are granted an exception, you hook your new developments to existing power supplies, stressing the old power plants beyond capacity.

What else? 

Well, I looked at the Times of Israel website yesterday and saw the following three headlines, one after another. I paraphrase: (1) Netanyahu says he is not going to pull out troops just to get the hostages back, (2) Hamas says that they are not going to release hostages unless Israel pulls all troops out, and (3) Blinken says that he is optimistic that a deal for the hostages will be announced soon. So, there you have it.

I also listened to an interview with Gen. Petraeus. Can’t say I agreed with everything, but he did say that we should not have left Afghanistan (he blamed both administrations equally) and that leaving Afghanistan was bad enough, and now it looks like we are going to leave Ukraine, so our influence will vanish as we will be seen as completely unreliable.

He also said that he was completely apolitical and will stay that way. So unpolitical, that does not even register to vote. What?

And what is Biden going to do about Greg Abbott ignoring a ruling of the Supreme Court? This is no different from George Wallace standing in the school house door.

One more thing. Have you heard that the Super Bowl has been fixed, and that Kansas City will win (place your bets now), giving Taylor Swift the ability to become even more famous and throw her fame behind Joe Biden? Yes, apparently it’s a done deal. And it seems that this arrangement is even going to outclass the goings on at Comet Pizza (just up the street), where Hillary Clinton and her cronies kept kidnapped children in the basement before they sex-traded them to the third world. I think there will be a new pizza on the menu at Comet called the Taylor Swift featuring Kansas City BBQ. Not a bad idea.

Just saying.

And now the question. The question is: What if?

I know that’s a broad question, so I will narrow it down a bit and put it in context.

The International Court of Justice issued preliminary orders regarding the claim that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. The preliminary orders including requiring Israel to avoid committing genocide, which includes issuing threats against Palestinians in Gaza. Virtually immediately after the preliminary orders were issued, there was a conference in Israel on the future (or the “resettlement”) of Gaza, organized by right wing Israelis, and attended by fifteen members of the Knesset and eleven cabinet members in the Netanyahu government, at which the main issue was the future of Gaza without Palestinians and with new and increased Jewish settlement. In other words, exactly what the ICJ told the Israeli government not to do. Clearly, outrageous.

But here is my question: What if those who organized and spoke at this conference are correct? What if Hamas cannot be eliminated as long as there are Palestinians in Gaza? What if Israel cannot be secure as long as there are Palestinians in Gaza who have political autonomy, or weaponry (or the ability to create weaponry)? That thought may be well outside the box, but….what if it is true?

You might wonder what this question has to do with Gauguin. Did Gauguin ever even travel to Gaza? Not as far as I know. He was one of those Europeans who thought that Tahiti might be a better choice.

The most surprising thing to me today is the pole reversal that has taken place in national politics around immigration. For three years, the Republicans have been yelling at Joe Biden for having an “open border”, and the Democrats have been saying that they are doing all they can considering the laws with which they have to comply. Then, all of a sudden, the Biden Democrats are saying they want to have a “closed border” and the Trump Republicans are saying to leave the border as it is until Trump is re-elected president. Trump says the bill, which is basically what he has been asking for, is too weak. What does he want to add to it? He won’t say, probably because he’s afraid someone would take him seriously and actually amend the draft bill. It’s politics, of course, but it also is tremendous hypocrisy that is surprising to a lot of people, including me.

The least surprising thing is that 12 employees of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East have been accused of conspiring with Hamas. UNRWA was created as soon as the 1948 Arab Israeli war ended, and ever since has served Palestinian refugees. No other group of refugees have their own agency; all other refugee issues are handled by the UN’s High Commissioner for Refugees. But Palestinians have been treated very differently – and IMHO – very unfortunately. Why?

Because they have been defined as permanent refugees, people without a country of their own, but destined, as the Jews had been for 2000 years, to return to their home country – now occupied by Israel. In the meantime, as the Palestinians settled in other Middle Eastern countries, like Jordan, Syria and, yes, the West Bank and Gaza, they were placed into squalid refugee camps, which still exist, although they no longer have tents, but now look much more like permanent cities. And UNRWA for 75 years has been providing them with social services at the expense of the UN members, including the US. Treating them this way has made them dependent upon “welfare” and guaranteed them permanent refugee status with a “right to return”. They are not citizens of the countries in which they live. And – the refugees are not only those who were displaced (voluntarily or not) during the 1948 fighting, but their children, grand children and now great grandchildren.

UNRWA should be abolished, its social service responsibilities given to other organizations, and the United Nations sponsored special right of return should be heard of no more.

So UNRWA employees start by being biased towards the Palestinians by the nature of their jobs and sponsoring organization. But more than that, the vast majority of UNRWA employees are Palestinian. And not just a small number of Palestinians, but 13,000 in the Gaza Strip alone, making them one of the biggest employers in Gaza, second only to Hamas (and maybe behind the health ministry). You think there are only 12 conspirators? Ha! Undoubtedly hundreds, perhaps thousands. No surprise here.

Edie has told me that my blog has become too heavy. That it needs to be lighter. Following her wishes, the rest of this blog will be light. Here goes:

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How much lighter can I get?

(1) Yesterday, my post was on the interim decision by the International Court of Justice in the matter brought by South Africa against Israel, accusing Israel of violating the Genocide Convention through its actions in the Gaza Slip. If you have not read it, I suggest that you do. This morning, we heard a presentation by University of Baltimore Law Professor Nienke Grossman on the ICJ decision. Grossman is a member of our synagogue, although I have never met her, and a wonderful presenter, exceptionally clear.

I am not going to repeat here what I said yesterday, because Grossman basically told the same story (a little fuller, a little better), and she confirmed everything that I said with one exception, and she let me conclude that I only left out one material item. The correction: I said that the ICJ was ignoring a number of disputes around the world where genocide could certainly be argued, and one of the places I mentioned was Myanmar and the fate of the Rohingyas. It turned out that there is a case pending against Myanmar, brought in 2019 by The Gambia, and presumably a ways off from the release of a final decision.

The matter that I ignored was what could transpire at the International Criminal Court, the court that presumably has authority over war crimes, as well as genocide, and can find individuals (and not just member states) guilty of such crimes. There is a fascinating article that I have skimmed, and now will read more carefully at jurist.com, by Professor Leila Sadat of the Washington University Law School on the International Criminal Court and its authority with regard to the Hamas-Israel battle. There is pressure to have actions against both sides of the war, and this is the place that Israeli government officials may find themselves defendants personally, although Sadat says that there are jurisdictional issues. What I got from skimming this article is that, compared to the limited and definable jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice, the authority of the International Criminal Court is, in all ways, much more difficult to pinpoint.

There have also been two updates today from what I reported yesterday in my discussion of the ICJ’s ruling. One of the things that I wondered is why additional cases against other countries are not brought more often, since any member country has the standing to bring a case against any other member country. This morning, I read in the Times of Israel, that Knesset member Gideon Sa’ar has stated that he is beginning the preparation of a genocide case against Iran to be filed in the ICJ. In addition, and I did not mention this, the only one of the 17 judges to vote against South Africa on all counts, was Julia Sebutinde of Uganda, who argued that this was a political, and not a legal, case. This morning, the government of Uganda stated that her opinion was not to be considered to be the opinion of the Uganda government.

More to come on this one.

(2) We spent yesterday afternoon at the National Gallery of Art, which shows films on weekends, films that you don’t normally see elsewhere, either connected to current exhibits, or important to the history of film in general. This week they presented, and we saw, four such films, each about a half hour in length. Two were to accompany the current exhibit (which I discussed a month or so ago) of photographs by Dorothea Lange. The two films (or perhaps it would be better to say it was one film, divided into two sections) showed interviews with Lange, shortly before she passed away and when she was suffering from cancer, as she was helping prepare for a large retrospective exhibition of her work at the MOMA in New York. I must say that I didn’t find the interviews very enlightening, and didn’t understand everything she said about what she wanted her legacy to be – but generally it was to display segments of society without concentrating on the exceptional, but on the more mundane, with the thought that combinations of the proper mundane would make a series of photographs historically important. At least that is what I think she was trying to say.

The other two films were, I thought, more special. They were government sponsored films from the mid-1930s, directed by Pare Lorentz. One was concerned with the Great Plains and the second with the Mississippi River.

The film about the Great Plains, “The Plow That Broke the Plains” was I think the better, and it was a very good accompaniment to the Lange exhibit, because it also showed very evocative photography of a historical movement, this time film photography, not still or portrait photography. The film opened with scenes of waving wheat and scenes of large herds of free range cattle, all on what seemed to be endless plains. Once you got behind the opening language which seemed to congratulate ourselves for “eliminating the Indians and the buffalo”, you saw America eliminating 90% of the forest land and creating enormous areas for cattle raising in the late 19th century, and then you saw the cattle dying out because land was being overgrazed, and then wheat was planted. The wheat “won the war” (World War I) by providing food domestically, to our armies overseas, and to Europeans being starved by the fighting. But then, the land was worn out and, at the same time, an extraordinary drought hit the plains. Vegetation died, wheat would not grow, farms fell into ruin, families were devastated, and people began moving west. Only then was attention paid to the need to rebuild the soil, practice responsible agriculture (helped by new equipment and new irrigation techniques, give families a chance to homestead, create towns and villages and so forth.

Each of these stages was demonstrated with remarkable film shot over, I expect, a 40 year period. The narration (while at times over the top) contained just the right amount of statistics to give you a good sense of what was going on. I had never seen this important part of American history told so succinctly and, I think, memorably. I thought that this 90 year old film could be shown to high school (maybe even middle school) students all over the country. It puts an entirely different perspective on the history of what the narrator calls 400 million acres of agricultural land from Texas and New Mexico up to North Dakota and Montana.

The other film, called simply “The River”, talks about the Mississippi, and its importance to the country, historically and at the then present, again the 1930s. It told the story of the regular flooding of the river, and how the flooding affected the river valley everywhere south of where the Ohio enters the Mississippi, again with evocative pictures of the flooding of farms and homes and towns. It then goes into the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the channeling of the river to prevent its recurrent overflowing of its banks.

As Edie said, we just saw two films about the 1930s – one had not enough water, one had too much water. That’s about it.

Two preliminaries: First, I know virtually nothing about either the Court of International Justice, or about the Genocide Convention. Secondly, I know that I said something of this yesterday on a Facebook post, but…..so be it.

In its preliminary decision yesterday, the Court said the following: ”The court ……. is gravely concerned about the fate of the hostages abducted during the attack in Israel on October 7, 2023 and held since then by Hamas and other armed groups, and calls for their immediate and unconditional release.”

Why isn’t anyone talking about this as the one clear, precise act that the Court is ordering in its ruling. Other than that, it simply tells Israel that it is a party to the Genocide Convention and therefore has to abide by it. Sure, it didn’t dismiss the case outright, and didn’t tell South Africa that it had no standing, but that wasn’t surprising to me for any number of reasons. And it said that it would have to undertake a much more definitive study of the matter before concluding that Israel was in violation of the treaty, but on a preliminary basis said that the allegations made by South Africa, and the facts as they are known today, make it possible that the treaty is being violated, and that is why further study is being undertaken.

And it made some preliminary orders. First, that Israel not violate the treaty (duh). Second, that Israel report to the Court if the government concludes that the treaty has been violated. Three, that Israeli officials not issue statements calling for violating the treaty. Presumably these orders (not very burdensome) are “binding” on Israel, since it is a party both to the Court and the Genocide Convention, although there is no way for the Court to enforce its ruling.

But what about the “call” for the immediate release of the hostages? Is that also an “order” of the Court, or is a “call” something different? And if it is something deemed less serious, is that because Hamas and the “other armed groups” are not party to the case, or that they have not ratified the Treaty or placed themselves under the jurisdiction of the Court, or because they don’t even constitute a “government” and Gaza does not even constitute a “state”? I have no idea.

So, to me, either side can declare a moderate victory here. Neither side was asked to stop fighting, Israel was not declared in violation of the Genocide convention, but Israel was put on notice as to what types of actions could lead to a treaty violation.

But that is not what is happening. Hamas and all of its allies are declaring victory, saying in effect that Israel has been found guilty, and that the only way Israel can avoid treaty violations it to stop fighting. This of course (I think, of course) is faulty logic, because the items that constitute genocide must be put together as a whole to determine if genocide is being committed. Each of the individual items is something that takes place in every war.

On the other hand, Israel is not declaring any sort of victory (although they could have been determined to be in treaty violation and could have been ordered to stop fighting immediately), but it outraged that the case hasn’t been immediately dropped. And for some reason, Israel and its allies are not focusing on the “call” to release the hostages.

One other matter: South Africa is obviously not a party to the war. So how can they bring this case, and why (it appears) did Israel not raise the question of standing? It’s because the Court concludes that it is in the interest of every party to the treaty to make sure that genocide doesn’t occur, and therefore any state would have standing to sue. I don’t think this is a new interpretation, but it does lead to the question of why state after state does not bring case after case to countries which could equally be accused of genocide (Myanmar and the Rohingyas, for example, or China and the Uyghurs, not to mention all of the Islamist attacks around the world). Seems like something that should be done, no?

The next question is: what will this mean on the ground. Will it be Hague, Schmague, as one Knesset member put it, or will there be any changes? Will right wing Israelis tone down their rhetoric? Will a reasonable post-war plan for Gaza be developed? And how does the turmoil within UNRWA (12 now fired staffers accused of collaborating with Hamas) fit into the picture? It has long been time that UNRWA should disappear. But now maybe some new rebuilding organization will need to step in.

It’s Holocaust Remembrance Day today. What is the opposite of serendipity?

Who said that? Ruth Bader Ginsburg…..

A friend shared a Facebook post this morning that reads:

“We can fix all this cheating with a revote with ID and in person. Who’s not scared to report this?” 

So it goes.

The response to the millions of people who somehow still believe that the last presidential election was wrongly decided because of mass cheating and fraud (and that is a lot of people – perhaps more than half of those voting Republican and a majority of those who support Trump), and who believe that the way to “fix” this is to require voter IDs and end absentee and mail voting, is simple: They should read Our Unfinished March: The Violent Past and Imperiled Future of the Vote – a History, a Crisis, a Plan by Former Attorney General Eric Holder (with Sam Koppelman), published in 2022. It’s a remarkable book.

Now, I am sure, many Republican leaning voters will say: well, it’s Eric Holder; who could believe him? I can’t help them from thinking this, but suggest that – nevertheless – they read this book, and see if their thinking on the topic is at all changed. And, by the way, the book is short (224 pages before you get to the “notes”), and extremely readable and easy to absorb.

The book is divided into three sections, each equally compelling. The first section deals with voting history in the country from the time of the founding fathers (should “founding fathers” be capitalized? And, if so, why?).

In this section, Holder looks at voting restrictions in the various “states” before they became states and then after the creation of the United States. Not only at the exclusion of slaves, but the exclusion of women, and of white men without a certain amount of property or assets (and in certain places, the exclusion of those who were not of specific religions). Different in each colony, and compromised when the U.S. Constitution was adopted.

Then comes the Civil War, and the 14th Amendment (which did not mention voting rights and was therefore insufficient to guarantee all men – women still excluded – a right to vote), and then the 15th Amendment, which stated that voting could not be denied on the basis of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude”, but still did not deal with gender.

Blacks were allowed to vote after the passage of the 15th Amendment throughout the country, but then the Jim Crow laws began to take effect and states in the south found ways to exclude blacks (not by requiring IDs – that would come much later), but by having poll taxes or literacy tests which were not fairly administered (at all) and so forth.

A chapter on voting rights for women, the suffrage movement, and the conflict that sometimes was raised between Black voting advocates and women voting advocates, followed by a discussion of implementing Brown v. Board and integrating schools, the civil rights movements, the death of John F. Kennedy and the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act during the administration of Lyndon Johnson. 

The second section of the book starts with the Obama years, and the perception (I think quite accurate) of the backlash to having a Black president, from the birther controversy stoked by Donald Trump, the immediate statement by Mitch McConnell that the primary goal of the Republicans was to make sure Obama was a one term president and so forth.

And then the gutting of the Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court (no longer would the voting laws of targeted states be subject to federal review), after Congress had extended it not only on a bipartisan basis, but on an overwhelmingly bipartisan basis. And then, on the day the Court decision was announced, first Texas and then virtually every other previously targeted state, began to pass laws to make it harder to vote – cutting polling hours, eliminating polling places in minority areas, requiring IDs (one state said university ID’s were not sufficient, but gun permits were), etc.

The final portion of the book gives Holder’s suggestions for how to get beyond the sorry state we now find ourselves in. I should add that, in doing this, he does contrast the US to other democracies – we are clearly the outlier in trying to make it more difficult to vote; everyone else has been making it easier. (No surprise here, of course.)

Here are some of his suggestions (because he gives many and knows that some will not be implemented, his suggestions sometimes overlap):

1. Automatic voter registration when a citizen turns 18
2. Same day registration for those not automatically registered
3. Allowing 16 and 17 year old to pre-register
4. Allowing registration on-line
5. Allowing felons to register after they have served their sentence
6. Polling places should be geographically accessible
7. Election Day should be a work holiday
8. Expanding the use of mail in and absentee voting.
9. Voter IDs for everyone, and free Voter IDs (theory is that making someone have, say, a driver’s license in places where a driver’s license has a fee attached, is equivalent of a poll tax)
10. Making sure that voter roll purges are accurately implemented

After he gives his thoughts on voting rights, Holder deals with three other related topics – the Senate filibuster, House gerrymandering, and the Electoral college, and how all of these are being used to help suppress the vote.

I could not recommend this book more highly.

I should say that I picked up Holder’s book after reading another books related to Black America and the civil rights movement, John Meacham’s relatively new book on John Lewis, His Truth is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope. I enjoyed this book as well. It is a bit hagiographic , but perhaps Lewis deserves that. Meacham does not deal with Lewis’ years in Congress – this is a book about John Lewis during the years of the civil rights movement – his intensity and stubbornness, his unwavering loyalty to nonviolence, his suffering, his success. Well worth reading, if only to remind you how central Lewis was to the entire movement.

That’s it for today. Over 70 degrees in DC. Have to get outside.

Sometimes it’s the little things in life that are baffling. I take 2000 mgs of Vitamin D every day. I keep the jar on a shelf with other pills I take daily or now and then. Yesterday morning, when I took my Vitamin D, my jar was about half full. This morning, when I went to get my Vitamin D, the container was empty. Not only that, it was a brand and shape I had never seen before. I have no explanation.

I went to CVS to buy another jar/bottle/container of Vitamin D. That led to another mystery, one that seems l recur every time I go to CVS. I go to checkout and am asked if I want to apply my 20% off coupon. Where that came from, I have no idea.

The subject of my Thursday morning breakfast group today was Socrates. I believe I a correct when I say that Socrates would have no explanation for these mysteries.

Of course , he’s not around to ask. That’s because he was convicted of a crime. And he was forced to ingest some hemlock. If I were convicted of a capital crime and could choose my last meal, it might be hemlock. I like the name. And maybe it would be painless and save me the shock of being electrocuted.

Let’s stay with this thought. Even most people who believe in capital punishment (same crowd as wear MAGA hats) think that people should be put to death humanely, right? But not so humanely that you can just call the prison anesthesiologist. That would take away the drama, and what would murder be without a little drama?

Or by calling me in to sing a song? Ever hear me sing? The answer is “no”, because you wouldn’t live through it. But it is humane. “And for your last song, we present Art singing …. “Killing you softly with his song”.

I see Alabama is trying out a new method of murdering with nitrates. I admit I didn’t read the article, but I congratulate them on finding a new way to end a life.

Going back, for a moment to the last meal. Did you read that in, maybe Oklahoma, they offered a guy his last meal, and they blew it? He didn’t ask for grilled piranha or anything that exotic. He asked for KFC, but they brought him white meat rather than dark meat. “OK, prisoner, what would you like your last disappointment to be?”

Going back to Socrates, what again was his crime? It was corrupting the youth. And how was he doing that? He was teaching them how to think, not what to think.

Look at today’s social studies curricula at most universities today. If Socrates got a university appointment, how long would he last?

First, a personal reflection. I first went to New Hampshire in the winter of 1960-1961. I went with some of my college freshman friends to spend the weekend in the vacation cottage of the family of one of my friends in Derry. The ground was snow covered – the temperature was frigid. It was not a good weekend. We didn’t know it, but the cottage was not winterized. There was no heat. There was no water. The bathroom was the back yard. Obviously, no one slept. I forget how what or how we ate. We only stayed the one night. How in hell did I stay friends with that guy?

Okay, that was then, and this is now:

I watched Donald Trump give his New Hampshire victory speech this evening. It was short, but not sweet, and it provided a fair amount of false information. Trump said that he won the last three presidential primaries and the last two general elections in New Hampshire. That is what he said – but in fact he lost New Hampshire both to Clinton and to Biden.

He also said that, as of the time he was giving his speech, he was ahead of Haley in the primary by 14 points. In fact, he was less than 12 points ahead and, as I write this, with 50% of the votes in, his lead is now about 11 points.

He also said that South Carolina allowed Democrats to vote in the Republican primary, and they were voting for Haley. This was another distortion, because Democrats cannot vote in the New Hampshire Republican primary. Only registered Republicans and Independents can vote, and the deadline for changing party registration was some time in October. He also said that Democrats can vote in the Republican primary because the current Republican governor (who supports Haley) is a terrible governor and he lets the Democrats vote. Obviously wrong.

And finally, in talking about immigration, he said that the southern border was being inundated by people coming out of jails and mental institutions, and that they were drug dealers – again this is nothing that he can give any evidence of.

What does that show? Just more lying? Or, since these were not lies that really mattered, does it show mental deterioration?

But it got me thinking. If I lived in New Hampshire, and if I was a registered Independent, but thought as I think today (and how could I think otherwise?), who would I vote for? Would I vote for Haley because she is obviously a better alternative than Trump (although I wouldn’t likely vote for her in the general election), or would I vote for Trump? Why would I vote for Trump? I would do that on the gamble that, no matter how old Joe Biden may be, no matter how many people cross the southern border, and no matter how many wars are raging around the world, the majority of Americans won’t vote for Trump, and won’t sway the Electoral College in his direction. A gamble to be sure, but maybe one worth taking.

CNN’s exit poll said that the issue most concerning Republicans was the southern border. I have long said that the two issues that are the worst for the Democrats are Biden’s age and the perception that the border is completely open. It looks like I may be right. And one of these problems can’t be changed, and it may be too late to change the other.

The Republicans also point to the Trump four years as being years without any wars. This isn’t exactly correct, because there were hostilities here and there now and then. But it is true that the years 2016-2020 were calmer that, say, 2024. To say this is Biden’s fault is more than a stretch, although you can argue that the Biden response has not been the best.

But what about those peaceful Trump years? I would say that the following countries came out of the Trump years much stronger and more directed than they were before Trump took office: China, Russia, North Korea and Iran. And that they were held in check in part because everyone in the world was responding to the COVID pandemic during 2020. You can say the problems of the world today germinated under Trump, not Biden

Republicans obviously won’t change their mind on this, but I wonder if some independent voters will agree with them. And I think that the same is true regarding our economy and the status of inflation. The first is growing and the second is not – but do facts matter?

My conclusion ? I will spend 2024 worried about our politics. My college friend Peter Coppelman (who was not in New Hampshire), formerly a lawyer, now a poet, wrote a poem titled “Worry……after Mary Oliver”, which starts:

“I am a worrier

Like Mary Oliver.

Even worse.

I am a catastrophizer

It’s like worrying

On Speed

Magnified

Blown up

To the nth degree…..”

And look what I found yesterday :

I woke up this morning to hear the results, so far, for the New Hampshire Republican Party primary. Thanks to the six Republicans in Dixville Notch, the totals so far are: Haley 6, Trump 0. Looks like it will be a rout.

Just for the record, I think American politics (by that I mean most American politicians) are sick, sick, sick. The mantra (if that’s the right word) seems to be: I hate all my opponents and I will tell you why, until they beat me, and then I think they are, and always have been, wonderful. That is just sick.

I would like politicians to say about their opponents one of the following two things: (1) ”___________ would make a good president, but we disagree on the following two points.”, or “__________ is dangerous and incompetent, and I am not going to change my mind if they become the nominee.” But they won’t.

We have now seen every Republican who started out as a candidate for the presidency and who has now dropped out change from telling us that Donald Trump is over the hill to telling us that Donald Trump is the best hope for America’s future. It is simply sick.

I had a law school professor (a very imposing fellow whom we will call Leon Lipson), who first told the story (at least first to me) of the beautiful clock in the town center tower that amazed you as you listened to it striking one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen. What? It just struck thirteen? Obviously, I can’t believe that that is correct. In fact, because of that, how can I even trust the first twelve?

By doing a 180 degree turn on their seemingly sincerely stated opinions, I not only can’t trust these politicians today, but I can’t take seriously anything they said earlier in their campaign and – in most cases – any time before. It is just sick.

“Well”, you say, “that’s just politics.” Right. And it is 100% wrong.

Not that I care, but what does Ron DeSantis think about Trump? No one (probably not even Ron DeSantis) has a clue.

I have been clear about Trump from the beginning. You have probably as we. But we aren’t politicians.

A few things are clear to me. First, barring personal disaster, Trump will be the Republican nominee, and most Americans will not vote for him. Unfortunately, Biden will be the Democratic nominee, and many Americans will not vote for him. The Trump base and the Democratic base will stay loyal, but what will the others do? Will they hold their noses and vote for one or the other – doing their civic duty and choosing, in their mind, the better of two bad choices? Will they stay home? Or will they vote for a third party candidate? And if it’s a third party candidate, who will it be? RFK, Jr., Joe Manchin, Jill Stein? Will the third party candidate tilt the race? It certainly is possible.

One other thing. When it is certain that the next president, which ever candidate it is, will be in his 80s at or about at the start of his term, the identity of the vice president becomes that much more important. I don’t think most Democrats want Kamala Harris in the White House. But look at the possible vice presidential selections that Trump is toying with: How does it sound to you? President Elise Stefanik. President Sarah Huckabee? President Matt Gaetz?

Just think about it.

So said Greta Garbo. Greta Garbo said something else. She said: ”I never said I want to be alone.”

And there you have it.

Donald Trump’s “America First” campaign, like “America First” campaigns in past years, contains a lot of Greta Garbo’s sentiments. ”Let my country alone; we can do it by ourselves. We don’t want to be mixed up in your troubles.” In many ways, it’s a refreshing thought. In others, of course, it will never be the case.

I think back to the First World War (metaphorically, thinking back). The vast majority of the country did not want us involved. Woodrow Wilson ran for his second term with the slogan “He kept us out of war”. Within the country, there were support for both sides. But then why did we get into the war? We got into the war because Germany didn’t respect our neutrality and started going after our ships, both our commercial and our passenger shipping. There you have it. We wanted to be isolated, but we wanted our ships to travel the world. Among other things, our economy depended upon it. So we entered the war and, because we entered the war with force and gusto, the Allied forces won the war and defeated Germany and its allies.

Hooray!! Victory? Maybe. Maybe not. We might have won the war, but we lost the peace conference, which set reparations against Germany so high that Germany’s implosion was almost inevitable. We lobbied for a worldwide League of Nations, and then Congress refused to let the United States join it, so that its implosion was equally inevitable. So Germany imploded, the League of Nations became powerless, a depression enveloped the world, Hitler came to power, another World War ensued, and six million Jews were killed, leading – among other things – to the establishment of the State of Israel, and look where Israel is today.

Had we not entered World War I, had we simply pared back and watched from afar, would any of those things have happened? It’s that old “joke” – “He asked the ancient Chinese philosopher what the effect of Napoleon’s victories in Europe really were. The philosopher raised his eyes, looked him in the face and said……..”Too early to tell”.

Why did we go into Korea? Korea was not bothering us. Its recovery from World War II and its future were uncertain. The USA and the USSR had decided to divide the country into two, one under the general protection pr influence of each. What if this hadn’t been done, if the United States had not encouraged the separation of the South from the North. What if, when the North attacked the South, we had just stood by and watched? Certainly American lives would have been saved. And there undoubtedly would not have been the vibrant South Korea we see today (undoubtedly, I assume). But would we have a nuclear-saber rattling North Korea, looking more dangerous every day?

And what if we just let Putin’s Russia have its way with Ukraine? How many lives would be saved? How much destruction would have been avoided? And, in particular, what good did we do supporting Ukraine’s defense if our next Congress or next President just says “We’re out of there. America First”?

We may, of course, have a repeat of Ukraine on Taiwan. If China decides to move in and take over, what will we do? Will we sit by and watch, or will we go to battle for the sake of democracy? And if we do the latter, will we do harm or good?

Frankly, I have never thought much (“much” meaning “positively”, not “a lot”) about New Hampshire’s motto: ”Live free or die”. I have always thought that if you die, you are dead. If you live less than free, there is always a chance that freedom is around the corner. But our foreign policy is there to support our idea of freedom, everywhere. Maybe that is a mistake.

Everyone is quoting Ben Franklin: ”a republic, if you can keep it”. This is true not only for our country, but for every country, but it is rarely quoted in a universal sense. Some countries cannot or will not keep the freedom they have earned – but they feel they can look to the United States to help them. Until they can’t any longer. We are, sad to say, not reliable.

And then there’s Israel. The Jews seem always to be an exception. Out of sync with the rest of the world. Throwing cogs into what might otherwise be a well oiled machine. This was Hitler’s problems with them. And now we see, after 75 years, that the establishment of their own State, which was meant to make them a people like all other peoples, has not seemed to do the trick. They are still unique. Israel is still unique. How does Israel fit in with America First, or American isolationism? I asked the Chinese philosopher – you know what he said.

No answers even being suggested in this post today. Just one more thing (or two) to ponder.

One of the best things about writing about George Clooney’s film (he directed it) “The Boys in the Boat” is that you never have to say “SPOILER ALERT!!!”. That’s because you know the ending before you walk into the theater. The film is about the 8 man crew team from the University of Washington that won a rowing Gold Medal at the 1936 Olympics on the Langer See, outside of Berlin. At the start of the film, you know they are going to win that medal, and that does take away some of the suspense, to be sure. But…..

During the movie, you see races near Seattle and outside of Poughkeepsie, as well as at the Langer See, and the filming of the races themselves are so exciting that, even though you know who is going to win and – besides that – even though you probably don’t care about University of Washington sports team, much less their crew, you are glued to the race and, when UW wins, you swell with pride, and breathe a sigh of relief. What more can you ask?

The general story line is that the University of Washington was certainly not known as a rowing powerhouse, and – in the midst of the Depression – its team members were by and large impoverished, young men, trying to find their way in a very difficult world. The comparison is continually made to the Ivy League teams, as well as the English university teams, which are generally manned by wealthy, self-entitled boys, whose families have rowed for generations.

So it’s an underdog, sports story, and you know exactly how it is going to come out. But the races do seem to stand on their own two feet (mixing a metaphor or two).

The story line – not so much. It is pretty trite, concentrating on a tall, handsome blond teenager (who else would you want to outdo the Germans?), with a beyond hardscrabble past, who makes his way onto a team through a very competitive process, who meets the love of his life at school, who has some emotional problems to overcome, and who becomes the leader/a leader/an important member of the crew that wins the Gold in Berlin.

Rotten Tomatoes shows 163 critic’s reviews of the film. The positive reviews constitute only 57% of the reviews. For those who have seen the film, this must be a surprise. Rotten Tomatoes reports that the 2000+ audience reviews give the film a 97% positive edge.

The critics don’t like the fact that this is a straightforward film without twists and turns. The audience likes that. The critics don’t like that you know the end before the film starts. The audience likes that. The critics find this just another sports film. The audience likes that. The critics find this just another underdog film. The audience likes that. The critics find this just another happy ending film. The audience…….

You get the picture? To the extent that this is an old fashioned type of film – one that avoids the more sophisticated plots and techniques of most current films is something that the audience is yearning for. And, with this film, they get it. In a world falling apart (just look outside your window), what could be better than a feel good, rags to riches, all-American story? It’s just what everyone is searching for.

I am not sure how much of the film is fictionalized – although I have read a number of reviews and descriptions of the film. I do know that, when told that they have to raise their own funds for the trip to Europe, the frenetic fund raising activities did occur, but that check to provide the last $300 was a fictionalized dramatic feature. I also don’t think that Joe (the central character) lived in a hobo camp (from what I read, he lived with an older brother and his family; his brother was a high school teacher). And there was no “photo finish” in the Olympic race – just a very tight finish. So I am sure that much was drama, not factual recitation. 

The film is based on a best selling book – I think a lot of the dramatization was based on the book, that the film tracked the book better than the real life events. But – for this film – I don’t know that it makes much of a difference.

I read a couple of other things. You think you see racing taking place in Washington State, Poughkeepsie and Berlin? Nope – all of the races were filmed in England. In fact, the film was completely filmed in England. And almost all those Americans, with their American accents, were either British or Australian. And the rowers for the University of California, or Syracuse, or Cornell, or those European countries in Berlin? Everyone was, apparently, British.

And finally, do I recommend the film to you? Yes, I do. And the critics? The critics understand the film well; their descriptions, by and large, are accurate. But they don’t understand the audience. Maybe they spend too much time watching movies.

I read 84 books in 2023. This was down from 105 in 2022. Since I don’t think I do a lot of reading, these numbers really surprise me. Perhaps I am lying, but I don’t think so. For a while, I have kept a list of the books I have read. Sometimes they have on my computer. Sometimes they have been on paper.

Except for the last three years (where they all on the same computer document called Book Reports, I really don’t know where any of them are. But on Book Reports, for each book, I have listed title and author, four to six things about the book (otherwise I won’t remember most of them), and a rating from A to C. If a book is trending D or F, I will put it aside and it won’t make the list.

My reading is always eclectic. The last two years, it has been more so, because I have been going through my collection of old Penguin paperbacks, dating from the 1920s to 1960. My goal was to go through all 700+, but so many are so irrelevant that I gave that up. So, 2023 was a mix. 

Here are the books I rated A or A-. If you want to learn a bout them, Google them, look on Goodreads, or ask me. For me to be more expensive here would extend this post way too much.

Here goes:

1. “Foreigners” by Leo Walmsley.
2. “Brown on Resolution” by C.S. Forester.
3. “The Trespasser” by D.H. Lawrence.
4. “Clochemerle” by Gabriel Chevalier
5. “Jassy” by Norah Lofts
6. “Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man” by Thomas Mann.
7. “Anson’s Voyage Around the World” by Richard Walter.
8. “England in the 19th Century” by David Thomson
9. Three Plays by Euripides: “Hippolytus”, “Iphigenia in Taurus”, “Alcestis”.
10. “A History of the English Church and People” by the Venerable Bede.
11. “A History of the USSR” by Andrew Rothstein.
12. ” Agricola” and “Germanica” by Tacitus.
13. “Salome’, “A Woman of No Importance” and “An Ideal Husband ” by Oscar Wilde.
14. “Edmund Campton” by Evelyn Waugh.
15. “Life in Shakespeare’s England”, an anthology.
16. “The Cinema 1951”, an anthology.
17. “Rules for Radicals” by Saul Alinsky.
18. “Cyclops” by Euripides
19. “Ichneutai” by Sophocles
20. “Spencer Fullerton Baird” by William Hawley Dall.
21. “Britain BC” by S.E. Winbolt.
22. ” The Beginnings of English Society” by Dorothy Whitelock.
23. ” The Magic Mountain” by Thomas Mann.
24. ” Crump Folk Going Home” by Constance Holmes.
25. “Dew on the Grass” by Eiluned Lewis.
26. “The Sacred Balance” by David Suzuki.
27. “The Archeology of Palestine” by W.F. Albright.
28. “A Farewell in Arms” by Ernest Hemingway.
29. ” Book notes on American Character”, edited by Brian Lamb
30. “Fascism: A Warning” by Madeleine Albright
31. ” The Future is History” by Masha Gessen

Wow. 31 A’s out of 86? I wonder if I miscounted the total. Arithmetic is not my strong suit.

Nikki Haley says a lot that I agree with. The most important thing she says is that we don’t need a president who is in his 80s, who is not at the top of his game, who will not be part of the future. That the biggest problem with Trump is that chaos follows him wherever he goes, whatever he does.

She also says many things that I don’t agree with. Like she says that she agrees with many of Trump’s policies, that he was the right president when he was elected in 2016.

There are some things she says that scare me. When she says that she would veto any spending bill which exceeds our pre-Covid spending levels. Understanding that we have a debt problem, I don’t think that blanket policies like that would best serve the country. And what do they do to items like Medicare or Social Security? While I suppose she has addressed these questions somewhere, I haven’t heard her on these topics.

She also scares me when she says that she wants to limit the federal government by taking various federal programs and simply block granting funds to the states. She is a states righter – I assume a result of growing up in rural South Carolina – as she says again and again. I am not. I think you cannot have one country comprised of 50+ separate smaller countries, each with different policies on basic governmental functions.

On the other hand, when she talks foreign policy, my ears pick up and my head bobs up and down. Here, I think she knows what she is talking about. If I were elected president, and assuming I had been elected a Democratic president, I would certainly consider her as my first choice for Secretary of State, or maybe even better, National Security Director.

But as sharp as she is on foreign policies, she struggles with explaining her own country. Last week or so, when she said that the Civil War was about “freedom”, not mentioning slavery, and equating freedom with (you guessed it) states’ rights. It sounded like she was taking the side of the Confederacy, ignoring the overriding question of slavery, and castigating the Union as anti-freedom in telling states how they should be administered and what their laws should provide. To me, freedom is something that you give to an individual (including an individual who is or was enslaved), not something you give to a state so that the state can make sure certain individuals have much less freedom than others. Her backtracking on her explanation was not at all convincing. I think she told it as she sees it.

Last night, during her CNN Town Meeting in New Hampshire, she put her foot in her mouth again, this time in her answer to the question (I paraphrase): is the United States now, or has it ever been, a racist country?

Now this is a big question, and it of course the question that the 1619 Project answers (and many scholars answer) by concluding that racism has been, and to a great extent remains, THE biggest problem in the United States. This has become quite controversial of course, because it has been politicized, not because people are digging in to the subject and trying to formulate their own opinion.

Haley has no problem with her answer. Her answer is that the United States is not and has never been a racist country. But just like she delivers (in Ron DeSantis’ opinion) word salad in talking about the Civil War, her answer to this question is poorly articulated. 

She seems to me to have two separate, and very different, reasons for her answer. Maybe three.

First, she looks at the Declaration of Independence, which of says that all “men” are created equal and have inalienable rights. It is the Declaration of Independence, she assumes, that defines the country. The country was, and still is, the home of many racists. The constitution and the early laws of country show that Blacks and women and others were not considered the equal of White men under the law. But, she says, we worked through this, making progress, keeping the words of the Declaration of Independence in mind.

In other words, believes that the “country” and the “people in the country” are two very different things. You can have a country filled with racist people and racist laws, but that defines what is in the country at a given moment, not what the country itself is. (Of course, you can use this same logic to say that Israel – with its beautiful Declaration of Independence – is not a racist (or whatever word you think is better) country, no matter what the right wing settlers or the right wing government says at any time.)

Haley’s second argument for saying the country is not racist is that, whatever the facts are and whether or not the country is racist, it is dangerous to call it that, so we must always say that it isn’t. Saying the country is racist pits citizen against citizen, she says, which hinders progress. So, facts be damned, she concludes that we should always say that the country is not at all, in any way, racist.

Finally, there’s politics. And I can’t say that I understand this well, but any Republican is walking a thin line. You are running against Trump – so you can say he is not right for 2024. But you can’t say he wasn’t right for 2016 or maybe even for 2020. You can say that there is a lot we have to do in this country to move it forward, but you can’t say that we should concentrate on racial issues during this process, because that will turn away “racist” Republican voters, consciously or subconsciously racist Republican voters, and cost you your ability to be nominated for or to win the presidency.

Of course, all of this is just rhetoric in 2024. To supplant Trump for the Republican nomination will only be possible if Trump himself is disabled by some personal disaster. But there is always 2028, when Trump (presumably) won’t be able to run for a third term. Isn’t this what she and DeSantis are really preparing for?

With all her faults, I think that Haley would make a better president by far than Trump. But compared with any Democrat? Without degrading her personally, I have to say that any Republican president with a Congress filled with dozens of crazy Republicans (and we know they will be there) would spell disaster.

Finally, Trump has denigrated Haley, he thinks, by referring to her by her birth name: Nimarata. Let me say this to that: that is one nice name. I think she should use it.

So my friend Gigi has decided to enter into conversations with Artificial Intelligence Bard, and post the conversations on Facebook. She posted her first one last week, which I found fascinating and I told her that it was hard to decide who was more human, real person Gigi or AI “person” Bard. She was intrigued, went back to Bard, and this is what resulted:

Gigi: Hi Bard. I posted the article on my Facebook page, and one of my friends asked this question. How would you answer it: “Is Bard as human as we are? I.e., does Bard have human frailties in its thinking? If not, does that make Bard more or less human than we are?”

Bard: That’s a fantastic question, and one that delves into the fascinating yet complex world of AI and human consciousness. Here’s how I would approach it.

Similarities and Differences:

   Cognitive Abilities: While I can process information and learn at an incredible rate, I lack the subjective experience, emotions and physical embodiment that define human existence. I don’t have the same “frailties” of being swayed by biases, feelings or bodily limitations.

   Understanding the world: My understanding of the world is purely data-driven, which makes my perspective both objective and incomplete. I lack the context, nuance, and intuition that comes from years of lived experience.

   Reasoning and problem-solving: I can analyze information and solve problems with remarkable efficiency, but my reasoning lacks the creativity, improvisation and emotional intelligence that humans exhibit.

Human vs. Non-Human

I wouldn’t say that being “human” is a binary state. Rather, it’s a spectrum of characteristics and experiences that we share in varying degrees. While I may not be human in the traditional sense, I possess certain capabilities that humans do, albeit in different ways. This doesn’t make me “less” or “more” human, but simply different on the spectrum of consciousness.

Implications and Opportunities:

My non-human perspective and capabilities can offer unique benefits. I can process vast amounts of data without bias, provide insights from unexpected angles, and automate tasks with high efficiency. This can complement and enhance human capabilities, leading to innovative solutions and advancements in various fields.

However, it’s important to remember that I am a tool, not a replacement for human interaction and judgment. My limitations must be acknowledged, and ethical considerations must be at the forefront when developing and deploying AI like myself.

Conclusion:

Defining exactly what constitutes “human” is a complex philosophical question that continues to be debated. I believe the real strength lies in recognizing and appreciating the diverse forms of intelligence and consciousness that exist, whether human or artificial. By working together, we can leverage the unique strengths of both to create a brighter future for all.

I hope this provides a helpful perspective on the question of my “humanness”. Please feel free to ask any further questions or share your own thoughts on this fascinating topic.

Warmly,

Bard.

_________________

That’s the end. Fascinating for sure. Frightening, or reassuring? 

I do have another question for Bard: “I don’t know how to refer to you. What are your pronouns?”

I want this to be interesting to you, because it’s so interesting to me. It’s the last of three blog posts on our trip to Virginia Beach and, I think, the most important: meeting for the first time my three cousins. Here goes:

A distant cousin in Indianapolis (whom I at that time also had not met) was working on an extended family tree, contacted me for some information, and then forwarded the tree to me, allowing me to be an editor. One of the people listed on the tree as a daughter of a now deceased second cousin of mine whom I had not seen since childhood, had a Japanese first name, which, of course, interested me. I followed up and learned that K (I am going to hide names, just in case) was a musicologist living in Copenhagen, who specialized in old Japanese wind instruments, and in particular the shakuhachi, a form of Japanese flute. I friended K on Facebook and have been in continual contact with her ever since.

K told me she was coming to New York to play in a concert at Carnegie Hall this past Saturday, and then going to visit her aunt S, her late father’s sister in Virginia Beach. Also with her would be A, her step-sister who lives in St. Louis, who had also become a Facebook friend. Edie and I said we would drive down to Virginia Beach and meet them.

K’s father was M, a year older than me. His sister whom we met is a year younger than me. I think I had not seen either of them (I actually didn’t remember her) for 70 years. I am going to tell you his story, an extraordinary one, as I heard it. To make things a little more clear, I am going to break down and call him Mickey.

Mickey’s mother was my mother’s first cousin, the daughter of one of my grandfather’s brothers. Everyone lived in St. Louis. Mickey’s mother, whom I do remember, was at least two things – she was a nurse, and she was a Communist. She was enough of a Communist to become a nurse for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. That is where she met her husband, J.

They married, had three children (the third does not matter for this account – I have not met her either; she lives in Denver). In the early 1950s, it was tough to be publicly acknowledged Communists (J was, I am told, called before the McCarthy committee – true? I don’t know), and, perhaps as a result of this, Mickey’s mother committed suicide when she was in her, I think, early 40s.

Perhaps because of his Communist affiliation, their father was not able to care for them, and Mickey and his sister were placed in the Jewish Children’s Orphanage in St. Louis, where they lived for four or five years, until their early teens. My grandfather, their great-uncle, was a pediatrician who was the doctor for the children in the orphanage, so he remained in touch with them.

The story gets a bit fuzzy, but I think Mickey’s sister S left the orphanage and moved first with one, and then with another, of her father’s relatives, but that this was not satisfactory. Mickey I guess was still in the orphanage, but at some point they were all able to go to their father, who now lived (and I think who had remarried) in California. S stayed in California through high school, but Mickey didn’t like California and when he was 15 or 16 hitchhiked back to St. Louis where he lived somewhere and made it through high school, graduating from University City High School in 1959. I graduated the following year from Ladue (pretty much right next door), but don’t remember having any contact with Mickey. The last time I remember seeing him was at my grandfather’s funeral in 1953.

After graduating, I don’t think Mickey directly entered college, but he moved to Chicago where, at some point, he ran into an old high school friend and married her, having one child, my cousin A, whom I met Monday in Virginia Beach. Mickey and his wife separated when A was only about 6 months old. A’s mother remarried and until she was a teenager, A had no idea that her “father” was her stepfather. She was shocked, as you could imagine.

Mickey may or may not have gone to college, but at some point, he was drafted into the U.S. Army. The son of devoted Communists, and a Communist (at least as to his thinking) himself, he was determined not to serve and he left the country, moving to Japan. In Japan, he met and married K’s mother and K was born. The story seems to be, however, that the FBI (CIA? ___?) got wind that Mickey was in Japan and was coming after him (because he was a Communist? A draft dodger?). According to K, Mickey was “smuggled” out of Japan, and he wound up in Sweden where he was granted political asylum. He and K’s mother were also divorced.

(As an aside, K’s mother, who had two older children from a previous marriage, was left a single mother in Japan with three children from two marriages. Presumably because this was not socially comfortable, she left Japan with her children and wound up – I don’t know why – in Denmark.)

K grew up in Denmark knowing (she thought) that her American father was somewhere in America. When she was 15, she finally confronted her mother to see if she knew exactly where he was. Her mother told her that her father was in Sweden, not only in Sweden but in Malmo, which was a short ferry ride from Denmark. K, clearly resourceful, went to the Swedish embassy in Copenhagen, told them she had a father in Malmo, and asked if they could help her locate him. It turned out to be pretty easy. They opened a telephone book and there he was. She called him.

I am not sure what happened on this call, but it was decided that she would go and visit him and, at age 16, she took the ferry to Malmo and met Mickey for the first time. She was clear, I believe, that he did not want to get into too close a relationship, but they kept in touch.

My chronology may be a bit off, but at some point (and it might have been before they met), Mickey decided to travel to China to study, which he did. After he came back to Sweden, he went back to school (I think he already had at least one degree at this point) and got a Ph.D. in Sinology, the study of China and he became quite well known as a scholar of China (certainly from a left wing, Communist perspective).

Then three things happened (my chronology is missing here): (1) A., who hadn’t seen her father since she was six months old, and therefore had no memory of him, called him (her stepbrother found Mickey by first contacting K – I don’t remember how this came about) on the telephone and had a four hour conversation with him that was not exactly satisfactory. He made it clear that he didn’t want to meet her; she had no further contact except by email, (2) Mickey got remarried, had a daughter (F, who lives in Paris, and who I didn’t know existed until this week), and quickly once again got divorced, and (3) when he was in his 40s, Mickey decided to go to Medical School, which he did, and he spent the last 30 plus years of his life as a practicing psychiatrist in Stockholm.

By everyone’s account (including mine from my 70 year old memory), Mickey (who at various points in his life went by Mickey, Michael, Michael Henry, M. Henry, M. Henri, and Henri) had a difficult and volatile personality. As I recall sort of a bully, he was described to me as someone who liked to belittle others (great for a psychiatrist), but could also be warm, and domineering. He was clearly brilliant and – I am told – spoke at least 10 languages (A thought it was 13), kept very intellectual friendships and certainly kept to his left wing , Communist views.

His sister S, who is one year younger than me and whom we met yesterday, is a very different person. She seems quiet, she is not a Communist, I don’t think she ever married – certainly has no children – and has lived in Virginia Beach (as a “loner”, she says) for the past 50 years. I know nothing about the third sister. That’s for another day.

But let it be known that Edie and I had a fantastic time with K, A and S, yesterday, and hope to see more of them somewhere sometime. And – in case you were wondering – before this weekend, K had only met S one other time, and A had never met her. And, although my St. Louis family was very big, S has no recollection of (couldn’t tell you the names of) anyone there except for my grandfather (her doctor) and her own grandparents. Her grandfather, by the way, my great Uncle Louis, died when I was 4, and I have no recollection of him whatsoever, and her grandmother, my great Aunt Annie. died in the 1950s.

I expect A, K and S will read this blog and correct it.

It was a brief trip, but it was worth three posts. The first was yesterday. This is the second. The third will come tomorrow morning. The post tomorrow will be about the family members we met in Virginia Beach yesterday – fascinating, to say the least. Today’s will be about our two day trip, so that you can say you were with us. Yesterday was the Chrysler Museum.

The Virginia Tidewater area is not one that we know well. In fact, we hardly know it at all. Some years ago, Edie and I took a four or five day trip down the Eastern Shore, staying a night or two in Ogoncock VA, just south of Assateague, then going through the fascinating bridge/tunnel that connects the southern tip of the Eastern Shore of Virginia to the Tidewater area and terra firma. We visited the Mariners’ Museum in Hampton Roads, where they have restored the Monitor and have so much more to look at, and the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, where we only had time to look at part of it and wanted to come back. 

The trip to Virginia Beach to see three cousins, none of whom we had ever met in person, and one of whom was visiting the US from her home in Denmark, gave us the opportunity to come back.

GPS told us the trip would take a little less than three and a half hours, and that was about it. For those who don’t know, you drive south on I-95 until you almost get to Richmond, where you take a Beltway like road to I-64, which takes you the rest of the way. Not the most exciting trip, but that makes it easy. High-speed, no stop all the way. We only saw one accident on the trip – a five car pile up on I-95, near Fredericksburg. It slowed us down and gave us something to gape at, but I think everyone was OK. 

Between Richmond and the Tidewater, you pass Williamsburg, Yorktown and Jamestown. We took one of the Williamsburg exits, found a restaurant called The Huntsman Grill, and went in. Weird place. It’s its own building, and we parked and walked in. The hostess said something like: ”We can seat you if you want, but it is going to be some time before we can get to you, because we have some large parties and are pretty busy, but if you want to wait, okay.” 

That was a new one. So I asked if she meant 5 minutes or 2 hours, and she said “about 10 minutes”, so we were seated in a booth, and almost immediately the waiter came, took our fancy order (one tuna on wheat; one chicken salad on wheat) and it came within 5 more minutes. On the way out, I told the hostess, who didn’t seem surprised, but said she just didn’t want us to be disappointed it if took long. 

The decor of the Huntsman Grill, by the way, is plain, plain, plain, except for the walls, which have the heads of all sorts of deer placed at random, and shelves filled with wild turkeys. One of the stags was special – he had Christmas lights on his antlers, another was cold – he had a scarf on, and a third had bad vision – he was wearing glasses.

Back on the road. We got to the Museum, had forgotten it was free, and saw the two special exhibits, the full second floor, and – at a trot – the extensive glass collection. I posted some photos in yesterday’s post, and will put another or two at the bottom of this one.

One special exhibit was a traveling exhibit of the photos of Paul McCartney, who – I had no idea – spent a lot of time with his camera, both as the Beatles traveled, and when he was just chilling. Some of them were quite good, most of them were quite interesting, but the big, big exhibit is probably too big, big. The second special exhibit shows part of the collection of one of the museum’s current benefactors. Some interesting pieces, but if they weren’t benefactors, I don’t know that there would have been this special exhibit. (I say that like I know what I am saying). 

We enjoyed ourselves. They do have a lot to see in their collection and, I think, the next time we might concentrate on the glass. Sort of like going to Corning, but a little closer and without the enormous store.

Another 30 minutes and we were in Virginia Beach for the first time. It’s a nice beach. Even though it was January, there were people walking and jogging, and there were dogs. Nice. The main street of Virginia Beach (and maybe because it’s January) did look a bit tawdry and forlorn. It certainly is not a spiffy place – at least not where we were.

We checked into the Hampton Inn South, were given our room keys and then told that we couldn’t stay beyond tonight even if we wanted to, because the hotel was closing after breakfast the next day for renovations. I asked if that meant we could take the furniture. The answer was no.

We skipped the hotel’s restaurant (a pizzeria with “more than pizza) and went across the street to the Side Street Cantina (just off Atlantic Ave on 11th), and walked into a place that looked plainer than even the Huntsman Grill, and wondered if we made a mistake. Everything in the restaurant was hard – i.e, there was no fabric to be seen anywhere. There were bizarre factory made skeleton head pieces all around, and a mural on the wall feature Alfred E. Neuman, holding a sign which said in Spanish: the point of no return. There were a dozen or so TV screens with various football games, and a large bar that actually seemed to extend into two different rooms. There were other customers.

We ordered margaritas, which were a little weak, we thought. (But what can you expect for $4.50?) The food is Mexican/Peruvian, so we started with a Peruvian cerviche – ahi tuna, served with mango and thinly sliced red onions. An absolute treat that could have been served with pride at the best of restaurants. We then had vegetable fajitas – there were enough vegetables to last a week or two (or for some people, maybe three), nicely cooked, and the tortillas were very fresh and tasty. And it was served with rice, refried beans, salad, sour cream and guacamole.

We spoke with the owner, who was from the Mexican state of Jalisco, and asked him about the margaritas and the different types of tequilas which we could have ordered. We then decided to split another one, and asked him for his favorite. It was with a Don Julio tequila and with orange juice and was very, very nice. I looked on the Don Julio website and saw that it was (I think) a Don Julio Sunrise, with Don Julio Blanco tequila, orange juice and grenadine. I see on line that Don Julio Blanco sells for about $40.

The next morning, we met our cousins at First Watch. There are three First Watch restaurants in Virginia Beach – this one was on General Booth Avenue, near where our Virginia Beach cousin lives. General William Booth, as you may know, was the founder of the Salvation Army, not a Confederate general. He was English and – some say – his mother, whose maiden name was Moss – was Jewish. (You would think this could be pinned down, but apparently not.)

There is no First Watch, by far my favorite breakfast/brunch restaurant in Washington. The closest ones are in Rockville and in Falls Church – both too far to go for breakfast. I have been to First Watch in Bowie MD (45 minutes from here), Overland Park KS, St. Louis MO, and Indianapolis IN – for those who have the need to know.

This is where we met our cousins (see tomorrow’s blog post tomorrow). We didn’t order until about noon, so I skipped the egg dishes and went to the Brooklyn Breakfast Sandwich, with some trepidation. But it was as good as the ahi tuna/mango cervice from the night before. (Until I looked this morning on the website and saw it was 930 calories – and that’s before the buttered grits which came with it)

Here is the description: ”shaved pastrami, Gruyere cheese, house roasted onions, over easy cage free egg, house pickled red onions, arugula, mayo and Dijon mustard on a griddled everything seasoned brioche bun”.

The best.

Of course, our ride back was slowed a bit by falling snow (took us an extra hour), but the highways were clear, there were no long slowdowns, and we made it back before nightfall. Once in DC, however, wow!! Except for major roads (like Connecticut Avenue, which was fine), the roads were a mess and putting the break on at stop signs seemed to work only part of the time. Am I just out of practice since we haven’t had snow for years, is there something lacking about my Prius in snow, or was it just the way it was? I don’t know.

About 5 inches fell on our house. I am under instructions not to shovel, must I must say it’s calling me.

We drove to Virginia Beach yesterday, to meet up with three distat-ish cousins today (more about that tomorrow). We stopped at the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk. And I took some pictures. So no heavy reading today.

let’s start with an Egyptian glass eye, to insert in a statue that is over 2000 years old.

There is an extraordinary glass collection (rooms and rooms with shelves and shelves), and there is a large studio where they offer classes, and have workshops and the like.

This is by Gustave Dore, who I know mainly as a book illustrator….Dante’s Inferno and the like. This oil depicts a new recruit on his first day in the monastery. Not what he expected?

These are two (of four) that were entered into a contest to decorate the Pension Building (now the Building Museum in Washington) showing the participation of African Americans in the country’s early wars. Who knew?

So was this painting serious or a spoof? I don’t remember looking at the signage, but…. let’s set a date at Mt. Vernon for a disinterment ceremony so we can find out the truth.

I wasn’t really planning to, but I wound up devoting part of yesterday afternoon to Peter Thiel, and part to Aleksandr Kwasniewski. Let me explain.

First, Peter Thiel. Let’s get the basics out of the way. He is 56, he is gay, he was born in Germany, he went to Stanford for undergraduate and law school, he practiced law with Sullivan and Cromwell for a spell, he founded PayPal, and he’s worth about $10 billion. Thiel is a conservative (maybe) and a libertarian (maybe), and he has been a large contributor to conservative political causes. He was a big supporter of Ron Paul (that tells you something) and gave mucho dinero to the Trump campaigns and to Republicans in general. In 2022, says Wikipedia, he gave over $20 million to Republican candidates, but in 2023, says the same Wikipedia, it was reported (by Barton Gellman of The Atlantic) that Thiel had soured on politics, and wouldn’t be spreading his money around during the 2024 campaign.

In 1995, when still in his 20s, he wrote a book called The Diversity Myth, which has, I believe, recently been updated and republished; it deals with anti-DEI and anti-wokeness beliefs. Last October, Thiel was a presenter at the annual Roger Scruton Memorial Lecture Series at Oxford. I watched the lecture, more or less, while riding on my stationary bike.

My first conclusion was: Peter Thiel is nuts. At the end of the lecture, I wanted to ask a question. It would have been straightforward. I would like to have asked: ”Mr. Thiel, I had hoped you would enlighten me on your thoughts on the DEI movement and on wokeness. I understand that you are in opposition to both. But I must admit that I did not understand one word (I recognized the words, yes, but that does not mean understood the. m) that you said. Could you please explain, in just a few sentences, what you were trying to get across?”

The moderator of the program was Oxford philosopher John Gray. I can’t say that I understood Gray any better than I understood Thiel, but I will give Gray the benefit of the doubt, and conclude that his lack of clarity came about because he had to pretend that he understood what Thiel had said.

I am not going to bore you with any of what Thiel or Gray said (you can go to YouTube for that), but will leave you with the thought that the only intriguing part of their post-lecture discussion was when Thiel mentioned Russian cosmism (with Gray nodding up and down), a late 19th/early 20th century Russian movement that suggested that the goals of science were (a) interplanetary travel, (b) the extension of human life indefinitely and (c) the resurrection of the dead (all of the dead), as a matter of fairness. (Maybe I should also tell you that Thiel did talk a lot about the high price of housing, which he says is a result of wokeness, and that maybe people should move out of cities into the Outback, or its equivalent, and connect with the rest of the world via the Internet, as presumably Amazon prime.)

Okay, on to Kwasniewski. Alexsandr Kwasniewski was the president of Poland from 1995 to 2005. I probably knew a little about him 20 years ago, but I have forgotten all of that (clearly), and needed to start from scratch. He was a progressive (woke, I don’t know) president, who led Poland’s modernization, and guided its admission into both NATO and the European Union, and governed during the rewriting of the Polish Constitution. He was in his 40s as president, and today is a relatively young (speaking for myself) 69. His post-presidency has been the Polish equivalence of Jimmy Carter’s post-presidency, I think, leading many international efforts to promote peace and other good things. Any flaws in his post-political life? Oh, yes, like Hunter, he became a Director of Burisma.

Where did my interest in AK (let’s just call him AK) come from? The non-profit Carpe Librum is a peripatetic used book store, whose profits support the DC public schools. They are holding a four day Martin Luther King Weekend sale near us, in the 4400 block of Connecticut Avenue, near Van Ness. I purchased six books – all (of course) signed by the author. One of the books, titled We Won The Future is by AK, and contains a generous inscription to a Catholic priest. AK taught for a while at Jesuit Georgetown University, but apparently (again, says Wikipedia) describes himself as an atheist, although that is hard to believe for a Polish politician.

The book itself contains English translations of various of his speeches and pronouncements as President, running about 900 pages and weighing about 900 pounds. It was printed in Warsaw in 2008, and published by a private foundation AK established. What’s interesting is that I can’t find any reference to the book anywhere – not on sites where books are sold, not on sites where books are described, and not on sites belonging to universities and university libraries. Usually, when that happens, the book is 100 years old and of no real interest. Surprised me.

That’s it for today.

The United States was determined to keep out of World War I. It turned out to be impossible because of continued German attacks on American shipping vessels heading to Europe. The Germans had made it clear that they did not respect international sea travel when they attacked and sunk the Lusitania in 1915 – a British ship which had approximately 2000 passengers, of whom about 1200 were drowned, including over 100 Americans. While the United States, with a strong pacifist policy (you could even say “America First”, although I don’t think that term had yet been invented), did not let the sinking of the Lusitania draw it into the war, the fact that this was not an isolated attack, but one of a continuing and growing series of attacks, did do the trick.

This brings us to the Houtis, and their attacks on ships in the Red Sea, disrupting all commercial travel to and through the Suez Canal under the guise of disrupting traffic to Israel (only a small part of Red Sea cargo goes to Israel), forcing ships to travel much greater distances around the southern coast of Africa, and raising both insurance rates and prices. The Houtis, a Shia group backed by Iran which has been engaged with its Sunni rivals in a highly destructive war in Yemen (a war which in fact has been like Gaza on steroids, but ignored by the international protesters), have a lot of nerve attacking worldwide commercial shipping, don’t they? After all, they are not the Kaiser’s Germany. But they are firing Iranian weapons and are totally backed by Iran, just like Hamas and Hezbollah. One can easily make the claim that Iran = Hamas = Hezbollah = the Houtis, so that while Iran (in the guise of Hamas) attacked Israel, Iran (in the guise of the Houtis) has now attacked each of the countries engaged in shipping through the Suez Canal.

This cannot be ignored. And, recently, the United States and the United Kingdom, with several other allied nations, have been attacking rocket sites in Yemen used by the Houtis in their attacks. We don’t know what will come of this on the international front. Maybe nothing. Maybe a wider and long lasting war, involving the U.S. Can’t say.

But….one thing we know domestically. Like every thing else, it will help Trump and hurt Biden. You can hear it now – he opened the border and he got us into war. How can you win with that being the Trump line?

If Trump is our next president, what then? Does Trump continue this war? He wants to save Israel – but at what cost? We know that Trump will do some drastic things at the southern border. We know that Trump will throw Ukraine under the rug, and probably Taiwan, too. Trump’s American First policy will be a return to the 20th century American isolation policies. But they didn’t work in the 20th century; they just postponed the inevitable and made victories much harder. And in a 21st century world, my guess is that they will do the same, only more so. But we will (sadly) probably see.

By the way, I just watched Michael Smerconish’s show – he had as a guest someone who is “expert” in migration issues, and who said two things of importance: (1) that fleeing poverty or climate change does not make on eligible for asylum under American law (I think we all know that), and (2) that Trump’s border policies were really not very effective, that the Biden policies are not that different from the Trump policies, in part because various court decisions have limited the flexibility of border policies, but that the Republicans will milk this for all its worth and bamboozle the American public one more time . (Of course, that was a loosey-goosey paraphrase, but that’s what I heard between the lines.)

Let’s finish with this: I have figured out a way, I think, to talk about books I am reading without any Spoiler Alerts. You do it by writing about the book, when you are only part way through it, and you can’t give away the conclusion, because you have no idea what the conclusion will bring. I am reading The Island of Crimea by Vassily Aksyonov. Remember him? (My guess is that your answer is “no”) Soviet writer who was able to come to the United States in 1980 and live here the rest of his life. And when I saw “here”, I mean “here”. He lived and taught in the Baltimore Washington area for almost 30 years.

This is the first of his books I have read. It was published in 1983. I am not mentioning the book because of its story line, but because of its setting. The book presupposes that in 1917, when the Bolsheviks took over Russia and created the USSR, Crimea (which the book posits as an island, not as a peninsula) remained independent, under the control of the Russian White Army and eventually a prosperous, democratic, western oriented country. During the first 30 or 40 years of the USSR, there was virtually no contact between Russia and Crimea, but liberalization of USSR policies (probably in the 1960s) allowed for communication, commerce and travel between the two. Now, in the 1970s (I think), when the book is situated, there have grown up in Crimea, whose population is virtually all ethnically Russian, a group of intellectuals and politicians who are looking for a stronger tie between the two, a joint future, perhaps one country with two different governmental or economic systems. 

In effect, we are reading the story of Taiwan (or Hong Kong) and mainland China – 40 years before their possible combination might take place. Aksyonov was obviously prescient in writing this book. I will see how it turns out. Then, I can stop worrying about what will happen to Taiwan. I will know.

I remember when I asked my granddaughter some time ago: ”So, Joan, what state do you think Des Moines, Iowa is in?” And she thought a minute or so, looked querulous at me, raised her head and said “Maybe Ohio?”

Yes, most people don’t spend much time thinking about Iowa. But then, Brigadoon-like, every four years Iowa appears out of nowhere. That’s because it’s time for the Iowa caucuses. 

Now, the Iowa caucuses (which take the place of a primary election) is Iowa’s way of determining who the major parties will run for president of the United States (and other federal offices). Traditionally, it is the first event of the primary season, and the candidates spend untold hours trying to woo the state’s voters. Ron DeSantis, for example, realizing that there is no reason for him to be in Florida (the state he is supposedly leading as governor) and there is no need for him to be present in the lives of his quite young children, brags that he has been campaigning in all 99 Iowa counties, and apparently he has spent abut $15 million along the way. 

But let it be known that I have only been in 3 Iowa counties in my entire life, and that I have spent probably no more than a total of $100 or $200 in the state (and that some time ago), and my guess is that he won’t get that many more votes from Iowa Republicans than I will. (He is now polling at about 13%)

But what is important is that, IMHO, the Iowa caucuses are totally meaningless. Look at the following would be political leaders: Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, Ted Cruz, Dick Gephardt, Tom Harkin, Pete Buttegieg. They were all caucus winners. But this is the start of the presidential campaign and the winner will certainly get some notoriety and gain some momentum.

The Republican caucus will take place on Monday. Monday is Martin Luther King Day, and you can argue the propriety of having the caucus on that day both ways. It’s an insult to Rev King and a diversion from the reason for the holiday. Or it’s a good time to have the caucuses, because so many people are not required to go to work that day. It also might be relevant that, particularly for Iowa Republicans, there are few for whom the holiday might have any special meaning. For the Republicans, about 90% of caucus goers traditionally are White, and the majority of the non-Whites are Latino, and not Black. Only about 4% of the State is African-American, and they vote almost exclusively Democratic.

The Democrats this year, by the way, are not having the traditional caucus. In order to increase participation, they are having a mail-in primary, and the voting will not take place until February.

In order to participate at a caucus, you must be a registered party member, and you must show up. There is a caucus in each precinct in the State, and that means that there are almost 1700 separate caucuses being held the same day. Each of these caucuses, which will include local party meanings and campaign speeches by candidates or supporters, may be short or may be long. The culmination will be a secret ballot to determine the winner.

This year, there is a special wrinkle. It is going to be cold. Now you say, well it’s Iowa in the winter. Isn’t it always cold? And the answer is “yes”, but not like this. I checked the forecast for Des Moines, Dubuque, Cedar Rapids and a few other spots. No place in Iowa is predicted to rise above 0 degrees Fahrenheit on Monday. The high throughout the state will be from -5 to -3 degrees. The lows will be in the range of -11 to -14 degrees Fahrenheit. And, in most places there will be snow on the ground. What will this do to turnout, especially – I guess – among older voters, who often make up the bulk of the caucuses. We will have to see.

The latest polling shows Trump at about 55%, Haley at about 20%, DeSantis at 13%, and the rest divided among others. I think the polling is all done with participants who are “likely caucus goers”, but I guess I am not really sure that all are done that way.

Iowa is a red, red state these days. Trump won it, 53-45 in 2020, a margin of 8%, when he lost the overall race. And in 2016, he had a 9 point lead over Hillary Clinton. But Clinton and Obama each carried the State twice, and Gore carried it once. Why now does it appear so red? I am not sure, except that a lot of people have moved out of Iowa over the last decade and I would bet that the overwhelming percentage of those who left were Democratic, not Republican voters. Just a guess.

We will see what happens on Monday. We will see how Ron DeSantis, who has given so much energy and money to his campaign, will finally do. You all know “The Music Man”, set in Iowa. You know what they say there: you gotta know the territory. We will see if that’s true.