STICKY FINGERS JOE BLOTS HIS COPYBOOK

On August 15 last, shortly after the Mar-a-Lago documents case broke, I wrote “I remain convinced that Merrick Garland has evidence of some sort showing that Trump intends or intended to monetize those documents in some way.”   It seemed obvious to me that the very first time in American history that a former president was charged with a crime, it would have to be something serious and not simply a matter of having some documents he should not have kept. Now, it may turn out that Merrick Garland has some evidence of genuinely treasonous behavior and is just keeping it very quiet, but I have to confess I have not seen the slightest evidence of it.

 

And now it turns out the good old Joe also took some classified documents home with them and stuck them in a closet. I know, I know, the cases are very different.  Well they may be legally but politically the documents case is dead now unless Trump really did try to sell them and Garland can prove it. 

 

I never placed much store in the documents case anyway. But the Fulton County, Georgia case is something else again. I would be willing to bet that the DA is going to indict Trump and a bunch of other people as well and with that phone call that we have all heard a million times, I suspect she will get convictions. The news is not all bad on a cloudy Thursday morning.

BIRTHDAY CELEBRATIONS

There are three dining venues in the continuing care retirement community where I live: the Pub, the Courtyard, and the Marketplace. Susie and I eat each evening in the pub and when we can, we sit at the bar where there are four places. Quite often, we are joined at the bar by another old guy named Jim. Jim is a retired Army general who taught for many years at West Point. All three of us turn 90 this year – Susie in a few days, Jim in March, I in December. Yesterday evening, Jim remarked that when he had his 90^th birthday, he planned to celebrate it by going to Fort Bragg and jumping out of an airplane, accompanied by members of the Golden Eagles, the Army’s elite parachute team.  I have to admit, I was impressed.

THINGS ARE LOOKING UP

Perhaps it is merely the fact that the days are now a little bit longer and the depressing sequence of four-day weekends is over for a bit, but I am feeling a good deal more cheerful and my natural Tigger is returning. The special grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia has wrapped up its work and the fact that it has asked for its report to be made public suggests very strongly to me that they are recommending indictments for Trump and a number of his co-conspirators. We shall see in not too much time. The discipline maintained by Hakeem Jeffries in the House and the disastrous decisions by Republicans encourages me to believe that before this 118^th Congress has completed its two-year journey, control may actually slip away from the Republicans.

 

I did want to make one observation about the comments concerning movies. I have always been rather put off by the snobbish attitudes of the super sophisticated European left-wing theorists. They all strike me as a bunch of upper-middle-class overeducated snobs who think that anything more than a raised eyebrow is an excessive response to the world. They are the sort of people who would consider a belly laugh a sign of intestinal upset. I have seen virtually all of the movies that Marc Susselman lists in his lengthy comment and I agree that we should simply allow ourselves to enjoy them without worrying too much about their ideological significance.

 

Nevertheless, I would like to point out that the very first movie on his list – The Wizard Of Oz – derives from a book by Frank Baum that was a satirical view of the late 19^th century conflict over the gold standard  (“oz” is of course the symbol for an ounce of gold.) The Midwestern farmers who are the heroes of the story had mortgages on their farms and the steady decline in the value of the dollar made their mortgage payments progressively less burdensome. The East Coast bankers, on the other hand, were creditors and pegging the dollar to the price of gold   maintained the value of the mortgage money they were collecting.

 

I loved Herbert Marcuse and I admire the work of his colleagues at the Frankfurt Institute but I do not think it would have been much fun to live in the world that they sought to bring into existence.

SUNDAY MORNING

In June 2020, I wrote a blog post about intertextuality, one of my favorite things in literature. Yesterday evening Susie and I went to the movie shown here at Carolina Meadows (free, with complementary popcorn) and saw the new Downton Abbey movie. There is a lovely and extended homage to the great old Gene Kelly Debbie Reynolds movie, Singin’ in the Rain.  If you have not seen the Downton Abbey movie yet, I strongly recommended. It is great fun in these difficult times.

 

On a totally different matter, I learned to walk 87 or 88 years ago – I do not actually remember precisely when – and since then like all other human beings I have been walking around without any difficulty. As a boy, I was a pretty good dancer, and I could even press up into a handstand and walk around on my hands – no problem. Now, because of my Parkinson’s, walking and even standing steadily upright have become problematic, and for the first time I am compelled to realize how extraordinary it is that we humans walk about on our hind feet without dragging our knuckles on the ground to steady us. It really is, when you think about it, an extraordinary feat of balance.

UPSTAGED AGAIN

Forty-three years ago I proved a powerful and important theorem in the mathematical reinterpretation of Karl Marx’s economic theories. I was, I thought, the first person who had even thought to prove the theorem and I was extremely pleased with myself (although the advanced mathematics that I used to prove the theorem would have been easy for any undergraduate mathematics major at a decent college or university.) The next year, in 1981, I published my results in a journal article. John Roemer, a very gifted Marxist economist and mathematician, wrote a comment on my article in which he noted that a Spanish economist, Josep Vegara, had proved the same theorem several years earlier. I guess it is a pretty good thing to be the second person to prove an important theorem, but it is nothing like being the first person.

 

Fast-forward 42 years and once again I have been upstaged. Yesterday afternoon, as I was watching Kevin McCarthy’s ritual humiliation, I reflected that the real solution to the standoff would be for five or six Republican Congresspersons elected from districts carried by Biden to declare themselves Independents and vote for Jeffries, on condition that when they ran for reelection no Democrat would run against them in their districts. I knew it would take some more time before this became likely but it seemed to me eventually to be a genuine possibility. I decided to write a post on this blog about my idea. A little later, as I was watching the Ari Melber show on MSNBC he had on as a guest the irrepressible Michael Moore, who put forward exactly the same idea. (I am sure all of this has long since been widely discussed in the Democratic House leadership, but what the hell.)  Moore added something that I did not know and had not occurred to me: apparently in every Congress of 435 members, as many as 10 or 15 do not make it to the end of the term, either dying or retiring or running for some other office or whatever.   Moore predicted that before this Congress is over, Jeffries will be House Speaker.

 

On a brighter note, although my local supermarket has stopped carrying that to-die-for popcorn, they do, it turns out, carry candied popcorn that is almost as good and I finished most of a bag yesterday watching the fun.

 

Well, in 6 minutes the House convenes again. I must go.

FUN TIMES

Well, despite the fact that the supermarket did not have any more of that marvelous popcorn, it was a very pleasant afternoon. I enjoyed the giggles and smirks of the Democrats as the Republicans flailed around and revealed themselves for what they are. If I may adopt a new meme that has gained currency lately, the Democrats were in total array. I shall be watching again at noon today. I have no idea at all how this is going to end but it clearly will end badly for the Republicans.

 

On another more personal matter, I had a very useful zoom conference this morning with my neurologist’s physician’s assistant, discussing my Parkinson’s disease. I asked a number of pointed questions and got, for the first time, clear coherent answers. To summarize the conversation briefly, it turns out they have not a clue. They do not really know what causes Parkinson’s, what it is, whether the medicine I take helps, what my prospects are. They simply do not know. So I am going to stop asking and just go on with my life. I am so glad to be living in a time when medicine has advanced far beyond what could be offered to patients when I was just a child.

WAITING FOR THE GREAT BEAST TO SLOUCH TOWARD BETHLEHEM

Well, it seems that my dreams are to be answered. Tomorrow, when the House of Representatives convenes, and each Representative, standing by his or her desk, announces in a loud voice a candidate for the office of Speaker, no one will get the 218 votes required. There will then be more rounds of voting.

 

This prospect poses for me a serious personal problem. During the run up to the holidays, a local supermarket started carrying cardboard tubes of candied popcorn that was to die for. Susie and I, but mostly I, consumed five of these in the course of a couple of days. My problem is twofold: is the supermarket still carrying this popcorn and do I dare buy some more of it to eat as I watch the chaos unfold? I think the answer to the second question is yes. If you cannot indulge when you are 89, what is the point of living to such an age?

 

The Republicans will have to be careful. There has been some talk that several of them may choose simply to reply “present” when their names are called. If twelve of them take that choice, then only 422 votes will be cast, and Hakim Jeffries, sitting there with 212 votes, will be the new Speaker.

 

As I have observed before, in these terrible times one must take one’s pleasures where one finds them.