A man must fall very low indeed to believe himself happy! —Charles Baudelaire
Greetings from the far left coast. My poem "This Flare of Existence" has been accepted for publication in Steam Ticket Vol 25, to be released in May. It's always nice when that happens. Plenty of rejections have been racked up since the last one. I will put an announcement and link in the newsletter when the issue is available online.
Poems do not come readily or often these days. This one found its way to me in December 2021. That makes its publication a little special.
About a week ago I found a favorite sweater, the one with broad horizontal stripes white and dark blue, afflicted with a hole underside of the left arm. Still some wear to be had in it, but the end is on the way. Drat.
British mystery novelist Kate Atkinson, not to be confused with an Australian actress of the same name, is a new find. While browsing the library shelves, I happened on Big Sky, which I think is the fifth in a series featuring former cop, sometimes PI Jackson Brodie (I never seem to read a series in order). Brodie is twice married, with a daughter whose mother is his first wife and a son whose mother was not a wife, at least not with Brodie. The second wife was a con woman somewhere in the past who fleeced him of every cent he had and disappeared.
Big Sky starts slowly with multiple threads bound to come together at some point. The plot involves a sex trafficking ring, a woman who as a young girl was a victim of a pedophile ring that preceded, then morphed into the sex trafficking ring, with people in high places in government, business, and the police mixed up in both, a hapless businessman who fears he is a suspect when the wife who left him turns up in her backyard murdered clad in suggestive attire, a washed-up comedian, a drag queen, a geeky high school kid, his four-year-old sister, Brodie's teenage son, a Labrador belonging to his son's mother, just to give you a sampling. Brodie bumbles into this scenario pursuing an unrelated investigation for the suspicious wife of a philandering husband.
Like many novels and films Big Sky is longer than need be. Some judicious editing would have been welcome. A minor quibble. Much of the plot turns on coincidence as storylines intersect and backstories come to light. Atkinson handles this in deft fashion, with generous doses of humor by turns dark, bitter, cynical, sprinkled throughout. The extended climax is gripping as villains get what they are due a manner that is inventive and satisfying.
I am presently reading an earlier book in the Brodie series, Started Early, Took My Dog, and find that it is made of similar stuff.
Un divan à Tunis (bafflingly released for English-speaking audiences with the title Arab Blues) is a nice little comedy/drama from 2019 directed by Manele Labidi. Selma is a young Tunisian woman newly returned to Tunis from Paris after living in France from the time her family moved to Lyon when she was ten, her father apparently a political exile. She has returned to Tunis to set up practice as a psychotherapist in a rooftop apartment above the home of her uncle, aunt, and cousin, a rebellious teenage girl with a smart mouth that gets her in trouble. The uncle and aunt cannot understand why in the world she would move back to Tunis or what possesses her to think that Arabs will go in for psychotherapy.
It turns out they do, as Selma quickly acquires a wacky but devoted clientele that includes a beauty salon owner, a baker who may be trans, a paranoid convinced he is pursued by Israeli intelligence agents, among others. For some inexplicable reason, the intelligent and capable Selma neglects to obtain a permit from the Health Ministry required to conduct her practice. A young police officer alternately warns threateningly that she will get in trouble for practicing without the permit and flirts. At first she ignores him. When he persists, she finds that navigating the inefficient and corrupt health ministry get the permit seems hopeless.
It may go too far to ascribe Selma's experiences and some of her missteps to culture shock after living most of her life in France, but there is an element of that, and a good deal of both comedy and drama turns on it. The plot and characters are engaging, it is easy to care about what happens to Selma and to wonder if she and the police office will get together. The portrayal of place and culture feels authentic. As I said at the beginning, a nice little film.
Remember when Joe Biden campaigned on bringing basic competence back to the executive branch after four years of Trumpian hackery? Back before he channeled his inner Bernie Sanders and went big on the domestic agenda, which begat Build Back Better's dreary slog to ignominy. Then there was the Afghanistan withdrawal. We do well to remember that fiasco was set in motion by his disgraced, twice-impeached predecessor. Nonetheless, any resemblance to competence in its execution was fleeting at best.
These lowlights are dredged up by way of setting the stage for last week's pronouncement: "For God's sake, this man cannot remain in power." Well. This was not helpful. As Tom Nichols put it, "The sound that could not be captured by the cameras after Biden spoke was dozens of staffers slapping the palms of their hands against their forehead." (Biden’s Comments About Putin Were an Unforced Error, The Atlantic, March 26, 2022).
For the record, I would like to see Putin removed from power, tried for war crimes, convicted, and made to pass the remainder of his days confined in miserable conditions. Biden may have done little damage beyond providing the tyrant and his mouthpieces with a propaganda talking point. That is damage enough. I do not see anything positive that comes of it.
The president is a self-acknowledged gaffe machine. This kind of thing is what we get with him, part of the package. Of greater concern, perhaps, should be the dismal effort by staff to walk back the remark. Any resemblance to competence escaped my notice.
For more analysis, check out Tamara Keith and Amy Walter on Biden’s comments about Putin’s power, PBS NewsHour, March 28, 2022.
Koch Industries remains bullish on Russia, one of eight multinational corporations that refuse to so much as make a symbolic gesture in the direction of reducing their Russian footprint.
Koch’s website indicates that its software business Infor, its electronics business Molex and its industrial products business Koch Engineered Solutions also continue to do business in Russia. Their imports, exports and taxes help prop up the Russian economy, and therefore Putin’s war effort. (Dana Milbank, Koch Industries’ valentine to Vladimir Putin, Washington Post, March 30, 2022)
Koch-funded groups criticize economic sanctions, while in this country Koch groups promote voting restrictions, fund candidates and initiatives intent on limiting voting access, and support other Republican efforts to establish permanent, one-party government.
Americans concerned about the Koch threats to democracy can keep their shopping carts free of Mardi Gras and Vanity Fair napkins, Quilted Northern and Angel Soft, Brawny and Sparkle, Georgia-Pacific office products, and Cordura fabrics, all goods produced by the oil, chemical and industrial conglomerate. (Milbank)
Jonathan V. Last pushes back against claims by Glenn Greenwald and Brett Stephens that the tyrant Putin is on a path to achieve his real targets: the energy resources of eastern Ukraine and most or all of Ukraine's coastline. Last asserts that Putin can "win" only if the West blinks. Even if Ukraine agrees not to join NATO, pledges not to pursue nuclear weapons, and formally cedes all claims to Crimea and the Donbas, the special military operation is still a strategic defeat for Russia if the West remains resolute (a huge if), for the following reasons:
- NATO has been reinvigorated and any attempt to break the alliance by forcing an Article V confrontation is now a dead-letter.
- The alliance may well expand to include Sweden and Finland.
- Germany is rearming.
- Ukraine has been pushed further into integration with Europe.
- The Russian military has been exposed as dangerously weak and disorganized.
Last is certainly not the last word on the subject, but his column is worth reading and consideration. Elsewhere he suggested hypothetically that the West should ease sanctions only after all Russian troops are withdrawn and there is an agreement on reparations. His position in the column of March 30 is less hardline, but key points remain: The West must be resolute. There should be no rush to ease sanctions.
The Washington Post reported that advisers may not be leveling with the tyrant about the military's performance in Ukraine and the effects of economic sanctions:
"We have information that Putin felt misled by the Russian military, which has resulted in persistent tension between Putin and his military leadership," White House spokeswoman Kate Bedingfield told reporters. "We believe that Putin is being misinformed by his advisers about how badly the Russian military is performing and how the Russian economy is being crippled by sanctions because his senior advisers are too afraid to tell him the truth." (Michael Birnbaum, Ellen Francis, et al., U.S. says Putin being misled, as Ukraine refugee tally hits 4 million, March 31, 2022)
The PBS NewsHour reported about this on Wednesday in a piece that included video of Antony Blinken commenting on the possibility:
One of the Achilles' heels of autocracies is that you don't have people in those systems who speak truth to power or who have the ability to speak truth to power. And I think that is something that we're seeing in Russia. (Russian strikes rock Ukrainian cities despite pledge to ease attacks)
A lot of this is speculation. Plausible, but still speculation.
The situation is discussed in greater detail in Isaac Chotiner's interview with Russian investigative journalist Andrei Soldatov, an expert on the Russian state's security apparatus (The Purges in Putin's Shrinking Inner Circle, The New Yorker, March 22, 2022). Soldatov is currently in London, having left Russia after the government made it absolutely illegal to report on state security services in 2020 and sent some signals that it would be better for him to leave the country. Here too much is speculation. Many sentences begin "It looks like…" Even so, it is another picture of an isolated tyrant being told what he wants to hear, with the added theme of the military's increasing power and influence.
I have heard NPR journalists routinely state that many people are tired of the pandemic. They just want to put it behind them and go back to what used to be normal life. A responsible journalist might note that this is understandable but not relevant to whether vaccinations, an additional booster, masks in certain circumstances, and other measures to provide for public health and safety remain prudent.
U.S. District Court Judge David Carter:
Dr. Eastman and President Trump launched a campaign to overturn a democratic election, an action unprecedented in American history.
Their campaign was not confined to the ivory tower—it was a coup in search of a legal theory. The plan spurred violent attacks on the seat of our nation’s government, led to the deaths of several law enforcement officers, and deepened public distrust in our political process.
Credit where credit is due dept. I have been hard on Maine Senator Susan Collins, with reason, I believe. Pundits counting heads before high profile votes invariably present her as a Republican moderate who might buck party orthodoxy. When the roll is called, well, let's just say she is no Joe Manchin. Her announcement that she will vote to confirm the nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson for the Supreme Court is a welcome exception.
Three new blog posts.
- Forthright and Fearless: Mary McCarthy's Intellectual Memoirs. March 20, 2022. I knew next to nothing about Mary McCarthy (1912–1989), the name only, as author of The Groves of Academe and The Group, novels I had not read, until interest was kindled…read more>>
- Impressions from the Confirmation Hearing. March 23, 2022. Good grief. I have not followed the hearing gavel to gavel but have caught a fair amount here and there, and as you might expect I have followed reporting and analysis at my usual, go-to sources…read more>>
- Cory Booker: "I'm talking about decency." March 25, 2022. Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson was not alone when she wiped away tears during Cory Booker's impassioned "Nobody's Going to Steal My Joy" speech on Thursday. By the time he was finished, members of her family and a staffer sitting behind Booker…read more>>
Keep the faith.
Stand with Ukraine.
yr obdt svt
Pictured below: Spring dragon boat sighting, Willamette River. March 27, 2022.
