Kiev and Liev

A few years back I set out to locate the village from which my wife's father's family had emigrated. The story was that they had come from Teteeve in Russia. After much looking and a lot of luck I discovered Tetiev in Ukraine, an appropriately Jewish town, famous in a way for having been destroyed in a pogrom.

If Tetiev is pronounced "Teteeve", then (I reasoned) Kiev is pronounced "Keeve." Today this deduction was confirmed on television by various ambassadors to Ukraine.

Last night Stephen Colbert discussed with actor Liev Schreiber (of Ukrainian extraction) how to pronounce "Liev." The actor gave a two-syllable pronunciation, perhaps because he was born in California.

The Disaffected Versus the Democrats

In 2016 almost twice as many citizens did not vote at all as did vote for Hillary Clinton. In that sense the popular vote (or non-vote) was won by the disaffected by a margin of about 45 to 27. Ex-President tRump ran third and was installed in office by our electoral college.

We like to think of ourselves as a democracy.

Who are the disaffected? What do we know about the 45% of our citizenry that does not vote at all? Not much beyond some guesses. 

Maybe 5% of the population was too drunk or crazy to lurch to the polls. Another 5% was too ill, too old or too cold. 

The remaining 35% who did not vote probably believed (on one level or another) that our governance system has been so corrupted by grifters, corporations and billionaires that it cannot possibly represent ordinary people at all. Non-voters likely feel absolutely no connection to Washington. It's nothing to them.

If you have ever written or phoned your congressional representative and gotten back a canned letter from a computer, you probably understand why the disaffected outnumber the Democrats.

This has been going on for a long time. How do we get the disaffected non-voter interested in participating in an election?  Is it by nominating a centrist? Is that the key move that the disaffected have been waiting for? 

Harriet

At some level, probably very minor, there seems to be a fragmenting going on inside the American Black community. A Nigerian-made film with excellent reviews has been blocked from a foreign Academy Award nomination because it is in English (apparently a common language in Nigeria). A group has formed for people of color whose ancestors were enslaved--the group excludes people of color without an enslaved background. There have been complaints that Harriet Tubman (in the current movie HARRIET) was played by a British subject. My guess is that unity is what matters and will mostly prevail.

My wife and I saw HARRIET last night. I suppose it is a standard Hollywood biopic about an astounding life. The critics gave it a 72%. The audiences gave it a 97%.

We found the film moving, suspenseful and informative. It conveys the horror that was slavery and the spirit that fought it.  I understand better why Tubman should be on our currency--she set an impossibly high standard--and why Andrew Jackson should not. 

Too Hip

In the political left there are many claimants to the hipmost position. I'm unsure how to rate leftness. Where on the chart do you put anarchists?  To the left of social democrats? To the right or left of Marxists?  How would you rate a union business agent?

Terry Southern wrote a short story about a white guy so deeply into jazz that black musicians couldn't stand him: the man was too hip.

Thaddeus Stevens

In high school long ago, I learned that Thaddeus Stevens was one of America's worst political villains, a "Radical Republican," which meant, I think, that he was supposedly a vindictive winner of the Civil War, a man who wanted revenge against the white secessionists instead of a peaceful binding up of the unfortunate wounds. Translation: Stevens argued that black men should have the same rights as white men. So he was hated.

He told Congress, "If you and your compeers can fling away ambition and realize that every human being, no matter how lowly born or degraded by fortune, is your equal, that every inalienable right which belongs to you belongs also to him, truth and righteousness will spread over the land."

He would have understood Bernie Sanders.

Stevens died shortly after that speech in the house he shared with a free black woman. Many visitors tried to visit him on his death bed, but he admitted only two, both black preachers, and he thanked them for coming. 

Leaving Clothes at the Door

Mom always said to leave your clothes at the door--and for a good reason. Otherwise you risk damaging your chairs, couches, rugs, carpets and bedding by bringing in bacteria and toxins. 

Even if your shirts and pants look clean, they're probably coated with more debris than you realize. This can lead to additional dusting, mopping, washing, wiping and dry cleaning. 

If you want your couches, tables, countertops, beds, rugs and so forth to last,  you should contact them only with your own oily skin. Otherwise fibers may break down prematurely. 

Your clothes are expert at picking up microscopic toxins. And they linger. Things like motor oil, pesticides, antifreeze and e-coli  may be present in your shorts. Do the right thing. Leave your clothes at the door. 

Common Sense

The first Presidential impeachment trial in American history, that of Andrew Johnson, a white supremacist, raised familiar issues. 

The defenders of Johnson tried to claim that a President could be impeached only if he had committed a serious crime. That rejected claim is today being advanced by the grifters defending Gen. Heelspurs. They are arguing that, yes, Heelspurs behaved badly but what he did was legal.

Thaddeus Stevens,  a famously anti-racist member of congress, presented another view in the tenth article of  Johnson impeachment. Stevens argued that Johnson had disgraced the office of the President when he had made crude speeches and threatened members of congress. In an eleventh article Stevens charged Johnson with obstruction of justice etc.  At the time, Wendell Phillips wrote that “Impeachment is the refuge of the common sense of the nation” when dealing with someone unfit for the office.

Democracy

You can't have a genuine democracy in a town where one voter has ten billion dollars and another voter has nothing. Money is power.

Harry Reid

I've been too hard on Nancy Pelosi. I'll put it this way. She's not a leader, unless what you seek from a leader is half-a-loaf. But she is an effective organizer and vote counter. She's famous for explaining her method: it's someone like "You wait until you have enough votes and then you call for a vote." She's not FDR or even LBJ. She's ObamaCare rather than single payer. But a little something is better than nothing, sometimes. 

Harry Reid, now, he was a leader. He was the dude who realized that if Hillary became the Democratic candidate for President, the Republicans would win. So he recruited Barack Obama to run in the primaries.