"Der Rebbe Sagt . . ."

The rabbi is standing at the head dinner table giving a speech in Yiddish. His associate endeavors to translate the rabbi’s remarks into English—“Der rebbe sagt, that is, the rabbi says . . . .”

It’s a funny joke that I can’t retell here because it needs to be performed. Racking my brain, I believe that I heard it performed by Harry Richman* on the Ed Sullivan Show. 

I bring it up now because I think we’re in a “Rebbe Sagt” moment in time. 

* On second thought, it could have been Lou Holtz, who appeared once on the Sullivan show.

*

“My favorite moment in Donald Trump’s trip to France,” Gail Collins wrote the other day in the New York Times,”

came when our president was doing a little riff about North Korea and Kim Jong-un. Not only had he come to know Kim well, Trump told reporters, “the first lady has gotten to know Kim Jong-un and I think she’d agree with me, he is a man with a country that has tremendous potential.”(1)

As Ms. Collins went on to note, however, Melania Trump has never met the North Korean boss. “Paging the cleanup crew.” Or, get some toady to offer a Trumpian version of “Der Rebbe Sagt”:

“President Trump confides in his wife on many issues including the detailed elements of his strong relationship with Chairman Kim,” his press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, explained. “And while the first lady hasn’t met him, the president feels like she’s gotten to know him too.”

Ms. Collins gave us another example of a “Rebbe Sagt” moment. Questioned about his wavering position on China trade, Trump replied, “I have second thoughts about everything.”

Again Ms. Grisham had to clear her throat and explain what the rebbe president

meant to say:

The president responded in the affirmative — because he regrets not raising the tariffs higher.

Perhaps Trump might have more success speaking in Yiddish.

***

(1)  https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/28/opinion/trump-g7.html?searchResultPosition=1

Inferno

David Koch kicked the bucket the other day. 

I cited Koch as a notorious polluter in a recent blog post:

Should one boycott the New York City Ballet, which calls the David H. Koch Theater home? Named after one of the notorious polluting Kochs, who also give gillions of dollars of tainted money to efforts to undermine our republican form of government.(1)

Here’s a photograph of Koch being applauded for handing over some of his tainted bucks to the New York City Ballet:

Notice the complacently smug mug.

According to Christopher Leonard in the New York Times, David Koch and his brother Charles “built a political influence machine that is arguably unrivaled by any in corporate America.”(2) And one of the major tasks of that machine has been to undermine any government effort to enact climate control legislation that might fight the disastrous effects of global warming, such as action to control greenhouse gas emissions. Koch, a graduate of MIT with a degree in chemical engineering, turned his back on science and supported a baying pack of climate change deniers. As Leonard reveals, 

in 1991, the Cato Institute, a Koch-funded think tank, held a seminar in Washington called “Global Environmental Crises: Science or Politics?” This was part of a decades-long effort to cast doubt about the reality of climate change.
David Koch worked tirelessly, over decades, to jettison from office any moderate Republicans who proposed to regulate greenhouse gases.

To hell with the planet—as long as Koch Industries could keep raking in its dirty money. 

*

David Koch won’t be around when this sphere of ours becomes a burning cauldron. But one can only hope that, in the spirit of divine justice, he will be spending eternity in an even hotter place.

***

(1) https://drnormalvision.blogspot.com/2019/07/take-money-and-run.html

(2) https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/23/opinion/sunday/david-koch-climate-change.html

***

Also worth reading:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/08/30/covert-operations

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/23/david-koch-dead-republican-donor-billionaire-

https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/kochland-examines-how-the-koch-brothers-made-their-fortune-and-the-influence-it-bought

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/david-koch-death-toxic-empire-875766/

Comes the Revolution . . .

Let’s once and for all put a stake through the heart of it—the myth that Donald Trump is a leader of a populist movement. 

Unless one believes that the sans-culottes who were at Southampton last Friday were representative of a surging underclass. In truth, what was represented among those in attendance, according to The Hollywood Reporter,* was the usual Trumpian mix of grifters, sexual predators, and brownnoses. There was Wilbur Ross, the conflicted Secretary of Commerce, Steven Mnuchin, the Secretary of the Treasury, famed for kicking people out of their houses, Phil Falcone, who somehow never figured out that he has to pay taxes, Bill O’Reilly, who got booted off Fox News because of sexual harassment charges, and the ever-lovable Rudy Giuliani and Geraldo Rivera. 

Not a Madame Defarge among them.

Those in attendance, who have never missed a meal in their lives, were able to bag another for a mere $100,000 or $250,000, filling their bellies with a buffet lunch of sirloin steak, shrimp with lemon chili and charred broccoli. 

There was no mention of entertainment, so I imagine the peasants in attendance were not offered a rendition of Bach’s cantata “Ich habe genug.”

***

*  https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/rambling-reporter/inside-hamptons-fundraisers-netted-trump-12m-election-1230690https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/rambling-reporter/inside-hamptons-fundraisers-netted-trump-12m-election-1230690

For Whom the Bell Tolls

The bell rang this weekend and the Pavlovian dog of the Trump administration responded.

The death of his old pal Jeffrey Epstein gave Trump some new baseless material to spew out into the Twitterverse. He re-tweeted nudge-nudge, wink-wink conspiracy inanities that pushed the Clintons into the middle the Epstein suicide story:

Died of SUICIDE on 24/7 SUICIDE WATCH ? Yeah right! How does that happen#JefferyEpstein had information on Bill Clinton & now he’s dead. I see #TrumpBodyCount trending but we know who did this! RT if you’re not Surprised#EpsteinSuicide #ClintonBodyCount #ClintonCrimeFamily* 

When rational people raised protests against Trump’s actions, there came Kellyanne "Alternative Facts" Conway (Bow Wow) to defend her labmeister: it was “clear what he was trying to say. I think the president just wants everything to be investigated.”**

 (That statement is just a teeny bit disingenuous; Trump refuses to allow his administration to investigate climate change, for example.)

Anyway, we probably should welcome the open inquiry stance that Conway (Woof Woof) has enunciated. I, therefore, have prepared a little list of questions that need resolution. The reader who can tie in one or another of the Clintons to the most conspiracies will win a year’s supply of Alpo or Ken-L Ration.

*

Who killed Cock Robin?

Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Where is Judge Crater?

What happened to Jimmy Hoffa?

Who put the overalls in Mrs. Murphy’s Chowder?

How the heck am I gonna wash my neck, if it ain’t gonna rain no more?

Does your chewing gum lose its flavor on the bedpost overnight?

Whatever happened to Baby Jane?

Where’s Waldo?

Why a duck?

***

• https://news.yahoo.com/trump-amplifies-epstein-conspiracy-theories-230010789.html?.tsrc=daily_mail&uh_test=1_04  

       **  https://news.yahoo.com/kellyanne-conway-jeffrey-epstein-conspiracy-162350907.html

Do Me a Favor?--Take 2

I am glad that I am not a very important person. I am glad that no one might attempt to write a biography of my life, exposing all my sins and errors, my crassness and laziness, my pettiness and my wastefulness, the slights I gave to others and the misjudgments I gave to myself. 

Along with the sigh of relief that my personal faults will never be exposed is the relief that professional faults that are not my own will never be ascribed to me—that no assiduous researcher will discover in dusty files ill-written, badly-organized, and faultily-constructed documents with my signature at the bottom. Reader, I did not write them!

As chairman of a college English department, I was asked at times by faculty members to submit letters to support their applications for promotions, for sabbatical leaves, for research grants, and so forth. Usually, the document would appear on my desk already composed by the applicant and ready for my signature. I remember the first of those documents: as mentioned above, ill-written, badly-organized, and faultily-constructed. “I can’t sign this crap,” I said to myself, and poised my pen, not to affix my signature, but to edit the text. However, I did not know where to begin, the text was so jumbled. Better to re-write the whole thing, I thought—until my better second thought told me that I had not the desire to expend my time and effort on the project— nor the sitzfleisch. 

So, balancing a possible diminution of my reputation as a writer against the certainty of being rid of the project, I said the hell with it and indeed used the pen to sign at the bottom of the page. 

And since English teachers can’t write, I was to repeat the charade several other times afterwards.

*

One day I was approached by a faculty member I’ll call MR (basically because those were her initials). Would I write a recommendation for her to support her application for promotion? (Groan.) “Write it yourself, and give it to me,” I told her. “I’d really like you to do it,” she responded. (Trapped.) “OK, give me your materials and I’ll deal with it.” The next day my mailbox was stuffed.

Now let me digress here to explain that just then MR was making noises about presenting the department with a proposal to make some sort of alteration in procedure that could limit the chairman’s flexibility in dealing with a future issue. A few days after the mailbox stuffing and just prior to the next department meeting, I approached MR and gently whispered into her earhole, “Maria, I am really against that proposal.” She blew me off. Her proposal passed, everyone subsequently forgot about it, and I of course ignored it.

The day following the meeting, her supporting materials were back in her mailbox.

She didn’t know the first rule of politics.

Do Me a Favor?

The Guardian (UK) website has a weekly feature that allows readers to respond to relationship questions. Some recent examples:

My boyfriend won’t tell his kids about me.

Would it be fair to retire and let my wife carry on working?

My husband has been having an affair with his ex-wife for the past five years.

Here is last week’s topic in full:

My boyfriend and I are in our mid-20s. We’re in full-time employment and live separately. We each earn a modest amount, with him about a grade higher than me. We have very different views on money. I’m frugal, he’s somewhat frivolous. He often borrows money from me at the end of the month. I have obliged in the past and he returned it as soon as payday came around. I have recently moved out from my parents’ house and so my outgoings have increased a lot. I have savings, but these are strictly for a house deposit. I told him that moving out would mean that I wouldn’t be able to lend him money any more, but he asked again. I refused, and this escalated into an argument, with him accusing me of not helping when I can, and that doing this out of principle has hurt him. We can’t agree, and I’m not sure how to move forward.*

The reader responses were very thoughtful, often drawing upon personal past experiences:

“I once went out with a man with a similar attitude to money.”

       “I was married to someone who (eventually) didn’t seem to care how much he spent on drink  when I was working and keeping both of us.”

“I had an ex who was not as responsible with money as I was . . .”

The readers agreed that at the very least the writer should not back down from her stand about no more loans. 

Many readers went further and warned about the future, if the writer were to continue the relationship with someone the readers saw as having character issues. As one wise reader remarked:

Disagreements over money probably break up more relationships than infidelity. . . . You’re allowed to break up over matters of money. It can be miserable being in a relationship with someone who is careless over money and expects you to bail them out.

The response that most matched my own? “Tell him to get lost.”

*

Some years ago, when I was playing tennis regularly, two friends and I would purchase a season’s court time at a local indoor club for Thursdays from 7:30 to 9 PM. We were assigned court number 1. We would rotate play—2 weeks on and 1 week off. 

On the first Thursday of a new fall season, my friend (Frank or Vic) and I were approached by Brad, the club’s teaching pro, who had a favor to ask. He had invited some friends to the club to play doubles, but the only court available was court 7, which, owing to a lack of space, had been put down as a singles court without the doubles alleys. Would we trade our court number 1 for the singles court, so that Brad & co. could play doubles? We graciously obliged.

The following Thursday Vic or Frank and I were down on court 1 preparing to start play, when through the curtains there came Brad & co. all set for action. 

I put my hand up. Not this week.

*

I once had a colleague who volunteered to drive me home. “But you live in the complete opposite direction,” I told him. “It would be an inconvenience for you.”

“If it wasn’t an inconvenience,” he replied, “I wouldn’t be doing a favor.”

*

I don’t know if it should be labeled an adage, a maxim, or an aphorism, but one of my favorite dicta is:

Once is a favor. Twice is an obligation.

Never put someone to an inconvenience twice. And never allow yourself to be inconvenienced a second time—for there will be a third and a fourth time. Better for them to think you a stinker than to have your life controlled by leeches.

***

*https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/aug/02/should-i-lend-money-to-my-financially-frivolous-boyfriend#comments