In light of recent events, with a democratically unseated yet demonstratively truculent outgoing POTUS showing a certain…reluctance to abdicate his throne, sending his Secretary of State on a “farewell tour” to gaslight the Earth for the “benefit” of the incoming POTUS, I thought it might be fun to revisit a post I wrote the day before Trump’s inauguration and ponder the Reagan-coined legacy question: “Are you better off than you were 4 years ago?”
…this is no dream, this is really happening, isn’t it? I feel safe. You?
“Ignorance is king. Many would not profit by his abdication. Many enrich themselves by means of his dark monarchy. They are his Court, and in his name they defraud and govern, enrich themselves and perpetuate their power. Even literacy they fear, for the written word is another channel of communication that might cause their enemies to become united. Their weapons are keen-honed, and they use them with skill. They will press the battle upon the world when their interests are threatened, and the violence which follows will last until the structure of society as it now exists is leveled to rubble, and a new society emerges. I am sorry. But that is how I see it.” – From the novel A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
President Donald Trump meets with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, left, next to Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergei Kislyak at the White House on May 10, 2017. Russian Foreign Ministry Photo / AP
When David Priess was a CIA officer, he traveled to Houston, he recalls, to brief former President George H.W. Bush on classified developments in the Middle East.
It was part of a long tradition of former presidents being consulted about, and granted access to, some of the nation’s secrets.
Priess and other former intelligence officials say Joe Biden would be wise not to let that tradition continue in the case of Donald Trump.
They argue soon-to-be-former President Trump already poses a danger because of the secrets he currently possesses, and they say it would be foolish to trust him with more sensitive information. With Trump’s real estate empire under financial pressure and his brand suffering, they worry he will see American secrets as a profit center.
“This is not something that one could have ever imagined with other presidents, but it’s easy to imagine with this one,” said Jack Goldsmith, who worked as a senior Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration.
“He’s shown as president that he doesn’t take secret-keeping terribly seriously,” Goldsmith said in an interview. “He has a known tendency to disrespect rules related to national security. And he has a known tendency to like to sell things that are valuable to him.”
The president also may be vulnerable to foreign influence. His tax records, as reported by the New York Times, reveal that Trump appears to face financial challenges, having personally guaranteed more than $400 million of his companies’ debt at a time when the pandemic has put pressure on the hotel industry, in which Trump is a major player.
“Is that a risk?” said Priess, who wrote “The President’s Book of Secrets,” about presidents and intelligence. “If it were someone applying for a security clearance, damn right it would be a risk.”
The White House did not respond to requests for comment. The Biden transition declined to comment.
Trump has said his finances are sound, and that the debts are a small percentage of his assets. Generally, though, large debts to foreign banks — Trump’s biggest creditor is reported to be Deutsche Bank, a German institution with links to Russia — would exclude a person from a top secret clearance.
Presidents, however, are not investigated and polygraphed for security clearances as all other government officials are. By virtue of being elected, they assume control over all the nation’s secret intelligence, and are allowed by law to disclose any of it, at any time, to anyone.
Former presidents aren’t subject to security clearance investigations, either. They are provided access to secrets as a courtesy, with the permission of the current president.
Typically, former presidents are given briefings before they travel overseas, or in connection with an issue about which the current president wishes to consult them, Priess and other experts say.
When President Bill Clinton sent former president Jimmy Carter to diffuse a tense stand off in Haiti, for example, Carter likely received classified briefings on the situation ahead of his trip.
And when George H.W. Bush visited his son in the White House, he sat in on on the President’s Daily Brief, the highly classified compendium of secrets that is presented each morning to the occupant of the Oval Office, according to Priess, who interviewed both men for his book.
Former presidents have long made money after leaving office by writing books and giving speeches, but no former president has ever had the kind of international business entanglements Trump does. Trump has business interests or connections in China, Russia and other U.S. adversary countries that covet even tiny portions of what he knows about the American national security state.
That said, Trump probably is not conversant with many highly classified details, experts say, He was famous for paying only intermittent attention during his intelligence briefings and declining to read his written materials. Moreover, intelligence officials tend not to share specifics about sources and methods with any president, unless he asks.
So Trump probably doesn’t know the names of the CIA’s spies in Russia, experts say. But presumably he knows a bit about the capabilities of American surveillance drones, for example, or how adept the National Security Agency has been at intercepting the communications of various foreign governments.
A vengeful, demented ex-president who desperately needs money. What could go wrong?
The Donald thought he was Inigo Montoya still trying to win with an electoral knife stuck in him. Donald Trump Jr. went to Atlanta for a Nov. 5 “Stop the Steal” rally and told the crowd daddy would “fight each and every one of these battles to the death.”
From the golf course.
“Everyone knows that we won the state,” the outgoing president tweeted a week later.
For all the Republican pre-election hype about cities burning across the country and breakdown of law and order, Slate’s William Saletan sees anarchists as a threat all right, just not the ones Trump means:
The new anarchists pretend to support law enforcement. But when the law doesn’t go their way, they threaten violence. “Victory or death!” the crowd in Atlanta chanted. One speaker at the rally vowed to “fight for Donald Trump until our last dying breath.” Another warned, “If they seat an illegitimate government, we’ll remove them.” A third said Trump would stay in power because “the Deep State doesn’t have the military on their side.” When police asked the rally’s leaders to finish up and end the event—after letting them rant for two hours without a permit—a speaker shouted at the cops: “We backed the blue. Thank you for nothing!”
God bless the U.S.A. Until you lose.
Trump has been setting up excuses for losing and insiders to help him rig the elections since the beginning of the year. He continues to claim his loss is all a massive heist in every swing state he lost and attempted to get ballots thrown out anywhere it might help him. Screw other Republicans candidates whose votes got thrown out with them.
These insurrectionists—not antifa or Black Lives Matter, which the right accuses of destroying the country—are the new threat to America. They’re talking about tearing down our democracy, with emphatic support from the president and his allies. Trump made that support clear after the Atlanta rally, by endorsing it and posting a link to the livestream. “Big Rallies all over the Country,” he tweeted. “This was a LANDSLIDE!”
I don’t have that much hope Democrats will secure both those Georgia Senate seats, but it would be a terrific late Christmas present for those of us not in the cult. Not that it would quiet the insurrectionists. They’ve already shown how bogus their pretensions are to faith in this system. They will not give up. They have to be defeated.
How black is your Friday? Honestly, I expected this morning to see more stories about nutty Americans risking their lives and duking it out in stores in a deepening pandemic for PlayStations and Xboxs. The world already thinks we’re nuts.
There are a few campers waiting in lines, just not the ones who traveled and can’t bring the stuff home on a plane or in a car already filled with family.
Black Friday has moved online more than in the past, making one wonder if Cyber Monday will be a bust. Crowds in stores this Black Friday will just mean Christmas will be blacker.
Maybe having lost a friend or relative to the virus has given a few Americans pause. A financial planner tells me, given his retiree clientele, that he has seen a half dozen die this year. A half dozen of my friends have had COVID-19 and survived. A cousin and her husband in the Midwest are home in bed with it now.
Our Franciscan* pope tells New York Times readers he nearly died at 21 while training for the priesthood in Buenos Aires. Doctors removed the upper right lobe of one of his lungs months after his admission to the hospital. He has some sense of what patients go through struggling to breathe. Quick work by two of his nurses kept him alive to have that later surgery.
This theme of helping others has stayed with me these past months. In lockdown I’ve often gone in prayer to those who sought all means to save the lives of others. So many of the nurses, doctors and caregivers paid that price of love, together with priests, and religious and ordinary people whose vocations were service. We return their love by grieving for them and honoring them.
Whether or not they were conscious of it, their choice testified to a belief: that it is better to live a shorter life serving others than a longer one resisting that call. That’s why, in many countries, people stood at their windows or on their doorsteps to applaud them in gratitude and awe. They are the saints next door, who have awakened something important in our hearts, making credible once more what we desire to instill by our preaching.
They are the antibodies to the virus of indifference. They remind us that our lives are a gift and we grow by giving of ourselves, not preserving ourselves but losing ourselves in service.
Francis shakes his head at notions of personal freedom Americans have elevated to “a prism through which they judge everything.” It puts their immediate needs above others’.
This is a moment to dream big, to rethink our priorities — what we value, what we want, what we seek — and to commit to act in our daily life on what we have dreamed of.
God asks us to dare to create something new. We cannot return to the false securities of the political and economic systems we had before the crisis. We need economies that give to all access to the fruits of creation, to the basic needs of life: to land, lodging and labor. We need a politics that can integrate and dialogue with the poor, the excluded and the vulnerable, that gives people a say in the decisions that affect their lives. We need to slow down, take stock and design better ways of living together on this earth.
Perhaps President-elect Joe Biden and his team are listening. My faith in his political adversaries in Congress, however, is an empty cup.
The pandemic has exposed the paradox that while we are more connected, we are also more divided. Feverish consumerism breaks the bonds of belonging. It causes us to focus on our self-preservation and makes us anxious. Our fears are exacerbated and exploited by a certain kind of populist politics that seeks power over society. It is hard to build a culture of encounter, in which we meet as people with a shared dignity, within a throwaway culture that regards the well-being of the elderly, the unemployed, the disabled and the unborn as peripheral to our own well-being.
To come out of this crisis better, we have to recover the knowledge that as a people we have a shared destination. The pandemic has reminded us that no one is saved alone. What ties us to one another is what we commonly call solidarity. Solidarity is more than acts of generosity, important as they are; it is the call to embrace the reality that we are bound by bonds of reciprocity. On this solid foundation we can build a better, different, human future.
Ours is not a culture of encounter but of confrontation. Shared destination? Solidarity? Sounds like communism to anxious Americans so focused on self-preservation and personal freedom that they cannot even preserve themselves or their own families.
Even some who have come through COVID seem not to have had the Aha moment of gratitude Francis retains. The vaccines cannot get here soon enough. This culture does not have the right stuff to save itself through mutual concern and prudence. Not when there are PlayStations and Xboxs on sale.
To tackle this topic, Pew Research Center conducted two separate surveys in late 2017. The first included an open-ended question asking Americans to describe in their own words what makes their lives feel meaningful, fulfilling or satisfying. This approach gives respondents an opportunity to describe the myriad things they find meaningful, from careers, faith and family, to hobbies, pets, travel, music and being outdoors.
The second survey included a set of closed-ended (also known as forced-choice) questions asking Americans to rate how much meaning and fulfillment they draw from each of 15 possible sources identified by the research team. It also included a question asking which of these sources gives respondents the most meaning and fulfillment. This approach offers a limited series of options but provides a measure of the relative importance Americans place on various sources of meaning in their lives.
Across both surveys, the most popular answer is clear and consistent: Americans are most likely to mention family when asked what makes life meaningful in the open-ended question, and they are most likely to report that they find “a great deal” of meaning in spending time with family in the closed-ended question.
But after family, Americans mention a plethora of sources (in the open-ended question) from which they derive meaning and satisfaction: One-third bring up their career or job, nearly a quarter mention finances or money, and one-in-five cite their religious faith, friendships, or various hobbies and activities. Additional topics that are commonly mentioned include being in good health, living in a nice place, creative activities and learning or education. Many other topics also arose in the open-ended question, such as doing good and belonging to a group or community, but these were not as common.
In the closed-ended question, the most commonly cited sources that provide Americans with “a great deal” of meaning and fulfillment (after family) include being outdoors, spending time with friends, caring for pets and listening to music. By this measure, religious faith ranks lower, on par with reading and careers. But among those who do find a great deal of meaning in their religious faith, more than half say it is the single most important source of meaning in their lives. Overall, 20% of Americans say religion is the most meaningful aspect of their lives, second only to the share who say this about family (40%).
People in a wide variety of social and demographic subgroups mention family as a key source of meaning and fulfillment. But there are some patterns in the sources of meaning that Americans cite, depending on their religion, socioeconomic status, race, politics and other factors.
This is a couple of years old and I wonder what might have changed since then. I would guess health would rate higher at the moment. And, needless to say, doomscrolling, worshipping Donald Trump and conspiracy theorizing would show up as being extremely satisfying for certain factions today.
Still, I would guess that the top rated satisfaction would remain the same: family. I am heartbroken for the relatives of the 260,000 people who died from COVID in the last 8 months and all the losses that are to come. It’s just such a tragedy.
President Donald Trump’s demonization of mail-in voting may have cost him votes in the recent election. Now, his demonization of Georgia’s entire electoral system is hurting his party’s chances at keeping the Senate.
Driven by Trump’s insistence that Georgia’s elections are indelibly rife with fraud, conspiratorial MAGA figures are calling for a boycott of the two Senate runoff races, slated for Jan. 5, that will determine which party controls the upper chamber.
Their reason: The two GOP candidates, Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, are not only insufficiently pro-Trump, they may be complicit in Georgia’s electoral fraud.
It doesn’t matter that both candidates are essentially lock-step with Trump, or that there is no evidence of links to electoral malfeasance. On Twitter and its less-restrictive alternative Parler, Trump’s more hardline followers have linked the duo to the president’s favorite — and untrue — voter-fraud theories. Hashtags like #CrookedPerdue and #CrookedKelly are flying around. The two lawmakers’ Parler accounts are brimming with posts accusing them of being secret “liberal DemoRats.”
The swelling anger is not just emanating from everyday QAnon believers in the MAGAverse. It’s also coming from prominent lawyers working on Trump’s behalf, including Sidney Powell, who was briefly a lead attorney in Trump’s push to overturn the election.
The growing chorus has caught the attention of some of Trump’s top surrogates, who have scrambled to push back against the movement. “I’m seeing a lot of talk from people that are supposed to be on our side telling GOP voters not to go out & vote for @KLoeffler and @Perduesenate. That is NONSENSE. IGNORE those people,” implored Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son and typically a MAGA world leader, in a Monday tweet.
The top comments below the tweet disregarded the plea: “We’re telling everyone to write in Donald J Trump!” one read.
The tensions symbolize the broader fights likely to erupt as Trump’s presidency dwindles. Trump was always an insurgent figure who grafted his loyal base onto the GOP. Once Trump is no longer the top elected Republican, that base may simply follow him wherever he goes — attacking anyone who shows daylight with Trump, spinning up “evidence” for Trump’s preferred conspiracies and, as in Georgia, boycotting the political system as punishment for betraying their leader.
And while it’s hard to tell exactly how much of the online chatter reflects wider voter sentiment, some Republicans are worried the conspiracy talk could shave off just enough MAGA voters to hand a tight race to the Democrats.
“Whenever you have a close election, any distraction can be decisive, and by all accounts, the runoffs in Georgia are going to be close, just like they were in November,” said Alex Conant, a political strategist and the former communications director for Sen. Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign in 2016. “I think Republicans need to focus the runoffs squarely on stopping Joe Biden’s agenda. If it’s about Trump and conspiracy theories, that only divides our party and emboldens Democrats.”
[…]
Powell, Trump’s erstwhile attorney, turned parts of the MAGA community against Loeffler when she started pushing an untrue allegation that Loeffler had somehow conspired with a voting technology company, Dominion Voting Systems, to suppress votes for Collins.
The QAnon-leaning MAGA community has long looked to Powell as a leading authority on such deep state plots against Trump’s supporters, especially after she took over as Michael Flynn’s attorney. The one-time Trump national security adviser had pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, but Powell came in and started alleging the authorities had actually duped and coerced him, a narrative that played well to Trump’s base. Trump on Wednesday formally pardoned Flynn after months of speculation.
And Powell isn’t the only Trump-affiliated attorney demeaning Loeffler and Purdue to the MAGA crowd.
Lin Wood, a prominent Georgia attorney who filed his own suit to overturn the state’s results, has repeatedly called for Loeffler to drop out of the race, pressed Perdue to show more Trump loyalty and for them both to begin “investigations” into the election.
“Threaten to withhold your votes & money,” he directed his followers on Twitter.
Wood seems to hold a special ire for Loeffler, tweeting about unrealistic scenarios in which she could be replaced by Collins and threatening to turn his “patriots” against her.
[…]
It might seem counterintuitive that QAnon adherents, a group of pro-Trump diehards, would actively try to damage his Republican allies. Yet the Q mythology has little to do with the fortunes of Loeffler and Perdue, much less the Republican Party. At its core, it’s a theory that Trump is the sole savior from a cabal of satan-worshipping, pedophiliac Washington elites.
“It’s really hard to put aside that worldview, even for just a couple months, to get behind a conventional election,” said Mike Rothschild, a writer and researcher on conspiracy theories who is working on a book about QAnon.
“When you’ve been spending years thinking all elections are rigged, the deep state controls everything, nothing you do matters and the only way to stop it is for Donald Trump to win every state, be president for life and destroy his enemies — you’re so caught up in believing this radically enormous thing, that you miss the very small thing right in front of you,” he said.
Even endorsements for the senators from popular QAnon figures, such as Congresswoman-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene, wouldn’t be enough, Rothschild noted.
And the pleas from people like Trump Jr. have done little to stop the disagreements.
“Some leaders in GA & National GOP complain I am hurting chances of @KLoeffler &@sendavidperdue to win runoff & save Senate control,” Wood tweeted on Wednesday to his 613,000 followers. “They are ones hurting those chances by failing to publicly demand investigation of fraud & special session of legislature. Look in mirror.”
The MAGA conspiracy theorists are turning on the RINOs. Who could have predicted?
Perdue is telling people that the anti-Trump suburbanites will come out to vote for him and that might be true. But he needs the QAnon people too. Appeasing both isn’t going to be easy.
I honestly don’t know if this is a real problem. The odds are that the two Republicans will win simply because Perdue and the combo of Loeffler/Collins got more votes in November. But the stakes are so high for the Democrats and the MAGA crowd is so nuts that you just don’t know. And who knows where we’ll be with the pandemic on January 5th? (I shudder to even speculate …)
Trump is the one who has poisoned his people about the voting system. And he doesn’t give a damn about Mitch McConnell’s majority unless he’s the president. So, I wouldn’t count on him stepping in to calm those waters. He might. But I suspect he’ll exact a price and I can’t imagine what it will be.
By the way, Sidney Powell “released the kraken” on Wednesday and as one might expect, it was a dumpster fire.
These are the first lines of Sidney Powell's "kraken" lawsuit that Trump supporters have been claiming would save his presidency, not looking great. The rest is just rehashed witness affidavits, including one that claims the ballot paper was suspiciously clean. pic.twitter.com/oihuMeZeig
I thought you might be searching madly for a “Thanksgiving movie” to stream tonight. Well, as Dennis Hartley has found over the years, they are few and far between. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t some excellent holiday appropriate flicks out there. Here’s one from Dennis a few years back:
I don’t know if it’s worth $5…but it’s pretty fuckin’ good!
I was originally going to do a post this week about my “top 10 Thanksgiving movies”, but after pondering it for a spell, all I could come up with was The House of Yes, Hannah and Her Sisters, The Ice Storm , Planes, Trains and Automobilesand Alice’s Restaurant. After that, I had nuthin’ (A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving ?But that’s TV.) Oh, I suppose there are many more titles out there (wasn’t there like, a Walton family Thanksgiving thingie?) but apparently they would not be among my favorites. One theme that I can more easily relate to, however, is movies about food (or that feature at least one memorable eating scene). Everyone’s gotta eat, right? So, chew on these (presented, as per usual, alphabetically-and not in order of preference).
Big Night-This is one DVD that I have repeatedly foisted on friends and relatives, because after all, it’s important to “…take a bite out of the ass of life!” (as one of the film’s characters points out with great veracity). Two brothers, one an enterprising businessman named Secondo (Stanley Tucci, who also co-wrote and co-directed) and his older sibling Primo (Tony Shalhoub), a gifted chef, open an Italian restaurant but quickly run into financial trouble. Possible salvation arrives via a dubious proposal from a more successful competitor (played with much aplomb by Ian Holm). The fate of their business hinges on Primo’s ability to conjure up the ultimate feast. And oh, what a meal he prepares-especially the timpano (you’d better have some pasta and ragu handy-or your appestat will be writing checks that your duodenum will not be able to cash, if you know what I’m sayin’). The wonderful cast includes Isabella Rossellini, Minnie Driver, Liev Schreiber, Allison Janney, and Campbell Scott (who co-directed with Tucci). Look for a mute Marc Anthony (the Latin pop superstar) lurking throughout as the kitchen assistant.
Comfort and Joy-Another delightful, quirky trifle from Scottish writer-director Bill Forsyth (Local Hero, Gregory’s Girl). An amiable Glasgow radio personality (Bill Paterson) gets unceremoniously dumped by his girlfriend on Christmas Eve, which throws him into an existential crisis, causing him to take a sudden and urgent inventory of his personal and professional life. Soon after lamenting to his GM that he wants to do something more “important” than his chirpy morning show, serendipity drops him into the middle a of a potentially hot investigative journalism story-an escalating war between two local rival ice-cream dairies. Chock full of Forsyth’s patented low-key anarchy and extremely dry one-liners. As a former morning DJ, I can tell you that the scenes depicting “Dickie Bird” doing his show are very authentic, which is rare on the screen. One caveat: It could take several days to get that ice cream van’s loopy theme music out of your head.
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover-A gamey, visceral and perversely piss-elegant fable about food, as it relates to love, sex, violence, revenge, and uh, Thatcherism from writer-director Peter Greenaway (who I like to refer to as “the thinking person’s Ken Russell”). Michael Gambon really chews up the scenery (figuratively and literally) as a vile and vituperative British underworld type who holds nightly court at his “front” business, a gourmet restaurant. When his bored trophy wife (Helen Mirren) becomes attracted to one of the regular diners, a quiet and unassuming bookish fellow, the wheels are set in motion for quite a twisty tale, culminating in one of the most memorable scenes of “just desserts” ever served up on film. The opulent set design and cinematographer Sacha Vierny’s extraordinary use of color combine to lend a rich Jacobean texture to the proceedings. Look for the late great pub rocker Ian Dury as one of Gambon’s associates.
Delicatessen-This film is so…French. A seriocomic vision of a food-scarce, dystopian future society along the lines of Soylent Green, directed with great verve and trademark surrealist touches by co-directors Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro (The City of Lost Children). The pair’s favorite leading man, Dominique Pinon (sort of a sawed-off Robin Williams) plays a circus performer who moves into an apartment building with a butcher shop downstairs. The shop’s proprietor seems to be appraising the new tenant with, shall we say, a “professional” eye? In Jeunet and Caro’s bizarro world, it’s all par for the course (just wait ‘til you get a load of the vegan “troglodytes” who live underneath the city streets). One particular sequence, involving a wildly funny, imaginatively staged sex scene, stands on its own as a veritable master class in the arts of film and sound editing.
Diner-This wondrous, episodic slice-of-life dramedy marked writer-director Barry Levinson’s first feature film back in 1982, and it remains his best, IMHO. A small group of twenty-something buddies converge for Christmas week in 1959 Baltimore. One is recently married, another is about to get hitched, and the others are still playing the field and deciding what to do with the rest of their life. They are all slogging fitfully toward that last, “no turning back” portal to adulthood. The most entertaining scenes take place at the group’s favorite meeting place, a local diner, where the comfort food of choice is French fries with gravy (mmm…French fries with gravy). Levinson has a great gift for writing dialog, and it’s all the little details that make the difference here; like a cranky appliance store customer who refuses to upgrade to color TV because he saw Bonanza at a friend’s house, and decided that “…the Ponderosa looked fake”. This film was more influential than it gets credit for; Tarantino owes a debt of gratitude (see below) as well as the creators of TV’s Seinfeld. It also helped launch film careers for Kevin Bacon, Mickey Rourke, Ellen Barkin, Daniel Stern, Timothy Daly, Steve Guttenberg and Paul Reiser.
Eat Drink Man Woman-Or as I once dubbed it: “I Never Stir-Fried for My Father”. This was director Ang Lee’s more substantive follow-up to his enjoyable, but relatively fluffy crowd-pleaser The Wedding Banquet (another good food flick). (another good food flick). Lee treads on Wayne Wang territory in this beautifully acted dramedy about the clash of traditional vs. modern values within Chinese culture. An aging master chef, who is losing his sense of taste (ah, savor the irony) stringently follows a tradition of preparing an elaborate feast every Sunday, which his three grown (and single) daughters are required to attend. Dysfunctional family angst ensues around these mandatory gatherings, as you might expect. As the story unfolds, Lee reveals the bittersweet truths and universality of family dynamics, which transcends culture and geography. Only caveat: An hour after you watch it, you’ll be hungry for a second feature (I’m KIDDING). You know I’m a kidder.
My Dinner with Andre– Boy, this one is a tough sell to the uninitiated. “An entire film that nearly all takes place at one restaurant table, with two self-absorbed New York intellectuals pontificating the whole time- ‘yak, yak, yak, yak’? This is entertaining?!” Actually, um, yes-it is. Quite surprisingly so. The late great director Louis Malle took a bold artistic gamble with this movie that pays off in spades. Although essentially a work of “fiction”, Malle’s two stars, theatre director Andre Gregory and actor-playwright Wallace Shawn are playing themselves (the pair collaborated on the screenplay). A rumination on art, life, love, the universe and everything, the film is not so much about the food itself, but more of a love letter to the lost art of erudite dinner conversation.
Pulp Fiction-Although the universal popularity of this Quentin Tarantino opus is largely owed to its hyper-stylized mayhem and the ultra-hip, creatively salty iambic pentameter spouted by the characters, I have always felt it to be a closer cousin to Diner than to, say, The Asphalt Jungle(I know that sounds crazy, but hear me out). Think about it: The film’s crucial opening and closing scenes take place in a diner, with characters conducting animated, eclectic conversations over plates of food. In Mia and Vincent’s protracted sequence at the theme restaurant, the camera gives us fetishistic close-ups of their decidedly all-American eats (“Douglas Sirk steak. And a vanilla coke.”). There’s that classic exchange between Vincent and Jules regarding “Le” Big Macs in France, Jules’ voracious hijacking of poor hapless Brett’s “Big Kahuna” burger, and Fabienne pining wistfully about her longing for blueberry pancakes. Even the super efficient Mr. Wolfe takes a few seconds out of his precisely mapped schedule to reflect on the pleasures of a fresh-brewed cup of coffee. I think this definitely qualifies as a food flick!
Tampopo-Self billed as “The first Japanese noodle western”, this 1987 entry from writer-director Juzo Itami (A Taxing Woman) is all that and more. Nobuko Niyamoto is superb as the title character, a widow who has inherited her late husband’s noodle house. Despite her hard work and sincere effort to please customers, Tampopo struggles to keep the business afloat, until a deux ex machina arrives-a truck driver named Goro (Tsutomo Yamazaki). After one taste, Goro pinpoints the problem-her noodles are bland (in his personal “code of the east”, bland noodles are an aesthetic crime). No worries-like the magnanimous gunslinger of the old west, Goro decides to take Tampopo on as a personal project, and mentor her on the Zen of creating the perfect noodle bowl. A true delight from start to finish, offering keen insight on the relationship between food, sex and love.
Tom JonesTruly, doth I really need to explain? Good sirs and madams, I prithee, just watch this morsel…and enjoy:
Foreign observers are watching with trepidation — and at times disbelief — as coronavirus cases surge across the United States, and masses of Americans are choosing to follow through with plans to visit family and friends for this week’s Thanksgiving holiday anyway.
It’s been a grueling year. Many have gone months without seeing their loved ones. Thanksgiving travel is down and many families are opting against their usual festivities. But as the pandemic drags on, with shorter days and chillier weather forcing more people indoors, the social isolation is becoming more difficult to bear.
Decisions over whether to gather have turned divisive, as experts warn that Thanksgiving includes the key ingredients — a shared, indoor meal and inter-household mixing — that could spark an even worse surge in cases in the coming weeks.
It’s a scenario that officials in other countries are trying to avert ahead of other upcoming holidays, such as Christmas and New Year’s.
“From Australia, this looks like a mindbogglingly dangerous chapter in the out-of-control American COVID-19 story,” Ian Mackay, an associate professor of virology at the University of Queensland, wrote in an email. “Sadly, for some, this will be a Thanksgiving that is remembered for all the wrong reasons.”
Australia has returned to a large degree of normality in recent weeks, with mass sporting events and even the iconic Sydney Opera House reopening.
Mackay compared large numbers of Americans traveling for Thanksgiving to China’s Lunar New Year celebrations in early 2020 that inadvertently helped spread the virus at a crucial early stage. In some ways, this might be worse.AD
“This time we all know where the virus is, we know how bad it can be, and we can be sure that this event will cause more sickness and some deaths,” Mackay said. The virus “will thrive among all the chances to trigger superspreading events among households and larger gatherings and parties. This is its way.”
Yap Boum, a Cameroonian epidemiologist and regional representative for Epicenter Africa, the research arm of Doctors Without Borders, said the willingness of some Americans to risk their and their family’s health to gather for a single day has left him befuddled.
“From my perspective, I found it really crazy,” he said of large numbers of Americans choosing to travel for Thanksgiving. “On one hand, you see the people dying, on the other hand … you see that the vaccine is close. Why can’t you wait despite, of course … the mental challenge?”
International news outlets and foreign journalists are covering Thanksgiving travel in the United States extensively, with a mixture of concern, bewilderment and schadenfreude.
“No nation suffers as much from corona as America — and yet in a few days a large part of the population here will meet to celebrate,” a U.S. correspondent for Germany’s Die Welt newspaper wrote this week.
“Like mask-wearing, Thanksgiving has become another front in the country’s partisan left- and right-wing culture wars,” the Sydney Morning Herald observed.
Noting that many people were still planning to travel by air this week, London-based journalist James Ball tweeted that the United States was in “absolutely deadly, delusional denial about Coronavirus.”
“It goes well, well beyond Trump,” added Ball, who works as an editor at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.AD
Many outlets focused on signs of economic turmoil in the United States, with Italian newspaper il Fatto Quotidiano running photos of long lines of cars at food banks under the headline “hungry at Thanksgiving.”
But some Europeans also compared the situation to their own governments’ pushes to partially reopen around Christmas, the most important celebration of the year in much of Europe, where cases have also surged this fall.
“America is bracing for danger this week,” Jennifer Beam Dowd, deputy director of the University of Oxford’s Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science, wrote on Twitter on Saturday. “Here we have time to encourage safe Christmas alternatives rather than family Russian roulette,” she added.
France has been in a strict lockdown since late October, but officials announced this week that restrictions will be slowly lifted ahead of Christmas and people will be allowed to travel and gather for the holiday — as long as cases remain below a certain threshold.
“But I call upon your sense of responsibility,” French President Emmanuel Macron said this week. “This will certainly not be a Christmas like the others.”
Germany is also in partial lockdown, with a draft proposal suggesting loosened restrictions around Christmas. England is set to lift its lockdown early next month, with the next set of restrictions implemented by region.
David Heymann, an American professor of infectious disease at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said that European officials trying to manage Christmas gatherings will probably determine their holiday restrictions before they can glean many lessons from what happens in the United States in the weeks after Thanksgiving.
“By the time you see the impact of Thanksgiving, it will be three weeks later, very close to Christmas and people will already have plans made,” he said.AD
Canadian Thanksgiving is celebrated in mid-October, and officials documented an increase in cases after some opted for indoor gatherings that day.
Amrit Boese, a research biologist who worked extensively on coronavirus research at the Public Health Agency of Canada, said she would now urge Americans to see that as a cautionary tale — and rethink any plans to gather.
“Don’t visit people from outside your household,” she said. “Don’t have people over. Just stay home.”
Beyond the risk of catching coronavirus, she said, people should consider that when hospitals are more overwhelmed, the experience of falling seriously ill also becomes even more lonely and isolating.
“Is it worth it knowing you may give something to your parents or grandparents?” she pondered. “Let’s say they end up in a hospital in an ICU. If it’s overcapacity or at capacity, you’re not going to get the kind of care you’d get if it wasn’t in that situation. Plus people can’t visit you.”
“The loneliness of that part of it is something that I would consider,” she said.
Boum said he sees the problem as a complex web of individual choices and broader U.S. failures to unite citizens behind one common message about the dangers of the virus.
“That’s the challenge of freedom. People have the freedom of choice and everyone considers that he can decide for himself,” Boum said. “But what people forget is your freedom stops where someone else’s freedom is starting. … We are not free to harm other people who are more vulnerable.”
I hate being a scold about this and I know that “shaming” is the worst thing you can do. I get why people are so desperate to see relatives or blow off some steam on vacation. I feel it too. But I just had a very close relative die and I’m not in the mood to indulge the idea that health care workers should be worked to death and thousands of people should die because we’re all going stir crazy — especially since there is a vaccine on the way. We can have Thanksgiving in July! Christmas in August! We can travel to see our relatives for no reason at all very soon!
I dunno. I guess I’m being misanthropic on what’s supposed to be a day of thanks. And I am thankful for many things, not the least of which is that I’ve been able to avoid getting this thing because I’m lucky enough that I don’t have to go out into the world everyday like the people who work in grocery stores and hospitals and other essential businesses and potentially expose themselves and their loved ones to this thing because they have no choice. And I am very thankful that I’m not a restaurant or bar or any other small business owner who the federal government has abandoned because of … I don’t know, the idea that this pandemic is some kind of political game. I despair for their recovery. I just hope it’s still possible.
Honestly, I had assumed that when he cancelled his Mar-a-lago trip (because it’s being remodeled…) he would use the opportunity to go visit the troops somewhere and get some good press. But apparently not.
Pres. Trump has arrived at his Virginia golf course on this Thanksgiving Day.
The new Supreme Court took up a moot case about whether or not a local official could close down places of worship in order to stop the spread of a deadly disease so Coney-Barrett could ensure that all the right wing Christians would have a nice day. Needless to say, they ruled that the Constitution forbids the government saving the lives of its citizens if it means that people can’t defy all logic and reason and gather in churches.
The wingnut Justices seemed to enjoy it. Here’s Neil Gorsuch demonstrating a lame 7th grade level sarcasm:
I don’t know about you, but I rarely spend a couple of hours sitting closely among strangers, singing and speaking in a closed building with little ventilation at a bike shop or liquor store. But maybe that’s a problem. And if it is, one might expect that Justice Gorsuch would recommend closing all of those businesses rather than being a snotty little bitch.
Roberts sided with the liberals as he did in the earlier case decided 5 months ago. And he even admonished the conservative justices for their tone… I guess he really is going to be the Anthony Kennedy of this court. Unfortunately, the crazed wingnuts have 5 votes.
