2 June—A reader who remembers the Litchfield Hills Road Race from its earliest days and is the parent of an athlete who was coached by Dave Driscoll emailed:
“I’m in agreement with you. His whole life was dedicated to that race. I never heard a bad word about him ever!”
Another reader agreed: “Why can’t they let the guy rest in peace? He didn’t ask a lot from anyone and served his country, did any of them? I agree with Morin about Driscoll’s legacy and that he deserves better from the road race committee and your comment about that’s where the money is.”
On the other hand, at Stop & Shop yesterday afternoon, as I was self-checking out the packaged thin-sliced provolone cheese (an excellent buy because it was free) and stuff I had to pay for (not an excellent buy because it wasn’t free), I was accosted by a middle-aged man I didn’t know. At least I didn’t recognize him. The stranger demanded to know if I was calling him a liar.
“Pardon?” I retorted. “What do you mean? I don’t know you. Why would I call you anything?”
“Your article said that Driscoll didn’t abuse anyone.”
“Oh. Well, that’s not quite what it said. But anyway, you know who I am, but who are you and were you abused?” Reasonable questions in the circumstance, I reckoned.
The stranger preferred to remain anonymous and refused to answer the abuse question. But he volunteered that he had been sent the link to yesterday’s disquisition by a friend. (I suspect he won’t become a devoted Monitor reader.) There was a thorough criminal investigation, he reminded me, emphasizing criminal, and the DA (as the anonymous stranger called the state’s attorney) was ready to throw the book at Driscoll.
“So why didn’t he?”
“You know.”
“Sure, the alleged victims and witnesses refused to testify against Driscoll, so the prosecutor had no basis or justification for an arrest warrant. So Driscoll wasn’t even arrested, let alone tried. So he has no criminal record at all. And that’s all there is to it. Can’t blame the prosecutor. Can’t even blame Driscoll. If he were alive, he might even sue for defamation.”
“But he did it and you know he did it.”
“I don’t know anything,” I retorted. “I hardly knew Driscoll. He never made any moves on me. And if he wasn’t convicted of abuse or even tried or even arrested, as far as I’m concerned the guy’s innocent. Period.”
“But I know he fucked boys.”
“”How do you know?” I persisted. “Were you one of them?” No answer. “If you’re one of Driscoll’s victims, why don’t you just say so? It’s nothing to be ashamed of, you know. Are you suing the town?” Still no answer. But the anonymous stranger looked pissed as he turned and walked away, his bag of groceries in hand.
Too bad the brief encounter didn’t give me a chance to bring up the posthumous civil ambulance-chasing aspect of Dave Driscoll’s alleged criminal abuse. Because that’s where the money is . . .
1 June—This letter just received. We mustn’t fail to note that this year’s Litchfield Hills Road Race is scheduled for 14 June, Donald Trump’s 80th birthday. (And Flag Day.)
LATE COACH’S LEGACY NOT MENTIONED IN ROAD RACE PROGRAM
Dave Driscoll, Litchfield Track Club coach and Litchfield Hills Road Race committee member, passed away recently with a running coach’s dedication and legacy that can’t be matched.
On the dark side of his legacy were sexual abuse allegations against Dave. After thirty years, alleged victims came forward even though no cases ever made it to court because of alleged victims’ refusal to testify. Still, alleged victims came forward in order to ban Driscoll’s legacy from his home town with gatherings and interviews [Staged media events. Ed.].
This was followed by lawsuits against the town of Litchfield and its former board of education. [Three decades after the alleged abuse, with the accused not able to defend himself. But that’s where the money is. Ed.]
The LHRR Board of Directors decided not to honor Dave Driscoll’s legacy in this year’s race program. But they did respect and support the lack of resolution of the alleged abuse after 30 years. Why would it make sense for the board to be logical, reasonable or understanding toward Dave Driscoll’s legacy? It would have made sense for veteran board members to rescind that decision. Sadly, this didn’t happen!
It’s my understanding the board was trying to avoid controversy and were not comfortable supporting Dave. [Ya think!? Ed.] This board isn’t comfortable supporting a deceased board member with a clean criminal record [Actually, no criminal record. Ed.], but will support someone who comes forward thirty years later with the objective to erase his accomplishments and destroy his legacy.
This LHRR board showed it has lost its independence to make reasonable decisions and not be swayed by outside influences. For a deceased member not to have the board’s support of loyalty is very disappointing and unsatisfactory.
Being a past race director of the LHRR, I realize there is changing of the guard. With that being said, principles shouldn’t change. Past race committees have always been dedicated to offering one of the best road races in the nation. It upheld road race principles, often resulting in decisions which held firm despite difficulty at times.
The decision not to honor Dave Driscoll’s legacy in this year’s race program is dishonorable and an insult to a person who dedicated his life to the running world in Litchfield and had a long-lasting impact on the race. Being a past board member and a long-time friend of Dave’s, I’m ashamed of the present LHRR board of directors’ unfavorable and immoral decision not to honor his rich legacy in this year’s race program.
Richard Morin
Litchfield
31 May—The big news today is that yesterday in Palm Springs, Flake State, some 1,037 schmucks each paid 75 dollars to register and receive a white dress, a platinum-blonde wig, and other relevant tchotchkes to celebrate Marilyn Monroe’s centennial, which is actually tomorrow. (For the benefit of Trumpistas, Marilyn Monroe was born 1 June 1926, a centennial is a hundredth birthday, yesterday is the day before today, tomorrow is the day after today, Flake State is California, and you wouldn’t understand a definition of tchotchkes. And, of course, Connecticut is Flake State East.)
The purpose of the Palm Springs Marilyn centennial celebration was actually to set a new Guinness world record. And that it did, easily eclipsing the puny Australian 254-strong event in 2020. You’ve got to wonder, what hath Guinness wrought?
It’s not clear whether the Marilyn-costume components, including the tchotchkes, were kept by the record-setting schmucks or returned to the promoter to be used in the next Guinness record-breaking farce.
Moving from farce to travesty, then, last week Donald Trump boasted, “Netanyahu will do whatever I want him to do.” Is that Trump or is that Trump? And the bellicose pacifist-in-chief may—just may—not be talking through his MAGA-moron hat. Because Bibi’s office didn’t provide a formal rebuttal and Israel’s self-protecting warlord-in-chief tactfully acknowledged that Israel “has no maneuver to influence the president right now.” In competitive diplomatic pussyfooting, that’s a sure winner. But consider the implication of “maneuver” as opposed to, say, “intention.”
The fact is that Netanyahu will do whatever it takes to prolong hostilities with whomever—preferably the despicable likes of Hamas and Hezbollah, of course, but any Arab or Muslim will do—to delay his pretty certain conviction for corruption. Because Israel’s supreme court isn’t as accommodating to a corrupt president as America’s.
While on the subject of corruption, just the other day Texas Representative James Talarico, who’s the Democrat running against Republican and Trump’s latest BFF Ken Paxton for the U.S. Senate seat currently occupied by Trump’s latest victim John Cornyn, called Paxton “the most corrupt politician in America.”
Without question, indubitably, and most certainly, Paxton is demonstrably, profoundly, disgracefully, prominently, and inveterately corrupt. Everybody knows it. And not only should he not be Texas’s attorney general, but he should be behind bars. Or, better yet, on a chain gang. (Doubtless one of Paxton’s attractions for Trump.) But even given political rhetoric and the not entirely inaccurate aphorism that all politics is local, does Talarico really and truly believe that Ken Paxton is more corrupt than Donald Trump?
30 May—Thirteen years ago on this very day, 13-year-old Arvind Mahankali won the 2013 Scripps National Spelling Bee by “correctly” spelling “knaidel.” Not to deprive the kid of his well-deserved glory, to be sure, but since “knaidel” or “kneidel” or “kneydl” or anything like it is a transliteration of Yiddish “קניידל” (Yiddish is written with Hebrew characters, of course), he was lucky.
Or, more likely, Arvind was well-acquainted—not just familiar—with the Merriam Webster Third New International Dictionary, Scripps’s orthographic bible.
Evidently “knaidel” is the most popular—common, accepted, you name it—transliterated English spelling of “קניידל.” More important, it’s the spelling listed in the Merriam Webster Third New International Dictionary. But even with so-called phonetic mapping and allegedly strict phonological rules that appear to be anything but, transliteration is at best more a matter of opinion—call it judgement, to be charitable—than science; it’s an art with protocols, take ‘em or leave ‘em.
“קניידל” is a fine example. Don’t forget that Hebrew is read from right to left, making it ideal for southpaws to write with fountain pens without smudging a word. While there’s no question about the “קנ” (“kn”) being pronounced as in “knish,” meaning the “k” isn’t silent, the “דל” ending of the word (“dl”), is pronounced as a short consonantal “dl” rather than a vocalically lengthened “del.” So why should the “del” spelling be preferred?
Then, of course, should the “a” vowel, as in “face,” be transliterated as “ai” or “ei” or “ay” or “ey” or “eigh” or just plain “a”?
Moving on, then, the plural of “knaidel” or whatever, is “knaidlach” or whatever, the “-lach” being the Yiddish plural suffix in this instance. Knaidlach are known to the world at large as matzo balls (or matzoh balls or matza balls, etc.) and are very easy to make and customarily served in chicken soup. But since they’re essentially spherical matzo meal (etc.) pancakes, they’re just as good pan fried. Or straight out of the mixing bowl.
Arvind Mahankali, by the way, went on to Carnegie Mellon for a bachelor’s degree in computer science and is currently doing a doctorate in machine learning at Stanford . . .
29 May—Seventy-three years ago today Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay were the first climbers confirmed to have reached the summit of Mount Everest. Since 1953, so many people—close to 8,000 at this writing—have made so many summit ascents—close to 14,000—that the Nepal Department of Transportation (NepDOT) is going to install traffic lights.
Moving down, then, “Pressure” is a new flick about how meaty urologists (commonly called weathermen) saved D-Day. For the Allies, of course. Forget about the details. Just know that the dreaded Motion Picture Association (MPA), best known for administering a meddlesome voluntary system for film ratings that’s supposed to guide solicitous parents on arbitrary and rather ridiculous age-appropriateness of movies and suitability for children, has rated the film PG-13. Because it contains war violence, bloody images, some “strong” language, and—worst of all—smoking. For shame!
The U.S. Supreme Court and Federal Communications Commission have pretty consistently maintained that obscenity—which at best is a matter of opinion, even given Justice Potter Stewart’s famous assertion that he knew obscenity when it saw it—trumps the First Amendment. That’s why, for instance, even commonly used allegedly dirty words are bleeped and certain body parts obscured in over-the-air television broadcasts. That’s one of the things the nanny state is about, after all.
With MPA age-appropriateness ratings, even though little darlings witness (and may even experience) violence and hear (and even hurl) expletives from the crib, they’re not supposed to experience any of that nasty stuff on the screen. So in real terms the MPA ratings have been little more than a joke from the get-go.
But throwing smoking into the PG-13 dungeon? Well, the ludicrous rationale there is that the omniscient Classification and Rating Administration (CARA) considers tobacco use to be a major public health issue. Just like cancer, among other issues, which is also an excuse for some PG-13s.
The Classification and Rating Administration, by the way, despite being an administration isn’t a government agency, although you never know. It is in fact the very division of the omnipotent Motion Picture Association that issues the stupid ratings. And these are they, from good to better, with CARA’s rationale:
G—General Audience: All ages admitted. Contains no content that parents would find offensive for younger children.
PG—Parental Guidance Suggested: Some material may not be suitable for children. Parents are urged to exercise caution and investigate the film’s content before taking younger children.
PG-13—Parents Strongly Cautioned: Some material may be inappropriate for children under 13. Parents are urged to be cautious, as the film may contain stronger content.
R—Restricted: Children under 17 require an accompanying parent or adult guardian. The film contains strong adult themes, language, violence, or sexual content.
NC-17—No One 17 and Under Admitted: Clearly adult in nature. The content is considered patently too mature for children 17 and under.
If you’re wondering about the beloved X rating, stop wondering. It was discontinued by the MPA in 1990 and replaced with NC-17. And that was because the MPA had failed to trademark the X. No that it would have been easy or indeed that it could have been done, as Elon Musk has been learning. So X is used by anyone at all to sell dirty movies and by Elon Musk to gratify himself . . .
28 May—Fifty-four years ago today CREEPy operatives known as the Plumbers (i.e., loyal American patriots working for the Committee to Reelect the President, who at the time was creepy Richard Nixon) broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Office Building and planted wiretaps and other bugs. Political espionage isn’t uncommon, of course, but what the Plumbers did was extreme. Besides being illegal.
Although Nixon likely had no prior knowledge of the amateurish escapade, it brought him down. Only 10 months after Spiro Agnew had resigned the vice presidency to beat impeachment and certain conviction for bribery and tax evasion, Nixon resigned the presidency on 9 August 1974 to beat impeachment and certain conviction for obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress.
(It must be noted that new Trump BFF and fellow sleaze Texas attorney general and now GOP U.S. senatorial candidate Ken Paxton was actually impeached for essentially that same stuff by his pals in the Texas house but acquitted by his real pals in the Texas senate. It’s to be hoped, in all events, that his rap sheet helps Paxton lose the election.)
So bribery, tax evasion, obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress naturally and unavoidably bring to mind Donald Trump and his administration. Trump’s double-barreled self-deal with himself has been accurately and definitively called the worst act of presidential corruption in U.S. history.
We’ll leave it at that—for now—because the narcissist-in-chief’s flunkies have come up with yet another winner. And here it is:
That’s only a sketch. But it’s no joke. Deadly serious. Illegal under current law, which hasn’t been rescinded or superseded since it was enacted in 1866. Yet. Legislation to allow this particular Trump ego-gratification travesty was in fact introduced in Congress last year by Trumpass-kisser Joel Wilson from South Carolina with the cooperation of Trumpass-kissers Ralph Norman also from South Carolina, Diana Harshbarger from Tennessee, and (of course) Darrell Issa from California. But—surprisingly?—it hasn’t gone anywhere. Yet.
Here’s what the nitwit Wilson said about his act of rectal osculatory homage: “Bidenflation has destroyed the economy forcing American families to carry more cash. President Trump is working tirelessly to fight inflation and help American families. This achievement is deserving of currency recognition, which is why I am grateful to introduce this legislation. The most valuable bill for the most valuable President!”
Yep. Wilson seems to have a hard-on for Trump. But does he really believe it?
Meanwhile, Patricia Solimene, Director of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing since Joe Biden appointed her in 2024, pointed out the irregularity, illegality, and folly of the Trump banknote. So of course she was as good as fired a month ago—reassigned (“not by my choice,” as she put it) to another job in the Treasury Department by Trump’s flunky United States Treasurer Brandon Beach, whose sole qualification for the job is that he tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election result in Georgia, which narrowly favored Biden.
“The buck stopped here,” Ms. Solimene wrote.
27 May—We must apologize for some misinformation in Saturday’s disquisition, “Hot time in Iran.” Trusting the diligence and reliability of our Mideast correspondent who moonlights as a rapporteur for the United Nations, the Monitor posted two recordings of what the correspondent (who in the circumstance will remain nameless) assured us were Iranian war dances.
So we casually (and irrelevantly) asked, “Can you tell which is which? Do you care? Does it matter?” And El Liberalissimo promptly and typically (and of course) snarked, “Do you plan to tell us the answer?” Well, El L obviously doesn’t know but does care. And that’s too bad. Because—and this is most important—it doesn’t in fact matter.
And that’s because, as a musically knowledgeable reader on the other side of the Pond emailed, “Sounds suspiciously Hibernian—Irish not Iranian. What have I missed?”
Well, that particularly perceptive in a far-away place reader missed nothing. Because painstaking investigation revealed that the two dances in question were in fact and indeed Irish and not Iranian. So we called our Mideast correspondent who moonlights as a rapporteur for the United Nations on the virtual carpet to defend and explain. But all they [sic] could say in defense and explanation was that Irish and Iranian both begin with Ir and they were in a hurry.
Suffice to say, our former Mideast correspondent now works full-time as a rapporteur for the United Nations.
Moving on, then, bad news first. Some time yesterday a lone paper wasp managed to insinuate itself between a sliding door and screen of the Monitor’s executive porch but evidently couldn’t immediately find its way out and appeared to be languishing there, absolutely still. Our maintenance editor saw the little creature at twilight and figured it would eventually go out the very way it went in (but in the other direction, of course) but couldn’t for the life of him figure out how the self-immured vespid was able to get in in the first place, as the screen and glass are intact and the bug-proof whateveryoucallit stripping is tight as well as intact. And where do socks disappear in washing machines?
Worse news is that Donald Trump crowed on his website yesterday: “Just finished my 6 month physical at Walter Reed Military Medical Center. Everything checked out PERFECTLY. Thank you to the great Doctors and Staff!”
And now the good news: We all know that Donald Trump is an incurable, inveterate, irredeemable, narcissistic, pathological, sociopathic liar. So there’s no reason to believe any information disgorged by him or any of his flunkies, even—or especially, in the circumstance—the medical ones. No reason at all.
So maybe, just maybe, Donald Trump will be doing the world a favor and shuffling off this mortal coil before too long. He appears to be well on the way out. And he won’t be missed by any good people, states, or institutions.
And now the better news: This morning the languid self-immured paper wasp didn’t appear to have moved, probably in contemplation of shuffling off its own mortal coil. So when the canine editor put Hope and Glory in their run he opened the screen door (the first time since the gods know when) and the stupid bug looked around and flew right off. Didn’t bother to say “thanks” . . .
26 May—The Hearst RepublicanAmerican’s opinion editor—or whoever is responsible for putting the ever-more-embarrassing editorial page together these days—evidently reckons that repetition is indeed the mother of learning and that not enough readers realize that “Climate change occurred well before the use of fossil fuels.” So he, she, it, or they today reran a letter to the editor with that title which had been published only a couple of days ago in the Sunday rag. Yes, it’s the very same letter, verbatim. And it’s absolutely true.
Another Hearst RepublicanAmerican editor (assuming there are other—or any—real editors at that rag) taught readers in today’s number in the “Today in history” column that “On this date [in] 1942 President Calvin Coolidge signed the Immigration Act of 1924, which barred immigration from Asia and restricted the total number of immigrants from other parts of the world to 165,000 annually.”
And that takes us to the topic of this disquisition, Emma Lazarus’s sonnet “The New Colossus.” (Not to be confused or conflated with Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus.” Of course not.)
Emma Lazarus, who died at 38 in 1887, probably from Hodgkin’s lymphoma, wrote “The New Colossus” in 1883 to help raise funds for the construction of the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty on what was then known as Bedloe’s Island, which arrived in 1885 in 50 pieces. [It’s still Bedloe’s Island rather than Liberty Island. Ed.] The poem wasn’t intended to be posted on a pedestal wall and in fact it was only in 1903 that it was bronzed, so to speak, and mounted in the pedestal.
This is it:
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
Getting past Emma’s rather self-consciously stilted verbiage, not uncommon for poetry in those days, let’s look at what she says, from “Glows world-wide welcome” to “Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.”
Put simply, Emma Lazarus didn’t know what she was rhapsodizing about. Because from the earliest days of the republic—the Naturalization Act of 1790 which restricted citizenship to “free white person[s]” of “good character”—through the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (just the year before Emma’s paean to immigration) which banned all Chinese laborers—immigrants have been welcomed to our teeming shore only grudgingly. If at all.
Emma’s wretched refuse—largely Jews, Catholics, and Asians—had it especially tough until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (a.k.a. the Hart-Celler Act), signed into law by Lyndon Johnson, abolished quotas based on race and national origin.
Calvin Coolidge’s 1924 Immigration Act, then, was merely another instance of xenophobia. So Donald Trump’s abusive, inhumane immigration policies that do end-runs around Hart-Celler are nothing new. Just worse.
And the latest word from Mar-a-Lago is that Trump wants the National Park Service to remove the New Colossus plaque from the pedestal. But not because of the immigration allusions or the verbosity he can’t understand. Rather, he found an obvious mistake in it.
“The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame” obviously alludes to Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota, Trump figures, so the plaque has no place in New York or New Jersey.
Funny that nobody else had noticed Emma’s error. Must be because she was actually alluding to Manhattan Island, regarded as New York City back then (and still, to many non-Manhattanites), and Brooklyn, which was a city unto itself until 1898, when it was consolidated into the City of New York as one of its five boroughs . . .
25 May—Some grown-ups (i.e., old farts) may remember that Memorial Day used to be called Decoration Day and was observed on 30 May. That’s how it started in 1868, as a day set aside to decorate the graves of fallen Union and Confederate soldiers with flowers, as a means of healing the wound, as it were. Well, not quite.
The first Decoration Day was observed at Arlington National Cemetery, which occupied part of the estate of Confederate General Robert E. Lee (a step-great-grandson-in-law of George Washington, by the way, whose machatunim owned Arlington Plantation), which had been confiscated by the federal government during the Civil War. The first interments at Arlington were in 1864 and by the end of the war in 1865 there were over 11,000 Union soldiers buried there, along with several hundred Confederates and a few thousand unidentified corpses; the Confederate graves were scattered among the Union graves.
For the first Decoration Day in 1868, when volunteers and families attempted to place flowers on all graves, Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs, who managed the cemetery, strictly forbade honoring the Confederate dead. And in 1869, Union veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic stood guard over the Confederate graves to make sure that nobody decorated them.
So much for healing. It wasn’t until 1901, in fact, that the federal government officially permitted decoration of Confederate graves at Arlington, after which a dedicated Confederate section was established. And, yes, the cemetery was segregated by race— until 1948.
Back to the holiday, then, after World War II, Memorial Day became more commonly used than Decoration Day, and the observance was expanded to casualties of all American wars.
Memorial Day became the holiday’s official name as recently as 1971 with the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, which had been signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson in 1968 and permanently set the observance of several federal holidays to Mondays, purportedly to reduce midweek work interruptions but in reality to give largely unionized government employees some extra paid days off.
Thus Memorial Day got to be the last Monday in May. That’s why we celebrate it today. And the holiday now commemorates not just American military personnel who died in direct combat, but those who died while serving in the armed forces regardless of the circumstances—declared war, police action, training accident, extrajudicial murder mission, nonmilitary accident or illness, you name it. It’s a matter of the decedent’s military status rather than the circumstances of death.
Veterans Day, on the other hand, called Armistice Day until 1954, honors all U.S. veterans living and dead and isn’t covered by the Uniform Monday Holiday Act. It’s always observed on 11 November because major hostilities of the Great War were formally ended at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918. But if 11 November should fall on a Saturday or Sunday, most federal agencies, inter alia, observe the holiday on the adjacent Friday or Monday. Of course.
And non-citizens as well as U.S. citizens who have served or are serving are honored on both Memorial Day and Veterans Day . . .
24 May—Surprise! Donald Trump’s personal firm of taxpayer-retained unethical shysters formerly known as the United States Department of Justice has removed from its website all the news releases about 6 January 2021 criminal prosecutions, claiming the information was just “partisan propaganda.” The surprise is that it’s taken this long for the most corrupt DOJ in the history of the republic to do its part in rewriting history.
Late last month, it seems, the notoriously unweaponized DOJ had filed an unopposed motion in the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals requesting that the seditious conspiracy and obstruction convictions of Proud Boys and Oath Keepers for the crimes they’d committed on 6 January be vacated. What the hell, Trump pardoned his fellow scumbags anyway. So it was done—with prejudice—early this month.
As Congressman Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee aptly put it last month, “These astounding motions are a humiliation for American democracy. They constitute an attempt to vaporize the verdicts rendered unanimously by American jurors who considered all the evidence, and to pretend that these seditious conspiracies against our government never happened. The same DOJ that prosecuted these men and secured their criminal convictions beyond any reasonable doubt is now asking a court to whitewash their crimes and pretend that they never led the insurrectionist mob that beat, crushed in doors, wounded, injured and hospitalized 140 of our law enforcement officers, disfiguring and disabling some of them for life.”
Repeat: What the hell, Trump pardoned his fellow scumbags anyway. So it was done—with prejudice—early this month.
When Trump and his embarrassingly obeisant, profoundly depraved, critically incompetent administration are mercifully—for the nation and world—removed, no doubt history will be made right again, as will all the other legislative, judicial, extrajudicial, architectural, and aesthetic evils and travesties Trump has perpetrated on a prostrate nation. And most Americans likely won’t be opposed to paying whatever it takes to make the corrections.
On the subject of Donald Trump, his father, Fred Christ (Trump), was able to avoid military service during World War II because as a real estate developer building housing (barracks and apartments as far afield as Virginia) for mostly navy families and shipyard workers he was deemed essential to the war effort. Fred was accused but never convicted of war profiteering, by the way.
Since Donald Trump wasn’t and never has been essential to a war effort or anything else, his draft dodge during the Vietnam nonwar, of course, was alleged bone spurs in his heels diagnosed by a podiatrist tenant of Fred’s. Like all of Donald’s actual medical records, x-rays of his feet—then or now—have never been released.
# # # # # # #
In other matters, it was in 1844 on this date that Samuel Finley Breese Morse (Andover and Yale), sitting in the U.S. Capitol, sent this very first message on his new telegraph device to the B&O Railroad Pratt Street Station in Baltimore, about 40 miles away on the I-95:
• — — •••• • — — •••• • — — •••• — — • — — — — • • • — — • — • — — — •• — — — • •••• —
It’s a quote from Numbers 23, “What hath god wrought?” But since Morse Code has only one letter case and Sam evidently didn’t include the dots and dashes for a question mark (••— —••) in his first message, it was really “what hath god wrought” or “WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT.” And you wonder if the guy in Baltimore could read Morse Code anyway . . .
23 May—Readers probably won’t recall that El Conservatissimo saw the light a couple of months ago—or, as we noted on 25 March, he’d “joined the stampede of former Trump admirers, defenders, and apologists who have finally seen and smelled the shit in the cesspool that is Trump and his corrupt administration.” We welcomed El C “to the right side of the right” and assured him “that now he’s more likely to be admitted to heaven.”
Well, El C continues to hew to the Monitor’s cause, as it were, and agrees with yesterday’s disquisition on younger generations’ inability—or disinclination—to take the heat. “Old farts like us didnt need airconditioning so why do young shits,” he writes. “I dont have airconditioning in my house and I bet you dont either and we don’t need it. Im not surprised trumpers cant come up with good things about the prick. Keep up the bitchin! Nobody does it better!”
Many thanks to El C, who reads and writes on a cell phone, which must explain his lack of punctuation.
Truth be told, there are a couple of ancient window units hiding somewhere in the Hovel, but they haven’t been in the windows since the gods know when. Good old-fashioned fans do the job quite well, thank you. And heat is preferable to cold in all events.
Moving on, then, as the self-styled peace president and his dutiful war-mongering flunkies prepare to illegally (of course) inflict still more gratuitous devastation and death on Iran (just because it appears they can get away with it), the Iranian buggers, as we’ve seen, aren’t taking it lying down. In fact, they’re doing war dances in Tehran in the north and Bandar Abbas in the south to piss off the aggressors.
Sad to say, given the vicissitudes of war, the musical instruments available for the Iranian war dances have been limited to the traditional folk rial whistle (somewhat like a penny whistle) and bodhrán (exactly like a bodhrán). Our Mideast correspondent, who moonlights as a rapporteur for the United Nations, was able to record the northern and southern Iranian war dances—a reel and a jig—for your edification.
Can you tell which is which? Do you care? Does it matter?