Our Dead Zone President

At the end of the 1983 science fiction thriller, The Dead Zone, a demagogue presidential candidate grabs a baby and holds the child up in front of him as a human shield. 

 

A reporter photographs the incident, which then appears as a cover story in a major news magazine, preventing the election of a man who would have authored a nuclear holocaust. Looking back at the film now--a young Christopher Walken playing someone who can see the future and hopes to kill a Hitler before the man assumes office--I see the similarity to Trump rallies, to the whipping up of a base dangerously infused with rage and misinformation. But there's no visionary Walken around to get Trump to make that fatal mistake that would lose him his base.

 

It's easy to imagine Trump grabbing a baby and holding the child up as a human shield. But he'd probably have to do that ten or more times before the meaning of such an act dawned on his base. The man can seemingly do no wrong, even for folks who say "he's not perfect" but they like him anyway. They like that he's not perfect. Or they see him as a father figure. Or they find him sexy. Or manly. Or delightfully capable of getting away with cheating, assault, murder. They love his shamelessness. They adore his lies. They feel empowered when he speaks. I think Trump could get away with the moment that ends the career of the fictional President Stillson, chillingly played by a very young Martin Sheen. 

 

A very old man whom I knew saw Hitler speak. Several times. Commenting that the "guy sounded like an idiot," the old man--who'd been a young lawyer in Vienna at the time--said he realized the guy "wasn't an idiot" after all. Hitler altered his accent and behavior for each crowd. Any politician can do that. But not every politician feels the absolute self-confidence of the true narcissist or the lust for destruction that marked Hitler's, and Trump's, reigns. 

A Flavorful Vegan Meal

 We still have fresh rosemary growing in an outdoor planter--and rosemary goes so nicely with garlic and pepper and olive oil:

and this freshly washed rosemary, crushed garlic, pepper, and olive oil mix decorates the potatoes so prettily: 

Pour the rosemary mixture onto the potatoes and mix well; put a sheet of aluminum foil over the dish (so the rosemary doesn't dry out) and slide it to an oven pre-heated to 220º C (about 425ºF) for about forty-five minutes. Stir occasionally, and remove the foil for the last ten minutes or so. 

Then you get this:

It's tasty, especially with a cucumber-mushroom-tomato salad tossed in olive oil, balsamic vinegar, dill, and salt:

Also pumpkin soup, which is already up somewhere on this blog. And a glass of red wine. All this makes the nightly news of Mr. NonConcession marginally less distressing. I've tweeted the man "Vote Him Away" videos with messages like "Scat!" and I hope against hope that he'll scat or scram or skidoo or crawl far, far away.

My Friend the Trump Supporter

Entirely by accident, I found out one of my friends was a Trump supporter. Someone had sent me one of the "Vote Him Away" videos.  I forwarded it to almost everyone in my address book, and 99% of my recipients expressed delight.  My friend represents the other one percent.

A very good writer, someone whose work has been nominated for a prestigious prize and someone who teaches at a university, my friend doesn't fit the typical profile. He's neither wealthy nor uneducated. 

Initially my questions were rebuffed--until I made it clear I wasn't criticizing him. I just wanted to understand the appeal of Donald Trump to a person who seems far more intelligent and aware of the world than the president he admires. 

If I discovered anything, it was fear: he thought the country would head for "Marxism and Socialism" without Trump. He didn't want free-loaders. What he didn't want to see, he wrote, was "socialism" in the sense of "industry run by the government and the ideas of competition and the potential for gain eliminated." He added that any such government interference "would bring about the end of America as I have come to know it. This is what I'm afraid of."

He believes "the media" suppresses "anything positive about the president." He believes "the president brokered two middle-east peace deals." He insists that Obama started the policy of separating children from parents (see Politico for a lengthy refutation).  He defended Trump's comment about pussy-grabbing as locker-room talk that's been exploited to harm his reputation. He suggested that "crass dialogue" on Sex and the City was just as bad, but perceived as feminist. He thought Trump's Charlottesville remarks had been selectively misquoted: "What he actually said was "There were very fine people on both sides, & I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists--because they shold be condemned totally. But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists."

And COVID? Trump's refusal to wear a mask? My friend said that as the leader of the free world, of course the man would not wear one. He compared Trump to FDR, pointing out that FDR took care to hide the leg braces he wore after being crippled by polio. I couldn't resist pointing out that FDR didn't have a contagious disease. My friend did not reply. I don't expect him to do so, and perhaps he's no longer my friend. I ask myself how someone this sensitive to art and literature could come to such conclusions, but there's a long history of the very gifted having very strange ideas. How could Ezra Pound have said--have thought--the anti-Semitic things he apparently believed? Or wished that Roosevelt would get shot? 

Maybe the greater mystery is my own revulsion. I take one look at Trump and recoil--before he speaks, I know all he wants is admiration. I know he doesn't give a damn about anyone else. I know this from his face, his gestures, his voice--I know this without the daily horrors, each one so awful as to make us forget the thing he did the day before. I know he's cooking up some awful thing, that he'll assemble his thugs and try to buy the Republican party or run the government from some four-star secure location. But I hope I'm wrong, that he'll end up with a ball and chain and in an outfit that matches his fake tan.

 

 

Humpty Trumpty

Humpty Trumpty very slightly cracked his shell.

Humpty Trumpty said that was very, very, very unfair and they shoved him on purpose and he's gonna call his Mommy and the Supreme Court, so there!

But all the Lindsey Grahams and all the Mitch McConnells

Couldn't swing Trumpty into the White House again . . .

A Meal to Get You Through The Election

Here's a meal that'll brace you for the last days of hope and dread before November 3: Spaghetti Bolognese, with lots of veggies on the side:

You will need:

olive oil

salt and pepper; a flavored salt with paprika is nice, too.

red onions

garlic cloves 

ground pork--about a fourth of a kilo

a can or two of tomato sauce with basil flavoring, or a few chopped basil leaves

zucchini, green beans, tomatoes

spaghetti

Parmesan cheese

(1) To a large frying pan in which you've heated a few tablespoons of olive oil, add two or three chopped red onions and stir. Allow to become transparent over medium heat. Add chopped garlic. I could always consume around twenty cloves, but there are those who are perfectly happy with one or none.

(2) Add the ground pork and brown it, breaking it up into bits and mixing it with the onions and garlic. Add salt and pepper. Add tomato sauce and allow to simmer, stirring occasionally.

(3) In a second frying pan .  .  . yes, same procedure as step one, but now you'll add vegetables instead of meat. I sautéed sliced zucchini and green beans, for about five minutes before adding the tomatoes.

(4) White you're doing the veggies, start the spaghetti, which usually takes around ten minutes. Grate the Parmesan.

Enjoy with a glass of red wine!

Covid Comebacks

When the New York Times features the University Hospital in my German city--as it did today, and as it's done several times--I feel epi-centerish. We're not Berlin, we're not New York, we're not the misguided denizens of mask-free Trump rallies. But people in my city go to bars and restaurants with their masks guarding their chins, or below sneeze level. They go to doctors who write them excuses, claiming asthma precludes the wearing of masks.

I don't go to bars or restaurants. I don't miss them--for the twenty years of my marriage, my husband and I usually preferred to stay home. When we dined out, we chose a Japanese restaurant that, during the week, boasted fewer than two or three patrons. We used to joke that maybe the place was a front for the mafia or something--how else would they stay open?

It's getting so that the hot spots are no longer hot spots, because they can't be distinguished from the places that are warm, and getting hot. 

I still figure I'm okay on the tram with my surgical mask and plastic face shield. I want one of those fishbowl style head coverings , the isphere, from Plastique Fantastique, the Berlin-based art studio that seems only to be hawking prototypes on eBay. The gym might close in two days; I still have my creaky cross-trainer, but no leg press. As the rain splashes the windows, as we all huddle through the last days before the election, I wonder if that rarest of sensibilities, common sense, will ever descend upon us again.

The Writer's Pandemic Dream or the Writer's Pandemic Nightmare

 A large part of me loves isolation. I don't have to see a soul--I can just play with my imaginary friends. No interruptions. That's when fiction-writing seems to be going well, in the sense that I've produced my daily quota of words. 

But when my imaginary friends aren't speaking to me--when I don't know exactly what they want--that's when the distractions I think I don't want tug at my heart. Why did I just spill 50,000 words on a heroine who doesn't, now that I've invented her, know what she wants? My heroine has to know exactly what she wants. In this way she'll be conveniently, satisfyingly, much more self-aware than I am. Sometimes she does know, sometimes not. Then there's the cast of thousands surrounding her. What am I to do with them? They can't just waltz around on their own, or if they do, my readers will be bored. They have to dance to her tunes, or in relation to her tunes, or in conflict with her tunes. Maybe even the ugly green building out the window is too much of a distraction. Maybe if I followed Thomas Mann's alleged practice of draping the windows with a dull gray cloth so that absolutely nothing could distract him would work. There's the problem that I am not Thomas Mann. But I do have a mightily interesting heroine and would so much like to see how she solves her problems. 

Hoping answers will come to me in a dream--or a nightmare.

And Another One Leaves the Nest

In a famous German song, little Hans ("Hänschen klein") a sturdy child typically pictured with a big hat and a walking stick twice his size is cheerfully marching away from home. In the background his mother,  the family pets, even a bird and a rabbit are looking anxious, but Hänschen pays them no mind--he's on his way. Although I keep trying to cheer myself up with the thought of how much less time I'll be spending on laundry and cooking, I'm exactly in the position of the mother in this video. Barely visible in the background, leaning over her Bavarian balcony, the mom dabs at her eyes. I know just what she's feeling. She's feeling what the Steve Martin dad in Father of the Bride feels when his twenty-year-old daughter is telling him she's fallen in love. He blinks and sees an adorable child in braids tied with ribbons lisping, "Dad! I met a wonderful man and we're getting married."

My child and I are in the same position. He's walking down that road all by himself, except when he needs advice on laundry or cooking, and except when I offer unasked for advice about staying clear of COVID in a dorm. Of all this charming folksong's many incarnations, the scariest is perhaps the one in Sam Peckinpah's 1977 film, Cross of Iron, about a platoon of German soldiers in 1943 on the Eastern Front. The ironies of men and boys marching off to this tune in a doomed war are the stuff of maternal nightmare. Of course the kid is eighteen and just like his brother, who also went off right on schedule at eighteen, perfectly able to make his way in the world. I can't help still being the hen hunting around for the eggs that were right underneath me, safe and sound, two minutes ago, even as I salute my grown-up boys and look forward, but with an aching heart, to the baby's departure in a few years.

Lord of the Flies

 If I were a religious person, I might wonder about that fly landing on Mike Pence's head. "That's no ordinary fly!" I'd say to myself. "That's Beelzebub!" Yes, that demonic fly landing on his head was there to show support. Attracted by the evil embodied in his support of Donald Trump--you lie down with devils and you get up with flies--that whopper of an insect settled comfortably on his snowy pate, rubbed its little forefeet, and smiled for the cameras. 

Beelzebub has a long and honored literary and cultural history. He's best supporting devil, second only to Satan, in Milton's Paradise Lost--"next himself in power, and next in crime"--that's Milton's Beelzebub. Also, "Long after known in Palestine"(where the VP was burned in effigy a few years ago.) Beelzebub's the right hand man. In Milton's words: 

He's the one

than whom,

Satan except, none higher sat, with grave

Aspect he rose, and in his rising seemed

A pillar of state.

Vegan Feijoada with a Secret Ingredient

Before we start, here's another secret: I prefer the stuff with sausages cozying up to the beans. But I'm cooking for vegans. This, my friends, is what you need:

But I'm getting ahead of myself. This ingredient goes in last. In the order in which you need them, here are the main ingredients:

Black beans

Water

Bay leaves--two or three. Dry is fine.

Chopped red onions and garlic to taste--lots. 

Olive oil in which to sauté the onions and garlic 

Cumin--preferably seeds. Again, lots. A tablespoon, at least.

Salt or a vegan veggie broth including salt

Rice--best made in a rice cooker. I recommend a mix of broken jasmine and sticky rice.

Smoked paprika

Cayenne pepper

Washed, drained fresh spinach

Manioc (Yucca) flour

Cubed sweet potatoes

Sliced oranges 

Chopped fresh cilantro and scallions

Last--but not least--the item pictured above: Laoganma black beans in chili oil. There are a number of Laoganma products--the word means "Old Godmother" in Mandarin Chinese.

Soak your beans, preferably overnight. They should be covered with water--two inches more water than beans, and might as well put a sheet of aluminum foil over them.

In the morning, or three hours before you want to eat, drain the beans, rinse them, and add almost twice as much water. Put in your bay leaves and allow the mix to boil, stirring fairly often. Turn down the heat shortly after the beans boil and cover.  Meanwhile put about a tablespoon of olive oil in a pan and add your chopped onions. When they start to get transparent, put in the garlic and then the cumin. Stir and sautée; then add the mix to the beans. Cover the beans and let them simmer on low to medium heat. Put your cubed sweet potatoes in a baking dish and add salt, pepper, a little olive oil--make sure the olive oil is evenly distributed. Put in oven at about 200 for about an hour. Get your manioc flour into a frying pan with olive oil and a little garlic salt. Sauté and stir.

Keep checking your beans and stirring; when they get a little softer, leave the lid off so that some of the water can boil off. Add your salt, paprika, cayenne pepper. Stir and let simmer. Then add a large dollop of Laoganma black beans in chili oil and stir. Allow the mixture to simmer while you get your spinach into the wok--I'm assuming you've washed and drained it. Add sliced garlic to the olive oil in the wok. Stir. Somewhere in here you've made your rice. Garnish all with chopped cilantro and scallions.

Result are great with a glass of red wine:

Defender of the Garbage Can

 One of our four garbage cans was missing. On a bright Monday morning I returned from running errands to find our Gelbe Tonne (the yellow one, for plastic) gone. Its former contents, fortunately all in plastic bags, lay heaped in a pile.

 Our neighbor volunteered that the week before, he'd seen a guy traipsing through the woods hauling a yellow trash can. The traipser was apparently lurking about somewhere taking trash cans on joy rides, abandoning them whenever he was tried of them.

"Oh, yeah," said my daughter, returning from school around lunchtime. "I thought it was odd someone had left a trash can up at the tram stop."

That's where ours had landed? My son ran up there, found our yellow trash can on the platform and rolled it home. Meanwhile the police, whom he'd called, appeared at the door, finding the trash can now where it was supposed to be. Was it damaged? No, but . . .

They'd keep an eye out for the guy, they said, and left.

Yesterday, my eagle-eyed and eared son heard a rusting downstairs and rushed out. The thief now had our "everything" trash container and was strolling up toward the tram stop. Keeping a safe distance, my son snapped photos and ran into the police along the way. They were glad to have the photos and confided that they knew who the guy was. Somebody using many recreational drugs.

Conversing with the trash cans too.

My son rolled our trash can home.

I have yet to check our downstairs area this morning but am glad that our attentive knight, Defender of the Garbage Can, is on duty!

 

On Rewatching the Harry Potters: Dinner for One Transphobe?

We're going through them, one by one, the teenagers and me--also dipping into "Harry Potter in 99 Seconds" and other charms on You-Tube (if you haven't seen this entertaining re-cap, lose no time). We utter Snape's long drawn out "obviously" before he does in the fifth one--Umbridge needling him about why he didn't get that defense against the dark arts position. We know about Emma Watson actually punching Tom Felton during the filming of The Prisoner of Azkaban, and why Buzzfeed says she did. As we eat our tacos or our fish or our tofu, chanting along with the dialogue, we forget, for very small moments, all the ills of our world. Until we start wondering why J.K. Rowling is saying what she's saying about transgender people--why she would imagine that transgender women would be a danger in a public bathroom. The notion brings me back to a story deemed newsworthy back when I was a teenager--I may have seen it on the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather, or I may have seen it elsewhere, but I saw it on some network news outlet back before CNN was founded: somewhere in Europe, at some bars, there were unisex bathrooms! Patrons of bars would enter a cubicle, do their business, and find themselves soaping their hands in a sink next to a person of what was then coyly designated "the opposite" sex. 

And this was news. People were talking. ("I mean, what would I do? A guy at the next sink? But if he's cute . . ." was the level of discourse.)

Oh, we've come a long way. I tend to see J.K. Rowling as more disturbed than hateful. The questions running through my head include "what's really eating her? Did she have some bad experience in a public bathroom?"

 Let's go to the bathroom scenes in her novels for insight. The troll shows up in a bathroom and he's a tough challenge for a bunch of first years. Moaning Myrtle messes with the U-Bend and the toilets in a girl's bathroom so unpleasant for her remarks and the constant flooding that it becomes a great place to hide out and brew polyjuice potion. And that's the bathroom with the faucet leading to the big bad basilisk in the basement. Monsters--snakes--a lollapalooza of interpretation here? Then Myrtle gigglingly appears when Harry's naked in the prefect's bathroom on the fifth floor during his efforts to solve a riddle involving an underwater egg. Not a girl to discreetly look away, Myrtle (also the animated stained glass mermaid in the window) wink and stare, making Harry most uncomfortable.

There's definitely bad stuff going on in the bathrooms of Harry Potter. We've only just finished the fifth one. Maybe I'll have an insight while watching the last three films . . . .or maybe I'll just wish Rowling would remember the advice emerging from the coy, or just lonely, Myrtle: "you're always welcome to share my toilet!"

A Ten-Minute Vegan Recipe That's Really Easy

You will need:

Potatoes

A can or two of chick peas

Tomatoes

Olive Oil

Cumin, salt, pepper, paprika, dill, and a veggie-flavored salt.

Put a little oil in the bottom of a large cooking pan. Set aside. Pre-heat oven to about 200º or a bit more, if you're willing to stir and watch. Rinse and drain the chick peas. Put them in a bowl with a dash of olive oil and the cumin, salt, pepper, paprika. Add garlic if you like, likewise onion. I would have done so, but was in a hurry and that would bring the preparation time up to a whopping fifteen minutes. Slice potatoes, arrange at one end of the pan with salt and pepper. Pour the chick peas into the middle. Lay the tomatoes at the end and add dill and veggie salt. Bake at about 200 for around an hour. And voila:

When it's 64 Days to the Next Election*

 

When he gets older, glues on more hair

Next year or right now

Will he still be happy 'cause he's so malign

Daily cheatings, bet moneyline . . .

 

 I've requested my ballot. If there's the snowball's chance in Hades that Biden and Harris can win, oh, let that happen. Please.  

*With apologies to The Beatles.

Excommunicated by Facebook

 I wonder if readers can help--so far, three specialists, two at the university and one at a local apple store, have been stymied. Ever since the end of May, I haven't been able to log in to Facebook on my own computer, the current message being that I haven't enabled cookies. Every cookie I've ever seen has been enabled, and the last specialist--who spent over an hour on the phone with me using a program that enabled him to enter my computer while I was there--gave up. I seem to be able to get to Facebook on my phone, but meanwhile, having done all that the specialists said I should do, including deleting cache here and there, I have to type in passwords for everything I do or read, even the New York Times. But no Facebook. I've tried the help center of course, but that invariably sends the message that my page isn't being displayed properly. Even tried emailing Security at Facebook and Help at Facebook and any other thing I could think of, but always got the message that Facebook.Com didn't exist. The first specialist said, "this is weird." The apple store guy, whom the first specialist asked to communicate with Facebook, said, "We don't do public relations for Facebook." The third guy, who seemed the most competent, kept saying, "let's try this . . . " but finally gave up. "This is crazy," he remarked, sounding dazed, after offering his final theory, that many people were probably experiencing something  like this because they were still on classic facebook as opposed to me. 

Any technical wizards out there? Or how about a Facebook representative?

 

P.S. Here's what happens every single time I try to log in, even after changing my password a zillion times:

The page isn’t redirecting properly

An error occurred during a connection to www.facebook.com.

    This problem can sometimes be caused by disabling or refusing to accept cookies.

 

A Colorful, Easy Summer Pasta

 When you don't want to spend much time over a stove, a pleasant alternative is pasta with fresh vegetables. Start with some nicely chopped garlic and chives:

1. Sautée the chives and garlic and set aside.

2. Chop the freshly washed basil and add to the pan with the garlic and chives.

3. Squeeze the lemons and add olive oil (to taste--I use a lot) and pepper, and beat with a whisk. Set aside.

4. Slice the tomatoes and add to the basil-garlic-chive mix.

5. Boil your pasta. Add the veggie mix. Add Parmesan. Yum.

God Has a Tummy Ache

There's the old whirlwind, cleft in his foot not showing, orange skin heated by Satanic forces within, blond hair actually moving, slightly, in the rush of helicopter wind, yelping that Biden is "against God--against guns!"

 

 

If I were God, I'd want my Mommy and a cup of chamomile tea to ease the pain.

Tale of a Stereotype: The German Doctor

Not all German doctors are like the one I'm about to describe. His German traits--his insatiable desire for order in particular, to the point where he listened to not a word I said--impressed me. So much so that I'm cancelling my next appointment after I see another doctor who will, I'm reasonably confident, offer different advice.

I developed a pain in my knee that seems arthritic or a "a sign of degeneration" according to an MRI and an X-ray, and wanted to see whether any treatment apart from the one I'd already been trying--cross trainer, ballet stretches, stationary bike--might help. Since the doctor I wished I'd gone to initially was on vacation, I picked someone vaguely in my neighborhood who had stellar ratings on Jameda. Glancing at the disk on which every X-ray trained on my bones appeared, he insisted the one he needed wasn't there. I assured him it was; he yelled for his assistant, an efficient young woman who rolled her eyes at me when he complained that the right material was not there, when it was, and quickly found what he needed. She was seated beside him on a physician's stool with rollers. The minute she'd brought up the material he needed, he grabbed her around the waist and rolled her out of the way.

    Oh, and when he examined me, he pressed down on my kneecaps. Which hurt. I'm certain the kneecaps of a teenage athlete would have hurt, but he insisted my age was to blame.

    We talked about my cancer diagnosis, and I made clear the findings of the MRI, namely that cancer wasn't to blame.

    "Sie brauchen ein Ordner!" he yelled. "Sie sind Tumor-Patient!" (You need a loose leaf notebook. You're a tumor patient!")

    Germans love their notebooks. Every bill, every pay slip, every insurance contract, every medical form, every this, every that, gets placed in plastic pocket and filed in one of those notebooks. Most Germans have shelves and shelves of notebooks. I have around three. Notebooks, that is. Not shelves of them.

    He thought every single letter I've ever gotten about my cancer diagnosis, from 2016 on, should be filed away in a big notebook. What he thought of me, personally, for not being fond of notebooks, was written all over his affronted face.

    Every time I have a CT scan, my whole history appears along with whatever's new in my diagnosis. No need for notebooks. He did not like my pointing this out.

    "Dünne Frauen!" he yelled, shaking his head. Thin women--by his standards, I'm thin? Me with my 62 kilos and my belly fat? The very sight of me seemed to irritate him.

    On the way out of his office I noticed that his receptionist is obese.

Donald Trump's Wonderful Memory

Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.

Can our POTUS repeat that? You bet! How does he manage this cognitive feat, demonstrating his vast competence as Master of the Universe?

1. Who's the most important PERSON in the world? Oh, so easy.

2. What does the most important person in the world enjoy grabbing? Now this was a bit harder. He had to get from "woman" to "pussy" but he managed.

3. See #1. Easy-peasy.

4. Camera. Like a mirror, only you have to wait a little bit! But so much fun! Yes, you have to wait, and I don't like that, but then you get to see yourself.

5. TV. Watches it all the time! Gimme 'nother cheeseburger, cutie. Look, there I am. Look, there I'm talking. Look at my nice hair and my face. Oh, my face! Can you resist me? Commmeerrre, baby.

We All Can't Breathe

The corona virus, the tweets of a monster, the staggering number of racist killings, make it hard for all of us to take anything like a breath. When we do, we're not relaxing, just pausing between bouts of anxiety. When Yeats wrote, 

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity,

he was living through the end of World War I, the Easter Rising, the quickly-crushed Irish War of Independence--all while his wife,  Georgie Hyde-Lees, was almost dying, a victim of the 1918 flu pandemic. She lived to give birth to two children, one of whom became a painter and set designer, the other a barrister.

There's the passionate intensity of a Trump rally and there's the passionate intensity of a peaceful demonstrator. Then there's the passionate intensity of a looter. There's a passionate intensity of Anthony Fauci telling the truth. He doesn't lack all conviction, but we are all losing hope in our ability to hear him. I'm happy to be in Germany, where most people do wear masks in public places. There's always the droplet-spraying toddler on the tram, the old guy with his mask slung around his chin and his finger up his nose, the angry young man shouldering his way through with no mask and a can of Red Bull or Beer, but these folks are not the majority here.