“If you lay the skyscrapers on the ground our Reflecting Pool is taller.”
“Jawdropping” is usually a figure of speech. Except as I watched this presidential moment, my jaw did literally drop. I’ve noted above it is weird, wacky and concerning. Weird and wacky can be fun and funny. Concerning is when the presentation tells you something—everything—about the very powerful man proudly making the presentation.
Putin thinks or would like to that Russia is still one of the top superpowers in the world. It isn’t, but he has a plan to get there.
All he has to do is knock one of the two superpowers from the top spots. Russia is never going to dethrone China. But he believes America is vulnerable. Putin is an expert and experienced intelligence officer–and dictator–so he knows vulnerabilities and can read people. He read Trump from first encounter. A man who thinks he’s smart but isn’t. A man who could be compromised and manipulated. Most of all, a man who, in the right position, could create chaos.
There are some particular American policies that Putin would like to see Trump adopt; weak support for Ukraine, for example. Mostly though, Putin wants to incite dissension and chaos in America because Putin, as a student of history and geopolitics, knows that internal dissension and chaos lead directly to national weakness.
Putin may not yet be able to declare mission accomplished. But every day he is getting closer to success.
In 1948, as much of the world was recovering from World War II, the world also felt guilty and ashamed at not having intervened sooner to save 6 million Jews from Hitler.
A Jewish haven was established in Israel. There was widespread, though not universal, support for this. Whether this “worked” is a matter of perspective. It was bound from the inception to be a source of conflict, which continues to this moment.
What might have been more broadly acceptable and peace-inducing would have been an Abrahamic state, rather than just a Jewish one. It could have been a democracy where human rights were guaranteed for all people—Jews, Christians, Muslims, other believers, non-believers. It could have been an official home for all three traditions that honor Israel/Palestine as a foundational sacred space. Differences in beliefs, some not insubstantial, could be subsumed to common principles. The Abrahamic religions are literally siblings. Like all siblings there are conflicts, but like children of the same father, they are also family.
Write that speculative history. You will find it is not perfect—what history is?—but you will also find less enmity and more comity. What could be wrong with that?
Bill Pulte surrounded by homes that are actually spies!
Trump has nominated Bill Pulte to be Director of National Intelligence:
Bill Pulte is the grandson of William J. Pulte, founder of PulteGroup, a residential home construction company. He studied broadcast journalism at Northwestern University. Pulte founded Pulte Capital in 2011, a private equity firm, and founded The Blight Authority, a nonprofit that clears empty homes, in 2015. Amid a leadership dispute, Pulte was named to PulteGroup’s board in 2016, serving for a four-year term.
It isn’t worth discussing whether Bill Pulte is qualified to be DNI. He is not.
What is worth discussing is why Trump wants so many manifestly unqualified people to help him run the country. There are too many unqualified—and sometimes vengeful and wacky—officials to list here.
A few reasons:
Many of the unqualified are rich, which means they can give Trump money and loyalty in exchange for prestigious positions.
Many of the unqualified are even less smart and knowledgeable than Trump, so he is not threatened by them.
Some number of Trump hardcore supporters are the sort of regular people who think that if they only had the opportunity, they could do a better and more patriotic job than some of the so-called expert communist enemies of America who once held these positions. They may not ever get nominated, but they can at least see that other unqualified people are getting the chance.
You are floating down a running river. The changing scenes along the banks are so interesting. You are lost in the views. But the river still demands attention and focus. As distracting as the scenery may be, there is the possibility of danger in the water.
The mass of new scenery in American life is staggering. It is possible that as this is written, a million Americans are generating videos, and eventually there will be a million media channels to show them. The government of America once proceeded with a limited number of news items, occasionally outrageous, often important, but mostly plain. Now we seem to be at one outrage a day, or even an hour. The river is running, dangerous rapids ahead, but the passing scenery, beautiful or horrifying, is so alluring.
Focus Americans. Be attracted or disgusted if you must by the constantly changing news and content. The flow. But keep diligent and vigilant focus on what matters. Some who do not mean you or most of us well are depending on distraction, hoping that like a child or pet, you will be fascinated by whatever shiny object is dangled in front of you. Please focus.
Ambient music is characterized by atmospheric, textural soundscapes. Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978) is credited with starting and naming the genre. He described ambient music as being able to “accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one.” Definitions are fuzzy, so adjacent genres—ambient, neoclassical, minimalist, New Age—may seem to blend and merge. Erik Satie called his own works “furniture music”, which doesn’t seem very different than airport music.
Hiroshi Yoshimura (1940 – 2003) is my current favorite. A Japanese artist, musician, composer and sound designer, his first album, Music for Nine Postcards (1982), came just a few years after Brian Eno, and Yoshimura is sometimes called the Brian Eno of Japan.
Below are a couple of tracks, Clouds and Blink, from Music for Nine Postcards.
Even if you are familiar with ambient music, you may not have heard/heard of Yoshimura. If you are not familiar with ambient music, convinced it is just some more of that New Age “stuff”, give it a try. One of my experiences is to walk among the songbirds, one ear on Yoshimura, one ear on the birds. Nice.
Three weeks ago I published the image above and the post below. It was not meant as a joke.
Joke’s on us. Trump is asking the Treasury to issue a $250 bill with his portrait on it, to celebrate America 250. The law does not allow the portrait of a living person to appear on currency, so Congress is being asked to change the law. (Or alternatively, the Treasury will simply break the law, since the president controls federal law enforcement, so who is going to arrest them?)
The lesson here, one we should have learned, is that Trump is totally predictable. Trump supporters praise Trump’s leadership style, saying it works because he is unpredictable. No. Maybe I got the denomination wrong, but the idea was right. As I said recently about Trump’s war strategies, he is not playing three-dimensional chess, he is playing zero-dimensional chess. You can see his craziness coming from a mile away. The American dilemma is what to do about it.
The U.S. $10,000 bill was discontinued in 1969 and was last printed in 1945.
This may be the year it is printed again. Will Trump order the Treasury to resume printing the $10,000 bill, this time with his portrait instead of Salmon P. Chase? Chase was Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of the Treasury.
Stranger things have happened and are still happening.
The news this morning about “cleansing” Gaza brought me back to poet Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008), featured here a year ago.
“Mahmoud Darwish is a literary rarity: at once critically acclaimed as one of the most important poets in the Arabic language, and beloved as the voice of his people. A legend in Palestine, his lyrics are sung by fieldworkers and schoolchildren.”
From the start of this Israeli war on Gaza and its people, I have focused not just on the depraved indifference to Palestinian lives but also on the cultural decimation. Not long ago Trump threatened to end a civilization in Iran. While he hasn’t followed through yet on the threat, Israel appears to have no such compunctions in Gaza.
Mahmoud Darwish is one of the Palestinian cultural treasures. Fortunately, he is out of reach of current events. Fortunately, his poems cannot be destroyed by the most deadly weapons.
Please also consider the vital message that “a tyrant’s fear of songs” does make life worth living.
On This Earth By Mahmoud Darwish Translated by Munir Akash and Carolyn Forché
We have on this earth what makes life worth living: April’s hesitation, the aroma of bread at dawn, a woman’s point of view about men, the works of Aeschylus, the beginning of love, grass on a stone, mothers living on a flute’s sigh and the invaders’ fear of memories.
We have on this earth what makes life worth living: the final days of September, a woman keeping her apricots ripe after forty, the hour of sunlight in prison, a cloud reflecting a swarm of creatures, the peoples’ applause for those who face death with a smile, a tyrant’s fear of songs.
We have on this earth what makes life worth living: on this earth, the Lady of Earth, mother of all beginnings and ends. She was called Palestine. Her name later became Palestine. My Lady, because you are my Lady, I deserve life.
UFC Octagon being built in front of the White House for America 250
Most Americans remain outraged and demoralized daily by the administration of the nation. If you are one who has grappled with these and other emotions, please do try to be of good mind and spirit.
One other response is that those Americans are simply exhausted. As the expression goes, what fresh hell will today bring? Pictures of the UFC Octagon being built in front of the White House fit that thought.
More is to come, especially as we draw closer to July 4, planned as a peak moment to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. America 250 has already been and will become a distortion of the history and of the values it represents. Among other things, at that historic moment 250 years ago, enlightened and oppressed people believed they could do better than living under a tyrant who cared nothing about them and everything about power and enriching himself and his friends. Because that sounds so familiar today, too close to home, we won’t hear anything about it in the official America 250.
Which is why, late as it is (so many responses to Trump are late and ineffective), we need alternatives to the official America 250. For just one example, we are going to be asked to sing both The Star Spangled Banner (official national anthem) and Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the U.S.A. (unofficial national anthem). I can think of many other songs we should be singing together that tell the American story, and you can too. That’s just one example of an alternative possibility.
Think and talk about how 2026 can be turned into an accurate and positive celebration of America’s admittedly imperfect history—then do it. America began as a somewhat enlightened, somewhat self-serving attempt to throw off the chains of unenlightened rule. For the rest of this year, and for the rest of this administration, we will be facing powerful attempts to rewrite history. We have the power to correct that and to transcend the unenlightened. We have the power to pursue and create alternatives. Starting with America 250.
It is Memorial Day, not Veterans Day, but there are never enough days to celebrate the sacrifice of our veterans.
In July 2020, Senator Tammy Duckworth was asked whether George Washington’s owning slaves should lead to taking down his statues. She said this question deserved a national dialogue.
Trump’s campaign responded:
“After saying she was open to tearing down statues of George Washington, Tammy Duckworth is now using her military service to deflect from her support for the left-wing campaign to villainize America’s founding. If she can’t defend George Washington, our first Commander-in-Chief, those of us who still respect our Founding Fathers’ immense sacrifice and think America is worth fighting for will hold her accountable for cowering to the far-left fascists in the Democrat Party.”
Trump talking about “immense sacrifice”, especially with respect to Senator Duckworth or any others who have served and sacrificed, including the ultimate sacrifice, is beneath comment. For those not familiar with the military career and the public service of Senator Duckworth:
Senator Tammy Duckworth is an Iraq War Veteran, Purple Heart recipient and former Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs who was among the first handful of Army women to fly combat missions during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Duckworth served in the Reserve Forces for 23 years before retiring at the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in 2014. She was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2016 after representing Illinois’s Eighth Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives for two terms.
In 2004, Duckworth was deployed to Iraq as a Blackhawk helicopter pilot for the Illinois Army National Guard. On November 12, 2004, her helicopter was hit by an RPG and she lost her legs and partial use of her right arm. Senator Duckworth spent the next year recovering at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where she quickly became an advocate for her fellow Soldiers.
One doesn’t have to have served in the military to honor those who have. Officials pretending to be patriots while ignoring the plight of veterans is nothing new in America, though the current administration seems to have perfected the strategy.
Thanks to all those who served in the military and in war, whether currently in government, public service or civilian life. More than mere lip service, they deserve the best we as a people can provide, and also deserve our respect. Claiming that Senator Duckworth was “cowering to the far-left fascists in the Democrat Party”, or that Senator Mark Kelly, another combat veteran—and an astronaut!—should be tried for treason and hanged is not a sign of respect for veterans or for selfless sacrifice. From some quarters that don’t seem to understand sacrifice, such respect would be far too much to expect.
Bob Schwartz 