So Now What?

The unthinkable has become reality. The world’s sole democratic superpower has put a man in charge who is dangerously vindictive and dangerously stupid.

Dangerously vindictive, because he eagerly uses the awesome political, economic and military powers of the United States government to settle personal scores, and because almost any innocuous word or deed is enough to make someone a target. 

Dangerously stupid, because this man is incompetent at anything other than generating effective self-glorifying propaganda, a skill for which he has no peer. It might not be so bad, were he to surround himself with experienced, intelligent public servants. Instead we see the likes of Laura Loomer, an outright paranoid lunatic, determining which national intelligence experts to keep and whom to fire.

The damage is real and will be long-lasting. Our scientific and public health institutions are being gutted and taken over by people who don’t believe in science. Our economy is in freefall. Arab Americans who were justifiably upset at Joe Biden for standing up to Putin while failing to oppose Benjamin Netanyahu’s atrocities in Gaza now find that both Ukraine and the Palestinians are being left to twist slowly in the wind. Trump counts his disastrous tariffs as a success because panic-stricken governments all over the world are begging him for mercy. But whom can we go to?

And on, and on. And we’re not even a hundred days into this four-year nightmare. Or possibly longer, since Trump has been speculating out loud about a third, illegal term in office.

So now what?

The moderate conservative David Brooks counsels us to use calm, reasoned persuasion to gradually turn the MAGA masses against Trump, rather than just entertaining each other with outrage that never makes it out of the liberal echo-chamber.

All right, but how? I’ve been counselling my fellow Americans about Trump on this site since 2019, when I stated why I’m against The Wall. This blog is open for all the world to see, and I would love to have readers from across the ideological spectrum. But I have no illusions that anyone reads this who is not already of my approximate point of view. Why read anything that questions your worldview when there are a thousand sites that will confirm it? And I’m not brave enough to stick my neck out by floating a reasoned, fact-based opinion on some ultra-conservative website. I don’t like the idea of SWAT teams at my front door. And back door. And also the windows.

Occasionally I spy on Fox News’ website to see if there are any cracks in the Trump idolatry, caused by the collapsing economy, gutted social welfare institutions, etc. But, no such luck. Fox News still leads with gleeful accounts of Trump triumphs and liberals getting smacked down, usually followed down the page with a mug shot of a dangerous-looking young black man with bad hair. Good luck finding any hint of a doubt of Trump or his policies.

So now what?

I don’t have any brilliant ideas for saving this country I love. I think the hordes in funny red hats are just going to have to find out the hard way that Donald Trump does not love them, does not care about them, and doesn’t know what he is doing. Eventually they will discover that he has made their lives more insecure, less safe, less free, sicker and, except for a tiny number of oligarchs, poorer than they were before.  But I am not optimistic that this realization will happen any time soon, given the human mind’s tendency to believe what it wants to believe, and the Internet’s capacity to feed any belief at all,

So now what?

Here are my suggestions, for what to do in the meantime:

Firstly, continue to talk, post, scream, shout, and sing about what is going on. Don’t ever give in to the temptation to treat the new horror as the new normal.

Secondly, love thy neighbor, even, and especially, the ones in the funny red hats. Keep the lines of communication open and the easy insults at a minimum. Talk about Trump and all the awful things he is doing (see: “Firstly”), but don’t play their hate game. That changes nothing and is bad for your blood pressure.

Thirdly, live your life. Take a trip to the coast. Have a fresh bagel with lox and a shmear and capers and sweet onion. A glass of Montepulciano. Or two. Watch a movie and read a book (but not at the same time, please!). Shut off this device and go for a walk. We owe it to ourselves, our loved ones, and our country to stay happy and healthy while this shitshow works itself out.

What Can You Get For $25 Million These Days?

Twenty-five million dollars. Twenty-five million clams. Twenty-five million smackers. Twenty five million simoleons.

What can you get for 25 million dollars?

Well, about 50 million of those high-priced eggs (using the new “egg surcharge” of $.50 at my local diner as a guide).

Or, you could hire about 350 public school teachers for a year.

Or, you could get about 200,000 children vaccinated for measles, at the typical out-of-pocket drugstore rate of $125.

Or, you could fund full-boat, four-year scholarships for 166 students at an average-priced college.

Or, you could buy about 15 powerful, long-range ATACMS missiles for Ukraine to use in destroying Vladimir Putin’s command centers, ammunition dumps, and fuel depots.

Or, using the World Bank’s figure of about $4.00 per, you could adequately feed 6,250,000 people for a day.

But one thing you cannot buy for $25 million dollars, apparently, is a seat on the Wisconsin State Supreme Court, as Elon Musk discovered last night.

Not that it’s much of a loss for Musk. According to Forbes’ magazine, the WORM (WOrld’s Richest Man) is worth about 340 billion dollars. That makes the 25 mil substantially less than 1/100th of 1 percent of his treasure. But we’ll round it up to that.

To put that in terms that ordinary, like, human beings can understand: suppose you are a relatively well-off late-career professional or recent retiree, with $1 million in assets. It would be as if you wasted $100—the price of a fancy-ish steak dinner for two—on a losing candidate’s campaign fund.

Still, 25 mil is 25 mil. And it’s an interesting question as to why it wasn’t enough to propel candidate Brad Schimel, a standard-issue abortion opposing, Affordable Care Act resisting, Trump adoring conservative, to victory. And this, in the state of U.S. Senator Ron “no exceptions for rape or incest” Johnson and recent union-busting governor Scott Walker.

Could it be that Musk’s millions actually lost Schimel the election? I like to think so. My theory is that many of the farm and factory voters of the great state of Wisconsin who personally related to Trump, found the grotesquely wealthy chainsaw-waving, fascist-saluting, government-employee-destroying tech bro just too repulsive, and that repulsion rubbed off on Schimel. And I find a crumb of comfort in the knowledge that at least Musk has $25 million less to spend in making the world a darker place.

And maybe we’ll treat ourselves to a steak dinner this weekend. I know for a fact that the money will be well spent.

On the New Police State

We are now living in a police state. That should be evident to anyone who has seen the video footage of the recent arrest of a woman by Immigration and Customs Enforcements (ICE) officers. You can see the video on YouTube. That clip should horrify all of us, liberal, conservative, Democrat, Republican, progressive, or MAGA.

In the video we see what appears to be an ordinary woman walking down a city street, alone, looking at her phone. She is stopped at first by one, and then several figures. Most of them are dressed in black from head to foot, and their faces are covered. She screams in fear, but in a few seconds she is surrounded, handcuffed and led to a big black SUV. She has since been whisked away to somewhere in Louisiana.

I have a lot of questions about this arrest and the way it was carried out. Why was this person taken on the street, by surprise? Was ICE afraid of a shootout if they knocked on the door at her home or office? Were they afraid she might set off a bomb if they didn’t ambush her? Why didn’t they just notify her by mail and give her a chance to find a lawyer and turn herself in? Was she some sort of international criminal ringleader who might slip away to a secret hideout? Beyond all that, what crime was she suspected of committing?

The woman being taken to the waiting SUV is a graduate student of Child Study and Human Development at Tufts University, named Rumeysa Öztürk. She is a legal resident, a citizen of our NATO ally Turkey. She has committed no crime. Ms. Öztürk was arrested as part of President Donald Trump’s phony war on anti-Semitism.  According to ICE, Öztürk “engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans.”

The idea that Öztürk is a Hamas sympathizer apparently originates in a rightwing vigilante website called Canary Mission, which in turn based its claim on an article Öztürk co-authored in the Tufts student newspaper last year. That article bears the incendiary headline, “Try again, President Kumar: Renewing calls for Tufts to adopt March 4 TCU [Tufts Community Union] Senate resolutions.”

The article makes a reasoned argument for Tufts to take a principled stand and to adopt the recommendations of its own faculty, staff, and student body to oppose Israeli military actions in the Gaza strip against Palestinian civilians. You may or may not agree with the article’s characterization of what the Israeli Defense Forces are doing to Palestinians. But I challenge you to read the editorial yourself and find in it an iota of antisemitism—or for that matter, an iota of hatred or prejudice against anyone. It makes no direct or indirect reference to Hamas.

But we are living in an authoritarian police state, and unfortunately for Ms. Öztürk, she embodies the confluence of several of its made-up demons: an immigrant, an intellectual, and a Palestinian sympathizer.

Don’t just take it from me. As the prominent Holocaust scholar Christopher Browning, professor emeritus of history at the University of North Carolina and author of The Origins of the Final Solution, concludes his essay in the current issue of the New York Review of Books, “Trump, Antisemitism & Academia”

It is utterly contradictory but hardly surprising for Trump to feign indignation over the harassment of Jewish students while openly advocating criminal violence against Palestinians. His campaign against campus antisemitism is simply a hypocritical pretext for his assault on American higher education.

This is shameful, and we should call it for what it is: state-sponsored terrorism.

On The Big Lie(s)

Imagine two husbands who are cheating on their wives and regularly staying out until dawn.

The first husband, whether out of guilt, self-interest, or a misplaced sense of decorum, does his best to devise credible lies to cover up his actions. He had to work late to catch up on a critical project. He was at Frank’s house playing poker with the guys all night, honest! Go ahead, ask Frank! Now, where can I take you for dinner tonight?

The first husband’s wife eventually figures out it’s all a lie, but she pretends to believe him, at least for a while.

The second husband doesn’t even make a pretense of credibility. Instead, his lies absurdly turn the tables on his poor wife and make her the villain. He’s not cheating, she is, the slut! And she better apologize immediately, or she might end up on the street. After giving back her ring!

And the second husband’s wife, whether out of self-interest or plain fear, apologizes, begs for forgiveness, and promises to sever her relationship with her best friend Mona, that lying bitch who told her she saw her husband with Melissa last night at the Tiki Lounge.

The first husband’s behavior loosely describes George W. Bush, who told the American public in 2002 that Iraq’s dictator Saddam Hussein (A) was a perpetrator of the 9/11 massacre of American citizens and (B) was preparing nuclear and (C) chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction in order to commit further atrocities against Americans. He backed up these assertions with “evidence,” including some grainy satellite photos of RVs or something in the desert, and testimony by some guy codenamed “Curveball.” This evidence was convincing enough to get Bush’s sober, honorable Secretary of State, the decorated veteran Colin Powell, to take it before the United Nations and use it to make a case for war.

Remember the aluminum tubes? The “yellowcake”? Anthrax labs? The pre-9/11 meeting in Prague? I’m ashamed to admit that, at the time, I believed that something must be going on in Iraq.

And the evidence was enough for our congress, who overwhelmingly passed a resolution authorizing the war.

After we went to war, we discovered too late that the “evidence” was all a lie. An ex-post-thousands-of-dead-facto justification for the war was that Hussein was a brutal dictator—true enough, but not the reason we were given to start with. I’ve literally grown old hoping for Bush to just admit that he made a horrible mistake.

Why am I writing this? It feels like poking myself with a needle. God, I miss Jimmy Carter.

But at least Bush respected us enough to construct a credible story. Donald Trump’s behavior is exemplified by the second husband. He doesn’t even try to concoct evidence. He doesn’t need to, doesn’t really care whether you believe him or not. He just fantasizes about what he would most like to be true, and then declares it as fact, from the anecdotal (immigrants in Ohio are stealing and cooking America’s beloved pets; little boys are going to school in the morning and coming home in the afternoon as little girls) to the global (Vladimir Zelensky is a dictator, Ukraine started the war against Russia, Panama is ripping off American shippers on behalf of China).

And the Republican Party is like that second husband’s wife, pretending to believe him. Or maybe they actually do. As long as they act like they believe him, there’s no practical difference.

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The End of Parody

If you’ve followed my bloggy offerings for any length of time, you know that I have feasted on our past and present president as a rich comedic source for the past nine years or so. For example, I considered how a Satan presidency would stack up against Trump’s (Satan comes out ahead in terms of experience and basic human decency); what a Trump State of the Union Address from a New York State prison might look like (in the “wishful thinking” category); and a revelation that the sensational “Anonymous” source leaking White House insider info to the media was actually Trump himself, vainly trying to satisfy his bottomless need for attention.

Given current headlines, it looks like our Commander-in-Chief will remain a rich source of material for as long as he remains in office. But the fun part of making fun of his hjinks is gone, for two reasons.

Firstly, I have come to realize that I cannot outdo Trump himself in parodying Trump. Consider that a fundamental device in political humor is the “take-it-to-the-logical-extreme” approach. For example, Trump has loudly speculated about the United States’ right to annex Greenland, so I wrote a recent blog in which Trump threatens to nuke Stockholm, er, Copenhagen, and if that doesn’t work, to impose tariffs.

What of it? I am writing about a man who once gave a press conference in which he suggested trying bleach injections and sunlamps as a cure for the COVID virus. A man who quite recently proposed forcibly and permanently evacuating the two million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip so that he could transform it into a luxury resort. A convicted felon who referred to the convicted thugs who violently assaulted the U.S. Capitol building in 2021 as “hostages” and gave each one a pardon or commutation. How can I out-ridicule a man who is already a walking parody of decency, statesmanship, and public service? I’m a pretty cynical guy, ready to think the worst about the present administration. Yet it never occurred to me to call those monsters “hostages.” Well done, Mr. President!

The second problem is more serious. Political humor these days has started to feel pointless, self-indulgent, even counter-productive. When I watch the master Jon Stewart doing his show before a studio audience that hoots and howls in approval, I have a sinking feeling that we’re just indulging in emotional self-gratification that makes no real difference to anyone. And it’s not even that gratifying anymore.

Meanwhile, there is real blood on the carpet. Trump is outlining proposals for the disposition of the Gaza Strip that would have been too appalling for even Benjamin Netanyahu to propose in public. Human beings guilty of nothing more than lacking proper paperwork are being rounded up and sent on flying prison buses out of the country. Guantanamo Bay is being converted to a concentration camp. Government officers in charge of financial and judicial integrity are being fired or forced to resign. Programs to encourage the development of wind and solar power are being pointlessly scrapped—pointlessly, unless you’re an oil company stockholder. NATO….

But why go on? I can keep on making jokes about it, but it looks like the joke is on us, the American people, in fact, the entire human race.

Maybe one day soon, when cracking a joke or drawing a disrespectful cartoon can get you sent to prison or worse, then political satire will be a meaningful act again. Til then…maybe I’ll start posting recipes. “The One Wrong Thing Everyone Does With Bolognese Sauce!”

Dead Center (Nel segno, Luigi Pirandello, 1904)

If you know anything about Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936), it’s probably because you’ve heard of his play, Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), about a family of fictional characters pleading with a theater director to stage their story, after their author has abandoned them.

But Pirandello was the author of numerous important novels, plays, and more than 250 short stories. A handful of his stories were translated into English and have been included in world-literature anthologies for decades; many others have not been translated.

Two Pirandello scholars, Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka, have been leading a project to solicit and publish translations of every one of his stories from various literary translators, and to make these translations freely available online. I am grateful to both of them for allowing me to contribute.

My translation of Pirandello’s story “Dead Center” (“Nel segno”) was recently posted on their “Stories for a Year” site, along with an excellent introduction by the editors, and you can read it here–as well as find links to many other Pirandello stories.

My thanks again to Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka, as well as to the Pirandello scholar Daniela Bini, whose early encouragement and advice did much to set me on the literary translation path.

Effective Immediately: Some Executive Orders We’d Like to See

Trump Keeps Up Breakneck Pace of Executive Orders: New York Times, 1/29/25

Effective Immediately: All McDonald’s restaurants in the U.S. will be renamed “McKamala’s.”

Effective Immediately: All illegal immigrants currently residing in the U.S. will receive a cute little sack containing a packet of Gummi Bears, a Starbucks gift card, U.S. citizenship, and a brochure entitled, “What is a Payroll Tax?”

Effective Immediately: All January 6th rioters will be required to display a prominent scarlet “A” on their tactical camouflage vests. It does not stand for “American.” Or “Adulterer.”

Effective Immediately: Federal funds will be released to enable authors of impertinent little blogs like this one to lead a life of creative ease.

Effective Immediately: The Justice Department is instructed to launch an investigation into why we have to sit through a zillion obnoxious ads before listening to or watching anything the least bit interesting.

Effective Immediately: Nothing is effective immediately. Sometime next week is fine.

ICE STATION ZEBRA II: FROSTED DANISH

Trump Alarms Denmark in an Icy Exchange Over Greenland—Headline, The New York Times, Jan. 26 2025

SCENE: White House, the Oval Office

KRISTI NOEM, Dept. of Homeland Security: It’s Denmark, sir. They appear to be moving forces towards Greenland.

POTUS: Those backstabbing Danians! I told you they were going to invade!

MARCO RUBIO, SECRETARY OF STATE: Technically, sir, it’s not an invasion, since Denmark is actually responsible for the defense of Greenland, which is….

POTUS: No way! Shut up!

RUBIO: I’m totally serious!

POTUS: So am I! Shut up!

KASH PATEL, FBI DIRECTOR: Should I arrest him now, sir?

POTUS: Not yet, just take away his Secret Services.

PATEL: I would, but the Secret Service actually belongs to Treasury, not….

POTUS: Shut up!

PATEL: Yes sir! Should I arrest myself now, sir?

POTUS: I never cared for those Denmarkians. Who wants their stupid pastries anyway! We can make danishes right here in America, and make them ten times better!

RUBIO: Umm…

POTUS: Umm, what?

RUBIO: Nothing, sir. Brilliant insight, sir.

POTUS: Kristi, we need the Secretary of Defense on this. Go wake up Pete Hegseth!

NOEM: He’s right over there on the couch, sir, next to the empty bottles.

POTUS: So wake him up! [Kristi Noem gives Pete Hegseth a good shake]

PETER HEGSETH, U.S. Secretary of Defense: What th’, where am I? [sees Noem] Oh hello, darlin’! How about you grab your .22 and we’ll jump in the old pickup truck and go looking for some misbehavin’ Malamoots!

POTUS: It’s the Danishes we need to focus on now, Pete! What kind of military are we up against?

HEGSETH: Well let’s see now, they got almost a hundred warfighters. I like to say ‘warfighters’ instead of ‘soldiers’ cause it sounds sexier! And some of them are actually female, which is totally wrong but kind of hot! Just thinkin’ about them Danish girl warfighters, I start to get…

POTUS: What about their navy?

HEGSETH: Well sir, our intelligence indicates they recently took an old herring boat and mounted a blunderbuss on the fo’c’sle. [Cue ominous music] We have drones operating in the area now to help us determine what a blunderbuss is. And also a fo’c’sle.

POTUS: Armor?

HEGSETH: We believe they are equipped with at least two tanks. One is on permanent display outside a museum in Vestervig. The other one is…currently unaccounted for. [Cue ominous music]

POTUS: [Squinting fiercely] My God, Pete…that tank could be on the herring boat right now…headed for the Gulf of America!

TULSI GABBARD, NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE DIRECTOR: Mr. President, we just received information that China is launching an invasion of Taiwan. I told them OK but please let us know next time.

POTUS: So sad. China would never have invaded if I were president of Taiwan! Now about those Denmarkers…We’re going to nuke the hell out of Stockholm!

RUBIO: Copenhagen.

POTUS: And also Copenhagen! And if that doesn’t work, they can expect 20% tariffs!

Quick Answers To Your Complicated Health Questions!

AS WE’VE NOTED BEFORE, the mainstream media has an annoying habit of printing headlines with intriguing questions, but instead of just, like, giving you the answer right away, they make you read a whole article with nuances and tradeoffs and science and stuff, and when you do finally get to the end, the conclusion is…inconclusive!  So, to save you time and stress, we take some recent “Wellness” questions posed in the New York Times and give simple, straightforward answers that anyone can understand…even our readers!

Do I Need to Worry About Microplastics in Tea Bags?  Nah, something else will get you first.

I’m Lactose-Intolerant. Can I Eat Dairy Anyway? Fine with me!

How Long Do Leftovers Last? Why do you think God gave you a nose?

What if You Just Don’t Like Breakfast? That’s cool!…but if you really don’t want that piece of bacon…

Is Bone Broth Really Brimming With Health Benefits? Yes, except for whoever’s bone that was.

Is It Better to Eat Before a Workout or After? Both. And skip the workout.

Is It Safe to Dermaplane My Face? Only one way to find out!

Why Can’t I Get This Song Out of My Head? Because it’s impossible.

Is Decaffeinated Coffee Bad for You? Yes, especially if you need to pay attention at an 8 o’clock Zoom.

How Do I Get Rid of the ‘Chicken Skin’ on My Arms and Legs? Slow down and eat over the plate like a civilized person!

Was Vittorio De Sica, director of The Bicycle Thief, a second Oskar Schindler?

Still from La porta del cielo, from: Di Gierre – Breve storia del cinema italiano, image in the public domain

You’ve probably seen Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film, based on Thomas Keneally’s book about a German industrialist who uses his factory in Poland as a cover for saving Jewish lives during the Holocaust. What could be better than a film based on a true story about a heroic Gentile saving Jewish lives?

Well…how about an actual film that saved Jewish lives?

A couple of day ago, idly following links related to late-Fascist and early-postwar film stars and directors in Italy, I came across the following notes in the Wikipedia article about the film The Gate of Heaven (La porta del cielo), produced in Rome in 1944 and released in 1945, and directed by Vittorio De Sica, known in the U.S. for his later, groundbreaking film, The Bicycle Thief:

Vittorio De Sica hired approximately 300 extras, who were Jewish or simply being persecuted by the Nazi regime, because of their physical oddity. To avoid their deportation and later execution, he prolonged the shooting of the film as long as he could, awaiting the arrival of the allied armies.

These two sentences are stunning, mystifying, and lots of other -ings. Could this story really be true? If so, why had I never heard or read about it?

And what did it mean that De Sica was hiring Jews “because of their physical oddity?” Was he making Nazi propaganda? This turns out to be a simple matter of grammatical misdirection; move up the comma after “regime” to after “Jewish,” and the intended meaning is clear.

And what exactly did “as long as he could” mean? Was he able to hold out until the American army liberated Rome, or did the Jews in his cast in fact get rounded up and deported to death camps?

Following the links cited in the Wikipedia article were no help. But I did find an excellent online article by Jeff Mathews from 2012, “Gate of Heaven.” He cites as his sources De Sica’s own memoirs, those of his son Christian, and a 2001 article by the film journalist Carlo Celli. His findings? Well…inconclusive.

Some background: The movie was shot in German-occupied Rome in the first half of 1944, while the Allied armies were slowly fighting their way towards the city. In September 1943, Allied armies had landed in Salerno in southern Italy, and the Italian government switched sides and joined the Allies.  Germany still had control of northern Italy, and began rounding up and deporting Jewish Italians. Meanwhile, the organs of Nazi and Italian fascist propaganda were coercing Italian film talent to leave Rome, the center of the Italian film industry, for places farther away from the front lines and more firmly under the control of the Italian Fascist puppet state.

The story of La porta del cielo differs according to the teller. On the “most heroic” end of the scale, the film itself was a complete fabrication, cooked up by De Sica and a certain young priest, the future Pope Paul VI, and produced on Vatican property in Rome (the Church Of St. Paul Beyond the Walls), with the express purpose of saving as many Jewish and partisan lives as possible. De Sica’s production ended up saving as many as 3,000 lives, through the hiring of cast, crew, and extras, and using the church both as a hiding place and a nominally protected space.

On the “least heroic” end of the scale, De Sica himself made the film up out of thin air when he was on the point of being forced to leave Rome for Venice to work on state propaganda, claiming that he was already committed to completing a project for the Vatican. De Sica then scrambled to create an actual project to match his alibi. Being a decent guy, he intentionally included some Jews and partisans in his cast and crew of 300 in order to keep them safe.

All the accounts agree that De Sica was able to keep shooting, or to pretend to keep shooting, until the Americans reached Rome on June 5, 1944, with his original cast and crew nearly intact.  There is no serious dispute that an actual film was produced, at least partly on Vatican property, with the Vatican’s consent if not actual sponsorship, and (in 1945) released.

The most serious problem with these accounts, especially towards the “most heroic” end of the scale, is that Mathews tried and was unable to find any mention by Jewish survivors of De Sica’s role in saving them.

Mathews’ conclusion? “To me, in spite of the different accounts of the details, the substance still rings true to me —Vittorio De Sica risked his own life to save many others, and I am happy to believe that that is true.” I guess that’s good enough for me.

UPDATE (8/27/25) Since this post was first published in December, 2024, we’ve made an interesting discovery: an interview with De Sica in the New York Times on the occasion of the American release of his film The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. It includes a wide-ranging discussion in which De Sica is at pains to distance himself from Mussolini and Fascism, and defends Italians in general against the charge of anti-Semitism. He discusses the making of The Gate of Heaven at some length, but makes no mention of using the film as a cover for saving any Jewish lives. Instead he claims that he hid “four adults and five children” in an apartment he had in Rome. The fact that De Sica seems eager to display his anti-Fascist credentials, yet doesn’t mention the Heaven episode here, makes me believe that the figure of hundreds of Jewish lives saved is apocryphal.

On Hanukkah, Christmas, New Year’s, and this Thing…Called 2025

The stretch of winter between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day will always have pleasurable childhood associations for me. I wasn’t raised in a religious household, but our family observed a lot of the fun and exciting (for children, anyway) holiday rituals: a Christmas tree and/or a menorah, exchanging gifts either on Christmas Day or following the eight days of Hanukkah. Adult shows on TV, so dull that comedies required a laugh-track to tell the audience when they were being funny, were largely usurped by the much more inventive and joyful animated “specials” (the stars of which were, and still are, Charlie Brown, and The Grinch), and in cold or rainy weather there was less of the annoying parental imperative to “go do something outside.” The colored lights and decorations in the stores, the dressed-up houses. Above all, freedom from the drudgery of that intellectual and bodily prison called “school.”

But of course paradise was short-lived. It seemed that Christmas morning had barely ended when neighbors were out in the cold sunlight taking down the lights. The days sped headlong towards New Year’s Eve, an odd, contrived celebration of a number on a calendar, that seemed designed for and by adults only. New Year’s Day was marked by stupefyingly dull TV fare: bowl games, which meant nothing to me, and, even worse, parades. Parades could be barely tolerable in person, but how could anyone stand to watch a parade on TV? Oh look, there’s a balloon that looks like Snoopy!

But mainly New Year’s Day meant the end of the holiday season, the end of cozy, colorful December, and the start of cold, businesslike January, and with it, the return to school. If you replace “school” with “work,” I had much of the same emotions as an adult.

Now I am blessedly and blissfully retired, and the prospect of January hasn’t carried the same feelings of dread as in the past. Until this year.

I feel like we are all on temporary leave from a horrible reality that will return with full force in January 2025. I don’t know what all it will mean, but I am certain it won’t be good. What will be left of the democratic republic of Ukraine in a year? How terribly hot will this summer be, and what will happen to our efforts to keep our planet from drying out and burning up? Will the men, women and children in Gaza finally be shown some real, meaningful mercy? What will happen to the basic institutions of our government, such as the Justice Department, or the agencies that at least try to assure us that our water and air aren’t carelessly poisoned by the engines of commerce? What will happen to the millions of poor, hardworking people in this country who lack the proper paperwork to be here, but have nowhere else to go?  What will happen to democracy itself?

Beats me. I wish I had consoling words for you, and for myself, but it’s hard to see how this all ends well, or close to it.

There will be a backlash against Donald Trump, against his gang of self-serving so-called ‘disruptors,’ against the angry people with the funny red hats. But who knows if it will happen in two years, or four years, or ten, or a generation from now, and how much irreversible damage will have been inflicted. Some of us won’t live long enough to find out.

To paraphrase Woody Allen, the country wants what it wants. And right now, for reasons I am somewhat afraid to understand, it really does want a ruthless mean-spirited vulgar huckster named Donald John Trump.

In the meantime…I think I’ll fix myself some nice pasta, open a bottle of wine, and see what’s on the movie channel. And complain once in a while. It’s all I can do.

Meditations on the New American Nightmare

It’s the Democrats’ fault for not nudging Biden aside sooner and allowing other contenders to be sifted through the primary process. It’s Kamala Harris’ fault for speaking in nebulous platitudes instead of outlining concrete policies. It’s the fault of “the elites” for not taking the concerns of plain old honest working families seriously.

These are the grim (or gleeful) explanations of the center-right pundits like Russ Douthat and Bret Stephens for the nightmare we now find ourselves in. And they contain grains of truth.

But there’s something missing in these arguments. No one forced any voter to pull the lever for the loutish vengeful convicted felon of doubtful mental stability over the bright empathetic woman with a lifetime record of public service. No one forced any voter to stay within the boundaries of Fox News, Truth Social, and Joe Rogan’s podcast, in considering what might be true or false. No one forced any voter to pick the party that looked the other way on January 6, that has vowed to pluck out the Affordable Care Act “root and branch” (in Mitch McConnell’s memorable words), that has treated global warming as a joke for the past thirty years, that has voiced only support for the proposal of “mass deportations.”

The Americans who voted for Trump saw the same man that I did, a man who (just to give some recent examples) publicly called former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi a “bitch,” promised to “protect” women “whether they like it or not,” and amused the audience at one of his final rallies by fellating a malfunctioning microphone.

And what was so awful about Kamala Harris, again?

But blaming the loser for the loss is a lot more comfortable than confronting the possibility that a majority of Americans are gullible, willfully ill-informed, insecure, and/or mean-spirited.

Trump believes that he escaped death in Butler, Pennsylvania because God wants him to be president. The possibility that God engineered the whole thing as a reminder to Trump of his mortality, and to give him a second chance to use his power to act charitably and with empathy towards the less fortunate, seems to have slipped his mind entirely.

But I don’t have insight into the divine. Maybe Trump has it right.