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.