At Last

About forty years ago, I decided to go on my first century ride (100 miles on a bicycle). It was a major ride along Long Island’s south shore, and everyone would return on the train (the LIRR). Of course, I didn’t know what I was doing.

Maybe  200 people signed up for the ride, and my plan was to join some experienced riders I knew and ride at their pace. I did not know how to pace myself. I chose poorly, and at about the 60 mile mark, I found myself alone and exhausted. Somehow I struggled on to the end, dragged myself to the train and fell into a seat, completely exhausted, dehydrated, unable to move. 

At that point a much older experienced rider noticed me and brought me some bottled water and food from the club stores. He talked to me for a bit, made sure I would survive and went  back and sat down. I recognized him, at least to the extent that I knew he was a character actor I’d seen many times. I didn’t know his name, and I never saw him in person again. But this week I saw him on a really old TV show. His name was Murray Matheson. 

Changing Races

Times change. Today if someone is born with the genetic attributes of a male but realizes she is female, we understand and accept that. You are who you believe you are. But if a woman with white parents realizes she is a black person, we shun her. You can’t just change the social conventions we call racial categories, unless you move to a different country with different racial criteria. Or unless you are a black person who becomes white. 

The Dude and the Creamsicle

Seth Meyers has pointed out that The Dude (in THE BIG LEBOWSKY) and Minority President Trump have a lot in common.

Each has been photographed while wearing a robe.

They are fixated on their rugs.

Both men love White Russians. 

The CNN Panels

Jon Lovett talked about the typical CNN news panel (on CNN!), and I did not take notes. This is my faulty memory of what he said.

The usual CNN panel of talking news-heads consists of seven people. The first member is a smart but dowdy old journalist, a woman with sharp insights into which party has scored a small point. She will never say anything profound, but she might say something interesting. Sitting next to her is a moron. The third member is a venal party hack who has never uttered an honest word in his life or felt a genuine emotion, other than avarice.  The fourth is the moderator, a conventionally handsome man or pretty woman who is adept at contradiction. If someone on the panel says, "I am a Republican," the host or hostess will jump in with, "Are you really? Not according to a majority of real Republicans.You've seen the polls." (This is proof of aggressive journalist integrity.)

The fifth member of the panel is a drooling idiot in a bib. The sixth is some old guy who was a liberal congressman during the Presidency of Jimmy Carter, and the last member is a retired  Bloomberg writer, slumped in her chair, dead. 

explode, crash and burn.

Minority President Trump’s first plan was to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. That failed today. His announced backup plan is to let the ACA explode, crash and burn. 

North Korea has announced that it is building a missile large enough to carry a nuclear bomb to Portland. Trump plans to wait for it to explode, crash and burn.

The planet faces global warming, which can be handled, according to Trump EPA leadership, by watching the weather system explode, crash and burn. 

Also, if his favorite team, the New England Patriots, doesn’t win the Super Bowl, Trump will take his football and go home. 

Davin Nunes in Charge

As you may know, Davin Nunes (who represents my father's birthplace in the Big Valley) is a close ally of Speaker Paul Ryan and chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. He's in charge of investigating links between Russia and the Trump transition team. I'd like to explain why Nunes is the perfect person for the job.

1.   Nunes holds a degree in agriculture from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.  He knows how to grow red beets for borsch as well as any Russian. And he can speak Portuguese.

2.  Nunes famously said that "global warming is nonsense," proving his adherence to Republican science and to the needs of economies, like that of Russia, dependent on selling oil at more than $60 a barrel. This is a farmer who fearlessly names names. In his book he called environmentalists "followers of neo-Marxist, socialist, Maoist or Communist ideals." He did not intend this as faint praise.

3.   Nunes was a member of the Trump transition team and leads the committee investigating it.. No one knows more about the Trump team than Nunes.  On the house committee, he currently serves as witness, judge and recorder. Just ask yourself, who is more thoroughly prepared to investigate Nunes than the man himself? 

The Size of Ideas

When I was in graduate school, I had a friend who set out to write a novel about Nothing. This was many decades before Seinfeld's TV series. Anyway, I thought the idea was great in its way. I can't recall exactly how the novel began, but it was something like this. "Tom was afraid of Nothing. He understood that Nothing could hurt him. He had no allies. People who believed in Nothing were scarce, and most of them argued that Nothing was too good for him."   And so on. My friend's problem was that the idea was excellent for a short-short story, but it could not support a novel. We see something like that in Democratic politics, where proposing a very small raise in the minimum wage cannot support a winning campaign.

A Hurdles Race with Death

In a recent terrorist incident in France, a minor criminal and drug abuser apparently decided to commit suicide by attacking some soldiers guarding an airport. His last words were, "I'm here to die for Allah." As someone has written, there must be 3,000 gods humans have believed in, and this unfortunate man did not believe in 2,999 of them. He killed real people to demonstrate his commitment to a single imaginary spirit in the sky. He thought that that was a good idea. This man was almost an atheist, but he didn't clear the final hurdle. 

Baiting Our Rump-Spung Ruler

All of us develop patterns of behavior as children that we use from then on to cope with problems. I  suppose one thing that psychologists do is identify the childhood patterns that hold us back or do us harm as adults. 

It's become obvious that a major pattern our Minority President follows is to bluster, scream and rage in public on each small occasion someone criticizes him (or implies a minor  imperfection). That's his coping pattern. If we want to watch Trump throw a childish temper tantrum every single day for the next four years, someone has to press his button. That kind of robotic behavior is funny. But it's hard to laugh when the Republicans are trying to cut back on the food supplied to helpless seniors (while claiming that they do it to give the penniless seniors tax relief).