Art is 80

During the heart of the pandemic, when Edie and I decided we could probably get out now and then if we were careful, we started to take weekly day trips. Then, as things opened more and more and our calendar began to fill, our weekly trips disappeared into the past.

But we have decided to try to start them anew, and this afternoon we took a short trip (i.e., only a half day trip, leaving our house at about 2:30 and getting back about 6) to one of the places we visited a few years ago. We went to the Monocacy Aqueduct which carried the C & O Canal over the Monocacy where it emptied into the Potomac, about 25 miles from our house. A few photos have been posted on Facebook.

The Canal itself follows the Potomac from Cumberland Maryland for 184.5 miles and ends in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington DC. (When the Canal was built, Georgetown was a separate city from Washington) The Canal was completed in about 1840 and was in operation until the early 1920s.

Obviously, it was a problem for a canal paralleling a river to see another river emptying into the river. As 2 1/2 year old Izzy would say “You can’t go through it. You can’t go around it. You can’t go under it. You gotta go above it.” So, the canal and towpath had to be raised to cross over the river. Depending on which sign you read, the first version of the aqueduct was completed either in 1833 or 1850. It operated until 1924, when a flood damaged and closed the aqueduct forever. It was rebuilt in 2005, but does not carry water at this point.

But it’s a beautiful and peaceful site and well worth our second visit.

I am trying to remember where else we went several years ago. Shepherdstown WV, Brunswick MD, Occoquan VA, Antietam Battlefield, Bowie MD, Chesapeake Beach MD, Ft. McHenry (Baltimore) and more.

I think our next venture will be Harpers Ferry – for some reason, we missed that one on our first round.

As I think about it this morning, I start with three American villains.

First, Donald Trump for destabilizing the world and turning Americans against each other.

Second, Rush Limbaugh for destroying the concept of truth.

Third, Atonin Scalia for his creation of the artificial concept of originalism, which turned American jurisprudence on its head.

Beyond these major villains, I blame (1) the opportunistic Republican Party for caving into the desires of those with the worst instincts, (2) the leadership of Congress for their total inability to work together for the benefit of the country and their failure to set appropriate priorities, (3) the right wing media for putting greed so far above truth, and (4) cultural, intellectual and religious leaders who have no concept of public responsibility or private morality.

It’s easy to name all the problems of the world, but hard to say that any of them are being solved. And now you know whom I blame.

It is sad, of course, to see how many Americans don’t see who the villains are,but it isn’t surprising. People throughout history have been duped by their leaders. There is no American exceptionalism at work here.

Let’s start with last night. Dr. Rachel Ukeles, Director of Collections for the National Library of Israel gave a fascinating presentation last night at Adas Israel. The NLI is going to open a beautiful new building in Jerusalem near the Knesset later this year and move its collection there and move its extensive collection there from its current home on the campus of The Hebrew University. She talked about the history of the library, and about eight items of particular interest in their collection.

Starting with the phrase “the Jewish people may be the People of the Book, but they have not been the People of the Library”, she talked of the history of Hebrew manuscripts and books, how they were maintained, bought and sold, but never placed into what we would call a library. Even the first attempts at a comprehensive Jewish library in Palestine in the late 1800s failed because, in part, of opposition of Orthodox rabbis to having a “Jewish” library contain anything other than approved religious books.

But the concept of a library did take off and the university library also acted as a national library (with a lot of moving books caused by the location of the Mt. Scopus campus after 1948 in Jordanian controlled Eastern Jerusalem, causing moving the library to the West Jerusalem Hebrew U. campus). In 2007, the Knesset unanimously passed a law creating and directing the mission of a national library, and finally, in 2023, the library will have its own home, separate from the school.

Her selection of parts of the collection to discuss included the original manuscript of Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, an old Gez-language Jewish bible from Ethiopia, a women’s prayer book from Salonica, and the original handwritten version of the song Yerushalayim Shel Zahav (Jerusalem of Gold).

I still have not been a regular event goer since the pandemic, and although this was not my first Adas evening event, it was one of the first. I was surprised to see over 100 people there, and it was nice talking to some folks I had not seen for years, and even helping a couple home after their car wouldn’t start.

Then, this morning, I left the house early to go to my Thursday morning breakfast group meeting at Beth El in Bethesda. We are now meeting in person one week a month, and staying on Zoom the other three. We will see what happens to our schedule in the future, but I know we won’t give up Zoom, because we now have a few members who are not able to travel to Beth El because they have moved to Florida and we don’t want to leave the Floridians out in the cold.

At any event, today’s presentation was on the City of Chicago (part 2) by Ed Kopf, who is good at this sort of thing because he spends a lot of time in Chicago, and because he used to be an American history professor. If I could pick out one important point he made in the development of Chicago, it was as a transportation and distribution center. A place where you had water transportation (the Great Lakes and a canal to the Mississippi), where railroads from all over the country came together, where there was an extraordinarily large amount of prairie land in the Midwest waiting for cultivation and livestock. Chicago became the home of meat packing, grain distribution, lumber transport and so much more. He pointed out those men (yes, men) who helped shape the city – railroad men, canal developers, stockyards owners and so on.

He also, of course, talked about cultural development and race problems, and fires and the Columbian Exhibition of 1893. All fascinating – and did you know that the Chicago River, which now flows to the west, at one time flowed into Lake Michigan? Well, that’s quite a story in and of itself.

Finally, I agreed to give my second presentation of the year on July 13. It’s going to be on Saul Alinsky, and much will be based on the biography of him written by my friend Sandy Horwitt, who passed away a little over a year ago. My premise (not Sandy’s) is that Alinsky, a very talented guy, was basically non-ideological in his community organizing (although he has become a symbol of left wing organizing) and that the person who had the largest success in putting Alinsky’s principles into action was none other than Newt Gingrich in connection with the development of the Tea Party. Stay tuned.

This is not the first time I have had a blog. But the other times have been when I was still working, so it has been a while. When I look at my earlier blogs (I have them all printed out and in three ring binders), I see a different person. Back then, I did things. I went to work five days a week (at least), and we went to the theater, saw movies, went to museums, ate at restaurants, saw friends, and read books. All this is in the blog – a lot of reviews of plays, films, books, exhibits and so forth.

It’s different now. Is it because of age, or pandemics, or Netflix, or something else? I am not sure. But, take yesterday, a typical Tuesday. I only left the house to drop things off at the laundry. Oh, yes, I took a walk of probably less than a mile late in the afternoon. That’s it.

What did I do at home? Actually, yesterday was a fairly active day. Here goes:

(1) I watched a program on line sponsored by the Baltimore Zionist District, a group that I had never heard of. It was entitled “Jewish Odessa Tour: From the City of Dreams to the Gates of Zion”, and included three contemporary videos (pre-war) and a presentation by a Ukrainian woman who runs tours of Odessa. What was amazing is that there were over 400 screens open, if Zoom’s statistics can be trusted. And, if anything can be trusted, Zoom statistics can. The program was long (the presentation itself over an hour), the videos were very attractive, but showed a lot of old buildings that began to blur together (rather than giving a feel for the overall city – e.g., where were the Potemkin Steps? The speaker was very knowledgeable and equally dull and humorless. The program dealt with 19th century Odessa, which – I saw by the Q and A – disappointed some because they wanted to know what happened during the 20th century, or what was happening today. But I learned quite a bit – especially as I very recently read Charles King’s book “Odessa” (which did not concentrate on the Jewish elements of the city, although he certainly dealt with them).

(2) I the evening, I watched another program, this one sponsored by the Haberman Institute for Jewish Studies, of which you probably know by now I am vice president. This was a discussion of “jealousy” in the Bible and in early rabbinic writing – jealousy, I would say, as a normal emotional reaction to certain situations (real or imagined), and an emotion which can itself get out of hand, leading to marital and/or societal disruptions. The talk, by Assistant Professor Sarah Wulf of the Jewish Theological Seminary, was interesting – although I was not sure that “jealousy”, as we think of the term, was the right term to use to discuss the various reactions a man can have when he knows or suspects that his wife has eyes, or other body parts, elsewhere.

(3) I did start a new book, as I keep going through my Penguins. This time it’s “Greenmantle”, a World War I novel by John Buchan, otherwise known as Baron Tweedsmuir, who became Governour General of Canada in his later years. I had read one other Penguin novel by him, which I did enjoy, but was quite different. The first one, “John McNab” was set in Scotland; “Greenmantle” was set in the Middle East and, it appears to me from the first 60 pages, could never be published today because of the attitude taken by Buchan towards the Muslim religion and Muslims; they were both evil and stupid, it appears, at least at the start. We will see what happens, as our protagonist tries to find a way to keep the Germans from bamboozling the Muslims to join their anti-British cause.

(4) The Nationals beat the Cubs, 4-1, and the game was on without sound during Prof. Wulf’s presentation. The Nats are in the last place in the East, to be sure, but they are one of the better last place teams in Major League Baseball. So far.

(5) I spent some time watching TikTok and YouTube clips of Dame Edna. I really don’t know much (i.e., I don’t know a thing) about Dame Edna, who so recently and so sadly passed away. I know she was a he, and his name was Barry Humphries, and that he was Australian, and that she had (or was it “she often had”) purple hair. Had I ever seen Dame Edna before today? Maybe, but I really don’t recall.

But I saw a few clips today and I have to say they were very funny. Now here’s a downer: I am not posting the clips here (I have no clue how to do that), so you will have to use your imagination to “see” them.

Clip 1: It is an opera house in London, and Charles and Camilla, dressed to the nines, are sitting in what is obviously the Royal Box. The door to the box opens, and in walks Dame Edna. She says hello to the royal family, the audience cheers and is already laughing, and while Camilla has only a hint of a smile on her nervous face, Charles is laughing away. Dame Edna sits down and, a second or two later, a proper looking man (a proper looking valet type man) walks in and hands Edna a note. She reads it, looks pleased, stands up and starts to leave the box. Before she does, however, she turns back to the royal families and says, with a hint of apology, “They found me a better seat.”

Clip 2: Dame Edna is on stage somewhere, and she is conversing with a member of the audience, a young woman. I don’t know if she knows the woman, or if the woman is someone famous – after all, this is just a clip. But she tells the young woman how nice she looks and how much she just adores her clothes. The young woman looks pleased. Dame Edna then says “Yes, and I am trying to think of the word that perfectly describes that outfit.” The woman looks at her expectantly. Dame Edna thinks for a minute and then says: “Ah, I have it……….affordable.”

This got me thinking. Who wrote these skits? Dame Edna? Or a comic writer? You may have seen that the comedy writers have now gone on strike, and all of the comics are apparently besides themselves because they can’t think of anything funny to say or do. This raises a lot of questions in my mind.

(6) Talking to my 2 1/2 year old grandson, Izzy. We were looking at a plate of figs (why not?), and I asked him. “If I had one fig and picked up another one, how many would I have?” Looking at my figs (I guess), he responded “Two”. “OK”, I said. “Now if I have two figs and I eat one of them, how many have do I have left?” Proudly, he looked at me and with great confidence said “Five!”.

As a preliminary matter, you should read yesterday’s post “Are You Hungary” before you read this one.

One thing I did not say yesterday about being in Budapest 50 years ago. When you were behind the Iron Curtain, in a way you felt like you were on another planet, or – perhaps better – in a parallel universe. Everything seemed the same, but different enough to throw you off a bit. And you were out of contact with your world. Obviously, there were no cell phones, but I think even to make a regular long distant phone call was an ordeal, and you could not guarantee that you can arrange it, or that it would work.

From Budapest, I was going to Prague, and I went by train. I don’t recall a great difference in the train I boarded in Budapest compared to trains in western Europe. I think they were quite similar, but perhaps I have forgotten. What I do remember is that it was a long trip, longer than I had anticipated, and that the scenery was sort of ordinary – rural, small hills, a lot of greenery. I don’t remember much more. (I just looked it up – there is now a high speed train that can get you between the two cities in 6 1/2 hours, but the normal train ride is between 12 and 13.)

I shared a compartment with a middle aged couple. I don’t think there was anyone else there. They couldn’t speak English at all, but between my pigeon Russian and my pigeon German, we were able to make sense of each other. And the German seemed easier. They were from Hungary, they were members of the Communist Party, he was an economist (I don’t remember her background), they were Jewish, they lived temporarily in Prague, and he was Hungary’s economic minister (his title was something like that) to Czechoslovakia. They were friendly, but between our language differences and general suspicions, our conversation was limited to the basics.

I had told them about my problem with my reservation in Budapest (they were apologetic as if it were their own fault), and that I was a bit fearful as to what would happen in Prague. They understood and then did something totally unexpected. They gave me their apartment phone number and said that if I was really in trouble – and they meant REALLY in trouble – I could call them.

The train reached Prague and I went right to the Park Hotel, then a brand new hotel (a rarity in Communist Europe) and presented my voucher. Guess what? I was told that they had no record of my voucher (which was for two nights), and that they had a room for the night, but not for the next night – they were booked. I obviously accepted the one night offer, hoping that a vacancy would show up for the next.

Two American men were checking into the hotel the same time I was. They obviously overheard my conversation.

An hour or so later, I went down to the hotel restaurant (I had not yet ventured out into the city), and found myself in a short line behind the two men I had seen in the lobby. They expressed their condolences and understanding at my dilemma and asked if I wanted to join them for supper. Of course.

It turned out that these two Americans (they were maybe ten years older than me) worked for the International Labor Organization (a branch of the United Nations) in Geneva and were in Prague for a day or two on business of some sort. They were both nice fellows, but I really don’t remember one of them and I really can’t forget the other. Why? Because he seemed to me that absolutely smartest person I had ever met.

Well, now perhaps I know better. He may or may not have been “smart”, and he probably didn’t have the world’s most winning personality. He was more like a “savant”, more like a walking trivia container. I remember two areas that he seemed particularly adept at. The first was opera – he not only knew every opera ever written (name, composer, librettist, plot, etc.), but he seemed to know every opera’s performance history (where it premiered, where it had played to raves or boos, the casts, etc.), and of course he knew everything about every opera singer and operatic conductor. Everything. And he wanted to make sure you knew that he knew – I couldn’t tell if he assumed you knew nothing, or if he assumed you know quite a bit – just not as much as he did. I was in the “nothing” category.

The second subject matter was baseball. He knew even more about baseball, it seemed, than opera. He was a follower and fan of the New York teams (now and historic), but his knowledge of games and player statistics had no boundaries. Whew.

The next day I wandered around Prague. Now many of you have been to Prague during the post-Communist years. What a city it has become! Much of it has been restored to pre-World War II glory. New hotels have been built. And everything has been built around an enormous tourist trade. If central Prague resembles anything these days, it resembles a real life Disneyland.

Not in the early 1970s. Then, Prague was the most grayest, dirtiest, down-at-the-heels city you could possibly imagine. The streets were filled with unhappy looking people, and you sensed that nothing uplifting ever happened there. After the buoyancy of Budapest, the depressive nature of Prague was overwhelming. Nothing good will ever come of this place. The Czechs have clearly given up, or escaped to the west.

After a day of wandering these streets, eating at down and out restaurants, and looking in antique stores that showed something of what Prague may have been like in years past, wandering through the old Jewish ghetto, seeing the synagogues and the overused cemetery, I realized that I had nowhere to stay.

What to do? I could go to Cedok, the Ibusz of Czechoslovakia and see what if anything they had to offer (although there was no way I could pull off my Budapest personality in Prague), or I could figure out how to use a payphone and call my friends from the train. I decided on the latter, although I was a little hesitant.

I made the call, they offered me a place to stay, and gave me instructions. They lived on the outskirts of the city. I took a trolley, which went through parts of Prague I would otherwise not have seen, and eventually saw acre after acre of Soviet-style high rise apartment developments, one of which they lived in. When I got to their stop, I saw the buildings from much closer, and saw that their condition was subpar, and that the roads and sidewalks connecting the buildings were also in need of major repair. I found their building, could get into the lobby. And the elevator worked.

There was nothing wrong with their apartment. It was well furnished, as I recall – not stylish but comfortable. They did have hot water. I remember they had both a toilet room and a bath room. Separate.

They told me that there were occasional problems with the plumbing, and the electricity went off now and then, and the elevator didn’t always work. They were clearly happier in Budapest than Prague. But this is where they were. His job was a good job and they had no regrets. We had dinner in their apartment, and breakfast the next morning.

They accompanied me down the elevator and made sure that I knew the way back to the trolley stop to go back to the city. I thanked them profusely. They made something very clear. They were happy to host me. But this was it. I was not to try to communicate with them in any way after this morning. I was certainly not to send them anything like a thank you present or try to correspond with them after I got back to America. This time together never happened. If anyone found out that it did, my host would lose his government job.

That’s pretty much what I remember about Prague. I took a train from Prague to Frankfurt. In Frankfurt I transferred to an over night train to Rome. I spent a day and night in Rome, wandering around with some people I had met on the train and having dinner with them at an outdoor restaurant overlooking the forum, and the next morning took a train to Naples. But that’s a different story – not for today.

Just one more thing. About a week after I got home from this trip, my office receptionist buzzed my intercom, and told me that two men were in the lobby and wanted to see me. OK. They showed me their FBI credentials and said something like “We hear you just spent some time in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Why did you go there? What did you do there? Did you have any personal contacts with anyone there? Did you bring anything to anyone there? Did anyone give you anything to bring back? Did you pack your own luggage?

I lied to the FBI, but nothing came of that, I guess. I didn’t go to jail, at any rate.

And, boy, have things changed.

As to the man whose death notice led me back to all of this? Mixed reactions, at best.

Is there a scandal on the Supreme Court? There are to be hearings today in the Senate, but will there be any witnesses? We have four scandals: There is Clarence Thomas’ getting expensive luxury vacations from Harlan Crowe, as well as his selling properties to Harlan Crowe. There is Clarence Thomas’ wife working with all of the right wing organizations that appear before the Court or take strong positions on cases before the Court. There is Neil Gorsuch, who, along with family members, sold an expensive property to the managing partner of Greenberg Trauig, a law firm with business before the Court. And there is Chief Justice Roberts himself, whose wife works for several important law firms who have regular business before the Court. Is there any surprise that Roberts does not want to testify at the hearings?

Who needs Supreme Court justices anyway. Why can’t Artificial Intelligence do the job? You submit your briefs and memoranda and Artificial Intelligence, which has at its command all American law precedent, British common law precedent, and more common sense than any Supreme Court justice, churns out the decision.

(By the way, you see in the paragraph above that I said “at its command”. I said this in a reflexive manner – I really don’t know Artificial Intelligence’s preferred pronouns. I will at this to my list of things to ask it/him/her/?????)

I was looking at the New York Times this morning. There are all sorts of issues discussed – matters of importance for the future of humanity, micro and macro matters. Can’t AI solve them all?

For example. It appears that New Orleans is a mess – “an exhausting history of inefficient bureaucracies, deep seated political corruption, entrenched poverty and a water system so decrepit that city officials regularly issue boil water orders.” And it has the nation’s high murder rate, terrible problems with car thefts, lagging basic city services, not to mention an unbalanced economy too reliant on tourists and, oh yes, climate change. What to do? AI will know.

And the same must be true with the looming staff shortages at U.S. prisons. What do we need to do to attract proper staffing? And how should current staffing be organized? And do we have too many prisons, or too few? And can’t our prisons be better designed and operated? All these questions – just right for AI.

If you go to the Arts section of the paper, you will find a review for a new novel, “Death of an Author”. This is the first novel reviewed in the Times written by AI. It’s a murder mystery with some unique twists and, apparently, not the most gripping writing. But nevertheless……

The facts were fed into three different AI apps by a presumably real man named Stephan Marche, who is a writer himself. The primary character in the novel is also an author, and she is murdered. But, somehow, she comes back to life (or not) to help solve her own murder.

OK, I am not a lawyer anymore, but tell me this? If a novel is written by AI, based on questions posed by a human being, and if three AI apps are used, who owns the work? Who can get a copyright? What a contentious issue this may be – it may be challenged all the way up to the Supreme Court, where the AI justices will have to decide.

Now go to the Business section of the Times. Here is exciting article is “A.I. to Read Your Mind Is Up Next”. Yes, in Texas, they have developed an AI system that can read your thoughts and translate it into text. Not perfected yet, but it probably will be by next Tuesday. Can’t quite remember that dream? Wait until your Smart Watch records the dream and prints it out, so you can see it first thing in the morning. Of course, it may also send the printout, or at least the text, to your “friends” or your “mental health A.I. assistant”, or your “government monitor”. Who knows? So exciting.

All of this explains (going back to Page 1 of the today’s Times) why Geoffrey Hinton, the Canadian scientist who perhaps has had more influence into the development of A.I. than anyone else, has quit his high level position at Google. He says that he “now regrets his life’s work”, and can console himself only by saying that if he had not developed this new branch of science or technology, someone else would have. But, as the Times says, he has gone from “groundbreaker to doomsayer”.

This blog post only reflects what I have seen this morning. Had I written it yesterday, it would have been different. It would have talked about how much better AI is than doctors in diagnosing disease and appropriate treatments, for example. Every day now brings something new, something that shows that human society is either in danger or superfluous.

No joke.

I was listening to the Leadership Conference of the Anti-Defamation League this afternoon on my car radio. Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker, the man who held off the attacker last year in Colleyville TX last year speak. He told an interesting Talmudic story. Here is what I heard:

There was a man born with two heads. The question was whether he/they was/were entitled to one inheritance, or two. A group of rabbis was consulted and the opinion was that a test should be conducted. A pot of boiling water should be poured over one of the heads. If the second head screamed, then they were one person and entitled to one inheritance. If the second head did not scream, they were two persons and entitled to two inheritances.

He then talked about Rabbi Soloveitchik’s interpretation of this Talmudic discussion. Rabbi Soloveitchik said that the purpose of this story was to demonstrate that we are all, all of us, connected. If you pour boiling water on one of us, the other will feel the pain.

I liked this .

But to digress a minute. After Cytron-Walker finished, ADL executive director Jonathan Greenblatt came out to praise him, and praise him he did. He talked about what Cytron-Walker accomplished in Colleyville, and how he is now assisting with the ADL. And then he said “So hats off to the Rabbi!”

Well, my gosh, Jonathan Greenblatt. There is one thing you ought to know. You do not tell people in front of a rabbi that they should take their hats off.

It was a gaffe. And it happens. Just like when I heard Don Rickles on a clip today try to insult a Swede by telling him they put too many holes in their cheese. It’s a gaffe.

But, then again, three gaffes and you are out.

Sometimes I do hear a funny joke. Should I repeat it? Like the one about the man whose neighbor is in his upper 90s and somewhat senile. And every morning, he comes to the man’s door and asks him if he has seen his wife; she isn’t at home this morning. And every morning the man must tell his 90+ year old senile neighbor that his wife died several years ago.

He told this story to his friend, who said: “Why do you talk to him every morning? Why not just not answer your door?”

The man responded. “I thought about that. It’s hard telling him every morning that his wife died. I should stop……..But I’d really miss that smile on his face.”

Now, is that a funny joke? I’m not sure. I thought so. I read something else yesterday, talking about writing, not about comedy. It was the advice that someone gave someone else. He said something like “No matter how well you write, there are going to be people who don’t like it. And no matter how poorly you write, there are some people who are going to love it.”

Same with humor.

Speaking of humor, I missed the White House Correspondent’s Dinner this year (on TV). I would be very surprised if Joe Biden told a joke that I would laugh at. Very surprised.

On the other hand, I am not sure that I could say anything that Joe Biden would laugh at. Unless he needed my vote.

Which he doesn’t.

One of the things that all (and I am sure I am not exaggerating) 80 year olds do is to look at the obituaries every day. Not, as the old “joke” says, to see if they are there, but – IMHO – because it’s the one place where it is unlikely that it’s fake news.

About a month ago, I saw a death notice of a man whom I had never met and whose name I had not thought of for about 50 years. But it was a name that brought back memories.

It was the early 1970s and I decided to take a trip behind the Iron Curtain. How this came about, I don’t quite remember, but someone advised me to call a certain Washington travel agency that arranged trips to Eastern Europe. The man who had died had been the owner of that agency.

[A diversion: Where is Eastern Europe? Much of what we think/thought of as Eastern Europe is more properly Central Europe. Do Poles think they live in Eastern Europe, for example? No way. “Mieszkamy w Europie Srodkowej!” or “We live in Central Europe!” In fact, based now on many trips, I realize that Eastern Europe seems to be located 100 km east of wherever you are at the time. What’s more, in Lithuania, some 30 km or so north of Vilnius, you pass a road sign that says: “Welcome to the geographic center of Europe.” Well, if you include Russia to the Urals, Norway towards the Pole, Iceland to the West and Sicily down South, this is pretty accurate.]

Whatever.

I called the dead man’s agency and arranged a trip (I was traveling alone) to Budapest and Prague. After Prague, I figured I’d relax in Italy, where I had traveled before.

Now today, people travel to Prague and Budapest like they travel to Rockville and Gaithersburg. But not then. Pleasure travel to Czechoslovakia and Hungary was very rare. And hard to arrange.

I flew first to Vienna and spent a few days there. I had been there before, and I have been there since, and frankly I don’t remember much of what I did there on this trip. I had booked a hotel which was relatively inexpensive and discovered that it wasn’t a free standing building but one floor of a regular office building that had doctors and lawyers and what have you. It was the first, but not the last, time I had seen such a hotel. I arrived in the late afternoon, checked in, and had an experience unique for me. The room I was given was small. No, it was tiny. No, it was miniscule. A rectangle with a single bed, a room so narrow that you could almost touch both walls while lying in the bed. There was a small chest of drawers, but you couldn’t open any drawer fully because you hit the side of the bed. Oh well, I said, just a couple of nights.

I asked where I could get a good meal nearby and I remember being directed to a small restaurant a block or so away with the name Zum Something or Other, that I was told was one of Schubert’s favorite places. It wasn’t crowded, I had a simple meal and perhaps the first Austrian wine I had ever had. Good wine, I thought. I looked for Schubert. He was not there.

I went back to my hotel and the small room. But I couldn’t sleep and in the middle of the night I left, walking the dark, empty streets of the old city of Vienna until I found a very nice small hotel with a larger room.

That is all that I remember about that trip to Vienna. I had booked passage on a hydrofoil to Budapest, a trip of a few hours up the Danube, and it was a beautiful day. The boat was modern and it was hard to believe that it skimmed on top of the water, but I guess it did.

I was a bit disappointed with the Danube scenery, and I was a bit disappointed that we didn’t stop at Bratislava, which we passed and looked interesting. I was intrigued by the guard towers, which appeared every 100 yards or so; I couldn’t tell if they were occupied. What did impress me were many of my fellow passengers who were Hungarian-Americans, many of whom were returning to their home country for the first time since they left, and most had left in 1956 during the failed revolution. They were the friendliest, most energetic, most welcoming of people, and they all convinced me that I would love Budapest, that it was heaven on earth. I was convinced.

If you have ever been to Budapest, and if you have arrived on the water, you know how magical the city is. You also know that you arrive at the pier, with the castle looming over you on the Buda side, and the Parliament on the Pest side. You climb a few steps to get to central Pest.

In those days, all travelers had to report in at Ibusz, the national travel agency, which controlled the life of all visitors. I had been told to report there and give them my voucher to the hotel arranged by the Washington travel agency. Ibusz was in a small building, and there were two young staffers, about my age, one male, one female. They took the voucher, did what they do, and told me two things: first, they had no record showing that I had a reservation and second, there were no vacancies in Budapest.

Now, I admit to being surprised, and you would possibly think that I would have been discouraged. But no. This was Budapest. The most wonderful place in the world. Nothing could discourage me. I simply changed my personality and acted as if these two Ibusz staffers were my oldest and best friends and surely together we would figure something out. And, lo and behold, these two loyal Communist functionaries seemed to change their personalities, too, and we went to work.

Before long, they told me that they found me a room not at a hotel, but with an elderly woman who took in travelers, but it was a cold water apartment, and she didn’t speak any English. No problem, I said, we worked out the details and I got the address.

Again, if you have been to Budapest, you know that central Pest is filled with (maybe) 6 story brick apartment houses, with flat fronts and an interior courtyard. You enter through the courtyard and, because there are no elevators, you climb interior stairs to balconies that run across all four sides of the building, and the apartment entries are off these balconies. Our landlady was quite elderly (it seemed to me at the time) and she was welcoming, but I couldn’t really communicate with her. She didn’t speak English, of course, but we couldn’t manage with my poor German, either. All I remember is that she wanted to buy my American blue jeans for her grandson and that she was willing to pay me $40 for them. That is the equivalent of almost $300 today. Where would she get that kind of money, I wondered. And if she could scrape it up, certainly that was something better to spend it on.

I did love Budapest. It was a very lively city with very active and attractive people – it certainly didn’t fit my image of a Communist city. The stores and markets seemed filled, and everyone you saw on the streets was well dressed. I visited the central market, and I ate some wonderful meals. The dollar was very strong then, and elegant meals, served in elegant settings, by very professional waiters, were dirt cheap. While I don’t remember all of the restaurants, I do remember Gundel, and a Russian restaurant on the Buda side called (in Hungarian) something that translated into Golden Caviar, where I ate on a subsequent trip, as well.

My other Budapest memory was my “night at the opera”, where I saw Don Giovanni done in Hungarian. It was a great performance in an old, then down-at-the-heels opera house, and I was amused at the sound of the opera in Hungarian – sounded to me that it was being done in baby-talk.

During the first act, something flew into my eye and I couldn’t get it out. At the intermission I went to one of the ushers (the ushers all looked like elderly Jewish women), and asked her in my best poor German where the restroom was. She smiled at me and responded in good German that the bar was in the room to the left. I realized she had not understood me, so I repeated it, louder and more slowly. She nodded and told me that the bar was in the room to the left. I was certain that my German was failing me, but I tried again, this time telling her that I had something in my eye and that I needed the bathroom to wash it out. She looked at me again, and told me that she knew that, and that the bar was to the left and that what I needed was not the restroom, but a cognac. I took her advice, got a cognac, chugged it, and my eye was fine.

From Budapest, I went to Prague and more adventures. Tune in tomorrow.

Probably not.

Now on to today’s program…….

It’s been raining all day here and, while the normal temperature reaches into the low 70s, I don’t think it hit 60 today. So I pretty much stayed where I am.

I also didn’t really turn the news on, so if anything important happened today, I have yet to hear about it, and I am clearly the better off for that.

And, to tell you the truth, my mind is pretty much a blank.

Now a normal person in my position would simply send a series of parameters to ChatGPT and see what it comes up and print it out as my own. But I am not a normal person. So that is off the table.

So let me tell you about the book I am “reading” (my latest Penguin). Called “Life in Shakespeare’s England”, it is a compilation of 16th and 17th century English writers, covering a number of subjects – Countryside, Superstition, Education, London, Books and Authors, Theatre, the Court, House and Home, Rogues and Vagabonds, and the Sea. The typical entry is about a page and a half. The Compiler was a man named John Dover Wilson, who was a pretty prominent guy, it appears, mid-20th century in Elizabethan studies circles.

I just began the book last night, and I barely opened it today, but I must say it is a real page-turner. Just not in the way that phrase is normally used. It is a page turner not because you can’t wait to see what the next page will bring about, but because you certainly can’t read all of these Elizabethan authors (their language, it does not appear to have been modernized) word for word, so you look at the first paragraph and a line or two after that (unless it really grabs you), and turn the page.

I have read Countryside, Superstition and Education. The English countryside was just as you thought it was, and just beginning to become a bit less so. The problems of education then were not that different from the problems of education today, but not the same either. And superstition in those days seems to have been much more ingrained than today – it wasn’t just knocking on wood, or avoiding black cats. It involved the Devil (who could infest anyone), witches (who feasted on foods made from the blood of children) and ordinary people who seemingly could do miraculous things (and therefore must be possessed of demons and therefore tortured until they confessed). Did they really believe that? We will see what the rest of the book brings.

SPOILER ALERT. Maybe I should also mention “Night Action”, in case I already haven’t, the Netflix series (10 episodes, I think) I am watching while cycling without gaining ground. It’s a show set in Washington DC, but filmed (of course) in Vancouver. Someone blew up a Metro, and then a couple (seemingly ordinary, but really spies) was murdered by a man with a mustache and an accent and his kinky girlfriend. Their attractive, but down on her luck, niece was in the house and escaped, reporting her adventure to a number that she had been told call in an “if something every happens” note her aunt had given her. Little did she know that she was calling a basement phone in the White House and that she was going to meet a guy who (my guess) will wind up to be the love of her life, as they dodge the two murderers, trying to figure out the meaning of a second her aunt had left for her, warning her that something terrible was afoot and it was all occurring at the direction of someone in the White House. Who can you trust? Who is trying to destroy the country, and who will be its savior? (By the way, the U.S. president is an attractive woman – but of a certain age, or getting there – and I surely don’t trust the vice-president. I didn’t trust the assistant director of the FBI, either. But he already dead.)

Do I recommend this show? Not really, but it isn’t so bad that I want to abandon it. Yet.

We have house guests staying with us for a few days. They are in town for a friend’s wedding. Two of them wanted a tour of Washington today. We got in my car about 11 or so. We decided to drive until we stopped for lunch and then decide if we wanted to do any more. We got home at 3:20.

This was strictly an automobile tour. Except for lunch, we stayed in the car and looked out the window.

Where did we go?

We drove west on Davenport to Connecticut Avenue and turned left, towards downtown. I pointed out the building where Harry Truman lived while he was Missouri Senator (he lived there from 1941-1945 and paid $120 a month for apartment 209) and then Vice President as well as other neighborhood hot spots, like Bread Furst (Bread Furst is primarily a bakery, but they have carry out foods and shelves filled with wines, chocolates and expensive olive oils). We then turned west on Van Ness Street. I explained the history of the brutalist/modernist building that once housed Intelsat and now sits virtually vacant and is looking for a new tenant or buyer. We looked at the Embassy of Singapore and China, and then the other embassies on International Avenue south of Van Ness, including Jordan, Ghana, Kuwait and Israel. Portions of the park in the center of the embassies seemed to have been fenced off – I didn’t know why, and it meant I couldn’t show them the apple tree grafted from Isaac Newton’s tree. Then we crossed Van Ness to look at the other embassies, including Slovakia, Austria, the UAE, Bangladesh and Pakistan. I explained what I knew about each building.

Back down Van Ness, we crossed Connecticut Avenue and drove to the Howard University Law and Divinity Schools (I explained that these schools were separated from the main campus), and then down Upton Street, past the Levine School of Music (in a building formerly part of the Carnegie Institution) and the varying houses on Lenore Lane (and saw their swimming pool already open). We drove down Linnean past Hillwood (the home of Marjorie Merriweather Post, famous for its gardens and Faberge egg collection); of course, Ms. Post also owned Mar-a-lago, but that is for another day) and across Tilden to look at the Cezch and Hungarian embassies. We then looked at Sherman Adam’s house, and the other buildings that make up the Peirce Mill complex, now over 200 years old. The Adams house was built by Peirce as a distillery – probably before 1800.

We climbed back up the Tilden Street hill, turned left on Connecticut, but soon found ourselves caught in the middle of Construction Central and terrible traffic, so we backtracked a bit, went up Rodman to Reno, and turned left on Reno. We stayed on Reno only to Newark Street, where again we turned left, this time to look at some of the houses in Cleveland Park (the oldest house in Newark Street was built in the 1890s and I think most were built before World War I). Coming back to Connecticut, we looked at the Cleveland Park business district (having some trouble since the closing of the Uptown Theater and the disruption of a number of parking places, but now the home of a number of new restaurants, along with the old standbys), the library and we drove past the Zoo (home not only to pandas, but to the newly opened refurbished bird cage), the Woodley Park Towers Condominium (where I once lived) and the Kennedy-Warren Apartments (where a number of friends live), before continuing through the Woodley Park neighborhood) and over the Taft Bridge over Rock Creek Park. We talked about the plan to put higher barricades on the bridge to prevent suicides, and wondered if this indeed prevented suicides or just directed them elsewhere.

I turned off Connecticut onto Kalorama (which apparently means “beautiful vista” or some such thing in Greek), and we explored several streets in that neighborhood, pointing out the large homes of the Portuguese and French ambassadors, the Ukraine House, and the Slovenian embassy before reaching Massachusetts Ave, where we turned right and looked at the Turkish embassy with a statue of Ataturk, the South African embassy with a statue of Mandela, the old Iranian embassy (empty since 1979), the Mosque, the Kahlil Gibran sculpture park and the Finnish, Vatican and Norwegian embassies. We looked at the entrance to the Naval Observatory (where the Vice President lives, and where the country’s most accurate clock is said to reside). I then made a U-turn, and we looked at the British embassy and the Churchill statue, and the Japanese, Bolivian, Brazilian and Italian embassies before turning up Whitehaven Parkway to see the Danish embassy, the Clinton house and the Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies.

Coming back towards Massachusetts, we crossed, staying on the continuation of the road, past more large houses, and into Massachusetts Heights. We came out of that area onto Calvert Street at the Omni Shoreham and turned right, turning right again on Connecticut and again going over the Taft Bridge. This time we stayed on Connecticut, going past the Washington Hilton, and under Dupont Circle, remarking how the COVID pandemic and resultant work-at-home movement has taken its toll on downtown restaurants and office buildings.

We went down Connecticut (I pointed out my first law office at 1025), by Farragut Square (I pointed out the Army-Navy Club) , the OMB, the Executive Office Building, the Ellipse, the former home of the Corcoran Gallery (now part of George Washington University), the headquarters of the American Red Cross, the D.A.R. (housing Constitution Hall), the O.A.S and the World War II Memorial. We then went around the Tidal Basin.

I was planning on heading towards the Wharf, but one of my passengers wanted to see the Mall, so instead I went towards Independence, turning north on 14th and making the first right onto the Mall from 14th Street. I pointed out where the Holocaust Museum was down the street to the South. We then saw the main Department of Agriculture Building, the African American History Museum (where we have yet to go), the American History Museum, the Natural History Museum, the National Gallery and East Wing, the Smithsonian Castle, the Smithsonian offices, the Freer, the Hirshhorn, the Air and Space Museum and the American Indian Museum. We then went south on 4th across Independence, and I pointed out the Voice of America and the Bible Museum. We cut over to 7th and saw HUD, and then went south towards the Wharf where we drove around a bit turning back at the entrances to the garages. We saw that there were a number of people eating at the restaurants overlooking the Potomac and wondered how all of these buildings were ever going to be filled and what their effect has been on the downtown economy.

From the Wharf, we passed Arena Stage, and drove east on M until we crossed North Capitol and wound up on Half Street near Nats Stadium. We parked and had lunch at Gatsby’s. The choices were a Greek omelet, a pastrami sandwich and a farro salad.

After eating, we returned to the car, drove through the Navy Yard area, pointing out what I could, like the DOT building, the Water Department, some of the new construction and the walkways and park along the Anacostia River. We drove past the Navy Yard, discussed the museum to be built there, and then turned north on 8th street, heading through Barracks Row, looking at the Marine Commandant’s house,passing all the restaurants (these not looking too busy today) and winding up driving through parts of Capitol Hill, until we got to H Street NE.

We looked at H Street and the status of development there, and then saw Union Station, but turned up North Capitol only for a block or two, turning off the show the new office and residential construction around there. Then we turned northeast up New York Avenue, passed the Gallaudet campus and into the Union Market area, where we saw the apartment construction, the market itself and both the wholesale food shops and the new restaurants and shops.

From there we went back to North Capitol and drove past McMillan Reservoir (talking about planned development there) and the hospitals, the cemeteries and old soldiers’ home (actually the home for “distinguished veterans), turning right on Upshur and heading to Mathewson, then into the Park, out by Broadbranch, and finally reached home.

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.