September 2018

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Pasternak wrote it all down

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"Bravery is contagious."

~ Patrick Leahy
   U.S. Senator from Vermont
   September 27, 2018

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------------------- [excerpt, Doctor Zhivago] -------- 

2

     They spent the night at the monastery, where Uncle Nikolai was given a room for old times' sake.  It was on the eve of the Feast of the Intercession of the Holy Virgin.  The next day they were supposed to travel south to a provincial town on the Volga where Uncle Nikolai worked for the publisher of the local progressive newspaper.  

They had bought their tickets and their things stood packed in the cell.  The station was near by, and they could hear the plaintive hooting of engines shunting in the distance.



     It grew very cold that evening.  The two windows of the cell were at ground level and looked out on a corner of the neglected kitchen garden, a stretch of the main road with frozen puddles on it, and the part of the churchyard where Maria Nikolaievna had been buried earlier in the day.  

There was nothing in the kitchen garden except acacia bushes around the walls and a few beds of cabbages, wrinkled and blue with cold.  With each blast of wind the leafless acacias danced as if possessed and then lay flat on the path.

     During the night the boy, Yura, was wakened by a knocking at the window.  The dark cell was mysteriously lit up by a flickering whiteness.  With nothing on but his shirt, he ran to the window and pressed his face against the cold glass.


     Outside there was no trace of the road, the graveyard, or the kitchen garden, nothing but the blizzard, the air smoking with snow.  It was almost as if the snowstorm had caught sight of Yura and, conscious of its power to terrify, roared and howled, doing everything possible to impress him.  

Turning over and over in the sky, length after length of whiteness unwound over the earth and shrouded it.  The blizzard was alone in the world; it had no rival.

_________________________________
{Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak.  Feltrinelli (first edition), Pantheon Books.  1957.}

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Can I Get a Witness

     Oop - bppp -- they blocked it.  I went to continue listening to Bob Woodward's new book on You Tube, and instead of the very talented narrator with the precise syllables, there was silence and a black rectangle with lettering in it saying this content "is blocked in your country."

     Blocked in my country.

     Hmmm -- I wonder which country I could travel to, to listen to that book free on You Tube...?

     So I had to pick listening to James McCord's testimony during the 1973 Watergate hearings.

     Mr. McCord has a speaking voice that's easy to listen to:  a gentle Southern accent -- from Oklahoma, maybe?  Or Missouri?  Sam Ervin, chairman of that committee, has another kind of Southern accent, so the sounds of the proceedings are kind of melodious.

     There are several spots in the testimony when a ripple of low-key laughter runs through the assembled listeners.  

A couple of times I knew what was funny, & other times I wasn't sure -- if not listening closely enough, and thinking of other things, and doing other things, at the same time... you need the exact context, maybe, to see what they are finding humorous.  

And part of it is, I think, that the people in the room were empathizing with James McCord -- he was a human being who had got himself into a dicey situation.

     He mentions the time when others involved in the Watergate burglary threatened him.  And he tells of being called at home and told to go to a phone booth on Route 355, by the Blue Fountain Inn, in Rockville, to receive a call. 

     One of the Watergate burglars was Eugenio Martinez.  During the McCord testimony, one of the committee members refers to Mr. Martinez, pronouncing it "Marta - nez" with the accent on the first syllable:

MAR - ta - nezz.

     Seems funny -- today, I think most Americans know to pronounce this surname 

Mar - TEEN - ezz,

with the accent on the second syllable.


     Back then, not everyone knew that.

_____________________________

On You Tube, type in

can I get a witness, the rolling stones

and play.

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no mere statement of innocence

     If we wrote a pilot and four-episode outline for a series called, Sex Pest at a Mid-Day Racist Séance, I wonder if HBO would pick it up.  or Netflix.

     Maybe plural:

Sex Pests at a Midday Racist Séance

No, singular is better.

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     Man, I can't believe it! -- Bob Woodward's book, Fear:  Trump in the White House, is on Audible, on You Tube!  You can listen to a guy read it to you, for free!

     Now, is the whole book on there?  I don't know, I only listened to the "Part 1" video and part of the "Part 2" video, so far.  Very informative.  I was amazed.  (Oh, FYI, after the book quoted from some conversations between Trump and Steve Bannon, the "F-word" is now officially completely worn out.  None of the rest of us can say the "F-word" anymore, because it's gone, there isn't any left, they used it all up....)

___________________________________

[excerpt, Fear:  Trump In The White House, by Bob Woodward.  Simon & Schuster.  September 11, 2018.]-------------------------

     Cohn and Porter worked together to derail what they believed were Trump's most impulsive and dangerous orders.  That document and others like it just disappeared.  When Trump had a draft on his desk to proofread, Cohn at times would just yank it, and the president would forget about it.  But if it was on his desk, he'd sign it.  "It's not what we did for the country," Cohn said privately.  "It's what we saved him from doing."

     It was no less than an administrative coup d'état, an undermining of the will of the president of the United States and his constitutional authority.

     In addition to coordinating policy decisions and schedules and running the paperwork for the president, Porter told an associate, "A third of my job was trying to react to some of the really dangerous ideas that he had and try to give him reasons to believe that maybe they weren't such good ideas."

     Another strategy was to delay, procrastinate, cite legal restrictions.  Lawyer Porter said, "But slow-walking things or not taking things up to him, or telling him -- rightly, not just as an excuse -- but this needs to be vetted, or we need to do more process on this, or we don't have legal counsel clearance -- that happened 10 times more frequently than taking papers from his desk.  It felt like we were walking along the edge of the cliff perpetually."

_______________________________

[excerpt, All The President's Men, by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward.  Simon & Schuster.  June 15, 1974] ----------------------------------

Woodward left the office about eight o'clock that Saturday night.  He knew he should have stayed later to track down James McCord.  He had not even checked the local telephone directory to see if there was a James McCord listed in Washington or its suburbs.

*       *       *

     The national staff of the Washington Post rarely covers police stories.  So, at Sussman's request, both Bernstein and Woodward returned to the office the next morning, a bright Sunday, June 18, to follow up.  An item moving on the Associated Press wire made it embarrassingly clear why McCord had deserved further checking.  According to campaign spending reports filed with the government, James McCord was the security coordinator of the Committee for the Re-election of the President (CRP).

     The two reporters stood in the middle of the newsroom and looked at each other.  What the hell do you think it means? Woodward asked.  Bernstein didn't know.

     In Los Angeles, John Mitchell,

the former U.S. Attorney General and the President's campaign manager, issued a statement:  "The person involved is the proprietor of a private security agency who was employed by our committee months ago to assist with the installation of our security system.  He has, as we understand it, a number of business clients and interests, and we have no knowledge of these relationships.  

We want to emphasize that this  man and the other people involved were not operating on either our behalf or with our consent.  There is no place in our campaign or in the electoral process for this type of activity, and we will not permit or condone it."

     In Washington, the Democratic national chairman, Lawrence F. O'Brien, said the break-in "raised the ugliest question about the integrity of the political process that I have encountered in a quarter-century of political activity.  No mere statement of innocence by Mr. Nixon's campaign manager, John Mitchell, will dispel these questions." -------------------- [end, excerpt]

_________________________________

You can hear (and see) McCord's testimony on You Tube:

Type in

Watergate hearings, James McCord.

It is riveting.

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sex pest at a mid-day racist séance

I had thought at first, on this cloudy day, that I would use as a title for today's post,

I don't mind a cloudy day.

But when I have a choice between

I don't mind a cloudy day

and

sex pest at a mid-day racist séance


...I have to go with -- Sex Pest At A Mid-day Racist Séance!


What can I say?

________________________________________


     All this bizarre and creepy news coming out of Washington with President Trump's Supreme Court nominee -- it's kind of distressing, and it makes you think.  What I thought about, part of the time, was all of the parties I was at, in high school and college, where stuff like that was not done.  

Not saying my high school was perfect, or Boston University was perfect, but -- I just never saw behavior like that, nor did I fear it.  Didn't occur to me that people might do things like that.



     The thought which comes to mind now is, this person --

(Brett Kavanaugh)

comes from a background of extraordinary ease and privilege, and I always -- and often mistakenly, it turns out -- assume a person brought up in that environment will be elegant, cultured, sophisticated.  (I guess, if you're rich I expect you to be --Jacqueline Kennedy.  No pressure, right?)

     An impression when I heard the first accusation was -- someone who comes from privilege, receiving what is supposed to be an excellent education at a private school, and he doesn't know -- no one has taught him -- how to be a gentleman, how to have social skills, how to talk to a girl.  (I mean, What-the-Hell?!)  Someone was not doing their job.

     I wondered, maybe when people have the luxuries of an easy life free of concerns about mere "survival" -- exciting, stimulating work if they want it, etc., etc.... and send their son to a private school, blah-blah-blah, etc....  I tried to imagine and said well, maybe -- the parents thought the school would teach him the basics -- Social-Skills-how-to-talk-to-girls-how-to-be-a-gentleman -- while at the same time the school people were believing that their students' parents are teaching all the Social-Skills-etc. at home.  

And in reality nobody is teaching these young men much of anything about the practical, everyday world of interactions.  It's like Mr. Kavanaugh and his weird friend Mark Judge "slipped through the cracks" as sociologists might say.

     It makes you wonder if they would have been better off in public school.  I mean, what are you paying for in an expensive private school if this is the result??!


     Alcohol is not an excuse, and the alleged behavior, if true, indicates a person with a disturbed mind, a lot of hostility, no moral compass and a basic cluelessness mixed together with an outsized sense of entitlement.  The opposite of the qualities a person should have to be any kind of judge anywhere, let alone be on the Supreme Court.

     But back to the origins of this weird behavioral issue -- Do people who are born to a life of ease and 

prestige, automatically conferred, 

sometimes simply fall down on doing the basics, because they're so accustomed to having other people do things for them?  Maybe no one taught this kid how to behave because they just assumed he'd turn out great.

----------------------I was done with this guy when I listened to him state that he has been "building a reputation for integrity and character."  Oh, for God's sake.

1.  "Integrity" and "character" are not words you can apply to yourself.  (Well, you "can," but it isn't good form.)  And for him to Not-Know this -- OK, we're back to clueless.  Tone deaf.  And --

2.  When you listen again to that simple sentence, he actually isn't even stating that he "has" integrity and character, he's saying he has been "building a reputation" -- in other words, Trying To Fool Everybody In Washington into believing that he has those attributes.  Dude.

     It goes back to basic social skills which many people who went to public school and work at regular jobs have.  What excuse does this guy have for not possessing Basic Social Skills??!  He appears to be a mediocre intellect, filled with arrogance who is where he is, not because of hard work, intelligence, vision, or even ambition, but because of who he was born to, and having everything handed to him.

     "Hey, Georgetown Prep!  Hey, Yale!  This is not an acceptable outcome!  Time to look at your whole program, and clean some house!"


     Supreme Court justice?  For life??

     I would not hire this person to move snow.

Done.

Next.

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