Hoping to stimulate some thought…

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Not much to look at, is it?

Well, I put out that Annie Andrews sign this morning. Here’s the way it looks from my home office window (and here’s a better angle from before I took it down upon Lindsey’s death). Doesn’t look like much, does it? And I see it already needs straightening. I also need to get those pine needles off the bit of roof in the lower left corner of the image. It’s always something. No wonder I don’t blog much anymore.

Anyway, as you know, back before our senior senator’s sudden death, I allowed a friend and neighbor to put an Andrews sign in our yard. She had no chance of getting elected at that point, but some years ago we got to the point at which Sen. Graham, whom I had long respected and admired, was no longer a fit candidate. You know the details. So while she had no chance, the sign was there to say that someone other than him should replace him.

I wasn’t really prepared to say much more than that, because I didn’t know enough about Annie Andrews to know whether I wanted to actively support her, personally. That’s because, like her opponent, she has no experience holding public office. I’ve had no opportunity to observe her in that arena. And once the factor of our late senator was removed, I wanted to study the situation for awhile. So I took down the sign.

(At this point, I am moved to explain the difference between voting for someone — and I have intended to vote for “Annie” since the special GOP primary, barring some shocking news arising — and placing a sign in my yard. But I won’t. To me, as one who has spent so much of his life agonizing over public endorsements, the difference between that and a private vote is obvious. And in some ways, placing a sign represents a bigger step than endorsement. I’ll explain further if I must, but for now let’s get back to our story…)

Of course, since then, the Republican nominee has demonstrated that she is stupendously unsuited to public office — and particularly this public office. I mean, amazingly unsuited. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a Senate candidate so unsuited. As time has passed, Dr. Andrews has not done that, so she now has more than my vote.

One thing that has taken me some time on this is the lack of helpful input. I know a lot of people think editorial page editors (which is my formative role regarding such things) just fire from the hip with whatever happens to strike them. Well, it’s not like that. A great deal — a great, agonizing, obsessive deal — went into endorsement decisions. Ditto with this new task (which I have undertook only since 2018) of putting out signs.

Trouble is, one of the things that was critical to that process, back in the days of newspapers, was the input of other very thoughtful, informed people sharing their most careful thoughts about each candidate. I’ve written a lot about that process. The most immediate part of that was the editorial board — the team of smart folks I met with every morning. I might go in with one idea, and come out with another. Other people think of things you don’t think of, see things you miss. I was almost never sure what I wanted to do until I tested the issue in that forum. Even if I stubbornly held to my original position and disagreed with my colleagues — a rarer occasion than you might imagine — I was more sure in doing so after that process.

But there were other sources — reporters who reported more in depth on S.C. politics than you see now. People who wrote opinions elsewhere, or on our op-ed pages. That’s all gone. I found in 2018 that there was only one paper left in the state with an editorial board doing statewide endorsements. That’s still the case, and on this race I haven’t seen anything along those lines from that paper, either… yet.

Finally, there were the candidates themselves — people I sat and talked with at length. Not questionnaires, not checking boxes. Wide-ranging conversations that could go anywhere, so you could really see the way people thought — assuming they were capable of that sort of activity. Not the silly dramatics of televised debates, which are light years away from the promise that Kennedy-Nixon offered in 1960. Compared to that, what we have now is professional “wrestling,” the Three Stooges without the humor.

Now, I’m stuck with what you’re stuck with — the low idiocy of social media shots fired in an attempt to damage the opponent, or to enrage people on “your side” so they give you money, and more money. Button-pushing. Almost never the slightest attempt to show anyone that you, the candidate, are capable of thinking and operating effectively in a deliberative environment, and working with a wide variety of other people — not just your fan base — to pass laws that ALL of us can live with.

Which is what this country’s institutions were supposed to be, and used to be. We’ve always had lively politics, and then were able to deal with serious issues after the elections. Now we have brain-dead politics, people going about with caveman clubs trying to knock the other people on the head, and “win” to raise money and run again. Not to solve problems.

Anyway, I finally got some help the other day. Some input from someone I respect greatly. Not someone I always agree with, but I do always respect him. George Will. He’s still out there doing it. Of course, I recently cancelled my Washington Post subscription, but a friend provided me of a copy of what he wrote about this campaign. Some excerpts:

When Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham died in July, the governor appointed his sister, Darline Graham, to finish his term. When she decided to seek the Republican nomination for a full term, President Donald Trump endorsed her, so she won the primary despite a cringeworthy debate performance. Asked about Taiwan, she said: “I’m not that informed on national security.”

Andrews has graduated from medical school, so she knows what it is to know things, and how dangerous it can be to get things wrong. She is not a political rookie, having unsuccessfully run for Congress in 2022. She pleases her party’s base by being displeased with pharmaceutical companies, and what she considers insufficiently severe taxation of the wealthy. (The top 10 percent of earners pay 70 percent of federal income taxes.)

In this year of an inconclusive war, a soaring deficit and stubborn inflation, many Republican candidates seem most worried about transgender matters. Graham, emulating the rhetorical style of her presidential patron, wrote in a Fox News op-ed that Andrews is “the worst pediatrician in the country” because she “supports turning confused little boys into little girls and vice versa.” Andrews, who opposes gender surgery on minors, says such surgery has never occurred in South Carolina.

Graham also said, “I believe boys have no place in girls’ sports.” In the context of her Fox screed, this falsely suggested that Andrews disagrees…

I don’t completely agree with Will that running once and not getting elected makes for significant political experience. But I love his observation that, as a physician, Dr. Andrews “knows what it is to know things, and how dangerous it can be to get things wrong.” Meanwhile, her opponent has aggressively, embarrassingly demonstrated that she knows no such things, and if she did know them, she would set them aside in the service of her goal of being the mindslave of the stupidest, most venal and malevolent man ever to get close to the presidency.

As to that point, here’s another highlight of the column: “Graham promises she will not be senatorial, as the Framers understood that adjective.” Absolutely. If you have the slightest idea what the Senate is supposed to be, you agree with that entirely.

As I say, I respect Will greatly, and I appreciate his input. But you know who should really, really respect what he has to say?

  • Republicans. I mean real Republicans, not Trump patsies. People who remember and care about the actual, respectable Grand Old Party. Will himself has been forced by Trumpism to walk away from that organization, but he continues to embody what it meant.
  • Conservatives. Real ones, I mean. People who think conservative thoughts and offer them in the service of a great nation, not people who bow down to someone who shamelessly strokes their prejudices, with no constructive end in sight. I realize few people undertand the difference today, because today’s political rhetoric doesn’t provide them with the vocabulary. For more than half a century, Will has been THE conservative thinker of American journalism. He still is, with very few remaining challengers. (If you doubt that, I refer you to his comments on Dr. Andrews’ taxation ideas.)
  • People who think. And those are rare, wherever they place themselves on the political spectrum. This is not just me sneering at the rest of you. I don’t think as well either, anymore. As I’ve been explaining, today’s political and journalistic environment doesn’t provide me, or you, with the kinds of generous tools and resources it used to lavish upon us.

Will Annie Andrews win this election because I put that sign out? Of course not. In fact, the odds are against her in this once independent-minded state. Her chances are better than they were against Darline’s brother, but the tendency of South Carolina’s white majority to vote only for Republicans (and lately, only for the kind of Republicans who kiss the feet of You Know Who, which is a vastly worse situation) shows signs of being set in stone.

I’m just trying to make people think, the way they used to do before they voted. It could happen. In any case, I decided to give it a try…

Here’s one reason to be glad you’re in South Carolina

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I just came back last night from a trip to Massachusetts and back that started last Tuesday (two days going up, two days there, two days back).

I’ll tell you about the trip later. At least, I hope I will. I still haven’t told about our trip to Dominica in 2023, or to Europe in 2024. But I hope I’ll write about those sometime, too.

I just wanted to mention gasoline prices. I was rather relieved last night when I saw that prices in my general neighborhood were about the same as before I’d left — about three-fifty-something.

I had not seen a single price below four dollars since last Tuesday. I was shocked when I bought some on the way up in the Washington area last Wednesday, and it was slightly above that mark. That would be the lowest I’d see until my return home.

On the way back, having spent the night in Carlisle, Pa. (because I wanted to revisit some fondly remembered sights from the years when I youngest daughter studied ballet there on the Dickinson College campus), I decided to take a drive on U.S. 11 over to Shippensburg. I wanted to see once more some of the most beautiful farmland I’d ever seen anywhere (it would have been even nicer if I’d headed toward Gettysburg, but that was out of my way.)

On the way, I saw I just barely had enough gas to get to Shippensburg, so I decided I’d stop at the Sheetz on the main drag there (King St.).

There, regular cost $4.19. But it wasn’t just the per-unit price that got me. I was driving a larger vehicle than I was used to, and it’s 18-gallon tank was basically empty. As I watched the numbers spin, it occurred to me to take out my phone and shoot video of the climax of the drama.

That was a personal record total. I’ve paid a little more than $50 a couple of times, years ago. But never anything like this.

So while I really enjoyed the trip, it was nice to get back home last night for a number of reasons, and that was one of them…

Why is it so much cheaper? If Donald Trump were a lot smarter than he is, I’d suspect that he was somehow shielding South Carolina from some of the effect of the fuel inflation he has unnecessarily caused. You know, since the majority of our voters love him so much.

Of course, if he hadn’t launched a wildly unsuccessful war on Iran, South Carolina petrol would still be a dollar less a gallon than it is now…

I’m not blaming Shippensburg, or Sheetz, a bit. It’s probably worse, some places…

Good news: Ralph Norman lost. Bad news: Darline Graham won

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OK, I know that’s kind of a bummer headline, so note that I also shared with you the evening’s best news: Red Sox win! Again!

And it’s all summarized there neatly on my lockscreen.

(I can’t praise the NYT enough for their coverage of S.C. elections, which beats all South Carolina media hollow. Sure, it’s just the bare bones, but it’s better and more timely than I’m getting from anyone locally. They’re showing what CAN be done with the Web….

(Not that the Web is perfect. The Sox won that game 7-3, so what you see there is incorrectly labeled “final.” Artificial Imperfection.)*

I’m not complaining about the runoff outcome; I did what little I could to achieve that result. My complaint is that this is as good an outcome that we could hope for, given where we started with the original full field in this primary.

Which turns us to November.

A couple of days back, my friend who put the Annie sign in my yard (just days before I took it down when Lindsey suddenly died) called me to ask whether I’d put it back up.

Well, no. That doesn’t mean that I won’t vote for “Annie.” But there’s a difference, for me, between settling for someone on Election Day and supporting that person with sufficient enthusiasm that I’ll put a sign in my yard.

And frankly, I haven’t even started to evaluate Dr. Anderson. I mean Andrews. See, I don’t even write her name correctly yet without thinking for a moment. (By the way, do not type “Annie Anderson” thinking you will find the website of a Senate candidate. Seriously.)

In the days ahead, I’ll be absorbing what I can find about each of these candidates. I expect to learn new things about Darline Graham now that she no longer has to out-crazy a bunch of lunatics in a Republican primary. She won’t have to worry about that again for six years. She’s got room to write other things on her blank slate.

The only relevant thing we’ve learned so far is that she doesn’t know anything about foreign affairs. But did anybody think she did? She’s the proverbial random-person-grabbed-off-the-street. And if you don’t know what I mean, go find some video of those street interviews David Letterman used to do. (Or was it Leno or one of those other late-night guys?)

And the question it causes me to ask is, does anyone assume that Dr. Andrews (I’m making myself practice that last name) is some kind of Lowcountry Henry Kissinger? Or should I say, to make Democrats out there happier, Dean Rusk? Or Sam Nunn, for that matter.

I sincerely doubt it. But I’ll look into it.

Alas, I can’t sit them down for 90-minute endorsement interviews, which would give me far better understanding than I can get through listening to the nonsense their campaigns are pumping out.

But I’ll make do, and share what I find. Force me to guess, and I’ll guess I’ll be choosing the pediatrician. That’s just based on what little I know so far — which is very little. I’m going to give them both every opportunity to surprise me. Who knows? Maybe I’ll decide to put that sign out. Who knows? I don’t. Not yet.

Oh, yeah. I need to do that today too, don’t I?

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I didn’t even have a chance to forget that awful runoff today. I went to my allergist for a shot, and as I was leaving… there was Henry. Also waiting for a shot.

I stopped to say hi, and noticing he was wracking his brain, I said my name and took off my ball cap. That gave him the excuse to say, “I didn’t know you with the cap!” I like to give people a graceful way out like that. Anyway, we hadn’t seen each other since just before one of the debates in 2018. He’s gotten older and lost weight. So have I. (It’s that season, when I shed 20-plus pounds to fit into my short cargo pants. All my fat cargos are long.)

He told his plainclothes bodyguard, who was standing next to his chair with his back against the wall, “This is a big newspaperman!” I added, “Used to be…”

Seeing his lapel sticker (“I Voted! Did You?”), I told him I was about to. I almost said, “I plan to vote for your girl,” just because this is a situation when I could actually say that honestly, but I held back. No need to ask him who he voted for, unless he changed his mind since yesterday.

He mentioned that there was no line to vote, I said I assumed it would be that way at my place, too, and wasn’t it a shame for people to be so uninterested in voting.

That’s it. I just thought I should report the contact. I’ll comment further on today’s voting in a separate post…

Finally, a bit of respect from the robot

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I’m thinking of rating her “able” and maybe giving her liberty in the next port.

I get lots and lots of respect these days. I get called “sir” wherever I go.

I notice it because when I was younger, I didn’t hear it much except from people who were trying to sell me something. I certainly never heard it in a newsroom, definitely not from people who worked for me. It wasn’t the culture. I learned that when I drove from Memphis to Jackson, Tenn., to interview for my first post-graduation newspaper job. I went up to the reception desk at the main entrance and told this girl who seemed younger than I was (I was 22) that I had an interview with Reid Ashe, the executive editor. She called back to the newsroom (in another part of the building) and asked, “Is Reid back there?” Having grown up in the Navy (and having been a copy boy in a very hierarchical newsroom in Memphis), I was a bit shocked. She was referring to the captain that way. What sort of barky was this that I was seeking to join?

I eventually learned it was the norm in newsrooms.

Sorry about the digression. I was saying, few ever called me that in my youth.

Now I’ve gotten used to it, although sometimes I’m still taken aback. Does a guy really want pretty young women to address him as “sir,” which I think translates from their patois as “Wow, you’re a real fossil, aren’t you?” I think not, Even at my age, I’d prefer something like “HelLOOO!” under those circumstances. I mean, I wouldn’t intend for it to lead anywhere, but it would be nice to hear occasionally.

I’m bothered more when black men who also have gray hair say it to me. Makes me feel bad on an ethical, moral level. If there is an opportunity to say it back to him, I do that. If he’s walked off as he said it, I’m just left to worry: Did he say it because I’m old or because I’m white? Hard to tell, most times.

I certainly don’t want to object, to say, “Don’t call me sir, sir!” I had that happen to me at age 7 when I was living in Woodbury, N.J., the first place I ever lived outside the South. The middle-aged man in the apartment next door corrected me rather brusquely and with a slightly irritated tone when I, of course, called him “sir.” His wife then interrupted his egalitarian lecture to correct him, saying “Don’t tell him that! It’s the way he’s been brought up.” I just went away disturbed and confused.

But anyway, people say it to me so much now that I’ve gradually come to accept it. Meanwhile, I’ve come to resent Alexa over the years because she never says it to me. I didn’t mind so much when she had this lovely, soft British voice that I found soothing. But when Amazon took that away a few months back (and however I Google, I haven’t found a way to get the preferred voice back), it started to irritate. It’s a brash, unpleasant voice now. I mean bright, attempting on some Yankee level to sound briskly agreeable, but the pleasantness is gone, for me.

And when I give her what is clearly a command and not a request — such as “Alexa, turn on the office light,” she sounds like an insolent, sarcastic teenager when she responds with nothing but a brisk, noncommital “OK.” I hear it as “Sure. Like I give a s__t.” And it didn’t sound that way so much when she was English. (Even in this benighted century, the Brits are more polite.)

Watch. I will be lectured now for my arrogant, elitist pomposity, expecting people to “sir” me. But even though they generally do, I don’t expect it from them, and I don’t mind the people who don’t. But the thing here is, Alexa is not a “she.” She’s an “it.” I put people on a much, much higher plane.This Echo is a bunch of ones and zeroes that speak to me with an irritating, ersatz voice in a tone I would never abide on my quarterdeck. I mean desk.

And having heard all the anxiety out there over AI, and having seen all those flicks featuring Skynet and the like, this hint of insubordination is a bit unsettling. It sounds like, “OK… for now…”

I say all that not to complain, but to explain why I’m so pleased today.

Lately, Alexa has been varying from her “OK,” with such things as, for instance, “Right,” or “You’ve got it!” Still implying I’m a minor irritant that she’s indulging with a huge favor, but at least there’s variety.

Today, though, I got something better than I’d ever hoped for. I said, “Alexa, turn on the office light,” and she said,

“Aye, aye, Captain!”

Sure, maybe she’s been reading my mind, as so many fear that she does.

But I was so gratified, I’d have granted her an extra rum ration had she been human. Sure, it sounded a bit like she was mocking the old tyrant, but I chalk that up to her new “brash Yank broad” voice. The thing is, she got the words right.

I’d have been happy with an “Aye, sir,” so this extra respect was lagniappe, and I appreciated it. I’m not my Dad, so I’ll never deserve to hear a human say that to me. I’ve done nothing to earn it.

But with a fake voicebox that exists to perform simple tasks for me, it’s good to hear. If only I had any hope of hearing it next time. She’s so capricious…

It should be a bit better tomorrow…

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Me, feigning optimism after voting. Oh, and I just checked, and my thumb isn’t actually as long as the looks. Must be lens distortion or something.

No, “it” does not refer to the nation, or the U.S. Senate, or South Carolina, or the planet. Or the Red Sox’ record (After that amazing, record-setting month, they’ve lost the last three games to teams who absolutely should NOT be beating them. But enough about that. I’m trying not to think about it.)

“It” just means my text queue. See the image below. I took that screenshot of my phone this morning. Every single text you see there is on behalf of someone running for Lindsey’s seat the U.S. Senate. One of them is Democrat Annie Andrews;, the rest are in the GOP primary today.

it won’t be all better tomorrow, just a bit. Maybe. My fear is that all the contributors to the people who lose today will start giving to the two who make it into the runoff, and i’ll still get as many texts. But I try to imagine better times to keep my hopes up.

Anyway, are you out voting today? I voted. Did what I said I would. Not proud about it, but it was the only thing I could think of to minimize the damage.

When I was there preparing to vote around 11 this morning, I was the only person voting, but four or five people were in other stages — signing in, turning in their ballots, etc. In the few seconds it took me to tick that one name, about five more came in and got in line.

So I saw no sign of a mob. If you voted, how did it go where you were? My only complication was that our polling place was moved to Mt. Hebron United Methodist Church, which is a couple of blocks from where we once lived, and practically across the street from the elementary school that most of my kids attended (which has been torn down now, alas).

I’ll let y’all know how the Red Sox come out tonight. Maybe you don’t care, but I do. And the chances for happiness are much better there than in S.C. politics at the moment…

 

Last-minute scraps of wretched nonsense

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I’ve mentioned the awful set of choices being laid before us in this hasty primary to replace the late Lindsey Graham on the November ballot.

Ever since I wrote and posted that, the offal of various varieties has been raining down upon us. How about those foolish scraps of mail on top above, especially the one trying to tell us that this woman filling her dead brother’s seat is one of those nasty libs that certain people love to hate so much.

You know, Darline Graham, Trump’s annointed.

There are no good choices tomorrow. So I think I’m going to vote for the least bad, Mark Sanford. He was an outlier in the Republican Party before Trump, but he looks almost normal now. He’s a flake and a misfit and has awful judgment, but the alternatives are worse.

I mean, the alternatives that have a chance of at least getting into the runoff. I had thought about voting. I thought about voting for one of the other five or six, but I just don’t know enough about any of them to possess any certainty that they aren’t worse than the rest. I’m not saying they are, I’m just saying I have no justification for saying they aren’t. For that reason, I don’t vote for people I know nothing about.

And none of them can get into the runoff. And we need some who has a chance of taking the place of one of the worst ones in said runoff. I had been wavering on the Sanford ploy, because it’s so distasteful, until I spoke with a smart friend after Mass last night, and she just assumed the runoff would be between Lindsey’s sister and Ralph Norman.

That was a sufficiently appalling notion that I’m going with Mark, because he has a chance of keeping Norman out of it.

It’s a desperate situation. I’m not happy taking desperate measures, but what is the alternative?

Some of you Democrats out there may answer, “Just skip tomorrow, and wait and vote for Annie Andrews in the fall.”

Yeah, right. Sure, the Democratic nominee may have more of a chance now than she had before Lindsey died. But that’s not saying much.

As I read it, barring something unforeseen at this point, the Republican nominee is going to be our new senator. So the time to try to minimize the damage — to South Carolina, the nation, and the world — is now…

Dangerous linguistic humor

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I had occasion this morning to revisit something from my linguistics class this spring, and it almost choked me to death.

I’m 72, and while I’ve had a lot of kind of scary asthma attacks in my life, some of them involving laughter — such as when I was a kid and my uncle (who was only a few years older) wouldn’t stop tickling me, and I couldn’t stop laughing — I’d never had anything exactly like this happen.

I was finishing my coffee at the end of a late breakfast (I did some blogging last night well after watching the Red Sox destroy the White Sox), and made the mistake of calling up one of ISMO’s videos on YouTube.

He’s a Finnish comedian, and my linguistics prof introduced the class to him because so many of his jokes are about the English language. I think the one above was the first he showed us. Here’s another one I saw at about that time:

Those were funny, if you’re into words the way I am, but the one I encountered this morning was dangerous. I couldn’t tell it would be at first. ISMO was just kind of riffing about the many ways we use a word that I don’t allow on the blog, and then he said something that made me spew coffee all over the table (while trying to stop myself from doing so, which was probably a mistake), and then, for at least half a minute, my throat was so tightly closed (probably to keep the coffee out of my lungs) that I could not take in any air to replace that I had spewed. For several minutes after that, I couldn’t take in more than the merest sip of air.

It was scary, but I seem more or less OK now, aside from some lingering soreness in the middle of my chest — rawness in my esophagus, or bronchii, or something.

What was the specific line that did that to me? I can’t remember. My brain was so busy worrying about getting air that it couldn’t be bothered to store the memory.

I won’t give you the link unless you ask for it. Oh, it probably won’t harm you unless you’re as obsessed with language as I am, and most people are not. But I’m not taking chances. I don’t want my blog to become an attractive nuisance, in the legal sense.

But if you watch the above, milder jokes, and get interested enough to watch more, you’ll probably run across it. It’s about one four-letter word that English speakers use in many ways, some of them contradictory. If you see something answering that description, make sure you’re not eating or drinking anything…

I mean, this thing was weapons-grade, like in that Monty Python bit:

This depressing special primary

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Screenshot

Last night, my uncle asked me if he had to vote today. He was worried that he did,, because he didn’t know of anyone running in the special GOP primary to replace Lindsey Graham on the November ballot that he could possibly vote for.

He made me panic for a moment. I was pretty sure the primary wasn’t today, but two things caused me to be uncertain: I’ve been busy lately, and I really, really didn’t want to think about this primary anyway. The options on offer are too depressing. Anyway, I checked, and no, it’s next Tuesday.

But I suppose that means I need to write something about it now. The fact that I’m writing far less about politics now doesn’t mean I ignore it completely.

When we were last on this subject, I had just taken down my “Annie” sign because Lindsey had just died, suddenly and rather shockingly. I took it down as respect for the dead (I don’t know if that’s an established custom, but perhaps it should be). I’d like to say I also did so because I had high hopes for what the special primary might come up with, but of course, I can’t. It’s more that I had only put the sign up because a) she was the only alternative to the sad disaster that Lindsey Graham had become, and b) my neighbor who had put up a sign I gave him in the last general election had given me this sign. In fact, he put it up (after asking my permission), and I just left it. I lack enthusiasm for Dr. Andrews, which I can address separately after this unpromising current exercise is over.

In the meantime, I wish I could say something more positive than “I lack enthusiasm” about one of these candidates in the special primary. But I can’t. Maybe some miracle will happen between now and next Tuesday. It it does, I’ll say something about it.

The saddest thing I can say about this crew is that among those I know (and I only vote for people I know something about, unlike so many), the one who comes closest to being a reasonable person is Mark Sanford. Yes, that’s how bad it is. If you don’t know what I mean, look at what I’ve written about him over the years. You’ll see that at first I liked him, but then was soon appalled, and kind of stuck with that. But then, he was appalling by pre-Trump standards. And as you know, if we could resurrect Richard Nixon and put him in the White House in place of what we’ve got, I’d be a pretty happy camper.

So let’s start with him and run down the rest of the list. I’ll say less about those I know less about:

  1. Mark Sanford. What he’s offering is pretty much what he’s always offered. The best thing I can say about him is that he is not a Trumpista. And that’s important. Beyond that… well, he brags about being a budget-cutter. He brags (in one of the many texts I’ve received) that as governor, he “balanced 8 state budgets.” No, he didn’t. The Legislature did. The state constitution requires that the state budet be balanced, every year, and that would have happened no matter who the gov was. What he did do, one year, was put on a childish display by vetoing the entire budget. It was the most grossly irresponsible thing I’d seen a chief executive do until Trump came along. The grownups in the Legislature fixed it, of course, as Sanford knew they would (which to me makes it worse, not better — he was leaving it up to the people who actually cared about the job, rather than pulling stunts). Folks, this guy is THE most extreme libertarian I have every encountered. Most libertarians don’t like paying taxes to support government. This guy didn’t want any money spent on government, even if the money fell from the sky. In 2009, with our economy a shambles, he tried to refuse $700 million in federal stimulus funds (that was going to be spent anyway, somewhere), simply on the principle that he didn’t want SC to have any more money to spend on government services. That time, the state Supreme Court stepped in as the grownup. Hey, if you like that stuff, go ahead and vote for him. But if he’s elected, you might want to put a bell on him, in case he wanders off again.
  2. Darline Graham. I was happy to accept her as her brother’s interim replacement for a few months. I didn’t think about beyond that. If I had, I would have said this was her chance to define herself for voters. Unfortunately, she is using this opportunity to define herself in terms of what her brother became after 2016, not what he was before. On the good side, she does proudly mention on her website her experiences serving in state government leadership roles. But that’s not her headline. Her big, bold headline is “Proudly Endorsed By President Trump.” Most voters are doing well if they know even one thing about a candidate, so that’s the one thing she wants them to know definitely. If she wins the primary, maybe she’ll drop that garbage and offer herself as a serious alternative to the Democratic nominee. But that remains to be seen.
  3. Ralph Norman. Remember when, early this year, I acknowledged an ad of his as a nominee for worst political ad for 2026 so far? The ad brought up so many depressing thoughts that I took the post down right after I put it up. I just didn’t want to bring up such things, much less discuss them on a blog. Unfortunately, there was a comment or two before I could take it down, so I decided I had to put it back up. I cursed my luck. I just wanted to get back to writing about more pleasant things. Well, now I can tell you that nothing Norman did or said after that caused him to rise in my estimation. This was not a surprise. I’d known about Norman from well before he insulted us by running for governor. Here’s something from 2023. If you want to go see if you can find something positive about him, here’s his website.
  4. Russell Fry. He’s technically a member of Congress (representing a district that didn’t even exist when I was at the paper, and I can’t name his predecessors either), but beyond that, if you mentioned his name to me before this, it might have sounded familiar, but I would have guessed he was a backbencher in the Legislature. In other words, I knew nothing about him until he ran for this. And everything I’ve seen since then tells me he’s trying to outRalphNorman Ralph Norman. Here’s his website.
  5. Duke Buckner. All I know is that I saw a picture, and aside from being a pleasant-looking fellow, I notice he’s black. Although it might be cool — in a weird, ironic, misleading way — for both of our U.S. senators to be black Republicans, it wouldn’t be cool enough to vote for him unless I know a lot more. Preferably something having nothing to do with Identity Politics. Here’s his website. One good thing I see is that he doesn’t mention Trump on the main page. That’s something…
  6. Samuel Sam Shepherd. I don’t know why his name is on the ballot like that. Maybe he doesn’t want you to think he’s this guy. Not that I would have. Here’s his website… No, wait — I couldn’t find one in a brief search. Here’s a TV news story. And here’s a Facebook page. Let me know if y’all find a website.
  7. Danny Ford II. I don’t see a website for him, either (but maybe I’m not looking for it correctly). Here’s his Facebook page. I see that he is a farmer, that his father had something to do with football (not that I’d hold that against the son), and that the party tried to keep him off the primary ballot. The reason they tried that makes me glad he won his court case. Might be worthwhile to look a bit further…
  8. Glenda Gail Parker. Don’t know anything, beyond noticing that she’s a woman, but Darline can claim the same distinction. More in Ms. Parker’s favor: No prominent mention of Trump on her website. Interesting…
  9. Mark Lynch. A second Mark! Here’s his website. (No prominent mention of Trump!)
  10. Mark McBride. Yet another Mark! Here’s his website. Again, no obvious mention of Trump (mind you, I haven’t read every word on any of these sites), and his issues page mentions relatively normal things that a Republican in, say, the 1990s might have talked about. Fascinating.

I’m going to look more closely into those folks who show no interest in the current president. Some of them sort of exude an aura of sanity that is sadly unfamiliar these days. I’ll let you know if I decide to vote for any of them.

Of course, if there are any professional Republican consultants who have taken a moment to pay attention to any of those candidates who seem to be from a pre-Trump universe, they are snorting with derision and saying something like, “Huh! Another loser who wants to stay a loser!”

That’s their conventional “wisdom.” Me I’m looking forward to a day when they’re wrong. You know, a day when our country is Great Again.

‘Too many chickens coming home to roost’

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Once, I was a hard-news guy. Strictly hard news. I was ready and eager to cover almost any disaster that befell my fellow humans — fire, murder, kidnapping, bank robbery. Even as an editor, I’d desert the newsroom and rush out to the scene to see if my reporters needed a hand covering it.

And yeah, I felt guilty about being enthusiastic about other people’s misery, but (I told myself) I didn’t cause the misery; I just wanted to be the first to tell everybody about it. (And I swear, I never exploited misery by asking a victim “How do you feel?” That kind of “news” coverage always nauseated me. Just the facts, ma’am.)

Once, there was a big bank robbery breaking on deadline, with the scanner telling us the robbers were holed up in a nearby apartment in a complex where I had once lived. Though we were between editions, I rushed to the scene and stood amid the cop cars that were surrounding the building, staring at the doors and windows and waiting for the action to break. Then I glanced to the left and the right, and saw all the cops were taking cover behind their cars, with weapons drawn. I decided to get behind something myself, but in a position where I wouldn’t miss anything.

I had to get back to the office a few minutes later, but don’t fret; I didn’t miss anything. The robbers weren’t there. Bad tip.

Once, my boss told me that I was her “news hound.” I protested that we had a newsroom of 150 news hounds. She said, “No, we don’t.” I say that not to brag, but to set up my point, which is coming soon.

Of course, my main hard news jam was politics — in my newsroom days, and even more so after my conversion to editorial. Politics was the main thing; the others were just interesting breaks in the routine. Political coverage and commentary is why we have the First Amendment protection for the press. Our Framers knew that an informed electorate was essential for our republic to survive, and that meant a free press. Politics was the one hard news thing every citizen could do something about. So they needed a lively, detailed source of reliable information on the subject.

And as long as we had healthy newspapers in our communities, our republic thrived.

But that’s not my point. My point is that our polis, our political community, our marketplace of ideas has now degenerated to the point that I take little interest in the political stuff. Which is why I don’t blog much anymore — and when I do, it’s usually about popular culture or other trivia outside the political sphere. There just seems to me to be no point to delve into what was the important stuff to me for most of my life.

You can inform people all you want, and reflect upon the salient facts as carefully and intelligently as you are able, and it has zero effect. Everyone rejects it vociferously. It’s not only that they are unaffected by the commentary; they completely disregard the facts. If the facts (much less the opinions) are not in agreement with their own prejudices, they sweep them aside with hardly a glance. After all, their own preferences are constantly reinforced by the more comfortable (to them) “facts” and viewpoints fed to them by the sources of information that have replaced serious news coverage.

So I spend more and more time thinking about other stuff. Like sports. Which is particularly ironic, given it’s me. I didn’t say anything to them, but when guys used to tell me, “I just read the sports pages,” it always lowered them a bit in my estimation. And now I’m sort of one of them.

Of course, it’s just baseball, the National Pasttime, but it’s still sports. And while I’ve got you, the latest is that last night, the Red Sox beat the Dodgers (currently the Best Team in Baseball, statistically), to close out the best month Boston’s history. Their won-loss average was .840 in July — 24 and 4. You know how I said, back when Boston took its first step up from the cellar, that all the best sports movies start with the team being in the hopeless dumps, before they climb and climb and climb until they win it all? Well, we’re really getting into the good part now. The final, triumphant reel is rolling.

So that was my favorite thing in the paper this morning. But I’m here to share my second favorite: “Too many chickens coming home to roost.” It was on the Globe’s front page:

Sure, roosters don’t lay eggs and are known to make a racket, so most amateur chick hatchers don’t have any use for them. But, the Wood Family Farm would like you to know it already has plenty, thanks all the same….

But folks in the area keep dumping their roosters there.

This story ties together a number of things that have interested me for some time. My family is into vegetable (and fruit) gardening, but we have to build raised beds because our soil is essentially red-clay brick. And my wife would like to have chickens, but, you know — subdivision covenants. My son, who lives in a nearby community, built a nice coop and got some chickens and his family had “free” eggs for awhile, but all he could keep where he lives was hens.

In populated areas, roosters aren’t allowed because, you know, the crowing. Hey, when we were in Thailand, everyplace we stayed (even Bangkok) had nearby roosters, and it was kind of nice. We always wanted to get an early start on the sight-seeing. But them’s the rules in populated areas.

And the reasons that one Peabody farm was a fave dumping ground for roosters were a) it was in the general Boston metro area (just west of Salem), and b) it was located at the junction of two major roads. And it’s driving Madison Wook, the young woman running the farm, nuts:

“I am just a 25-year-old girl taking care of her family’s farm, and it keeps falling on me to take these roosters in when they’re dumped,” Wood said.

And bless her, she’s sweet-hearted enough that she does take them in, even though there are now 15 of the useless braggarts and she’s not set up to have any. She feeds them and puts them “in her paddock alongside her ducks and cows.”

So I like Madison Wood. And I even have some sympathy for the folks who are inflicting this plague upon her. They care enough about chickens to keep them, and they can’t keep the these guys, but they don’t have the heart to butcher and cook them. (And sure, our farming ancestors would scoff at that, and their hunter-gatherer ancestors wouldn’t even scoff, because they’d be too busy starting a fire and making a makeshift rotisserie. But we are prisoners of our soft environment, so as I say, I’m sympathetic.)

But these folks need to take their Foghorn Leghorns somewhere else now. I hope Madison doesn’t get any more boarders to worry about. But one upside: She’s not going to have any trouble waking up in the morning for awhile…

 

Your Virtual Front Page for Wednesday, July 29, 2026

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Since I needed art for the page, I thought I’d brag that for once, one of my fig trees is bearing really well. Huzzah!

I think the blog is back up and functioning normally, but let’s test it out with a quick VFP!

  1. U.S. Strikes Iran as Fighting Reignites Across Region — And here we go, on and on. You may want to take note of the sidebar to that lede story in the NYT: Trump Encounters a More Determined Iran as War Widens. Indeed. They know that, after all his ridiculous bluster and bravado, he very badly wants out of this fight. Do you think they can outlast him? I do.
  2. ‘There will never be another Lindsey Graham’ — That’s what Henry said today at his funeral, and I expect he’s right. In that way, he matched his prececessor, Strom Thurmond. In important ways, he exceeded him. Personally, I’m going to remember the days I was so proud to have him as my senator, before the terrible period that started at the end of 2016. We could use another senator like the one he was back then.
  3. Joint Base Charleston will be re-named in his honor — A fitting tribute, although I had been unaware there was a “Joint Base Charleston.” Turns out it’s what I think of as the Air Force Base, which is more fitting, since that’s the uniform he wore. It’s certainly a more honorable recognition that that offered by you know who before the funeral.
  4. Oregon is on track for its worst wildfire season yet — I guess Trump will have to threaten Oregon with a tariff, if they don’t stop this nonsense. Europe, too, I suppose...
  5. And now from the world of sport — The Red Sox lost one last night. And although the glow of their record-tying streak is still upon them, they’re trailing in this one. I’m confident they’ll pull it out, but I need to go to bed. After this, they should stop playing these games on the West Coast — unless those people learn to set their clocks properly. No, this isn’t an actual sports story, and doesn’t really belong on the front; I just wanted to get that off my chest.

Yeah, I LIKE Pope Leo

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Still having serious technical problems with the blog, but I’m going to try to post a short one as an experiment…

America Magazine notes that while most popes refer to Scripture or other church documents in their missives, Pope Leo branches out:

Sometimes popes go rogue. Pope Francis liked to reference the English priest and novelist Robert Hugh Benson as well as Fyodor Dostoevsky. As is the case with any pope who reigns for more than a few years, the documents of the latter years of Francis’ tenure also had a lot of references to his own papal oeuvre. (If you want to get technical, even St. Luke liked that move: What’s the opening line of Acts of the Apostles? “In my first book, Theophilus…”) And Pope Benedict XVI liked to include Plato and other classical Greco-Roman authors as much as he did any church father.

What no pope has ever done until now, however? Quote Bob Dylan.

Dylan? I really like this pope. (And I LOVE Francis for the Dostoyevsky.) Of course, being a pontifex maximus, Leo goes DEEP with his Dylan. No “A hard rain’s gonna fall” or other stuff everybody knows, he digs down into arcana like a superfan:

In the foreword to a new book collecting his writings on peacemaking, Disarmed and Disarming: Peace Is a Gift, the pontiff quoted a 1963 Bob Dylan song, “Go Away You Bomb,” citing a line Dylan directed at nuclear weapons: “I hate you cause yer man-made and man-owned an’ man-handled.”

If you’ve never heard of the verse or the song, you’re not alone: “Go Away You Bomb” was never recorded by Dylan. He seems to have written the song in a day in 1963 at the request of Izzy Young of the Greenwich Village Folklore Center, and it only exists as a typewritten manuscript. The lyrics have the same tone and feel as “Masters of War,” the classic song released the same year on “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,” but Pope Leo didn’t cite that famous track: Instead, he dug deep, like a hipster tossing aside “Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits” for a vinyl B-side of something terrible from “Self-Portrait.”…

See, that’s cool. Reminds me of cool friends who were into Jeff Beck when I was in high school, while I didn’t know who he was. I was too busy trying to figure out whether Paul was dead. (You’ll be glad to know I decided he wasn’t.)

Now, we’ll see if I can post this…

 

Your Virtual Front Page for Tuesday, July 21, 2026

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This was among the frozen goods offered for sale at a local Aldi.

OK, no more Homer for the moment. Let’s move on.

It’s been awhile since I’ve done one of these, and I expect it to be harder than it used to be, but here goes…

  1. Man told he’d have to pay $2.4 million for school pollution records — OK, this one grabbed me. Usually, an agency that wants to say “F___ you!” to a citizen’s public records request will charge, say, $100. Prices really are rising, aren’t they? By the way, the agency involved is one of the two that we used to call DHEC.
  2. Speaking of prices going up… — This refers to the picture at the top of this post. My source failed to check the price, but if it was a nickel, that would be five cents more than anyone should have to pay for ice cubes. But you know, the moment we first paid for water in bottles, we should have known this was bound to happen. Me, I’m gonna keep making my own, like our hunter-gatherer ancestors.
  3. Trump Threatens Canada With Tariffs for Wildfire Smoke Over U.S. — So… a bad thing happens to Canada, and Canada struggles to deal with it, so he proposes to punish Canada for it? I guess it makes as much sense as persecuting people for coming here from countries where they are starving and/or oppressed. You see why I don’t read as much “news” as I used to? This is what it’s like.
  4. Nicaragua’s President Ortega says no more elections — He’s been the dictator there for 20 years now. So much for those idealistic Sandinistas, huh? Elections? He don’t need no estinking elections! (Yeah, I know that’s from a Mexican character, but it’s all I could think of…)
  5. Red Sox are one win from tying their record for longest win streak — You knew I’d get to this, right? As of last night, they’d won 14 games in a row. If they win tonight — the game starts in less than an hour — they’ll tie the franchise record of 15 straight. And that was in 1946, when they had Ted Williams at his peak. See? I gave you some good news…

 

OK, I finally saw the flick, and I was impressed

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Matt Damon did a good job of humanizing Odysseus. Beside him is the unprepossessing Athena.

Wow. That was quite an experience, seeing “The Odyssey” last night. It’s one of the few times I’ve been at a film that the audience applauded at the end. I joined in.

Christopher Nolan really accomplished something here. I was very impressed, and not a bit disappointed — which is unusual for me, with things I’m familiar with when I go in.

I highly recommend it.

I do have one BIG complaint, which is definitely not Nolan’s fault. I went to see the movie in Imax, so it looked great. But the first thing I did when I got there was turn off my hearing aids, and that wasn’t enough to shut out the painful noise. You’d think that would be great for a guy who’s hard of hearing, but it isn’t. Loud sounds produce a tremendous buzzing distortion in my ears. I couldn’t make out dialogue; I could only understand about 20 percent of what was said. (Sometimes it helped to put my fingers in my ears.) I knew the story, so I usually knew what was going on. But I can’t wait to see it again with normal sound — and maybe subtitles.

Another thing that helped me follow and enjoy the flick was that it followed the original about as faithfully as you can in just three hours of running time. There were changes, but they were very inventive and helped move the story forward convincingly. Examples of that:

  • In Homer’s verson, a priest at Ismarus gives Odysseus a supply of sweet, super-powerful wine that a normal human needed to dilute 20 to 1 before drinking. Later, our hero uses the uncut stuff to drug the Cyclops so he and his men can escape. In the movie, there’s no stop at Ismarus, so no wine, and Odysseus just waits until the Cyclops is asleep before blinding him. It works.
  • He doesn’t stop in the land of the lotus-eaters, either. Instead, Calypso feeds lotus flowers to Odysseus to give him amnesia and keep him around for seven years. This works on a couple of levels. First, it sort of exonerates Calypso because she ultimately decides to let the hero go, and even helps him remember who he is and where he wants to go. First step: stop eating the flowers!
  • Secondly, it exonerates Odysseus for leaving his loving wife in the lurch back in Ithaca while he spends every night in the bed of a nymph for seven years. Hey, he forgot! This is not the only thing Nolan does to make Odysseus a more sympathetic figure to a modern audience. Between all the slashing bloodshed and hanging girls who slept with the enemy and selling captive women into slavery, and lots of lying, Homer’s character wasn’t quite the thing for moderns seeking a hero. He had problems. But by skipping and soft-pedalling a lot of that, plus casting Matt Damon in the role, Nolan made Odysseus someone a 2026 audience could cheer for. It was very artfully done, and he didn’t overdo it and make him fake or too vanilla.
  • He also toned down Athena. She keeps showing up, but she’s a very unprepossessing goddess, considering. People tend to think of her as the goddess of wisdom, like her Roman rip-off Minerva. But she’s also the goddess of war — a tall, strong figure who wears a soldier’s helmet. She was into bloodshed, and was always counseling Odysseus — and Telemachus — to man up and swing the sword about. In this, she wore a lovely white robe and imparted Wisdom to our man O during relatively quiet moments (as in the still you see above). I mean I think she did. Since I couldn’t hear dialogue, especially quiet dialogue, I admit she could have been saying, “Get on out there and kick some ass, ya sorry wuss!” But in a quiet, philosophical kind of way.

Anyway, all those changes worked. What were the best parts?

My son was there with his family, and in discussing it with them after, I brought up the scene with Polyphemus, the Cyclops, which I thought was very well done, as I said above.

But after I got home, I remembered the very best part — when Circe turns O’s men into swine. It was astounding, and it was done without CGI, which makes it more amazing. I won’t tell you how she does it, but it’s not your garden-variety, wave-a-wand hocus-pocus. SPOILER: It’s particularly shocking to see after the way Circe appears (and hasn’t identified herself) — not as a foxy enchantress, but like somebody’s mom, utterly terrified to find armed soldiers in her home. She looks like an everyday middle-aged lady throughout the scene, but by the end there’s no doubting her power. Earlier I quoted Jack Aubrey as saying, “… as for that tale of all his foremast-hands being turned into swine… why, he might tell that to the Marines.” He would not have doubted had he seen this.

As for least-favorite part… above, I said I was “not a bit disappointed” by anything, but I’d have been happier if I’d seen some sirens. Oh, Odysseus gets tied to the mast, and acts out the words of my fave Cream song, “How his naked ears were tortured/By the sirens sweetly singing…” But I saw nothing. I was eager to see whether they looked like this or like this. I would have preferred the former, but been happy to see anything.

Oh, about those controversies: I wish I could say Lupita Nyong’o was awesome as Helen, but I can’t. And it’s not just because, her face aside, she’s too skinny for me to think of her as the world’s most beautiful. She just wasn’t as good in the role as she needed to be to shut the complainers up. She wasn’t, say, as good as Sophie Okonedo as Queen Margaret in the recent production of Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays. When I first saw that, I kinda went, “Huh?” (I mean, she was supposed to be from Anjou), but was deeply impressed at what she did with the role. Not so in this latest instance. But it didn’t matter much given that Helen wasn’t as critical to this particular story, once the war was over.

I did have a “Huh?” moment early in this masterpiece early in the story, when I thought, “Why is there a girl dressed as a Greek soldier on that beach?” I finally decided it was supposed to be a very young boy, and I was right. It was supposed to be Sinon, who wasn’t actually a character in The Odyssey, but was added by Virgil in his Latin version. Nolan had added Sinon to set up something involving one of Penelope’s suitors, showing you what a bum that guy was (paying a kid to go to war in his place). Later, I learned Sinon was played by the same person who starred in that charming and witty movie “Juno” quite a few years back, who later became a trans activist. Which explained things, sort of. Maybe Nolan wanted to tick off somebody else out there besides Elon Musk. But what I don’t understand is why Odysseus would have sent this kid Sinon on essentially a suicide mission. Sinon sort of had the same question when O later looked the kid up in the realm of Hades.

As for the other casting choices I had been wondering about… I already said Matt Damon was perfect as the guy who could present O as someone who appealed to a Hollywood audience. He really made the movie work. Anne Hathaway and Tom Holland did fine as Penelope and Telemachus (the loved ones O was forgetting while shacking up with Calypso). And believe it or not, the “Twilight” guy was good as the very worst of the suitors, Antinous. I suppose he’s matured as an actor.

I said above that this was one of a very few films I’ve seen that caused the audience to applaud. There was another thing that has seldom happened in my adulthood: I came out of the theater feeling like I was still in the movie. It took awhile to shake. When I saw (and then reviewed) “Star Wars” in 1977, I was having trouble shaking the feeling that my Chevy Vega was an X-wing, and I was swooping in to finish off the Death Star (which was not the safest illusion to have while zipping East on Walnut Grove in Memphis). I had a similar experience after seeing “Apocalypse Now,” which haunted me the rest of the day.

I had that experience a lot when I was a kid living in Ecuador. My best buddy Tony Wessler and I would go to the Variedades theater near my house, pay the equivalent of two cents to get in, and sit on plain wooden benches to watch Italian (and sometimes French) movies with classical themes — gladiators or Hercules or whatever. The special effects were terrible, and if not for the Spanish subtitles we’d have understood none of the dialogue, but these shows were about the action. Afterwards, walking the six blocks or so home, we’d pass by construction sites littered with pieces of bamboo (they used it for scaffolding), and use them to swordfight constantly, all the way. We were IN the movie.

But since I’ve been grown, movies have to be something really special, do something new and different to give me that feeling. Last night, when I got to my car, I felt it strongly. Before driving away, I texted my wife, who had not come along, to say that after three hours of what I had experienced, I had this feeling it was going to take me another three to get home. She took it as a joke, but I actually felt that way.

I hope ol’ Tony has been to see it. This was everything those cheap flicks we enjoyed so much back in the day wanted to be…

What WOULD Helen have looked like?

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In this depiction from 550 BC, Helen’s white, but everybody else is black. Go figure.

OK, here we go again…

Yesterday, I questioned the casting decisions for the new film I still haven’t seen, but am anxioius to see — “The Odyssey.” But I did so optimistically, thinking it’s likely that Christopher Nolan knew what he was doing, and has more imagination regarding such things than I do.

Then, I listened to the third of four podcasts (yesterday I forgot the one in the video) that “The Rest is History” put out about about “The Odyssey” (both Homer’s and Nolan’s versions). And I found myself groaning when Tom Holland and his guest, classicist Daniel Mendelsohn cited the first of the “controversies” that have cropped up about the film.

And of course, this being the 21st century, it was about Identity Politics.

It seems that the actress who plays Helen of Troy is black. Her name is Lupita Nyong’o. So here we go.

Well, she definitely fulfills the primary job requirement: She’s beautiful. Does that make her the best choice for the role? I’ll get back to that. Meanwhile, the “controversy” seems to have been kicked off most prominently by a guy who, now that he’s the richest guy in the world, seems to have decided to dedicate the next chapter of his life to reinforcing every negative stereotype about white South Africans:

Sheesh. You’ll notice that in my previous post, I didn’t mention who was playing Helen in this film because I didn’t look to see. It didn’t even occur to me that she would be depicted, since this isn’t the Iliad, but the story about what happened to this one guy and his crew after the Trojan War is over. But apparently it includes the part when Odysseus wins the war by coming up with that big wooden horse trick.

I did raise the question of whether Matt Damon was right to play the star, and so did Holland and Mendelsohn, pointing out that Damon is sort of the ultimate whitebread All-American boy type, which the ancient Greeks were not. And one of the guys on the podcast, at some point, asked one of those overused points of the PC universe by asking, Why don’t they question that, huh? Well, I did, but I’m hoping Damon does a good job with it.

From there, they took the discussion in an intellectually respectable direction by discussing the question: How DID Homer picture Helen?

To encapsulate what they said, they made two excellent points: The first was that Homer was careful not to give many details about what she looked like. (Although he did say she was “white-armed,” but I see that as a reference to class rather than pigment. Upper-class ladies stayed out of the sun. Also, her father was a “swan.”) That, of course, left it up to the reader or listener to picture Helen according to whatever standard of beauty was admissable to those audience members.

Secondly, they made the logical point that what Homer and other ancient Greeks were picturing was probably someone who looked like them and their immediate neighbors. It’s extremely unlikely that they pictured in their minds either a blonde such as the one who played Helen in this flick, or a sub-Saharan African like, well, Lupita Nyong’o. (Although technically, she’s from Mexico. Still, her parents were Kenyan.)

Personally, that’s the way I would have gone. I wouldn’t have taken it to extremes — I wouldn’t say, insist upon a Greek woman — but I would have gone for a more or less Mediterranean look. Or at least sought a beautiful woman with dark hair, like Anne Hathaway — who plays Penelope in the film.

I thought the makers of “Troy: The Fall of a City” did a good job when they chose Bella Dayne to be their Helen. But, possibly illustrating the idea that we all have our own notions of beauty, I thought the most attractive actress in the series was Frances O’Connor. She was cast as Hecuba, Paris’ mom. (Still, she’s a lot younger than I am.)

Anyway, what do y’all think? Who would be the perfect Helen? To get you started, I’ll throw out a few names, and link to images. It’s not a Top Five List or anything. I didn’t think that hard about it. I just thought:

  • Who is really, really beautiful, the kind ancient men might have gotten into a huge scrap over? Not only that, but what does she have that’s extra, the X factor, that turns heads?
  • Who looks vaguely Mediterranean, or at least isn’t a blonde or redhead or East Asian or sub-Saharan African or anybody who makes the average viewer go “Huh? I thought she was from Greece!” Although if she has the other qualifications and is at least a brunette, I’ll give her a pass on the olive complexion (yeah, I’m cheating to give Anne Hathaway a chance).
  • Who is a real actress, preferably with the chops to handle the role — not just some hot pop singer or model?
  • She doesn’t have to be the right age for the role NOW. That’s too restrictive because I’m not likely to think of actresses who are that age (which I suppose, given the place and time, would be somewhere between 20 and 30 during the years of the war) at this moment.

Here are my suggestions (not in order):

  • Penelope Cruz. Admittedly, I didn’t think of her on my own, but she came up when I Googled beautiful actresses who looked Mediterranean (just to kind of get me started), and she fit the bill.
  • Rashida Jones. Wait, you say, her father is of African descent! And you’re thinking that because you’re thinking in racial, Identity Politics terms. I’m thinking looks. And in this case, a combination of a man of African descent and the chick from the Mod Squad gives us the right look. And she certainly has the X factor.
  • Rachel Weisz. Dang. I just said “X factor,” and I’m not going to keep repeating myself.
  • Emily Blunt. OK, OK, I know — too Northern European. But there’s something Hellenic there that I think the costume and makeup people could work with.
  • Gal Gadot. I was done with this list, then someone on the telly mentioned her name, and I had to come add her.
  • Marisa Tomei. I’m going to say “X factor” again because she’s got more of it than anyone here. As for unmistakeable Mediterranean (or at least Caribbean) allure, did you ever see “The Perez Family?”
  • Marisa Allasio. Mentioning the other Marisa made me think of this one, whom I admit I’ve never seen act, possibly because she retired and married a count when she was 22 and I was 5. She’s way more Helen than those gorgeous Itallian actresses who came along in the ’60s (sorry, Sophia). OK, she’s blonde, but give her a break; she’s from Turin, not Naples! But she’s way Italian, so dye her hair.

That gives us something to start with. But we’ll need a time machine to get them. That last one retired in 1958.

EDITOR’S NOTE: I actually saw the film last night, but nothing in this post reflects that. I mostly wrote it yesterday, but wasn’t done before I had to head to the theater. I just did some editing and fleshing-out of points this morning before posting it. I’ll make observations later about what I saw.

Tom Holland and Tom Holland both say it’s good

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Of course, one of them — the Tom Holland we know better as Spider-Man — has a vested interest. And the other Tom Holland is an enthusiastic classicist, and co-host of my fave podcast, “The Rest is History.” The latter is particularly a fan of The Odyssey, and had been looking forward to Chistopher Nolan’s new film version for some time. The younger Tom Holland plays Telemachus in the movie.

Still, I appreciate their recommendations, which reminded me to buy a ticket. Not for tonight (opening Fridays are such a mob scene), but for soon. I didn’t really need the video reminder, though, because the elder Tom and his podcast partner Dominic Sandbrook have done no fewer than three episodes on the Homer’s epic this week.

I’m still listening to the first one. And no, The Odyssey isn’t itself a work of history. But it is about a key figure in the defining story that loomed over and fired the imaginations of the ancient Greeks and Romans — the Trojan War. The entire Greek culture is called Hellenism, for the woman whose beauty started that whole 10-year contretemps in the Hellespont area. And as we know, the Romans were too busy conquering people to create their own culture, so they just stole the Greeks’. Remember Romulus and Remus? In one version of their story, they were descended from a Trojan War veteran.

And when I say defining story, I mean the way the Arthurian legends were in England (you know, the Matter of Britain). And the Trojan saga was at least as big as everybody in the Marvel Universe is in America today. They were sort of like all those superheroes (wrap in D.C. as well) combined with George Washington and the Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth Rock. (These days, we do have some tiny awareness of actual history. But history was not a thing before Herodotus invented it.)

And frankly, I’ve always been more interested in the story of Odysseus problems getting home after the Trojan War than in the war itself. Maybe I’d understand the actual war and its motivations better if I could just once see a photo of Helen herself. Lacking that, I’m more into the Sirens and the Cyclops and the lotus-eaters and Calypso than a 10-year siege.

But that’s not the only reason I’m pumped about the movie. I’ve never seen anything in the IMAX format. I’m eager to see how film can produce better resolution than most digital images. More than that, this flick is the first to be shot entirely on IMAX 70 mm film, and to be processed without any digital tricks — things like adjusting color tones were done by filter overlays, old-school. Since I’m sharing videos, take a look at this clip:

Finally, I’m intrigued by Nolan’s casting choices. Some were unexpected, but I hear they worked out well:

  • Matt Damon as Odysseus. I think Damon is great, but I never saw him as a mythical hero on this scale. No, I didn’t think, like Paul Rudd’s character in “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” that he was a “kind of a Streisand” (Will Hunting was a pretty tough kid), but I truly didn’t see him as an action protagonist until “The Bourne Identity.” Yet he was awesome in that. So maybe, despite not being Russell Crowe or Kirk Douglas, he’ll be just as awesome in this.
  • The aforementioned younger Tom Holland as Telemachus. Really? Peter Parker as the young son of Odysseus whose father has been gone so long he doesn’t remember him? Maybe. We’ll see.
  • Anne Hathaway as Penelope? Admittedly, she’s beautiful enough to play Helen herself, but I’ve got to get “The Devil Wears Prada” and “The Princess Diaries” out of my head.
  • Charlize Theron as Calypso? Well, maybe she could be a nymph. Maybe. Even if she is (and I’m going to get myself in trouble, but the thought insists on coming to the fore) 50. But hey — if she had existed, Calypso would probably have been older.
  • Robert Pattinson as Antinous? Isn’t this the teen heartthob from “Twilight?” I don’t picture him as one of Penelope’s thuggish suitors.

But based on what I’ve heard from the Tom Hollands and others, I expect to be surprised by their performances. So I’m very much looking forward…

The way things stand at this pointless pause

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Screenshot

And we turn to the world of baseball…

Which is experiencing an annual pause, the All-Star Break, which I always hate. And especially this year.

My boys from Boston have a remarkable streak going — nine wins in a row, by far the longest in baseball at the moment. But now they’re resting, getting soft, losing the feeling of the streak — or so I fear.

And the first team they’ll face when the games start back is… the Tampa Bay Rays. As you can see above, those are the guys who are leading the AL East, and are three games ahead of the Yankees.

Fine, I say to buck myself up. The White Sox are leading their division (as you can also see above). And the Red Sox swept them last week, in Chicago. Hey, and remember a few days ago when I celebrated the fact that they were no longer in the Cellar? Well, now they’re up another notch, in third place.

But, I worry: That’s when the Bosox had the big Mo going, before this blasted Break. Now they’re sitting around… except for Contreras, Chapman, Rafaela and Suárez, who are in this thing today.

But, back on the first hand, the Tampa boys will be cold, too. Right? And maybe some guys will be off Boston’s IR list by then. Right?

I just wish the Break was over. I need some baseball. REAL baseball, not silly, gimmicky exhibitions…

Lindsey Graham, 1955-2026

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What a sad and tragic epitaph for a once-wise man: ‘and Staunch Trump Ally.’

I’ve called Lindsey Graham a stand-up guy here before, and I’d really like to have reason to do so again.

— me, Dec. 1, 2017

The saddest thing, to me, about our senior senator’s sudden death is that I never got to say that about him again.

I had hoped something would happen to return him to good sense — the good sense that he still had just a year before I said that, when he said this:

He was absolutely right. “We” — the Republican Party, he meant… was almost completely destroyed. The party of Lincoln — which all my life had frequently produced candidates that were better than those from the opposing party — was no more. The process was complete by 2014. More than that, the America that was founded as a monument to deliberative government lay in pieces in the acrimonious dust. But I’ve addressed that before; back to our subject at hand…

During the 2016 campaign, Graham played the role of the acid-tongued party jester, daring more than anyone to speak the truth about Trump, and do it in a way that got widely quoted. You may recall some of the things he said. Here’s one:

“You know how you make America great again?” Mr. Graham said in a CNN interview in 2015. “Tell Donald Trump to go to hell.”

But that’s not the Lindsey Graham I appreciated most. It’s not why, in 2007, I called him a “stand-up guy.” It wasn’t for being a wiseacre. The world has plenty of those. It was for being an actual wise — and courageous — senator who in the years before American went mad, had distinguished himself for exercising nonpartisan judgment over and over. He was the guy you could depend on most to try to hold back the ill tides that brought about the disastrous things that were poised to destroy our country, from hyperpartisanship to xenophobia.

Of course, as the obituaries are saying, he was — with two of my other favorite senators in that time, John McCain and Joe Lieberman — one of the “Three Amigos,” who believed fervently that the strongest nation in the world was obligated to live up its global role since 1945. That meant standing up for liberal democracy and collective security, no matter how much that ticked off either the kind of Republicans who would embrace Trump’s advocacy of “America First,” or Democrats still deeply traumatized by Vietnam.

I was with him there, but I was just as proud of him for his activities as a gang member. I mean the Gang of 14 and the Gang of 8. (If you don’t remember what those were, click on the links.)

The Gang of 14 was about the way the Congress (and the country) was being torn apart by absurdly fierce, take-no-prisoners, partisan battles over judicial nominations. This had been getting worse and worse every year since about 1973, and the partisan nastiness was spoiling the country’s ability to deal with anything else. Graham was a leading member of the Gang, and the best at articulating its reason for being. He kept saying “elections have consequences,” and he proved that he meant it by backing Democratic nominees (assuming they found them objectively qualified) when there was a Democratic president.

Such an attempt — and in Graham’s own case, a reality — was based in belief in two things that had long been missing in the confirmation process: rationality, and a sense of proportion.

The Gang of 8 was just one instance of the most politically suicidal stand Graham ever took: trying to create a sensible, truly American, and workable immigration system. He did it right at the moment when his party was going into full-xenophobe mode — which of course is what created Trumpism, the rebirth of Know-Nothingism.

But he bravely stood up against the backlash that came his way over the next couple of years. I particularly recall the time when he was booed by the mob attending a South Carolina Republican Party gathering when he stood to speak. He just brushed it off with a surprising insouciance, waiting for those people to shut up so he could go on with his speech.

When was it that Lindsey Graham stopped standing up? When did he become the most lickspittle toady of Donald Trump? Apparently, a lot of people have trouble remembering. The New York Times this morning said, after mentioning Lindsey’s goading of Trump in 2016, “A decade later, though, he was regularly and effusively lauding Mr. Trump.”

Well, that’s true. But that wording makes it sound like a long, slow process over the course of a decade. It most certainly was not. It was sudden, and stunning. Of course, I remembered it slightly inaccurately myself — I thought it happened as soon as the 2016 election was over. It really occurred over the following year.

That quote at the top is from a Dec. 1, 2017 post headlined “Would the real Lindsey Graham please stand up?” But the signs of Lindsey’s crack-up had started earlier in the year. In October, I cited with horror a NYT piece headlined, “As Other Republican Senators Bolt, Lindsey Graham Cozies Up to Trump.” My words for it were, “What a disgusting headline about Lindsey Graham.” But I knew it was true. Here’s how I ended that post:

It’s really a shame to see this. Especially when Lindsey’s best buddy John McCain, as sick as he is, is determined to go down swinging against the guy Graham once quite rightly termed “the world’s biggest jackass.”

Because the thing is, he does know better. And therefore, he owes us better…

Several months earlier, there were signs Graham would be a Republican who would stand up to Trumpism with the same lack of personal regard as he had against isolationism, hyperpartisanship and xenophobia. But that was at an end.

It’s a tragedy for Lindsey Graham, and the country, that he never went back to being the man whom I had admired for very good reasons — before he let Trumpism overwhelm him.

Why did he do it? It’s an inadequate explanation, but the most convincing one to me is simple and personal: Lindsey Graham was a guy who had nothing to fill his life but being a United States senator. He had never married, and had no kids or grandkids. His parents had both died by the time he was 20. There was only his little sister, 11 when he was 20, whom he finished the process of raising. She has always expressed her appreciation to him for that, but she grew up and had her own family. I’m sure he stayed close, but there seems little doubt that the most consuming part of his life in recent decades has been in Washington. And it was certainly consuming. By the end, it seemed to be eating him alive.

Being not only a senator, but one of the most notable and quotable senators in Washington, was a tremendous addiction for a man with his sort of mind. How could he stand going back to S.C. and trying to build a new persona — maybe starting his own private law practice — as he was moving into his 70s? He had to stay in the Senate, or so he seemed to firmly believe.

Anyway, that’s my theory. It could be wrong. After all, he didn’t seem so terrified at losing his seat when he was infuriating so many in his party over immigration and judgeships. But something in him seems to have cracked as he realized that his party was no longer a party of ideas, but a cult with one main rule: Love Trump, or we hate you. He hadn’t seen anything like that before. (Neither had I, in this country.)

So what happens now? An anecdote…

A couple of days ago, a good friend who lives in my neighborhood called me and asked if I’d let him put an Annie Andrews sign in my yard. This was something that I hadn’t thought about, and I hesitated for a second or two, before remembering that this friend was someone who agreed to let me put a Russell Ott sign his yard two years ago. A this point I said “yes.”

I was out at the time, and when I came home, there it was.

This morning, a little before 9 a.m., that same friend called to tell me that Lindsey Graham was dead. He also expressed amazement that I hadn’t heard that, but I hadn’t. I do sleep sometimes.

A few minutes after that call, I went out and took down the “Annie” sign. Not for good, necessarily. I just took it down for two reasons:

  1. Respect for the dead. I’ve got one of those short flagpoles by my front door — the kind that hangs diagonally from a wall. There’s no way to lower it to half-staff. So I did this instead.
  2. I was supporting Andrews, even though I knew little about her, because I didn’t know anything bad about her, and since 2017, I have voted for any decent candidate who opposed Graham in a general election. But now, I wasn’t sure about who would be facing whom in the general. Henry McMaster will be appointing a replacement for Lindsey, and then there will be a special Republican primary. So there are variables.

Now, do I think that in this age of Trumpism, I will like either Henry’s appointee, or the winner of that special primary? No, probably not. But maybe the fallen GOP will surprise me with an unknown — somebody I will have to learn about just when I’m doing what I hadn’t really done before that phone call Friday (which is what made me hesitate about the sign) — study Annie Andrews as a candidate.

I need some time — the thing Lindsey didn’t get enough of, in the sense of enough to return to being the man he had been — to figure this out.

Happier times. Now all three amigos are gone.

OK, the BoSox are no longer in the cellar…

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This just happened last night, when the Red Sox beat the White Sox, 8-1.

And it’s been awhile.

So you know what this means, right? Haven’t you ever seen a baseball movie about a hapless but loveable team that goes from worst to first? Think “The Natural.” Think “Major League.”

This is the point in the plot — somewhere near the middle of the season, or a bit past that — when the team makes the turnaround, but the pennant still seems beyond its grasp.

You might run some numbers and say with the number of games left, it’s highly, highly unlikely. But remember, we’re now in the era of playoffs, and it’s possible for a Wild Card team to win it all.

Oh, I should add: This formula also applies to basketball. Think “Hoosiers.”