Month: February 2017

Three gynocentric flicks

The French journalist, critic, and novelist,  Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, famously observed, “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”, or “The more things change, the more they remain the same.”

Antisemitism is on the march again. In Europe, it’s the same old story – right-wing nationalism is resurgent. But there are a few new elements in the mix, including the condition of rising Muslim populations and their catch-all grievance of Palestinian victimhood. They are abetted by the  “intellectual” left, which has increasingly lost the ability to distinguish between vilifying Israeli policy (OK, if you want to split hairs, “Zionist” policy), and vilifying Jews.

In this country, though, something new seems to be happening. The rash of bomb threats against Jewish Community Centers (60 so far this year), and the recent vandalizing of Jewish cemeteries in St. Louis and Philadelphia has us all on edge. There can be no doubt that Trump’s embrace of Steve Bannon, Breitbart, and the alt-right is a major contributing factor. It’s pretty clear Bannon doesn’t like Jews.

Is this what it felt like in 1933? Just a couple of news stories, but nothing to get panicky over? We don’t want to over-react, but we don’t want this to go unremarked either. What to do?

But you’re tired of hearing me rant about Trump, right? I get it. Man, he really sucks the oxygen out of normal daily life and social discourse, doesn’t he?  It’s exhausting.

I know – let’s go to the movies!

You know how everyone is always complaining about how there are no good roles for women, and how no movies pass the Bechdel-Wallace test any more?  Well, here are three fairly recent movies I can recommend, each with a strong female character at its center.

And the best part is they’re all about surviving the Nazis! Let’s go watch a couple of these and then we can reflect on Alphonse Karr’s aphorism. D’accord?

Ida (2014)

Phoenix (2014)

Sarah’s Key (2011)

If you haven’t seen these, I won’t spoil them for you (except maybe a little). In each case a young Jewish girl or woman survives the war against all odds. But, to me, the unifying theme of the three is the death not just of the Jews of Europe, but the death of Jewishness itself. Though the women survive, at least for a time, their Jewishness does not.

There is no doubt in my mind that the Europe of today very closely resembles the Europe of Hitler’s dreams. It’s hard to understand the enormity of the crime that was committed: one out of every three Jews alive in the world in 1941 was murdered by 1945. And in some swaths of The Pale, every single last Jew was killed.

Of course, the persecution and killing of the Jews is the thing that shocks and engages us, but it is the death of Jewishness itself that may be the larger crime, and therein lies the ultimate victory of the Germans. Yes, I said Germans. Despite all the retroactive claims of heroism and “resistance” that you hear about from today’s oh-so-liberal Teutons, in the 1930’s trying to separate the “good Germans” from the Nazis was a pointless exercise. It was a distinction without a difference – some people actively participated and others “only” watched.

It’s true that there may be a stray “Jew” here or there that has persevered in Europe, but not one Hitler would ever recognize.  That stray doesn’t dress “like a Jew”, isn’t part of a synagogue’s congregation, doesn’t speak Yiddish (an entire language and literature extinguished!), doesn’t read the “Jewish press”. All those trappings of Jewish life and culture have disappeared. “The Jews” are not a political force, not a cultural force, or really any kind of force, except in the paranoid fantasies of the right, which have survived the decades completely intact, also against all odds.

In the east, in Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus, Romania, Moldova and elsewhere, young people are completely unaware of the history of the Jews or even that  Jews ever lived there, much less comprised 50% of the population in many places.  The small town or “shtetl” of Shalom Aleichem, once the center of Jewish life, is no more. And, more significantly, there is no trace it ever was there to begin with. There are no Jewish schools or libraries, no Jewish businesses, no buildings with Jewish iconography, no birth, death or marriage records.

And almost every Jewish cemetery is gone as well. Like today’s antisemites, the Nazis and their collaborators loved to harass the living Jews, and could not let the Jewish dead rest in peace, either. But unlike today’s antisemites, they didn’t stop at merely turning over the headstones and scrawling their messages of hate. They carted off the stones and used them to pave roads, latrines and basement floors, a practice finally halted in Ukraine in 2013. All traces of Jewish life, and death, were obliterated.

As I read the news of the day, I wonder when will it be time to sound the alarm, and when will it be too late? And, this time around, will the righteous be able to stop it?

Alphonse Karr also said, “Every man has three characters – that which he has, that which he thinks he has, and that which he exhibits.”

Do not obey in advance

In the days just after the election, Timothy Snyder, the Yale history professor who writes so well about Eastern European history, observed that  “Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism or communism.”

He was worried about what a Trump presidency would do to our democratic institutions, and hoped that the lessons that should have been learned from the rise of Hitler and Stalin would keep us from repeating the same mistakes again. He offered a list of things that any citizen could do to try to resist the terrible possibilities.

All of the 20 suggestions on the list are good, but a couple stand out for me:

1. Do not obey in advance. Much of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then start to do it without being asked. You’ve already done this, haven’t you? Stop. Anticipatory obedience teaches authorities what is possible and accelerates unfreedom.

3. Recall professional ethics. When the leaders of state set a negative example, professional commitments to just practice become much more important. It is hard to break a rule-of-law state without lawyers, and it is hard to have show trials without judges.

13. Hinder the one-party state. The parties that took over states were once something else. They exploited a historical moment to make political life impossible for their rivals. Vote in local and state elections while you can.

20. Be a patriot. The incoming president is not. Set a good example of what America means for the generations to come. They will need it.

The problem I see with the list, and why the cause is already lost,  is that it speaks only to those who both understand what is happening and think it’s a bad thing. In other words, it’s a list for people who already knew that Trump would be bad for the country. It’s the other 60 million that need to be convinced, and it just ain’t gonna happen.

Some examples:

4. When listening to politicians, distinguish certain words. Look out for the expansive use of “terrorism” and “extremism.” Be alive to the fatal notions of “exception” and “emergency.” Be angry about the treacherous use of patriotic vocabulary.

Really? There is absolutely no way the people who love to hear the man-baby finally say the words “radical Islamic terrorist” and repeat the “Make America Great Again” slogan are ever going to act on this advice. FoxNews built a commercial empire (and now a political one) by betting that their viewers couldn’t do this. That’s exactly why we’re here.

8. Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.

Okay, Professor Snyder, I’m going to give you a bye on this because you wrote it before we learned about “Fake News” and “alternative facts.” The problem is that the Trump supporters apparently do not have the tools or the will to distinguish facts from nonsense. In the internet world, everything is just as true as everything else, and they’ve already made their choices.

9. Investigate. Figure things out for yourself. Spend more time with long articles. Subsidize investigative journalism by subscribing to print media. Realize that some of what is on your screen is there to harm you. Bookmark PropOrNot or other sites that investigate foreign propaganda pushes.

Yeah, no. Even this blog entry is too long already for most people to get through. The digital assault on our senses is so heavy that you really can’t ask people to read/study/investigate anything more -they’re already being sprayed by a fire-hose of information that they can’t sort out or interpret. (Except for a very few voracious readers and lifelong students. I’m looking at you, faithful subscribers to GOML.)

18. Be reflective if you must be armed. If you carry a weapon in public service, God bless you and keep you. But know that evils of the past involved policemen and soldiers finding themselves, one day, doing irregular things. Be ready to say no. (If you do not know what this means, contact the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and ask about training in professional ethics.)

Too late again. The people you’re talking to here are already beyond this suggestion and have chosen to violate suggestion #1 as well: they’re obeying in advance. If you doubt it, glance at this article from yesterday’s Failing New York Times about how Immigration Agents have been set free by Trump’s tweeting, and aren’t really waiting for the courts to sort it out.

5. Be calm when the unthinkable arrives. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that all authoritarians at all times either await or plan such events in order to consolidate power. Think of the Reichstag fire. The sudden disaster that requires the end of the balance of power, the end of opposition parties, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. Don’t fall for it.

We’ve talked before here about how Trump seems to be goading the bad guys into attacking us in the hopes that he can consolidate his power, marginalize the courts, and, above all, become the most up-voted, liked, favorited, highest-ratings president ever.

I almost didn’t bother including #5 here, but I wanted an excuse to  link to this other Snyder article on the Reichstag fire of 1933. If you don’t know about the fire, brush up with this article. Snyder says, “The Reichstag fire shows how quickly a modern republic can be transformed into an authoritarian regime.”

Setting the agenda

By now it should be frighteningly clear that Trump’s knowledge of history, current events, foreign policy, and just about everything else comes directly from FoxNews, which he watches religiously. Or Breitbart, if the situation requires. When asked early in the campaign what his foreign policy and military expertise was, he said “I watch the shows”.

If he sees Tucker Carlson interview some guy who wrote a book on how Sweden is dealing with problems caused by its liberal immigration laws, the next morning he gives a speech about terrorism and says “look at what’s happening last night in Sweden”.  Of course, he’s so inarticulate that this phrasing leaves plenty of room for clarification and deniability, and his surrogates must fan out the next morning to put out the fires.

If Trump sees Herman Cain on FoxNews talking about how the deficit decreased by $12 Billion in Trump’s first month vs. an increase of $200 billion in Obama’s first month, the next day the man-baby is tweeting about how the Fake News Failing New York Times isn’t covering this wondrous achievement. No point in mentioning how meaningless the statistic is and how Cain could just as easily have noted that the deficit increased under Trump.

From this piece:

Using the same logic, for example, you could claim that after four days in office Trump increased outstanding public debt by more than $10 billion, and that Obama had reduced it by $6 billion.

But there is no need for Trump to vet anything with advisers or experts, no need to think about the implications of his response, no need to moderate his interpretation or language. It was on FoxNews and that’s good enough for the man-baby. Let the tweets fly and the devil take the hindmost.

All during the Obama administration, Fox, Breitbart and other”news” outlets excoriated Obama and then Hillary Clinton for not using the words “radical Islamic terrorism” when talking about the threats we face. It was their daily mantra, meant to show how soft and misguided liberals and democrats were. Obama answered the criticism by correctly pointing out that it wouldn’t help solve the problem to use those words, and would almost surely exacerbate it.

But Fox and Breitbart are all the man-baby needs. He’s all about “radical Islamic terrorism” now. The problem is, there are people around him that know Obama was right all along, including his new National Security Adviser, H.H. McMaster. It just isn’t helpful to talk that way.

We’ll see how long McMaster lasts or whether Trump just ignores him. This much is certain: when FoxNews says it would be better to use different language, Trump will use different language.

Given the direct and almost instantaneous path from Trump’s favorite media outlets to his Twitter, can anybody seriously argue that Fox and Breitbart are not setting the national agenda at this point?

 

When will enough be enough?

I’ve just about forgotten all about Trump’s many and various displays of petulance, incompetence, ignorance and insanity of the last week or two. Something about no security precautions at Mar-a-Lago, I believe. Maybe a terrorist attack in Sweden? Kellyanne Conway said something or other that resulted in a week-long time-out. Signed something that’s going to screw up the environment, I think. Flynn something something. “See you in court” over what, now? A few others I just can’t remember at all.

It’s just exhausting. At least one outrage a day that, in normal times, would have blown up the media for six months, 24/7.  But with the man-baby, if it’s more than a day old, it doesn’t count anymore. Never happened. Never said it.  Don’t need you Soros-funded political hacks rooting around trying to dredge up ancient history. It hurts Our Country.

Today’s craziness tops them all (until tomorrow, that is). Yesterday, at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the tiny-handed clown amped up his attacks on the press (and threw in the FBI for good measure), repeating that they are “the enemy of the people” and criticized as “fake news” any anonymously-sourced reports that reflect poorly on him. Note that anything that reflects positively on him is real news.

He backed this up later with another of his Executive Tweets:

OK, we’ve heard all this before. Nothing new to see here, people. Just move along.  But the CPAC blast was quickly followed by the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer,  barring the Failing New York Times, CNN, and other organizations Trump doesn’t like from his daily press conference.

Folks, we’re in uncharted waters here. Nothing like this has ever happened before. Really, how long until the Brownshirts are in the streets?

Trump just does not understand how this country is set up. He quite obviously has never read the constitution and has no idea what the limits of presidential power are meant to be. Or the importance of an independent judiciary.  Or a free press.  This is what happens when you elect a businessman-in-chief who has never held elective office of any kind ever. You get a guy who cannot tolerate any sort of disagreement and feels he can punish anyone who doesn’t toe the line.

He’s warring with the courts, the intelligence agencies, the press, our historic allies, business executives that don’t praise him sufficiently, all members of either party in congress that show any hesitation. Everyone who doesn’t praise and flatter him.

It’s almost funny. Trump has vowed to punish “leakers” now, though he loved and encouraged Wikileaks just a few months ago, and openly invited the Russians to hack away at his opponents.

To me, what really illustrates Trump’s lack of understanding about the role of the press is his saying that news organizations should not publish stories with anonymous sources.  Journalists have fought this battle many times over the years and always won. It’s quite obvious why no one would ever talk to the press about any wrongdoing if they had to have their name revealed. In the Trump era, this is more important than ever, since you would immediately lose your job and be attacked relentlessly on the internet.

Here’s a deal for you, man-baby: you reveal the name of your special investigators that found all that “unbelievable evidence” in Hawaii about Obama’s real birth certificate, and we’ll consider having this idiotic discussion about anonymous sources again for the millionth time.

Standing by…

Shame upon the legal profession

Fifteen law professors specializing in legal ethics from around the country have filed a complaint against Kellyanne Conway. They come from Georgetown, Yale, Duke and other premiere institutions of legal study. The letter was filed with the D.C. Office of Disciplinary Counsel and alleges “conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation”. It says, in part,

“We do not file this complaint lightly. We believe that, at one time, Ms. Conway, understood her ethical responsibilities as a lawyer and abided by them. But she is currently acting in a way that brings shame upon the legal profession.”

Conway was admitted to the D.C. Bar in 1995, but is currently suspended for not paying her dues. The maximum penalty that could result from this action is disbarment. Conway is not practicing law in D.C. and has no intention of doing so. In other words, none of this is going to matter one bit.

And if someone still thinks that an action like this will result in any shame or remorse on Conway’s part, well, they haven’t been paying attention – that ship sailed months ago. More likely we’ll be hearing about “a politically motivated attack by so-called lawyers”, or “lawyers being paid by George Soros, blah blah blah”.

The Trump team is not bound by the rules and conventions that every previous administration has held themselves to, and that every previous congress has required. This letter is just another whisper soon to be lost in the hurricane of chaos surrounding Trump.

All bets are off, folks. There is a new standard in play: if Trump or someone in his circle does it, it’s OK.

If you doubt it, just think about what we’d be enduring now if the tables were turned. Imagine Hillary Clinton had been elected while receiving 3 million fewer votes than Trump, that there was evidence that the Russians had actively aided her campaign, that she refused to reveal her taxes (a historic first!) which might reveal her Russian business interests, etc. etc. etc.

This hypothetical is posed by David Frum, a neoconservative political commentator and former speech writer for George W. Bush, in a podcast discussion with Sam Harris, entitled We’re All Cucks Now. Give it a listen – it’s well worth it.

Well-poisoners win again

In this post from before the election, I was marveling at the willingness of Trump’s inner circle to support and tirelessly explain any idiotic half-baked bullshit that suddenly and without warning erupted from the man-baby’s twitter. From the post:

I would ask Kellyanne Conway, is there no job so vile and immoral that you wouldn’t do it for a price? If I doubled your salary and gave you the “job” of poisoning all your neighbors’ wells, would you take it? And do it with that infuriating fake smile?

When I wrote that, I didn’t really believe that anyone would actually take a job actually poisoning an actual well. Especially their very own actual well. How wrong I was.

Last week, the tiny-handed one signed legislation that would roll back the “Stream Protection Rule”,  to prevent it from “further harming coal workers and the communities that depend on them.” See, Obama, or as most apparently know him, the illegitimately-elected Kenyan Muslim devil,  thought he’d try to curtail the coal industry’s long-time practice of freely dumping their mining wastes down the hillsides of Appalachia, creating a hellish moonscape of many of the towns below. And poisoning their water.

With his characteristic impulsiveness, thoughtlessness and boasting, Trump claimed the rule had been costing “many thousands of jobs” because of the expense incurred cleaning up the mess.

This Failing New York Times editorial lays it out, but the gist is that the rule may have cost 260 mining jobs a year, but that those were offset by new jobs created to assure compliance.

It’s just an outrage, not just because it’s exactly the kind of thing you knew this idiot was going to do, but because it was done essentially out of sight as the massive clouds of chaos emanating outward from Trump at all times block the sun and the real news. There’s just no time or energy to pay attention to many of the things that we really should.

This comment on the piece hits the nail on the head,

The good news? You get to keep your job.  The bad news? Your job is going to poison your family.  Welcome to the Art Of The Deal. Maybe you should have read the book before you voted.

The fact is that the coal jobs won’t be coming back anyway, because there has been a gradual shift globally towards natural gas and the coal market has shrunk. From the editorial:

Trump might as well have been signing a decree that the whaling industry was being restored to Nantucket.

The point of today’s screed is that we got the government we deserved. Just like everyone else all over the world that stands by and lets the worst have their way.

Here’s the thing: Trump doesn’t care about the environment or jobs or abortion or immigration or anything else. The only thing he cares about is adulation, up-votes, attention, flattery, and “winning”. If there were more of those things to be had in imposing  tighter restrictions on the coal industry, that’s what he’d do.

I don’t know how it can ever happen and I’m not optimistic, but for this disastrous course we’re on to be changed, Trump must be made to believe there are more of us that will love him if he behaves differently than if he doesn’t.

Verdun

101 years ago today, the first shots in the battle of Verdun were fired. It was to become the longest and most destructive battle in what was then known as The Great War (World War I), and in all of history. By the time the battle was over 10 months later, there had been 377,231 French and 337,000 German casualties.

The battle was meant to start nine days earlier, and thousands of Germans were ready in their “stollen”, or tunnels. But snow, wind, rain, and poor visibility kept them in place.  The tunnels had no heat and were flooded, and the condition of the troops deteriorated with hunger and medical issues. During the delay, the French had some time to move their troops into position.

stollen

Germans waiting to start 

At 7:15 A.M. on February 21st., the fierce German bombardment began. 80,000 heavy grenades fell at a rate of 40 per minute on an area of half a square kilometer. The French trenches were blown up and men were ripped to pieces, buried under the earth or disappeared into the air. Trees are uprooted and body parts hung in the branches. The bombardment lasts nine hours.

The Germans emerge from their stollen at 5:15 P.M. expecting to find no-one alive, but the bombardment was less effective then they hoped, and the French are there to resist. The Germans use flamethrowers as an offensive weapon for the first time.

The battle continues for four days before the Germans are able to capture their primary objective, Fort Douaumont.

douaumont

Fort Douaumont at war’s end

The French at Verdun are under the command of Henri-Philippe Petain, later the Chief of State of Vichy France. Retreat was not an option for him, and he orders the defense of a line between the remaining fortifications at Verdun “at all costs”. The battle for the village of Douaumont continues for days, and ultimately the Germans prevail on March 2nd, taking many prisoners, including Charles de Gaulle.

This was the battle of the Anthill. It is re-created in Kubrick’s superb anti-war movie, Paths of Glory, which has an unforgettable opening tracking shot of Kirk Douglas, as Colonel Dax,  moving through the French trenches. See this movie again soon.

But Petain has achieved his objective, which was to delay the German advance for a couple of days while French reinforcements could be assembled. The battle for Douaumont bogged down, and the battlefield became a muddy swamp where neither army advanced for months. Fort Douaumont was finally re-taken by the French in October.

The overall battlefield itself was tiny, less than 10 square kilometers. Men on both sides lived in trenches and were fighting for just a few yards of territory at a time.

World War One Battle Of Then

verdun3

Now

The Hell of Verdun

A French captain reports: …I have returned from the most terrible ordeal I have ever witnessed. […] Four days and four nights – ninety-six hours – the last two days in ice-cold mud – kept under relentless fire, without any protection whatsoever except for the narrow trench, which even seemed to be too wide. […] I arrived with 175 men, I returned with 34 of whom several had half turned insane….

The last note from the diary of Alfred Joubaire, a French soldier: …They must be crazy to do what they are doing now: what a bloodbath, what horrid images, what a slaughter. I just cannot find the words to express my feelings. Hell cannot be this dreadful. People are insane!…

A German soldier writes to his parents: …An awful word, Verdun. Numerous people, still young and filled with hope, had to lay down their lives here – their mortal remains decomposing somewhere, in between trenches, in mass graves, at cemeteries….

Henri Barbusse describes the trenches as:
…a network of elongated pits in which the nightly excreta are piling up. The bottom is covered with a swampy layer from which the feet have to extricate themselves with every step. It smells dreadfully of urine all over….

A French stretcher-bearer describes the consequences of a flame-thrower attack: …Some grenadiers returned with ghastly wounds: hair and eyebrows singed, almost not human anymore, black creatures with bewildered eyes….

A German eye-witness: …The losses are registered as follows: they are dead, wounded, missing, nervous wrecks, ill and exhausted. Nearly all suffer from dysentery. Because of the failing provisioning the men are forced to use up their emergency rations of salty meats. They quenched their thirst with water from the shellholes. They are stationed in the village of Ville where every form of care seems to be missing. They have to build their own accommodation and are given a little cacao to stop the diarrhoea. The latrines, wooden beams hanging over open holes, are occupied day and night – the holes are filled with slime and blood…

A neutral contemporary feels: …that they, within the framework of this World War, are involved in some affair, that will still be considered horrible and appalling in a hundred years time. It is this Hell of Verdun. Since a hundred days – day and night – the sons of two European people fight stubbornly and bitterly over every inch of land. It is the most appalling mass murder of our history…

ossuary

15,000 French rest at Douaumont

Sweet Home Chicago

Eric Clapton called Robert Johnson “the most important blues singer that ever lived”.

Johnson died in 1938 at the age of 27 near Greenwood, Mississippi. It’s not clear how he died and some legends have grown up around the subject, e.g. that he was poisoned by the husband of a woman he had flirted with. On his death certificate, the county registrar wrote that the man on whose plantation Johnson died was of the opinion he died of syphilis.

Just as the details of his death are murky, so are many of the details of his life. Again, there are a number of legends about it, the most important of which is that he made a deal with the devil at a crossroads near the Dockery Plantation (or near Hazelhurst or Beauregard, Mississippi, depending on the version).  He met the devil at midnight and handed him his guitar. The devil tuned it and played a few tunes then handed it back. At that instant Johnson attained full mastery over the instrument and gave his soul for the fame he would receive as a musician.

Only a couple of pictures of Robert Johnson exist, and a few recordings.

robert-johnson

When you listen to his music, you may not be struck at once by its greatness or power.

I think it’s like trying to understand how the first moving pictures or first “talkies” were received by the audiences of the day. They had never seen anything like them before and their minds were blown. To the contemporary movie audience, bored even with 3D or CGI magic, those early innovations now seem like nothing at all. Maybe it’s the same with the early music innovators.

During his life and even twenty years after his death, Johnson was virtually unknown. He got the recognition he deserved after the 1961 release of the Columbia album, “King of the Delta Blues Singers”, and a much wider and mostly white audience heard his music. Many of the greats of Rock and Roll and  R&B claim Johnson as a primary influence.

“Sweet Home Chicago” was one of four of his tunes included by the Rock and Roll all of Fame in their list of 500 that shaped the blues genre. This is the 1936 recording:

I was thinking about all this after stumbling on this version of Sweet Home Chicago, in which Barack Obama helps out the immortal Buddy Guy (and a constellation of other extremely bright stars).   Obama could do it all and make you feel good, too. No Executive Order or even Executive Tweet can roll back this part of his legacy.

Some other modern members of the “27-Club”, important and highly original musicians who died at age 27:

Jimi Hendrix “Smoking” taken in early 1967 in Gered’s Masons Yard studio in London.

Our enemy

It’s getting scarier.

I don’t see how this ends well for anyone. Even impeachment means violence in the streets and a further shredding of the fabric of our democracy. The man-baby will go down swinging, inciting the crazies directly via Twitter. We’re never going to be free of this lunatic, and the damage he causes will be permanent.

And we all know who controls the media, right?

jews

After he mobilizes the military to deport everyone that looks different from him, perhaps the media will be next. They should be, after all, if our tiny-handed president says they’re the enemy.

generals

Well, at least he’s getting the right guidance from his trusted advisers. They’ll surely put him on the right course.

manbaby3

Maybe a little rest and relaxation will clear his head.

vacations

I inherited a mess

No.  You inherited a fortune. You’re creating a mess.

Anyone who watched Trump’s “press conference” yesterday should be able to see now that the man is unhinged and almost surely ill. When I say “anyone”, I mean anyone who isn’t in some FoxNews-induced trance.

There is no question you can ask him that will be answered directly. Instead, the response will always be about his own greatness, the hugeness of his victories, the failings of his critics, or the conspiracies aligned against him. No-one who disagrees with him does so in good faith – all are lying, crooked, failing, losers, sad, fake, and so on.

Ask him what explains the rise in antisemitic incidents since the election, and he’ll answer that he’s the least antisemitic person anyone will ever meet and also the least racist. That is, if you can tease out an “answer” from the incoherent word salad he serves up. OK, we believe you – now answer the question if you would.

I can’t think of a single thing he’s ever said that wasn’t an exaggeration or distortion of the actual facts. And if you call him on one, he will insist he was right or tell you that you misunderstood, or, if absolutely necessary, say the words came from someone else. In this last resort,  his favorite locutions are some form of “A lot of people are saying…” or “This is what I’ve been told…”, etc.

In short, there is no use challenging him. You will never get a satisfactory answer and, if your words or ideas gain enough traction with others, you will be personally attacked, possibly sued, and made a sworn enemy of the lunatic fringe. Who needs it?

Of all the crazy shit he blathered about yesterday, the thing I find the most insulting is the idea that he inherited a mess. The Obama presidency, in addition to being the most ethical and scandal-free we’ve had in decades, made tremendous progress cleaning up a real inherited mess. Do you even remember the financial crisis of 2008?

Here are a few facts about the nature of the “mess” Trump has inherited.

mess

One of the things Trump bragged about in the presser was how well the stock market is doing since he was elected. Obama knew better than to brag about it because it could easily come back to bite you if you did, though he really did have something to brag about. But Trump’s bragging is especially funny if you remember that during the campaign he said stock prices were artificially high due to incompetent and biased Federal Reserve policy. He said Janet Yellen was “doing political things” by keeping interest rates low.

But what bothers most people, I think, is that we’re starting to realize there will be no actual governing over the next four years, only “campaigning”, by which I mean Trump ceaselessly proclaiming his greatness, denigrating others, and making up “facts” along the way.

Mar-a-Lago Situation Room

There is a highly secure “Situation Room” at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, where he and his aides can figure out how to respond to fast-breaking crises like North Korea test-firing a missile in the neighborhood of Japan. It’s cleverly disguised as a public dining room. So seemingly blatant breaches of security are not breaches at all, but the normal kind of activity to be expected in any highly secure area. Or something.

As should be obvious to all at this point, Trump is an insane clown who has no knowledge of how the government works, or diplomacy, or security, or, really, anything other than how to be the center of attention at all times. It’s pointless to criticize an insane clown or attempt to hold an insane clown accountable for the insane things he does because, after all, he’s insane. Also, the miasma of free-flowing insanity around the clown at all times is so dense, you couldn’t possibly pick a good starting place or even prioritize it all or try to respond to any of it in a rational manner.

This Failing New York Times piece points out that Democrats are lamenting  “the fact that the national security incident played out in public view”. “There’s no excuse for letting an international crisis play out in front of a bunch of country club members like dinner theater,” Nancy Pelosi tweeted.

In this one, the scene at the Mar-a-Lago Situation Room is described and Trump is likened to the Rodney Dangerfield character in Caddyshack: “a reckless, clownish boor surrounded by sycophants, determined to blow up all convention.”  It goes on, “But this is real life, and every time Mr. Trump strikes a pose, the rest of the world holds its breath.”

From the article:

The news conference took place after Mr. Trump held a meeting with Mr. Abe and their entourages out in the open in the club dining terrace, examining documents and talking on a commercial cellphone as guests drifted by and took photos, servers reached over the papers to deposit the entree, and Mike Flynn, his national security adviser, held up his phone, on flashlight setting, so everybody could get a good look.

It apparently never occurred to Mr. Trump, Mr. Flynn or Steve Bannon, another member of the National Security Council, who also trained his cellphone on the paperwork, that holding a cellphone camera over these documents might allow foreign adversaries and hackers to get “some pretty good pictures,” too. Cellphones aren’t allowed even in secured areas of the White House. Yet there they all were, playing Situation Room in the open air, for a random crowd in Palm Beach, Fla.

None of this surprises me, or probably anyone else, at this point. It’s Trump being Trump. And by tomorrow, we’ll be on to the next insanity and this will be tossed on the heap of scandals never to be revisited.

I just want to point out one quick thing here before we move on to God-Knows-What: when she was Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton used a private email account to send her aides information like changes to her calendar. She is therefore unqualified to be president and should be arrested, tried, convicted, and, if Trump’s “base” has anything to say about it, hanged.

Is there a double standard at work here? No, of course not. You can’t seriously compare the actions of a sane competent woman to those of an insane incompetent clown.

In other news, the fees to join the Mar-a-Lago “club” have doubled to $200,000 since Trump won the election, but he is absolutely not benefiting financially in any way from holding office. Or something.

Let There Be Light

There are three main reasons that the Scopes Trial didn’t really settle the issue of whether the Theory of Evolution should be taught in schools, and why we’re still arguing about “Creationism” almost a century later.

The first is that (really stupid) people thought Darwin was saying something like “your grandmother was a monkey”, and they knew that to be a priori false.

The second is that very religious people thought that it contradicted the Bible, which taught that God created Adam and Eve, etc., and that therefore Darwin’s theory was untrue and also heresy.

The third is that various politicians saw that what mattered in all this was not the science, but rather the votes of the really stupid people, so there was no real margin in going against the grain on this.

Isn’t that always the way.

In reality, Darwin doesn’t contradict the Bible at all, if you just think a little bit about the word “day”.  If I said, “Back in my day,  music was really music”, most people would understand that “my day” meant “my youth” or “my era” or “my time”, and not some particular 24-hour period.

From Genesis:

1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness.5 God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.

OK, we have light and darkness on the first day. But it isn’t until the fourth day that we have the sun and the moon. Just a few verses later, Genesis says:

16 God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. 17 God set them in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth, 18 to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19 And there was evening, and there was morning—the fourth day.

So the question is, how long was the first “day” if the sun didn’t exist? Well it wasn’t 24 hours long, that much is clear. It was an “era” long, and it doesn’t matter whether that’s a million years or something else. It’s all a blink of an eye to God. Or maybe He hadn’t invented “time” yet.

My point is that you can stick to a literal translation of the Bible and still understand that evolution was merely the tool that God used to create things in the first “days”, and Darwin was not a heretic. If you’re not really stupid, that is.

I’m thinking about this today because on this day, February 13, in 1633, Galileo Galilei arrived in Rome to face charges of heresy. His mathematical and astronomical observations had led him to support the Copernican idea that the earth revolved around the sun, and the Roman Inquisition was pissed about it. It was heresy and that made Galileo an enemy of the state.

Trial of Galileo Galilei before the Inquisition, 1633.

Trial of Galileo

It was heresy because it contradicted various biblical passages which “proved” the earth was the center of the universe. For example,  1 Chronicles 16:30 says:

30     tremble before him, all the earth.
    The world is firmly established; it shall never be moved.

Of course, the translated word “moved” here could be taken in other ways.  You could have taken it in the sense of “changed”, and this would have avoided a lot of trouble, and (intelligent) people may have seen there was no conflict here between scripture and science.

Galileo pleaded guilty to the charge in exchange for a reduced sentence and lived out the remainder of his life under house arrest. In 1992, only 359 years later, the Vatican acknowledged its mistake. So much for infallibility.

One thing to understand here is that, as with creationism, the politicians had something at stake here beyond what was true. And by “politicians”, I mean Popes and Cardinals. The Catholic church was the “state” and the wealthy and influential had the highest offices in the church.

It was vitally important to them that their “constituents” believed that they were the agents of God, or else their authority and influence would be undermined. Science and truth were secondary.

Isn’t that always the way.

A couple of other things to think about as long as we’re thinking about whether science can help explain things or solve problems, and whether politicians will be speeding up the process or slowing it down:

The Larsen C Ice Shelf is cracking in Antarctica. Ice shelf A and B already cracked in the last few years.

ice

New Zealand has just experienced its largest whale stranding in decades.

whales

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch now covers 8.1% of the Pacific Ocean. There will be more plastic than fish  in the ocean by 2050.

pacific-garbage

Woman in Gold

This beautiful painting by Gustav Klimt, “Bauerngarten”, will shortly go on auction at Sotheby’s in London. It’s been appraised at over $56 million dollars, but Sotheby’s expects it to go for much more.

bauerngarten

Klimt is one of the most important artists of the late 19th and early 20th century,  a leader of the Vienna Secession movement, and revered by Austrians. His primary subject was the female body and some of his work, particularly a ceiling he painted at the University of Vienna, was controversial for being “pornographic”.

sculpture

Today, all his work is much sought after by both collectors and speculators. In 2006, Oprah Winfrey paid $88 million for “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II”, and last summer sold it to a buyer in China for $150 Million.

woman2

In his “golden period”, Klimt used gold leaf in his work, creating some very striking multimedia works, one of the most famous of which is “The Kiss”.

kiss

The most iconic work of this period was known for years as “The Woman In Gold”, which took three years to complete. It hung in the Belvedere Palace in Vienna for some sixty years beginning in 1941, and was regarded as one on the great treasures of Austria and a symbol of Austrian culture.

woman1

You might notice the resemblance of the subject here to the one in Oprah’s oil painting. It is, of course, the same woman, Adele Bloch-Bauer, and the title of the painting, before the Austrians enshrined it, was “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer”. It was commissioned by Klimt’s most important patrons and friends, the Bloch-Bauer family of Vienna.

Adele Bauer was born in Vienna in 1881, the youngest of seven children. Her father was the General Director of the Viennese Bank association and the president of the Orient railway company. She married at eighteen to the 35-year-old Ferdinand Bloch, the son of a Prague sugar producer. He grew the sugar business into an important European industrial concern. Adele’s sister was already married to his brother. They had no children and both couples combined their names to Bloch-Bauer.

Adele made their home a salon for intellectuals and artists, and the Bloch-Bauer patronage contributed greatly to the flourishing of Austrian art in the period. The two Klimt portraits Adele commissioned were a small part of their legacy. Adele died suddenly at age 44 of meningitis.

Shortly after the annexation of Austria by the Nazis in 1938, the Germans barged into the Bloch-Bauer home and took all their possessions, including the Klimts.

Ferdinand fled and died in Zurich in 1945.  He had willed the art to his nephew and nieces including Maria Altmann (née Maria Victoria Bloch). Maria married Fredrick “Fritz” Altmann who was taken to Dachau shortly after their honeymoon in 1938 as a hostage to get the Altmanns to transfer their textile factory to the Germans. Maria and Fritz were able to flee with their lives to the U.S. All the property they left behind was taken by Hermann Goering.

Maria became a naturalized citizen in 1945 and worked in the clothing industry. Fritz died in 1954. The story of how Maria was able to reclaim ownership of the Klimts, despite the determined efforts of the Austrians not to return them, is told in the film, “Woman in Gold”. Check it out on Netflix.

Both the Klimt portraits of Adele are currently on display at the Neue Galerie on Fifth Ave. at 86th in NYC. They’ll be there until September when the oil will go to its new owner in China. You have a few months to see them together. See you at the Neue.

 

 

Dartagnan beat me to it

You’re assignment today is to read this short piece on the Daily Kos.

I was going to write something along the same lines, but there’s no need – Dartagnan beat me to it and laid it all out perfectly.

It starts by pointing out that 9/11 turned Bush’s presidency around. His popularity early in his term was terrible, but soared after the attacks. 9/11 gave him cover to launch a disastrous war that had been planned before the attacks, and also to throw off constraints on presidential power.

It goes on to say that everyone knows an attack is coming at some point now, and Trump is doing everything possible to provoke it while laying the groundwork for blaming others (the courts).

It will be much worse this time around for a variety of reasons including the fact that Trump conflates national interest with his own self-interest.

Anyway, just go read it and report back here tomorrow.

L’état, c’est lui.

The man-baby’s hands seemed even tinier this morning.

Yesterday, a federal appeals court panel of three judges unanimously refused to reinstate Trump’s executive order  banning travel from seven Muslim countries.  The bleating and tweeting began immediately.

Trump quite clearly does not understand our tripartite system of government and the separation of powers it requires. He does not recognize the authority of any person or institution to  question his “mandate” or even his judgement as President/Emperor/King.

Anyone who dares question him obviously has “political” motives.

All I can say here is that I really hope this does go to the Supreme Court and that they unanimously uphold the appeals court. Any other result certainly will be evidence of politics destroying our system.

In recent days, we have seen that we can’t rely on the republican congress to assert its own power, independence or integrity (ha!). The approving of all Trump’s cabinet picks so far, as preposterously unqualified and inappropriate as they may be, shows this clearly.

The press has been neutralized, including, and perhaps especially, the newspaper of record, the Failing New York Times.

There’s really nothing left between us and idiocracy but the courts. Maybe a supreme court decision defining the limits of presidential power, or, as everyone would certainly refer to it, “a rebuke”, would stem the awful tide of Trump’s bullying.

See you in court.

“Trump Lashes Out”

Google it.

The man-baby is always lashing out. If you google it today, you’ll find a few new “lashing out” stories on the first page. This is just the lashing out of one day.

First, he “lashed out” at Nordstom department store for dropping Ivanka’s line of whatever the fuck she has a line of. Really, didn’t we just hear about how he was going leave the running of all the family’s businesses to his kids? See, he didn’t have to divest any of his holdings because there would be no conflicts of interest as long as the kids took care of all the business. He’d stay completely out of it.

Apart from the conflicts of interest, though, there is the issue of using the bully pulpit to attack or praise individual businesses based on whether he thinks they support him enough. It’s an entirely new thing for a president to be doing. Trump has praised L.L. Bean (board members contributed to him), caused some firings at Wynn casinos (someone said something about Melania), has continued to criticize “Celebrity Apprentice” after promising not to (Schwarzenegger didn’t support him), and on and on and on. Anyway, let’s all go on a shopping spree at Nordstrom today.

Then there’s the story of Trump “lashing out” at Senator Richard Blumenthal, who revealed that the man-baby’s Supreme Court pick, Neil Gorsuch, said Trump’s war on the judiciary was disheartening and demoralizing. This one’s kind of funny not just because it’s a great example of Trump shooting the messenger, but because this particular lashing was attacking Blumenthal for misrepresenting his Viet Nam service (Trump was a draft dodger).

Then there’s the link to Trump “lashing out” against the judge who ruled against his Muslim travel ban. You know, the “so-called” judge that was appointed by W. At least he didn’t accuse this one of being a “Mexican”.

If you go past the first page of search results, you’ll find links to Trump lashing out at Vanity Fair because they published a negative review of his restaurant, Trump lashing out at John Lewis, lashing out at “professional anarchists” who joined protest against him, lashing out at the Failing New York Times, CBS,  and even FoxNews for suggesting Steve Bannon is calling the shots, lashing out at the Australian P.M. in a phone call, etc., etc. etc.

One that didn’t make the list today, but should be there by tomorrow is Trump lashing out at McCain for questioning the “success” of the Yemen raid.

As Trump himself has told us, he’s the best at many things. But when it comes to lashing out, no one even comes close.

So unifying. So presidential. So insane.

Rule 19: Democrats can’t speak

I was starting to feel like Nostradamus the other day, when I looked back at my inauguration day post. I made a bunch of predictions about the coming Trump administration, including,

“Polls will be discredited when unfavorable, and embraced when supportive.”

“From here, there will be only pre-approved interpretations of events, statistics, economic indicators, battlefield successes or failures, climate change, science.”

Two days ago, your president tweeted:

And today, Yemen withdrew permission for any further U.S. anti-terror ground missions because of the recent raid that produced civilian casualties that outraged Yemenis, while the man-baby is repeating that it was a great success.

The thing is, it’s all happening so fast that it doesn’t really feel like “predicting” anymore. Trump is seizing all power by discrediting, mocking, and attacking all who disagree or criticize. And I’m not talking about Meryl Streep or Alec Baldwin here. And I’m not talking about all the incendiary nonsense of the campaign.

I’m talking about the things he’s said and done in his three weeks of being president. I’m talking about his war against the other branches of our own government,  and against other governments.

When Trump referred to Judge James L. Robart, a Bush appointee who ruled against his Muslim travel ban,  as a “so-called judge”, it was actually shocking to me to see the judiciary discredited in such a manner. In a tweet, of course. From the President of the United States.

I started to compose a few paragraphs of outrage but then I couldn’t figure out how to begin or how to place it in context. It wasn’t the beginning of anything and there isn’t any rational context. It wasn’t an isolated incident. It wasn’t something that was so out of character and unexpected that we all had to stop and debate about it.

No, it was just another drop of venom-flecked spittle in a continuous fire-hose of venom-flecked spittle that has blasted from this insane clown and his posse for a couple of years now.

As president, Trump has railed against our free press (of course), our independent judiciary, the loyal opposition in congress (meaning even Republicans who dare take a step back), our intelligence agencies, corporate leaders, our treaty partners, our historic allies, and everyone else who might serve as a check or a balance or even a headwind to the power he wants to consolidate as president.

And it’s not just those in positions to oppose him now, but also those who might dare to oppose him in the future. The absurd Kellyanne Conway felt obligated to tweet (!) on behalf of the administration against Chelsea Clinton, of all people, who had said something about Conway’s invented “Bowling Green Massacre” .

Why respond at all? Why dredge up some ancient “lie” that Chelsea’s mother once told? And the idea that “you” lost the election is telling. Chelsea Clinton didn’t lose the election any more than Barron Trump won it. But, see, Trump can’t stop campaigning against his enemies, even after victory, and needs to throw red meat to his “base”. Chelsea Clinton might run for something some day. But the main idea is that those who “lost” have no right to speak now.

Yesterday, the latest, and really most disheartening, thing was added to the mix. That ever-so-American American, Mitch McConnell, invoked the obscure Rule 19, to stop Elizabeth Warren from reading into the record her objections to the nomination of Jeff Sessions for Attorney General.

Warren was reading a letter from Coretta Scott King that called Sessions a racist, and one from the late Ted Kennedy saying he was a  “disgrace to the Justice Department.” McConnell invoked Rule 19 to silence her. The rule says senators may not “directly or indirectly, by any form of words impute to another Senator or to other Senators any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a Senator.”

When you think of what’s coming out of the Oval Office now, this move and this rationale are just unbelievable. And that congress would so quickly and completely submit to and abet Trump’s crazy desire for all power and zero criticism makes no sense to me. Don’t they want any power for themselves?

For months, I was reassuring myself that Trump would get a rude awakening when he found out that being President was not the same as being Emperor. What fun it would be to see his face when congress pushed back or the courts ruled against him.

But the joke is on us. All hail His Imperial Majesty, Donald J. Trump.

Dreyfus, Zola, Herzl

On this day in 1888, the trial of Emile Zola for criminal libel began in Paris. He had published an open letter to the President of France, Félix Faure, accusing the French Army of obstruction of justice and antisemitism in the case of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew.

Dreyfus was a loyal career soldier sentenced, for treason, to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island in French Guiana. He had been falsely accused of passing military secrets to the German embassy, though evidence had been discovered and brought to the attention of authorities that another officer, Ferdinand Esterhazy, was actually the guilty party.

jaccuse

Zola’s intention was to be prosecuted for libel so that he could present the exculpatory evidence about Dreyfus during the trial. Zola was convicted of the libel charge, removed from the Legion of Honor, and faced imprisonment.

He fled to England to avoid prison, but returned after eight months.  He was offered a choice between a pardon which would allow him to go free if he admitted to being guilty, or facing a re-trial in which he was sure to be convicted again and sent to prison. Although he was clearly not guilty, he chose to accept the pardon.

Zola said of the affair, “The truth is on the march, and nothing shall stop it.”  In 1906, Dreyfus was finally exonerated by the Supreme Court.

The sensational Dreyfus case divided France, but provided proof that the intellectual class could shape public opinion and influence state policy. This was not lost on Theodor Herzl, a Hungarian-born secular Jew, who was a writer, journalist, and political activist working in Paris at the time. Herzl was witness to mass rallies in Paris following the Dreyfus trial and stated that he was particularly affected by chants of “Death to the Jews!” from the crowds.

Herzl is often thought to be the father of Zionism, though some scholars dispute this. He was certainly one of the strongest early promoters of the Zionist idea in any case. What Herzl took away from the Dreyfus affair is that a Jew could never truly assimilate into any other national culture. No matter how French or German or American, or “un-Jewish” he might think himself to be, other Frenchmen, Germans, or Americans always would see him as a Jew.

As a young law student, Herzl had become a member of the German nationalist fraternity, Albia, which had the motto “Honor, Freedom, Fatherland”. He later resigned in protest at the organization’s antisemitism.

He concluded that a Jew would not be accepted as a real Frenchman or German, despite any efforts or displays of patriotism or heroism in the name of that nation. He was always an outsider, the “other”, and always would be seen to have “Jewish interests” that would come before and conflict with French or German interests. Herzl concluded, presciently it would soon be shown, that the Jews could not rely on the protection or beneficence of their “host”governments. To be safe in the world and regarded as citizens in full, they must have their own state.

Herzl worked hard to organize Zionist conferences, lobby European governments, and so on. In 1896, Herzl published “The State of the Jews”, a book which argued that the Jewish people should leave Europe either for Argentina or for Palestine, their historic homeland. The Jews possessed a nationality, he said, and all they were missing was a nation and a state of their own. It was the only way they could avoid antisemitism, express their culture, or practice their religion freely.

Herzl died in 1904, and his descendants all suffered tragic fates.

His daughter Paulina struggled with mental illness and died of a drug overdose in 1930 at age 40.

His son Hans had converted from Judaism to being first a Baptist, then a Catholic, and then flirted with various other Protestant denominations. He shot himself at 39 on the day of Paulina’s  funeral. He left a note that said:

“A Jew remains a Jew, no matter how eagerly he may submit himself to the disciplines of his new religion, how humbly he may place the redeeming cross upon his shoulders for the sake of his former coreligionists, to save them from eternal damnation: a Jew remains a Jew. … I can’t go on living. I have lost all trust in God. All my life I’ve tried to strive for the truth, and must admit today at the end of the road that there is nothing but disappointment. Tonight I have said Kaddish for my parents—and for myself, the last descendant of the family. There is nobody who will say Kaddish for me, who went out to find peace—and who may find peace soon.”

Herzl’s third child, his daughter Trude, died in the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

Trude’s son, Stephan Theodor Neumann, was Herzl’s only grandchild, and became an ardent Zionist. He was working in Washington D.C. in August 1946, when he learned how his mother had perished. He was despondent about her fate and his inability to help the Jewish people. He jumped to his death from the Massachusetts Avenue Bridge in Washington, D.C. on November 26, 1946.

bridge

G.O.A.T.

For decades, I hated the New York Yankees. Actually I still hate them, although most of the justifications for the original hatred have long since disappeared.

I hated them because every situation seemed to favor them, because they always had the best players, because they always had the most money, because they always had the most luck. And, most of all, because they always broke the hearts of lifelong Red Sox fans who repeatedly saw their heroes come so close before the Yankees invoked the inevitable luck/skill/magic/whatever required to  kill their hopes and dreams for yet another year.

And the Red Sox fans weren’t the only ones who hated New York. All the fans of all the other teams felt pretty much the same way. New York was the Evil Empire. They bought wins. They stole the best players from all the other teams, turning them into Yankee farm teams. They cheated. They were cheaters.

All the while, the Yankee fans could not have cared less. The Yankees were always playing when everyone else had gone home for the winter. The championships flowed into New York and their players were seen as the Greatest Of All Time, the G.O.A.T., whether they really were or not.

It must have been great to be a Yankee fan. You spent all those hours watching the games for six months and all that money at the Stadium to see them in person, but, in the end, it was all worth it. When the team won, you won. Your prayers were always answered. God liked you best.

Last night, the Patriots, my Patriots, completed the greatest and most improbable comeback in Super Bowl history. Everything had to fall their way, our way, in the end. And, of course, everything did. Records were broken and opponents’ dreams were shattered. All the detractors who were gloating when it seemed out of reach found that the joke was on them. Again.

In my old age, I finally know how it feels to have been a Yankee fan all those years. All my time and all the attention paid over the last six months was totally worth it. Tom Brady is the G.O.A.T.  I’m a good person. God likes me best. Everyone else hates us.

The Patriots won it all. Again.

 

 

The Rose Kennedy Median Strip

The North End is Boston’s oldest and arguably most interesting neighborhood. It was settled in the 1630’s and has been a residential neighborhood continuously since then.

“North End Aerial with Rooftops”

Click to enlarge

Paul Revere’s house is still standing, as is The Old North Church.

revere

Paul Revere slept here. Every night.

church

One if by land, two if by sea…

In more recent times, it was where the Great Molasses Flood of 1919 happened. And the Brinks robbery. It was the home of Honey Fitz, JFK’s grandfather, and Charles Ponzi, inventor of the you-know-what scheme. At various times it was the neighborhood of Boston’s African-American, Irish, Jewish, and, most recently, Italian populations.

brinks

This is where the Brinks robbery happened

molasses

Some say you can still smell the molasses in summer

For fifty years, the North End was physically separated from the rest of Boston by the monstrosity known as the Central Artery, an elevated highway that sliced through downtown  Boston, blocking out the sun and creating a daunting obstacle for any pedestrian who was bold enough to try to reach the North End on foot. In the picture below, you can see a couple of foolhardy tourists risking their lives walking from downtown on the left to the North End on the right.

centralartery1

In 1991, the Big Dig started, a huge infrastructure project that completely changed Boston. It added a new tunnel under the harbor to carry I-90 traffic to the airport and beyond, a new bridge to carry I-93 traffic across Charlestown, and lots of other stuff.  The centerpiece of the project was the removal, finally, of the Central Artery, and the building of a network of tunnels under Boston to carry all the displaced traffic.

Click to enlarge

All of this meant 15 years of chaos and disruption for downtown Boston and even more isolation of the North End. It’s been a decade since it’s been completed, and, by and large the traffic objectives were met. The 24-hour traffic jam that had existed in Boston was greatly mitigated and the monstrosity that had divided the city was removed. It was once again possible to walk to the North End.

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The Central Artery, before and after the Big Dig

All throughout the project, one of the most interesting questions was what would be done with the open space created by the removal of the Central Artery. As usual, everyone in Boston had an idea, but most agreed it should be green space in some form. In 2008, The Rose Kennedy Greenway was finally opened. The slogan on their website is “Boston’s Ribbon of Contemporary Parks”

OK. Finally to the point of today’s post. The Rose Kennedy Greenway is not all that green and not in any sense a “way”. It is, rather, a more-or-less contiguous chain of 23 parcels of land, each developed separately with no real over-arching theme or cohesion. You’ve got the Armenian Park, the Chinatown Park, the Dewey Square Park, and so on. And while it does reduce the danger of reaching the North End on foot, it does little to “invite” you to do so.

It is a failure and a perpetual finalist for the Stewie Award.

The biggest problem with the Greenway is that it replaced the car-centric planning of the Central Artery with a car-centric open space. To be fair, it at least does have a few blades of grass growing on it. And it looks good from a helicopter.

after_aerial_photo_of_greenway-0-0

The Greenway is bounded by a three lane road on each side of it, and the 23 parcels are divided by active cross streets, each with a set of traffic lights that has Greenway users begging for a few seconds to pass from one rather bland and joyless parcel to the next. The car is still king, and therein lies the problem.

greenway2

As the above photo clearly demonstrates, the more accurate name for the Rose Kennedy Greenway is certainly the Rose Kennedy Median Strip. Or perhaps the Rose Kennedy Lost Opportunity.

Three of the twenty-three parcels are shown in this particular picture, and the one in the top left reminds us of the car-centricity of the Median Strip. It is a ventilation tower for the tunnels below, and gives off the expected “keep out” vibe when passing close by. There are also several other of the parcels that are nothing but on- or off-ramps to the tunnels.

Ramps: click to enlarge

This next before-and-after composite gives you an idea of what the Greenway really achieved for pedestrians and “park” users. Not all that much.

composite

It’s better, of course, but think of what it might have been! Other big cities have dealt with similar challenges and have come up with ideas that really do invite the pedestrian in and keep the automobile out. New York’s High Line comes to mind.

high-line

In Paris, you have the Promenade Plantée, the “first elevated park in the world”.

paris

But we’re talking about Boston here, not Paris or New York. In Cambridge, right across the Charles, we know how to make life better for pedestrians. All you have to do is set aside a few hours every week, say Sunday afternoons, and prohibit cars from the place you want to enjoy. Check it out:

 It would be so easy to improve the Rose Kennedy Median Strip, too.  Just close off a few of those pointless cross-streets to traffic on Sundays. That would be a start. The traffic on Atlantic Ave. is practically nothing then, and everyone could still get where they want to go just by driving an extra block or two to make their turns.

All those businesses in the North End would be happy about it. They waited half a century to be re-connected with the city they started, and we didn’t really deliver on the promises made. But, again, we’re talking about Boston. Not gonna happen.

That’ll Be The Day

The day the music died was 58 years ago yesterday. On February 3, 1959, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J.P. Richardson (“The Big Bopper”) died in a small plane crash in Clear Lake, Iowa.

holly

They were on a tour of 24 cities in 24 days called the Winter Dance Party. They were travelling by bus, but the bus was having heating problems, so Holly chartered the plane to fly his band, which then included Waylon Jennings, from Clear Lake to Moorehead, MN, where the 12th date of the tour would be.

Most people know the story of how Richardson asked to take Jennings’ place because he was sick. Holly joked to Jennings that he hoped that old bus broke down, and Jennings joked back that he hoped the plane crashed, a remark that haunted him his whole life.

And most people know that Valens “won” the last seat on a coin flip with Dion (of the Belmonts), though that story has been disputed. Apparently the $36 price of the plane ride was an important disincentive.

The Big Bopper was 28 years old. He was on the tour because of the success of his one hit record, Chantilly Lace, which elevated him from the menial jobs he had up until then. He was broke when he died, with only $8 in a savings account.

Hard to believe, but Ritchie Valens was only 17 years old!  He’d already had several big hits including the immortal “La Bamba”, and was certainly destined for greatness. His work is still an important influence today. Seventeen. Wow.

valens

At 22 years old, Buddy Holly was an old man compared to Valens, and was by far the biggest star of the three. He had recorded dozens of great tunes at that point, and wrote them all himself.  It’s hard to overstate his influence on those that came afterward. That’ll Be The Day was the first song ever covered by the Quarrymen, John Lennon’s first skiffle band that morphed into the Beatles. But everyone listened to Buddy Holly and everyone wanted to be like him.

Most of the tunes were simple, using just three chords and about two minutes in length, as the AM radio format of the day required, but Holly’s brilliance was to show how much could be done within those primitive boundaries.

Holly basically invented the modern rock band. The original “Crickets”  had Holly on lead and vocals, along with rhythm guitar, base, and drums. But the rhythm guitar, Niki Sullivan, quit the band after a year to go back to school, so the iconic line-up was lead, bass, and drums.

It’s all that was needed to make great Rock ‘n’ Roll.

Buddy Holly was one of the most important pillars of 20th century popular culture, and his music is as exciting today as it was all those years ago.

An ignorant piece of work

I’m often struck by how much more people in other parts of the world know about what’s going on here than we do ourselves. And how seriously they take the blatherings and tantrums of President Man-baby, while we, here in the U.S.,  are becoming inured to them.

Want to know how we’re doing in Australia? A good friend of the blog in Melbourne emailed us his thoughts under the subject heading, “An ignorant piece of work”:

Stewie,

Your President is clearly an ignorant piece of work. His real weakness however is arrogance. He seems to think Allies and others will do what ever he wants them to do, i.e. what ever suits him politically. He has no concept of respect and give and take in a relationship. I would have said it would be hard to disrupt the Aust / US alliance especially with a Liberal (rightish) govt here. But he has done that already. 

Most Australians viewed his election with some amusement – happy to see a country that is weirder than us and makes for interesting newspaper reading. He never had much support here but now he would have a popularity rating of way less than 20%. I don’t suggest he try and visit here anytime soon – there would be large and active demonstrations. There would certainly be very little respect. Even the far right that were all over his win have disappeared – no mileage in being associated with him. The Govt had been taking a fairly conciliatory line to things up to now. “The American alliance is an enduring one and we will work respectfully with whoever the American people chose” sort of thing. Now I hear people ask “why would I go to the US for a holiday?”. All he has managed to do is drive people away and make it politically difficult for our govt to support the US in anything. So when they need support he will have to give back way more than he will want. And our Prime Minister was a pretty successful business man and has a healthy ego so he is going to give as good as he gets. The satire on TV here makes Saturday night live look tame!

The Government here has a 1 seat majority in a 144 seat House of representatives and a minority in the Senate. And its polls are not great. The opposition is a real disciplined opposition looking for any opportunity to have a go.

So the real issue for the US is its become exceptionally hard, if not impossible, politically for the Australian Government to support the US in anything substantive. China is already our major trading partner and there has been a long held view, and a slow reality, that we need to be much closer to Asia and especially China. Turnbull (not Trumball!) has everything to lose by standing up for the US.

I would have thought someone would have briefed the US president on these fairly basic facts before he gets cranky on a call and then has it leaked to show how tough he is!

Binyamin Appelbaum of the Failing New York Times, @BCAppelbaum, made this great map showing the countries Trump has pissed off in his first two weeks. Don’t want to think about what it might look like four years from now. If we’re still here, that is.

map

Tweeting towards Bethlehem

Three weeks ago, #Trump told us his health care plan was just about ready –  “all but finished”, he said. “It’s very much formulated down to the final strokes. We haven’t put it in quite yet but we’re going to be doing it soon. We will have insurance for everybody. It will be in a much simplified form. Much less expensive and much better and much lower deductibles”.

Sounds great, man-baby!

It all came as a big surprise to Republicans in congress. They hadn’t heard word one about it, apparently. Not to worry, though. We’ve forgotten all about it now. Three weeks ago is the paleolithic era in the sped-up world of the man-baby. Promises, accusations, recriminations, Executive Orders, feuds – they all fly by at the speed of Twitter and are immediately lost in the ether, replaced by some new craziness.

Does anybody really care? Does anybody expect the “truth”? Will anybody ever hold him to any of it? No, no, and no way.

Did a health care plan even exist, other than in his own imagination? Who can say. Remember, in his “Birther” heyday in 2011 he said with complete sincerity and conviction that he had investigators in Hawaii that had found unbelievable evidence regarding Obama’s real origins. “They cannot believe what they are finding”,  he said on TV.  He’d reveal it all in a couple of days, he said.

He never revealed anything. “They” found nothing because there was nothing to find and because “they” didn’t exist, any more than the P.R. man “John Miller” did. It’s hard to know whether it’s all “lying” or something else. Does a delusional person “lie”?

Anyway, I started writing this because I was reading about our recent “successful” raid in Yemen, where a Seal Team 6 member was killed and three were injured, where civilians including some children were killed, and where we purposely abandoned a $75 million aircraft.  Mind you, I read about it in the “failing New York Times” so it’s “fake news” to begin with.

But the man-baby tells us it was a success, so it I guess it was. From the article:

Mr. Trump on Sunday hailed his first counterterrorism operation as a success, claiming the commandos captured “important intelligence that will assist the U.S. in preventing terrorism against its citizens and people around the world.”

“Important intelligence” sounds good, maybe even better than his health care plan or his birther evidence. Maybe he’ll tell us what it is soon. Or maybe we’ll forget all about it after a few more crazy tweets.

Here are some candidates from this morning:

tweets

A Deal with the Devil

If there actually were any real “Christians” in the Republican electorate, they abandoned their religious convictions to vote for Trump, an amoral con-man with no religious convictions at all. Everyone knew what he was, but they threw away all the “family values” and other holier-than-thou rhetoric and litmus tests that were applied to all presidential candidates over the last several decades.

Many have said all along that what was really at stake in this election was the ability to nominate Supreme Court justices, particularly for the seat left open by the death of Anton Scalia a year ago. Since that time, the Republicans have behaved in an unconscionable way, refusing to even meet with a highly qualified middle-of-the-road Obama nominee, Merrick Garland.  The ninth seat has remained vacant, leaving the court split 4-4 on ideological issues. Of course, there should be no “ideological” issues at all for the SCOTUS, but rather only legal issues. But we’re way past that now.

And the reason the Supreme Court pick is so important to them is that their fondest hope in the world, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, is now possible. This was their deal with the Devil: we’ll elect even the preposterously unqualified and manifestly dangerous Donald J. Trump if it means the end of legal abortion in our country.

In selecting Neil Gorsuch for the court, the man-baby has delivered. Gorsuch will be approved even though the current rules require 60 senators to vote for the approval and there are only 52 guaranteed republican votes. Democrats would be well justified in resisting this after l’affaire Garland, and perhaps they will. There are ten among them who must run for re-election in states won by Trump, so their calculus is a bit different. Maybe they’ll give in.

But it doesn’t matter – even if the Republicans can’t convince eight democratic senators to vote with them, they will simply change the rules to require a simple 51-vote majority for confirmation. It’s who they are. It’s what they do.

The first two weeks of Trump have been a vertigo-inducing amusement park ride, but without the amusement. I can’t imagine anyone in congress looking forward to four, or perhaps even eight more years of it.

At this point, I would gladly accept a different deal with the Devil: we give you the SCOTUS and the overturning of Roe. You give us impeachment for Trump’s blatant conflicts of interest. We’ll have President Pence for four years, and a return to some sense of normalcy.

Whaddya say? Deal?