Art is 80

As the Nats’ baseball season ends today, we look back as the Nationals, who we hoped would be better, end their season just about equal to how they ended their year in 2023. Both years, there were times (early in the year) when things looked good, then performance dipped and ownership decided to trade veteran players for youngsters, and the team pretty much tanked the rest of the year. Now, we look forward to 2025 with a very young team, but a team with very young players with another year under their belts and the possibility of their having matured that much more. We look forward to the return of three players who were injured most of this year – pitchers Travis Williams and Josiah Gray, and outfielder Stone Garrett.

But enough of that (I could go on and on). Let’s talk about baseball in a more general sense, and about a film, “Hank Greenberg”, we just saw, and a book “Jackie Robinson and the Integration of Baseball” that I just read.

Aviva Kempner’s film “Hank Greenberg” was released 25 years ago. Now, it has been remastered (I have no idea what that really means or accomplishes, but it does sound good) and re-released with a brief ending featuring …….. but maybe that’s supposed to be a surprise.

Hank Greenberg was the Detroit Tigers’ first basement from 1930 to 1946 (with four years off for a little thing called World War II), and then played for the Pittsburgh Pirates for a year. He was a rarity in at least three ways – he was very tall for a baseball player of his time (6’4″), he was really good (well, he hit really well), and he was Jewish. He grew up in the Bronx and he spent most of his career in Michigan.

Aviva Kempner grew up in Detroit. The stories about the relationship of Greenberg and the Detroit Jewish community are legend, and many are retold in the film. The relationship between Greenberg and his home borough of The Bronx (and in truth the rest of New York City) are also legend. For the Jewish community, a star baseball player was more than a novelty – it was proof that the Jews were integrating into American society. And it didn’t hurt that Greenberg was clearly an exceptionally nice guy.

The film tells the story of the relationship of Greenberg to the greater Jewish community. But my reaction was similar to the reaction I had when I watched the film “The Catskills”, which I wrote about a week or so ago. Growing up Jewish in St. Louis, I didn’t know anything about the Catskills, so the film, on that level, did not connect with me. The same thing is true of Hank Greenberg.

Yes, he was out of baseball by the time I started following baseball. But that didn’t stop the Jews of Detroit remembering him and talking about him. In St. Louis, we talked about Yogi Berra. Yogi Berra grew up in St. Louis. He never played for a local team – he was always the Yankee catcher (and of course, his background was Italian, not Jewish), but we talked about him all the time in St. Louis. He was ours. (I remember the story of when his wife asked him, late in his life, where he’d like to be buried. “St. Louis where you grew up, New Jersey where we live, or New York where you played?” Berra’s response: “Surprise me!”.) I imagine Greenberg is to Detroit and the Bronx as Berra is to St. Louis and New York.

But it’s a very, very good film, and one of the things you learn is how pervasive, before World War II, antisemitism was in this country. Not only antisemitism, but prejudice against other ethnic minorities as well. And how it was politically correct in those days to use pejorative ethnic or religious adjectives or nouns to insult fellow Americans. This was true on the baseball field, as it was elsewhere. (My favorite quip from the film was not on the field, but when Greenberg was in Army basic training, a famous trainee, and the sergeant in change of his unit said that he didn’t want any “Goldbergs or Rosenbergs” in his group. Hank said “you know, I am a Greenberg”, to which the sergeant responded: “I didn’t say anything about Greenbergs, did I?”)

After seeing “Hank Greenberg”, I read “Jackie Robinson…..”, a book by NPR’s Scott Simon that came out just a few years after Aviva Kempner’s film. It’s a short book, and clearly not the most detailed or nuanced of the many books about Robinson, but it serves its purpose. Its purpose is in showing the racism in American professional sports, and especially baseball, and the difficulties in, but the necessity of, integrating the sport. What Hank Greenberg went through with antisemitic insults was, frankly, nothing like what Jackie Robinson went through. And Robinson’s perseverance was remarkable; his ability to hold his temper was one of the reasons Branch Rickey chose him as the first Black signed by a major league team. (And the fact that Robinson and Greenberg felt allied in their fight against prejudice is highlighted in both the book and the film.)

Seeing this film and reading this book are a good way to see American racism and nativism at work. If you get a chance, and want a third leg for this chair, go to the Negro League museum in Kansas City (MO), where they trace the remarkable Negro League’s chronology and, at the same time, the course of anti-Black racism in the country. It will give you a way to get an understanding that might be harder to find elsewhere, particularly if you are of an age that did not live through the time prior to the Civil Rights movement’s successes. Yes, they were major successes, although today sometimes it is hard to see them.

One last thing. Hank Greenberg was 6’4″. Yogi Berra was only 5’7″. Yes, Yogi was small for a player in his day, but Greenberg was a mountain compared with most. He stood out when standing next to fellow major leaders. Today? I looked at the Nationals’ roster (assuming each team is basically the same): The Nationals have six pitchers 6’4″ or taller, and 2 position players. That is about 1/3 of their roster. As to players under 6′? They have 5 (3 are 5’11”).

That is a major change. Maybe 1/3 of the team is Black today. No one is Jewish. But almost half of the team is Hispanic. One quarter of the team was born outside of the United States.

Yes, time have changed.

(A friend sent me Friedman’s article along with his high praise for the article. This is my response to him.)

This is in response to Tom Friedman’s column in the October 25, 2024 New York Times, titled “Why Everything Is Suddenly Spiraling for Israel”.  Friedman faults the Biden administration for not being tough enough on Israel, and says that, if it had been, the Gaza situation might have been quickly resolved, and the problems in the West Bank and Lebanon would not have increased, and there could be arrangements made (with the help of moderate Arab countries) to replace the Palestinian Authority leadership and finally move into a two state situation.

I wouldn’t give this article high praise.  And Tom Friedman does tend to write the same article over and over and over. And over.

He somehow ignores Israeli democracy and puts the United States in charge of Israel’s foreign policy.  Yes, most Israelis dislike Netanyahu, and most Israelis are frustrated (to say the least) with the lingering hostage situation, but most Israelis do seem to favor the war aims. 

To think that, had Biden acted differently, all of these pieces would fall together like Friedman writes is to reach a conclusion without any substantial evidence that it is, in fact, reachable.

Both Hamas (and allies) and Israel have the same aims – getting rid of the other and taking their territory. This has always been the goal of Hamas and probably most Palestinians. It has only recently become the aim of many Israelis, but now it is.  They were both playing a status quo game until Hamas had “success” in their raid way beyond anything they anticipated.  Israel’s responding with an attack could be anticipated.  The assumption then is that there would be a hostage for peace (and maybe some Palestinian prisoners in Israel) arrangement, but Hamas refused to release most of the hostages, obviously feeling their oats.

This led to a change of thinking in the right wing of Netanyahu’s right wing government, and among much of the general Israeli population.  They thought that “this is enough” and “we have to end this once and for all”.  That led to (1) increasing the war in Gaza to so destroy the Gaza infrastructure and make it basically uninhabitable and potentially unreconstructable in the near future, (2) putting pressure on West Bank Palestinians to make their life there as miserable as possible, and (3) finally, a full scale attack on Hezbollah. My educated guess is that, with the exception of (2) above, these actions are welcomed by most Israelis.  (I am not ignoring the massive demonstrations for ceasefires and hostage releases – but I think it is pretty clear that a ceasefire will not lead to hostage releases at this time, so while the demonstrations are understandable, they are doomed to being ineffective.) The goal is to eliminate threats to Israel from its neighbors and that means some form of Israeli control from the river to the sea.  Whether that control demands reduction of Gaza and West Bank populations is a good question; that is why (2) above is most controversial.

But the Israeli coalition is implementing (1), (2) and (3), not just (1) and (3). The coalition understands that the world would condemn them, no matter what they did, so they discount that.  They hope that Iran will be afraid to retaliate directly for fear of an attack on Tehran and its nuclear facilities. They hope that they could really destroy the power of Hamas and Hezbollah with Israeli military strength.  They hope that the moderate Arab countries will stay silent and stay out of it, as they pretty much have.  So far, all this has worked.

Netanyahu will either be successful or not in his war effort.  Someone else will most likely wind up leading post-war Israel. We don’t know what Israel will look like then, and we don’t know what policies will be put into play. I assume Israel won’t be destroyed (but of course this is possible). Assuming there is at that time a stronger Israel and a weaker “Palestine”, I think the moderate Arab states will be ready to work with Israel even closer (and with the remaining Palestinians) once the Iranian backed terrorist groups are out of the picture. This is why they are remaining silent during all of this.

As to Friedman’s belief that, if only the Biden administration had been firmer with Israel.  I don’t think this is really possible.  Remember (if I remember correctly) that Congress (maybe just the House, again I don’t really remember), after Biden said he was going to hold back certain powerful bombs from Israel, passed something to require giving Israel all the weaponry it needed and that Congress had previously approved.  There are American political interests to take into account, which Friedman seems to ignore.  There are strong American interests asking Biden to be more supportive of Israel, just as there are those who want him to pressure more for a cease fire, or who want him to be more vocal in supporting the Palestinians.

It is obviously a risky game that Netanyahu is playing.  The explosive walkie talkies and pagers, and attacking political leaders at the highest level, is very atypical and may lead to reciprocal attempts.  But it is possible that it will turn out to be a risk worth taking.

The loss of life is horrible, as is the property destruction, and the potentially forced migration.  But in the minds of the Israelis, who feel under existential threat, these are secondary issues.  And I think the same is true in the minds of the moderate Arab states.

Before October 7, and even before the attitude of Hamas in negotiating hostage release, I would have written this differently.  But now I plead ignorance as to what the right policy is. I am not sure Israel is wrong.  (That does not mean that I support Netanyahu or Ben Gvir or Smotrich generally, but on this issue, I think that the support within Israel goes well beyond their wing of the coalition).  And, assuming Israel itself doesn’t become victimized by overpowering air strikes, it will recover from the current social and economic problems relatively quickly  after the war ends. 

If bombs start falling on Israeli military basis or greater Tel Aviv, then everything changes there will be all out war in the Middle East.  The only safe city, I would guess, would be Jerusalem, which I don’t think anyone would seriously bomb.

If the Times ever wants to replace Friedman with me as a commentator…….I demand equal pay.

I promised you there was a lot to learn walking up 16th Street,  and we are still really at the beginning. Only three blocks today, and more things of importance, perhaps, than everything we saw on Rhode Island Avenue put together. Or maybe not.

On the previous two blocks, we saw two hotels, the Hay- Adams and the St. Regis.

We start this walk with the Capitol Hilton, a 500 room hotel that was built in the early 1950s and fills the entire block between K and L.

I was having breakfast in the coffee shop of this hotel with an out of town client on September 11, 2001, when I learned of the planes hitting the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

You cross L Street, pass a large, modern office building, and then you get to a mansion built in 1910 but sold to the tsarist Russian government in 1913 to serve as the Russian embassy. The embassy is now housed on a large, secure campus several miles away, but this building remains the home of the Russian ambassador, over 100 years since it first housed someone in that position.

Next to the Russian building, you find the University Club, a private club with a restaurant and

squash courts. I just read that the initiation fee is only $1000, and the basic monthly fee is $172. Assuming this is accurate, call me amazed. The last time I was in this building was a few months ago for a 60th reunion college class luncheon. How was the food for that lunch? Not good. Maaybe $172 a month is actually too much.

Immediately to the north, you find the American Chemical Society

And then the headquarters of the National Education Association.

We are now getting close to the end of our three block walk. But wait……we have only done the east side of 16th Street. We will now go back to K Street and look at the west side of 16th Street. It is different.

You start with a typical Washington office building filled with lawyers and with a K Street address, but a 17th Street front door (no photo). You then have a 100 year old building, which is now a 14 unit office condominium building, followed by the first of the many old, historic residential buildings we will see as we proceed.

These are the buildings across the street from the Hilton.

But after we cross L Street, things get even more interesting. Our first stop is at the Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center, where you can go to their small museum about Oman, take Arabic classes, or research in its library.

Unfortunately,  the woman who runs the museum had a conflict yesterday and the museum was closed. But I didn’t care, because up the block, I could go to the equally small Chinese American Museum.

Alas, closed for a private event.

We next pass the large three building headquarters of the National Geographic Society, which has its own, larger museum. Alas, again. The entire complex is under renovation. Nothing will be open until 2026. The photo below shows what I could see over the construction fence.

So we continue. Two major Hispanic organizations. First, Unidos, the largest Latino civil rights organization, and then the home of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute, which provides educational programming for young Hispanic future leaders.

So we have Arabs, Hispanics and Asians on this block. What is left?

Greeks!

One building is left on this block. Two proud lions guard its entrance. No signs give away its occupants. 1222 16th Street. What is it?

It’s the American Academy of Achievement. (I’m tired. You will have to Google it.)

We are almost done. But on the block north of M, we have two more hotels. The first is the Jefferson, often paired with the Hay-Adams as the best two historic hotels in the city, priced a tad below (but more expensive than the Hilton). You could probably get a room here for $400 for tonight.

We now get to the Marriott Courtyard at the next corner. Anything interesting about this? Of course. This building used to be the headquarters of the National Rifle Association before they fled to far away Virginia, maybe 30 years ago.

And we are done. But where are we?  We have been here before. We are at the intersection of 16th and Rhode Island. Back at Scott Circle. Hello, Winfield. The two hotels and the good general are below.

This will be a short one today because my time is short, and I have to keep my iron man status – this is approximately my 680th consecutive blog post. How many games did Cal Ripken play without missing one? 2600 or so? When I get to 2500, I will tell you and we can all work together to see if I can best him. It will mean about seven and a half years without missing a day. Then Art will be about 89. What do you think?

I listened last night to Stephanie Ruhle’s interview of Kamala Harris, and heard Harris’ very logical explanation of how she will handle the economy. For those who have criticized her as not being specific enough, this interveiw provides a good response. If I had a chance to ask her questions on this topic, I would ask her several very broad ones, starting with : (1) How did you determine that the positions she is taking (on taxes, housing, tariffs, etc.) are the best ones? and (2) What have you done to determine the effect of these various positions on the economic status of the country, including the national debt? I would do this to make sure that she has a basis for her positions, other than what she believes to be politically the right positions to take as part of her campaign. I would then ask her about Congress. How does she expect Congress to react to her proposals? What happens to these proposals if the Republicans continue to hold the House? What if the Republicans take control of the Senate? What if the Democrats control the House and/or the Senate, but don’t have the 60 votes needed in the Senate (which they undoubtedly won’t) to overcome a filibuster? And how do you prioryour proposals?

At any rate, her proposals make much more sense that the Trump proposals to cut everyone’s taxes and put tariffs on everything coming from overseas. This means that the tax cuts will be at least somewhat offset by the inflation caused by the tariffs, that there will be retribution affecting American exports, and that the national debt will continue to rise. And the idea that John Deere will have a 200% tariff on tractors built in Mexico, when that would violate the Trump revised NAFTA agreement is of course absurd.

At any event, I thought Harris gave an excellent speech on her economic policy yesterday in Pittsburgh before the Ruhle interview, and while I am sure that parts of her program can be, and will be, picked apart by critics, I think she is on track.

She is also on track, of course, on Ukraine, as opposed to the unbelievable speech by Trump who basically stated “elect me, and Ukraine gets no more money”, Ukraune is totally ruined and wonrecover for hundreds of years, and who has refused to meet with Zelenskyy while he is in New York for the UN General Assembly assembly.

I continue to expect that every time Trump and/or Vance open their mouth(s), they will lose a few more supporters, and the election will continue to favor the Democrats. But we can’t be sure. As I have always said, the one thing that Trump says that I agree with is that American voters can be very stupid. At least for now, we have to live with that.

OK, I am going to stop here. It’s just a busy Thursday.

Our first stroll up 16th Street will only cover two blocks. “What?”, you say. It looks like three – H to I to J to K. But you forget. There is no J in Washington’s street alphabet. There is only speculation as to why that is the case. You can look it up. We don’t speculate here.

The first two blocks of 16th Street each contain a church and a fancy hotel. So let’s start there.

This is the Hay-Adams, built in the 1920s on the site of what had been the two homes of John Hay and Henry Adams.

Hay (among other things, Lincoln’s personal secretary, and McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt’s Secretary of State),  and Adams (historian and public intellectual) were best friends and purchased adjoining lots just north of Lafayette Square in the early 1880s. They hired famed architect H.H. Richardson to design them side by side (and very large) townhouses. I have seen one photo of those townhouses, though, and concluded, architecturally speaking, their loss was no loss. Historically speaking? That’s another story.

The Hay-Adams remains a luxury hotel, with the least expensive single room costing about $800 per night. (I compared this outlandish amount with the cost of a room at the Waldorf Astoria, the former Trump International, on Pennsylvania Avenue. Rooms at the WA are hard to find under $1000.)

On the next block, at the corner of 16th and K, you find the St. Regis Hotel.

The St. Regis is comparable to the Hay-Adams in all ways. In addition to expensive rooms, each has an expensive restaurant. Expense account places, only.

Moving to churches, you have to start with St. John’s Episcopal Church, across from the Hay-Adams, known as the “Church of Presidents”.  Built in 1815 (that’s a long time ago), it was designed by Benjamin Latrobe. Latrobe is (or should be) well known, as among other buildings he designed is the United States Capitol.

St. John’s is open to the public. The sanctuary is very simple (which I like). On the other hand, the stained glass windows are very colorful, even on a gray day.

Several presidents are recognized on the walls. Chester Arthur dedicated a window to his wife, after she had passed away.

Abraham Lincoln is recognized through the Lincoln pew, where it is said Lincoln always sat when he attended, and that he always attended alone.

The church on the next block is very different. The First Church of Christ, Scientist was housed in an important brutalist structure that few people  other than I, liked. It was torn down, and the Church decided to build a full scale office building with a church and a Reading Room enclosed within it. The entrance is striking, but don’t call me a fan. Below the photo of the new church is the now demolished Brutalist church, taken from the internet.

Among the other office buildings on these two blocks, we certainly can’t ignore the large AFL-CIO building, looking at both the outside and the mural in its lobby.

And we shouldn’t ignore eith the building  at the corner of 16th and I housing the Laborers International Union or the building  with the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute ( a branch of the Reagan presidential library) and (coincidentally?) the office of the Motion Picture Association within it.

Finally, we should note that these two first blocks of 16th Street have been “renamed” Black Lives Matter Plaza, and that the words “Black Lives Matter” have been boldly painted on the street, but in a way impossible to photograph from ground level.

I attended a breakfast meeting on Friday with John P. Rose (Brigadier General U.S. Army, retired), who directs the School of Defense and Strategic Studies at Missouri State University. When I was growing up in St. Louis, there was no such thing as Missouri State University. It’s a result of a name change – the former Southeast Missouri State University in Springfield. And why would there be a School of Defense and Strategic Studies at a Missouri state school in, of all places, Springfield?

Well, first of all it turns out that the program is not carried on in Springfield, but in Fairfax, VA. The program was started by another individual in California, but whose home town was Springfield, and he decided to bring the program back home, which he did. After his leadership ended, the continuation of the program, at least as a successful program, probably mandated that it leave Springfield, and Washington turned out to be the best place, both because of its attraction to students and the availability of internships and other programs.

I must admit that I had never heard of the program, and my guess is that you hadn’t either. But it now has over 300 students, all graduate students, about 1/3 in PhD programs and the rest getting masters degrees. For those who attend live classes (I think, but am not sure, that this is the majority), the classes are all evening classes (6 to 9 p.m.) in Fairfax County. There are others who matriculate via Zoom and I think still others who do not do live Zooming, but who watch video recordings of classes.

The purpose of the program is to prepare students for 21st century dangers to the security of the country. A quick glance at some of the names of classes gives one a good idea of what is being taught: nuclear strategy, arms control, international law, international negotiating, conflict and accommodation, U.S. defense policy, science and technology in warfare and defense, regional security problems, NATO, Russian military strategy, weapons of mass destruction, space policy and security, international terrorism, intelligence and counterintelligence and covert action, understanding military action, causes of war, small wars, guerrilla warfare, emergency strategic challenges, Chinese military policy, chemical and biological warfare, cyber conflict, climate change, ethical issues, and so forth.

What you soon realize (if you have not realized it already), is that this is a very complicated world and it is getting more complicated, and more dangerous, by the day. I don’t know how many programs there are like that of Missouri State, I don’t know how strong the faculty is, or how talented the student body is. But I know these are all issues that need much more attention than they seem to get, and I am glad to hear that there are programs like this around.

The goal is to teach for the future. What was clear from the conversation Friday morning is that, even with all of his experience, knowledge and concentration on these subjects, General Rose really can’t predict the future much better than any of us can. That is why the students need to be prepared to respond to a variety of threats, each of which requires technical training to understand and to counter. A big topic of course is whether or not everything is becoming too complicated for the human race to control or, on a slightly lesser level, whether American democracy with all of its faults, its starts and stops, etc., is capable of responding to a world of one-man, or one-party, dictatorships and instant and omnipresent social media. At least, that is my big topic.

And I guess that one day we will find out.

In many ways, 16th Street might be THE heart of Washington.  It starts on H Street NW and runs in an absolutely straight line for just under 7 miles when it hits the Maryland line, but then runs fewer than 2 miles more when it ends at

Georgia Avenue, just short of the Beltway.

H Street NW is just one block north of Pennsylvania Avenue,  and if 16th Street continued on the block between Pennsylvania and H, it would run right through Lafayette Square, and if it continued south of Pennsylvania Ave, it would divide the White House (address 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue) in two. So we are lucky it stops where it does.

We are going to walk up 16th from Lafayette Square to the Maryland line, stopping to learn what we can about what we pass. Don’t be in a hurry. This will probably take some time. But we should learn a lot.

Here is a picture looking north on 16th from its H Street start.

We are not going to begin our walk today, but turn around and look at the White House and Lafayette Square.

All of these people are walking on Pennsylvania Avenue, which has been closed to vehicles between 15th and 17th Streets for almost 30 years. Now, it is filled with tourists and protesters. Like these:

North of the White House, between the White House and H Street, is 7 acre Lafayette Square. Originally, when the White House was first built, Lafayette Square was part of a larger area named President’s Park. It included the area south of the White House now known as the Ellipse, as well as areas to the east and west of the White House, now the sites of the Treasury Department and the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. In the 1830s, Lafayette Square was made a separate area and renamed.

It is a pleasant place,with green grass, seasonal gardens, curved brick walkways, and statues.

The center of the square featues a statue of our controversial 7th president, Andrew Jackson. If you don’t know why he is controversial, Google him.

He sits proudly on his horse, with its front legs raised. It is apparently the first statue anywhere with two legs raised and not a third support for the weight. It is also the absolutely first bronze statue cast in the United States. The sculptor was Clark Mills. His studio was a few blocks away. His assistant was one of his eleven slaves. It was dedicated in 1852. And, by the way, the model for the horse was Mills’ horse, not Jackson’s. At the time the statue was created, Jackson and his two best known horses, Duke and Sam Patch, had departed from this earth.

There are four other larger than life size statues, one on each corner of the Square, each representing a European who had come to America to participate in our revolution.

One, of course, is the Frenchman Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier de La Fayette (you can just call him Lafayette). Believe it or not, Lafayette was commissioned as an officer in France at age 13, came to America out of idealism, and was made a Major General in the Continental Army when he was 19. He was a close aide to Washington (25 years his senior), participated in battles, stayed the winter at Valley Forge and more, and was adulated as a hero of the war. The statue dates from 1890.

Another is the Pole, Andrzej Tadeusz Bonawentura  Kosciuszko. He came to America at the age of thirty, having received military training in Warsaw, and filled with idealism, serving for almost ten years in various capacities before returning home. The statue was dedicated in 1910.

The third is the Prussian, Friedrich Wilhelm August Heinrich Ferdinand von Steuben. Von Steuben came to Valley Forge at a low point for the American army, bringing his skills to retrain the army before it went back to battle. The statue was dedicated in 1910.

And the fourth is another aide from France, Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, comte de  Rochambeau. He led the French expeditionary force, fighting with American troops at Yorktown. The statue was dedicated in 1902.

That’s enough of this. We should get started on our exploration of 16th Street, and not get bogged down too long here.

And we will do just that. But not today.

I am sorry to say I have only been to South America one time. And that was about 50 years ago, when I took a trip to Bogota and the upper Amazon (Colombia and Peru) and then traveled to Lima, Cuzco and Machu Picchu. That’s it.

My reactions back then? I was surprised that Bogota seemed like a modern city. I thought the Amazon one of the most beautiful areas I had ever been in, I thought Lima a rather dull and ugly place. I thought Cuzco fascinating and of course the same of Machu Picchu. I thought rural Peru was enthralling, and the people who lived there seemed (and this is okay) from another planet.

My guess is that if I redid that trip today, things would be different. Bogota and Lima would be much bigger (they were large then) and have more skyscrapers (in 1970, metropolitan Lima had about 3,000,000 people and now has more than 11,000,000; metropolitan Bogota also has about 11,000,000 and in 1970 had a little over 2,000,000). Machu Picchu has been more built up for tourists. Cuzco is probably about the same because of strict controls (I am guessing that; have no clue, really). Iquitos, the isolated capital of the Peruvian Amazon now has about 500,000 residents; in 1970, it had fewer than 100,000. As to the river itself, then populated virtually exclusively by indigenous villages, again I am not sure.

Charles Darwin visited South America in the 1830s, on the Beagle, where he was the ship’s naturalist, and he spent the time exploring and collecting and drawing and explaining what he found. Both fauna and flora. We all know that it was that lengthy five year voyage to South America and the Galapagos Islands that provided the basis and framework for his later work on evolution. I have never read his Voyage of the Beagle, but I have read (years ago, as well) the fascinating description of the trip in Alan Moorehead’s Darwin and the Beagle. My reaction reading that book (I had already been on my Amazon trip) was: WOW!! How things have changed.

Although I haven’t been back to South America in the pat 50 years, I have tried to keep up with the many (often exciting, often sad) things that have happened there, and I have a pretty good idea of what each of these countries look like today. I am a geography buff (and have been since I started collecting stamps at probably about age 8) and I do pay attention to these things.

I also do a fair amount of travel reading. So I was interested in a book titled Silver Seas and Golden Cities, published in 1929 by Francis Parkinson Keyes. I can’t tell you much about Keyes. I know she wrote a number of well-read books. I know her husband was a U.S. Senator. But anything more I told you about her would be speculative at best, based on insufficient knowledge.

In the late 1920s, she traveled throughout Latin America, for the specific purpose of writing this book. She got the royal treatment on her trip. Perhaps because she was going to publish an account of the trip, perhaps because of her husband’s position, or perhaps for some completely different reason, on each stop, she was met by members of the local elite and treated to the best each location had to offer. The fact is that, while some of the best was truly first class, other of the best was quite challenging.

The reason the book interested me so much as I read it is again, as when I read about Darwin and compared his South America with what I had seen in 1970 or so, and what I think about what I know about South America today, is how much things have changed.

For example, when she was in Venezuela (we know how much that has changed over the last decade), and had been hosted by the President, she was impressed with a country on its way to boundless future. Her next stop was Rio de Janeiro, she realized that “you couldn’t get there from here”. Remember that South America, as opposed to our own continent, is a very uneven place, with high mountains, broad rivers and extensive jungles, making transportation very difficult. There was no land route from Caracas to Rio (today there is, according to GPS, and it will take you almost four days to drive it; it is almost 4000 miles), and of course you couldn’t jump into a commercial airplane in the 1920s. There also was no direct sea connection. To get to Rio from Caracas, you had to take a ship to Barbados. From Barbados, you had to take another ship, to Trinidad. And from Trinidad, you could take a boat to Rio de Janeiro.

In the 1920s, Rio had about 1,500,000 inhabitants (exact number seems unclear) and one of the things that Keyes was most impressed with in this resort-like city was its safety. It was by far then Brazil’s biggest city; Sao Paulo, now the continent’s largest city with about 23,000,000 residents (yes, you read that right) was then not even worth thinking about visiting.

She went to Buenos Aires, which she called the Paris of the Americas and thought one day would rival Paris in all ways – there was no possibility that future of Argentina was not rosy. The trip to Iguassu Falls in the 1920s was a real ordeal. To get there from Argentina, you had to do river travel, railroad travel, and more. Days and days to see the waterfalls. And yes, she says, well worth it in spite of the hardships. When she went around Cape Horn through the dangerous Straits of Magellan and visited various overly large plantations there and crept up the Pacific Coast, you got the feeling that the future was clear here as well, although the cities were a bit more conservative and laid back than in the east. And, by the way, she loved Ecuador, which seemed to be then virtually an unknown country, a place no one was paying any attention to, and that she really thought at least some tourists should put on their itineraries.

My purpose in writing this is not to give a full description of her trip, which is worth reading, or to give a full review of her books, also worth reading, but simply to look at how much South America has changed from the 1830s to the 1920s, to the 1970s, to today. Sure, I understand that every place as undergone radical changes over this time. But compared with the United States, for example, I think that South America has radically out-changed us. I just wish I could document this better to myself through more personal exploration.

Because I am going to talk about three of them, my descriptions will be much briefer than they should be. I tell you this only so you should not be afraid to read on.

From Russia with Lev. Rachel Maddow was the executive producer of this MSNBC documentary that premiered last night on TV, and that will be (or maybe already is) available for streaming everywhere. It is not accident that this film, which follows the career of Lev Parnas from his upbringing as a hustler both in Odessa and then in Brighton Beach, until he became one of Donald Trump’s closest associates, sent with Rudy Giuliani and Igor Furman to convince Ukraine to find dirt on Joe Biden and (or through) his son Hunter.

It’s a remarkable story of Parnas, who is apparently a born salesman, who integrated himself in the Trump world and was tasked with this important task in order to “make America great again”. And that is what he thought he was doing, until he realized that there was no there there, that there was no evidence of Biden crime or corruption and that in fact he, his fellow travelers and the President himself were the ones who were corrupt.

It was obviously a major change when Zelensky replaced the deposed Poroshenko, and Ukraine was no longer politically acting on behalf of Russia, and no longer willing to go along with an investigation when it appeared there was nothing to investigate. And when Trump told Zelensky that if he did not investigate the Bidens, Ukraine would receive no more defense or economic assistance from the US, it was too much for Parnas.

Parnas kept close records of everything he did and photographed everything. With the help of his wife, everything was backed up into an iCloud, so that when the FBI took Parnas’ phone and computer, they still had copies of everything. It was this evidence that formed the basis for the first impeachment of Donald Trump.

No one, except perhaps for an alcoholic Rudy, comes out as bad in this story as Trump. No surprise there, I guess, and perhaps the most noteworthy act is Trump’s unwillingness to say that he even knew either Parnas or Furman. The evidence that they were not only known to the President, but in his innermost circle, is clear. But once they were targeted by law enforcement, Trump and his other allies, such as Giuliani, professed total lack of connection with them.

There is much more to the story, but for that you have to see the film. It will get, I am sure, a lot of press over the next 45 days, because it could convince someone who is undecided as to their vote to avoid voting for Mr. Corruption.

One more thing. If you watch the film, stick with it until the end. You may think you know how this film will turn out, but there is a fascinating twist at the end. Hint? Okay. It involves Hunter Biden.

Ain’t No Back on a Merry-go-Round. We saw this film this week at the DC Jewish Community Center. It is a Washington-centered documentary, but everyone should see it. It is the story of Glen Echo Park, now an arts and cultural center, but formerly an amusement park in Montgomery County. With an enormous swimming pool, a merry-go-round, and a roller coaster, among other things, it was a center of fun and amusement for kids and teens in the Washington area. Provided they weren’t Black.

The film is the story of the integration of Glen Echo. It involves a group of students at Howard University and a group of homeowners and residents (including children) of the Bannockburn neighborhood, which adjoins Glen Echo. These residents, many (most?) of whom were Jewish, living in a “lefty” part of town, home to people who felt unwelcome in large parts of residential Washington, joined with the Howard students to spend a summer picketing the park.

The connection between the students and the Bannockburn community (two groups who had no previous contact) was fascinating to see develop, as was the connection between the Glen Echo picketers and the larger (much larger) civil rights movement to come. The Glen Echo pickets were in the summer of 1960. The participants included people like Stokely Carmichael, and also many who became freedom riders in the south in subsequent years.

The owners of Glen Echo, two Jewish brothers named Baker, who stayed silent during the summer of the picketing, opened the park the next year on an integrated basis.

Like many amusement parks, Glen Echo’s business decreased. Was this in part because of integration? It’s hard to say. It most certainly was connected to the demise of the DC streetcar lines, which stopped running to Glen Echo in 1962, leaving the facility dependent on private automobile transportation. And there were other entertainment options opening.

The film includes many interviews with those involved in the picketing over 60 years ago, people (White and Black) now in their 80s. Their stories, which I think had largely been forgotten, will now live on.

The Catskills. This is another new film, that had played at the DC Jewish Film Festival this year, and was shown as a special program by the Haberman Institute for Jewish Studies, of which – as you know? – I am still vice president.

This is a very nostalgic film for those whose youth included summer visits to the Catskills (and there are, it turns out, many) but even for those of us mid-westerners who knew no one who ever went to the Catskills, it is an important story. For almost 50 years, these resorts provided an opportunity for Jewish families to escape the cities in the summer and get fresh air. Whether they stayed at one of the large, fancy hotels (and there were many), the small lodges (and there were even more), or the bungalow colonies, the Catskills played a major role in helping Jewish immigrants and their families integrate better into America and play their part in this sector of the “American dream”.

The Catskills of course played another role. It was the birthing place of American stand up comedy, and many or most of the comics whose careers came of age during the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s got their starts in the Catskills. Were it not for these Jewish establishments, would these comics (Jewish and gentile) have ever become such an important part of American entertainment? Possibly not.

Eventually the Catskills declined and the old hotels no longer exist. What led to the decline? Many things. Subsequent generations of American Jews felt more American, less alien, and did not need to, or want to, vacation only with other Jews. Jews, who had sometimes not been welcome at other resorts, now found they could stay anywhere they wanted. And air travel changed everything; you don’t have to vacation in Sullivan County, you can fly to Paris.

The film, directed by Lee Gillespie (not Jewish, but with a Jewish wife) is worth seeing. I don’t think you can stream it now. But keep your eyes open. It, like Ain’t No Back on a Merry-go-Round , is making the film festival circuit and will probably be in your neighborhood soon.

SORRY – another day with no time to proofread.

Whenever we go anywhere these days, we almost always preface it with a discussion about whether we really want to go or not. And our conclusions vary.

We had this conversation this week, and opted to go. We are very glad we did.

The event was a session at American University with Israeli author Etgar Keret. Keret is a very popular writer, mainly of short stories, but also of film scripts and children’s books. His stories tend to be written in plain language (maybe think Hemingway) but have an ironic twist (maybe think Kafka). I have only read a few, and I can’t say that I was attracted to them. Keret also teaches at Ben Gurion University, and I have heard him speak there, as well.

He is a very engaging speaker. Very creative. Short, thin, and with a ready and winning smile.

His major topic was how Israel has changed since the Hamas invasion, so it wasn’t a pleasant talk, but it was filled with humor, and I did take a few notes about his remarks that made me laugh. Let’s see if they seem clever in print.

For one thing, he talked about growing up in Israel, the son of two Holocaust survivors. He praised his mother and her inviolate “rules”. The rule he liked best is that, if it was raining, she wouldn’t let him go to school. Her feeling was that the few things his only moderately adequate teacher would teach him were “just not worth getting wet for”.

His mother is a tough lady. Once, she took him to a pediatrician, and there were two chairs in the waiting room, occupied by another mother and son, a woman whom his mother knew. The mother told her son to let Mrs. Keret sit down because she was a Holocaust survivor.  But Keret’s mother wouldn’t take the chair. She said to the young boy that she was going to teach him a lesson. Holocaust survivors, she told him, are tough. They don’t need to sit down.

And then, there’s his very orthodox sister, who lives in Jerusalem in Mea Shearim, and has 11 children. And she has “more than 50” grandchildren. A little later, he clarified, and now I paraphrase. “When I said she had more than 50 grandchildren, I didn’t mean she has 51. She told me she stopped counting when she got to 50. That it was bad luck. Who knows how many she has? Maybe 70. Or 80.”

Keret himself has one son. When his son was very young, unsurprisingly Keret made up a story for him every night. One night, after the story, his son said “Can you write that one down?” Keret was surprised and asked why. His son responded, “Because that’s the way we make a living.”

…..

Maybe you had to be there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are a few specialty shops, especially for musicians.

There is a psychic.

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

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

and one which runs its own campus shuttle service.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And….

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I want to give her her due.

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

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

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

And with those, come restaurants and

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I should have added these three points:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What more can I say?

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

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

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

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

And there is street art.

All this stops when you get to the campus.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But there is more to do.

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

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

Where can I possibly go from there?

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

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

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

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

       “For my retirement”

           Arthur Hessel

        American (1942-    )

               Mixed Media

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

But what does it tell you?

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

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

That sure tells you something, too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then the commercial development begins anew.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and need a friendly smile….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You ever imagine knowing so much about Charles Town WV?

No time to proof today……

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Apparently,  you can not be on both.