Make Chicken Great Again--a Recipe Fit for a Functioning Adult

Serve it with Veuve Cliquot Yellow Label if Nancy Pelosi wins:

Buy a corn-fed chicken or a bunch of chicken breasts or chicken thighs. Salt and pepper them--or add the rub of your choice (I recommend one with sea salt, garlic, paprika, parsley, caraway seeds, Fenugreek, marjoram, nutmeg, chili powder). But anything you like. Salt and pepper are the only essentials.

Put chicken in a baking dish in the fridge overnight, or at least a couple of hours. The skin will be crispier when you bake it.

About half an hour before you want to bake the bird, remove it from the fridge and put it on a plate. Pour a few tablespoons of olive oil into the baking dish and add the following:

coarsely chopped red onion
coarsely chopped white onion
at least half a cup of cherry tomatoes
two small sliced zucchini (or bell peppers, any shade. Or both)
slices of lemon--use a whole, large lemon
drained, pitted black or green olives
drained artichoke hearts

Stir the ingredients so that they're covered with the olive oil, put the chicken on top and bake at about 430ºF or 220ºC for about an hour. Enjoy with rice or potatoes. And the hope of a newer, nicer POTUS.

Adventures of the 98-Year-Old Narcissistic Mom, Part One Thousand

So bad it's good: She sent (I give her credit for her handwriting--spidery, but legible) a Get-Well card to my husband. He's Catholic, and it's a Happy Hanukkah card featuring a menorah assembled from dreidels--one she's sent before on numerous occasions.
She must have bought a gross of those Happy Hanukkah cards. Seems to me she sent one as a first communion card to my firstborn.
In this card, she advises my husband that she thinks I must be "stuffing" him with "vitamins" and hopes he's feeling better, but remarks that she thinks "what you need" is a trip to the city in which she resides, because "we have vitamins too!" I did mention to her that he's in the hospital, but I give her credit for probably not remembering because of her age. 
But to tell the truth, when she was forty or fifty years younger, she also didn't remember stuff like this.
She would love a visit from us. In each and every one of our phone conversations of the past few months I have apologized for not being able to visit her right now because my husband's lungs are seriously compromised and I need to take care of him. What I haven't told her is that he has lung cancer on top of two other lung diseases.
She sends "lotsa love," encloses photos of my children as toddlers (they're teens and young adults now) and demands photos from us.
"I hope you'll be feeling better and better," she tells my husband.
Then there's another card. He's had a birthday, and she's commemorating that occasion. Brownie points for remembering at all. This card says, "Long may you thrive!" and is decorated with hearts and exclamation points. If you didn't know, you might think she was his girlfriend. A position she tended to assume with any boyfriend of mine she liked before I was married. And now, since she likes my husband . . . well, thank goodness she's 98 and lives very far away indeed.
I think I'll pour myself another glass of red wine right about now. 
P.S. Finished that one. Reaching for the bottle. I'd forgotten the punchline. I phoned the 98-year-old because lately she's been bragging about a gift she made to Ivy League University X, which she attended in her glory days. "They even gave me an annuity!" she crowed--a remark leading me to believe the gift is large, and indeed it is, she confirms: "They'll get a whole lot more when I die!" 
Here was our recent conversation:
Me: "Mom, since my son B. is applying to Ivy League University X, it would be good to know how much you gave them. Do you remember?"
Mom: "Let me look it up." (absent for five minutes. Rustling, crashing sounds. She returns).
"So, you'd like to know how much money you'll get when I die?"
Me: "No, Mom. That's not what I asked. Since B is applying. . . .  " (I repeat myself).
Mom: "Can I call you back?"
Me: "Sure!" (I assume she won't call)
Ten minutes go by. The phone rings.
Me: "Hello?"
Mom: "I just found my will. You're getting ________."
She gave me the figures, what she's doling out to me, my husband, and each of our three children. It's not enough to cover a year's tuition for Ivy League University X.
Mom. "Of course, I'm leaving something to my nieces and nephews, too!"

In the Wake of the Halle Murders

Many in my Western German city are probably, like me, relieved to be at some distance from the young man who tried to gun down a synagogue. The East has long been known for poverty and trauma. Before the wall fell, the repressive regime did all it could to substitute itself for the family, and largely succeeded. The children and grandchildren of the former East Germany seem to fall prey to racist ideologies at a higher rate than they do where I live. 

Which is not to say that such problems don't exist where I live. I had thought of my city as freer of the tribal divisions afflicting the former East Germany, until a visiting pastor  mentioned the regular weekly prowl of neo-Nazis through a working class neighborhood. He told us that when his parish was preparing for a march on tolerance and acceptance, the neo-Nazis succeeded in blocking it, legally, as a "disturbance of the peace." Neo-Nazis are getting louder in a neighboring city. Another neighboring city is divided into Italian mafia, anti-Western Arab groups, and neo-Nazis. Each of these tribes offers something that feels like family. A neo-Nazi group is nothing if not a substitute for a real family--and therein lies its unfortunate source of power. Try persuading a young man who likes to wear a uniform and carry a stick that better, more satisfying things exist in life than a selfie portraying his boot on the neck of a refugee. 

My children came home from Gymnasium with a few stories. A girl who'd decided to wear a hijab was told it "didn't go" with the uniform required for choir, and she couldn't wear it to performances. The instructor in question got told off by other students, was pressured into apologizing, but the girl apparently quit choir, not wanting to belong to a group led by someone with that teacher's attitude toward her religious identity. Another student from an African nation was asked--by a different instructor-- if she could since a song "in African." This teacher--who has a Ph.D.--referred to Africa as "a country," even when students remonstrated, and when the student whom she'd asked to sing pointed out that she did not speak the language in the song. 
These students did not complain. The teacher is the teacher. Or maybe the students feel they have to put up with these incidents, that they should not make trouble. I think we should all talk more. I know the teachers, know they probably have no idea how much their words hurt. I doubt they remember offending. 

Speaking as a teacher, I would advise any young student who has experienced a moment of mindless racism--which is about how I'd classify these incidents--from a teacher to write up the incident with their own interpretation of it and with pointed, but friendly, suggestions to remedy the problem.

Whistleblower in the Dark: Linda Tripp Versus Our Current Hero

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The Gangster as a Trumpesque Hero

Robert Warshow's line, "The gangster is a man of the city," chills me when I think of the oval office's occupant. Warshow's seminal essay, "The Gangster as a Tragic Hero," appeared in 1948, and has been read as a founding document of cultural studies. In Warshow's recognition of the need for critics to keep a finger on the pulse of popular culture, in his implicit rejection of a Victorian notion that only texts exuding what was deemed high moral or literary value were worth studying, lay genius: he saw how much of life and politics goes tragically unread. Warshow's idea of the gangster as a product of the city, "with the city's language and knowledge, with its queer and dishonest skills and its terrible daring, carrying his life in his hands like a placard, like a club," uncannily describes the gangster in the White House. Warshow describes the gangster as a man who makes his way independently, makes his life, imposing it on others. It's as if Warshow had heard America's top gangster brag that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any voters, or grab women "by the pussy" or ignore all requests to hand over his tax forms.  The gangster (usually a "he") embodies a perverse form of American individualism. The flip side of America's innovations in medicine, technology, art, is this nihilist--examples might include Julian Assange and certainly Roy Cohn.

Warshow's essay offers real answers to the question of how this shady thug rose to political power and remains at the height of it. One of the traits America traditionally honors is individualism--we love our inventors, our Edisons, our Singers, our Bessie Blounts, our Mary Andersons. The gangster, instead of inventing the sewing machine or the cotton gin or gadgets to help amputees feed themselves or the light bulb or the windshield wiper, invents an evil self. He becomes an asocial criminal personality, usually a murderer, who allows us to identify ourselves with him until the moment he is shot or, in the case of Tony Soprano, the screen goes black. We enjoy a guilt-free vicarious experience of his larcenous, scandalous, and cruel life but not of his ignominious death. For that part, we tell ourselves, "He got what he deserved--thank goodness it wasn't me." The lights go up, the popcorn container's empty, we go home with a clear head. Again, Warshow's spot-on: "the experience of the gangster as an experience of art is universal to Americans." 

Try reading Warshow's amazing essay here:
http://crmintler.com/AGH/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Warshow-GTH.pdf
and thinking about the monster in the White House.

The Mock Impeachment Song (with apologies to Lewis Carroll)

Did Zelensky leak the provocation POTUS put him through?

Did the trusted staff just have enough of “fake news” ballyhoo?

Could tiny fears be trawling through the Donald’s temp’ral lobe?

Since impeachment’s now the talk of everyone around the globe?

Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the probe?

Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the probe?

Will Giuliani make things even worse for Donald Trump?

Will Barr, Maguire, and other dudes exonerate his rump?

If there’s a chance Pelosi’s moxie proves the cover-up

And rids democracy of all that’s Trumpesque and corrupt

Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?

Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?

Clueless and Keyless in Germany

Today I felt nostalgic for the hardware store around the corner from my New York apartment, where I can bring in a set of keys, get 'em copied less than ten, chat with the nice owner about house supplies, and zip home with that new set of keys. No muss, no fuss.
It's different here in the land of the careful, the correct, and the completely regulated. The guy down at the key place took the keys in his hand and wondered what Schloss (the word can mean either "castle" or "lock") they were for? I said those were our housekeys and he cast a bemused, suspicious eye in my direction. I could almost see the thoughts running through his head. Judging by his expression, I was possibly:
(1) A deranged stalker trying to get into my ex-boyfriend's home and murder his child's rabbit
(2) A thief or a spy
(3) A lunatic--because who ever needs keys copied?
Tentatively, I asked--since I hadn't completely understood his tirade--whether this was "wegen Gesetz," that is, something to do with law, or just not possible. He shook his head at me, this guy who looks like a miracle of efficiency in the shoe-repair and key business, who has actually repaired my shoes, but who now thinks I'm a vampire because I want some keys copied. But I persisted. Did he know anywhere where I might get these keys copied? Smoke puffed from his ears. His look: I had made an off-color remark.
I called my husband, who left a long message involving certificates needed and other bureaucratic matters, disquisitions on the shape of the key and how that affects the situation. Interpretations, anyone? Me, I think it has something to do with German notions of privacy, which must not be violated, if you want to stay alive, that is. Keys open doors, after all, and the German home is a fortress, with windows that roll down securely (none of these flappy windowshades, that flip up with the merest breeze!)
Someday, I will have another set of keys to my house--I did emphasize to the locksmith that I was talking about my very own house--but I will need German negotiations, probably through my husband, before I get them.

Why Don't Europeans Just Speak European?

Ladies and Gentlemen, and other honored genders: I kid you not. That was a real question. My husband's graduate student, a German of Turkish ethnicity, was traveling in the USA and found, as he worked his way through California, that the further from the coast he got, the more he was asked questions like that. 
He was also asked why Germans had such a low opinion of the NSDAP (the Nazi Party). 
I can imagine the poor guy sweating, fingering his collar, gearing up for the question so many young Germans are still asked by Americans: "What was it like to live under Hitler?" 
Once upon a time in Jersey City, I taught students who had been educated in the local public school system and never strayed beyond the borders of their hometown. They could see the proud towers of the World Trade Center--which were still there--but despite the PATH train to lower Manhattan which they knew I, their teacher, took every single day, they were afraid to go there. 
"But my mom," they would say, or "my aunt," or "my dad" or even "my teachers" say it's really dangerous there, "especially the subway!"
"I'm still standing," I would say. "I take the PATH train every teaching day, and on the subway I read or grade papers."
Their eyes bugged. Awe.
I didn't inform them that occasionally I'd seen trouble: a subway car opened, a loud sound boomed, the car filled with dark smoke, and we all ran out. Only to run back in for our briefcases a minute later when smoke dissipated. Or the time, in a car so packed my knees hurt from the weigh of bodies leaning against them, when a voice yelled, "I got a blade!" But the police resolved that one too, almost before I had time to feel scared.
The point is, the kids in Jersey City dealt with worse most of the time. The car that hit a large, ugly student and then sued her for damages. The student health care center that offered no contraceptives or information about AIDS, when Jersey City had a rate of infection second only to New York. The priests who seduced their charges or fellow teachers, or children, but who stopped a student standing at the bus shelter to warn her of hellfire: she was "living in sin" with her boyfriend, the priest had discovered. The college president who was said to have fallen down the stairs dead drunk, breaking his neck. These kids told me that all those people in the Austro-Hungarian Empire spoke the same language. 
"Yeah, they did!" my brightest student informed me. "They're all European."
"The Germans spoke so many dialects they could barely understand each other. The Czechs. The Hungarians. The Poles, the Ukrainians, the Slavs . . . "
"But," insisted my student, "I thought . . . I mean, they're all white people."
Europeans. They're all Europeans, right?

The Ballistic 98-Year-Old and the Adoring Acolyte: In Search of Solutions

The 98-year-old wanted to go on vacation.

 A few months ago, she broke her ribs, lost her memory and abandoned her hearing aid, which probably ended up in a restaurant napkin, all $4000 of it. 

She says her phone is defective--that's why she can't hear conversations. She forgets to use her walker and cane and "I don't really need them anymore!" Hence the broken ribs. Four of them, causing intense pain. Opioid level pain.

She's got a pal, thirty years younger, who loves to travel with her, and considers Mom the greatest thing since sliced bread. You would think that's wonderful. Except:

(1) The 98-year-old is paying her companion's expenses. Room, board, transportation.
(2) The adoring acolyte wants to be the only one in her life. What do we need a nurse for? I can take care of her! I sleep 6.5 hours per night! I have Red Cross training!
(3) Everybody else in the old gal's life, including the director of her assisted living residency, thinks a nurse should be on hand.
(4) The B&B owner says the nurse can't sit anywhere but the 98-year-old's bedroom, or the bedroom of her companion. Can't use any toilet but theirs.
(5) When you offer to Yelp the place, the companion says, "Oh, dear God, no." These "wonderful people" shouldn't have their business ruined. She asks me to pay them to tolerate the nurse as a "day guest." 
(6) When the nurse appears, discreetly, and the elderly mother tantrums, the companion says, "But your daughter hired the nurse! She paid for the nurse. You and me, we're friends. I'll protect you from your daughter."
(7) Three murderous letters later, the ancient mom's spidery handwriting indicates her displeasure: "I am already being taken care of by my friend!"

Why am I surprised when my mother's best friend thinks the way my mother thinks? Because the adoring acolyte is reasonably well-educated, Phi Beta Kappa, a professional? But education is no match for delusion. The adoring acolyte wants to proceed "without deception" when the 98-year-old doesn't want a nurse, never wanted a nurse, never agreed to a nurse--although she did, and has already paid for said nurse. The acolyte declines to introduce the nurse as "my good friend!" But it's okay to say, "your daughter hired her." When I didn't.

I can suggest finessing. First, there's calling Mom's sane friends and apprising them of the situation.

Then there's the conversation with Mom herself:

"You are every bit as sane as you ever were, every bit as lucid, and as you say, Mom, you are just as compos mentis as you always were. It's just that there's been some memory loss."

Astoundingly, she agrees. She is indeed every bit as sane as she ever was, every bit as lucid, every bit as compos mentis as she ever was. Compounding the problem are the frailties of age, the memory loss, and the companion who's every bit as compos mentis as Mom. But who is currently her health care proxy.
Suggestions, gentle  reader, suggestions?

The Vacationing 98-year-old, the CNA, and the Well-Meaning Friend

The Certified Nursing Assistant arrived punctually at the comfy bed-and breakfast where the 98-year old mother has been taken--against the advice of her assisted living home, her other friends, and her daughter, me, that is--for a vacation. Of course we're just the Greek chorus here: if I were 98, I'd ignore the chorus too, and insist on doing any fool thing I wanted to do. The four broken ribs of last winter,  the broken hip, the tendency to insist she can walk on her own without a cane or walker . . . those are the things that get to the Greek chorus. Hence the need for the CNA. Who has been hired to be near her at all times.

The comfy bed-and-breakfast has been patronized by the 98-year-old since long before she was a 98-year-old. Long before the island was a place where Main street shops had no price tags--if you need to know the price of anything, you don't belong there. Once upon a time in the 1960s, real estate was cheap, beaches were uncrowded, Portuguese bread was inexpensive and delicious, the island movie screen was too small to show The Sound of Music, and people had laundry spinners in their back yards. There was a homemade donuts place and you could buy hot dogs, postcards. Even a "Dexter's Shell Shoppe" selling tinted tropical shells out of somebody's garage.

That was then. Tommy Hilfiger bought and decorated a mansion there, which, last I heard, his ex-wife was trying to sell for 27 million. Then 19.5 million. He wasn't the only Richie Rich. The billionaires crawl around everywhere. The A&P disappeared. Lyme disease got worse. 

People changed. Would it have been possible, in the sixties, for the owner of a bed-and-breakfast patronized for years by an elderly person to tell the elderly person's friend she was "not comfortable with the CNA out in the reception area or patio, or using the hall bathroom, since the CNA was not a guest here?"

The owner of the B&B is very comfortable telling the CNA to sit in the airless bedroom of the mom's companion, and only use her personal bathroom. The mom's companion thinks she should put up with the owner telling her this. She says she has "smoothed things over." The owner is a nice lady, she thinks, who has been nice in other summers, so that complaining about the treatment of the CNA would be mean. She thinks I should pay the owner something to tolerate the nurse.

I think the owner should act like a decent human being.

My attempts, via email, to get the 98-year-old mother's pal to tell the owner of the B&B to let the CNA use the reception area, the patio, the hall bathroom--by Yelping the place if necessary--have been rebuffed.

The hired help come to the back. They look different. They talk different. Maybe they are people of color. Maybe they weigh more. Maybe they have another accent. Maybe they have a uniform? Maybe the wrong brand of jeans? Maybe anything that gives away they're not Tommy's crowd.

Don't places like this charming little vacationing spot have chambers of commerce that set policy for oldsters and their entourage? You'd think they would.

After El Paso And Dayton

 That such a slave as this should wear a sword,
Who wears no honesty. Such smiling rogues as these
Like rats oft bite the holy cords atwain . . .
King Lear, 2.2.70-73



"Hate has no place in America,” the president said. “Hatred warps the mind, ravages the heart and devours the soul.”
Watching his face, I thought of those criminal nurses who get a kick out of putting someone in a coma and then reviving them. Being thought of as a hero. Anything for admiration.
Trump's words said one thing. His eyes, his face, said the reverse.  Like a child forced to apologize and who sneers out a savage "Sorry!" Trump insulted America again, refusing to dethrone the NRA and partying at home. No one really expected him to support universal background checks or to enforce red flag laws. Or to sing hymns or hold hands with the families of victims. His role is to make deals, not to govern, not to help, not to pray, not to sympathize. Not to heal.
He is still trying to sell himself to Americans who didn't vote for him, while apologizing to some of the white supremacists who did. "You know I have to say this stuff," his eyes telegraphed, "and you know I don't mean it."
We know Trump doesn't mean that what "warps the mind" and "ravages the heart . . . devours the soul" is a problem--as long as he can make money or gain power. 
 The day after the election, when everyone I knew was swimming in sorrow, and when I said, "it's a sad day when Trump is elected," a stranger said, "I voted for him!"
I couldn't turn on my heel and walk out of the room--we were both receiving chemotherapy and had to sit opposite one another. But I was curious. As the medicine dripped into our veins, I asked her why.
"He's going to fix health care," she said. "He's a businessman." She didn't particularly like him, but she had faith in his competence. 
So many believed, still believe, that he cares. Or, like the woman who believed he could fix health care, and who had ovarian cancer, were desperate. The odds of her being alive are slim, but if she is, I hope she's changed her mind.

Stranger Things, Dark, and National Character: Preliminary Observations

Is there still such a thing as national character? There's national taste. Americans like underdogs and optimism; Germans like very tidy houses and Angst with a capital A. That's my impression, comparing Dark to Stranger Things. Vogue can claim all it wants that Dark is "Stranger Things for Grown-Ups," but actually these completely different shows probably appeal to the same audiences: folks with a taste for the creepy and the jump scare. The two shows have a single thing in common: parallel universes. Make that multiverses in Dark, but only because Germans tend to be complicated. Americans want to get stuff done and Germans want to get stuff done correctly (is there always a difference?) Here's my take on these series:

German: You need a chart to keep track of the characters and their time zones. It's always raining or radioactive--in case you didn't pick up the deep despair. Precision: Every Thirty-Three Years Something Happens Again. Papers will be Spread Out All Over the Living Room Floor While an Angst-Ridden Cop examines them--also, the photos of missing persons and related documents and obscure symbols will be stapled in a symmetrical design on the wall, complete with (literally) red threads. The wall will be lots, lots, neater than Dr. House's magic-markered comments on his whiteboard.

American: comic relief, oozing grade B move fifties science fiction creature sure to scare teens who never heard of Invasion of the Body Snatcher, Night of the Living Dead, or The Blob:




Then there's guilt. American: "It's not our fault! We're innocent! It's the big bad Russians!" Germans: "We feel guilt. We feel guilt. Though we ain't done nothing wrong, we feel guilt." Americans: That city on that hill we built clears us forever. Indians? What indians? I didn't learn about them in school." Germans: Holocaust, holocaust, holocaust. Atone, atone, atone. Philosophy. Americans: "We're here because we're here! Besides, God said so." Germans: "What is the meaning of life? Are we doomed to repeat the past? Fate is our fate is our existential fate is our dooom and gloooooom." Try googling "Stranger Things and Humor" and you'll find an array of items upon which to click. Not so when you google "Dark and Humor" or even "Netflix's Dark and Humor" or anything you can think of to indicate that you're trying to find something about the show, not dark humor in general.

Americans: Face your show with Bud. Germans: Face your show with beer. Real beer. Americans: understand that Germans are better at Angst and pessimism. Germans: understand that Americans favor humor and optimism. Yes, the stereotypes hold true . . . at least on these shows.

How Many Children Had Claire Underwood?

The author of the essay inspiring this one--L.C. Knights--titled his famous essay, "How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?" People like me who'd only glanced at it in graduate school went about for years imagining that he'd wondered about what kind of mother such a woman could be, since Lady Macbeth, when she's browbeating her husband into agreeing to murder King Duncan, utters these memorable lines:

I have given suck, and know 

How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me.

I would, while it was smiling in my face,

Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums

And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you

Have done to this.

She's nursed a baby, and knows how lovely breastfeeding can be: the baby loves and trusts you, the mother. But, Lady Macbeth tells her cowering husband, if she'd sworn to slam the kid's head on the floor so hard that it cracked open and spilled out his brains, she'd have stuck to her word. Her husband, she's saying, is a wuss, since he's going back on his promise to stab that king--and stab while the king sleeps. Indeed, what kind of woman would, first of all, make such a promise, and then carry through on it?

Absolutely not the question L.C. Knights was asking in his 1933 essay, the title of which is intended as a rant against folks who were into praising Shakespeare's ability to create fabulous characters. Knights says Macbeth really a statement about evil. 

But why would that position preclude the title question? Oh, that title has a life all its own.

In any case, the answer to the question of what kind of woman would make, and follow through on, a promise to dash out her baby's brains is obvious: Claire Underwood. 

Or is it obvious? I imagine the baby kicking triumphantly inside her as Mom stabs Doug Stamper in the gut, twisting the knife in the wound so he'll bleed out fast. Would the girl grow up to be just like Mom? And what if she asked  insistently about her daddy? Developed into just the kind of investigative reporter Claire loves to have shot in the back of the head? Had the ethical command of Catherine Durant? What if Claire's baby took after some other branch of the family? Would Claire leave the kid alone if she sat around writing poems?

In other words, I wish the series would go on . . . and on. We finally finished season six last night. I wasn't surprised by the ending--I knew it would be, in Robin Wright's description, "operatic," and indeed it was. But I want the next scene. Kid with au pair all the time? Or kid being homeschooled by Mom and accompanying her to all political events? Yes, I can see Claire in a stylish nursing top, threatening somebody with something. My favorite moment was the look of shock on Petrov's face, and his question: "Are you a gangster?" Well, Duh, Petrov. 

Really. This show must go one. Just for one more season. Please. What kind of a mom will she be? Will the kid say, "Mommy, get me a brother?"

Independent? July 4, 2019: Five Tips for Survival

The only good news I have is personal: today's CT scan showed no return of cancer. But cancer consumed American democracy some time ago. We're watching season six of House of Cards, the level of corruption probably nowhere near what's actually happening with He Who Shall Not Be Named and Who Has No Right to the Oval Office. He who, I tell myself, has to be human enough to die some day, but only the good die young. By his standards, he is not yet old. Last July fourth, we were appalled by the separation of children from families at the U.S. border, and we are still appalled. I ask myself whether anything's gotten better since exactly one year ago today. And then I think of Claire Underwood. Who has so much more style than the serial rapist in the White House. Which makes her no less evil. I'm not a praying person, but I'm close to taking up the practice--can't hurt, right? If there's anything to celebrate, it's the following:

(1) Family
(2) Appreciating how much those kids at the border need theirs.
(3) Hope. There's always that.
(4) A robust red wine followed by a toast: "Still not my president"
(5) The idea that the United States is in there somewhere, still, beneath the present ruling class.

Linda Fairstein and The Persecuting Spirit

America has inherited “the persecuting spirit” that Nathanial Hawthorne attributed to his unrepentant ancestor, a judge at the Salem witch trials. That Puritan lust to punish a scapegoat, “the ecstasy of sanctimony,” Philip Roth called it, has come and gone throughout American history, examples including the McCarthy era, the herding of Japanese-Americans into internment camps in World War Two, and attacks on Arab-Americans after 9/11.

And now Linda Fairstein, tried and condemned in the court of Twitterdom: “The fact that Linda Fairstein writes crime novels for a living is proof that she has the capacity to make up stories in her mind as she did with the Central Park Five narrative,” someone tweets at #cancelLindaFairstein. So all novelists are cheaters and liars? Fairstein is “a devil!” cries another. Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.

Fairstein was always known for being deeply concerned with justice, devoted to reforming the treatment of rape victims. Not as one so bent on success that she’d engineer the sacrifice of five young men in order to solidify her professional authority. Why are we forgetting that Eric Reynolds who is black and was the lead detective on the case, along with David N. Dinkins, who is black and the former mayor of New York, believed in the guilt of the Central Park Five? The claim that the boys had never said they were “wilding” but only “wilin’” or hanging out was unheard by many, including Dinkins, who proposed “anti-wilding” measures. Multiethnic witnesses were reeling from other assaults in Central park. The sadism of the jogger incident overshadowed all. The now-exonerated five present themselves as the contemporary version of the Scottsboro boys, the nine African-American teenagers, ages 13-20, falsely accused of raping a white woman on a train.

Is it even possible to watch DuVernay’s Netflix series without thinking of Eric Garner’s murder, of white supremacists waving tiki torches in Charlottesville, of black men and teenagers murdered for walking down the street? For sitting in their own homes? In the wake of these tragedies, how many people even consider the possibility that the NYPD investigation of the Central Park jogger may actually have been ethical?

DuVernay’s directorial failure in A Wrinkle in Time, rather than the success of either Selma or When They See Me, suggests some answers. DuVernay always said she planned to “blackify” Madeleine L’Engle’s classic, the idea being that non-white children could better identify with non-white heroes and heroines. The biracial actress playing Meg, Storm Reid, said she felt a responsibility to “uplift” and “empower little African-American girls” by playing a character written as white.

The notion that an African-American girl cannot identify with a white girl reveals an understanding of race as a given, something that cannot be transcended, rather than a product of culture, class and history. But when James Earl Jones played King Lear, he entered into the role as an English old king, not as an African-American. When the 19^th-century African-American actor Ira Aldridge played Shakespearean roles, he played them wearing whiteface. When a racist “Jump Jim Crow” minstrel show arrived as competition, Aldridge appropriated one of the show’s skits into his own act, parodying it. Deflating racist denigration, he offered the same advice as Mrs. Which in L’Engle’s novel:  that the only way to cope with something deadly serious is to try to treat it a little lightly—not to lose one’s sense of humor. Moments of humor intensify the gravity of the contest between the forces of good and evil.

DuVernay’s adaptation of L’Engle’s novel misses the gravity as well as the humor, I believe because DuVernay’s vision of race and power is one-dimensional. The idea that black girls can better appreciate Meg Murry’s challenges when a black actress plays her is problematic. It’s like saying a straight actor can’t play a gay person. Du Vernay’s Meg is a black girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles because apparently black girls would be less able to relate to white girls growing up in a small New England town.

What if the essentialist conception of race that informs DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time plays a role in her demonizing of Linda Fairstein? Justitiae soror fides, or “Faith is the sister of justice,” one of the Latin phrases quoted by L’Engle in her novel, should be our guide: we should not lose faith in Linda Fairstein unless or until someone can demonstrate that she stands guilty of the crimes of which DuVernay’s Netflix production accuses her.  

 

The Biowashwall: Remember the Stone Soup Story?

My vegan child persuaded me to try a biowashball,

what Americans call a "laundry egg," and rather than designate it a good or a bad one, I'd have to call it incomplete, mainly because 30 washes into the promised 300, it needs back-up. Has its merits, but clothes reeking of sweat and mildew still have a whiff of sweat and mildew after they've been through a cycle in my laundry machine. A fainter whiff than before, to be sure, but the whiff is there, gentle reader, the whiff is there.
First, the looks: the thing resembles a cross between a grenade and a washboard, only it's round. Think of a large green frog with a great many warts, throw in one of those rubber porcupine balls that dancers and middle-aged ladies use to work out the kinks in their muscles, and you get the general drift. It's green as the Emerald City and if you bowled it across the floor to a teething toddler (an off-label use that might just work) the kid would enjoy crushing it against his gums. Besides, it rattles, you see, from all those highly-touted ceramic balls in it that are supposed to be ecologically correct. On Amazon.com I find that the warty little thing is supposed to clean laundry without detergents, to ionize (doesn't that sound cool?) the water to repel dirt and stains from fibers with "no residue or chemicals," to be hypoallergenic, antibacterial, and odor-eliminating, to be suitable for all washing machines and water temperatures, and to last for 1,000 loads of laundry or 3 years.
My experience leads me to say that with mildly dirty loads (that day I didn't sweat much) the thing can sort of do its job, but it does it much better when you add laundry detergent. When you've got those stinky mildewy things, the stuff that's been worn at the gym and then spent the night in an airtight smelly sports bag, adding baking soda and vinegar to the detergent helps. I enjoy watching the biowashball do the bump with my clothes as my longsuffering machine whirls them.
Now, I'll concede two things: (1) you can use less detergent than you normally would and (2) those hard little warty bumps probably have a washboard effect--they do your scrubbing for you. But I would not throw them in the machine with delicates and wools. The ball's probably too tough for them. I don't regret buying it: I think, with proper backup, it's a real cleaner. It's just not a miraculous alternative to detergents.

P.S. I do use environmentally proper detergents! Specifially, Frosch.

The Rainy Season and the Backyard Frog

Last Sunday when the temperature climbed, we took the plastic covering off the patio furniture and discovered, residing in a puddle of water formed in the fitted corner of the protective sheet, a surprisingly large frog, who cowered under the table--which we then decided not to move to the center of the patio where it usually goes.
Her companion, the bullfrog in our defunct (came with the house) little round swimming pool (now an algae-infested pond) has been emitting loud mating calls regularly, so much so that both I and my son have attempted to remove him with a rake. But he seems to prefer life in the pond. He wants her to come to him, we realized. Hop clear across the patio where a bird or a cat could get her, through the grass, where the moles would be disinclined to consume her, but where she could easily fall into their tunnels and never be heard from again. Then there's the uphill hop through the thorny bushes on the hot brick pathway to the pool. Even if she makes it there, how will she get up the tall sides? She'd have to climb a nearby tree and drop, probably by accident, into that gooey mess of old leaves and green gunk and hope she landed near him.
How like a . . . not a man, but Donald Trump. Oh, he'll go to England to meet the queen (Buckingham Palace to be sullied by this frog who won't turn into a prince no matter who kisses what body part) but his mind, as ever, remains where it always is.
In the muck at the bottom of the pond. Where the fair trade deals drown.

Fast-tracking the "Aprikosenkuchen"--an American Mistake with a German Recipe

Many German recipes require time and patience--and I have almost none of either. But apricots are in season and I love that stuff you can get at the bakery, usually with plums, a kind of long square tart, fruit set into dough, sweet but not too sweet, occasionally topped with whipped cream. Looks easy. I bought a quantity of apricots, made sure I had butter, eggs, sugar, dry yeast, milk, and flour. I also imagined, when I rose at 6:45, that I'd be washing down delicious tart with my coffee by around 7:30.
To do so, I would have had to get up around 4:00 a.m.
Oh, like a real baker.
Yes. 

There's the part where you dissolve the dry yeast in warm milk and mix it with the already prepared butter-egg-flour-pinch o' salt-sugar mix. But after that you're supposed to let the bowl cool its heels in a warmish location for another 45 minutes. Then there's the rolling out of the dough, after which it gets to rise, in the pan, for another 20 minutes (while you're whipping up the pudding of your choice to apply with the apricots).

I was very hungry indeed, also in a hurry--American traits. No, maybe just New Yorker traits. I gave that dough fifteen minutes (during which it did seem to bubble up a tad), then said, "ready or not, here I come" and hoped, idiotically, for the best. Poured it onto a buttered pan, schlonked in the apricots, baked for around half an hour. 

It was edible, gentle reader, but just barely. If I hadn't been absolutely starving, I would have said the unrisen dough had a gluelike texture. Whipped cream would have been a good idea, if I'd had any. 

But that whipping of the cream, even with a mixer takes time, too . . . 

The Loss of Rachel Held Evans, Unifying Christian Voice

On May 4, 2019, Rachel Held Evans died unexpectedly in a Nashville, TN hospital.

She was a theologian an atheist could love. Like C.S. Lewis in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in Mere Christianity, and in his better-known Narnia books, Evans wrote with humor, commonsense, and openness about her own spiritual crises. Raised to believe that all non-Christians burned in hell forever, she learns as a middle-school student that Anne Frank and her sister died of typhus in a concentration camp. Staring at Anne’s photo on the cover of her paperback, Evans begs God to “let her out of the lake of fire” for being a Jew. She notices that her Sunday school teachers spoke of hell as a place for Hitler, not his victims, and she’s quick to observe inconsistencies: if her Sunday school teachers and college professors were right, she reflected, then hell would be populated not just by Hitler and Stalin, Hussen and Milosevic but by “the people that they persecuted.” As a college student, she watches the televised execution by the Taliban of a Muslim woman in a soccer stadium in Kabul and seriously interrogates her fundamentalist belief that only Christians enter heaven: “The idea that this woman passed from agony to agony, from torture to torture, from a lifetime of pain and sadness to an eternity of pain and sadness, all because she had less information about the gospel than I did, seemed cruel, even sadistic.” At that point she experienced the transformative spiritual crisis that is almost inevitable with the constitutionally honest. Against all odds, she rejected easy hatred for difficult love.   

She will be remembered for her bravery in rejecting dogma for questions, even or especially when these sent her into spiritual agony: “What makes a faith crisis so scary is that once you allow yourself to ask one or two questions, more inevitably follow.”  Doubters of all faiths and those of none admire her skill in setting down, in crystal clear prose how unsettling, even terrifying it is to ask questions that shatter one’s entire sense of identity.

In her online congregation, she brought together young and old who were looking for a God of love who didn’t automatically dump them in hell for being gay, questioning the patriarchy, or wondering, as she did, why tickets to heaven could only be offered to Christians. In the polarized world of Donald Trump, she brought together the disparate groups he keeps divided. Her voice will be greatly missed.

Master Archie, Royal Baby

And Veronica?
And Mehitabel?
Surnamed Leach? (or Cox, or Macleish, or Roosevelt?) Given a choice, I'd take the poet. The kid has a cute name. 
Yes, he could grow up to be the clueless boyfriend of a sweepingly narcissistic, credit-card cracking daughter of a "big shot" politician.
Or he could, using magic or reincarnation, become a pensive, philosophical cockroach who goes for a much-more-in-the-know alley cat.
(Wow! This sounds like his mom and dad. Sorry, should have said mum and dad.)
Or hey, Cary Grant, or the poet, or America's version of royalty.
Whatever junior wants, he can become . . . except a commoner, unless mum and dad have their way and terminate the monarchy. They wouldn't do that, would they? No, but they might extract their son and his future siblings from future commitments to wearing a crown.
Meanwhile, isn't he the cutest little baby you ever did see? (except for your own, of course!)