DEAR DAN…..

Dan Rather — remember him? –has recourse to twitter which, on many if not most occasions, strikes me as kind of 5th Avenue tickertape torrent of streaming white lies, sometimes benign, mostly somewhere between vile and half-hearted. And, I confess, I’ve thrown out, over a few years, a modest wads of curling streamers via twitter from high above the motorcade of life. ( Enough with the metaphors, Greg!) It all winds up in a heap in the gutter, best forgotten. (Merciful END of metaphor.) That includes many of the President’s tweets. Sadly, all the stupid things he’s had to say on Twitter have come to haunt his Supreme Court nominee — all those things he’s said that show no respect for the independence of the judiciary. He throws out tweets, then throws out red meat at his rallies. (Forgive THAT metaphor.)

So, back to Dan Rather, who, with a retired newsman’s free time, freely opines. Thus he has tweeted on this October 15th, if you want to be an “originalist” in law, maybe you should go all the way. Cooking on the hearth, leeches for medicine. And old mule for transportation. Or maybe you can recognize that the world has changed.

Strange that this celebrated ex-newsman, seemingly of normal intelligence, albeit with intellectual pretentions, would fail to see the patent and careless mixing of categories here, especially since he claims to be referring to originalism IN LAW.

I tweeted back, for better or worse. I don’t know if Dan will see my tweet since this beloved ex-CBS mouthpiece has droves of adoring fans — into the thousands — and they all quickly affirmed him with little hearts in piles of tweets. Nonetheless, I tweeted, If you truly aspire to be a scholar, you’d be less disingenuous and acknowledge a distinction between eccentric backwoods “originalism “in one’s lifestyle — and THE LAW, and you’d see your error ( though, of course, we suspect you see it and are not serious or sincere here — at least we all hope not). But you’ve put on display your signature “Danish” sanctimony. Yet, even by your new lower standards for fairness, this is unworthy of you.

You know what? That’s not EXACTLY what I tweeted, but is in the ballpark. (For one thing, it’s way over the Twitter character limit.) Being a rare visitor to Twitter, I could not bring my original tweet up to the surface. It was, you’ll be comforted to know, less snarky, more to the point.

And you get — MY point. It was D.R. who was being snarky. I was, in however bitter a manner, trying to speak for truth. Truth is always original. It doesn’t matter how, as Dan puts it, the world has changed.

THE NEW WOMAN IN TOWN

I guess you call them memes, and they are all over the worldwide web mocking the new Supreme Court nominee. They are unfair and repulsive and have often been propagated by other women, e.g., a photograph showing Amy Coney Barrett in her red dress side-by-side with an image of submissive flocks of handmaids in red dresses and bonnets from the show, “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

So this is the savage snobbery of the elite and the woke against the new woman in town. Think of it as girls in the schoolyard making fun of the new girl, her looks (she’s prettier than them) and her background (she’s from New Orleans, lives in the midwest and is Catholic, etc.).

Of course, what they really don’t like — is that the new girl is also smarter than them.

MIDNIGHT INTERLUDE

In my beginning is my end. In succession

Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended

Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place

Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.

T.S. Eliot from East Coker (in Four Quartets)

Not a real estate report — just a bit of poetry that, at this midnight moment, seems to fit the beginnings and endings and falling, crumbling world of this late October, 2020. Let’s all take the by-pass.

SHALL WE SOON SEE A COURT IN …..”SHAM”-BLES?

“Sham” was the most favored word the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee deployed against Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett today. Remaining for a moment on the verb “deployed” I’ll note that Rhode Island Democrat Senator Sheldon Whitehouse compared Judge Barrett to a “torpedo” aimed by the Trump Administration at the Affordable Care Act. (Block that Metaphor!!)

The hearing is just beginning but senators on both sides gave us an earful on Monday. All we got to hear — in this hearing — from the nominee herself was her opening statement. She has a high-pitched, girlish voice and looks very much like the suburban mom she is. But her statement, at one point, contained the hard nugget of truth — at least to traditinalists — about the role of judges in every court in the land — again, at least to those, like Barrett, who profess an “originalist” or “textualist” view of the law — a view quite obviously opposed by the liberal Democrats on the Committee who seem to favor a more activist court. Not that that’s exactly a late bulletin.

Barrett said: Courts have a vital responsibility to the rule of law which is critical to a free society. But courts are not designed to solve every problem or right every wrong in our public life. The policy decisions and value judgements of government must be made by the political branches, elected by and accountable to the people. The public should not expect courts to do so and the courts should not try.

She’ll likely be confirmed, but what will happen to a court the Democrats plainly hope to “pack” with two new members in order to gain more control over it. Not that they’re owning up to it.

What’s in progress here is an assault on the system itself. This hearing is, in a sense, just a sideshow. The real trouble is down the road.

Stay tuned.

AND SO IT BEGINS….

The spectacle is underway as I write — the confirmation hearings for Trump’s high court nominee. I feel I must listening and watch.

But….

It is so awful. And the vetting is not over yet, the cross examination not begun. The nominees sits masked, listening. Nebraska Republican Senator Ben Sasse is giving a timely civic lesson. Good idea, based on what I’ve heard from the Democrats. Democrat Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, in a long, angry peroration, essentially called the nominee a “torpedo” aimed at the Affordable Care Act.

On and on. Later.

FURIOUS SEASON

It is so easy, so cheap and easy to ridicule our enemies, political or otherwise, when they have an embarrassing moment beyond their control. During the televised Vice Presidential debate, viewed by millions, in this fraught and consequential political season, a common house fly found its way out of the Salt Lake City night and into the debate hall on the campus of the University of Utah. It then found its way into the brilliantly lit halo of studio lighting and decided, following a fly’s mysterious mental logic, to wing its way in front of the cameras that are electronically conveying images across the continent and into the homes of millions of Americans– and lands on the hair of the gentlemanly Vice President of the United States who, as it happens, is Vice President to the most polarizing President ever to sit in the White House. Michael Pence has generated some hate of his own. I hated him constantly talking over the moderator and wondered why the Trump/Pence team had not learned its lesson from the spectacle that was the Presidential Debate. I say that unreservedly. When I saw it land, I thought, “here will begin the easy ridicule.” I half-hoped the moderator could see it and, seeing it, seized the moment to clear away this distraction in jocular fashion. I knew if the insect landed on Senator Harris, nothing would be made of it – or, if so, only by the cheapest of cheap Trump/Pence supporters. Of course, it showed up brilliantly on Pence’s snow white hair.

Odd thing about flies. In Jean-Paul Sartre’s retelling of the Electra myth, the flies are The Furies. Trappist Monk Thomas Merton wrote a book of poetry entitled, Seasons of Fury about the troubled world outside his monastery’s walls.

It is, indeed, a troubled season. The monastery beckons.

OCTOBER UNTITLED

A golden, somber October has settled over much of the country, over much of what I still regard to be home to the north. Here in subtropical latitudes, long ago and once again familiar to me, it is damp heat stirring in the palms. Green and yellow, never gold — seamless and sleep-inducing and somehow unreal. Think of this time of the planet, though, as a phantom wrapped in poisonous nightshade slouching toward a November morn to be born on that First Tuesday of ugly, inevitable reckoning and dubious realignment that, if it goes the way the liberal rabble wants, shall be greeted by Time Square-esque New Year’s Eve delirium. It will be CNN’s Morning in America.

Or — maybe not.

Seething hate has boiled up at the non-politician who was able to win four years ago perhaps because he was running against the most disingenuous and untrustworthy woman ever to ride the coattails of a far more politically astute husband to the place where, on behalf of liberal minions, she would symbolically break this faux Glass Ceiling — and I dare not say a word against this slow-grinding feminist uprising that will go on pitting women against men and daughters against fathers. Oh, what have we drunk? Poisonous nightshade while, in the back of the empty cafe — empty because we are in a pandemic and he can’t open yet — the sad proprietor strums his guitar and goes broke. Just one of the other elements in our current morass — and probably the one that will assure a Trump defeat. He has not handled it well. I for one don’t think anyone else would have prevented 200,000 American deaths, despite what the lying, conniving Democrats say. But from the outset he failed to set a tone of paternal concern and empathy and guidance and leadership. A simple piece of cloth over his face could have made an enormous difference. (Did he just not think he looked good in a mask??) I find myself joining the chorus of enemies, calling him a fool. And I hate that I find myself in that position.

Trump banners all about me in this neighborhood of this Battleground State loft and fall gently on streets named for far-off tropical islands and, all in all, called Paradise Island. Good people in good homes — artificial only in the sense that they are of vinyl and metal but the refuge of a middle class from across the nation, like me. I live here among them; for how long I know not. Other banners I see, besides the Stars&Stripes, celebrate the Nebraska “cornhuskers” and the Iowa “hawkeyes” and the Green Bay Packers and Philadelphia Flyers…etc…etc… There are some banners for Biden and Harris, the senescent Hollow Man and Has-Been and the sniveling bigot consumed like the man she’s partner with and once so effectively attacked in a debate — consumed, I say, by raw, untrammeled ambition.

The crude, uncouth zillionaire might win (The Silent Majority hidden in their homes across America might come out to rebel and change the narrative; come out of their mortgaged, overtaxed refuges, be they modular or old wood and shingles. It could happen. It would unleash the despair of the chattering classes and the liberal elite. But, right now, this scenario seems unlikely.)

The non-politician President has flubbed matters mightily and infuriatingly. He has reminded us why it is not bad to be a politician or at least have good political instincts. Of course, he is a man who constantly trusts his instincts over advice from others– some instincts possibly good, no matter what anyone says ( for instance, getting us out of the murderous Iran Nuclear Deal). But he seems increasingly unable to sort bad instincts from good, like not wearing a mask during this pandemic. Going mask-less and failing simply to say ‘I hate White Supremacists’ — was below bad instinct. It was the proud and perverse death rattle of a man just outside the ring of normal discourse.

Of course, it wasn’t that long ago that the “experts” were telling us we didn’t need masks. However, wearing them, to my mind, is a sign of respect for our fellow citizens in this medically dangerous time. History and science will tell us someday. For now, Mr. Trump needed to accept the transient science and its symbols of common bonding and solidarity.

So the man convalescing in the White House marinates mask-less in his hubris and fantasies but still captures the hearts and loyalty of millions of beleaguered, decent, despised, underestimated, ignored, sane, common sensical, family-loving, patriotic Americans who have been declared “deplorable” by an elite or two. Who shall arise to save us all — the devoted, like them, and the ambivalent, like me?

And October creeps on. I will miss October. I will miss much more than that when November shadows fall over the lands where it is not eternal summer. That is my fear.

KAMALA HARRIS: BIGOT AND PHONY. JOE BIDEN: PHONY AND FOOL. GREAT TICKET!

And so 2020 advances. President Trump in the hospital, the media scum is using the moment for recrimination. Kind of a ‘you got what was coming to you’ moment. And so — 2020, what a year! On so many troubled fronts! I’m not a Trump supporters — but….

Here’s what I know about Joe Biden: he is the guy with the “nice guy” image. But long observation of his long career reveals a now-senescent, garrulous fraud, transparently a liar and phony governed by untrammeled and long frustrated ambition for the Oval Office. He now operates without regard for any principle and has changed all his most moderate positions, including long, formerly unwavering support for the Hyde Amendment to satisfy the Left wing of his Party, which now pretty much is the whole bird. All to get the prize he’s been denied. He is a pathetic armature on which the left will shape its ideas. The Party architects are now Bernie and AOC. I challenge anyone to deny that.

Kamala Harris is simply an anti-Catholic bigot who believes membership in the 138 year-old Catholic fraternal charitable organization The Knights of Columbus disqualifies one to sit on the federal bench because, like the Catholic Church, it opposes abortion — or, as Ms Harris and her minions would put it — “a woman’s right to choose” (choose what? That’s the issue). She has been elevated far beyond her competence fairly to represent the interests of all Americans.

Donald Trump is the following: stubborn, arrogant, inarticulate, undisciplined, even unwilling in front of millions of viewers — for reasons that can only be a source of appalled speculation — to denounce White Supremacy, apparently (I’m speculating)”insulted”(as he would see it) by the assumption that he needed to make a public profession that he wasn’t a racist when Joe Biden isn’t being asked if he supports the transparently racist/ Marxist violent organization known as Black Lives Matter that has been burning and looting our cities and assaulting innocent people. He simply had to say, I absolutely denounce White Supremacy — I don’t want those people in my campaign, in the Party or in the country. I hate them. If you’re out there, stay away from me and mine.

You, Donald, were justifiably irritated that Joe Biden was not asked about his support for the destructive and duplicitous rabble now operating under the fraudulent title, Black Lives Matter; and that he got away with claiming that Antifa is just “an idea”. But you could have pivoted and asked that question yourself — if you had even a scintilla of ability as a debater of ideas. (I knew I shouldn’t have watched this thing.)

The whole thing was infuriating to anyone who hoped you’d perform well. I suspected you wouldn’t — because, again, as a candidate, you are undisciplined, fail to take direction, think the belligerent way you deal with the media is the way you conduct yourself in a debate. And yet, ironically, you’ve been the last best hope of genuine conservatives in and out ( and I’m out) of the Republican Party , and in America — and of what few conservative Democrats are left.

Get well, D.T. You apparently remain the blunt instrument we’ll have to use to pry open the door to sanity and freedom — and you’ll have to help us keep it open (and I know you’ll brag about that) for four years– until someone better comes along. But right now, I fear the fools may win and commence a four-year assault on our liberties, our economy, our morals. You name it.

“It’s a mess, ain’t it, sheriff?”

If it ain’t, it’ll do til the mess gets here,” said the West Texas sheriff in No Country for Old Men.

God help us!

THE GIRL FROM RIO PIEDROS

I met her — I forget how — during a two week stay in San Juan. It was in the Candato neighborhood of hotels and casinos. I was staying in a little hotel called El Canario. I had a pleasant room with levered shutters. There were always these trade winds and the constant sound of the coqui frogs. I loved that little place. When one of the maids won a trip to Saint Thomas at a church social, she brought it to the hotel and the amiable anglo front desk clerk informed me that the maid had been to Saint Thomas many times and therefore had no need for such a trip, did I want the ticket? Yes, thank you. And that was a day trip to Charlotte Amalie, to be written of another time.

But the girl from Rio Pedros…well, this will be a simple sad story only because I recall only that I met her probably in one of the grander hotels, probably in the ground floor casino level — and she was very nice and had lived in Atlanta and maybe there had been a marriage that was no more. I think she might have been with friends. She invited me to come to her place for dinner, probably the next night.

And so one night in my little rented compact I set out for Rio Piedros, a San Juan suburb. I have no memory of her apartment building, though I was stone cold sober. There is some vague memory of a two-story complex with a stairway to a second level. This was in June, 1977. That night keeps coming back to me, because — well, it wasn’t like I had any romantic intentions. Did she? Did I, at least have the courtesy to arrive with perhaps flowers and a bottle of wine — or did I just show up? How did I, so often directions-challenged, even on familiar U.S. turf, find her place so easily, unfamiliar as I was with Puerto Rico? Somehow I just recall going up a ramp to join cars on an elevated highway — speeding Puerto Rican drivers all around me, but I was fine with it. I was feeling adventurous. I was 30.

I have memory of a dining room. Not of what we ate or anything we said or how long I stayed. and, of course, I don’t recall her name.

How is it that there was such a night, such a special invitation from a stranger? Does she remember me? My name? My face? For I see — so little, but remember only that gracious invitation, that pleasant woman who must have made me dinner. And then it was goodnight and goodbye — forever.

Forgive me for forgetting so much. I re-live what little I recall and wonder about you — the girl from Rio Piedros. I hope you are well.

WHATEVER

Ah, a woke book! Is it ever! Lucy Ellman. She’s a novelist. British-American. Her book is Ducks, Newburyport. Funny title. It’s a novel. Haven’t read it. It’s a single sentence. It goes on for 1000 pages. Okay. Whatever. (I’m going to write a novel of four, three, two, and one-word sentences.

Okay. Whatever.

Now (enough of that). The novel is narrated by an Ohio mother of four. Nothing I can say about it won’t make me unwoke. But let me say this: Lucy Ellman, in an interview last year said of her protagonist that four is too many children. In fact, she said, due to the climate emergency, humans should be aiming for close to “zero births.” She further said that women with children are bores who are wasting their time. Here’s some of her run-on stream of conscious thinking on the matter. She said, “you watch people get pregnant and know they’ll be emotionally and intellectually absent for 20 years. Thought, knowledge, adult conversation, and vital political action are all put on hold while this needless perpetuation of the species is prioritize.”

She did concede that the desire to have babies is “strong” and “forgivable.” Then she ran on to say, in what sounds like the kind of contradiction known to overtake woke people who write run-on sentences that “the power and meaning of motherhood are largely overlooked” in our society.

You know why? Guess. Take a 1000 pages if you need to.

Answer: “Patriarchy.”

Whatever.