Thoughts on Sarah Sanders reply to SOTU.

1.) Somebody sent her to smiling school. The results are kind is scary. She should stick to scowling, it’s her authentic self.

2.) Her mom was told by doctors she couldn’t have kids. Message: Experts are always wrong! The hell with ‘em! 3. Woke wokey-woke woke woke woke. Sanders was picked b/c she’s the youngest governor in America, strong contrast to Biden, but her message—too much sexual freedom and too goddamned many foreigners—is a pitch to the geezers.

1.) Grieving people are subjected to constant harsh judgment. You’re grieving too much. You’re grieving too little. You shouldn’t be crying. You shouldn’t (if you’re a widower) pursue female companionship. Get over it! How dare you be enjoying yourself! nytimes.com/2022/03/18/hea… 2.) The pathologizing of grief risks setting firm rules that ought not to exist. Initially there was talk of limiting the “normal” period of emotional incapacitation to six months, which, among other things, is at odds with religious (including Jewish) traditions. In the end …

1. Rita Lavelle was the last person tried for contempt of Congress, but she wasn't convicted. (She was convicted of perjury instead and served a three-month prison sentence.) I think that means the last person CONVICTED of contempt of Congress was G. Gordon Liddy. Am I right? 2. If Liddy was the last person criminally convicted of contempt of Congress then that means nobody's been convicted of this crime since the Supreme Court recognized the existence of executive privilege.

1. One of my most moving experiences ever watching a film was at New York’s Paris Theater. It was the final scene in “Oh, What A Lovely War,” Richard Attenborough’s 1969 adaptation of Joan Littlewood’s satirical revue about World War I, whose armistice we celebrate today. 2. I was 11, and the Armistice was very distant—though less distant in 1969 than 1969 is today. I knew almost nothing about the First World War, of which the second (about which I knew more) was the toxic sequel. Viewed as a single phenomenon they represent the biggest …

1. My experience of 9/11 was very personal, but not in the way that’s usually meant. I didn’t know anyone who died that day, either in NY, Washington, or Pennsylvania. It was personal in what I guess you’d have to call the narcissistic sense. 2. My world had gone haywire two months earlier. So when I saw that someone had crashed two planes into the World Trade Center, and a third into the Pentagon, and tried to crash a fourth into the Capitol before the passengers stormed the cockpit (“Let’s roll”), I thought:

1.) A year ago, just back from visiting @tomricks1 and @marykayricks in Austin, I visited my kids in NYC. We saw Martin McDonough’s “Hangman” and a Dorothea Lange exhibit at MOMA. The next day I delayed my bus trip home so I could see Yo Yo Ma and Emmanuel Ax perform ... 2.) ... at Carnegie Hall, a venue that, strangely, I’d never before been inside. I knew it could be three or four months before it would be possible to do such things again. Apparently this weekend in NYC was a key Covid spreading event, but I was lucky and didn’t ...

1. Super Tuesday’s results make it almost certain that whoever is inaugurated president in January 2021 will be the oldest U.S. president ever elected. 2. It could be Bernie Sanders, who’ll be 79, or Joe Biden, who’ll be 78, or the incumbent, President Donald Trump, who in 2017 was, at 70, the oldest elected president, and would break his own record at 74. It might still be Elizabeth Warren, who'll be 71, though ...

1. The Academy's selection of "Parasite" as best picture is attracting a lot of attention, and justly so, as a breakthrough in recognizing foreign-language films and the achievements of nonwhite filmmakers. But there's another dimension that isn't getting much attention. 2. That dimension is class conflict. "Parasite" is a closely observed and fairly bleak social satire about inequalities of wealth. Wealth inequality has never been an easy topic for Hollywood liberals. Racial and gender inequality aren't easy topics, either, of course ...

1. “The Irishman” is a magnificent, blood-spattered 3.5-hour cautionary tale about what happens when pension trustees fail to honor their fiduciary duty. (I can’t understand why this wasn’t mentioned in the reviews.) In the sequel, the feds take the Teamsters into ... 2. ... receivership and manage its Central States Pension Fund even worse than the Mob did when the cash was used to underwrite various colorful but not necessarily profit-maximizing ventures (blowing up people in their cars, etc.). Meanwhile Teamsters members lose their ...

1.) In my 2012 book “The Great Divergence” I wrote that race didn’t contribute in any direct way to the post-1979 boom in income inequality b/c the gap between white and black incomes hadn’t widened. That conclusion now requires revision. politico.com/newsletters/mo… 2. New evidence (see link in previous) shows that the black-white wage gap has been growing since 2000. It may even have started growing before that. This is horrible news. It was bad enough when we thought no progress had been made in four decades. Now ...