President Trump’s latest attack is on the Smithsonian Institution, which he excoriates for exhibits that demonstrate “improper ideology.”
I’ve spent forty years teaching and writing history, and those words first brought to mind the Nazi “Degenerate Art” exhibition in 1937 Munich.
In that exhibition, the “degenerate” artists included Paul Klee, Otto Dix, Wasily Kandinsky, foreigners like Grant Wood, Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso and Piet Mondrian.
The Degenerate Art received a showing that year, but so did properly ideological Nazi art, dominated by great nude sculptures that celebrated Aryan beauty. They were in another gallery, far grander, gallery.
Two million Germans ultimately attended the Degenerate Art exhibition. About 600,000 attended Hitler’s Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung—“Great German Art Exposition.”
If you’re in the mood for Aryan nudes, they were inert in the Great German Art Exposition. They are far less so in the first ten minutes of Leni Riefenstahl’s “Olympica,” the filmmaker’s tribute 1936 Berlin Olympics–what we Americans remember as the Jesse Owens Olympics.
But not even Jesse Owens nor Paul Klee could stop the immense, and immensely seductive, power of fascism. It was simply too late.
And it might well be today.
In the links: An excerpt from “Olympia;” a long-ago lesson plan on modern art from AGHS that includes some of the “Degenerates.”
Thirty years ago, this pilot, Kara Hultgreen, became the first Navy fighter pilot assigned to an aircraft carrier. She died in a crash in 1994. Naval and military aviation is dangerous.
Twenty-eight women pilots died in World War II at a rate, if you need to know, and I think you do, far, far below their male counterparts, like the twenty-year-old air cadets who came to these women for flying tips. I’ve written about these women. They matter to me.
(Above) World War II pilots Betty Pauline Stine (Santa Barbara High School); Hazel Ying Lee and Getrude “Tommy” Tompkins, all killed in 1944. Tompkins and her fighter plane, the elite P-51 Mustang, have never been found after disappearing in fog above Santa Monica Bay.
Last July, another Navy pilot became the first woman to score an air-to-air victory, shooting down a Houthi Drone over the Red Sea. She flew her F-18 Super Hornet off the USS Eisenhower’s flight deck.
Her name has never been revealed, for security reasons.
Above: Eisenhower and her escorts; an F-18 Super Hornet at the moment it breaks the sound barrier.
Today’s Cabinet meeting, after stunningly stupid bureaucrats at the top of the food chain had accidentally revealed the plans for this year’s strike on the Houthis, was, well, stunningly stupid. They blamed the editor of one of America’s oldest and most prestigious magazines— the “failing poet” Walt Whitman published in The Atlantic, for God’s sake—for the incident. In fact, the editor refused to publish the details because that might have cost the lives of young Navy pilots.
After the Airing of Grievances and the Feats of Strength and the Condemnation of the Principled, the bureaucrats at the top of the national food chain abased themselves in the presence of the president. The president’s national security advisor (the fall guy, even moreso than the Secretary of Defense, an alcoholic sexual predator) for this carelessness in the matter of young fighter pilots’ lives—delivered a speech so fulsome in its praise that the president became nearly Christlike. The president enjoyed this. Everyone around the Big Peoples’ table applauded.
A marked contrast in tone was adopted by the Secretary of Defense. At the time of the meeting, Pete Hegseth was landing at Joint Base Oahu. This is not a well man.
The day after this ad hominem attack, the editor of The Atlantic revealed the content of the texts exchanged. It became clear that none of the Cabinet or Cabinet-level bureaucrats is well. Not a one, including those who posted little flame emojis as the Houthis and their girlfriends were being incinerated.
What also became clear is how terrified all of them are of presidential advisor Stephen Miller, whose go-ahead set the attack into motion.
Not even Scrooge’s ghosts could redeem Stephen Miller, America’s Martin Bormann.
Miller has no military credentials. He does make war, however, on elderly Americans, nonwhite Americans, working-class Americans, teachers, judges, journalists, and on what Jefferson Airplane called, in the song “White Rabbit,” Logic and Proportion/Fallen sloppy dead.
While it was an American history moment, the Cabinet meeting was far more remindful of Stalin or Dear Leader, North Korea’s Kim Jong Il. the father of the dictator that the president admires so much. In making 45/47 the infallible Captain of our Ship of State, the Cabinet, I think, secretly hoped for medals.
Arizona’s Last Mooring, Friday, December 5, 1941, by Tom Freeman
This beautiful and poignant painting is by the late Tom Freeman. I’ve used it several times, since I write so much about World War II, including the two Arroyo Grande sailors lost when Arizona blew up on Sunday, December 7. 1941. I loved teaching United States History, and this ship is so evocative of one of the sharpest turning points in our past.
Monday’s turning point—the Inauguration—is so sharp that it could, metaphorically at least, break our necks.
This might well be our last weekend as a free people. We might have thought this so on December 8, when vast Japanese fleets and air armadas were rumored off San Francisco, when Germany, who declared war the next day, seemed so invincible. It took us nearly four years to make ourselves free again.
I wonder if we’ve lost the will to be free—it’s hard work, true— in 2025. Now we want to be the tough guys the Japanese thought themselves to be in 1941. They wanted a free hand in China. We want Greenland and the Canal and maybe even Canada. We are ambitious, aren’t we? And both the Japanese and the Germans, two nations in the grip of racism, wanted to punish anyone whom they considered their inferiors. Now we want to be the punishers.
My fears about us, today, were heightened by brief glimpses—about all I could take–of this week’s Senate confirmation hearings. They included an alcoholic misogynist who will preside over Defense, a Wall Street player who believes in the magic of tariffs—someone needs to explain the Great Depression to this man— and in the wisdom of tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, a state attorney general, a 2020 election denier, who thinks Justice has been “weaponized,” and, today featured the DHS-Secretary designate, who dragged her hunting dog into a gravel pit and shot her dead.
What I saw was appalling. All of them were evasive when they weren’t being hyperbolic. All of them lied about the policies they would enforce or choose not to enforce, just as three Supreme Court nominees lied. All of them had kissed the generous rear (wisely, from the great distance that separates D.C. from Mar-a-Lago) of the man who’d nominated them. They were beholden to him, afraid of him. He was the audience they were playing to.
Of course, they were all Republicans. But these are all Republicans, too. From “Truth Social” Wednesday, as quoted by NPR:
“As of today, the incoming Trump Administration has hired over 1,000 people for The United States Government,” Trump’s post reads. “They are outstanding in every way, and you will see the fruits of their labor over the coming years. We will MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, and it will happen very quickly!
“In order to save time, money, and effort, it would be helpful if you would not send, or recommend to us, people who worked with, or are endorsed by, Americans for No Prosperity (headed by Charles Koch), ‘Dumb as a Rock’ John Bolton, ‘Birdbrain’ Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, disloyal Warmongers Dick Cheney, and his Psycho daughter, Liz, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, General(?) Mark Milley, James Mattis, Mark Yesper, or any of the other people suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, more commonly known as TDS. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”and his Psycho daughter, Liz.
These people—not to mention scores of Democrats, are among the Enemy Within. The Democrats might find themselves in prison if Trump, the man Scots refer to as the “Cheetoh-Faced Shitgibbon”—can move fast enough before the midterms.
That’s what he wants to do, with his seventh-grade command of his emotions, his language, his nation’s history (he did not know who won World War I; a speech he gave on Gettysburg reads like seventh-grade crib notes) and of his curious middle school/Mean Girls definition of “treason,” the crime he asserts that was committed by Liz Cheney, Adam Schiff and Gen. Mark Milley.
The Americans who voted for the Shitgibbon, who will, of course, pay a terrible price, given his designs on Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, on the prices they’ll pay, inflated by his tariffs, on the fecklessness of industrialists, enriched by the Trumpian tax cuts and freed to visit on their employees the kind of cruelty depicted by Upton Sinclair, even by Charles Dickens.
The testifiers remind me of the ghastly Edgar Allan Poe story, “Hop-Frog; Or, the Eight Chained Ourang-Outangs.” A despotic ruler throws a costume party. His high-born guests, like the president-elect’s oligarchs and nominees, think themselves so far above the common folk that they make fun of them. They are especially merciless toward the king’s court jester.
But it’s the court jester who proposes the costume party. All agree that it’s a splendid idea.
The jester also provides the costumes—the orangutan costumes—tight-fitting and doused in alcohol. Once the party’s underway, he sets his tormenters alight.
This is easily one of Poe’s most dismal stories, and as you may have noted, he is not one of our more cheerful writers. I don’t advocate this fate for the potential Cabinet officers who are testifying this week. But if they are someday consumed by fire, the agent that starts it will be, of course, hairspray.
Their boss, disappointed, will turn on them, as he has on nearly everyone else who has served him.
Or, if Justice and the FBI and his other Cabinet officers survive Trump, there is still a chance, a slight one, given recent history, of their jail time sometime after 2028.
As for the rest of us, I’m reminded of the late cartoonist/satirist Walt Kelly, who created a swamp inherited by a variety of creatures, including Pogo the Possum. Kelly was one of the few—others were CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow and The Crucible’s Arthur Miller—to finally come around and confront Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his communist witch hunts. This might be the wisest remark Pogo ever uttered.
It fits seventy years after the Army-McCarthy hearings that finally brought Joseph McCarthy down.
McCarthy’s chief counsel, of course, was Roy Cohn, one of President-elect Trump’s mentors.
The turning point came in a confrontation between United States Army counsel Joseph Welch and Sen. McCarthy. It was an indelible moment, captured live on television, then in its infancy.
I do not know if we can find another Joseph Welch. But, in just my family’s humble past, we found a sailor and a soldier who gave their lives for us, in December 1941 and January 1945, respectively. We have Irish immigrants who worked in Pennsylvania oilfields, homesteaded on the Minnesota prairie, grew oranges in Southern California. We have a woman—my paternal grandmother—who was one of the first delegates to a national political convention, in Madison Square Garden in 1924. We have a woman—my maternal grandmother—who grew up in a rough gold-mining town and learned to cook from Chinese immigrants. My paternal grandfather was so devoted to education on the Ozark Plateau that they dismissed classes in Texas County, Missouri, on the day of his funeral in 1933. My maternal grandfather was a cop in a tough oil-town, Taft, who once laid out three roughnecks, cold as tinned sardines, in an alleyway after they’d jumped him. He helped a lost little boy, terrified, find his way home. We have a railroad engineer who drove the Great Northern Empire Builder until the day he died at the controls. We have an Irish immigrant nun who devoted her life to orphans in the Albany orphanage that was once the home of Hamilton’s Schuyler sisters.
And, of course, we have my folks, in the photos just above, who taught me many things, including the deep love I have for my country, including and despite its faults. They made me, without knowing it, a history teacher.
There’s just the faintest chance that in this immense reach for power that begins Monday, Donald John Trump will soon find himself outnumbered by people of character. Nearly all of them, including my family members, are dead now. They are ghosts. Maybe Trump, if he’s lucky, will suffer a Dickensian fate, like Scrooge’s redemption.
Or maybe, finally, in the depth of his cruelty, Poe will catch up with him instead.
A father and daughter, “illegals,” drowned in the Rio Grande, 2019.
If you know history—worse, if you teach it, which steers you into confrontations you don’t want—your tolerance for ignorance dissipates. This quote is a favorite of ignorant people.
Of course your ancestors came here the “right way,” especially if they came between 1880 and 1914. We had another ten years before we would subdue the first immigrants—the Lakota people—at Wounded Knee, and we still had a vast continent to fill once we’d accomplished the extermination, or near-exterminations, that we’d always glorified, from Puritan sermons to the the pronouncements of the first governor of California to breathless newspaper dispatches from the Black Hills, and its gold deposits, in the 1870s.
So your ancestors—Italians, Poles, Russian Jews, Bohemians. Irish and the largest immirant group, Germans–were needed to fill the empty space in this map. Their influence remains: In Texas, there are many little towns where “Texas German,” is the second language. Missouri River towns have names like Versailles, Vichy, Hermann. In my hometown, Arroyo Grande, Califronia, what is now Cherry Avenue was dense with Bohemian families.
We were starved for people. Unless, of course, to use a few examples, you were Chinese (denied with the Exclusion Act), Japanese (The “Gentleman’s Agreement”) or Filipino (citizens and then, on a Congressional whim, not citizens. Filipinas were not allowed to come to America.)
“Illegal Aliens” are driven by the same desires that motivated Italians, Russian Jews or the Irish: poverty, persecution, starvation. But not even the “coffin ships” that claimed so many Irish immigrants can compare to the agonizing deaths in our Desert Southwest today.
The great irony is that we are as starved for people now as we were in 1880. The vastness now is not calculated in land, but in the passing of Americans from my generation—the so-called” Boomers”—who, liked the migrants, leave nothing behind when they die: the American birth rate in 2023 was half that of 1957, in the midst of the Baby Boom. And the Boomers are retiring—or dying—so it’s we account who for the gap today, generational rather than geographical, that so closely resembles the emptiness between the Mississippi and the Pacific in 1880.
But these people are not welcomed, ostensibly because they came here the “wrong way.” They came here because death squads killed friends or family members, because climate change has reduced fields of corn to crisp rows resembling papyrus, because there are no jobs for young people in bifurcated economies marked by the vast divide between landowning elites and landless farmworkers.
What would you do in the same circumstances? Illuminate me.
Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth. All hat, no cattle?
So says Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth, who went on to say that “unity is our strength.” I fail to see the contradiction that he does.
Women’s Airforce Service Pilot Hazel Ying Lee, killed in the line of duty, 1944.
Baron Friedrich von Steuben, who played a major role in training Washington’s Continental Army, was gay.
Sen. Daniel Inouye, 442nd Regimental Combat Team, Medal of Honor.
Navy veteran Tammie Jo Shults, who, in 2018, brought her Southwest Airlines passenger jet safely in after an engine had exploded in mid-flight.
Henry Johnson, 369th Infantry, “The Harlem Hellfighters.” When Johnson and a comrade were attacked by twelve Germans in May 1918, he defended his friend in hand-to-hand combat, killing or wounding several Germans with a bolo knife. He was awarded a Croix de Guerre with a Gold Palm, the highest French decoration for bravery.
Lt. Col. Bree Fram is an astronautical engineer with the U.S. Space Force. She is transgender.
Sgt. Jose Mendoza Lopez was born in Mexico. Below is his Medal of Honor citation.
A view of Filipino immigrants from the Arroyo Grande Herald-Recorder, March 1934:
U.S. Army Specialist Vanessa Guillen was murdered at what was then Fort Hood, Texas, in April 2020. She was twenty years old. The details are horrific. She was beaten to death with a hammer and her body was dismembered and buried along the Leon River. The prime suspect, Aaron Robinson—who may have been sexually harassing Guillen—was arrested for the murder, He escaped but shot himself dead with a handgun before he could be re-arrested.
The crime was so horrific that it became integrated into the “Me Too” movement, which is no less important now than it was, a short but forgotten memory ago, for men like Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby.
Coincidentally, then-President Trump met with Guillen’s mother at the White House. Here is the photo op.
Trump promised to pay for Vanessa’s funeral expenses.
Today, multiple sources, including The Atlantic, whose credibility includes the fact that it’s been a journal of literature, culture and politics since 1857, are reporting that Trump reneged on that promise.
It gets worse.
What the former president balked at was the bill for the soldier’s funeral.
“$60,000? For a fucking Mexican?”
It’s a quote in keeping with his previous comments on American soldiers: He called the Marines at Belleau Wood “losers.” In 1918, they assaulted German machine-gun nests at Belleau Wood–the Germans remembered that the Yanks were firing from the hip and smoking cigarettes as they advanced–and overran them.
These are modern-day Camp Lejeune Marines re-enacting that assault. This is hard to watch, but the Marine Spirit is evinced in the weapons of some of the assault troops: They are armed with short-barreled pump-action shotguns, which means that they intended to fire their weapons into the faces of the German machine-gunners.
At Arlington, he confessed that he didn’t understnd the place. “What as in it for them?”
He objected to the presence of a disabled veteran at a public ceremony: “Nobody wants to see that!”
In a fundamental—eighth grade—misunderstanding of the Constitution, he referred to military commanders as “my generals.”
And Mexicans? “Murderers and rapists,” from the day he rode down that escalator.
History teaches us that there is nothing new, not even the most venal. This was a stunning moment at the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings, when Sen. McCarthy accused the United States Army of being riddled with communists and “fellow travelers,” including a young soldier. The chief counsel for the Army, Joseph Welch, finally confronted the powerful McCarthy:
Thankfully, McCarthy soon died. His influence hasn’t. His counsel, Roy Cohn, later became one of Donald J. Trump’s most important mentors.
What passes for Trump’s faith comes from the otherwise benign Norman Vincent Peale, whose book The Power of Positive Thinking, has been fused with the thinking of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels: If you believe in anything strongly enough, it becomes the truth.
Trump borrowed another concept from Joe McCarthy: The senator began his anti-communist crusade in 1950 with a West Virginia speech entitled “The Enemy Within.”
I keep thinking, because I am a history teacher who loves his country, that I have outgrown my capacity at outrage for those who don’t. Every time i see a pickup truck with an American flag and a Trump flag, I see a contradiction. It’s a conclusion based in fact: On January 6, 2020, the Capitol rioters tore down an American flag and replaced it with a “Trump 2020” flag.
The two flags don’t belong together. They are mutually contradictory.
I have one more thing to say, because it’s important to me.
“A fuckingMexican?” So was this soldier, Jose Mendoza Lopez, born in Mexico.
Here is this man’s Medal of Honor citation:
Sergeant Jose M. Lopez (then Private First Class), 23rd Infantry, near Krinkelt, Belgium, on December 17, 1944, on his own initiative, he carried his heavy machine gun from Company K’s right flank to its left, in order to protect that flank, which was in danger of being overrun by advancing enemy infantry supported by tanks.
Occupying a shallow hole offering no protection above the waist, he cut down a group of 10 Germans. Ignoring enemy fire from an advancing tank, he held his position and cut down 25 more enemy infantry attempting to turn his flank. Glancing to his right, he saw a large number of infantry swarming in from the front. Although dazed and shaken from enemy artillery fire which had crashed into the ground only a few yards away, he realized that his position soon would be outflanked.
Again, alone, he carried his machine gun to a position to the right rear of the sector; enemy tanks and infantry were forcing a withdrawal. Blown over backwards by the concussion of enemy fire, he immediately reset his gun and continued his fire. Singlehanded he held off the German horde until he was satisfied his company had effected its retirement. Again he loaded his gun on his back and in a hail of small-arms fire he ran to a point where a few of his comrades were attempting to set up another defense against the onrushing enemy.
He fired from this position until his ammunition was exhausted. Still carrying his gun, he fell back with his small group to Krinkelt. Sgt. Lopez’s gallantry and intrepidity, on seemingly suicidal missions in which he killed at least 100 of the enemy, were almost solely responsible for allowing Company K to avoid being enveloped, to withdraw successfully, and to give other forces coming up in support time to build a line which repelled the enemy drive.
Lopez became a Texan. Vanessa Guillen was Houston-raised. We may not have all that much power over our lives, but we do have the power to choose those whom we admire, those whom we aspire to be.
I voted today and it was painless, almost joyful. This is why.
At Latrobe, Pennsylvania, Arnold Palmer’s hometown, one of the candidates–the one who’s clueless, shameless, and gutless, if only in the moral sense—opened a campaign speech with an extended commentary on the size of Palmer’s manhood.
Manhood does not make the man. Rasputin was well-endowed, too. His member, thanks to macabre Russian archivists, is preserved in alcohol. Both the Russians and the candidate appear to be confused about this business of manhood.
It’s class and grace and courage that makes manhood. Palmer had all of these, all of them somehow embodied in a golf swing so violent that it might’ve summoned tornadoes.
Palmer was a polio-stricken greenskeeper’s son whose talent got him a scholarship at Wake Forest. When he became a pro, it was his personal magnetism and his charm that started peeling away the galleries from other pros. They became “Arnie’s Army.”
He was fearless and often took chances that cost him tournaments and huge prizes.
He was as cordial as his swing was violent. The Brits instantly loved him. Palmer loved children, including his own.
He broke my heart many years ago, when I was fourteen.
In the 1966 U.S. Open at San Francisco’s Olympic Club, Palmer dropped a seven-shot lead on the back nine of the final round, on Sunday. A playoff followed the next day. I stayed home from school to watch it.
I had just learned golf, and I adopted the same knock-kneed putting stance that Palmer used.
But his opponent in the Open playoff could sink a putt placed on Holland’s northern border and sink it in a cup holed just inside Belgium’s.
The man who’d tied him, a somewhat pudgy golfer named Billy Casper, a devout Mormon who eschewed beef for buffalo meat, defeated Palmer in the Monday playoff. I stayed home from school on Tuesday, too, all by myself.
Palmer was disconsolate. So was Billy Casper, seen here with his arm around Arnie’s shoulders.
Arnold Palmer meant as much to the classy, sportsmanlike Casper as he did to all of us.
The man who cracked wise about manhood, a subject he knows little about, knows nothing about sportsmanship, either–sportswriter Rick Reilly’s book about his golfing, Commander in Cheat, is more revelatory about Donald J. Trump as anything any political analyst has ever written about him.
He hits drives that disappear into sawgrass and suddenly reappear in front of the green. An opponent’s ball, once visible in the fairway, is found, resembling the yolk of a fried egg, embedded in a fairway sand trap. He drives his golf cart over greens that are manicured with the care of Grace Kelly’s Hollywood stylists, greens that get more love than babies in a preemie ward.
He kicks inconvenient golf balls so regularly that his caddies secretly call him “Pele.”
Rory McIlroy will no longer play with him. Golfers like Bryson DeChambeau will, but he plays on the LIV Tour, sponsored by Mohammed bin Salman, who sees the public beheading of women as an invaluable tool for teaching his Saudi subjects proper citizenship.
Stateside, Trump historically has played his first round on courses he’s just bought and then declares himself the club champion. The clubhouse is later doomed to a monstrous portrait of the champion that would embarrass Jay Gatsby.
The way the Commander in Cheat plays golf was foretold by Auric Goldfinger—a man who, interestingly, shared the same hair color.
Before he died, Palmer openly expressed his distaste for Trump’s lack of civility, both on and off the course. Arnold Palmer was bewildered by a man who so openly and constantly disgraced himself.
Palmer, only to himself, disgraced himself in his performance at the 1966 Open at Olympic. He lost. He got over it. He accepted defeat.
That part of his character—his bedrock authenticity—is what made the jubilation with which he won such a joy to watch. I got over my heartbreak rapidly, too. I loved to watch this man in the same way I loved to watch Sandy Koufax, who refused a starting assignment, on Yom Kippur, in the World Series.
These men were the kind of men I wanted to be someday. The only quality that surpassed their athletic power and grace was their integrity. That is what I wanted more than anything else.
Someone is trying to tell me something and, for once, it’s not the typical condemnatory voice that I’ve lived with for seventy-one years. Today it was affirming. It began to creep up on me when I drove to do some grocery shopping at drove past a Muslim family at Elm Street Park. They had a blanket spread out in the shade and they were eating—men, women with their hair covered, little kids. When I drove back home, the blanket was folded and all of them were standing in a circle and holding hands and, I think, singing. To paraphrase a song by Sting: Muslims love their children, too.
It then dawned on me: Ramadan is over. That didn’t hit me until I got home and remembering my beloved student Leila, a devout Muslim, I got little tears in my eyes. Leila had tears in her eyes when, as part of a school assembly that honored retiring teachers, she presented me with a bouquet of roses. She is compassionate, considerate, respectful and she has a first-rate mind—an engineer’s mind, but one driven by a deeply humanitarian heart.
That was the second international moment. The first came when I saw this version of the !Xhosa wedding song on a South African variant of The Voice. The young woman, named Siki Jo-An, is twenty-five and she’s from Elizabethtown.
I first heard this song, performed by Miriam Makeba, whose clicks are profound, when I was a little boy on Huasna Road and Mom had both double albums of Harry Belafonte’s concerts at Carnegie Hall. Our cabinet stereo, big as a coffin, also served for the Stones albums I smuggled out of my brother’s bedroom and for my copy of the White Album, which, yes, I did play backward. Paul was dead.
But no albums were played so much as Belafonte’s. I realize now that the man was a fundamental part of my education, along with the braceros who worked the fields just beyond our pasture fence and the food–sopa, sushi, lumpias–that were part of what made growing up in Arroyo Grande so formative for me.
Belafonte’s songs ranged from “Hava Nagela” to “John Henry” to “Sylvie” to “La Bamba.” Since he was Jamaican, perhaps his most famous song endures because of the film Beetlejuice. It’s a marvelous moment.
Maybe it’s because of the braceros, but maybe my favorite song from those albums was his take on “La Bamba.” You can hear Belafonte dancing on the album, but it would be many, many year later, thanks to this video, that I got to see him dance. And, yes, is Spanish is beautiful.
So here’s a Mexican song performed by a Jamaican. Belafonte gave me the education I needed to marvel, sixty years later, at a Muslim family celebrating together, happy together, on the shaded lawn in the Elm Street Park in the town that is my home—and theirs.
Oh, and dinner? Pesto pasta. As American as my collateral ancestor, the president’s aunt, Mildred Washington.
Here are “Mas Que Nada,” from Brazil, by Jazz singer Carol Albert–she gets the song, as do her musicians (the trumpeter is incredible) and backup singers–and “Guantanemara,” from Cuba, by the wonderful Playing for Change people.
And I don’t want to end with even that song. An old American favorite was another South African song written in 1939. It became a Tokens hit in 1961 America. Ladysmith Black Mambazo, “discovered” by Paul Simon in the 1980s, performed the song here, circa 1990, with an a cappella group from London’s East End, the Mint Juleps.
Dreyfus’s stone cottage, Devil’s Island in what was in his time French Guiana.
Today in history, April 13, 1895: French Army Capt. Alfred Dreyfus, a convicted spy, entered the notorious penal colony on Devil’s Island.
The powerful men who sent Dreyfus there knew he was innocent, but lies are more powerful than men.
What made it convenient for them was the fact that Dreyfus was a Jew.
The daughter of a former student of mine was recently admitted to Cal on the basis of her letter, her grades and her character.
The SAT was not required. This was the test that, in the 1920s, was devised by the deans of the Ivy League to keep Jewish high-school graduates out of their schools. Harvard became alarmed when they realized that 22% of the student body was Jewish.
Jews, most of them recent immigrants, had not scored well on World War I Army aptitude tests. So the deans devised the SAT, based on those tests.
In neither instance did the powerful win. Dreyfus would be admitted to the Legion of Honor for his service in World War I; his son, Pierre, earned France’s highest military honor, the Croix de Guerre.
And the Ivy League men were no match for Stanley Kaplan.
I hope that we Americans are a match for the same kind of polarization that so divided France in 1895. This was the way I introduced the lesson on Dreyfus to my history students.
OUR NATION IS NOW THIRD WORLD & DYING. THE AMERICAN DREAM IS DEAD! THE RADICAL LEFT ANARCHISTS HAVE STOLLEN OUR PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, AND WITH IT, THE HEART OF OUR OUR COUNTRY. AMERICAN PATRIOTS ARE BEING ARRESTED & HELD IN CAPTIVITY LIKE ANIMALS, WHILE CRIMINALS & LEFTIST THUGS ARE ALLOWED TO ROAM THE STREETS, KILLING & BURNING WITH NO RETRIBUTION. MILLIONS ARE FLOODING THROUGH OUR OPEN BOARDERS, MANY FROM PRISONS & MENTAL INSTITUTIONS. CRIME & INFLATION ARE DESTROYING OUR VERY WAY OF LIFE. NOW ILLEGAL LEAKS FROM A CORRUPT & HIGHLY POLITICAL MANHATTAN DISTRICT ATTORNEYS OFFICE, WHICH HAS ALLOWED NEW RECORDS TO BE SET IN VIOLENT CRIME & WHOSE LEADER IS FUNDED BY GEORGE SOROS, INDICATE THAT, WITH NO CRIME BEING ABLE TO BE PROVEN, & BASED ON AN OLD & FULLY DEBUNKED (BY NUMEROUS OTHER PROSECUTORS!) FAIRYTALE, THE FAR & AWAY LEADING REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE & FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, WILL BE ARRESTED ON TUESDAY OF NEXT WEEK. PROTEST, TAKE OUR NATION BACK!
Hey, that’s why they call it “Truth Social!”
* * *
The only place that’s worse off than us is Scotland. Those haggis snorters—it’s been documented that haggis is ten times stronger than Fentanyl—have referred to Mr. Trump as a “Cheeto-faced ferret-wearing s___gibbon,” an “idiot cockwomble,” (alternatively, a “polyester cockwomble”), a “hamster heedit bampot,” an “incompressible j__ztrumpet,” and a “leather-faced s___ tobbagonist.”
Shame on them.
* * *
In the States, since My President is due to be indicted Tuesday, here are all the False Allegations I am going to protest tomorrow:
1. He paid a Playmate of the Year—Hef is dead. Get over it, people!–and a horse-faced porn star (the man has a way with words, doesn’t he?) so they wouldn’t reveal that he had sex with them, those lucky girls, and that he wears Tidy Whitey briefs.
The women in question and the President on Air Force One, One shudders to think how Gov. DeSantis would eat a fine meal like that being consumed by the Greatest President Since Lincoln And Probably Greater. There would be grease everywhere, gravy on his tie and a couple of chicken bones might foul the jet engine’s intake. He must not be president. VOTE TRUMP!
2. The bogus claim, brought in a civil suit for defamation, based on the contention that The Greatest Lover Since Rudolph Valentino raped E. Jean Carroll in a department store. “She’s not my type!” he has said clearly about the woman he’s twice confused in depositions with his former wife. The same goes for the other 26 women who’ve claimed everything from rape to job-place sexual harassment. They’re all dogs, anyway.
3. The audio tapes made by Georgia Republicans that have him trying to change the 2020 vote count in his favor. It’s patently obvious that the voice on the telephone is Alec Baldwin’s, who imitated Mr. Trump on the lowly-rated Saturday Night Live—Sad!— and who shoots people in the face pretty much every day.
4. The New York Attorney General’s civil suit that alleges he inflated his properties while applying for bank loans and deflated their value for the IRS. So what’s wrong with THAT? That’s what made America great! Also, those offshore banks in The Bahamas are a splendid example of the most important foreign aid since the Marshall Plan.
5. The documents, allegedly classified, that were carefully stored at Mar a Lago, not too far from where they put together the shrimp cocktails for dinner, and in the White House toilet bowl. The National Archives asked for those documents twice, and politely, before the subpoena. Hey! He’s a busy guy! Anyway, My President has amply demonstrated that he can declassify those documents, as he himself said, just by thinking about them.
6. The lawsuit brought by those snowflake cops who got their feelings hurt on January 6. Waaaah!
7. The giant fibberooni that The Greatest President Since Jesus encouraged violence January 6. “Be there. Will be wild.” was an obvious reference to the Super Bowl that year–the Chiefs beat the Niners–which was (Oh, my! What a coincidence!) played in FLORIDA. It’s obvious, too, that the Justice Department investigating January 6 is riddled with Commie Pinko Preeverts (scratch an FBI agent, find a Maoist pedophile), Liberal Bleeding Heart Quiche-Eating All Creatures Great and Small viewers and Drag Queens who Frug at middle school assemblies while singing Donna Summer’s “Hot Stuff.”
8. “I HATE HIM PASSIONATELY!”
–Tucker Carlson.
That’s a classic Lamestream Media Lie, posing as an actual text Tucker sent to a Fox News colleague. It’s “posing” as a real text because, technically and legally, Fox’s lawyers had to surrender it during Discovery in the pending Dominion Voting Machines lawsuit. That’s a mere trifle.
You can’t fault a guy, in my opinion, who still wears bow ties and whose voice gets so high and whiny that you’re afraid he’s going to burst into tears any second. That’s passion, my friends.
(Just in case this isn’t a lie, I’m willing to throw a frozen Chicken Pot Pie through Tucker’s windshield—he’s the heir to the Swanson TV Dinner fortune—if I ever get the chance.)
9. Another snowflake: United States Marine Corps General and former Chief of Staff John Kelly, who, among other White House staffers, heard Trump call the Marines who died at Belleau Wood in 1918 “losers” and “suckers.” Semper Fickle” to you, Kelly. (But many thanks to the staffers who informed the president which side had won the First World War.) The Germans said the Marines approached their machine guns almost casually, smoking cigarettes and firing from the hip. The Germans were terrified; they called the Americans “Devil Dogs.”
Have you ever seen the Greatest President Since Darryl F. Zanuck with a dog?
I rest my case.
Anyway, it was raining that day and, staffers said, rain plays hell with the presidential hairs, all gossamer and wispy in their origins from the other tectonic plates that shift so frequently on the skull of the Greatest President Since Grover Cleveland Alexander. That ‘do was representing the United States of America to the world that day in 2018, my friends, on the hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Belleau Wood
I rest my case some more.
10. An exploding golf ball or seven needs to go into the bag of Sports Illustrated writer Rick Reilly, whose book “Commander in Cheat” alleges that The Greatest Presidential Golfer Since Trump Voter Jack Nicklaus is also the biggest cheat since Auric Goldfinger. And two snowflake awards for pro golfer Rory McIlroy, who has said he will never play with Our President again. McIlroy has won the British Open, the U.S. Open and the PGA Championship. Yawn.
McIlroy has NEVER fired Khloe Kardashian, that Fat Piglet, as The Greatest President Since Zsa Zsa Gabor so accurately described her, from Celebrity Apprentice because she was getting a little chubby. That takes Golf Balls, people.
I’m sure there are other things I must protest strongly and bigly, but I think those ten are enough for Monday.
In the meantime, I leave you with the most eloquent presidential words since Lincoln’s Second Inaugural:
A Work in Progress 