Photo of the Day: Riding on a Sunlit Summer Sunday Morning, Englewood NJ

What a difference a few hours make! As I write this on a late Sunday afternoon, the sky is gray and cloudy, with at least some rain predicted.

But this morning—well, it could have been what a local forecaster of some years ago used to feature as one of “the 10 most beautiful days of the year.” Bright blue skies, comfortable temperatures and humidity.

A whole group of guys—it must have been between 15 and 20 of them—thought the same thing, because they were out on their bicycles in my hometown.

They were riding single file as they rounded the corner across from me, barely slowing down. Not that it mattered: at that time of the day and week, traffic at this thoroughfare is much lighter than from Monday through Saturday.

I could barely whip out my iPhone to photograph the scene fast enough. Anyway, I was glad I could time what I did.

Joke of the Day (Oscar Levant, on His Morning Routine)

“First I brush my teeth and then I sharpen my tongue.”—American pianist, actor, author, and savage wit Oscar Levant (1905-1972), asked about his morning routine, quoted by Erskine Johnson, “Erskine Johnson’s Hollywood Today,” Santa Cruz Evening News, Sept. 26, 1940

Flashback, August 1876: Audience Stunned by Richard Wagner’s Epic ‘Ring’ Cycle

As the opening-night audience listened to the premiere of the latest works by Richard Wagner in mid-August 1876, they got what they anticipated, and then some with his “Ring Cycle": a totally immersive musical theater experience, requiring a maximum commitment of time and devotion.

I’m not sure you will find another cultural figure who created something so enormous, so innovative, or requiring so many resources. Drawing on Norse mythology, Wagner proposed o stage four operas connected by a symbol, to which he gave the name of the whole cycle: Der Ring des Nibelungen (“The Ring of the Nibelungen”), totaling 15 to 16 hours.

Only one person he trusted to act as librettist, composer, overall artistic director, stage director, producer, prompter, and supervisor of his acoustic and seating innovations: himself.

Each of the four operas (Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung) needed not one, but two intermissions. And he wanted, and got, a theater built to his specifications in the city of Bayreuth.

Along the way, Wagner was unbelievably fortunate to have the patronage of King Ludwig II of Bavaria. I don’t think I was the only tourist ever to view the latter’s castle, Neuschwanstein, and think, “This guy was crazy.” (In fact, he was sidelined for good—after all but sinking Bavaria into bankruptcy—in 1886, and died shortly afterward under mysterious circumstances.)

In some ways, Ludwig differed from the composer. He would have preferred Munich rather than Bayreuth as the site of the Festspielhaus; he upbraided Wagner for his antisemitism; and, when the monarch compelled his genius friend to turn over the scores of the first two parts of the “Ring,” Siegfried and Die Walküre, it led to a quarrel and a temporary construction halt until Ludwig extended a loan that allowed the festival to open.

Moreover, Ludwig believed in Wagner enough to support him financially when the composer sought to fend off creditors and keep his quarter-century dream of the gesamtkunstwerk, or “total work of art.”

In short, it was inconceivable that Wagner would have realized his dream if not for the patron he privately nicknamed “Parsifal” after his pure, idealistic hero.

Not everyone was enamored with Wagner’s work or the mystique accruing to it. In this prior post, I noted that Mark Twain did not, contrary to belief, write that “Wagner is better than he sounds.”

But he did approvingly pass along that observation by someone else, and he did devote an extended essay, “At the Shrine of St. Wagner,” that took issue with Bayreuth’s cuisine and the composer’s songs (“Nothing can make a Wagner opera absolutely perfect and satisfactory to the untutored but to leave out the vocal parts”).

I have to admit feeling much the same as Twain. But it would also be impossible to deny that Wagner fundamentally changed musical theater—and, arguably, paved the way for so much in 20^th-century culture through his innovations, including:

*orchestral arrangements that incorporated new instruments;

*powerfully built singers who could make themselves heard over these 80-to-100 piece orchestras;

*signers as fully committed to naturalistic acting as to their vocals;

*pits covered, with orchestras unseen so audiences can concentrate on what is onstage;

*leitmotifs, or short, recurring instrumental cues associated with characters, objects, and themes, the better for audiences both to remember them over multiple hours and to subliminally signal emotions;

*continuous, “through-composed” music that blurred traditional distinctions between opera’s arias and recitative sections;

*seating “in the round,” with audience members seated democratically, without regard to pricing;

*theater lights darkened during performances so audiences would concentrate on the action and not on what others around them were doing;

*ambitious subject matter dealing with the most convulsive human emotions: greed, power, love, and salvation.

Even if you have never attended the performance of an opera, it is hard to miss the widespread influence of Wagner:

*films that either use his music directly (most famously, “The Ride of the Valkyries” in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now) or his leitmotif device (the scores of John Williams);

*J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, which, despite the novelist’s denials, employed a similar plot as the “Ring Cycle”: the complications involved in possessing an object of miraculous power; and,

*most controversially, fusing romantic nationalism with antisemitism, leading to exploitation by one of his greatest admirers, Adolf Hitler. 

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Jim O’Grady, on Picking a Saint To Help You)

“Maybe you, too, have an unreasonable fear that is leaching the color from your life. Maybe you remedy this through walking, meditation, or therapy. I recommend picking a saint to help you. The ‘saint’ doesn’t have to be a literal, official Catholic one—they can be anyone who rejected a life of maximal self-interest in favor of radical service, someone whose commitment to the rigors and contradictions of doing good in this world can show you how to live in it."—Podcast reporter and biographer Jim O’Grady, “Letter of Recommendation: Saints,” The New York Times Magazine, Sept. 15, 2024

Quote of the Day (Gabriel García Márquez, on an August Visit to a Mother’s Grave)

“She returned to the island on Friday, August 16, on the three o’clock ferry. She was wearing jeans, a plaid shirt, plain flat shoes without socks, carrying a satin parasol and a handbag, and her only luggage was a beach bag. In the row of taxis at the dock she went straight to an old model corroded by the sea air. The driver welcomed her warmly and took her jolting across the destitute village, with its mud-walled shacks, palm-thatch roofs, and streets of burning sand beside a sea in flames. He had to swerve around undaunted pigs and naked children pretending to be toreadors. On the outskirts of the village he drove down an avenue of royal palms where the beaches and the tourist hotels were, between the open sea and a lagoon inhabited by blue herons. At last he stopped outside the oldest, most dilapidated hotel.”—Colombian novelist, journalist, and Nobel Literature laureate Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014), Until August, translated by Anne McLean (2024)

Quote of the Day (Craig Bernardini, on a Hot, Humid August Day)

"It had been the hottest summer since three years before he was born. He hadn’t thought he could get enough breath, the air so thick and moist, like the world was a giant’s greenhouse cellar. He had learned not to swallow his breath, not to tighten up his chest. On an August day he started four times. Three false starts, but on the fourth he was sure. Fifty meters isn’t that far, anyway, and the water is warm and clear."—Fiction writer and essayist Craig Bernardini, “Depth Charge,” in Narrative Design: A Writer’s Guide to Structure, edited by Madison Smartt Bell (1997)

Quote of the Day (William Morris, on Art)

“Art is the expression by man of his pleasure in labour.”—English textile designer, poet, artist, essayist and fiction writer William Morris (1834-1896), The Art of the People (1879)

TV Quote of the Day (‘Family Ties,’ As a Young Lady Tells Alex What She Did for Love)

Jane [played by Michelle Meyrink]: “Alex, I've had a desperate, passionate yearning for you ever since I was a little kid….I used to watch you across the playground when you were playing with the big kids. And in high school when you ran for Student Council President, I voted for you. 300 times. I'm sorry you didn't win.”

Alex Keaton [played by Michael J. Fox]: “Well, you did all you could.”—Family Ties, Season 3, Episode 11, “Don't Kiss Me, I'm Only the Messenger,” original air date Nov. 29, 1984, teleplay by Ruth Bennett, directed by Will Mackenzie

I wouldn't be the least surprised if Mike Lindell is convinced that Jane voted in the GOP gubernatorial primary for his opponent, Minnesota House Speaker Lisa Demuth, and she got all her friends to do likewise.

After all, Jane already had voted as a youngster for a Republican, Alex Keaton. With 40 years and lots of practice, she could have put her candidate of choice over the top at last!

Flashback, August 1896: Henry Ford Meets Thomas Edison

When the obsessed 33-year-old tinkerer Henry Ford met Thomas Edison for the first time in mid-August 1896, he found encouragement from the older businessman for his gas-powered enterprise—planting the seeds for friendship that lasted to the death of “The Wizard of Menlo Park.”

Perhaps the most famous public instance of their interaction was their 1921 road trip, when they were joined for part of the way by President Warren Harding—an event depicted in Mark St. Germain’s 1995 play, Camping with Henry and Tom.

But I became far more fascinated by their mutual admiration society—and each man did to create and maintain it—while reading Edmund Morris’ 2019 biography Edison.

The occasion for their first encounter was the annual meeting of the Association of Edison Illuminating Companies, an organization founded by Thomas Edison and associates in 1885 to encourage research and the exchange of technical information, ideas and solutions.

Already employed for the last five years at the Edison Illuminating Company in Detroit, Ford first approached his hero surreptitiously, snapping a picture of the straw-hatted inventor asleep on the porch of the meeting’s venue, the Oriental Hotel in Brooklyn’s Manhattan Beach (now the location of the Kingsborough Community College’s Marine and Academic Center Building).

Later that night, he seized his chance for a more open encounter as more than 40 business executives, drinking and puffing cigars inside at a banquet, were conferring about the possibility of electric-powered vehicles. This represented a natural new area of interest for Edison, who was already changing society with, among other innovations, the electric light bulb and the electric power plant.

At one point Alex Dow from Detroit Edison pointed out Ford, his chief engineer, to the great man, and said, “There’s a young fellow who has made a gas car.”

Two months, a drive through the streets of Detroit with his new "Quadricycle" had already demonstrated Ford’s gift for self-promotion. He further evidenced it as he sat by and laid out his plan to the hearing-impaired Edison.

Despite his own interest in a storage battery for horseless carriages, Edison recognized the practical of the proposal he was hearing, telling Ford, “Keep on with your engine. If you can get what you want, I see a great future.”

It wasn’t until 1912, though, that their friendship became closer, when Ford, flush with his burgeoning success with the “Model T,” invested $1.2 million into the Edison Storage Battery Co. as a potential triggering device for automobile self-starters.

A few years later, Edison invited him down for a visit to his Fort Myers, FL, winter home, and for more than a decade the two went off on cross-country auto excursions, usually in the company of tire magnate Harvey Firestone and/or the naturalist John Burroughs.

What drew the two men into a closer friendship. The most obvious commonality, present in their first encounter, was a Midwestern plain-speaking style. But Morris also points to their “shared disdain for Ivy Leaguers, alcohol, and haute cuisine; driving energy, graphic thinking, and delight in anything new.”

They differed in subtle ways in their relationships with families, and more significantly in how they viewed politics.

While Edison maintained a complex, often demanding, even bumpy relationship with his sons, Ford was positively abusive to Edsel, publicly humiliating his ideas in front of other employees and subjecting him to so much stress that he suffered for years from severe ulcers before finally dying from stomach cancer at age 49.

And, while the workaholic Edison often neglected his two wives (and even disclaimed knowing anything about women at all), Ford, many biographers believe, engaged in adultery with his secretary, a relationship that may have resulted in a son out of wedlock.

Furthermore, although Edison expressed the sporadic anti-semitic remark, he employed Jews and other religious and ethnic minorities in his labs. 

In contrast, Ford was not content to vent virulent attitudes on camping trips with Edison and other friends, but through distributed a paper he bought, the Dearborn Independent, circulated through his company’s dealership a 91-part series based on the vicious and fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

When Ford passed along this material to his friend, Edison sent back a note acknowledging the gift, Morris notes, while being careful not to endorse its views.

From the mid-1920s on, even as many ordinary Americans began to eye Ford more critically than when he had been a rising folk hero, the auto magnate led the nationwide celebration for Edison as the grand old man of American inventive genius. In October 1929, he and President Herbert Hoover attended "Light's Golden Jubilee," a ceremony marking the 50th anniversary of Edison's incandescent lamp.

Ford paid homage to his friend that day by announcing the Thomas Edison Institute, an initiative in which he bought, dismantled, and reassembled hundreds of historic buildings and artifacts—including, notably, the legendary Menlo Park lab complex.  

Now Greenfield Village, it continues to give tourists and students, together with the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation, a vivid sense of the worlds that these two industrial giants left behind and created.

Song Lyric of the Day (Ray Davies, on ‘Lazin’ on a Sunny Afternoon’)

“I love to live so pleasantly
Live this life of luxury
Lazin' on a sunny afternoon
In the summertime.”—British rock ‘n’ roll singer-songwriter Ray Davies, “Sunny Afternoon,” performed by the Kinks on their Face to Face LP (1966)
 
For years, this song has evoked for me the dog days of summer, when it’s too hot and humid to do much of anything. Lots of people feel similarly, I bet, because the tune seems to get more airplay this time of year—including at my local Starbucks.
 
This month 60 years ago, “Sunny Afternoon” was climbing the UK charts, and before long it gave the Kinks a hit on this side of the Atlantic, too. So much of its success, I think, derived from an oom-pah melody that seduced listeners into not paying all that much attention to its lyrics.
 
That “life of luxury” was the least of it: that decadent aristocrat moaning about the tax man chasing him also admits, without much regret, to “drunkenness and cruelty” aimed at the girlfriend who, understandably, has left him.
 
It’s a counterpart to a user in another song on the Face to Face LP released that fall, “Dandy,” a playboy who is warned, “you're moving much too fast…you can’t escape the past.”

“Sunny Afternoon” has had a life beyond vinyl, also giving its name and forming the centerpiece of a British musical that premiered in 2014. Centering on the rise to prominence of The Kinks, it featured music and lyrics by Ray Davies with a book by Joe Penhall. It finally made its North American premiere at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater a year and a half ago for a month-long run.

Quote of the Day (William Butler Yeats, on ‘The Clouds About the Fallen Sun’)

“These are the clouds about the fallen sun,
    The majesty that shuts his burning eye;
    The weak lay hand on what the strong has done,
    Till that be tumbled that was lifted high
    And discord follow upon unison,
    And all things at one common level lie.” —Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet-playwright William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), “These Are The Clouds,” in The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats, edited by Richard Finneran, with revisions and additional poems by Anne Yeats (1989)

Quote of the Day (Patti Smith, on Her Youthful Literary Ambition)

“I believed I could write the longest book in the world, record the events of every single day. I would write it all down in such a way that everyone would find something of themselves.”—American poet and rock ‘n’ roll singer-songwriter Patti Smith, Bread of Angels: A Memoir (2025)

(The image accompanying this post, of Patti Smith performing at New York’s Bowery Ballroom, was taken by her sister, Kimberly Smith, on Dec. 31, 2007.)

TV Quote of the Day (‘Frasier,’ Calling in a Marker To Get Time Away)

[Niles refuses to sub for Frasier on his radio show during his vacation.]

Frasier Crane [played by Kelsey Grammer]: “Very well. You leave me no alternative but to call in my marker.”

Niles Crane [played by David Hyde Pierce] [nervously]: “What marker?”

Frasier [ominously]: “Oh, I think you know.”

Niles: “You wouldn't.”

Frasier: “I would.”

Niles: “You can't!”

Frasier: “I will.”

Niles: “That was three years ago!”

Frasier: “I don't recall there being any statute of limitations. I distinctly recall that when you asked me to go out with Maris's sister, you said that you would ‘owe me one forever.’”

Niles: “But you only spent one evening with Brie. That hardly compares with what you're asking me to endure.”

Frasier: “Oh? Shall I refresh your memory? Midway through the opera her ermine muff began to tremble. As it turned out she had used it to smuggle in her adorably incontinent Chihuahua. Just as I thought we'd reached the low point of the evening I suddenly felt a sandpaper tongue licking my earlobe. Alas it did not belong to little Hervé! Fortunately my shriek coincided with the on-stage murder of Gondolfo! Roz will expect you on Monday at two.”

Niles: “For your information, Brie had a very tough row to hoe growing up. It's not easy going through life with one nostril.”

Frasier: “Did I mention she had a cold that night?”

Niles: “Monday at two it is.”—Frasier, Season 4, Episode 5, “Head Game,” original air date Nov. 12, 1996, teleplay by Rob Greenberg, directed by David Lee

Spiritual Quote of the Day (David French, on Respecting Another’s Beliefs)

“To respect a person's conscience isn't to show weakness or embrace moral relativism. It's to recognize that God is at work in all human hearts and that existential humility doesn’t contradict religious conviction. It is a vital aspect of the Christian faith.”—Op-ed columnist David French, “Pope Francis Is Turning Certainty on Its Head,” The New York Times, Sept. 22, 2024

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Stand by Me,’ on Friends)

The Writer [voiceover, by Richard Dreyfuss]: “It happens sometimes. Friends come in and out of your life, like busboys in a restaurant.”—Stand by Me (1986), screenplay by Raynold Gideon and Bruce A. Evans, adapted from the Stephen King novella “The Body,” directed by Rob Reiner

The coming-of-age drama Stand by Me was released 40 years ago today. Technically, its $52.3 million domestic box-office gross would not put it in blockbuster territory, but it earned a tidy profit because of its low $8 million, enabling Rob Reiner to make more and bigger films.

After viewing the finished product, King told Reiner it was the best adaptation of any of his films to that time. Audiences today are likely to respond with the same powerful emotion that the novelist did.

Though the main plot of the movie is set in 1959, its themes are universal: loss of innocence, family neglect, and, most poignantly, the transience of childhood friendships.

Even Facebook goes only so far in retaining early bonds: distance—in geography, stations in life, and, sadly these days, politics—serves as an aching reminder of all we have lost over the years.

But we have those friends when we need them the most, as we are sometimes thrown into confusion in growing up as we discover the world and start to discover ourselves. The quartet at the heart of this film are, then, just stand-ins for ourselves.

For an especially enthusiastic take on the film, see this 2017 guest post by Jessica Prescott on the blog “Hamlette’s Soliloquy.”

TV Quote of the Day (‘Soap,’ on Reluctance to Yield to the Will of the People)

[Burt has just received the election recount results.]

Burt [played by Richard Mulligan]: “Prentiss got caught stuffing the ballot boxes, so I won, I am the sheriff.”

[Everyone congratulates Burt.]

Danny [played by Ted Wass]: “How 'bout that? Sheriff. And I get to be deputy, right, Burt? Me, deputy, me. Please?”

Bob [played by Jay Johnson]: “I'm gonna be the deputy.”

Danny: “You are not!”

Bob: “Am too!”

[Danny and Bob argue before Mary breaks it up.]

Mary [played by Cathryn Damon]: “Burt, what's the matter?”

Burt: “Well, it's Prentiss, he won't give up the office. Yeah, he's holed up in the armory with enough weapons to quality as a Third World nation. He says he will not be taken alive and my first assignment is to take him.”

Danny: “Let's go get him.” 

Burt: “Danny, this Prentiss, he won gold medals for marksmanship and he is now in a fortified stone building.”

Bob: “On second thought, I don't want to be deputy.”—Soap, Season 3, Episode 20, original air date Mar. 13, 1980, teleplay by Susan Harris and Stu Silver, directed by J.D. Lobue

I must confess that when I heard that bit here about someone who “won’t give up the office,” I had a flashback to January 6, 2021—and especially one person involved that day. I bet some of you felt the same way.

Believe it or not, it looks like, since no legal or electoral price was paid for that refusal to accept the results of an election, other politicians want to get in on the act. A New York Times headline from the other day, about the major and several council members in rural Avenal, CA, who lost a recall election, says it all: “They Were Voted Out. They Refuse to Leave. Now What?”

Now what? Better pray that anyone else who gets this idea doesn’t get their hands on weapons, as Prentiss did in this Soap episode.

This scenario seemed the height of nuttiness 47 years ago. Now…

Quote of the Day (Hilary Mantel, on ‘A Silence Full of Words’)

“You can have a silence full of words. A lute retains, in its bowl, the notes it has played. The viol, in its strings, holds a concord. A shriveled petal can hold its scent, a prayer can rattle with curses; an empty house, when the owners have gone out, can still be loud with ghosts.”—British novelist, short-story writer, and memoirist Hilary Mantel (1952-2022), Wolf Hall (2009)

Making Dr. Fauci the New ‘Enemy of the People’: The Senate’s Degrading, Disgraceful Show Trial

By and large, Capitol Hill and the media have moved on from last week’s Senate “hearing,” if that’s the right word for it, featuring Dr. Anthony Fauci. 

But the stench lingers over the questioning of an 85-year-old retired official who dedicated nearly four decades to protecting the health of Americans. It won’t dissipate any time soon.

What was it that the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (HDGAC) paraded before their constituents? A hearing? No. An interrogation? Only slightly better. A witch-hunt? Nearer. A McCarthyite public burning? There you have it.

For the past several years, committee head Rand Paul has claimed that Fauci, while director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), approved research in China that could have produced COVID-19.

As the hearing began, the Kentucky Senator urged the witness to “come clean” about mistakes made early on—and, when Fauci on the advice of legal counsel exercised his First Amendment rights, threatened him with “consequences” for obstructing the “investigation.”

Aping President Trump’s foul-mouthed antics and degradation of his office, Senator Bernie Moreno of Ohio screamed “who the f— do you think you were” at Fauci, then had the temerity to demand that the immunologist apologize—rather than having the grace to do so himself.

As there are virtually no GOP public officials, even down to the local level, ready to defy Trump, I expected this berserk performance from the Republican Senators. In a way, it’s also probably part of the job description of members of the nation’s fallaciously named “greatest deliberative body” to posture and pontificate.

But I hoped for more from the nation’s media. Instead of examining how much truth actually resided in the accusations that Fauci misled the country, they engaged in tsk-tsking him for what they deemed insufficient humility and for shading the truth:

*Gal Beckerman’s Atlantic summary of Fauci’s private notes was headlined, “The Revelatory Cringe of Anthony Fauci.”

*Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan compared his appearance to “congressional hearings on la Cosa Nostra, and the head of one of the five families is fiddling with his diamond pinkie ring as he asserts his right not to incriminate himself.”

*Contrarian commentator Andrew Sullivan, starting off by urging readers not to blame Fauci for the coronavirus or the lockdown, concluded on a shrill rising note by saying that they should hold him responsible for “protecting his own ass at all times, stigmatizing those he disagreed with and basking in fame at champagne parties as others died alone, gasping for breath, only to be denied a proper funeral (like my own father).”

These and similar commentators failed to recognize a variation on a longtime Trump theme—one that should have struck close to home for them. The GOP HSGA committee members’ attempts to stigmatize Fauci parallel the President’s charges that the American media represent “an enemy of the people.”

That phrase, as several historians noted when the President began using it at the start of his first term, echoed similar words popularized by Joseph Stalin whose mere use, as successor Nikita Khrushchev said later, “made it unnecessary that the ideological errors of a man be proven.”

The attempted show trial of Fauci may have disheartened his supporters—and thrilled his critics—but would hardly have surprised aficionados of classic theater.

More than 140 years before, the Scandinavian playwright Henrik Ibsen had anticipated a community squabble over a health and environmental crisis—and the vulnerability of a medical professional who warns of the danger—in his fiery satire, An Enemy of the People.

Ibsen’s protagonist, Thomas Stockmann, blows the whistle on the contaminated water supply for his town's lucrative new baths, only to be foiled by vested interests who manipulate public opinion against him.

Unlike the journalists who rolled their eyes or clutched their pearls over Fauci’s resort to the Fifth Amendment or note about every celebrity praising his work, Ibsen never lost perspective on the full humanity of his truth-speaking doctor.

For all his idealism—and correctness about the spa—Stockmann is hardly selfless, let alone saintly. He expects the town to greet him as a hero—and when it turns on him instead, he denounces them all in increasingly vitriolic terms that only alienate them further.

While hardly embodying perfection, Stockmann demonstrates an integrity in sharp contrast to his detractors. He pays a steep price for his unflinching honesty, as he loses his job, his children are expelled from school, and his home is vandalized.

Since the start of COVID-19, Fauci has been lambasted not just in his hometown, like Stockmann, but nationwide. Even while heading the NIAID, he faced threats that became so frequent and alarming that he and his wife needed federal protection—a security detail that Trump has since gracelessly withdrawn.

MAGAnauts were quick to trace the assassination of Charlie Kirk to incendiary progressive rhetoric. They might ask themselves whether claims that Fauci was, as new movement member RFK Jr. claims, a “criminal” given to “lying about everything” might produce similar results.

The hypocrisy of such charges is rank, especially coming from legislators like Paul, Moreno, and Texas Senator Ted Cruz, whose self-regard during the Trump Administration has increased even as their usefulness in exercising their constitutional duty as a check on the President has radically declined.

Typical of how—well, infectious—such talk might be was NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers, who demonstrated that the effects of his acknowledged three concussions might be worse than thought when he called Fauci an “absolute coward.”

If Rodgers truly wants to see an “absolute coward,” he might want to view Feb. 28, 2020 footage of an election-fearing Trump, a month into the pandemic, assuring Americans that “One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”

And if Senator Paul wants anyone to “come clean,” he can start with himself and explain why in March 2020, as the pandemic accelerated, he continued to work, travel and use the Senate gym for nearly a week while awaiting COVID test results that proved positive—forcing colleagues like Mitt Romney and Mike Lee to self-quarantine.

The Fauci browbeating in no way fulfilled any Congressional mandate to investigate, to ascertain facts so appropriate legislation could be passed.

It’s not just because it will be nearly impossible to discover the truth about conditions in China while that government tightly controls the flow of information—a characteristic of an authoritarian regime being adopted at a frantic pace by the Trump Administration.

Not, it’s also because Congress in Trump II—and, arguably, earlier—is no longer capable, and probably not interested, in enacting laws.

Instead, what Americans witnessed last week was a blame game that will frighten away exemplary medical professionals from entering the public health field lest they, too, like Fauci, experience abuse, calls for their imprisonment, and threats to their safety and that of their family members.

It is a particularly shameful aspect of the Age of Trump that public health—like sports, once thought to be a matter beyond politics, where Americans could unite in a common concern—has become just another front in the culture wars. 

Anyone who dares face a public aggrieved by job losses or deaths and inflamed by misinformation will indeed prove, as Ibsen’s beleaguered hero maintained, that “The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.”

(The image accompanying this post, of Dr. Anthony Fauci attends a coronavirus update briefing Tuesday, April 7, 2020, in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House, is an official White House photo taken by Tia Dufour.)

Quote of the Day (Russell Baker, on Summer’s Power ‘To Make Us Suffer and Like It’)

“What must the fish make of it as they pass the American coast with its banks packed with sunning carnivores? There they lie in the millions—their flesh broiling, their hides oiled, their hair stiff with salt, their blankets stained with mustard, their skins bitten by insects, the grit of sand between teeth and toes, their great masked eyes staring blankly into Proust, electric guitars throbbing into their earplugs, and the boredom as thick as crocodiles on the Zambesi. Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American reporter, humorist, and memoirist Russell Baker (1925-2019), “Observer: The Strangest Shores,” The New York Times, June 27, 1965

Quote of the Day (Lynne Truss, on Our ‘Screen-Bound Lives’ and Social Skills)

“Many aspects of our screen-bound lives are bad for our social skills simply because we get accustomed to controlling the information that comes in, managing our relationships electronically, deleting stuff that doesn't interest us. We edit the world; we select from menus; we pick and choose; our social 'group' focuses on us and disintegrates without us. This makes it rather confusing for us when we step outdoors and discover that other people's behaviour can't be deleted with a simple one-stroke command or dragged to the trash icon.” —English journalist, novelist, and radio broadcaster and dramatist Lynne Truss, Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door (2005)

The image accompanying this post, of Lynne Truss at an event for Melville House Press in Brooklyn, was taken on Feb. 13, 2015, by Terry Ballard from Merrick, NY.

Joke of the Day (Emo Phillips, on Him and Technology)

“A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.”—American stand-up comic and actor Emo Phillips in “Quotes on Technology,” Reader’s Digest, June 2009

Maybe true back in 2009. But if the edge lords of today’s tech world have anything to say in the matter (and they will, they will), you can bet that they’ll be crowing about the athletic ability of their latest AI-driven projects before long—even promoting a Computer Olympics.

(The image accompanying this post, of Emo Phillips opening for Weird Al Yankovic at the Apollo Theater, was taken on Mar. 22, 2018, by slgckgc.)

This Day in New York History (Roy Cohn, McCarthy and Trump Whisperer, Dies)

Aug. 2, 1986—While pressed by multiple misconduct charges leading to disbarment, Roy Cohn—a shadowy courtroom presence behind public figures ranging from Sen. Joseph McCarthy to future President Donald Trump—died of complications from AIDS, a disease he denied having.

When I was an undergraduate nearly 50 years ago, I was talking with fellow staffers on my college newspaper about the McCarthy Era, venting my loathing for the senator’s chief counsel. Suddenly, a freshman reporter yelled, “Don’t talk about my Uncle Roy that way!”

To say that I was stunned by this unexpected response would be an understatement. But I was equally amused by the retort of another reporter in the room: “I wouldn’t go boasting about it, Richard.”

Cohn had graduated from the same school where we were matriculating, Columbia University. For all his brilliance (he graduated from the law school at age 20), he remained, a quarter-century after his meteoric rise to fame and notoriety during the Red Scare, a deeply loathed figure on campus.

He was reviled in New York at large and Washington, too, for what many judged his abrasive, ethically edgy representation of clients. But his Rolodex still bulged with prominent people from all walks of life and even both political parties. (Despite closeness to far-right Republicans, he retained the ties to local Democrats developed by his father, a judge and member of the party.)

Clients hoped to benefit not just from his undoubted knowledge of the law, but influence. Ironically, in his last couple of years, even as he falsely claimed he was afflicted with liver cancer, Cohn was calling in chits in the ideologically sympatico Reagan Administration to secure the experimental AIDS medication AZT, then only in the clinical trial stage.

Nearly a decade after his death, Cohn was depicted, in all his splenetic hypocrisy, in Tony Kushner’s epic drama of life during the AIDS years, Angels in America. 

And more than three decades after his passing, he was recalled as the evil mentor of young real estate tycoon-on-the-make Trump, in the documentaries Where’s My Roy Cohn? and Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story Of Roy Cohn, as well as the feature film The Apprentice.

Ivy Meeropol, the director of Bully. Coward. Victim, has special reason to abominate Cohn. As an assistant prosecutor, he was not only instrumental in winning espionage convictions against her grandparents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, but also in communicating in secret with Judge Irving Kaufman about the need to sentence both to death.

(Today, after the release of declassified Soviet archives and USA government intercepts, the historical consensus is that though Julius was guilty of running a spy ring, the evidence against Ethel was far thinner—contradicting Cohn’s ludicrous contention years later to journalist Sidney Zion that she was “the mastermind of this conspiracy.")

Though Cohn facilitated the Rosenbergs’ destruction, it is equally true that he helped engineer the self-immolation of his boss after that trial, McCarthy, during the lawyer’s 18 months as chief counsel for the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

His insane threat to “wreck the Army" if it did not give friend and fellow aide G. David Schine favored treatment in boot camp—and his demand that McCarthy back him up—resulted in the televised hearings that exposed the senator unmistakably as a bullying, reckless threat to the Constitution.

Resigning from his post after the Army-McCarthy hearings, Cohn retreated to New York, where he spent more than two decades building up a profitable practice at his law firm, Saxe, Bacon & Bolan.

By the time that journalist Ken Auletta caught up with him for a December 1978 Esquire article, he was riding high—scoffing at four trials from which he had escaped unscathed, even crowing that his notoriety, rather than being a stigma, furnished him with more publicity and clients.

He had some reason to feel that he’d survived the worst blows thrown at him. By this time, his clients had numbered Francis Cardinal Spellman (who had employed his services in a school prayer case), Barbara Walters (whom he briefly dated), Studio 54 co-owners Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, Aristotle Onassis, Rupert Murdoch, Bianca Jagger, and rumored Mafia chieftains Carmine Galante and “Fat Tony” Salerno.

Nevertheless, Cohn’s ambition and ruthlessness were so relentless as to spark speculation that they were rooted in fear, including of antisemitism. 

Robert Sherrill’s August 2009 review in The Nation of two books pointed to Cohn’s concerns that the public would associate Jews with Marxism, and the lawyer did stun friends with enough slurs directed at co-religionists that it was commonly believed that he was a self-hating Jew.

That behavior was certainly bewildering. But I think Sherrill does not give adequate attention to what was surely Cohn’s more gnawing unease: exposure as a gay man.

As early as the Army-McCarthy hearings, when he and Schien were closely, even inextricably, linked in the public eye, he squirmed as the lawyer representing the military, Joseph Welch, when asked by the senator what a “pixie” meant, responded, “A pixie is a close relation to a fairy. Have I enlightened you?”

As Cohn reveled in his celebrity, whispers about his sexual orientation turned into open conjecture. Auletta, for instance, bluntly asked during an interview if he was gay, and it was difficult to miss the insinuations—starting with the quiet adjectives and adverbs before exploding in the final sentence—in this passage:

“He looks like a killer. Except for the body and the deportment. He's only five feet eight inches tall, 144 pounds. The suit he is wearing this day is dark blue, slightly tucked at the waist, with a faint stripe. A modest paisley tie fades into a nondescript striped shirt. His mannerisms—the licking of the lips, the waving wrists—are effete.”

Six weeks before his death, surely too sick from AIDS to fight with his long accustomed vigor and ruthlessness, he was finally disbarred on several charges, including:

*tricking a dying, elderly multimillionaire client into signing a will naming Cohn as co-executor;

*failing to repay a client $100,000 he’d borrowed for two decades, until the disbarment proceedings started; and

*submitting a false statement on an application to the DC bar.

No summary of the influence of Cohn on life in the second half of the 20^th century—or the first quarter of this one—would be complete without a discussion of his relationship with President Trump, which began in the mid-1970s.

Dennis Rohatyn’s October 2019 post on the Culture Catch Web site criticized Where’s My Roy Cohn? for offering an overly simplified explanation of Cohn’s impact on Trump, leaving the President's overbearing father Fred out of the picture. Fair enough.

But with that said, it’s all too easy to see how Trump absorbed the lessons of his consigliere:

*Never admit wrongdoing, or even a mistake.

*Attack, attack, attack the prosecution.

*The more preposterous a countercharge, the better. (He called the Jewish lawyers from the Nixon Justice Department suing the Trump Organization for refusing to rent to blacks “Gestapo agents,” just as Trump later would weaponize the Justice Department to pursue counter-investigations against officials involved in previous cases against him.)

It’s fair to say that Cohn helped Trump gain his coveted foothold in the Manhattan real estate market with advice on converting the Commodore Hotel into the Hyatt Hotel. 

Then he protected him from the consequences of his playboy lifestyle not only by writing his prenup agreement with Ivana, but also by directing the young Czech emigrant to a lawyer of his own choosing who would review the pact.

For all his tirades about desiring loyalty from aides, Trump displayed little of it as Cohn fought in vain against disbarment and AIDS. The disappearing act did not go unnoticed by the lawyer, who is said to have remarked (in the bowdlerized version) that Trump had ice in his veins.

It is rare that one individual can be seen as a malevolent force in three different eras. But the life of Cohn resoundingly confirms the truth of Shakespeare’s line from Julius Caesar: “The evil that men do lives after them.”

(The image accompanying this post, of Cohn conferring with Sen. McCarthy over questioning of witness William Taylor, was taken on Aug. 23, 1953. It appeared in the Los Angeles Times and is now part of the collection at https://digital.library.ucla.edu/catalog/ark:/21198/zz0002shqk/)