Quote of the Day (Isaac Bashevis Singer, on a Polish Holy Man)

“When Reb Sheftel stood at the lectern in the synagogue in his prayer shawl and phylacteries, he looked like one of the ancients. He had a high forehead, and under shaggy eyebrows, large eyes that combined the sharp glance of a scholar with the humility of a God-fearing man. Reb Sheftel imposed a variety of penances upon himself. He drank no milk unless he had been present at the milking. He ate no meat except on the Sabbath and on holidays and only if he had examined the slaughtering knife in advance. It was told of him that on the eve of Passover he ordered that the cat wear socklets on its feet, lest it bring into the house the smallest crumb of unleavened bread. Every night, he faithfully performed the midnight prayers. People said that although he had inherited his grain business from his father and grandfather he still could not distinguish between rye and wheat.”—Polish-American novelist, short-story writer, and Nobel Literature laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991), “The Dead Fiddler,” translated by Mirra Ginsburg, in The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer (1982)

Quote of the Day (Mark Kramer, on Baseball’s Tommy John)

“Tommy John is an American hero in his own right, esteemed by millions of baseball fans. He has entered a kind of timeless boyhood that seems especially appropriate to the clockless game of baseball. He's not the oldest pitcher pitching; he's not in the teary final months of a long career; he continues to be good and never was the best; he's neither outrageous nor electrifying during interviews. What he has done is endure and gather admiring fans through 20 seasons of play, while sharing with the public his religious convictions and dramatic off-field struggles—the surgical repair of his injured pitching arm, the near death of Travis. He is a hero for the age of the born again and the silent majority. Blessed with athletic talent and a picture-book family, driven by self-discipline and piety, given to forthrightness and modesty, abstemious among colleagues sometimes given to excess, he has become a national demonstration that around these parts, love of church, country and family is still what gets rewarded.”—American sportswriter Mark Kramer, “The Timeless Boyhood of an American Hero,” The New York Times, Sept. 11, 1983

I can count on the fingers of one hand my encounters with current or retired baseball players, but one was Tommy John. I saw him in early 1982 in a restaurant-bar in Fort Lee, NJ called Clams Casino—something of a hangout for alumni of my high school, as a friend worked as a bartender there.

It was still relatively early in the season, before John was traded from the New York Yankees, and he was at the restaurant a bit late in the evening following a game. Fans quickly gathered around the star pitcher, with many asking after his two-year-old son Travis, who the prior year had been in a coma for 19 days following an accident. 

John was gracious to everyone giving him their best, even though it was interrupting time I’m sure he would have preferred with his family.

I think many people saw the pitcher on multiple other occasions reacting similarly: with modesty, grace and gratitude for what he’d been given.

I flashed back to that evening over a week ago, when I read John’s farewell and thank-you to Yankee fans. He was unable to attend the annual Old Timers’ Game that weekend because he was in hospice care.

So it was no surprise that he died at age 83 this past weekend from bladder cancer, nor that tributes poured in for him from those he thrilled while on the mound or touched in personal encounters.

I can think of only one other Yankee, Lou Gehrig, whose name is tied so closely to modern medicine. The Hall of Fame first baseman gave his name to the neuromuscular disease that took his life; John, to a career-saving medical specialty that helped him—and later, countless other pitchers—return to the mound.

All credit to Dr. Dr. Frank Jobe, the Los Angeles Dodgers team surgeon who developed and performed the innovative technique in 1974. 

But John was not merely a passive recipient of another’s genius. He took the risk of this surgery, then put in the long, countless hours to make sure he could not only return to baseball, but with the same or greater mastery than he had before.

In this respect, John was a revolutionary figure in the evolution of the game. But I chose the quote that leads off this post to illustrate that paradoxically, he was also a throwback.

The two people mentioned in this article as the southpaw’s heroes, Billy Graham and Richard Nixon, illustrate his religious and political conservatism.

But John came of age before the dawn of the 24-hour news cycle or social media when athletes, no matter what their personal beliefs, did not go out of their way to proclaim them, and when fans could care less what their heroes thought so long as they helped the team win a championship.

As a starter who managed to excel even without a 100-MPH fastball, John was a throwback in another sense. His career is confounding to modern pitching coaches and sabermetricians who urge starters to throw as hard as they can for five or six innings before turning the ball over to a battery of relievers expected to hold the lead with similar hummers.

In contrast, John believed in going deep into games and, when possible, even completing them. He didn’t have to throw overwhelming heat; he could make his admittedly underwhelming fastball drop like a sinker, and his curve bit the inside or outside corner. More often than not, hitters swore at their ineffectuality in grounding out.

John’s death has left many of his baseball contemporaries arguing with greater urgency the case for his eventual enshrinement in Cooperstown. If that push is like others posthumously propelling Dick Allen and Ron Santo into major league baseball’s Valhalla, he might have a real chance this time.

(The source of the image accompanying this post, of Tommy John around 1981, is the New York Yankees via tradingcarddb.com.)

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.)