A deep and ebullient spirit

When I stumbled upon the news Monday (on social media) that Gwen Ifill had died, something clutched my heart, and my eyes filled with tears. Although I’ve withdrawn from news programs because the substance and the standards have deteriorated so much, I could still count on PBS NewsHour if I wanted intelligent coverage. And Ifill was a good chunk of that intelligence.

I’d thought it a little odd last week when her co-anchor Judy Woodruff had started one of the broadcasts by saying, “Gwen Ifill is away; we hope to have her back soon.” Usually you hear that someone’s away on assignment, or vacation. This wasn’t that, and so it transpired. Ifill died Monday, age 61, from complications arising from endometrial cancer.

She’d been working almost right up until the end, because she was both a consummate journalistic professional, and because she loved covering politics. My least favorite subject.

Since her death, various configurations of friends and colleagues have gathered on PBS to talk about what a gift Ifill was to their profession and to their lives, how she enriched the existence of everyone around her. Here are some of my key take-aways.

David Brooks, of the New York Times, wrote this appreciation of her. Ifill was a PK, the daughter of a minister. Brooks writes that she, “told me that if she didn’t go to church on Sunday she felt a little flatter for the whole week. A spirit as deep and ebullient as hers needed nourishment and care, and when it came out it came out in her smile, which was totalistic and unrestrained.”

On NewsHour on Monday, one of her former colleagues said, “You could read a book by the light of Gwen’s smile.” He was right, as you can see from this photo that I stuck on my office door:

Since I did that, two of my colleagues have stopped by to thank me—they’d worked at WETA, where Ifill’s programs were produced. They hadn’t worked with her directly, but she’d still touched their lives. I repeated the “read a book” quote, and they both agreed. In each conversation, our throats were tighter than normal.

A couple of nights ago Charlie Rose interviewed Michele Norris, a friend of Ifill’s for more than 30 years. Her throat tightened, too, as she discussed the difficult days and weeks Ifill endured; very few people—colleagues or viewers—even knew she was ill, much less dying. Norris said something that stopped me in my tracks:

“She chose joy,” she said. Even at the end, she chose joy.

I’m sorry I never got to hear her laugh. Everyone says that laugh was something amazing. I’m also sorry I never got to hear her sing. Everyone says her singing was something to behold, as well. Based on her speaking voice and the wattage of that smile, I believe both statements.

And here's something else: the very act of me taping an Internet photo of her to my door gave me a connection with two people I'd only nodded and smiled to in the kitchen or the loo for the past ten months. A human connection of recognizing the gifts of kindness and steadfastness this woman gave to everyone around her.

We are all poorer for the loss of Gwen Ifill.

Upon mulling it over...

Okay, here’s something else that seems fairly neutral for troubled times, in spirit if not in smell.

I say this as someone who at the weekend bought a couple of bottles of Glühwein, which I expect to thoroughly enjoy over the Advent period: I cannot imagine what product team ever thought this was a good idea. Even one in the UK. I mean—toilet paper with any kind of food-related scent seems pretty beyond the beyond. But…mulled spice?

Mulling is the process of heating a beverage such as wine, ale or cider and dressing it up with a bunch of (not to put too fine a point upon it) smelly spices. Cinnamon. Cloves. Allspice. Nutmeg. Things you also find in cookies. It seems…odd to think of paying extra to have those scents added to toilet paper.

Frankly, it’s not like we’re not already assaulted with these fragrances during the shopping season. I don’t think you can walk into a mall or grocery store without passing through a wave of at least cinnamon. I suspect it puts you in the buying mood.

Wiping your tush with it? I just dunno.

Okay—this has put me into a bit of a strop, so let me leave you with something else Mull-related, which also gets up my nose.

Ho, ho, ho.

Cleanup in aisle 23

While I try to come up with anything about our current situation that doesn’t make me want to commit ritual seppuku on the National Mall, I’ll be posting random stuff that may or may not be amusing.

Like this photo I shot at the Pentagon City Whole Foods last summer. They may have been in such a hurry to put up the signs that they weren’t paying attention to, well, much of anything.

Class to crass

Sometime last summer I was watching some docu on PBS about how things run at the White House. It was actually interesting, although I can’t recall the title, so I’m unable to actually recommend it to you. But I did one find one sequence fascinating.

That was a clip on some state dinner during the Kennedy administration. Because this handoff is the very definition of seamless teamwork.

I doubt we’ll see anything like it anytime soon, given the presumptive occupants as of the end of January.

Gratitude Monday: Die Vereidigung

It’s a short one today. On this Gratitude Monday, as I watch the revolting scramble by Repugnants to haul out all their plans to dismantle democracy on their way to be first in line to kiss the Chaos Monkey’s ring, I give thanks for the fact that our armed services swear an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States. 

(Congressmorons do, too. But they've made it quite clear that they don't mean it.)

The Executive and Legislative branches of our government have devolved into the structure of a banana republic; I’m not sure about the Judicial, although of course the Supreme Court is now on eBay.

But I hold out hope that our military will never pledge loyalty to a single human being, named or unnamed, or to render unconditional obedience to anything except the Constitution. 

And that’s all I can muster at the moment.

Remembrance of things past

Yeah, it’s undoubtedly been a lousy week for people concerned with learning from history, with leadership as a force for good and with being able to show progress as a recompense for the men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice in service of the ideals of freedom, justice and equality.

And here we are, at the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the time 98 years ago when the physically exhausted and morally bankrupt Second Reich implemented a cease-fire agreement from the Allies. This day always saddens me, and this year more than most, because we’ve just elected about the most morally bankrupt creature I’ve ever seen to high office, and our service members will be on the literal front lines of his cowboy policies.

On and off the battle field, at home and in foreign fields, men and women have for more than 200 years willingly gone into harm’s way in defense of something that transcends race, religion, politics or gender. That something would be the form of government established by those upstart former colonists in 1787.

As you may know, every uniformed service member takes an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States—not a President, not a state, but the figurative Pentateuch of all laws that evolved from it. Tell me, Ozymandias, where else the law is valued so highly as here?

(Or it was until the Chaos Monkey threatened to hack great swaths across it, both foreign and domestic, between his bluster about building a wall and making Mexico pay for it, and his announced intention to go to war against Iran and “take their oil”. We’re getting closer than ever to looking like the kind of country that spends a November night burning synagogues, smashing shop windows and then making thevictims pay for it. He’d view that as smart business.)

But these hundreds of thousands of Americans—natives, immigrants, Sikhs, Muslims, Baptists, Buddhists, urban, rural, north-south, bi-coastal, draftees or volunteers—put their lives on the line to defend those principles of that “more perfect union”.

Veterans Day is when we nominally honor those who chose to walk this path—to be the instruments of policy. In reality, though, we don’t do a whole hell of a lot of honoring, outside of the DC-Arlington National Cemetery area. And I have to say that I’m a bit worn out after this recent campaign. So I’ll fall back on Mother England’s Remembrance Day customs, especially in this year of the centenary of the Battle of the Somme.

This year, after a long hiatus, I was able to get poppies; the British Embassy had them, so on Election Day I took the bus out there and got five of them. I find it odd that my manager, with degrees from Amherst and Harvard, professed not to know the significance. He pointed to the one I was wearing yesterday and said, "It's very pretty..."

Yeah. Okay.

But I’ll take comfort in “Flowers of the Forest,” the powerful centuries-old piece that began life as a lament for Scots slain by Englishmen. But because Highland regiments formed the backbone of the British army in so many wars, it has been transmuted to a universal tune that accompanies the bodies of British soldiers home to their final rest.

It has had rather a workout in recent years, in Afghanistan and Iraq. But here it appears against the background of memorials to the losses of the Somme. And if for no other reason, that would render me a sobbing wreck.

This year—even more so than in the past—I just wish we were farther along in learning from history’s disasters, and not so apparently dead set on repeating them.

Peace out.

With apologies to the rest of the planet

As you might imagine, I—like slightly more than half of America—am sporting that deer-in-headlights look today. Because throughout the vicious, disgusting, underhanded campaign that the Republicans ran from the get-go, I still thought that enough reasonable and unfearful people existed to make a good choice in this election.

We was wrong.

It turns out that the American electorate is even more misogynistic than it is racist. And it’s deeply, powerfully racist.

They’ve not only given the best set of toys in the history of the world—the US military, the US economy, the US legal system—to a 70-year-old orange toddler with no impulse control and no adult supervision. They’ve surrounded him with spineless, unprincipled lickspittle Republicans at every level, who are even as I write this congratulating each other on having dodged the bullet that the Chaos Monkey candidacy seemed to have aimed at all their hopes.

The party of “Jew-S-A” and Rope-Tree-Journalist has control of every branch of the government. And they’ll plunder the country for every last nickel of profit for themselves and their corporate partners, as they eagerly gut social support for those not part of their plutocratic world view (read: the poor, the elderly, the disabled, the mentally ill, minorities of all stripes, and all the suckers in the working and middle classes), scrap infrastructure investment, throttle freedom of the press, undo what environmental protections we still have, and generally feather their own nests.

Look at this photo—that obscene tee shirt isn’t even the most disturbing part of it. The look on that woman’s face, and on the girl’s, is the kind of thing captured on the faces of bystanders who cheered as Jews were driven out of German towns 80 years back. We saw it again during the 60s on white faces as blacks and others were set upon by dogs and doused by fire hoses outside public schools and lunch counters.

This election marks not only the triumph of racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, homophobic, greedy, vindictive, ignorant bullies. It is also an expression of how magical thinking has enabled people—even those who profess religious principles—to brush aside a flood of empiric evidence that the Chaos Monkey is a serial liar and empty boaster; a dishonest businessman who stiffs employees, vendors and tax jurisdictions—and brags about all of it; a creature with such a loose grasp on reality that he denies words and actions that are recorded and accessible; an empty husk of an ethics-challenged humanoid whose most strongly-held principle is his tenacity at holding a grudge; an absentee father who cheated on each wife with a mistress who became his next wife; a shameless malignant narcissist, fraudster and long-time scam artist…and, even if they uneasily tsk-tsk at a few of what are considered mortal sins, they somehow think that by conferring upon him the most powerful office in the world, he’ll rise to the occasion. Cognitive and moral dissonance of Biblical proportions, if you will.

Jesus wept.

Somewhere the devil is counting 59 million souls who swallowed their scruples about lust, lying, greed, idolatry, cheating and the rest of it in exchange for electing someone who wasn’t black and wasn’t a woman.

The Monkey’s supporters roared their approval of his blustering promises to restore the cosmography they feel is threatened—the one in which white people prevail no matter what, simply by virtue of being white. When men without college educations could still build a secure life with a good job, with a wife and kids at home and a solid pension. You know what made it possible for men without college educations to achieve that economic security? Unions. You know who is antithetical to unions in any manifestation? Yeah. The party of plutocrats that you just gave a lock on the government.

These supporters are just like the Germans who voted for the NSDAP: they clamor for authoritarian policies to clamp down on the [Mexicans, Jews, Muslims, uppity women, not-us, not-me] who threaten their king-of-the-hill expectations. It never occurs to them that the authoritarian powers they so eagerly confer on the present-day Nazi surrogates will ever be used on them.

This is a classic example of the turkeys voting for Thanksgiving.

The man goes on trial in a few days for child rape. His aides had to take away his Twitter access because he couldn’t control his urge to slag off critics and toss out edicts like Elagabalus. (Like Elagabalus, he also has delusions of deification.) He had his lawyers file a lawsuit in Nevada courts on Tuesday to suppress lawful voters whose transgression was "voting while not white."

(Fortunately a Nevada judge told them to pound sand. But under a Chaos Monkey administration, it's going to be harder to see justice done. At every level.)

And this is what the American electorate thought was preferable to a woman succeeding an African American. We went low when we could have gone high.

There are two modest upsides to this debacle, I suppose:

Brits are feeling reassured that they are not the most pig-ignorant fuckwitted electorate on the planet. 

And the descendants of Warren G. Harding are doing the happy dance because he’s no longer hogging the position of worst President in US history.

Okay—one more positive; for reals. Throughout her campaign, Hillary Rodham Clinton has shown remarkable grace, strength, determination, focus and resiliency. Yes—mistakes, slips, bad days. But on the whole she absorbed more unfounded abuse, vilification and revolting accusations than any human should have to take, and she never faltered. The next woman to run for President will have a much smoother path because Clinton blunted the edge of this misogynistic rage and terror. God bless her.

Mazel tov, y'all

At the time of this writing, the polls are still open across the United States, and there’s no telling who’s ahead in the Presidential election.

Well, except if you’re Breitbart, which has called the election for the Chaos Monkey, on the same page that they’re foaming at the mouth about voter fraud. No cognitive dissonance there, then.

Anyhow, I’m tucked up in my living room, fairy lights, candles and wee drap of Glenmorangie, avoiding any news reports, and pulling in a little frisnic from Monday, because it might be my last chance to laugh about this election for four years.

Around noon on Monday my Twitter feed lit up with news that one of the Monkey’s spokesbimbos had decried Jay Z’s appearance on behalf of Hillary Rodham Clinton (the Monkey was in a real pout about his lack of celebrities; evidently even he’s having a hard time proclaiming that Scott Baio, the Duck Dynasty and Ted Nugent are the best celebrities). Because of his vulgar lyrics.

(Unlike her orange lord’s vulgar life.)

Specifically—and you know I am not making this up—singing about “throwing mazel tov cocktails”.

Quelle scandale!

Well, I got to thinking about it—as did everyone else on social media—you know, what would a mazel tov cocktail look like? It would have to include Mad Dog or Manischevitz, plus something bitter. Either Angostura or horseradish.

Well, here are some of the recipes put forward on the Twitters-dot-com:

Meanwhile, I believe I’ll just top up the Glenmorangie.

Vox dei

As everyone on the planet knows, it’s Election Day here in America, the last chance that states controlled by Republicans have to disenfranchise voters who they fear might not cast their ballots for Republican candidates. This exercise has been a bit of a challenge as some of those jurisdictions have had early voting, and they’ve been forced to find multiple long-term ways of closing polling places, limiting hours and otherwise harassing the electorate into giving up.

California, of course, would not be one of these states. In California, you get voting materials in multiple languages (in Los Angeles County that would be Spanish, Chinese, Tagalog, Korean, Vietnamese, Khmer, Thai and Hindi), and they’ve been encouraging voting by mail for a long time. Whenever I went to my polling place in the Valley They Call Silicon, I’d very often be the only person there, surrounded by eight precinct workers overjoyed to have something to do. I often had to stop them tearing off half a roll of “I voted” stickers; they were just so pleased to have someone to give them to.

(In the Commonwealth of Virginia, on the other hand, if you want to cast your ballot before Election Day, you have to basically get a note from your mommy explaining why you should be excused from the long lines and scrutiny of Republican poll monitors. Like you’re going to be in another continent, or will be undergoing triple bypass surgery. If you’re performing triple bypass surgery, you still have to vote in person.)

So when I considered my electoral options this year, I called the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters and requested an absentee ballot.

Because—aside from everything else—no state in the country gives such good ballot as California.

This is because of the state’s practice of submitting initiatives (voter-originated) and referenda (legislature-originated) measures to the general electorate for us to approve or dustbin. You know: vox populi, vox dei.

Every election I’ve ever experienced in California has had at least one proposition about marijuana and one about prisons. Without fail. This year is no different. Proposition 64 is asking for the legalization of recreational marijuana, Propositions 62 and 66 are to do with the death penalty and Proposition 57 is about criminal sentencing, parole and juvenile criminal proceedings.

There’s also a measure (Prop. 60) requiring actors in porn films to use condoms; one (Prop. 56) directing cigarette tax income to fund healthcare tobacco use prevention, research and law enforcement; and one (Prop. 63) restricting the size of gun magazines that can be sold in the state. (Man, I am not sorry to be missing the NRA-funded ads on that one.)

Ditto the Big Pharma propaganda against Prop. 61, which puts caps on prices the state will pay for drugs. Between anti-Prop. 63 and Prop. 61 ads, enough money will have been dropped up and down the state to build and equip state-of-the-art K-12 schools into the next decade. But instead it’ll go to trying to bamboozle the electorate.

America, goniff.

Here’s the one this time around that I’m most tickled about: Proposition 59. That’s the one that instructs whichever Congressmorons we send to Washington to use their authority to overturn the Citizens United decision, via whatever means necessary, up to and including a constitutional amendment.

Yes, I know that it’s more symbolic than actionable—serving much the same purpose as a warning shot across the bow or the rattle of a diamondback. But California has been a bellwether state for decades, and as she goes, eventually so goes the nation. This is a way of serving notice that we are mad as hell and we’re not fixing to take it much longer.

But here’s something else I love about California: both candidates for the US Senate are Democrats, women and the daughters of immigrants. (Kamala Harris’s parents from India and Jamaica, Loretta Sanchez’s from Mexico.) My choices for the House of Representatives are both Asian-American, one who’s been doing a great job already and one who wants to undo it all.

I also love that, even though the Registrar of Voters has never once got my name spelt right (even after one of the many people I spoke with throughout September and October keyed in the correct spelling), no one has ever tried to use that anomaly to try to turf me out of the polling place. All this “voter fraud” crap? Not California, baby.

So, commiserations to those who have to put up with the shenanigans of those who’ve forgotten that this republic was founded in reaction to arrogant and autocratic politicians, and deep thanks to your perseverance in making your will known by whatever means your jurisdiction has set forth. They may not be listening; they may in fact need their hearing checked. Today is the day when We the People have our say.

And We the People of California get to say a whole freakin’ lot.

Gratitude Monday: adding my voice

On Election Eve, here’s what I’m grateful for:

Despite what some political elements would like to pretend, every citizen of this country age 18 or over (with some, very few, exceptions) has the right and the obligation to vote in elections from municipal office to the President. 

Millions of men and women around the world view this as an exceptional gift, one they can barely hope to achieve in their lifetimes, so they wish for it for their children. They read about the United States, our elections, even our government, and they hold us up as a shining city upon a hill.

In the past few days, I’ve seen photos of women who were born before the 19^th Amendment became law; they are only too well aware of the decades of struggle that took place to win them this right. Many of them cast their votes for a woman to be President, and the looks on their faces are extraordinary.

Tomorrow, the Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, N.Y., will remain open for an extra four hours, to accommodate the numbers of people who make pilgrimage to the grave of Susan B. Anthony, to affix their “I voted” sticker to the stone.

And on a personal note, I’m grateful for having had the opportunity to cast my own ballot by mail, and that I can freely proclaim it on my office door.

I couldn’t go to Rochester, but I did write my thanks to Susan B. on my sticker.

However your conscience guides you, I hope you find a way to vote tomorrow. It’s an important election—they all are. And they all require all of our best efforts. You’ll be grateful, just like me.