Art is 80

There are many concepts that are mysterious to me. Today, we’ll look at grading in schools at all levels. I don’t understand them at all.

I don’t remember my grades on my elementary school report cards, but I assume they were pretty good. To the extent that teachers warned my parents that I was not where they’d like me to be, I think the issues were always things like paying attention, speaking out of turn, and things like that. Grades per se were never an issue.

This had been the case when I was at Flynn Park in University City, Maryland in Clayton, and Ladue Elementary in Ladue. After 6th grade, I started junior high school in the relatively new Horton Watkins High School, the Ladue system high school, which was then only about 5 years old. I was in that building for the next six years.

While at Ladue, I either made all A’s, or perhaps I had one or two B’s over the six years. I was also in what were called “accelerated classes” for the major subjects – in those accelerated classes, the numerical value of our letter grades were upped by one. In other words, if you received a B, it was equivalent in ranking to an A in any other class. On the basis of this, I graduated (third in the class, not first) with something above an A average.

Well, gee! That makes me look pretty smart, right? And I admit I wasn’t dumb. But I never thought I was that smart, either. And getting an A in a class did not mean that I got an A on all my assignments, or that I got an A on all my tests. Those interim grades didn’t seem to matter. Whatever they were, my report card always said A. I can’t explain it. (The clearest example is when I took Solid Geometry. I said then, and I say now, that I didn’t understand anything in the class. Finding the areas and shapes of various three dimensional objects was just beyond me – I understood nothing, and the grades on the first several exams demonstrated that. So, I went to talk to the instructor, Mr. DeArmond. I wanted him to explain things to me in a way that I would understand them. But he didn’t do that. All he did was say “Don’t worry about it.” I left that meeting confused, I took the final exam, and I knew I did not do very well. My grade for the class? An A.)

I think I have said this before, but when I was in my senior year, our guidance counselor called me into her office and told me that she had a “deal” every year with the Harvard admissions office that she could get one person of her choice into Harvard; anyone else would have to compete with the rest of the world. And she wanted me to be that person. (I should say that the year before, I had won the Harvard Book Award for high school juniors – I don’t know how that was decided at all. I don’t know that I ever thought about that.)

She told me that, if I wanted to go to Harvard, I should apply, and that I shouldn’t waste my time applying anywhere else. That was weird, right? And what was weirder is that is exactly what I did. And, of course, I got in. So, did my admission to Harvard depend on my grades? (I don’t think they depended on my SAT scores, which were somewhere in the 600s – not bad, but not like the all-800 folks I met when I got to college.) Or could Mrs. Reiss’ have picked anyone she wanted to? (And why did she pick me, after all? I have no idea, but I have always thought it was because I was friendly to her daughter, who was, I think, sort of a loner and a few years behind me. I wasn’t friendly to her because I wanted to go to Harvard; that never occurred to me. She seemed like a nice girl, perhaps a little lost, suffering from being the daughter of a faculty member.)

So, I spent four years in Cambridge, taking all sorts of classes (but no “hard” classes – no math and no real science classes), and winding up with a nice B average. Very few A grades, and few, if any, grades below B that I recall. I was far from the brightest person there, and there were others on my intellectual level who worked much harder than I did. But the fact that most of my grades were B’s does not mean that I thought I did equally well in every class. Far from it.

I noticed that some people knew, when they took a test or turned in a paper, how they did. They could tell me things like “I got a B on that test”, or “I wrote a good paper; that’s an A”, and they were almost always right on the mark. I had no clue. I would come out of an exam thinking I had aced it, and I’d get a B-. Or I’d think that my answers were off the mark, and I’d get an A-. I had no clue. None. Ever. (The only paper I really knew was good was my senior honors thesis, on the relation of the Jewish Bund in czarist Russia to the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party – the future Communist Party. That paper, I knew was good, and it was on the basis of that paper (100 pages long or so, with most of the research done in Russian) that I graduated magna cum laude. Not on the basis of my grades.

Senior year, I also took the LSAT exam, the requirement for law school admission. I remember that I took it on a Saturday morning in the fall, and that it was a cold gray football weekend, and I had plans after the exam for the game and more. The exam was awful. Four (I think) hours of questions – multiple choice and essay – many of which I didn’t really understand, much less know how to answer. I left the exam very depressed and spent the rest of the weekend feeling the same, knowing that I had blown my chance to go to a top ranked law school.

Several weeks later, I nervously opened an envelope containing my LSAT grade. I was shocked to find it a 754 (out of 800) – which was a very, very good grade. How was that even possible? To this day I don’t know, and wonder if there was an error somewhere in the process. I am not saying this to be modest. To this day, it is beyond my grasp.

My first year at law school was, in my mind, a disaster. Like Harvard College, Yale Law had some brilliant students, and they seemed to understand every lecture, every case, be able to converse with the professors as an equal. And I didn’t think I understood how to approach the subjects, much less succeed. And for once, my first year grades tracked my thoughts as to my progress. In the second and third year, though, something happened. All of a sudden, my grades were much better (I think I graduated around the bottom of the top third of the class), but it didn’t mean that I thought my performance had improved. For whatever reasons, like in high school, I was just getting better grades. (One more example – we had a “take home” exam in a legal accounting class. I understood little about accounting practices for public utilities – this is what I recall the test being on – and when I saw the two or three question essay test, I was stumped. I had no answers. After about 2 hours into the 4 hour test, I took my exam answers, which filled maybe 4 pages of a blue book, to the administrative office to hand it in. I was told, not surprisingly, that I was the first. A friend was also there, but he was getting a second blue book. He said to me: “What a test! There is so much to say, I hope I finish on time.” “Wow”, I thought. You can guess the result – he and I got identical grades on this exam. Go figure.)

After the end of law school, the next major exam of course, is the Bar Exam. I had decided to take the Missouri Bar Exam, thinking at the time that I would probably spend my career and life in St. Louis. Most people took this exam very seriously. They signed up for daily bar review courses, and pored over sample questions – a full time job for a 6 weeks or so. I couldn’t do that. For one thing, I was not in St. Louis, I was in Boston. For another, I was in a very complicated personal situation which took virtually all of my time and more than all of my emotional energy. I did have the print outs from the Missouri Bar course of several years previously. But I was told they would be of limited value, although I am sure that I did study them as best I could.

The Missouri bar exam was given at the time only in Jefferson City, the capital, a small town on the Missouri River, half way between St. Louis and Kansas City. I went to Jeff City with a few friends, and we spent the night in a 0-star motel on the outskirts of town (which of course was filled with exam takers). That evening, we didn’t know if we should cram some more (that seemed impossible) or party (in Jefferson City?), but I know that we didn’t assume we would get 8 hours sleep. But in the early morning hours, a massive thunderstorm struck the area. Torrential rain, and a lot of noise. No sleep possible. And no electricity anywhere.

We crossed the sand bagged Missouri River in the morning. No working traffic lights. Rain still falling. And we went into the building where the exam was being given. Long tables to sit at. But no light. Electricity out all morning. Test taken under very unusual conditions.

As with the LSAT, I knew I had done poorly. No question about that. I forget the normal percentage of folks who passed the Missouri bar on the first try in 1967 – I think it was close to 80%. But I was going to be one of the 20%. Not only would that mean I was going to have to retake the exam, but the embarrassment would be overwhelming.

Again, a month or so later, the results of the bar exam were published, and I had passed. I have several friends who did not pass. At least one I remember was shocked. As certainly as I thought that I hadn’t passed the exam, he was equally sure that he had passed it. We were both wrong.

What’s my conclusion to all of this?

I wish I had one.

But I don’t.

Before I get into that, let’s go back to my reject Penguins, the books at the bottom of the pile that I knew I would detest reading. Those that I left to the end of that particular pile. You remember how much I enjoyed reading Rothstein’s “History of the U.S.S.R.”? (No? Well, OK, it’s been two days) Now I am reporting on “A History of the English Church and People” by Bede, the Venerable Bede. I found it fascinating.

Of course, I don’t know what it would be like to read Bede in the original Church Latin. And I don’t know what it would be like to read Bede in the earliest translations into English. His English and my English have little in common. You know how hard it is to understand Chaucer’s English? That’s because Chaucer wrote in the 14th Century, almost 700 years ago. You think that’s a long time ago? Well, get this! Bede wrote over 600 years before that, dying in the year 740.

That brings me to writing and, in this case, to translation. The translator (presumably from the Latin) of the edition of Bede that I read is a man named Leo Sherley-Price. I looked him up and the Internet tells me he is 111 years old. I assume(d) that was wrong, so I looked up a notice of his death. But I didn’t find one. So……..maybe?

At any rate, I loved this translation. I have no idea if it is accurate or not, but boy is it readable. It is clear, intelligible, without unnecessary verbiage, and without arcane words. Is this Bede, or Sherley-Price? That I don’t know. Maybe both.

So how does one write right? Obviously, styles vary greatly. I know my style, and I am sticking to it. In fact, if I was asked to vary it, I would refuse. Not because my style is the greatest. But because it’s the only style I have.

If I was asked to write a description of a room, I would probably say something like: “It was a large room, with light coming in the window from the south, lighting up the otherwise somber decor in the late afternoons.” Someone else would talk about shape, and colors, and furniture styles, and wainscotting, and window niches, and internal shutters, and hardwood floors, and even how many Muslim women wove the Kurdish carpet under the tea caddy. I just can’t do that.

I am very straightforward in my writing. And I write like I speak. In fact, as I write, I am speaking to the reader in a voice I can hear. And I don’t want to turn the reader away by using too many adjectives, or words he/she won’t understand, or complicated sentence structures.

I also can’t write fiction – I could never write a novel or a short story (not that I want to). I once knew someone who told me that, as she drove from appointment to appointment, she would write mysteries in her head, developing plots and characters, and that sometimes she would turn them later into prose. I was aghast. To me, a plot is something you build a house on.

As a lawyer, I never thought much of myself as an author of court filings – briefs, memoranda of law, etc. I wrote them. I am sure they weren’t bad. But I never thought I was ready for truly prime time. My organization of material – my style – didn’t really fit that model.

And perhaps I couldn’t be a journalist. Or a speechwriter. I understand those two professions to be closely related. People leave one to go to the other, and back again. When I first came to Washington and had a job as a Special Assistant to a HUD Assistant Secretary, my work for him was filtered through his Executive Assistant, who wrote most of his speeches, and who had been, for fifteen years or more, a journalist before coming to HUD.

It was torture. I would be asked to write a piece of some sort – normally a position paper, or perhaps a write up of some project I had a role in. I would put together what I thought was a good piece, and turn it over to the Executive Assistant. He would then rewrite it – almost every word. Not adding or subtracting from the substance. It was just that his style and my style were worlds (perhaps universes) apart.

He told me that I didn’t write like a journalist, and I should. That meant, as I understood it, that while I put together my paper by laying out the pieces and ending up with a whole, what I should be doing is leading with the whole, and then adding the pieces afterword, from big pieces to small pieces. I heard what he was saying – but I couldn’t do it. It just wasn’t my style.

So I went in to my boss, the Assistant Secretary and told him of my dilemma. I told him that I wrote the way I wrote, and that for me to write something and then have the Executive Assistant rewrite it from scratch was a waste of everyone’s time, and I thought that I should quit. He told me that I didn’t have to quit – that he had a better idea. His better idea was that I should ignore the Executive Assistant and pass my work directly to him.

From then on, everything went swimmingly. I learned the Assistant Secretary’s style and mine were, in fact, pretty much the same. As to my relationship with the Executive Assistant from then on…..that’s another story.

And my style carried me pretty well through 40 years of law practice. No one ever told me that I needed to change the way I wrote, that I should be more flowery or descriptive, or my conclusions should come at the top of the page, not the bottom. And that’s my style today – nothing has changed.

Oh, yes, the Venerable (i.e., one who is venerated) Bede. Who was he anyway, and why didn’t he have a real name? Well, I don’t know any more than you do about the name, but he was an 8th century monk in Northumberland, who liked to fiddle around in archives and decided that it would be nice to write something about the origins of the Catholic faith on what we now know as the British Isles. No one had done that before – written about what transpired after the Romans left Britain up until his present time a few hundred years later. It was Bede who searched out the kings and queens, the battles and alliances, the Christianizing of various pagan groups, and the paganizing of various Christian groups as the pendulum swept back and forth.

For this reason, Bede is known as the Father of English History. For without him, there would be gaps (and indeed there still are gaps, because the archives he searched did not tell him everything about everywhere).

So, a few takeaways that I took away:

(1) We are certainly not talking about a United Kingdom. There are native tribes, the Picts, the Gaels and others, who form the Celts. Then there are those Germanic tribes who moved in with, or just following, the Romans – the Angles, and the Saxons, say. And then tribes original from Gaul – the Britons. What about the Romans themselves? They seem to have all left. And what about the Vikings? Aha….they haven’t come yet.

(2) Among the these tribes, there was a lot of fighting, mainly over territory, and there were royal marriages meant to avoid further conflict, just as you might suspect. Boundaries went back and forth, bad kings followed good kings, kings got murdered, some renounced their thrones to live simpler lives and so forth. A lot was going on back then.

(3) Christianity in some places came slowly and in some places took hold quickly. At times, a Christian king would be replaced by his pagan son, or a pagan king would invade a Christian kingdom and destroy the churches and monasteries.

(4) There was, at least as far as I knew, a surprisingly close connection, even in these times, between the Roman papacy and the clergy on the British Isles. Rome would appoint bishops, would send letters of instruction as to dogma and ways of living, many of which are reproduced by Bede (and by no one else), and clergy in the British Isles would travel to and from Rome for advice or approvals.

(5) There were heresies afoot and questions as to how best to deal with them. Original sin – did it or did it not exist? When is the right time to celebrate Easter?

(6) There was an extraordinary amount of disease, and epidemics that took the pious as well as the impious. Yet some people recovered, and some were never affected. Some clergy referred to by Bede lived well into their 80s.

(7) Church and monastery building was constant, with funding usually from royal families who had become Christian.

(8) And finally, boy were there a lot of miracles. These parts of Bede’s writing, also taking from archival sources, are obviously not viewed as historic, except to the extent that they reflect legends that were believed, or at least cited, during those days. But miracle cures, portends of the future, evil people being struck down. These things occurred over and over.

I’ll stop here. But my advice? If anyone ever approaches you on the street and says “Read the Venerable Bede, or I will kill you”, don’t gamble with your life. Find a comfortable chair. And enjoy.

I remember watching a documentary film about Eastern Europe, where an older man said something like: I was born in Russia, have lived in Poland, Romania and the Soviet Union, and now I live in Ukraine, and I have never lived anywhere but this house.

What is a country, anyway?

I bring that up in light of the comments of the Chinese Ambassador to France who recently said that he questioned whether former Soviet Republics were, in fact, independent countries. In light of the war in Ukraine and the question of whether China itself can help bring about a cessation of fighting, this comment was surprising. But it deserves some thought.

The basic facts are obvious. For about 75 years, following a revolution in czarist Russia, there was a country known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, consisting of 24 semi-autonomous states located on land that had been previously parts of the Russian empire. In 1995, the Soviet Union broke up and each of those republics declared itself independent, and their independence was recognized internationally, through multi-state organizational memberships (like in the United Nations) and through bilateral agreements between the new republics and other established countries throughout the world. So far, so good.

Then, something happened. Vladimir Putin began to think about recreating all or part (we really don’t know) of the old Russian empire, whether as a presumed defensive measure (to keep out Western political influences which would isolate Russia) or as a simple belief that Russia just should be bigger and more influential than it is. And, as we know, in 2014, he invaded the eastern part of Ukraine and recaptured the Crimean peninsula.

Now, you can make an argument that all of Ukraine and all of Russia belong together. Historically, they have been together more than apart, and you can even make an argument that Kiev is the most important center of early Russian history. And because Crimea was transferred to the Ukrainian SSR until 1954, you can perhaps make that argument even more strongly regarding Crimea.

But the better argument is that Ukraine and all the other former Soviet republics have been internationally recognized by treaty, etc. as independent countries and that, once this has been done, a country can’t simply change its mind and invade. This, of course, is what was done in 2017 and in 2022 in Ukraine.

So why would the Chinese ambassador say what he said? Well, there was Hong Kong, which China decided should no longer be independent, and there is the perpetual question of Taiwan, which broke away from mainland China in 1949. Now, there are differences between Hong Kong and Taiwan, on the one hand, and the former Soviet Republics on the other, to be sure. For one thing, Hong Kong became a British colony in the 1840s, and was transferred by Britain to China under certain conditions (which the Chinese have since breached) in 1997. Taiwan’s situation is even more uncertain, since so many other countries, including the United States, have recognized Taiwan without “recognizing” Taiwan. China certainly does not want to admit that, if it wanted, it could simply fully absorb both of these regions into China proper. And just as certainly, China does not want to give any support to potential separatist movements – such as in Tibet. China does not want any limitations on a potential irredentist Chinese empire, and therefore perhaps China cannot argue against an irredentist Russian empire, in spite of the differences in the two situations.

But a treaty is a treaty. International recognition is international recognition. Once established and recognized, borders should only be changed by mutual agreement, not by aggressive invasion. And aggressive invasion must be opposed. Always.

(1) Driving While Black

We watched PBS last night and saw the two hour documentary “Driving While Black”. It’s not a perfect title. But it was an interesting program – the history of transportation for Blacks in America. Starting with limitations on slave travel, the difficulties during Reconstruction, segregation on trains and in train stations, the danger of traveling by car as well as the lack of restaurants, motels and gas stations that would serve Blacks along the road. Sad, but to me familiar, story – I can’t say that I “learned” anything. But I am 80 years old and lived through much of the time covered. I’m not Black, but I have heard, or read about, these stories again and again. But the program is interesting, and the historic photos and videos were most interesting.

But what I thought about, while watching, was Florida. Why? Because it seemed to me that, if a bill now in the state legislature is passed, it would be illegal to watch this film in any public institution. As I understand it, the law would prohibit public institutions from teaching that any institutions in the United States were “created to maintain social, political or economic inequities.” Now we don’t know if this bill will pass (everything seems to pass in Florida right now), but if it does…….

Slavery was clearly created to maintain social, political or economic inequities, as were the laws passed during the Jim Crow era, and the institutions that permitted Blacks and Whites to be treated apart from each other, including public buildings like, say, train stations. And the entire premise of this documentary is to demonstrate just that.

If documentaries like this cannot be shown in public institutions (and that would include public universities, libraries, etc, as well as K-12 schools), how will Florida children or Floridians in general learn about this?

Now let’s look at this from another perspective. Let’s move for a minute to Holocaust education, which is now mandated in some, but not all states. We have had more Holocaust education than ever before, and we have had more instances of antisemitism. How can this be? I have recently seen a lot of questions related to Holocaust education? (1) Can children born, say, at least 65 years after the end of World War II, relate to the Holocaust? Does this education mean any more to them than learning about the Armenian genocide that occurred 35 years before? (2) Even worse, does Holocaust education really teach that antisemitism is dangerous and to be avoided because “look where it can lead”, or does it teach some young people that Jews were fair game then, and maybe they should be fair game now? In other words, does Holocaust education run the risk of increasing, not decreasing, antisemitism?

It’s a terrible thought, but is it possible that the way to fight antisemitism is not to talk about Jewish history? Is it possible that the way to limit discrimination against Blacks is not to talk about Black history? This is as counterintuitive as it gets, to be sure. And I am not saying that I agree with this theory. But….like most things….we should give it some careful thought.

(2) De Rerum Natura

Let’s have a shout out for Lucretius! After finishing the “History of the U.S.S.R.”, I went to the next semi-reject on my pile of Penguins: Lucretius’ “The Nature of the Universe” (“De Rerum Natura”). Turned out that this one was equally fascinating.

The translator, R.E. Latham, gave a fascinating introduction to this long, long poem (no, I did not read every word – I read a lengthy synopsis and selected particular segments to read – I think Lucretius would have been satisfied), making it clear that the worlds of Athens 2300 years ago and of Rome 2100 years ago did share some characteristics of our world today. Namely, things taken for granted were disappearing, no one knew what was going to happen next but everyone sensed that it wasn’t going to be good, and what’s the world coming to, anyway? He spoke of Diogenes the Cynic, Zeno the Stoic, and Epicurus, who relied on “common sense”. Lucretius, living two hundred years or so later, was a follower of Epicurus.

This means that, in explaining the universe, Epicurus relied on what his mind told him made sense. And a lot of what his mind told him finds resonance in today’s science. The universe had a beginning and is going to have an end. If there are gods, they live in an entirely different plane from humans and there is no contact. The gods did not create the universe, will not destroy it, and certainly don’t interfere in or give a damn about what we humans do. Human beings are made up of “atoms” (not Lucretius’ word, of course), which are the building blocks of everything in the universe. This is no afterlife, your atoms don’t disappear but as your body disintegrates, your atoms just go somewhere else and become part of something else. No atom disappears. But death is death, and your mind and your spirit disappear along with your body. No reason to worry about it. You are part of something bigger than yourself. And as you live your life, your common sense will lead you along. The world exists, your senses allow you to see what exists, nothing exists beyond what your senses can see or hear or touch or feel. Nothing is so important to go to extremes about. You don’t need as many things as you may think you need. We all wind up the same.

A shout out to Lucretius, whoever you may be. And, yes, we really don’t know that much about him. At all.

As I continue to read through my paperback Penguins, I find there are some books which I know I shouldn’t ignore, but which I assume will be a slog to read. I push them aside until they are the only ones left on a particular pile. My current pile consists only of these temporary rejects, and the book I just finished reading is “A History of the U.S.S.R.” by Andrew Rothstein, written for Penguin and published in 1950. 1950 was, as you recall, only five years after the end of World War II, and three years before the death of Stalin.

Over the past 65 years or so, I have read a lot about the Soviet Union. I have read histories, and biographies, and sociological studies, and novels, and essays, and everything else. Why should I read another book – one written so long ago. And one that I had never heard of, one that I don’t even remember being referenced anywhere. But I picked it up. And I opened it up. And I started to read.

It’s a long book, almost 400 pages with quite small print and narrow margins. It is filled with details. It is well enough written, but the prose does not tug at your heartstrings. But something about it is weird, I thought. This just doesn’t feel right.

So, then, only about a dozen pages into the book, I looked up Andrew Rothstein in Wikipedia. Wow! How did I miss this (I admit not reading the mini-bio in the book). Andrew Rothstein was a Communist. This book seemed weird so quickly, because it was written from such a different perspective.

Now, to be sure, Penguin did mention that Rothstein was a “foundation member” of the British Communist Party. But this was on the 32nd line of a 34 line bio. And the cover of the book simply listed title and author, giving no hint (in a subtitle, perhaps) that this was a Communist history of the U.S.S.R.

Rothstein himself was British. That is, he was born in London in 1898, to parents who had come to London from Russia in 1890, would-be revolutionaries no longer comfortable in czarist Russia. His father, also an active Communist, was not permitted to return to Britain after a trip to Moscow in 1920, and remained in the Soviet Union, serving in a number of governmental positions, including as Soviet Ambassador to Iran.

Andrew, however, stayed in the UK, went to Oxford, helped found the British Communist Party, and became a journalist, working for years as the London bureau chief of the Soviet Union’s news agency, TASS.

With this in mind, this book becomes fascinating on many levels.

(1) First, because it deals with the same history that all other books on Soviet history deals with, but it approaches them differently that you can’t help but see them in a different light. Is Rothstein engaged in deception, in fake news? I don’t think so. I think this book is a scholarly attempt by a serious journalist to describe the history as he saw it.

(2) Without refuting what I said above, I do think that Rothstein engaged in self-censorship, as you must do to remain in good standing in the Party. I don’t know specifically what he self-censored, what he would have liked to have said but thought better of. But I don’t think that means he was engaging in fake news, or disinformation like Russians are prone often to do. He was simply telling a story from a different perspective.

(3) How does this show up? In dealing with conflict with Germany (so much of this book deals with the First and Second World Wars), Rothstein suggests that many Allied leaders (and Allied populations) were more worried and distrustful of the Bolsheviks than they were of the Germans (whether the Germans were Prussian jingoists, Nazis or post-war Germans), and that they certainly didn’t want to let the Soviets too closely into their post-war world. He points to the period after the First World War, when the Allies had armies that remained in Russian territory and where they gave support to the Whites during the Civil War period. He points to many things that happened during the the fight against the Nazis – attempts by the West to attempt to push the fight onto the Eastern front, and away from the West, limits on the amounts of and types of military equipment the Western allies allowed the Soviet Union to have. And he suggests a form of collaboration between the the Western Allies and the defeated Germany after World War II, to lessen the power of the Soviet Union in dictating terms of peace. How accurate these accusations are, I am not sure; they are not what you normally hear to the extent that Rothstein keeps repeating them, but I don’t think they can be discounted.

(4) Although Rothstein talks a lot about Soviet agriculture – the process of collectivization, the treatment of the kulaks (large scale farmers), etc., and gives a lot of detail on the hows and whys, and the ups and downs, successes and failures of this process, certain things are left out – most notably the government-led Ukrainian famine in the mid-1930s, as the regime required so much of the Ukrainian crops to be provided for the remainder of the country that so many of the Ukrainians themselves were left to starve.

(5) Rothstein talks from time to time about the various non-Russian nationalities and how the Soviet Union promotes their culture (OK, he does exaggerate a bit), but he doesn’t mention the Jews as one of these nationalities. Rothstein is obviously Jewish (his parents come from Kovno (Kaunas), Lithuania, the heart of the heart of the Pale), but he doesn’t mention anything about the Soviet treatment of the Jews. In fact, you wouldn’t know that there were any Jews in the Soviet Union (the only reference being in one sentence mentioning the establishment of Birobidzhan, the so-called Jewish autonomous district on the Chinese border in Siberia). From our perspective, this seems weird, but the Soviets were intent on denying all religions, including Judaism, and denying Jews as a race at the same time – there were many Jewish communists in the upper echelons of Soviet society, and almost all of them would share this opinion. Does that mean that they all would have left out reference to Jews in writing a history of the USSR.? Of that, I am not so sure.

(6) Following up on Rothstein’s failure to mention Jews as residents or citizens of the USSR, I should also mention – even more surprising – is that I don’t think that he once mentioned Jews as targets of the Nazis. Ever.

(7) Then there were the show trials of the 1930s, when so many loyal communists had their loyalty not only questioned but denied, and where they were either sentenced to long prison terms at hard labor in harsh weather or were killed (or both). Rothstein discusses some of the early trials, such as the trials of Kirov and his circle, but concludes that they were all traitors to the Soviet Union, and that their confessions were valid (although he admits that no one outside the Soviet Union seemed to have accepted their validity). He does not give any hint that the trials were not fair and the verdicts justified. He does not talk at all about prisoners being sentenced to labor camps in Siberia.

With all of these criticisms, and assuming you can take them into consideration as you read along, I think the book does give a fairly full and, as I have said, detailed versions of a lot of things. Rothstein’s description of the November 1917 revolution and how the Bolsheviks took power, of the course of the Civil War that followed, of the total revision of the agricultural system, of the remarkable buildup of Russian industry (including how Russian industry was affected by the Second World War and how it responded to the needs of the country’s defense), of the diplomatic relations with the West, and of the fighting during the Second World War on Russian soil. This is a serious book with, of course, a very different perspective.

What about Stalin? Interestingly, this book is neither an ode to Stalin or (obviously) a criticism of Stalin. Stalin is rarely mentioned in the book, except incidentally, but for one relative short sections that basically says: I should mention Stalin – here are some examples of his speeches during this period of time. That is really it.

I don’t think Rothstein ever fell out of favor the Soviet Union. He lived in Britain his entire life (although his work with TASS et al gave him the right to a Soviet pension), and he lived a long life, dying at 95 in 1993. This was two years after Gorbachev was forced from power and the Soviet Union collapsed. I don’t know if at 93, Rothstein was in shape to comment on that major event.

How many people read his book? What do scholars think of it? I don’t know the answer to either of those questions.

Big topic, I know. Can’t cover it all. But here are some random thoughts that may mean something individually or when put together.

As most of you know, I went to public schools through 12th grade in suburban St. Louis. I did very well academically and was admitted to Harvard, the only school to which I had applied (that’s another story). When I got to Harvard, I learned something the first week I was there, even before classes started: I didn’t know anything. It appeared to me that, while there were some freshman as ignorant as I was, we were the minority, not the majority.

Now, I know it was Harvard, and Harvard attracted some exceptionally bright people, but my reaction (and my mind has not changed) was: my high school education was not very good.

I concluded that the Ladue school system was just not very intellectually oriented. Putting Harvard aside, I compared myself to a number of kids I knew who had gone through the University City system, and I concluded that the U. City graduates were much better prepared.

What was the difference? I believe University City had a progressive Board of Education. Ladue clearly did not. The Ladue system was run by a very conservative Board, who hired very conservative administrators. Ivan Nicholas, the superintendent, was not called Tsar Nicholas for nothing. And Richard Stauffer, the Ladue High principal, assured me that, by the time I matured, I would become a responsible supporter of the Republican party.

In successive elections for the Board, my mother and her friend and our neighbor Irv Sobel ran for the Board, and lost. We always felt that the campaign against both of them was influenced by antisemitism. Both were described as Communists (oh, my) and of course my mother was female, and Irv was a professor at Washington University. I remember one part of the campaign against him – he was an “educator” and Ladue already had an “educator” on the Board.

During my first week at Harvard, one of the speakers for the freshman class was journalist I.F. Stone. I never had heard of him – but at least everyone who had gone to high school in New York State had. He was a very progressive, non-Communist journalist. Why hadn’t I heard of him? My guess is that references to people like Stone were not permitted to be discussed in the Ladue curriculum.

Missouri was a Civil War border state – it had been a slave state that stayed in the Union. In the 1950s, I would guess that half of my class would have voted with the Confederates, not the Union. I don’t remember any instruction on racial equality, or even on current race relations. At the time, St. Louis was pretty segregated – and we never gave any thought to it. As to gay students, I never heard anything about that in school – was anyone in my class gay? I can’t even answer that today.

Yes, we lived in a large suburban enclave, and rarely left it. We lived the way people should live, and there was no reason to think that any of us would live any differently. The Ladue system’s goal was to develop “the whole person”. That means no over thinking things, no eccentricities, etc.

I know times have changed over the past 60+ years. Even when my children were in school 30 years ago, things had changed. So, I don’t pretend to have any expertise on how to reform the current educational system.

My conclusions are different:

Did my being educated in a conservative suburban school system affect the way I look at society and politics today? The answer is “no”.

Did the lack of intellectual rigor affect my post high-school life? The answer is “maybe”, not because I didn’t “catch up”, which I think I did, but a more rigorous high school might have led me to a different approach to my college education, which might have led me onto different career paths.

Was the lack of intellectual rigor related to the conservative nature of the school system? I think this answer is “yes”, because it limited one’s ability to become familiar with a wider range of thinking.

Did the conservative nature of the school system have any other effects on my future life? Here, I am not sure, but it is possible that a more activist school system would have encouraged me to become more activist as time went by.

So my overall conclusion is that I really don’t know the answer to any of these questions. A school system’s ideology competes with family, peer pressure from other activities, innate qualities, and the world at large. As for me, I don’t think the Ladue school system had any real effect on how I think, although it may have had an effect on how active I have been in trying to put my thinking into action.

I wonder if there have been any studies on this. On how the political and social biases of one’s education affect one’s later life. Seems to me these studies would be crucial. If someone would study, say, the class of 1960 Ladue High School and the class of 1960 University City High School, what differences would they find, and to what extent could these differences be attributed to differences in the social and political characteristics of the school boards and faculties.

We just got off a Zoom with my five high school classmates and spouses/significant, and it was pretty depressing, if truth be known. The reason is clear. We were talking about artificial intelligence. I know, this is a repeat topic.

But this time, we talked not only about how it might affect the world, but about how it is seemingly uncontrollable. This time we talked about how happy we were to be 80, and how difficult it would be to be a young person today. What is there to look forward to? What would you think about as a career? The one thing that is clear – the amount of teenage and twenty-something depression seems to be climbing and climbing.

When we got off the Zoom, we turned on the Chris Hayes show on MSNBC and saw he was talking to an “expert” on Artificial Intelligence, who said that she thought that AI may totally infiltrate and change our lives very quickly – perhaps within the next 18 months or so.

Keep tuned.

(1) In February1972, I spent a week or so in the Soviet Union, half in Leningrad and half in Moscow. It was an wonderful trip, and I learned so much about the Russian Federation. One of the things I learned was that the food was just awful. I saw no vegetables other than potatoes and cabbage, the meat was stringy, and – oh, yes – I think the bread was good.

I remember flying out of Moscow on PanAm, and being served what was probably a normal airlines chicken dinner. But – to me – this was the best dinner I had ever had – and still today, I count it as a most memorable meal.

Today, I had my five year colonoscopy, which was preceded by fasting all of yesterday, and spending yesterday evening and this morning taking the colonoscopy prep. When we got home, I made myself a very ordinary peanut butter and jelly sandwich on whole wheat toast. This ranked with the PanAm meal as one of the best I have ever had. I will never forget it. (By the way, crunchy peanut butter and blueberry preserves from Maine)

The thing about colonoscopies is that they are sorta fun, but the prep and the groggy recovery not so much. I had it done at a new place for me (same doctor) – the Capitol Endoscopy Center on New Hampshire Ave, just over the District line. Wasn’t sure what to expect – but I have to say: I really liked it there. The two women at the registration desk, the woman who led me in and gave me my gown, the woman who inserted my IV and took my blood pressure (and whose cell phone rang reminding her to call her father with Alzheimer and remind him to take his medicine), the woman who asked me all the questions that I had already answered twice, the two who rolled me into the procedure room, the nurse there who told me that I didn’t at all look like I was 80, and the woman who read me my discharge instructions, as well as my doctor and the anesthesiologist, all get an A rating. Oh, yes, and the woman who drove me there and home, and waited for me all that time.

(2) So it looks like CNN has redesigned its sets, and has taken on the extraordinarily original name of News Central. Wow! But it also looks like it has taken out all of the chairs and making all of the anchors and guests stand up. Why are they doing that? Half of them are leaning against a table or wall, and all of them look uncomfortable and like they are waiting for someone to offer them a seat. Wish I could.

(3) The Supreme Court has done it again – they have kept the abortion medication available for another two days. Wow, again! I haven’t looked at the District Court decision by the Amarillo One, but find it interesting that he decided he could out think the FDA on whether this safe 20-year old medication was properly tested. When I was in law school, here was such a thing called the Chevron doctrine, which basically said that the courts would give deference to agency decisions. As I understand it, this doctrine is still there, but it isn’t quoted much (or maybe at all) these days. This would be a good place to reinstate it, but I don’t see that happening. I don’t know what the Court will do.

But what is the standard for drugs? I have always heard that the FDA process is the creme de la creme, and that it beats any other nation’s drug approval process. And we are all familiar with drugs that are available, say, in Europe but not here, only because the FDA is being more thorough. So, if the Supreme Court adopts the District Court position here (I know now we are just dealing with injunctive relief, but that does give you a sign), all FDA testing will seem to be in question, not only regarding the methodology, but regarding the type of results which are acceptable.

This, of course, brings me to all these drug commercials I see on TV. By the way – I turn the sound off and ignore most of them, but I really want to take Skyrizi (I have no idea what condition it is supposed to cure – I just like the name). But you look up Skyrizi on the Internet and it says that it can cause fainting, dizziness, low blood pressure, swelling of face, eyelids, lips, mouth, tongue or throat, trouble breathing, throat tightening, chest tightening, skin rash and itching. Other drugs advertised on TV can cause lymphomas and other cancers, and strokes and congestive heart failure.

So I ask you – if Mifipristone is potentially unsafe, what about everything else? Think of all those folks allergic to sulfa (like me) or penicillin, or the terrible things that aspirin can do to your stomach? Will they all have to be pulled?

As to the horrendous actions of the Russians in Ukraine, don’t we have to ask ourselves a question? Are Russia’s actions any worse than what the U.S. did in, say, Vietnam or Iraq? I think, if we are honest, we have to say that there is no significant difference. That doesn’t make the Russian actions forgivable, just as our actions are not forgivable. They may lose importance through the passage of time, perhaps, but they are not forgivable. Ukraine did not pose a threat to Russia, just as North Vietnam and Iraq posed no threat to the United States. But in each case, there was a perceived threat (incorrectly perceived) and in each case it was incorrectly assumed that any military action would be short and successful.

But, while the military actions may be equally immoral, the countries are fundamentally different. In the United States, for the most part, dissent and free speech are allowed and in Russia, for the most part, dissent and free speech are stamped out. This is in part because of our histories – the United States has operated with a fairly fair and fairly independent legal system since the beginning, and Russia has always viewed its prosecutors as state actors enforcing the will of the government.

Over the past several days, two news items have deepened the problems of dissent and free speech in Russia. For one, Putin critic (and recent Washington DC resident) Vladimir Kara Murza was given a 25 year prison sentence, and Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was denied bail after being accused of espionage, which could result in a sentence as long as 20 years.

This morning, I watched a 90 minute Zoominar on the Kara Murza situation, sponsored by the Kennan Institute. The panelists included a Russian defense lawyer now working out of Tblisi, Georgia, a Russian TV anchor now broadcasting from Riga, Latvia, a Russian activist now living in Berlin, and a Russian journalist also living somewhere outside the country.

What did I pick up?

1. None of these people seem to think that it was a dumb move on behalf of Kara Murza or Alexei Navalny (also serving a long term prison sentence) to return to Russia, but that it was rather a heroic move, knowing the likely consequences.
2. Although many Russian journalists (print and video) have moved outside the country, many are still reporting from inside Russia, all at risk.
3. For some reason, YouTube continues to operate freely in Russia, and it is through YouTube that journalists still can get through to Russians, although there are recurrent rumors that Russia will shut it down soon. There are so many Russian journalists reporting on YouTube, that you can spend 24/7 on it reading their reports.
4. Foreign journalists working in Russia have been in contact with exiled Russian journalists, and been able to transmit info into and out of the country. The Russians were jealous of the ability of the foreigners to travel in and out of the country without fear. That is, until Gershkovich was arrested. This was a total game changer. Now, many journalists have left Russia and some employers and foreign countries are asking them to leave.
5. Berlin has become the largest center of Russian dissidents abroad. The Germans, though, have a difficult time distinguishing between those who have left Russia as political dissidents eligible for asylum, and Russians who have left the country because it just seemed like a good time to leave, or even those who left the country simply because they did not want to serve in the military. A number of these people were in fact not against Putin per se or an autocratic regime, but simply did not want to put themselves in danger, and this creates a problem for the country which admits them. The countries which abut Russia (Poland, say) are even more concerned about letting in Russians who in fact cannot be vetted as actual political dissenters.
6. Why do lawyers continue to work to defend prisoners in Russia knowing that they will most likely lose the case? The answers given were that, in large part, it was because they want to make a record for the future – for the time when Putin is gone and policies change, and decisions have to be made about what to do about existing prisoners. Why aren’t lawyers themselves targets? Some, in fact, have been, and none feel at ease, but Russia needs the lawyers too so it can maintain that it has a fair and functioning (almost said fair and balanced) legal system.
7. Everyone seems to be a friend of, and like, Kara Murza a lot. His health is a major concern since it was compromise by the two times that Russia tried to poison him (or, I should say, did poison him, but not successfully). Same, of course, with Navalny.

I just saw Andrea Mitchell interview Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg was charged with espionage in this country 50 years ago following his leak of the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War. He was not convicted, however, not because he didn’t do what he was accused of, but because of misconduct by the prosecution. This would never have happened in Russia where conviction rates are over 99% (according to one of the panelists this morning). There is a difference between Mother Russia and Uncle Sam.

(1) Want a Ride? When I retired from law practice in 2012, I wanted to find volunteer opportunities. One that I selected was to volunteer for Northwest Neighborhood Village, a local organization devoted to helping seniors remain in their homes, helping drive members to medical appointments and the like. I did this for about 5 years, until I turned 75, when I was told (basically) that I was too old to continue driving, that I should retake a driving test, plus a senior driver learner’s course, and that I would only be given short assignments within the neighborhood. That’s when I stopped volunteering for them.

But it was a terrific thing to do, although it interrupted my day quite often, largely because of the people I met. Without naming names, here were some of them:

1. An Episcopal priest who had led an upstate New York diocese and who had just retired as assistant dean of the National Cathedral. He and I became fairly friendly and even had lunch a few times.
2. A man who was a long time science reporter for National Geographic Magazine, interesting because – when he got the job – he had no scientific background whatsoever.
3. A former university professor who had been blind for life, but now was also deaf, but still living on her own. She my most challenging assignment and – believe me – was well beyond my skill set.
4. A Dutch born diplomat who had been working at the World Bank. I became friendly with both him and his Lebanese wife, and after he became housebound visited him just to talk a few times.
5. A woman who actually had been a paralegal for my law firm 40 years earlier, and whom I hadn’t seen since. This was a surprise, and a treat.
6. A nice, reserved woman from Sri Lanka who lived up the street in a Connecticut Avenue Apartment. I used to drive her to a Buddhist retreat way far away (and I don’t even remember where it was).
7. A Filipino woman, who family was originally Indian, from Goa, who lived with her sister, and who loved to hear the latest about my then very young granddaughter.
8. The mother of a prominent national author and journalist, who was an expert on Al Qaeda and bin Laden.
9. A man who was a DC native, but whose career was as a university librarian in New York City. He moved back to DC when he needed to go into assisted living.
10. An African American economist who spent most of his career working in India before becoming a university professor in the Midwest.

Each of these people I drove multiple times to their medical or other appointments. Of the 10 people I listed above and assisted in the years 2012…..I know at least 7 have passed away. I find that fact, by itself, to be rather amazing.

(2) Want to see King Lear? One of my memories of King Lear is from almost 40 years ago, when then very young Michelle was shown a photo (I think she was shown a photo) of Martin Luther King and asked if she knew who that was. She did. She said: “It’s Martin Luther King Lear”.

On a very different note…….last night, Edie and I streamed the Shakespeare Theatre’s version of “King Lear”, starring Patrick Page, who exuded emotion and confusion and sorrow as the unfortunate, aging King whose plans for the future had certainly crumbled. A bravura performance to be sure, and supported by a very strong cast, and by a collection of simple, yet evocative, sets that did not detract from the intensity of the drama.

You remember Lear? He decided to divide his kingdom equally among his three daughters, only asking them to tell him how much they loved him. Two did so, but poor Cornelia could not exaggerate like her sisters and simply she told him that she loved him as a daughter was to love her father. She was disinherited (but not left without a penny, because she soon married the King of France), and the other two daughters plotted against their father and each other, tearing the kingdom apart. Cornelia tried to rescue her father, but in the end – it’s a Shakespearean tragedy after all – Lear and his three daughters all perish. And while all of this transpires, the aging Earl of Gloucester (Craig Wallace in this production) has his own parallel problems, dealing with his deceptive adopted son, and his skittish biological son.

Reviews of the play talk about the necessity of advance planning if you are an aging king, so you can know when to step back and have the next generation ready to move forward. Maureen Dowd, in an NYT editorial yesterday, referenced the show as a lead-in to talking about Joe Biden, Donald Trump and even Diane Feinstein; they should know when to step away. But, looking at Lear from the perspective of an 80 year old man, I am not so sure. I think the lesson might be the opposite: yes, you are old, but if you step away from your ruling position, you might find yourself the target of the next generation and you might go mad defending yourself while, as you watch from the side, everything you worked for your entire life goes to ruin. It’s all about perspective.

I don’t like talking on the phone. I can’t remember the last time I called anyone just to talk. I guess I did 60+ years ago when I was in high school, but by the time I was in college, I think I had pretty much weaned myself from long phone calls.

Not that I mind if I see a call coming in from someone I know. But I do hope they are calling for a reason, not just to chat. And when I get a phone call from a number I do not recognize, I don’t answer the call. If the caller leaves a voice mail, I will start to listen, recognizing that most of those callers want to buy a house in my neighborhood, or are concerned about the diabetes that I don’t have.

But I do like to communicate. And for that reason, email to me was a godsend. And for years, I communicated by email a lot. But then it began to taper off. Not because I slowed down, but because so many people (especially, but not only, younger people) stopped looking at their emails very often, or because their email inboxes were so filled with notes from people who wanted to buy a house in their neighborhood or treat their diabetes that they just gave up looking.

Many of those people started to text. I receive texts from family members (and from people who want to buy houses in my neighborhood or treat my non-existent diabetes), but not very often from ordinary folks. And I hardly ever have conversations by text.

I do have What’s App on my phone, but I never use it. I did for a while last year when some Israeli friends were coming to visit and that’s the way they communicated. But that was only until they went back home.

The result of this is that I have less one-to-one communication with people. And I miss that.

But the smart phone has found a way to partially compensate for that. Now there are ways to communicate not one-to-one, but by reaching many people at once. You can do this through Facebook, and I do. But now there, as well, people are shying away. While I still have hundreds of Facebook “friends”, fewer of them look at Facebook and fewer still respond to posts. And as to other similar apps, I have never really used them very much. Instagram is for some reason confusing to me, and Twitter is just too filled with both garbage and redundancy. And most of others, I have either never heard of, or I would be talking to the wind, because no one I know uses them.

And finally, there is TikTok. I am not a TikTok. I am not a TikTok creator, but I do look at TikTok a lot – I guess mainly for fun. I have a couple of entry points and I have trained them pretty well – one for political posts, one mainly for music. And the fact that China owns the app doesn’t interest me very much.

But unfortunately I do see problems with TikTok. It seems clearly addictive, and while this addiction may be fine for an 80 year old retired man, it is not ok for a 14, or 21, year old. And for them, it is not only its addictive qualities, but its content. So much of TikTok seems to show “perfect” young folks doing acrobatics, performing extraordinary athletic events, talking about sexual exploits, bantering with their significant others, or ways they earned large amounts of money. The connection between TikTok addiction and mental illness seems to be more than a question.

No answers to these questions – but when you add these concerns to those surrounding Artificial Intelligence I wrote about yesterday, you realize that we are all on a one way trail to ……………. where?

In the English language, you capitalize nouns when they are very important. You don’t write, for example, god if you are talking about God. When slavery was in fashion, slaves were black, but now their descendants are Black. And the white slaveholders are now White. You get the picture.

This is how I know that artificial intelligence is important. It is more and more often being called Artificial Intelligence. As I understand it, Artificial Intelligence is the flawed intelligence demonstrated by machines, rather than the flawed intelligence demonstrated by human beings. With the right machinery, you and I could converse through artificial intelligence. We could teach each other, argue with each other, comfort each other, or just shoot the breeze. While we were talking, real you and real I could do other things, and not have to deal with each other at all. Our artificial conversation could go on for years and we would have know idea what what the artificial we were talking about. Our conversation could be turned into press releases, or essays or even books, our ideas could be spread abroad in our name, people (or artificial people) could argue about which of us is correct, and which of us should be locked up. We would have no idea that this was going on.

In the meantime, Artificial Intelligence can now be used to make videos, as I understand it. Not with animation, and not with real characters being photographed, but artificially created representatives of ourselves. These videos could be released, with the sound track from our artificial conversation, to prove that it was the real us, not the artificial us, who were talking. Again, we might not even know about it, and nobody would believe our alibi , because it is just too easy to create artificial alibi.

Now, let’s get a bit more devious. Artificial Intelligence could have me admit to a horrendous crime that the artificial me committed, as shown on video that has been spread around the world. Artificial me could scam old ladies out of their inheritances, or scam young women out of their trust funds.

Artificial Intelligence could even show Vladivostok being obliterated by American bombs, and this video could automatically trigger the OK for Russian bombs to head towards New York City. Artificial Intelligence shows the promise of so confusing our world that we won’t recognize what is artificial and what is not (if there will be anything remaining of the real world to identify).

With this in mind, we subscribe to the New York Times so that we will keep up with all the news fit to print. I assume that our subscription is to the real New York Times, but maybe it isn’t. When I looked at the front section this morning, I saw many articles which I assumed to be (relatively) accurate. And I knew they were important – after all they were selected for the front section by the Times’ editor. Or maybe it was the Times’ artificial editor?

It doesn’t really matter. At least we can keep up with the news, and I can all your attention to important stories that you may have missed. Such as the full page (!) story on page A9 entitled “A Former Parisian Finds Her Goats Enchanting. Her Neighbors Don’t”.

Once you get over your surprise of a two sentence headline (alors!), you focus on the news behind the news. What can be in this story, what’s the back story, how is it relevant to me and my dear ones? Well, don’t spend too much time looking – there just isn’t much there. The headline says it all. The story was written by Catherine Porter. The real Catherine Porter, I am sure. The artificial Catherine Porters (all of them) would never have spent so much artificial mental energy on a story about a former Parisian and her goats.

And, oh yes, I did not read the entire full page story about the goats. I am leaving reading (and absorbing) this crucial tale to the artificial me. He/she/it will bring your up to date on its artificial blog.

Now and then, I listen to the morning call in shows on C-Span. I listened this morning, when there was no guest and the call in question was: What would you like to see Congress do as a priority?

This was not a question designed to result in any new emphases in public policy, but there were a few callers who took the question seriously. Not that they had thought out their knee jerk responses, but at least they thought they knew what they wanted: a closed border, or no more federal debt, or some form of gun control. But then there were, probably even more than usual, the wackos.

The hands down winner of the wacko of the day award was the guy who wants Congress to stop spending so much time concentrating on Christopher Columbus, taking down all of his statues. Instead, he insists, they should be concentrating on Amerigo Vespucci, “who owned many more slaves than Columbus”. Amerigo’s name, he said, should be eliminated everywhere it appears. So, the United States of ___________, or maybe just the United States? Say, what?

There was another fellow who described himself as a life-long, blue-dog Democrat. But one who disagreed with Clinton when he signed NAFTA in 1992, and who thinks that the Democrats haven’t done one thing right in more than 30 years. What does he want Congress to do? He didn’t get that far. Say, what?

There was the lady who wanted both term limits and an age after which anyone in Congress has to resign. The age? She thought 65 might work, after all that’s when most people retire. And there was an 87 year old lady somewhere in Massachusetts who seems to think that is making every problem worse than it was and, boy, can she reel off a list of problems.

That’s when I turned it off. But this afternoon, I was in the car and I turned the radio back on. Again to C-Span. This time to the NRA convention in Indianapolis. I learned that the president of the NRA thinks that Wayne LaPierre should be beyond criticism. I learned that the wife of the governor of Louisiana shoots wild boars from a helicopter. But most of all, I learned the Mike Pence suffers from serious problem for a man who was so close to the presidency. Mike Pence as a VERY SMALL MIND. A VERY VERY SMALL MIND. And I don’t think he knows.

I heard Pence speak to the NRA leadership council. He is not going to get into motives. He does not know why the “TRANS-person killed those kids”, and as to the fellow in Louisville? Why, he should have been in an asylum. In fact, what we need to do is institutionalize everyone with a mental health problem, say ex-Veep Pence. The radical left of the ’60s forced us to put these people on the streets, and we haven’t been the same yet. Lock ’em up, just not in the lock up.

What else does Pence think we should do? We should have armed guards in every school, for one thing. We should have universal concealed carry for another (presumably, this goes in the category, “as our forefathers wanted us to”). We should close the border, we should stop all abortion, we should get rid of liberal prosecutors who are encouraging all the raging crime in our streets. And yes, he is proud of the four year Trump-Pence administration and especially all the conservative judges we put on the courts, including the Supreme Court. Yes, Mike Pence has a VERY VERY SMALL MIND.

What do we all know about Odessa today? For one thing, we know it’s in Ukraine, and it is one of the cities that has been hit by, but not destroyed by, the war. We also know that we have been told to drop an ‘s” and spell it “Odesa”, something which I find quite difficult to do (and which my computer’s spell check finds just as hard).

Anything more? Some of us have seen the film “Potemkin”, Sergei Eisenstein’s silent film about the lead up to the Russian Revolution of 1917. The steps leading from the docks to the commercial area of the city, and the baby carriage with the screaming baby careening down. Some of us (not me) know it as a city where our ancestors lived before finding their way to this country. And some of us (not me) have visited. We may also know that a large group of authors (Pushkin, Babel, et al) and musicians (especially violinists) have come from Odessa.

Charles King, professor of governmental affairs (or some such thing) at Georgetown, published a book on the history of Odessa in 2011. He called the book “Odessa”. I have just finished the book (it doesn’t take that long), and find it enlightening. The story of Odessa is not a pretty story, but (as one reviewer of the film “Banshees of Inisherin” said of the film), it is a terrific feel-bad book.

Odessa, on the Black Sea, is a younger city than Washington DC. It was designed, as was Washington, on a basic grid pattern, with variations. It was created to be a commercial Russian port on the Black Sea, connected by ship to Europe and the Ottoman Empire more easily than by land to Moscow or St. Petersburg. For a city in tsarist Russia, it was given a lot of independence. It was considered by many more European than Russian. Even its population was minority Russian. There were Russians and Ukranians to be sure, but there were also Greeks and Italians and Jews. At its high point in the mid-19th century, more than 1/3 of its residents were Jewish. Odessa was a cultural as well as a commercial center – opera house, theaters, libraries, university.

It was a great commercial city, sending grain from Ukraine across the world. But as competition increased, as railroads began to pick up the deliveries that before had been primarily maritime, the city hit on some rough years as the century came to a close. The general turmoil in Russia did not help. Ethnic group turned against ethnic group. Pogroms hit Odessa, as it hit so many other places within the Pale of Settlement. The government became more and more concerned about revolutionary thinking and striking out at suspicious individuals and groups. Then came the revolution and Odessa was clearly a fish out of water. It’s great commercial days were behind it – it was unprepared for what was to come.

Eventually what was to come was World War II. During World War II, virtually all of Odessa’s Jewish community was wiped out. Some had emigrated, to be sure, but others were worked to death, sent to camps, or scattered to the unfriendly countryside. For three years, Odessa and surroundings were occupied – not by the Germans, however, but by the Romanians, a story little known and told well by King. The Romanians, as you will see if you read the book, were merciless. You didn’t need ghettos and you didn’t need death camps. The Romanian occupiers did not need any of those things.

Prior to the current war and now in the independent country of Ukraine, Odessa grew back to an image of its prior self, proud of its history, a tourist destination. Now, of course, that too is in the past, at least for now.

If you are at all interested in the history of this unique city, Charles King’s
“Odessa” is the book for you.

As we near the end of the Passover holiday (sundown tomorrow), I thought a few words about my earliest Passovers would be in order. Until I was 7 or 8, we went once a year for a seder (normally the first seder, I think) to a house on Princeton in University City, Missouri (aha, I bet you didn’t know that streets in University City tend to be named after universities – there’s a Harvard, a Yale, a Princeton, a Pennsylvania, a Dartmouth, a Stanford, a Tulane – you get the idea; by the way, no MIT). Five people lived in that house – there was Neil (he was younger than I), Myrtle and Oscar Roufa (they were Neil’s parents), and Fetter David and Mima Gitel Ridker. I always called the house Mima Gitel’s house, although sitting here today, for the first time maybe, I realize that it was Myrtle and Oscar’s house, and their elderly parents were just living with them. I think.

Thinking back, I realize that I know very little about these people. Neil and I had nothing to do with each other; he wound up dying very young having been involved with drugs and who knows what else at an early age. Oscar didn’t live very long, either, I don’t think. He was quite heavy and he was in the liquor business (I assumed at that time that this was a disreputable business to be in) and had a shop called Happy Hollow Liquors in Wellston Missouri, even then a suburb you knew to stay away from. Myrtle lived forever, but I never saw her in later years. I am sure she passed away in her 90s.

Myrtle and Oscar were Americans. Gitel (pronounced “geetle”) and David (pronounced “duvid”) were from deepest Europe. They spoke with heavy accents. My memory of David is that he was stooped, thin and short, with gray hair. Gitel was also short and (again in my memory) always had a hair net or its equivalent on. I thought then that they were ancient – but looking at the years of their deaths, I see they were then in their mid-70s. Gitel died at 90 in 1967, but I don’t think I ever saw her after, say, about 1952. Probably, it would be more accurate to say 1953, because that was the year that my grandfather, Abraham Margulis, died (at 66), and he was the connection.

Gitel Chervitz Ridker was my grandfather’s aunt, or my great-great aunt. She was the younger sister of my great grandmother (my grandfather’s mother), Mochle Rivka Chervitz, who died well before I was born. In fact, she died at 43, ten years before my mother was born. That’s why my mother’s Hebrew name is Mochle Rivka.

According to what I can gather, there were eight Chervitz siblings, five girls and three boys. My family tree is blank on most of them. But I do know that a few (at least a few) of them winded up in St. Louis. I am not sure when. Did they come at the same time, or separately? I am not sure, although this is something I could find out (and probably should). In my early years, we did visit some Chervitz cousins, but – again – probably after my grandfather’s death, they never entered my lives. Perhaps my mother was in touch with them – I don’t know.

I should say that this line of my family does have some yichus. Yichus? That’s a Yiddish word, which means (I translate so loosely) that someone in your family tree was smart or famous.

Yes, there is yichus in that family. You see, Mochle Rivka and Gitel’s father was Yakov Israel Chervitz, and his father was Gedalia Chernovitz (what happened to the “no” between those generations is one more question), and Gedalia married another Mochle Rivka (who also died even younger, at 29 or 30), who became my great-great-great grandmother. Mochle Rivka (I don’t know her last name, or if she had one other than bat-Baruch) had a father named Baruch, and Baruch had a father named Teveuh (not the one in Fiddler on the Roof), and Teveuh’s father was Hersh (we are now up to great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather).

Hersh too had a father, Ephraim. Ephraim’s mother was Adel, and Adel was the daughter of a man named Israel ben Eliezer, who lived from 1700 to 1760 and became known as the Baal Shem Tov (or Master of the Good Name), the founder of Hasidism. The Ball Shem Tov was therefore my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather, and his father Eliezer my great-great-great-great-great-great-great–great-great-great grandfather. That’s the yichus (assuming yichus goes back that far).

Now, how do I know all of this? I know all of this because Myrtle (remember her?) and my mother’s sister, my Aunt Loraine, did keep in contact and Myrtle gave Loraine a “family tree” and told her to give it to me.

Now, the descendants of the Baal Shem Tov have been well documented, as you might imagine, so I don’t have much doubt as to the accuracy of all of this. But you wonder whether this means anything to me, or whether it will be important for my grandchildren, say, to know that the Baal Shem Tov was their great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather. I think so, for sure. And to go on a little more with this, I think he and I would have got along very well; I am sorry that he died 182 years before I was born. We share a lot in common – we don’t like dry religious services, we like to wander around on our own when the weather is good, and we pay a lot of attention to the Jewish world. We would have had a lot to discuss, and I think we would have influenced each other quite a bit.

I guess I diverted a bit from my early seders. Well, we have one more day to discuss them, because this post is already long enough, I think. And if I don’t get to it tomorrow….there is always next year. And maybe, by then, I will know a little more about all these folks, and their lives over 200 years or so in today’s Ukraine, and after they got to America, which at least all the children of my great great grandfather Yakov Israel seemed to have done. And maybe I will trace some of the branches forward – not only those who remained Chervitz, but Yakov Israel’s daughters’ families, some of whom became Rimmels (one of those was my Hebrew teacher before my bar mitzvah), some Rothmans, and some Rutenbergs. I might learn something interesting.

I feel a bit news-numb today. Nothing seems to excite me. What do you think is wrong?

Do you think that I should be concerned that important top-secret documents from the Pentagon were posted on the Internet, and that for about two months the Pentagon didn’t even know?

Do you think that I should be concerned that these documents showed that Russia can indeed wait out Ukraine and that the billions of dollars and euros that the U.S. and Europe are pouring into Ukraine may be wasted after all?

Do you think I should be concerned that the Arab nations of the Middle East may be finally realize that the way to bring about the destruction of Israel is just to sit back and watch the internal firing squad?

Do you think that I should be concerned that the crazier Donald Trump acts, and the more crimes for which he accused, his support in the Republican base just seems to grow?

Do you think that I should be concerned that the better the American economy seems to be doing, the more the Federal Reserve wants to crush it?

Do you think that I should be concerned that Jim Jordan is now the head of the House Judiciary Committee?

Do you think I should be concerned that something like one in every twenty houses possesses an semi-automatic weapon, and that there have been more mass shootings than days so far in 2023?

Do you think I should be concerned that French workers may not be able to retire until they are 64?

Do you think I should be concerned that the FDA may be forced out of business and that the approval of new drugs may be relegated to a judge in Amarillo Texas?

Do you think I should be concerned that Clarence Thomas, who professes to only love traveling in America to RV parks and Walmart parking lots, is being forced to take ultra-luxurious international trips?

Do you think that I should be concerned that the only way to gain public office in the United States is to talk about global warming, and provide support to increasing fossil fuel production?

Do you think I should be concerned about the fact that, of the 33 most developed countries in the world, only 32 have figured out how to provide universal health insurance to its population?

Do you think I should be concerned that the federal courts have decided they have no role in overseeing the mapping of Congressional districts, and that this should be left to politicians?

Do you think I should be concerned that Elon Musk owns Twitter, and the Chinese on Tiktok?

Do you think I should be concerned that major earthquakes in California and Israel are only a heartbeat away?

Do you think I should be concerned that I am 80 years old, and will probably not really live to 120?

Do you think I should be concerned that I am numb to all of these today?

(1) Abe Fortas was a Supreme Court justice. He was even nominated to be the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court by Lyndon Johnson. His nomination did not succeed (many thought it was because Fortas was Jewish – this certainly seemed to have played a role), but it also turned out that Fortas had some other problems – he was being paid to give lectures at American University by a bunch of his former clients, and he had entered into some sort of arrangement with a financier named Louis Wolfson, who was to have paid Fortas $20,000 a year (only the first payment was made and it had been returned). Wolfson was accused, and I think convicted, of insider trading. He appealed to the Supreme Court. Fortas recused himself, and the Court did not take the case. But Fortas was convinced to resign from the Court.

Is this very different from Clarence Thomas? He has been sent on luxury vacations by Harlan Crow, also a business man (development rather than finance), and has for years been paid by Conservative groups to give speeches. Equal is equal, no? Should Thomas follow in Fortas’ footsteps?

(2) Sometimes, I have to question even my own memory. I have for a year or so put Charles King’s book “Odessa” on my “one day I will read” list. The day before yesterday, I finally started it – I had picked it up at the Montgomery County Wheaton used book store a few weeks before. I am about half way through it – in the middle of the 19th century. But I have to ask some questions: Why does this book seem so familiar? Have I read it before?

The book was published in 2011, which means it would have been a post-retirement read. I know we don’t have another copy in the house. Where would I have read it? Will I ever know the answers to these questions? Does it make a difference? Probably not. But it is one more mystery.

(3) The Nationals and the Rockies split their 4 game series. Let’s talk about Denver. I haven’t spent much time there and haven’t been there for, I am sure, more than 20 years. Here are my recollections:

a. When I left basic/advanced training at Ft. Ord, California in 1968, I decided to take a Greyhound bus back to St. Louis, as I had never seen most of the west before. I remember going through Sacramento, Reno, Winnemucca, Salt Lake City, the Rockies, and Denver. Deciding not to sit on a bus across Kansas, I flew from Denver to St. Louis, and I made that decision before we arrived at Denver. I had already been on the bus a few days, because I stopped in some of the places named above to have a look around.

When the bus pulled into the station in Denver, I needed to get lunch and then go to the airport (that’s my memory). Across from the bus stop, there was a restaurant with a sign that said “Topless Waitresses”. I went in and, lo and behold, this was a restaurant with topless waitresses. A topless waitress seated me, took my order and brought me my food. I keep trying to remember, but for the life of me, I have no idea how the food was.

b. When I was working at HUD, I took a business trip to Denver. It was a short trip – flying west in the morning, and east late at night. I went with a woman that I was working with. I have no idea what the purpose of the trip was, but I remember after meeting with people in the morning, one of the men with whom we met said “I made reservations at the Denver Club for lunch”. He then turned to my companion and said “….but I don’t think they will let you in. They don’t allow women in the dining room, but I think you can get something to eat in the bar.” Say, what? I never saw the Denver Club.

c. We once drove from Santa Fe to Denver on a vacation. Would you believe that this is a beautiful drive? It was disappointing to reach the end, but Denver didn’t fail us. While we weren’t looking for entertainment, we found it. The most extraordinary lightening experience we had ever seen anywhere (or have seen since). Lightening like fireworks exploding across the sky.

d. Each of these trips involved flying into or out of (or both) Stapleton Airport, now closed. When I was working at HUD, one of my suite mates was a fellow, about my age, named Craig Stapleton. Nice fellow – also a “Special Assistant”, but he was a political appointee (this was the Nixon administration) and I was not. I remember when I got back from the Denver business trip I mentioned above, I asked him if he knew that the airport in Denver was named Stapleton. He looked at me without expression and said: “Yeah, it was named after my grandfather”.

That’s when I learned that Craig’s grandfather had been mayor of Denver. Craig was not from Denver, by the way. I was surprised and, I must say, a bit impressed. I haven’t seen Craig since he and I left HUD (that’s over 50 years ago), but he seems to have done OK for himself – he became the U.S. Ambassador both to the Czech Republic (or maybe it was Czechoslovakia at the time) and to France. Nice guy. I wish him the best.

That reminds me of another fellow who was one of the four Special Assistants – he was of Hispanic descent (I will not identify him here, but will use his initials MS), and I assumed it was his Hispanic background that helped get him the job (it was an era of incipient diversity) and I assumed he came from an immigrant background and was making his way in the new world. I never questioned my opinion. After all, he came from Brownsville TX. Even today, Wikipedia describes Brownsville at 94% Hispanic.

Once after a holiday weekend, I asked MS if he had gone home. He told me he had gone to visit his grandparents. “In Brownsville?”, I asked. “No”, he said, and he named some town in the Hudson River Valley. I was very surprised, asking him how long ago his family had moved North. His answer was something like: “Oh, it was sometime in the late 17th century. They were Dutch. Their name was van __________.”

Whoa, I thought. Who is this guy? And what about his New York Dutch society mother who married a poor Mexican immigrant and moved to Brownsville? I asked a few more questions. “Your father’s family is Mexican, though?” “Oh, no, my father is from Barcelona.”

Now, I was really taken aback. How does a Spaniard (Catalan?) from Barcelona marry a Dutch lady from the Hudson Valley and wind up, of all places, in Brownsville. What misfortune led them to such a place?

“How did they wind up in Brownsville?”, I asked. “Oh, my dad’s business is there”, he responded. “What does he do?”, I asked. “He owns ________ (I forget the number) oil tankers.”

MS did not wind up as Ambassador to France, but he wound up as the Anheuser Busch distributor in one of the largest metropolitan areas in the country.

e. One more. I did fly into Denver in 2019 – just before the pandemic struck. But not to go to Denver – just to pick up a car and drive north to Ft. Collins. All I remember is that I liked the ceiling of the new airport – the first time I had been to Denver since Stapleton closed. Does that count for anything?

And there you have it.

First:

I am still reading through my collection of Penguins, and have just finished a very interesting (and well written) book, “The Jewish Problem” by Louis Golding. The book was published in 1938 and written before Kristallnacht that November and, obviously, before the start of World War II in 1939. It describes in some detail the position of the Jews in Germany and, more recently Austria after the German takeover, a subject that most of us know only too well. He spent a lot of time talking about European countries where the condition of the Jews was deteriorating – such as Poland, Romania and Hungary, and discussed the effect of the Nazi success in Germany on influencing these other countries. He discussed the effects of Nazi propaganda and Nazi-inspired movements in Western Europe (he is English), the United States, Canada, Australia and (what he considered a lost cause) South Africa. He did not seem to think that the propaganda in any of these western countries (other than the Union of South Africa) could turn them into Nazi states, but he describes extensive activity and some Nazi successes everywhere. He talked about the USSR as one country offering safety to Jews, but only at the expense of their Judaism. He then talks about Zionism and Palestine, and the support given to Jewish settlement in Palestine by the British, which had been adopted by the allies after WWII, and led to giving the British a mandate after the defeat of the Ottoman empire. He acknowledges that the British forces didn’t know what to make of the Jews in Palestine (who were not, like others that Britain had been dealing with elsewhere, acting like colonial subjects), and stated that Britain needed to maintain control in Palestine for other strategic reasons.

I found the book very interesting for another reason. Again, this book was written before Kristallnacht (so he could not know that the Nazi regime would clamp down on the Jews so much more, and so soon), and before the beginning of the war (he does not speculate on whether there will be any war involving Britain or, say, France or the U.S.). And obviously he doesn’t mention the then unthinkable prospect of a Final Solution.

Or does he? One of the things he talks about is the inability of other nations to take in the Jews that Germany would like to expel. Not only their unwillingness, but their inability in the middle of a world wide depression already straining the resources of virtually every country. And he assumes that not only do the Jews of Germany and Austria need a place to go, but the 3,000,000 in Poland, the 900,000 in Romania and the almost 500,000 in Hungary also need refuge. He talks about previous mass movement against the Jews. After the Romans destroyed the Temple and ended the semi-autonomous Jewish state, the Jews could immigrate anywhere within the Roman empire. The Jews kicked out of England could go to France. The Ottoman empire opened its doors to the Jews kicked out of Spain in 1492. And so forth.

But this time, there is no place to go. He makes this point emphatically. But he really does not go any further. What did he expect would happen? He must have thought about it. And it looks like perhaps he was afraid to write about it. Hard to say, but the missing conclusion is notable.

By the way, the other Jewish Penguins I have read include “Judaism” by Isidore Epstein (which I thought a really good capsule, but somewhat detailed, history of Jews from Torah time onward), published in 1959; “An Enemy of the People: Antisemitism” by James Parkes (another good book written by an Anglican philosemite, several of whose books I have read over the years), published in 1945; “The Jews of Our Time” by Norman Bentwich (a fact filled account of Jews in post-war times) published in 1960; and “Zionism and Palestine” by Sir Ronald Storrs (a defense of the British mandate and its need to maintain impartiality) first published in 1937.

Second:

From the comfort of our family room, we watched the Nats beat the Colorado Rockies, 7-6. The Nats’ hitting hero was Stone Garrett, recently called up from Rochester. He got four hits and drove in five runs.

We saw Stone Garrett in Spring Training and he looked good. Where else has he played? Other than a short time with Arizona, here goes:

(1) Batavia Muckdogs

(2) Greensboro Grasshoppers

(3) Jupiter Hammerheads

(4) Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp

And I always thought my favorite team was the Macon WhoopiesTe.

Team naming is a tough thing. And it’s a thing that everyone thinks they can do without professional help. But in the corporate world, it’s different. They go to the expert branding company with the catchy name….Lippincott and Margulies. Without Lippincott and Margulies, how would Pepsi Cola Company ever thought of Pepsico, just to name one.

Well, the Redskins are now the Commanders and the Indians the Guardians. What will the George Washington University Colonials become? They have narrowed down their choices to four that I find hardly acceptable: Catalysts, Fireworks, Independents, and Monumentals. They have apparently rejected my suggestions:

The George Washington University Slaveholders.

The George Washington University Cherry Trees.

The George Washington Carvers.

The George Washington Powdered Wigs.

Your thoughts?

There is so much going on in the world that I thought I would report on a couple of little known stories that will not enrich your lives or perspectives on iota.

First – the jury is out. Here is the background: when you live in the District of Columbia, you are obligated to appear at Superior Court for possible jury selection once every two years. If you are chosen for a trial, you serve the duration of the trial. If not, you go home the day you were called, and are not required to appear for another two years. All of this was disrupted by the pandemic, as jury trials were not held in the District for an extended period of time, but things are now back to normal. (As an aside, once you hit 75, you can opt out of jury service, but that is frowned upon …. by me, at least.)

I have dutifully shown up whenever called. I have been on jury panel after jury panel, but never been selected to serve on a jury. While I have done my duty, I have also wasted a lot of time. And for several years, I had not received a summons.

Several weeks ago, I received a jury summons for 8 a.m. (that is very early for me, you know) on Monday, April 10. I dutifully registered and filled out the questionnaire. I could not imagine many calls for juries on Easter Monday and assumed, I would report for duty, take a seat in the large waiting room, sit there for 5 or 6 hours and be told I could collect my $30 jury fee (or whatever it is now) and go home.

But no! Yesterday, the court emailed me and told me that I wasn’t needed at all. I could sleep late. No, I would not get my $30. And yes, I have now accomplished my required jury service until April 10, 2025.

Second – the dreams. A very busy night, last night.

First, I was asked to travel to an unusual and dangerous land, hard to get into, at the behest of an American journalist (or scholar or something) who was on a long term assignment there. I was excited to go. I went and presented my ID at the gate of this forbidden land and given a visitor’s ID. I went to the office of the man who had summoned me (it was right at the border) and he told me he didn’t need me after all, that I could go on back home. I wanted to see something of the country. I asked if it was forbidden to walk around. He said that it should not be a problem. I saw that my ID said that I was allowed in from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. and it was already after noon. He told me just not to get caught. I knew I had until the end of the day to get back to the airport.

It was a fascinating town. Interesting street and architecture. I remember parks and sculptures. An abandoned soccer stadium (why was it abandoned with such tall grass growing) right in the middle of the city, and the most amazing high rise slums I had ever seen – buildings that were blocks long, maybe 20 stories high, yellow in color, balconies with hanging laundry at every level. Out of place in this otherwise peaceful looking land. I took a lot of pictures.

Finally, the other dream. We were staying somewhere – me, Edie, and our three children, two of whom were young, and one a young adult. We had to leave the next day, and I didn’t know how we were ever going to get everything packed in time and, even if we did, I did not know how I would fit it into our two cars (a big car and a VW bug), or why we even had two cars there. To make the packing easier, I threw out a lot of the kids toys. I knew they would be mad, but what choice did I have?

Our adult daughter was living in an apartment. She told me she needed one more piece of furniture and what she thought it would cost, which seemed a bit high to me. But the next thing I knew, she was coming back from the furniture store with her other father, or father-in-law, and told me they had just bought furniture. She showed me the store receipt. Many items and they cost a fortune.

I then learned that my daughter owned the building her apartment was in, that she was going to rehab it (if she could figure out how to get power into the building for heat) and there were eight condominiums. And that she was going to own three (including the one she lived in), her two sisters were going to own two each, and her other father, or father-in-law, was going to own the 8th. They would all be rented out, and it would guarantee them income for life.

I asked how she had come to own this building, and her other father, or father in law, yelled at me and told me I was suggesting that he was doing something illicit (which I was). I assured him I wasn’t. But he was furious.

I decided to go back to packing. I told Edie I didn’t know how any of this would fit, and told her I had thrown out the toys (she was not happy with me). I also told her that, although I knew we were all supposed to go to the Adirondacks for a a week, I didn’t see how we could do it, and we should just go home. That didn’t go over well, either.

I decided to put gas in the large car, which was parked right out front. I got in, but no one wanted to let me drive out of the parking space. Big trucks kept hemming me in. I decided just to gun the engine and did, roaring out to the street, as trucks were honking and honking. I took a right turn to where it looked like I could get gas, but all I saw were electric charging stations, one both sides on and on, down into a big dark tunnel with no end in sight.

That’s it…..

Whew.

Although there have been exceptions, normally we host two seders every year with family and friends. The past several years have been exceptions because of the pandemic, but this year we expected to be back to action. Hannah and her family were to be traveling to Massachusetts, so we had seders planned with Michelle, Josh and his boys, several cousins who live in town, and one out of town visitor. It would be a lot of work (that means mainly not me), but getting back to normalcy. But…….

First, Edie had what we think was a case of food poisoning three nights before the first seder. But what if it was something else? Was she contagious? Would anyone want to eat the food? What about her energy level?

While we were trying to figure out what made sense, we learned that our out of town guest – for other reasons – decided not to make the trip. But we told our first night guests that we had to cancel.

Then, to top it all off, I got sick and spent Monday pretty much horizontal. That cinched it – we cancelled day 2.

But Wednesday morning, we both felt recovered. Wednesday night, we streamed the Adas Israel community seder (verdict: it’s not the same thing), and mulled over what we should do for the second night.

We decided to uncancel night no. 2, and called our 5 guests and told them. All seemed happy to come. And did.

And somehow, Edie pulled together a dinner of a terrific salad, matzah ball soup, salmon, cauliflower kugel, roasted vegetables, asparagus and strawberry fluff. I was able to make the table look like a seder table with all the trimmings. And our seder – 5 adults, 1 11 year old and 1 15 year old – went like clockwork.

But, oh yes, back to Hannah’s family. On the day before they were to leave for Massachusetts, two year old Izzy developed a fever. So Andrew and Joan flew out, but Hannah and Izzy remained home. Izzy’s fever spiked and even today he just recovering. So they were in DC, but were unable to come to our house.

So – it wasn’t a normal Passover for us (and certainly not for Hannah) – but it could have been worse.

Next year: normal will preside.

I just read William Faulkner’s “Requiem for a Nun”. It’s an odd book – a combination three act play, with extensive prose introductions of each act providing a stream of consciousness history of Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, Faulkner’s imaginary country which is the site of much of his writing. The play (a sequel to his earlier novel “Sanctuary”) involves the strange tale of a bad marriage (with an interesting, and disgusting, back story), which results in two children. The couple hire a Black mother’s helper (with a rather sordid back story of her own), who recognizes that her employer’s main problem is her six month old child, and for this reason she cannot leave her marriage. To “help her out”, she smothers the child, and is convicted of murder. The mother is aghast, but wants the murderer forgiven and her death sentence curtailed.

OK, that’s that. And that’s not what I am writing about. I am writing about Faulkner’s use of the “n-word” throughout the book – not in his narrative, but in the dialogue that appears in the play. I am sure that, if this fantastic sounding story were to have actually happened, this would have been how the characters would have been talking.

My questions, of course, are: Should this book be banned? Should it continue to be published, read and possibly even discussed in literature or theater classes, and if so at what level? Should it be edited, replacing the “n-word” with something more accepted?

This came to my attention once again this morning is a front page New York Times article, “Readers Torn by Push to Revise Classics for Modern Sensibilities”, with references to Agatha Christie, Ian Fleming, Roald Dahl, Mark Twain, Ursula LeGuin and Dr. Seuss. Do you rewrite books so that offensive words won’t be read?

It isn’t that different, is it, than certain other of today’s trends? Do you destroy statues of Confederates or which honor dead Confederate soldiers? Do you take names off academic buildings, because the names relate to people who owned slaves? And so forth.

One of the facets of western society today that is striking to me is our willingness to avoid dealing with important problems (of which there are many) and our willingness to spend untold hours and energy dealing with relatively unimportant matters. Not that these are totally unimportant, but related to climate change, nuclear threats, etc., they clearly rank lower.

My own position is pretty straight forward: as to the books, don’t change anything. Whatever was written must be viewed as of the time when it was written, and not rewritten to make things more acceptable today. This is all part of understanding and coming to grips with history. I think we can all deal with this.

Look at the title of this post. Look at the author of this post (that would be me). After stating unequivocally that we can deal with leaving things as they are, it looks like I may give myself very good advice, but clearly I don’t all the time take it. That is worthy of an entirely different discussion.

At the funeral of Rabbi Bill Rudolph this week, I learned things I didn’t know. He was an athlete, a bicyclist, and a handyman. At the funeral of George Johnson, I learned that he not only played the guitar, but also could play the piano, the saxophone, and the cello. Who would have guessed?

What would one learn about me at my funeral? Not much, I would say. And that’s because I have kept most of my talents so well hidden.

Well, I am going to share one of them with you today. Do you know that I have an uncanny knack for finding things (just today, for example, I found both the lost vinegar and the lost pepper grinder)? I learned that I had this unusual talent at a young age, and immediately took advantage of it.

In the summer between third and fourth grade, I and a neighborhood friend Roger McKnight founded the Hessel-McKnight Detective Agency. The agency was so successful that, although we shut it down for the school year, we reopened the agency the following summer before closing our doors (OK, we didn’t really have any doors) for good.

I must admit that I don’t remember a lot about our many successes. I also don’t remember a lot about Roger McKnight. I think he was my age, although he might have been a year older or younger (probably younger; if he was older, it would have been McKnight-Hessel). I think we went to the same school, although I don’t remember him there, so maybe we didn’t (many kids in my neighborhood went to the local Catholic school). I remember he had blond hair, and we hung out a lot together those summers. But that’s all.

I have no idea what happened to Roger McKnight, because he and his family moved out of town. They probably moved (I remember it was to Oregon) right after we shut down Hessel-McKnight. No contact since then.

Our biggest case was our first case, as I recall. The vinyl lawn furniture in the backyard of a family down the street was all slashed. Our job was to find out who did it. We took the job with confidence. We decided that no adult would slash lawn furniture and that it had to be a kid. We then knew we needed to figure out who would have done such a thing. Was it a random attack, or was it done by someone who knew the family whose chairs were destroyed, and had a conflict with them.

I don’t remember the details. I know we talked to a number of people on the block. And I remember we decided who must have done it. And I remember that we confronted him and, after careful questioning on our part, he confessed.

I don’t remember who the slasher was, and I don’t remember his motive, or why he decided to confess. I only remember that the Hessel-McKnight Detective Agency had proven its bona fides, and went on to solve several other (albeit more minor) mysteries over the two years of its existence.

As you read this historical piece, you might have noted one other thing. We were about 10 years old, and we had the freedom to wander around our neighborhood from morning ’til dark at will. As did all the other kids. This would never happen today, as we all sadly know. But in 1950, it wasn’t even a question.

Well, except for one time, when it was a question. That’s when a traveling circus pitched its tents in the parkland on the other side of our street (Topton Way , Clayton MO, now the site of Clayton High School). It was a real circus, with rides, and a side show, and games, and animals. It was also very exciting, and right across the street.

A bunch of us spent a lot of time watching as the circus was being set up. It was a great adventure. But our parents weren’t so excited. When I say “our parents”, I mean everyone’s. We couldn’t understand what they were concerned about. We were very mature kids – probably 8 to 12 years old. And the circus folks were extraordinarily welcoming and warm and instructive. Everything a kid could want.

We were in disbelief, when we learned that our parents were most concerned about us decided to run away with the circus. When we crossed the street, they thought we might never be seen again. We were in disbelief.

That’s the way it was in Clayton MO in 1950. Them were the days.

On this day, April 4, in the year 1968, I was in the middle of basic training for the U.S. Army Reserve at Ft. Ord, California. I think it was late afternoon in California, and my company was at the rifle range, a large area where a number of us would stand in a row shooting at human shaped targets. My company was composed of reservists, serving the first part of their six month active duty requirement, before going home to serve six full years as a reservist (hoping that we would not find ourselves activated and sent to Vietnam). A number of us, like me, were from St. Louis. Others were from Dallas, Hawaii, Arkansas, places I cannot remember, and rural Louisiana. Most of the guys from Louisiana were not like the rest of us, or so it seemed.

Our target practice was interrupted when a voice called out from a loud speaker system that I didn’t even know existed: “Your attention, please. We have just received word that Rev. Martin Luther King has been shot and killed in Memphis.”

It was a shock, to be sure. But the next shock was at least as great. A cheer went up from many of my fellow recruits.

There was one Louisianan who I was quite friendly with during the few weeks of basic training. I don’t remember his name (I have blotted most of the names connected with Ft. Ord out of my memory years ago). He was a tall guy, and fairly heavy. He had not gone to college (at least yet), and had been working at a filling station outside of Lafayette. He was bright, knew right from wrong, and was very nice.

The cheering at the news did not surprise him at all. He was a little surprised, though, at the letter that came from his mother, thanking God for MLK’s death.

As we all know, it was just a few months later that Robert Kennedy was killed at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. I was still in basic training, and as lights went off early for those six weeks, we did not learn about Kennedy’s death until we woke up early the next morning. Interestingly, my memory does not recall anyone cheering at that moment. I think we were all, isolated as we were, traumatized by what was going on in that part of the country that was not Ft. Ord – war, assassinations, demonstrations, drugs and music. We were sealed off in basic training – helpless, but somehow protected. Where was the world heading?

Today, we have some of the same feelings, I guess. Our country was divided then; it is divided now, and the future is uncertain today, as it was then. As ex-President Trump heads to the New York courthouse to be arraigned today, a new wild card is being dealt, and we don’t really know what is going to happen. We are told that cameras will not be allowed in the court room, but will be allowed in the hallways. We know that there will be security at all stages of the arraignment. But still, my mind flashes back. Images of Jack Ruby come into my consciousness again and again. I will be so glad when all this is over.

Yes, I know……it never will be.

A high level official from Moody’s was on C-span’s Washington Journal this morning. The subject was the banking system. He told the story of when he started a business 30 years ago. He couldn’t get a loan from a large bank, but got one from a smaller, local bank, provided he give the bank a personal guarantee and a mortgage on his house.

OK, so far, so good. But then he said “I knew the banker because his daughter and my daughter were on the same soccer team.” I assume he said this to demonstrate that local bankers were members of the community, although those who operate national banks’ regional offices live within a community. But I took his remarks a different way: it isn’t what you know, but who you know. Would that local bank have given a loan to someone that the banker did not know, particularly if the borrower were someone of another color? Obviously, I don’t know, but I am pretty sure that statistics would show that such borrowers had a harder time getting this type of start up business loans.

How did get into Harvard? I think it was because I knew the high school guidance counselor pretty well, and I am not sure that my “competitors” knew her that well. How did I get my excellent job at HUD as a Special Assistant to an Assistant Secretary? I got it because I knew someone at HUD who had a similar position, and who shopped around for me to see if any such jobs may be vacant. How did I move from HUD to a law firm? I did it because I knew a partner at that law firm, and he contacted me at a time that I was not even looking.

These may all be small examples. But they tell a story. And it shows how affirmative action might help those who don’t have a clear path to helpful contacts. Now, I have recently read a proposal by someone that affirmative action based on race alone no longer makes the most sense, particularly as it has been used to assist those who may not need assistance irrespective of their race. But rather that there should be some economic or sociological test for affirmative action. I think that makes some sense – but how would it be designed and implemented in a way that would minimize abuses? And, of course the majority of the recipients under such a program would probably, in many or maybe most places, still be members of minority groups.

I guess you could say that schools do this all the time when they offer scholarships. This is true and perhaps most of the schools do provide scholarships to those who really need it most. But when I was on the scholarship committee of a local private school, I had no assurance that we were doing that. Of course, we reviewed not only applications from parents, but also federal and state income tax records. But there were families who had sizeable incomes, but equally sizeable mortgages, second homes and fancy automobiles, and who had no savings. And families with less income who lived in a small house and had been able to save some money simply by being more frugal. There were families with little income or assets, but who had grandparents who were ready to cover any amount that scholarships would not provide. And so on. And then there non-financial issues – “I really like that family”, “He’s such a cute kid”, and the opposite. I resigned from the committee after two years.

Is any of this avoidable? Or, perhaps the question is whether we should even try to avoid any of this. Maybe factors like this are necessary to grease the wheels of society.

It all reminds me of Joseph Henrich, and my post of a few days ago related to his findings that the non-Western world works more on connections and family relationships than the Western world does. It occurs to me that maybe Henrich is wrong. That the West relies as much on connections and contacts, but that the connections and contact on which the West relies are just different from those that fuel Asia and Africa.