Art is 80

This is officially my 500th consecutive daily post on the blog. I expect that your reaction is: Get a life. Might be a good idea.

Well, on this Saturday, March 30, we are going to see The Lehman Trilogy at the Shakespeare Theater downtown. Hopefully, I will like it, and tell you what I think about it tomorrow.

But today, I want to talk about DC sports. Not that I am an expert (that should relieve you, I guess), but there is a lot to say.

First, the Nationals (that’s our baseball team): The Nationals, in the middle of or near the end of their rebuilding) came off a very strong Spring Training. Here’s what I noticed: First, our set team, which includes many from last year, but two or three new to us but seasoned players who have had fair-to-middling careers so far, played well, but were certainly not exciting. Second, our “prospects”, young guys who were not expected to be on our opening day roster, played much better than our regular team did, but that didn’t seem to mean that much for this year. Third, our starting pitchers were the same five guys who were not as good as they needed to be last year (our relievers include a few new to us pitchers who could be very good).

Conclusion: without pitching, and without bringing up our prospects, it looks like more of the same for the Nats this year. And that’s too bad. [I should add that one of our new fair-to-middling players, Nick Stenzel, unfortunately broke his finger before Opening Day and the Nats called up Trey Lipscomb, one of our prospects to be the starting third basement.]

We have tickets for the home Opening Game Monday at 4. The weather promises to be wet. Of course.

More important is the news about the Wizards (basketball) and the Caps (hockey). Their owner, Ted Leonsis, announced several months ago that he his teams would be leaving downtown DC in four or five years, to move to a new arena and attached entertainment center, to be built in Alexandria, Virginia. As DC’s downtown has been struggling since the pandemic (there are still fewer that half the daily workers downtown, with so many working remotely), with empty sidewalks, vacant storefronts, and closed restaurants, the loss of these two teams seemed like just one more tough blow. And it was presented as a done deal.

But the done deal became undone when, on top of worries and complaints from Alexandria residents who feared the crowds and traffic, the Democrats in the Virginia legislature made it clear that they were not going to support a $1,500,000,000 giveaway to the billionaire team owner and the deal suddenly died. Virginia has a Republican governor, who apparently thought this would be a slam/dunk, and a legislature where both houses are controlled by the Democrats.

Suddenly, everything was reversed. DC Mayor Bowser, DC Council Chair Phil Mendelson, and owner Ted Leonsis turned out to be best friends, and to have been sharing drinks throughout this entire time, and a deal was put forward for the complete modernization of the DC arena. Not only that, but the commercial mall which adjoins the arena (and which had contained an AMC Multiplex and a bowling alley among other things, but which is now fairly empty) is being leased by Leonsis for what I understand will be a 200,000 square foot entertainment center and more, and the DC government is providing all sorts of incentives to protect and clean up the Gallery Place area. This is enormously important for the downtown. I am sure it would have eventually recovered from everything having to do with the last four years (how could it not?), but this will make things much easier and faster, and will certainly help the city’s tax base.

In the meantime, the Wizards (whose record so far this year 14-60) will keep struggling for a long time, but the Caps might even make the playoffs this year; they continue to be exciting to watch and hopefully will keep up the pace they have been on recently as the season winds down.

And then there’s the Commanders (nee Redskins – football) which, under new ownership, is making change after change every day, it seems, and which even talks about building a new stadium at the site of the abandoned RFK Stadium in the District as a replacement for their current home in Prince George’s County MD. We will see if that happens – there will be a lot of neighborhood opposition I am sure, as rebuilt Capitol Hill now extends almost to the RFK grounds. Either way, with new ownership, the Commanders should engender new interest.

That’s it for my sports report. I pay little or no attention to our women’s basketball team, the Mystics, or to our soccer team, DC United. And I note that our neighboring Baltimore Orioles (baseball, of course) also has new ownership, led by Washington good-guy philanthropist David Rubenstein, replacing ownership under Peter Angelos. who recently passed away. This will hopefully make the Orioles and the Nationals friends, and not only rivals for attention.

Last night we watched “Poor Things”. On TV. In the comfort of our own home. The lead actress, Emma Stone, won an Academy Award as Best Actress this year for her role as Bella Baxter. The film has received positive reviews to be sure, has made its investors a lot of money, and has been panned by many of the people I know. It is billed as a comedy. If it’s a comedy, it’s about as noir as a comedy can get.

It’s based on a book, published about 30 years ago, by Alasdair Gray. My guess is that the film and the book are closely related, but quite different at the same time. The book won some awards when it was published as well. I am wondering if I am curious enough to read it.

It also has a lot of sex involving Emma Stone with three men with whom she is weirdly involved, and a bunch of others who are paying her for the privilege (and a brief Lesbian interlude). For this reason, I would support anyone who claims that this movie should not be shown at elementary school assemblies.

It also involves a fair amount of Gore (and not the Al kind), as bodies are cut up or cut into or pulled apart throughout the film.

You see, there was this woman Victoria, who not only had a terrible marriage (since she was married to a mad man, we later see), but found herself pregnant and, at some point near the end of her pregnancy jumped off a bridge into the River Clyde, as it flowed through Glasgow. She wasn’t saved, but her body was pulled out of the water fairly quickly and (for reasons I have already forgot), given to Dr. Godwin Baxter, a mad scientist (and son of a possibly even madder scientist), who took the brain out of the never-to-be-born baby and placed it inside the skull of the baby’s mother, Victoria. This turned out to be super-easy to do. Even a child could do it. No muss. No fuss. Not even any blood.

He names his creation Bella, and she is a fully grown woman with the brain of a just born baby. So she has to learn everything a baby learns, but as an adult. And since she is not a baby, she also has sexual urges that she cannot at all understand, but instinctively knows how to act upon.

God (that’s Godwin’s nickname) hires a young man to help him raise Bella and expects him to marry her, which for some reason the man agrees to do, and they are arranging the wedding when a suave young man appears, sweeps Bella off her feet and takes her to Lisbon and then to Paris; he too is in love with her for whatever reason. And he wants to marry her and she agrees, but she steals all of his money and gives it to two sailors on the ship they are taken to give to the poor of Alexandria (Egypt, not Virginia). This sours their relationship, and they get off the ship in Paris, where she meets a brothel owner who helps her get off her feet and make some money.

Eventually she returns to Scotland where she is to marry the man she left when she went to Lisbon, but this time the ceremony is interrupted by her husband when she was Victoria. In fact, he thinks she still is Victoria.

Bella decides to walk out on her husband to be for a second time, moves in with her Victoria husband, and finds that this doesn’t work any better now than it did then. So she leaves and comes back to the man she was supposed to marry.

She then learns her story, that she is both mother and daughter, which she finds surprising, but something she can live with, and the pledges her love again to her would-be husband. Presumably, they live happily ever after.

This is a really dumb plot. The only reason to see the film is if you want to see Emma Stone having sex again and again. And – that is not a very good reason.

It was quite a shock to hear yesterday that former Senator Joe Lieberman had died. Whether he had been ill at all, I don’t know, but apparently he fell in New York City, and died of complications of the fall at his home in Connecticut. That’s all that has been reported so far.

It certainly gets you thinking about falling. The statistics on how many older people fall are also shocking. The CDC says that about 15 million adults 65 or older report having fallen each year, with 9 million of those requiring medical help or leading to temporary immobility. Falling is the leading cause of injury related deaths among the elderly.

I had lunch with a friend just a few years older than I am last week, and he told me that he had recently fallen and broken his nose. I had coffee with another friend the week before, who is in her early 70s, and she told me that she has fallen four or five times. Another friend, also in her early 70s, who has a number of medical problems and uses a walker when she leaves her apartment, has fallen a number of times at home, twice having to be hospitalized. It’s clearly a serious business – especially if your bones have become brittle or you hit your head. Whenever there is ice on the ground, I think back to Dr. Robert Atkins, whose professional goals were to keep people healthy through their diets, and who slipped on ice in New York City, hit his head and that was it. How quickly things can turn.

Going back to Joe Lieberman, he and I were in the same law school class, Yale 1967. I really didn’t know Joe back then. He had also been a Yale undergraduate and knew those Yalies who had continued on to the law school, but was not one who was normally present during the activities of his law school classmates. He was always off doing political things. And even back then, everyone said that Joe was a politician and would become a Senator one day.

He did, of course, and moved to Washington. I saw him now and then at class “lunches”, something we did then, and then saw him more, when he became a semi-regular at Adas Israel services, at a time when I was an active board member and officer of the Congregation. He and his wife were involved in the synagogue’s primary day school, but he became disillusioned with Adas Israel after the day school left the synagogue to become independent, and the synagogue/school divorce was not pretty. I stayed at Adas (still there, and we are talking decades ago), but also became a Board of Directors member at the independent school. By then the Liebermans had aged out, I think. After that, I saw Joe largely at Law School functions, including our every five year reunions in New Haven, which he and I both religiously attended. He was in person as he seemed in public – warm, polite, friendly, and respectful.

It was of course exciting to see him run for the Vice Presidency on the Gore ticket and very disappointing when the Supreme Court first showed its political colors by intervening in the Florida race and deciding, on its own pretty much, who won the presidency. Gore and Lieberman bowed out; that was how things worked back then. But WWDJTD?

It was also interesting to see Joe win a Senate seat as an independent, after losing the Democratic primary, in 2006, even though he caucused with the Democrats. But he never went back to the Democratic Party, he supported John McCain for president over Barack Obama, and he ended his career (no longer in office) by embarking on the unrealistic No Labels attempt to run a third (or fourth or fifth or sixth) presidential candidate in 2024. No Labels has not yet identified, or at least has not yet publicly identified, a candidate and now may not do so. We will see.

In other words, Joe left a very mixed legacy. He did things his way, and sometimes that doesn’t work as well as expected.

Joe Lieberman was not the only high level national politician in my law school class. The other was Paul Tsongas, who was a Senator from Massachusetts and a leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1992.

Paul was very different at law school from the oft-missing Joe. And Paul and I were quite friendly throughout law school. He was one of the nicest guys I knew, but he never seemed to me very sure of himself. Working class background, Greek background – maybe these things made him feel isolated. He was very soft spoken, quite cerebral I thought, someone you could have a good conversation with. But he seemed to me to be somewhat lost during the law school years.

I remember a conversation we had during our third year. I was pretty clear where I was going after we graduated (of course, things turned out completely different from what I thought my clear path would be), but Paul had no idea. He didn’t want to practice law. He had no idea where he wanted to live. He was so tied into his Lowell MA community, but what could he really do there? And where else could he go? I remember him telling me that he was thinking about applying for (or maybe he had applied for ) a clerkship with the District Judge in American Samoa, and he thought he might go there (and never be heard from again).

He didn’t go to American Samoa – he got involved in politics, and found his surprising niche. He probably would have run for president as the Democratic candidate if it weren’t for Super Tuesday and a guy named Bill Clinton. Had he run and won, I guarantee you he’d never have fooled around with Monica Lewinsky.

Sadly, Paul had come down with lymphoma in the 1980s and, although it seemed he had been cured, it came back and he died in 1997, when he was only 55. It was a year after my sister, age 49, passed away from the same disease.

At any rate….a lot to think about today. I’ll think about something else tomorrow. I hope.

I graduated from Harvard in 1964. For those of you who are good in math, you might have already realized that means it is almost time for my 60th college reunion. The reunion is at the end of May, and I don’t plan on going, but I did go to a lunch yesterday that was billed as a preliminary to that important event. About 15 of the 90 1964 Harvard graduates who live in the area showed up. We had, among others, a doctor, a physicist, a statistician, a poet, a diplomat, an economist, a journalist and a bunch of lawyers. I knew one of them and recognized three others; everyone else was a total stranger.

The lunch was at the University Club, a downtown eating (and sleeping) club that has been around probably longer than I have. Through the decades I have been in Washington, I have been to a significant number of lunch events there, but I haven’t set foot in the building for over a decade. The first floor is still beautifully attired and the meeting rooms on the second floor still deadly dull. Our $55 lunch consisted of mini-wraps, a bag of potato chips, a green salad, and little lemon and chocolate wedges. Probably worth about $10. No one, on the basis of this meeting, is going to join that club.

A couple of statistics for you to mull over: People who were 81 or 82 (our age now) when we were born were themselves born in 1862 or 1863. People who attended their 60th reunion when we were graduating from college had graduated from Harvard in 1904. You can let that sink in.

Everyone at the lunch got to stand up and say whatever they wanted to say. The first person told his life story from the day he was born until he walked that morning into the University Club, and that sort of set the tone for everyone else. It was interesting, to be sure, but don’t worry if you missed it. I have already forgotten most of what was said – people were born, they went to high school, they liked their Harvard experience, their career has been interesting (some careers more interesting than others), they have or have not downsized from their houses in the DC area, they think the world is falling apart, they are worried about what they are turning over to their grandchildren and Donald Trump scares them to death.

There is something else we all seem to agree on. The Harvard of 2024 is not the same as the Harvard of 1964, and it was a much better place and institution back then. It’s not so much the Claudine Gray episode (her testimony before Congress and her alleged plagiarism) as it is the experiences that Jewish students on campus are having today. Some of those who previously have donated to Harvard appear to have stopped donating (except for two who said that they are still donating to Harvard’s Hillel). Some reported what children or grandchildren who have recently been at Harvard have been saying, and it isn’t pretty. We all noted that there had never been any clashes between groups of students when we were at Harvard, and that no one appeared to feel uncomfortable because of religious or ethnic background. We did not talk about race – there were no Black class members at the lunch (there weren’t that many at the school when we were there).

We didn’t really have a chance to discuss in detail what we felt were the causes of the current situation, and we all realize that Harvard is not the only university facing the same problems. And while clearly the Gaza war was a catalyst, it was felt that the problems go well beyond that. We did talk about the fact that the Jewish student body at Harvard today is only about 1/3 what it was when we were undergraduates, and that this is largely the result of attempts to diversify the student body; there seemed to be differences of opinions of whether this was inevitable, and whether it is for the overall betterment of society. We did not talk about the overall issues of how the social sciences are being taught everywhere today (oppressors vs. the oppressed; colonialists vs. indigenous populations – and how Jews in the Middle East are viewed as oppressors and colonialists, whereas Jews view themselves as always on the edge of being victims exiled from their homes or worse). This did not come up, although it probably would have been the next topic.

At any rate, in addition to the feelings expressed (by Jews and non-Jews) at the luncheon (although the Jewish class members have perhaps the strongest feelings), I learned of at least two classmates who did not attend the luncheon in part (at least) because of how they view Harvard today, and of several who are not going to Cambridge for the reunion because of these feelings. There was also concern stated that the reunion agenda (which had programs on climate change and world peace, etc., contained nothing on Jews (or other ethnic groups) at Harvard being, or feeling themselves to be, under attack, or about the situation at the university in general.

O tempora, o mores. (That’s Latin – do they still teach Latin at Harvard?)

How is it possible that Donald Trump may again become president of this country?

I don’t know how many of you read about the interview Trump gave to Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom (Israel Today) yesterday, but this one interview alone should be sufficient to convince everyone that a vote for Trump should be added to the list of Deadly Sins.

First, as he has done in the past with regard to anything bad happening in the world, he blamed the Hamas October 7 attack on Joe Biden, saying that “[Hamas] would have never done that attack if I were there”. He said that it was because Hamas “has no respect” for Biden (the implication being that Hamas really respects Trump). He has of course said this as well about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It is all the fault of Joe Biden and his weakness.

Perhaps remarks like this have become so commonplace that most Americans would simply roll their eyes and go on with their lives. But what else Trump said in that interview is more serious. I quote Trump (the translations come from the English language Haaretz article on the interview) speaking about Biden:

“He can’t put two sentences together. He can’t talk. He’s a very dumb person. His foreign policy throughout 50 years has been horrible.”

He went on and said:

“In Israel I get 98 percent of the vote……”…we have a lot of people in the United States who are Jewish but they actually fight Israel, look at the New York Times. It’s a Jewish family. I think they hate Israel. I watch what they write in the New York Times. It’s hysterical.”

And:

“How could a Jewish person vote for Kamala Harris? And essentially, you know that’s what probably is going to happen because you look at this guy, he can’t walk down a flight of stairs, he can’t walk across a room. He can’t find the exist to a stage without five different sets of stairs. You might have Kamala Harris if this doesn’t work out. Something happens to him, and you have her. She supports the enemy, but he supports the enemy, too.”

We here in DC know our three electoral votes will go Democratic. But what can we do to influence voters in other places? We gotta do something. I checked Real Clear Politics polls this morning. Still have Trump ahead in most of the states that should be competitive. Time is growing shorter, if not short.

But life is uncertain. Look, for example, at what happened early this morning in Baltimore, when a Singaporean-flagged 1000 foot long cargo ship ran into a pillar holding up the Francis Scott Key Bridge on the Baltimore Beltway, causing untold damage, injury and death. No one predicted this – an entire bridge suddenly down into the Patapsco River, cars under water, construction workers dead, commuter routes destroyed, ships in Baltimore Harbor paralyzed. Who would have imagined that such a thing could happen?

And equally surprising things could happen in this election. We will have to wait and see. But, as we keep waiting for the political tide to turn, it hasn’t happened yet.

As Kurt Vonnegut said (again and again), “So it goes”. [“What???”. the younger generation says, “Kurt Who?? Don’t you mean Taylor Swift?”]

Of course some things are not surprising: (1) The Hamas attack (2) the Russian attack (3) the ISIS-K attack. But we treat them as surprises anyway – “We are shocked!!!”. Same will be true of a Trump victory.

So it goes.

As the first half of March brought us sunny, warm Spring weather, along with beautiful early flowering trees, I was ready for a complete change of season. But as of a few days ago, the skies darkened, the temperatures dropped, the winds picked up, the cold rains fell, and (as happens every year) my belief in the arrival of an early Spring was shaken. So, except for last night’s Megillah reading, I have stayed home over the weekend, and may lay a bit low for the next few days. Not that it c-c-c-c-cold outside (it’s in the low 50s), but it’s colder than the 65-75 we had been experiencing over the past few weeks.

Some of my time this weekend was spent reading a book titled Winter Journal by writer Paul Auster. Auster too was hibernating during a cold winter (his in New York), holing up in a small studio he was renting, writing a different sort of a blog (not on-line, so I guess not really a blog). And yes, he noted, too, how it was still cold, even in March.

It’s a relatively short book, without chapters, but with little pieces (separated by a single blank line) that might be called biological tidbits. He is trying to explain himself; in fact, he is writing to himself, as seen by his consistent use of the second person. “You left the house”. “You flew to Paris, and then you….” . and so on. He is rethinking the story of his life. In non-chronological bits and pieces.

How did he decide which one piece followed another? I don’t know. But we have pieces about his growing up in New Jersey, his parents’ relationship and divorce, his experiences playing sports as a teenager, his early sexual stirrings and his later acting upon them, his move to Paris and the people he met there, his first marriage and its breakup, his second marriage (now about 40 years old), and so forth. Maybe they are in the order in which he wrote them. Maybe he spent months ordering and re-ordering them. Maybe he wrote three times this many, and threw the rest out. Or kept them in a file for a subsequent book. I don’t know.

It isn’t that I found his life overly fascinating, although it had its interesting moments to be sure. (I think he had more interesting moments in his life, for example, than I have had in mine…..and that isn’t a personal complaint, just fact, something I think may be true for most compared with me.) It isn’t that I found him someone to necessarily admire; in fact, I ended the book feeling nothing for him one way or the other. He clearly made a lot of early mistakes, but he clearly profited from some of them.

But the book reeled me right in, and I didn’t want to put it down. Largely, I think, this is because of the quality of his writing. He really writes well. And, by the way, we learn nothing of his other writings, or his film work, reading this book. That, like most of his interactions with his children, are left out. Maybe he has written about that elsewhere, I don’t know.

Many of the subjects he chooses are subjects that I choose from time to time writing my blog, although his skill far surpasses mine. And, to be sure, I don’t sit all day in a studio working on this blog. Usually, I sit down for maybe 30 minutes and often (as you probably have guessed) don’t proof it, much less gone back to alter it or polish it.

At any rate, I am sorry I have finished Winter Journal. I would like to have read more of his Paul Auster’s tidbits.

Only one of his entries seemed out of place, and I wonder why he included it. Along with all of the other pieces in the book, each of which discussed elements of his life or maybe touched upon his parents’ lives before he was born, but for one. In one long entry, he talked about a movie he saw one night when he couldn’t sleep. A film from the 1940s or 1950s, called Dead on Arrival, or rather D.O.A. He discussed this film in almost scene by scene detail – a businessman from southern California takes a solo business trip to San Francisco, orders a drink at the bar, gets sick, learns that the drink contained poison and that there is no cure and he will die within 48 hours, and spent the remainder of the film successfully tracking down the individual who poisoned his drink, discovering the the murderer thought something about him and wasn’t even true, so that his death was going to be a mistake.

This description comes about 75% through the book. Random, it seems. But maybe Auster found a hidden message there, although his only comment was to wonder what he would do if he found himself in the same position with only 40 years to live. He was 64 when he wrote that book, and clearly was feeling his age. Now, he is 77 and, I assume, feels it even more.

I saw a film yesterday, too. A film starring Caesar Romero and Lois Maxwell, from 1952, called The Lady in the Fog. I could tell you the complete plot, just as Auster told me the complete plot of D.O.A. But I won’t.

I will only tell you one thing. Have you ever heard of Lois Maxwell? No? Well, you have probably seen her in several films. She found her niche a little later. When she became Miss Moneypenny in all of the Sean Connery James Bond films. You learn something new every day.

As I think I have said before, there were other years when I published a blog. One of those years was 2009, and I have a print out of the entire blog. I wasn’t as religious as I have been with my current blog, which is published every day, but I probably did write something two or three days a week, of various types and various lengths, so there is a lot to look at. And last week I decided to look at it, and last night I finished reading through the entire year.

Now we are talking about 15 years ago, and it turns out I was quite busy that year – restaurants, concerts, books, a couple of trips. The usual. And I kept a record of it all, for whatever reasons I had at the time. And, although I was still practicing law then, I didn’t mention anything about my work at all.,

As I read through my year of 2009, what surprised me the most is how much I don’t remember. You could divide my year into three categories – things I remember, things that I had forgotten about but remember once I am reminded of them, and things that look to me like they must have been experienced by someone else. And – although I didn’t count things up and the three segments feel relatively equal – I wouldn’t be surprised if the category “things I have forgotten about completely” were the biggest.

For example, on March 30, 2009, I noted that I had read Andre Maurois’ biography of Disraeli, and that I had, in 2008 read his biography of Shelly. Now, I could tell you a fair amount about these books (not everything of course, but a fair amount) today. But that’s not because I read them in 2008 and 2009. I read them again in 2022 or 2023, as part of my reading through many of my Penguin paperbacks. They were both interesting books, relatively short and undoubtedly not complete, but containing enough information to give you a good sense of what Shelly and Disraeli were like, or at least what Maurois thought they were like. But, to my knowledge and belief, I had no clue that I had read them 15 or so years earlier.

On the other hand, there are some things I remember well. I remember going to see both The Winters Tale (Shakespeare) and Arcadia (Stoppard) at the Folger Theater, but I don’t remember seeing four Chekhov plays (three as readings, one fully staged) at Theater J at all.

In August of 2009, we took a trip to Nova Scotia. I remember the ferry from Portland, and I remember a number of things we did in Nova Scotia, staying with my college roommate who has a summer house (it belonged to his Canadian father) there.

In Nova Scotia, I remember driving through the area where a UFO had supposedly landed in the not so distant past (Canada’s answer to Roswell), I remember buying a cap that I still have at a fish company, I remember seeing the Bay of Fundy and being surprised at how nice the town of Wolfville was, along with Acadia University there, I remember the nice provincial patrolman who stopped me for driving too fast, I remember the drive back through New Brunswick and our stopping at Fredericton on the way back, and so forth.

None of these memories made by post where I recapped our trip. In the post, I spoke about restaurants that I don’t remember at all, about museums (the Nova Scotia Museum of Art, which I didn’t like, and the Rossignol Cultural Center, which I did) that I can’t imagine that I went to, or the Joggins Fossil Cliffs that we apparently visited (and were fascinated by) near Truro.

The only things in my note that I really remember about Nova Scotia was the casual dinner party that my roommate’s neighbor hosted, and the cemetery where victims of the Titanic are buried anonymously, some on the Christian side, and twelve (I think) on the small Jewish side of the cemetery. And I don’t know why my notes didn’t mention the pedestrian signs in hilly Halifax, which simply say “Slippery Slope”.

But there’s more. The entry on our trip talked about us stopping in Ridgefield CT to see my sister’s stepson and his family, and then stopping in Kennebunkport Me to see friends of Edie and, at the same time, seeing daughter Michelle and her then boyfriend, who were vacationing in southern Maine at the same time. Now I do remember Ridgefield and Kennebunkport and some (not all) of the things my blog said we did there but, for some reason, I don’t at all remember those stops as being part of the same trip that led us to Nova Scotia. Even reading about it did not jog my memory to realize that this was the same trip.

Well, this is just 2009. I have lived every year since 1942. (That’s why I am 80+) In each of these years (most had 365 days, about 20 at 366 days), I have done a number of things every day. How many of these things do I remember?

OK, ask me about second grade, and I can tell you three or four things that happened at school (out of hundreds or thousands), but I can’t tell you anything that I know happened that year out of school, either after school or on weekends or during the summer. At all.

I guess I just never thought about this in this way before. About how much of my life is a mystery to me. About how much that has happened I have no clue about. I guess the moral is: if you want to know how much you have forgotten, keep a diary.

We know that the Hamas (grogger roll) October 7 attack would probably never have happened if Israeli officials had paid attention to the lower level Israeli intelligence figures who concluded, well before October 7, that Hamas (grogger roll) was preparing for an attack, and that Hamas (grogger roll) was being very clever in its preparations. And we know that the reaction of the right wing Israeli government (grogger roll) under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu (grogger roll) has been to avoid any admission of failure or error, and to double down on the response to Hamas (grogger roll) to the extent that, presumably, 30,000+ Palestinians have died, and hundreds of thousands are in dire need of food and water.

Today we are reading about an attack on a rock concert venue in a Moscow suburb, where at least 150 Russians have been killed and an equal number injured. We have learned that United States intelligence had, over the past several weeks, become aware that groups were planning an attack on a crowded event (or multiple events) in Russia, and had warned the Russian officials (grogger roll), who apparently completely ignored the warnings, and considered it (I suspect) American disinformation. Now that the attack has occurred, these Russian officials, starting with Vladimir Putin (grogger roll), are also doubling down on the response, not admitting any fault, and will most likely strike out in ways that will be unfortunate, to say the least.

Do we see a pattern here? If so, what is it? It isn’t, as one might suspect, that there were intelligence failures, because there haven’t been (at least, not complete intelligence failures). It’s that intelligence is only good if it is acted upon, and is of no value if it to be ignored. And just as death is inevitable for everyone, and taxes inevitable for all but the very wealthy and the tax cheats, terrorist attacks are also presumably something approaching inevitable against those who belittle intelligence, or who decide to play the odds when it is not convenient to do otherwise.

About 25 years ago, when Russia was engaged in a war within its internal Chechnya Republic, and Putin had just come into power, there were a series of explosions in apartment buildings in Moscow, killing several hundred people. The explosions were immediately blamed on the Chechens, and several were arrested, and the war against the potentially breakaway republic was immediately intensified. Later, speculation grew that the bombings were not orchestrated by Chechen rebels, but by the Russian FSB (successor to the KGB) itself as a way to galvanize increasing hate against Chechnya so that the war could be intensified (as it was).

The current concert hall tragedy has been claimed by a group known as ISIS K as their doings, but my guess is that somehow Putin (grogger roll) will find a way to blame it on Ukraine. In fact, I have just read that seven men have been arrested, and that they (I don’t think they have been publicly identified yet) were caught trying to escape from Russia over the Ukraine border (of course). Is it a coincidence that this event occurred just days after Putin (grogger roll) won an election for another six years in power, and when protests have been staged across the country following the more than suspicious death of Alexei Navalny, Putin’s (grogger roll) would be rival for power?

The United States has thankfully been spared any large terrorist attacks since the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Towers in 2001. Sure there have been lone wolf attacks on several synagogues and other religious institutions, and there have been lone wolf attacks on schools and gatherings in places like Las Vegas and suburban Chicago, but none of these attacks have been by sophisticated, organized groups, and certainly none have been perpetrated by foreign terrorists. And, while this could change today or tomorrow, I think we have to thank our overworked law enforcement groups at every level, from the federal CIA and FBI down to local law enforcement in the smallest of communities. And we can only hope that our intelligence establishment is adequately staffed and funded as time goes on, and that any evidence that surfaces of potential attacks is taken seriously by those political leaders in a position to do something to shut down the threat.

Many, maybe most, schools and religious institutions have increased their vigilance and security, and that is all to the good (even though the fact they are required to do this is anything but good). But it seems like large gatherings in general are tempting to would be terrorists. The festival in the Negev Desert, where over 300 in attendance were murdered in October; the concert yesterday in Russia where over 150 have been killed. It appears that security at these venues (often private profit making venues, as opposed to churches and schools) may not be strong enough, and that more is needed. Clearly security at the Negev festival was lax, and – although I don’t know – I assume the same was true in Moscow.

It raises another question – even though on a percentage basis the odds are very small, should people think twice about going to any venue where security is limited – a concert, a cinema, a sporting event, a festival, a political rally? No one wants another COVID-type lock down for sure, but no one wants to be caught by a terrorist attack either.

It is unfortunate that we are now living in a country and an era where our governing bodies concentrate on the ridiculous and fail to address the important problems of the day, even those problems which are the easier to solve and which lack partisan intransigence. I fear that things will get worse before they get better. And not only do I fear this, but apparently younger Americans fear it even more, if recently polls and studies can be believed.

We have elections coming up. If, miracle of miracles, the Democrats control both houses of Congress and the Presidency, we have a chance to turn things around. If control is split between the two parties, we will continue our paralytic state, subject to whatever winds are blowing our way. If the Republicans control all three, heaven help us.

(The preceding paragraph was not a partisan statement, but rather a simple result of using one’s common sense.)

Chag Purim sameach.

(1) On Saturdays, sometimes, I go the synagogue. I also go to the synagogue on many major and minor holidays. For example, tomorrow night I intend to go to Purim services to hear the Meggillah Esther read. (Yes, I have heard it before). And with it comes a Purim spiel – this year (I am sorry to say) it has to do with Barbie (the film I couldn’t sit through) and I guess I am supposed to wear pink. Luckily, I have a pink kippah; that may do it.

On Tuesdays, sometimes, I go to church. The church I go to must at some point have religious services. After all, it looks like a church and has the name Episcopal in its title, but I go because on Tuesdays at noon, they have concerts. My attendance used to be more often than it has been, because I often have other things to do on Tuesdays, and more often I just forget. But this Tuesday, I did go and heard concert performed by a trio consisting of a viola, a cello and (no, not a violin) a flute. It was interesting, I thought.

They played three pieces. The first by French composer Albert Roussel (1869-1937) is titled Trio pour flute, alto et violencelle, Op 40. It was commissioned by American music patroness Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, and was premiered in 1929. I found it an odd piece – a combination of nice lyrical music, but with an undertone of dissonance and unease. I didn’t like it all. Why did he write it?, I thought. But then it dawned on me. 1929. A time of openness and progress, in life in general and certainly in the creative arts, but all with a underlayment of uncertainty and fear of the future. If this is what Roussel had in mind, he got it just right.

The second piece was called Whirlwind Variations, by a contemporary composer, Zach Davis, written for this group of musicians. The two short movements are called “calm” and “chaos”, and that’s what they were. I thought this piece a real winner – but the title did confuse me. Doesn’t a variation have to be a variation of something? Here we had two distinct movements – neither really a variation of the other (unless there is something that my non-musical brain missed in its entirety)..

The third piece? Beethoven’s Trio for strings, Opus 9, Number 3, written for violin, viola and cello. The violin part was re-scored for flute. And? I think it worked. On the other hand, there was probably a reason Beethoven wrote it for violin, don’t you think?

The musicians were Robert Cart, Wade Davis and Ivan Mendoza. Nice.

(2) We did watch a film on On Demand last night. Picked it for no good reason. May have heard of it before, but don’t remember if I did. It’s called “Carol” and stars Cate Blanchett (who I have to remember is not Kate Winslet, although their names are 100% the same in my mind) and Rooney Mara (who must have been born feet first; otherwise, why isn’t her name Mara Rooney?).

‘It turns out that this 2015 film had virtually unanimous positive reviews, won a number of awards, and was nominated for many, many more. It takes place in the early 1950s, and involves a young, struggling aspiring photographer and a somewhat older and much wealthier aspiring divorcee, who find each other and, while I don’t know if they really fall in love, develop a relationship that doesn’t go over well with the one’s would be husband, and the other, a reluctant divorcee who wants full custody of his child. It’s steady and well done all around.’It turns out that this 2015 film had virtually unanimous positive reviews, won a number of awards, and was nominated for many, many more. It takes place in the early 1950s, and involves a young, struggling aspiring photographer and a somewhat older and much wealthier aspiring divorcee, who find each other and, while I don’t know if they really fall in love, develop a relationship that doesn’t go over well with the one’s would be husband, and the other’s husband, a reluctant divorcee who wants full custody of his child. It’s steady and well done all around.

One of the later scenes takes place at a diner with the odd name of Spare Time Diner. I looked to see if it was a real place, and there it was (I think it may have recently closed) in a Kentucky suburb of Cincinnati. Now, the film takes place in New York City, Chicago, and Waterloo Iowa. But when I looked up the making of the film, I learned that it all was filmed in Cincinnati.

If you have Paramount/Showtime as part of your cable subscription, you may want to watch Carol. It’s based on Patricia Highsmith’s book The Price of Salt, which she wrote under the name Claire Morgan. Wikipedia quotes someone as saying it was the first lesbian novel with a happy ending. I don’t know how the book ends, but does the film end happily? To me, the film’s ending was unambiguously ambiguous. Maybe the book ended differently.

Not really.

I have printouts of a blog that I have always assumed that I wrote for the year 2005, and then for the years 2009 and 2010, and finally for the first few months of 2011, when they seem to have stopped. Sometime last week, when I finished the book I was reading, I decided my next book would be my 2009 blog. I have now read through about half of it.

But guess what? I don’t think I wrote it!! Who did?

It’s true that it was written by someone with my name, by someone who lived (and worked) in Washington DC, by someone whose wife had the same name as mine has. But it’s also true that it was written by a very busy person, who went to the theater a lot, saw many films, read books, went to museums, at out at restaurants. Did all sorts of things. The kind of things that I do now, and probably did much more of in 2009.

But I don’t remember most of the things or places he was writing about. For this reason, I must conclude that he is not me. But he is someone who shares some of my interests and, not surprisingly, now and then he does write about something that I remember. So, once in a while, we must have been in the same places at the same time.

Yesterday, for example, I read that he had watched a film called The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which won the Golden Globe best foreign film award, about a young man who was totally paralyzed by a stroke, except that he could blink one of his eyelids, and that his mind was unaffected by his stroke. It was a unique and frightening story. If I had watched that film, I am sure I would have remembered it.
He also listed ten restaurants he had recently eaten in, and he rated them. I guess because we live in the same city, I have eaten in most of them, but he ate at a few that I have never set foot in. For example, he ate at Shangri La in Bethesda (he liked it a lot), and he ate at Baldwin Station in Sykesville MD (I am sure that I have never eaten there, and I don’t know that I have ever been in Sykesville MD) where he had fish and chips. Does that sound like me?

And can you imagine me sitting on the lawn at Strathmore Hall listening to a jazz concert by a Latin group called Calle Sur? I can’t.

But in fact it’s worse. Some of his entries don’t talk about things he did in 2009, but about memories from his past, when he was much younger. I remember virtually everything he says in these posts. This means, I think, that not only has he stolen my name and so forth to report on his current 2009 escapades, but that he has actually stolen my earlier life. Or to put it another way, I guess, he has stolen my earlier memories.

I wish I had known about this guy earlier. I would have sent him a Cease and Desist letter, to force him to stop publishing all of this false information about the 2009 me, and to stop publishing true information about my deep past, without first getting my permission.

It’s all rather disturbing, don’t you think??

As they say, we are a country of laws. And Congress creates those laws, the President administers them, and the Supreme Court determines if the Constitution permits them. This puts the Court at the top – the other two branches decide what we as a country will do, but at any time, for any reason they deem appropriate, the Supreme Court can say “no”. Or the converse. The Supreme Court can take something that seems clearly improper and say “yes”.

And, as we know, our Supreme Court is a big disappointment, but we can’t really do anything about it, because we are a country of laws. And what the Supreme Court says – that is the law.

As we also know, the Supreme Court is run by a group of individuals who claim to be “originalists”, jurists who look to the Constitution not as a living document to be molded to meet the times, but as a more static document, and their goal is to find and use the “original meaning” of a constitutional provision to determine “yes” or “no” today.

Now, we know that they may be a bit hypocritical in employing this doctrine. They might use it when it suits their purpose, and not use it when it does not. But that’s for a different day.

For today, I want to talk a little about how “originalism” and “common sense” have so little in common. If you are a pure originalist, you pay no attention to common sense. You don’t care what the effect of your ruling might be. If your pure originalist analysis tells you that the answer to a question should be “yes”, you go with “yes”, even if you know that the repercussions might be terrible.

For example, if you believe that the Constitution leaves the question of abortions to the states, the fact that a previous Court has ruled differently is irrelevant, and the fact that you undoubtedly know that reversing that decision will create utter havoc is irrelevant. You can’t use your common sense; that is not your department. In fact, it is no one’s department.

This then goes to the question of states’ rights versus federal rights – an argument that has been going on since before the Constitution was written and which is evidenced by much that appears purposely unclear within the wording of the Constitution. Over the almost 250 years that this country has been in existence, the pendulum has swung in the favor of federal supremacy. But now, with the Dobbs case (the abortion case) being one example, it is going the other way, and individual states are being given more rights to determine how various matters will be handled within those states, without regard to the rest of the country. Of course, we are one country, with people living in one state and working in another, having a home in one state and perhaps a second home in another, and so forth. Having states decide policies such as reproductive rights on a state by state basis violates common sense. But the originalists don’t care.

(There are always exceptions – the most obvious being the Court’s ruling against Colorado which will require Colorado to allow Donald Trump’s name to be on its presidential ballot. The Court’s rationale here was not originalism, as much as it was common sense (they said). How can you run a national election and let each state do whatever it wants to do? Of course, states do do what they want to do in virtually all areas involving national elections. Except now in this one area. Why the exception? Could it simply be politics?)

Yesterday the Court, on a temporary basis it appears, said that Texas can implement it new states-rights immigration law. As I understand it, Texas state and local law enforcement officials can now arrest anyone they deem came into the state from Mexico illegally, hold them in prison pending trial, charge them with a misdemeanor (or if it’s a repeat violation, a felony) and fine or sentence them or return them to Mexico. What the standards will be for determining who to arrest, we don’t know. Whether Mexico will agree to take the immigrants back, is a big question; Mexico says it won’t take them. Whether or not an entrant will have the right to even claim asylum under federal law, we don’t know.

If Texas is allowed to continue enforcement of this new law, other states will follow and each law will be written and enforced differently. So, the rights of people entering the country will differ depending on where they enter. And we don’t have any real idea as to how this will relate to the rights of federal officials from HHS who, up until now, have enforced our border laws.

But we do see the precedent that is being created. States having their own immigration and reproductive rights laws will lead to more areas in which the states will declare that they have rights to replace federal laws with their own, or if not replace them, certainly to enforce their own laws alongside the federal officials who are enforcing the country’s own laws. A slippery slope indeed. And soon we will have a 21st century John Calhoun arguing that states have the right to nullify the enforcement of federal laws within their borders, and a Supreme Court who will take its originalist thinking and look at the compromise that we call our Constitution and see it from the eyes of those who believe that we are a nation where the states control, and only call on the feds when they want to.

As someone on TV says…..”stay tuned”. These are very important issues and you need to stay alert. That’s only common sense.

Nadine Gordimer won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. She was born in and lived in South Africa her entire life. She was Jewish (her father from Lithuania; her mother from London), but apparently not religious. She was actively anti-Apartheid, and a member of the African National Congress. During the Apartheid era, some of her books were banned in South Africa. She was a friend of Nelson Mandela, both before and after his long imprisonment. She died, at age 90, in 2014.

I have read, I believe, three of her novels. I find them appealing. Clear and to the point. Not fancy. And dealing with important moral and ethical issues. Yes, Apartheid South Africa was very different from segregated America, but they were not unrelated. In both cases, a White political and financial elite were by and large believers in the superiority of their racial makeup, and had no problem putting limits on what non-Whites and especially Blacks in their countries might be able to do. In America, it was a White majority, and in South Africa a White minority. In both America and South Africa, the settlement of the lands involved power and violence. In America, we tended to kid ourselves and not even understand the depth of our segregation policies; in South Africa, everything was right out there in the open. In America, dissent from our racial strictures was permitted; in South Africa, it tended to be shut down. But the basic understandings were often pretty much the same.

The first of the Gordimer books that I read, some years ago now, is called The Lying Days. It was, I think, her first novel, written when she was about 30. It was the story of a young White girl (a coming of age story) living in a rural town somewhere not far from Johannesburg. She lives in a segregated White society, of course, but as she grows, she begins to meet some other people, not White, and she sees the existence of conditions she hadn’t known about before, she sees the frustration of her non-White friends, and she sees the dangers of coming to their defense. I don’t really remember the story line. I don’t remember if the book had a happy or a sad ending. But I remember the emotions it evoked in me as I read it, for after all, I was someone who also grew up in a totally segregated society and who, until I was about the age of Gordimer’s protagonist, did not even realize it.

The second novel I read is The House Gun, was published in 1998, when Gordimer was in her 70s. The House Gun is a crime novel, set in South Africa, to be sure, but not dealing with Black/White relations in the post-Apartheid era, but set in a society that is still subject to outbreaks of violence, perhaps left over from that earlier time. The main characters in the book are a long married couple, living a relatively placid existence, who learn one evening as they are watching the TV news, that that there has been a murder. When the phone rings a little later, they learn that their son – a promising young architect – has been arrested for the murder and, a little later, they learn he has confessed.

They learn their son is bisexual and that before he developed a relationship with his current girlfriend, he had a male lover. And that it was that former male lover whom his son murdered, when he caught him making love on a couch with his current girlfriend. The parents cannot understand how their son could have done this and, to be clear, neither can their son. There will be some sort of trial, and there is the potential for the death penalty.

Much of the book concerns the trial, and the unraveling of the lives of everyone involved. The reviews were mixed. I remember being engrossed in the story to the very end.

I have just finished reading my third Gordimer novel, None to Accompany Me, published before The House Gun, in 1994. This book does deal with the politics of South Africa. Mandela has been released from prison, and it is transition time in the country. A constitution is being written. Members of “the Movement” are organizing themselves and trying to figure out what the future South Africa should be.

The lead character is a lawyer who gave up the private practice of law some time ago and turned to working for a Foundation looking for justice for the country’s Black citizens – land claims, employment issues…..the usual. She is on her second marriage; her first was short lived, this one much longer. But her husband, an artist whose art was not successful and a man who has never quite found his occupational calling, and she are drifting apart, it appears. She is active; he is passive. And then things happen.

She takes a lover, a sometime lover, a Black man who works also for the Foundation. She works on cases that turn out badly, or at least that become such a confusing web that they will probably never turn out well, she is attacked with a co-worker whom she has been mentoring and he dies of injuries suffered in the attack. Her son (and she does not really know which of her husbands fathered her son) lives in London, is having his own domestic problems and returns to Johannesburg, adding even more complexity to his parents’ relationship.

In the meantime, there is another couple with whom she has been close. A Black couple. The man has been imprisoned on Robben Island, and expects to be a part of the new South Africa, but he is passed over and it is his wife who is selected to be a leader of the new South Africa. Another complication in a very complex country during a very uncertain time.

It is all too much for our lawyer – being pulled in too many directions. Her son goes back to London; her husband decides to go with him. She stays, continues her work at the Foundation, sells the house she has lived in for forty (maybe) years, and moves into a small apartment adjoining the house of Black lover, who has not been her lover for sometime. But she has hopes, perhaps, until she realizes that he has moved on with someone else – someone much, much younger than she.

I don’t think that the three books I have read are among those which are Gordimer’s best known works. I should probably try them. The Guardian listed the five Nadine Gordimer books that you must read. I have read none of them.

I have never been a fan of violence in film. I try to avoid war films for that reason – there are many that I haven’t seen that you might expect I would have. But some time ago (I actually remember when), I realized that I only disliked watching realistic violence. Give me surrealistic or over-the-top violence and I was fine with it. I realized that watching a Sam Peckinpah film “Straw Dogs”, with Dustin Hoffman, which came out back in 1971, and which I probably watched that long ago. Protecting his sanctuary house from invaders, as I recall, Hoffman was a one man army who destroyed anyone who dared to advance towards his property. Clearly surrealistic. Clearly over the top. I thought it was fun.

Saturday night, after attending a cousin’s Zoom birthday party, we decided to watch a film. We had cut out a newspaper article a few days before which (like so many we cut out and then ignore) listed the 5 little known films on Netflix that must be streamed. We decided to go with no. 1, titled “I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore” from 2017. The description was a bit intriguing.

It started off as a film about a young woman whose house was robbed, the article said, and when she found out that the police would do nothing, she decided to track down the thieves herself. Then, the reviewer noted, this simple film turned into a complex thriller. That sounded OK, so we searched it and turned it on.

Our hero, or anti-hero, was a young nursing assistant who lived by herself in a rented house. She came home one evening to find her house ransacked and her laptop and her grandmother’s silver missing. The police came, took notes, and said “we’ll call you if anything shows up.” Realizing that reliance on the police was useless, she scoured the neighborhood, found an odd loner who was willing to help her (“help” being a relative term), took a plaster cast of a shoe print she found in her back yard, and wondered what to do next.

She had a tracking device on her phone to tell her where her laptop was, but only when the laptop was turned on. And within a day or so it was. So she and her new accomplice friend tracked the laptop to a house filled with stoners – after the first hint of violence, she learned they were not the burglars, but had bought the laptop at a massively large junk store. They went to the store, found the silver chest and took it, but not without a little more violence.

While at the store, she recognized the shoe of someone pawning some jewelry as her thief. This started a series of chases and unlikely adventures that ended with five dead people, and her good friend seriously wounded (i.e., seriously enough wounded that he could have only survived in the film). And the event leading to their death was worthy of the late Peckinpah.

It’s not a great film by any means. And the “thriller” film, turned out to be a “slasher” film. But – as I said – it was so over the top that it was fun.

And I also have to thank the film for introducing me to my new favorite song. Here is one rendition:

I did have some more to say today, but I will make it brief. We went to two Asian restaurants last week. One gets and A, and one gets a C.

The A restaurant, in Adams Morgan, is Izumi, on Columbia Road, a new Japanese restaurant. I had stepped in for a quick sushi lunch about two weeks ago. I think it had just opened then. And we went back for dinner – I had a salmon poke bowl (I know, Hawaiian), and Edie had a delicious (her word) avocado, shredded cabbage and sesame sauce dish and a raw flounder dish that had a strange name. We have decided it is our official Japanese restaurant in Adams Morgan and think everyone should try it. As of this morning, on Google, it has 16 reviews. Its average review: 5.0.

The other restaurant is Malaysian and is in Columbia Heights on 11th Street NW. It’s called Makan and has been there for a while and received good reviews. We went for brunch (having seen it was good for brunch), but the menu looked like it was the same menu they use for lunch and for dinner. We had kare dalca and nasi ganja.

Makan is on a three block part of 11th street that is filled with restaurants. Most, on a beautiful weekend day, were doing a thriving business. There were only two other tables filled at Makan when we arrived, and it was empty when we left. The food was all right, not exceptional, but the atmosphere was pretty depressing. Not only because of the sparse crowd, but because their large staff was so sullen. I looked carefully. During the hour we were there, I saw no one smile or laugh. At all. I’d stay away from Makan, even if you are attempted to try an unusual (for here) cuisine.

Now, time to start my day

2009 is now 15 years ago. (I know you already knew that.) And I had another blog in 2009. I thought I would look at the week starting March 16, 2009, and see what I was thinking about, or what was going on in my life. Here goes:

(1) “The Civil War: A Musical Tribute” was the name of a show playing at Ford’s Theater. My reaction was “Am I the only one who thinks this name is both weird and offensive?” [March 16]

(2) I finished reading a 2003 book The Flying Camel, featuring the stories of 18 Jewish women who grew up in Muslim countries (Iran, Iraq, Libya, Tunisia and Morocco), and who told of their experiences growing up in these countries and then how their families were treated if they moved to Israel. I found the stories hair-raising and credible. And I thought everyone should find and read the book. [March 18]

(3) This one I have to quote in full: “My passwords and my user ids for my office email account, my two gmail accounts, my yahoo account, my bank accounts, my two blog accounts, my facebook account, my twitter account, my Delicious account [what was that?], my Ebay account, my PayPal account, my Smithsonian account, my Dinnerbroker account [huh?], my National Law Journal account, My Washington Post account, my New York Times account, My Ancestry account, my Flickr account, my Snapfish account, my NAHMA account, my NLHA account, my Pacer account [huh?], my Hilton account, my Mariott account, my American Airlines account, my Delta account, my Southwest account, my AARP account, my HDR account, my Postini account [huh], my Kodak account, my Ritzpix account, my Best Western account, my Lexis account, Allregs account, my Orbitz account, my Expedia account, my Travelocity account, my Hotels.com account, my Hertz account, my Amtrak account, my Northwest Airlines account, my Hotwire account, my Consumer Reports account, my Comsumer Checklist account, my Amazon account, my Borders Books account, as well as the many other accounts that I don’t even remember I have.” [March 19]

(4) I seem to have been very offended that companies were entering bankruptcy, and paying executives to remain with the company during the bankruptcy process by paying them excessive amounts of compensation, which I thought ridiculous and unfair to creditors. I was especially perturbed about the AIG bankruptcy, where apparently some executives were paid in excess of a million dollars. I have not thought about this outrage in the last 15 years. My guess is it remains a problem. Or not. [March 22]

(5) A summation post, talking about what happened the preceding week. First, our cat was diagnosed with an overactive thyroid, which required liquid medicines twice a day, something our cat didn’t seem to appreciate. Second, dinner at Cafe Deluxe in Bethesda [now gone] which was very good, Saigon Bistro on P Street [now gone] which was not very good, and Grenville Moore’s on H Street NE [still there] which was “as always, excellent”. Third, theater: at the Forum in Silver Spring [now gone] I saw an end of civilization play called “Marisol” [don’t remember it at all]. I appreciated the acting, but not so much the plot, which I describe on the blog, and compare it unfavorably with Thornton Wilder’s By the Skin of Our Teeth. By the way, I thought the world, in 2009, was barely hanging on. Didn’t even imagine what 2024 would feel like. Fourth, three weekend lectures at Adas Israel by Rabbi/Professor Max Tiktin [may his memory be for a blessing], on (a) Hebrew poetry, and especially the poetry of Yehuda Amachai , (b) Hebrew literature and its role in Israeli society, and (c) Yiddish literature in Warsaw between the wars. Sorry that I remember so little of it.

(6) Books. Reading the volume of Viktor Klemperer’s diary covering the years 1942-1945 in Dresden, a few short stories, and made an attempt (not successful) to read Nechama Tec’s Defiance, about the Bielski resistance.

(7) Cousins. I had pizza at Pete’s in Columbia Heights with my newly found second cousin. [Now this is a mystery – who could that have even been?]

That’s it. What lessons do I draw from that? First, I was more active at 66 than I am at 81, it appears. And second, memory can only take you so far. A blog is important. Next life, I am going to start blogging as soon as I can write and operate a computer, and I am going to use it not for those who will read it next week, but for myself to read when I am old and doddering.

So what could be worse than Gaza in 2024? Maybe Haiti. And Haiti, for reasons too complicated to discuss here, has never been in great shape. But I will say this – Haiti in 1977 and Haiti in 2024 were much different places.
Haiti today is apparently controlled by rival gangs and has a non-functional government. It is overcrowded and food supplies are limited. Tires burn in the center of streets. Hospitals have been bombed or attacked. No place is safe.

Haiti in 1977 were calm, calm, calm. It was under the dictatorship of the man known as Baby Doc Duvalier (the son, not surprisingly of another man known as Papa Doc), and it was one of the safest places in the world. It was said that a traveler could leave his suitcase on a busy street corner and come back a week later and it would still be there, untouched. In part this was because Baby Doc ran, as they say, a very tight ship, as did his father, so that the population was terrorized by the Ton Ton Macoute, a large group of thugs who kept order for the Duvaliers. (I read that Ton Ton Macoute was a figure from Haitian mythology, who kidnapped young children, carried them away in a gunny sack, killed them, and at them for breakfast.)

Baby Doc took over from his father in 1971 and remained in power for 15 years. Like his father, he not only kept Haiti’s population terrorized, but he also robbed the country blind. When he was overthrown in 1986, who moved to Miami, with almost a billion dollars, and lived almost another 30 years. A billion dollars in 1986 would be almost three billion today.

The reason I compare today’s Haiti with Haiti in 1977 is that in February 1977, we went to Haiti for our honeymoon. It was a compromise location – Edie wanted to go somewhere warm with a beach, and I wanted to go somewhere interesting. It was a good compromise. (By the way, Bill and Hillary Clinton went to Haiti for their honeymoon the year before.)

We flew from Miami to Port-au-Prince. It was a sprawling, poor city, with a lot of people, all dressed in bright colors. Again, it felt very safe. And it certainly was not overrun with tourists. We stayed in the Hotel Oloffson, in the center of the city, a 19th century wooden mansion that had been built as as the home of a former president of the country and turned into a hotel in the 1930s. It is still operating (as much as anything is operating) today. It was very atmospheric, had a good restaurant, is centrally located. It was known to readers of Graham Greene as the site of his novel, The Comedians, and it was clearly the place to stay. As I recall, the only downside was that our room looked over a patio that adjoined a ball room, or party room, and that one night we were entertained by a wedding band, entertained until after 3 a.m.

I don’t remember all the sights we saw in Port-au-Prince. I remember Baby Doc’s palace, I remember the market (many items sculpted out of rare mahogany), and I remember traveling to the suburb of Petionville, where the Haitian elite lived. And I remember that the Haitian elite lived very well, as compared to the Haitian masses, and that Petionville, located in the mountains east of the city, also had a temperature which was much, much cooler and more pleasant than the hot, crowded city.

One of the characteristics of being White travelers in Port-au-Prince in 1977, is that you were hounded by young boys, probably 10-12, who wanted to sell you things, or wanted candy or cigarettes. We met one charming young fella, who clearly looked upon us as susceptible prey and offered to show us around. We let him do that, although I don’t remember anything about the day. But the next day he reappeared with a gift for us (a small painting that he said his brother had done, and which we still have, although we don’t have it hanging up – the quality was not the best), and was ready (to our surprise) to stay with us the next day. (By the way, I am not sure how we communicated with him – pigeon English, I expect.)

He was not at all concerned when we told him that we weren’t going to wander around the city that day, but planned to take a bus to the town of Jacmel, south of Port-au-Prince, which we had been told was worth visiting. No problem, our young friend said, he knew Jacmel backwards and forwards and would be our guide. OK, why not?

We went to the bus depot and got on a colorfully painted bus, with luggage on the roof, along with animals, and overfilled with people, for what I recall was about an hour or two trip south. When we got to Jacmel, we learned, again not surprisingly, that our friend had never been there before, and that he knew less about Jacmel than we did. Jacmel was the home of an American expert on Haitian art, Seldon Rodman, and we decided to find him. We found his house, but no one was at home. What we couldn’t find was a place to get lunch. We took the bus back – I remember it being less colorful and less crowded.

From Port-au-Price, we flew north to Cap Haitien, the original capital of the country, and where we could visit the palace of Henri Christophe, one of the first kings of Haiti. The palace called Sans Souci, is located outside of the town, and I remember we took a bus to the entrance of the grounds, where you had the option of walking to the palace, or riding on a donkey. We did one or other.

Getting to Cap Haitien was an experience. We flew, and the plane seated eight passengers and had room for a pilot and copilot. There was no copilot, however, and there were eight passengers. The pilot was a young, blond, very White man; maybe he was 20. I am sure the FAA had not inspected the plane or certified him. He told Edie that she could be his copilot, so she got a front row seat. The flight was fascinating. We flew very low, so we could see the topography (largely mountainous) and the large number of rural Haitians (could almost see their faces) as we took the relatively short flight.

We stayed in a hotel that overlooked Cap Haitien and had an absolutely first class restaurant, and a nice swimming pool. I am sure the hotel (it was a small hotel) is no longer there. The restaurant had one dish that was so good that Edie made it again and again after we got home. Neither of us now has any idea what it was.

From Cap Haitien we stayed at a small beach resort on the west coast that was simple, simple, simple. I remember sand, pine trees, and picnic tables and that was it. It was fine for us – but nothing to recommend.

Of course, in 1977, you traveled differently from today. You took American Express Travelers checks with you, and when you needed to buy something, you used credit cards. But there weren’t ATMs – you couldn’t go to the bank and get cash.

This led to two problems. One – we found a painting we really liked – but we couldn’t buy it and bring it home, because credit cards were no use in Haiti, you needed cash. Who knew? We certainly didn’t. Two – we had one travelers check left, and I went to a bank to cash it. The bank refused to cash it, saying that they didn’t think my signature matched the signature on the check. We spent the last cash we had on a taxi to the airport – we didn’t have money for the “exit fee”. It looked like we were going to live the rest of our lives in Haiti, until another American, a man from Lubbock Texas who ran a television repair shop there, took pity on us and gave me $25 in exchange for the remaining travelers check. That’s the only reason we live in the United States today.

While we couldn’t bring back the painting we wanted, we have acquired a few Haitian paintings over the years.

Our neighborhood community-owned theater, the Avalon, has a special showing virtually every Wednesday evening of a foreign film not normally available for view in the United States at the time. This Wednesday night we went to see a Czech (and Slovak and German and Ukrainian) film entitled “Victim”, a 2022 film which may start to receive wider distribution. So far, it has been shown in film festivals, where it has been nominated for, and won, a number of prizes. I thought it worth mentioning for reasons that I hope will become apparent.

The victim of “Victim” is a 13 year old boy, a talented gymnast, who lives with his single mother (the father has long abandoned the family) in the equivalence of public housing in a mid-sized town in the Czech Republic. But they are Ukrainian, not Czech, and the mother (whose name is Irina) is in the arduous process of trying to get Czech citizenship (which, I assume, her minor son would also get if she does).

Irina has to return to Ukraine to gather some material she needs for her citizenship application and leaves her son alone, with a friend assuring her that she would check in on him to make sure his is all right. Sadly, she learns that, late at night, her son has been seriously beaten up in the hallway of their apartment building, and has been taken to the local hospital where he injuries require immediate surgery. She leaves Ukraine and gets back to the Czech Republic as quickly as she can.

There seem to be a large number of Ukrainian immigrants around the town, and – except that they are all struggling to restart their lives – there does not appear to be any major prejudice against them. But there is tremendous prejudice against another prevalent group – the Roma, the gypsies. And as there are many Roma families in the complex in which Irina and her son (Igor) live, it seems to be, in everyone’s mind, clear that the attack on Igor could only have been done by wild, uncontrollable Roma teenagers, including one who lives in the apartment directly above Irina. And, I should add, that the anti-Roma prejudice seems to be as strong among the Ukrainian immigrants as among the ethnic Czechs.

Igor himself says he cannot identify the boys who beat him up. He only knows that there were three of them. He also says (although he seems not to be believed) that his upstairs neighbor was not one of them. The authorities reach their own conclusions and arrest and detained the Roma neighbor, and will presumably be charging him with participating in the crime.

The local, and maybe national, press pick up the story and deepen the feelings against the Roma in the town. A young man, probably in his 20s, also a gymnast, decides there should be a rally and a march to support Igor and his mother, to criticize the local government for failing to act against the Roma. The mayor, afraid of the rally, shows her own support for Irina and Igor, giving them an opportunity to move to a newly constructed building in a different neighborhood and bestowing a cash award on them.

Then, one day, Igor, still recuperating in the hospital, tells his mother that he wasn’t beaten up at all, that he was showing off for a girl in his class, climbing on the upstairs railing, and that he slipped and fell. No Roma were involved. No one else was involved.

His mother is beyond shocked. Here she had been so public with her innocent son’s predicament, she had spoken out not so much against the Roma, but for the police to find the three boys who assaulted her son. She had accepted money from the city and the mayor, she had been meeting with the young man organizing the rally (although she was ambiguous about it). She came across as a perfect mother. And what should she do now?

The Czech actress who plays the mother (Vita Smachelyuk) does a wonderful job in an emotionally complicated role. The film deals with a number of subjects: the strains on immigrants, the prejudice against certain groups of community members, how to deal with a major and unexpected family tragedy, and how to deal with a lie that has taken on a life of its own.

It’s well worth watching. You just have to find it.

Let’s change the subject.

This is a painting by Jean Pierre Cassigneul, a living French artist in his late eighties. We have a poster with another of his paintings in our guest room bath. I find this painting very appealing.

But why? It is totally flat and two dimensional. The woman, the water, the far shore. More like a collage than like a painting with depth. And look at the sail boat. It’s much too small. The woman’s hat – what are those blurry things on top of it? And why is the rim color the same as that of the background hill? And look at her nose. Does anyone have a nose that long and thin? And look at that left arm – the bend is not at the wrist, but somewhere on her forearm.

These are all flaws, aren’t they? Flaws that I identify.

So why do I like it? What makes art art anyway?

I really haven’t ridden the Washington Metro very much since the end of the COVID pandemic. Maybe once a month or so, no more. I used to ride it considerably more often.

But yesterday, I decided to take the Metro somewhere. I am not being more specific than that because, when I got on the Metro at Van Ness, I didn’t know where I was going to take it. It was a beautiful day, and I was out for a walk, and decided to walk in someone else’s neighborhood rather than my own for a change.

So I walked to the Van Ness station (about 2/3 of a mile from the house, maybe a little closer), and was very excited to see a Red Line train entering the station just about the same time that I was entering, and I got onto the train. And I decided to go all the way Union Station.

Then it hit me. This looked like old times. Over the past year or so, I have always felt a bit lonely on the Metro. The cars are fairly large (depending on the vintage of the car, they are built to hold 110-130 people each), and I have found myself more likely with only 5 or 6 others, nowhere near capacity. But yesterday…..wow! The car was, if not full, filled with people. Most seats taken, several people standing. Just like old times.

The car added and lost riders as it went station to station. Cleveland Park, Woodley-Zoo, Dupont Circle, Farragut North, Metro Center, Gallery Place, Judiciary Square. Only one more stop to go. But at Judiciary, the doors stayed open for what was clearly too long of a time. And then the voice of the driver came over the loudspeaker. “This car is out of service. This car is out of service. All passengers disembark.”

Yes, it was exactly like old times.

After I finished roaming the streets a few hours later, I got on a bus to come up Connecticut Avenue, the L2 bus. I got on at Connecticut and M, took out my Senior SmarTrip card, and touched it to the sensor, expecting the normal “buzzzzz”. No sound. I tried it again, but the bus driver said to me: “It’s not working. Just get on.” Ah, technology.

This reminded me of old times, too, but different old times. There I was in 1970-something in Naples, planning to take a short train ride and spend the day in Pompeii. Going to the station, I learned that all the ticket takers were on strike. What to do? I asked someone at the station if they knew how I could get to Pompeii. “Take the train”, he said, and pointed me to a particular track. “But I can’t get a ticket; they’re on strike”, I said. He looked at me like I was a little confused. “Only the ticket sellers are on strike”, he said, “the trains are running. No one else is on strike”. And so I went to Pompeii.

Oh, well for those of you wondering what I did yesterday when the train was evacuated at Judiciary Square. I left the Metro, rather than wait for the next one, and wandered on foot to Union Station – a moderately interesting walk in an area I don’t normally wander through – and had a Harvest Salad at the Franklin Grill, a carryout with outside tables in the office building where both NBC and CNN have their Washington offices. (You know, where the CNN anchors sit with windows overlooking the Capitol.)

The salad was fine and I realized how very American these various salads with chicken are. Are they served anywhere else? Can I get a Cobb Salad in Naples? I was excited to be at the Franklin Grill, because I expected that any minute Wolf Blitzer or Lester Holt or, yes, Kaitlan Collins would walk in, but – alas – there must be an executive dining room.

From there, I stopped in the United States Postal Museum, a Smithsonian Museum right next to Union Station. I hadn’t been there in a while – no big changes. A number of visitors.

I like to learn things at museums. So I looked at the exhibit on how stamps are printed. One of the examples (they displayed a full page block) was described as follows: “The vignette was printed by offset and the frame by intaglio. In offset printing, an aluminum plate is photographically treated so that the positive image retains ink. The plate transfers the image to a rubber blanket roll, which in turn transfers the design to paper for the finished product. Four colors (plus beige) were printed individually to achieve the final vignette image.”

One of the few times I have read an explanation and felt both dumber and humbled when I was done.

It would seem that yesterday was not a good day for the Trump campaign. But time will tell.

The general story is that Republicans just can’t keep to the truth.

(1) Take Special Counsel Robert Hur’s testimony, and the discrepancies between the full transcript of his interview with Joe Biden and his report of his findings. Hur testified that he saw Biden as an elderly man with a faulty memory, and in his report gave as his major example the fact that Biden couldn’t remember when his son Beau died. This created, as Eric Swalwell said, a “firestorm”, leading to Republicans claiming again and again that Joe Biden was mentally unequipped to be President and that his mind would weaken further over the years of his second term. It led to denials, of course, from the Democrats, who tried to explain that Biden was very distracted by the Hamas attack on Israel, which had taken place a day or so before.

But it turns out that this denial rationale was unnecessary. It turns out that Hur reported something that never happened. The transcipt (as opposed to the official report) showed that Hur asked Biden if he remembered the month that Beau died, and Biden responded immediately “Oh, God. May 30.”

This important Special Counsel report was just wrong on this very important fact. Period. Well, maybe not Period. How could this have happened? How/why did Hur make this mistake? And, once he did, knowing how it would end up being the focus of the report, how could the Department of Justice simply released the entire report without, apparently, doing any checking?

And, just to add to this, in the transcript, when talking about where various files were stored, Hur told Biden that he had a photographic memory of his house. This mental complement, of course, did not make it into the report.

Robert Hur is a registered Republican, and former Trump appointee. Although he swore again and again that politics played no role in his investigation or report, was he being deceptive to the public or to himself?

(2) And this came less than a week after Alabama Senator Katie Britt, in her response to President Biden’s State of the Union Address, attacked the Biden immigration policy by giving the example of a 12 year old girl, who was raped and sold for sex on the American side of the Mexican border by someone connected to a Mexican drug cartel, and, by implication during the Biden administration.

The problem with this is that this event happened during the administration of George W. Bush, that it occurred in Mexico far from the American border and having nothing to do with this country, and that it had absolutely nothing to do with a Mexican cartel, but was rather the action of an apparently independent pimp.

Now, I don’t know who prepared Britt’s speech, whether she did it or someone else. But again, minimal fact checking would have helped. Or – if it wasn’t a question of simple carelessness – are we looking at a second attempt to deceive the public.

As Joy Reid said last night – the Democrats play by the Marquis of Queensbury rules, and the Republicans don’t.

Now, when I Googled the Marquis of Queensbury, this painting appeared. I could have simply added it to this post and told you this was the Marquis of Queensbury. But, no, I am not a Republican, so I looked further and discovered, lo and behold, that this is a painting of the first Marquis of Montrose. Well, Bob’s my uncle.

Google apparently made this “error” because both the Marquis of Montrose and the commoner who developed the Marquis of Queensbury rules (first published by Queensbury) were James Grahams. And there you have it.

So, Republicans, take note. It’s not that hard.

The number of readers of this blog each day varies. I don’t usually focus on the differences, but I was surprised that there were relatively few readers yesterday when I wrote about Alan Dershowitz and impeachment. I thought it very interesting. Maybe you want to look at it today.

I started today with a longish walk to the bank and the post office and am now having a cup of coffee near Chevy Chase Circle, about 3000 steps from my house.

And I am thinking about Kaitlin Collins. In case you don’t know who she is, she’s a TV journalist, who anchors the 9 p.m. news show on CNN (Eastern Time), and does a remarkably good job at it. Why I am thinking about her is that she has a major position with a major cable news outlet, interviewing some of the world’s most newsworthy individuals, including former President Trump and his long time aide, Brian Butler, and she is only 31 years old.

She has been with CNN since 2021, as their White House correspondent and co-anchor of their morning show. How do you get in that position at such a young age? She comes from a small town in Alabama and has only an undergraduate degree from the University of Alabama. I find it remarkable that she was promoted so quickly. There must be a lesson here that others can learn from.

At any rate, she does a very good job, and this was proven last night through her “exclusive” interview with Brian Butler, Trump Employee #5, who has apparently given extraordinary testimony about (1) removing classified documents from Mar-a-Lago the day the FBI was coming to town, and (2) making sure that surveillance cameras were turned off in the rooms where the boxes were stored. Damning testimony, it seems. One more nail in what will be hopefully Trump’s political coffin.

But let’s get back to my cup of coffee this morning. The cafe is not crowded, and an elderly man, who looks like he may be sleeping on the street (of course, I may have looked that way, too) steps in, walks up to the counter, orders a ham and cheese something and a bottle of water and sits down near me. As he bit into the sandwich, I heard him mutter to himself: “This bread is hard. It’s not American bread. It’s French bread. I’m not French.”

There was another friend in the cafe, and he and I had been talking from our two tables. The man eating ham and cheese had overheard a little of that and, after my friend left, began talking to me.

“Here we go”, I said to myself. Little did I know that I was about to enter a lengthy conversation about the history of the Washington Post. And a fascinating conversation it was with an individual who worked as a Post reporter for about 5 years during the 1970s, and who has apparently had a rough time after that time. But his knowledge of Post history was remarkable. We spoke about Eugene Meyer and Katharine and Philip Graham and Ben Bradlee and William Raspberry, and others. It was an interesting conversation, filled (on his part) with details, and dates, and connections, including thoughtful points on the role of Black reporters during the time after the death of Martin Luther King, Jr and the riots in DC, and the Watergate scandal and the Nixon resignation.

And then we got into conspiracy theory. It is my friend’s belief that it is possible that Philip Graham didn’t commit suicide, but that his wife Katharine Graham murdered him. Whoa!!

Here is his theory. Eugene Meyer gave control of the Post to his son-in-law Philip Graham, with whom he was very close, in part because if he had given control to Katharine, it would have meant that Philip would have been working for Katharine, and he had a strong feeling that a husband should never work for a wife. Then, after Eugene Meyer left the Post and died, the marital relationship between Katharine and Philip became very strained. Philip then found a new love (my friend named her, but I don’t remember what he said her name was) and decided to leave Katharine. As this was going on, Philip was having mental or emotional problems and entered a mental health facility known as Chestnut Lodge in Rockville, Maryland. At some point, Katharine took Philip out of Chestnut Lodge and drove him to one of their homes. That is where Philip “committed suicide”.

I am not commenting on the accuracy of this theory. I would assume it is wrong. But the conversation I had this morning? That was fascinating.

When did people start talking about an ice cream flavor called Peach Mint? It was either the first Trump impeachment, or maybe it was the Clinton peach mint. I am not sure. In any event……

As I said yesterday, I unexpectedly picked up and read a 2018 book by retired Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, titled The Case Against Impeaching Trump. As you can tell from the publication date (if you are smarter than I was), when the book was published, the first impeachment of Trump was under discussion, but had not yet been accomplished, so this is not an analysis of “what happened”, but a warning of what should not be happening. And, by the way, I decided to read this book not to learn more about the Trump impeachment, but about the impeachment of Alejandro Mayorkas, Biden’s Homeland Security Secretary, and the potential impeachment of Biden himself.

Dershowtiz describes himself as follows: a civil libertarian, a liberal, one who does not like Donald Trump, one who thinks that constitutional questions should not be decided on a partisan basis, one who was a strong supporter of both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. He prides himself on his consistency (over a 50 year period) looking at the question of impeachment. He is a former Board member of the ACLU, and believes that the ACLU has changed from an organization dedicated to civil liberties, to one knee-jerk supporting Democratic candidates, and he abhors the change. He is also saddened, he says, that so many friends have turned against him because of his nonpartisan views on impeachment and other constitutional issues, and time and again he contrasts his views with those of his fellow faculty friend, Lawrence Tribe (whom you can see often on MSNBC).

Dershowitz’s views are straightforward. The Constitution gives the House the right to impeach someone who has committed high crimes and misdemeanors, and the only high crimes mentioned are treason and bribery. He says that these are limitations written into the constitution and cannot be expanded, and although what specific crimes may be high or may be misdemeanors, you can’t turn actions that are not crimes into crimes for the purpose of impeachment. He says that those legal scholars who think that you can, who take a more expansionist view of impeachment, are wrong, even though he concedes they may be in the majority.

Specifically, he says that you cannot impeach a federal officer (President or otherwise) for making bad policy decisions, or for performing their job poorly. And he says you cannot impeach someone for acting within their constitutional authority, no matter how dumb an act they may undertake, or how harmful.

For example, he says that there is no crime in a presidential campaign colluding with a foreign government, as dangerous and unpatriotic as it may be. There is a crime, he says, in a foreign government making financial contributions to a campaign, but not to a campaign simply working with a foreign government, or even pressuring a foreign government, to dig up dirt on an opponent (as Trump did with Ukraine).

Taking the opposite position is, in his view, simply putting politics over the Constitution. And he cites various authorities who say exactly this – that impeachment is a political action, and whatever the politicians in the House decide to use as the basis for impeachment is all right. Dershowitz argues strongly against this.

Therefore, I am sure he would conclude that the impeachment of Mayorkas was totally improper, and he would say that he would reach this conclusion not because of political considerations, but because of constitutional considerations. Now, I have not heard Dershowitz say anything about Mayorkas (although I bet he has), but I have wondered about the Mayorkas impeachemnt, and about what the Senate is going to do about an impeachment trial. My thought was that the House impeached Mayorkas strictly on a partisan basis, not alleging any crime that Mayorkas committed (much less one that might reach constitutional levels). I think that the Senate can just ignore the impeachment, and not hold any trial whatsoever. Why have a trial on an impeachment if you believe the impeachment is not a valid impeachment? By the way, I haven’t heard anyone suggest this, although clearly the Senate is not moving ahead very quickly (or at all?).

Finally, I must say that this book (which I am sure was rushed to print) is a bit deceptive. The entire book is only 146 pages long, and the essay on impeachment (in spite of the book’s title) is only 28 pages long. The remainder of the book is filled with short essays that Dershowitz has had published in various places over several years, dealing with other constitutional/political questions.

These include (1) the impossibility of judging a president’s “corrupt intentions”, (2) the built-in conflict of interest having an Attorney General whose tasks include both being the head of federal criminal prosecutions and the administration’s top lawyer (he says that in most countries, the prosecution job is a separate one, totally independent of politics), (3) the phenomena of jury shopping (the example being Robert Mueller’s decision to impanel a grand jury in DC, in addition to the one already impaneled in Virginia), (4) the dangers of raiding lawyers’ offices (thinking specifically of Michael Cohen, who had not yet “flipped”) and the potential withering of the attorney-client privilege, which Dershowitz believes should be strengthened), and (5) the unknown question of whether a president can pardon himself. He condemns Trump for his comments after the Charlottesville riots, and he believes that the appointment of a Special Counsel to look at the Trump/Russia connection was incorrect and that it would have been more properly the job of an independent investigatory commission, not a prosecutor.

And as to Trump’s claim of complete presidential immunity (obviously not made at the time the book was written), I believe he would laugh it off completely, and would look at the issue the same way he looks at impeachment. If the President is acting within his capacity as president, he is immune from prosecution in spite of making outrageous or dangerous decisions or having “corrupt intent”. On the other hand, if the President is breaking the law with regard to an action not part of his presidential duties, he is – like anyone else – subject to the law. I don’t think the issue of whether a President could be prosecuted while in office was covered in the book, and I’d be interested in how Dershowitz would respond to that possibility.

So this little book turned out to be a gold mine of thoughts on the Constitution and the Presidency. And – as I said – all in 144 pages.

Yesterday, I started looking at a book I never thought I would ever even think of reading. It’s Alan Dershowitz’s The Case Against Impeaching Trump. Why, you ask, would I read a book about impeaching Trump who, at least for now, is not someone in public office? And, besides that, Trump has already been impeached twice and it hasn’t seemed to make a difference. And even beside that, Alan Dershowitz has sure said some weird things over the past few years, hasn’t he?

But I picked it up not so much to read about Trump, but rather to think about the recent impeachments of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, and the possible impeachment of Joe Biden. I thought I should know what Dershowitz thought about those (I haven’t heard him speak to the matters), and to figure out what I think about them. (Well, I guess I already know that.)

But, even though it’s a very short book, and I wasn’t going to read it word for word (at least I didn’t think I would), I didn’t finish it yesterday. Yes, where has the time gone? I feel like I lost…….at least an hour or so.

So…..tomorrow (I hope) the subject will be impeachment. Today, the subject will be…….the Donald Trump rally in Rome Georgia. We actually watched it on Newsmax.

The rally was packed, he said, overfilling the biggest room available in Rome, and there are thousands, yes thousands, of people waiting outside. And the fifteen minute ride from the airport? More people than I have ever seen en route to anywhere before. (But the fake media won’t print that.)

I looked up Rome, a city of about 38,000 and the county seat of Floyd County, Georgia, just about an hour or so northwest of Atlanta. Floyd County voted 70% for Trump in the 2020 election, so it is surely friendly country. It is also Marjorie Taylor Greene country – the heart of Georgia’s 14th Congressional District. So, it’s a good place to start your “official” as they call it presidential campaign.

There didn’t seem to be a lot of hoopla. Trump was, as usual, quite late in taking the stage, but once he took it, he surely was not going to give it up prematurely – he spoke for about two hours, maybe a little less, maybe a little more and, no surprise, he really didn’t say anything new. Part of his speech was scripted (he had two teleprompters), and part was ad lib. You can guess what parts.

The main points of the speech were clear. Joe Biden (he used his full name “Crooked Joe Biden”) is incompetent, cognitively impaired, dumb, a criminal, and by far the worst president the United States has ever had. The crowd seemed to agree.

And to prove it, just look at all the troubles we have in this world – and there are many. Each and every one of them turns out to be Crooked Joe’s fault. I hadn’t quite understood that, but now that it has been explained (well, not really explained), it is clear to me. Had Donald J. been reelected three years ago, the world would be in a different position. Putin would not have attacked Ukraine (he wouldn’t have dared), and Hamas would not have even thought about attacking Israel (who put that thought into their heads? obviously Crooked Joe). And clearly no one would mess with us…..because they know what Trump would do to them. They know it so well that they couldn’t even imagine it, in fact.

And what about these criminal and civil cases he is involved with? They are, each and everyone of them not only criminal in and of themselves, but they are each directed by and coordinated by the White House. Did you know that? And the judges and the opposing lawyers – corrupt is too mild a word for reach and every one of them. And you know how you can prove this? It’s easy. Just remember that “I have not done one thing wrong. Everything I have done is perfect”. See? Easy. And, by the way, he still has no idea who E. Jean Carroll even is.

And the border? Well, we have gone from the absolutely safest more secure border in world history to the most open and dangerous border that humanity has ever seen. Trump, if elected, is going to shut down the border and to go after everyone illegal in the United States and send them on their way. And, yes, they are “illegal” – just because they have been allowed to stay in the country pending proceedings doesn’t make them just “undocumented”; they are and always will be illegal.

And why did Crooked Joe let in that guy who killed that Georgia student whose name Biden cannot even pronounce? Yes, that too, seems to have been a personal decision of our terribly bad (worst in the world) so-called president.

A digression: This guy and his two brothers really are bad news, and were allowed to stay only because, it seems, the border officials are so overworked, or because mistakes were made. Can’t deny that. They should not be here.

But you see where I am going with this. It was an awful speech and the crowd seemed to eat it up. Yes, we have trouble. Right here in River City.

Another digression: Rome GA is in fact on three rivers – the Coosa, the Etowah and the Oostanaula. How would you do if that were the Final Jeopardy question?

Last thing: at the end of the speech, Trump, who had been in deep ad-lib mode, went back to the teleprompter and rapidly read off everything wrong with Biden. It was a very impressive and long list. I would like to have a transcript, because – if you are directing the Biden campaign – in fact you need an answer for each and everything on the list.

OK, and remember: Tomorrow impeachment.

Last night we decided to watch a film, but didn’t have any idea what we wanted to watch. (Yes, of course we have a list; and, no, we never consult it.)

Knowing that looking either on On Demand or on Netflix randomly turns out to be frustrating at best, I went to YouTube, which of course has more movies available than have ever been made. But YouTube being YouTube, it gives you random recommendations, and we took the first one on my YouTube home page – “The Tenth Man”.

It turns out that “The Tenth Man” is the title of at least three films and a play and a novel. All proved relatively successful and convinced me that if I ever write a novel, write or produce a play, or write or direct a film, I am going to call my creation “The Tenth Man”. It can’t fail.

Last night’s “The Tenth Man” was a film produced for British TV in 1988 based on Graham Greene’s novel of the same name, published three years earlier. I haven’t read the book, but guess (based on the mini-reviews on Goodreads) that it’s a pretty good book. And of course, I don’t know how close the film came to the book, but my guess is that was pretty close. And we enjoyed the film, even though we thought the ending could have been better. (I am not going to tell you about the ending.)

So what is this film about? It’s 1941 or so in German occupied Paris, and a number of men are randomly swept off the street and herded into a large prison cell, one of whom being a totally non-political and seemingly harmless lawyer, who turns out to be Sir Anthony Hopkins (who knew?). An officious young, tall and thin German officer walks in and states that one of every ten men in the cell (there are about 30 who have been arrested) is going to be killed to show the Parisians something or other, or to keep them from doing something or other. And, the prisoners themselves have to choose who the three will be. “We don’t care who you choose”, say the German.

They draw lots, and Anthony Hopkins is picked to be one of the three to be killed, but because he is both wealthy (he inherited his money – his law practice is not much to speak about) and a coward, he asks for someone to change places with him in return for all his worldly possessions, including money and a fancy estate outside of Paris. A young and presumably consumptive man who wishes to provide financial security for his mother and his sister, agrees. The young man is executed. Sir Anthony lives.

Move forward three years. The Nazis are gone. Anthony Hopkins is now a penniless beggar who doesn’t know where to turn, and who decides to swallow his pride and return to his former home, now occupied by the dead man’s mother and sister (it’s quite a coincidence, by the way, that the dead man’s sister is none other than Kristin Scott Thomas). He shows up at his former estate, introduces himself with a new name and says that he was a cellmate of the original owner of the house (in fact, he is of course he) and Kristin’s late brother. He is also hungry.

Meanwhile, the house itself is in shambles, and it turns out that Kristin and her mother hate living there, and they curse and despise the man who purchased his own life and the expense of their son/brother. Hopkins realizes he has to keep his identity well hidden. He has aged a bit in the Nazi prison, he has grown a long shaggy beard, and he never circulated much in the nearby town anyway, so (perhaps a bit unbelievably) no one recognizes him. He stays at the house at the request of Kristin Scott Thomas to help keep the place in order and replant the formerly extensive garden.

All is well. Perhaps there is a budding romance. But then one day, the door bell rings, another man appears (damn if he doesn’t look just like Sir Derek Jacobi) who introduces himself as the man who owned the house (much to Sir Anthony’s surprise and distress and utter confusion) and who informs them that he once again owns the house because of some new French law that voids all transactions done under duress during the Nazi occupation.

I’m not going to tell you what happens, but I will just leave you with the following thoughts: Sir Derek (the fake owner) is swarmy, Sir Anthony (the real former owner) is scared to death, and Kristin (who I don’t think has either been sir-ed or dame-ed) is totally at sea (although she is saved by her fabulous facial expressions, where she shows so much confusion and surprise that you would swear she had never read the script).

But…..there’s more

First, did you know that W. Somerset Maugham wrote a play called “The Tenth Man”. This play is apparently about an unscrupulous business man, who tells his long suffering wife that 9 out of 10 men are worthless and easy to bamboozle (I am not sure if WSM used the word “bamboozle”, but we can pretend, can’t we?) He goes about proving to her the is a master bamboozler (much to her dismay), but then he meets “the tenth” man, and the jig is up. It was made into a film in 1936.

Now comes the surprising news. Someone wrote a review of the film in The Spectator in 1936 and praised the plot and the direction. Who was that reviewer who was so pleased with “The Tenth Man”? It was 32 year old Graham Greene, who when he was 81 wrote his own “The Tenth Man” (see above, if you have short term memory problems). How ’bout that??

But wait…..there’s more. In 2016, there was another film called “The Tenth Man”. And this one we actually saw. It is focused on a rundown neighborhood, formerly a center of the Jewish community of Buenos Aires, and a charity run (not well) by the father of our anti-hero, Ariel, who returns from New York for a visit. He and his father see the world very differently (neither see it as I do, by the way) and it will take an attractive, if mysterious, woman who sees it still differently to try to help resolve their issues. We saw the Tenth Man sometime during the pandemic (or maybe even before) and found it enjoyable and interesting, if not Oscar-worthy. Although it turned out that lead actor Alan Sabbagh did win a Best Actor award in the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival, and in the Lleida Latin-American Film Festival.

And then there was Paddy Chayevsky, who wrote a play “The Tenth Man” in 1959, which ran on Broadway for a year and a half (over 600 performances). And, no, Derek Jacobi was not in it – but…… Lou Jacobi was. Does that count? (And I don’t think they are related, but maybe Henry Louis Gates, Jr. knows something I don’t.)

Paddy’s “The Tenth Man” was based on Ansky’s play, “The Dybbuk”, but wasn’t set in the old country, but in Mineola, New York (I have no idea where Mineoli, even though I did have a Great Aunt Minnie). There in deepest Mineola, a number of old Russian Jewish men live and spend all their times doing the things that old Russian Jewish men do, until something unusual happens. The granddaughter of one them seems to become possessed by a dybbuk. What to do?

That’s it for The Tenth Men. But if you want something close, how about Agatha Christie? Remember, she had ten, then there were nine, then there were eight, then there were seven, and so on until “And Then There Were None.”

There are 13 works of art hanging on the walls of our guest room. Most are prints of various sorts, two are original oils, and three are posters. We moved into our house in 1981, and two of our posters are from National Gallery shows of 1980. This one is from a showing of the collection of Martin Neuman. I have no idea who that is.

But……this 1938 painting by Paul Klee, titled Capriccio in February, has to be one of the cleverest and most appeal work of art since those cave dwellers painted those animals in the south of France.

So if you come to visit us, and just don’t feel like getting out of bed or socializing, you can stare at it all day. Just saying.

Before I forget, I want to congratulate Rupert Murdoch on his engagement. It’s his second engagement since he turned 90, and if this one goes through, he will have married his fifth wife. I wish him well. Maybe this is the relationship that will last the rest of his life.

I saw this morning a poll that said that 60% of those who watched thought that Biden gave a first class State of the Union address last night. And I saw that Marjorie Taylor Greene was not in the 60%. She seems to think that Biden should be arrested for the tragic murder of that University of Georgia student, who was killed presumably by an illegal immigrant from Venezuela. If Trump had been president, she is sure that this guy would be killing people in Caracas, not Athens. Of course, his clone might be coming in right now, since the Republicans won’t bring the border bill that their Senate negotiators designed and approved. Shame on them.

And then there was Mike Johnson, smirking behind the President after having admonished the GOP to behave. Watch what I say, not what I do? (I know, he didn’t physically rip the speech up as Nancy Pelosi did in her worst moment)

And then there was expelled ex-Congressman George Santos, who watched the speech from the floor of the House (that’s his privilege I am told) and then announced that he is going to run for Congress again!!

Let’s see. What else? The Republican response, delivered by Alabama Senator Britt. I don’t know anything about her, but I have to say that she sounded like she was trying to sell me her favorite brand of dishwasher soap, not GOP policy. Speaking of that, did she mention even one GOP policy? I don’t think so. And that’s in part because they have none.

Besides his age, which he can do nothing about, Biden has two problems. One is obviously the border as I have repeatedly told him to no avail. It’s too late to do anything about that. The other is inflation and interest rates. I think the Dems can have a message here,a threefold message. One, a comparison of inflation here and in the rest of the world. Two, the independence of the Federal Reserve, led by Republican Jerome Powell, appointed by one Donald J. Trump. Three, the rate of inflation today, compared to when it was at its highest. Are you listening to me, Joe?

As to the overall speech,I thought it was OK. I liked last year’s better, as I remember. But I do think the Biden campaign can use some clips to their advantage.

Now what do we have to worry about? Jill Stein, Cornell West, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., No Labels, and all those Democratic voters who have to be convinced not to stay home and not to throw away their votes.

Well, it’s Thursday, and that means I just got out of my Thursday morning breakfast meeting, and the topic of the presentation and discussion today was “free will”.

Diversion: Already a diversion. I just remembered the film, which I never saw, “Free Willy”. Do you think that was somehow a pun on the concept of free will? I must look deeper.

Diversion 2: Am I writing about free will this morning because I want to, or because I have no choice? Read on.

The gist of the presentation, which was excellent, is that scientists have concluded more and more that free will is an illusion and that we have no choice as to what we do, or what we think. That our thinking is always a physical process, governed by the neurons in our brains (and we have millions of them), and the challenge is to determine how those neurons direct us, not whether they direct us. To what extent our genetic history controls, and to what extent those neurons are governed by our experiences. And of course, to what extent can we (the societal we) control how the neurons of particular individuals work, whether by drugs, or therapies, or whatever.

And then comes the questions of good or bad. Does the knowledge that we are not making our own choices out of a floating free will make us more understanding of the behavior of others, or more impatient? How does it make us look at ourselves?

What does it mean to think that maybe we can change others’ (or our own) behaviors and behavior patterns by using drugs or other stimuli that change the way our brains work, and that we will get better at this as time goes on? What does it say about our criminal justice system? Should we be more tolerant of aberrant behavior, even when it adversely affects society? Should “punishment” not be for the sake of punishment, but for the sake of rehabilitation (which could be done by brain manipulation) or the sake of eliminating societal dangers, even if it means punishing someone who has no control over his/her activities and therefore isn’t really deserving of punishment?

If we give drugs (either recreational mind-altering drugs, or medicinal drugs) that have the effect of changing personalities to make the world (macro or micro) run more smoothly, are we tampering with something we would be better off letting alone, or are we showing progress in social engineering? Like everything else, we know that brains could be altered for the better, but also for the worse – and it depends on who is doing the altering.

And of course that brings us to Artificial Intelligence and to the question of consciousness. If we can influence thinking, are we creating a form of AI in the human brains we are altering? If we can create a machine that can “think”, are we creating a sort of consciousness in that machine?

It was pointed out that, even if one believes intellectually that free will does not exist, one can still believe emotionally that it does. Also, that it is possible that free will exists, but in a limited way. Most studies point to decision making being the result of biological or chemical necessities, not free choice. But proof, proof with a capital P, is hard to come by. And maybe the illusion of free will is a necessity – and also a result of biology and chemistry.

And then someone brought up the question of memory. If our neurons are to some extent controlled by our experiences (“I broke my foot jumping off a roof; I won’t jump off a roof again.”), how does memory fit in? What if I don’t remember something (maybe it happened to me when I was a baby; maybe I just have trouble remembering things), will the event itself still affect me, just unconsciously? So many questions.

As one of my Thursday cohorts pointed out, if I forget to do something, and my wife calls me out for it, it is not a satisfactory answer to say “It wasn’t me, it was my neurons that I can’t control.”

All of these questions (and there are so many) may be both extremely important and totally irrelevant. As our diagnostic science, our ability to alter our brains, and the complexity of the world all increase, how does this overall question of free will fit in?

Back to diversion: I did find an article on someone else’s blog from 2014 called “Free Will or Free Willy?” I read through it very quickly, and can’t say that I understand it, but it – from a religious (specifically Catholic) point of view – concludes that indeed God gave us free will, and advising us that we can use our free will for good if we choose, and that we should so choose. No science in that blog post, just religious belief. Should the writer be castigated for his lack of scientific reference? Or praised because he didn’t let science get in the way of his theoretical exercise of what may in fact be (in some form, under some definition) God-given free will?