Pandemic: Rounding the Final Turn?

 

This graph shows Covid-19 data for the entire USA (source: The New York Times).  It’s not encouraging. 

 

The average daily case counts go up and down, but we’re six months into this and the virus is still out there, cutting an unpredictable path across the nation. Meanwhile, we’re approaching 200,000 deaths.

In my opinion, there’s no telling how long it will last. This data gives me no confidence that we’re "rounding the final turn," as Donald Trump recently predicted. And I’m skeptical of his claim that a vaccine could be ready "within weeks."  

Why do I lack confidence in those predictions? Not to belabor the obvious, but the pandemic has become too politicized, at least in the US. With this administration leading the effort in an election year, it’s going to be very tough for researchers, drug companies and regulators (such as the Food and Drug Administration) to make good scientific decisions. With all the pressure to get something approved and into production, it wouldn’t surprise me if the first-generation vaccine turns out to be ineffective.

Dame Diana Rigg

With the news of Diana Rigg's death, I've been thinking about why she made such an impression on me. I first became aware of her when I was a 13-year-old boy, living in England and avidly watching The Avengers. Like any normal man I was smitten, stung by Cupid's dart.

Rigg once told an interviewer that the name "Emma Peel" was chosen because the show's producers wanted a female character who had "M-appeal," or male appeal. She certainly had that. It wasn't just her beauty and that posh English accent, which slays me whenever I hear it. Diana Rigg had something more. She radiated intelligence, independence, strength. A woman not to be trifled with.

At first, that was just the Emma Peel character. But as the years went by, I was impressed with her behavior in interviews and her determination to continue her theatrical career. She kept taking on the challenging classic roles. She's shown here with Anthony Hopkins in a 1972 production of Macbeth.

And then there was her reappearance in 1989 as the host of a PBS mystery series. She apparently hadn't felt the need to fight the aging process with plastic surgery. I liked the fact that she wasn't afraid to show the wrinkles. I suppose she just didn't think it was important enough to be bothered by.

When she reappeared on television again in 2013, in A Game of Thrones, the aging process was complete. It's nice to think of her surrounded by admiring actresses on the set, smoking and swearing. 

 Obituaries:

• BBC News
• The New York Times
• The Telegraph
  

Trump Suggests Polling Place Double-Check for Mail-In Voters

 [Cartoon by Kevin Kallaugher. The Economist.]

Every few weeks, The President of the United States says or tweets something that irritates, amazes or just plain drives me half-crazy. As to whether this is a deliberate strategy, or just the man’s mental incontinence and quick trigger finger, I cannot decide.  This article by AP News documents the most recent outrage in pretty objective terms.

Trump suggests polling place double-check for mail-in voters
 By Christina A. Cassidy and Deb Riechmann

Some news outlets depicted this as “Trump encourages people to vote twice.” It’s not quite that bad. According to the AP story, he said or at least meant “that people who vote early by mail should show up at their local polling places on Election Day and vote again if their ballots haven’t been counted.” 

But I have to ask: if you’re willing to go to the polls in person to check whether your mail-in ballot has been received, why even bother to vote by mail? Just vote in person. 

I doubt Trump thought it through that way. There are many possibilities. Perhaps he felt an urgent need to rally his troops in a strident call to action, but ended up just shooting from the hip without thinking it through at all. Or perhaps he’s laying the groundwork for a future claim that the election was rigged, a hoax, invalid, fake news, and it’s all because some people’s votes weren’t counted and others were counted twice. That will come in handy if he happens to lose the election. 

Or maybe he simply delights in trying to stir up trouble and confusion, to distract people from something else. 

Whatever his motives, there are all kinds of problems with the approach he’s suggesting. Imagine the chaos if crowds of people show up at the poll in person on Election Day demanding to vote again unless someone can prove to them that their mail-in vote has been "counted." Poll workers would have to deal with disputes and temper tantrums while everyone else waits in line, infecting one another with covid-19. 

In addition, giving people that second chance to vote is bound to increase the risk of an inaccurate count. No system is perfect, and the more people are allowed to vote twice because we can’t find their mail-in ballot, the greater the risk that duplicate votes go undetected. That hurts the public’s confidence in the system. In the worst case, it would give Trump a reason to refuse to accept the results of the election.

Of course, Trump's approach to politics has already hurt confidence in so many things. Never did I imagine that people in this country would come to doubt the fairness of our elections, but somehow it has happened. Two people I know personally are deeply concerned that their vote will not be counted, or will be somehow stolen. Trump's "polling place double-check" idea plays directly to this paranoia. It doubtless appeals to conspiracy theorists and disaffected voters who suspect that shadowy forces are at work, pulling the strings like a diabolical puppet master behind the scenes, trying to thwart the President’s efforts to drain the swamp and Make America Great Again.

It borders on irresponsible for an elected official to make a proposal like Trump's just two months from Election Day. If we're going to consider changing our election process this way, it should be done deliberately and with care. Let's consult experts, such as whoever oversees the election in each state.  Get input from the public. Hold Congressional hearings. Do it carefully and with transparency, not in haste.

Personally, I don't think any of that is necessary. Our election system has worked pretty well for the past 200 or so years. I think mail-in voters should just trust the system to capture their vote effectively. If they cannot get comfortable with that, then they should forget the mail-in idea and vote in person on Election Day.

This post began as a response to someone’s comment on a Facebook post. But at my wife’s insistence I’m trying to avoid doing battle on Facebook. So I turned it into a blog post instead.

Steve Bannon Arrested for Money Laundering and Fraud

This is the text of an e-mail I was going to send to a close friend. Not wanting to hurt feelings or ignite a feud, I wisely (???) decided to turn it into a blog post.

I’m sorry if my comment about Steve Bannon’s arrest offended you. I was just reacting to this story in The Economist and BBC News. 

Bannon was once Donald Trump’s chief strategist. In that role, he was quite vocal about wanting to dismantle the "deep state" and "drain the swamp." Before that, he was the executive chairman of Breitbart News. 

But now, Bannon has been indicted by a federal grand jury for money laundering and fraud in connection with the President’s promise to Build The Wall. 

Please do not try to turn this aside by reminding me that a former FBI lawyer has pleaded guilty to making false statements in an effort to put surveillance on one of Trump's campaign staffers. That doesn't advance the discussion, nor does it do nothing to mitigate my concern, which is simply this: Trump has too many associates (Stone, Manafort, Flynn, Cohen, Papadopolous and now Bannon) who have been accused, and some convicted, of wrongdoing. There must be a reason for that. It can’t all be a tissue of lies in a diabolical plot designed to bring down Trump. It is plain to see that this must stem from a failure of judgment, or character, in the President himself.

 References

The Economist. August 20, 2020. Steve Bannon is Arrested for Fraud. Yet Another of the President's Cronies Is In Trouble.  

Dunleavy, Jerry. The Washington Examiner. August 19, 2020.  Ex-FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith pleads guilty in Durham investigation.

Whose Body? by Dorothy L. Sayers

Published in 1923, this British detective novel has an ingenious story line and well-drawn characters. For me, however, it was spoiled by unkind references to Jews that some would call offensive at the least. 

The murdered man, Sir Reuben Levy, is Jewish. Nobody else in the book is described as Anglican, Catholic, Presbyterian, Methodist, or of any religion at all. Only Levy is singled out for his faith, and almost always in negative terms. Levy is described as "a little Jewish nobody, " a "sheeny" and one of those "self-made men of low origin" who don't take care of their teeth and are terrified of dentists. When discussing an investment, Levy "shrugged up his shoulders and looked like a pawnbroker." Other examples:

"I don't hold with Hebrews as a rule."

"I remember so well the dreadful trouble about her marrying a Jew."

"I'm sure some Jews are very good people, and personally I'd much rather they believed something."

Given the context in which these things are said, perhaps the author is merely pointing out the casual anti-Semitism of the British upper class. It's hard to tell. But for me, there's too much of this distasteful material in "Whose Body?" I understand the same sentiments crop up in her other books. I'm not sure I want to read any of them for that reason alone.
 

The Burning Girl by Claire Messud

The Burning Girl by Claire Messud

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

If you liked Megan Abbott's "Dare Me" and Tana French's "The Secret Place," you'll love "The Burning Girl." I certainly did. You can tell by the length of this  review.

This is a coming-of-age story (or "bildungsroman," as the Library of Congress' classification system would have it). Two sixth-grade girls spend a summer exploring an abandoned mental asylum in the woods near their town:

"We ventured daily up the grand staircase to long corridors of almost identical rooms, in which torn blinds still dangled at the cracked and smeary windows, or in which sinks encrusted with dessicated black slime hung askew from the walls, their taps useless."

With that delightfully gothic scene as prelude, it's no surprise when one of the girls, Cassie Burnes,  has one problem after another when her mother's strange lover moves into their single-parent household. When that's combined with puberty and adolescent social anxiety, the tension level in the house gets cranked up to unbearable levels.

Messud is a pleasure to read because she has a sure hand in crafting beautifully phrased descriptions of ordinary things without overwriting: 

"The kittens were sisters from the same litter, two tortoiseshells, small enough then to hold in your hand, with tiny white teeth and opalescent claws that dug pulsingly but painlessly into your jeans when you set the creatures on your lap."

 I was also struck by this, early in the book, as the narrator describes her best friend:

"All you had to do was to look into her eyes - still blue eyes that turned gray in dark weather, like the water in the quarry -- and you could see that she was tough. Strong, I guess is a better word. Although in the end, she wasn't strong enough."

As I read that for the first time, I thought: well, what about that quarry? What's going to happen there? And what wasn't she strong enough to handle? I had to find out, and that kept me reading. (Just as a teaser, the quarry is right behind the old mental asylum.)

Don't let those quotes fool you into thinking this is a cozy mystery. Messud takes on some deep issues, but is skilled enough to do so in a way that fits naturally with the plot. Even though the protagonists are mainly adolescents, this is dark, adult stuff, such as: it's hard to know what is true, because we shape our own reality so it makes sense of who we think we are. Whatever choices we think we make, whatever we think we can control, has a life and destiny we cannot fully see.  And finally, referring to a dream in which Cassie puts on a black cloak:

"Now I know, for what little it's worth, what it means to be a girl growing up. Maybe you can choose not to put on the cloak, but then you'll never be free, you'll never soar. Or you can take on the mantle that is given you; but what the consequences may be, what the mantle might do, what wearing it may entail, you can't know beforehand. Others may see better, but they can't save you."

It seems to me that the cloak represents the choices we make and the identity we create for ourselves. And Messud gave Cassie the last name Burnes for a reason: she is the burning girl.

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The Outsider by Stephen King

The Outsider by Stephen King

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Outsider is excellent work by Stephen King - his best in quite a while. I read  this son of a bitch until my eyes dropped out of their sockets and plopped into my lap, and my brain was fried. Of course my brain was already fried, and has been for years, but that's not the point here.

My only complaint is that two of the characters have names which are too similar: Frank Peterson and Ralph Anderson. I kept getting them confused, requiring the creation, yet again, of a table of characters. It would have been better to give one of them a more ethnic name, like Wicznoski.

Come to think of it, I have another complaint. King uses the peculiar term "lookie-loos" to describe gawkers, as he did in at least one previous book.

In his afterword, King reveals that he has an "able research assistant" named Russ Dorr. How do I get into that line of work, and get paid for it? I could also position myself as a "name consultant,"  helping authors avoid problems like that noted above. I could do it all from home, without any coronavirus risk.

N.B. And another thing: as long as I'm complaining, I want to mention a new and distressing physical ailment that's plaguing me. I am suffering from what I believe to be "MacBook Thumb," a repetitive stress injury brought on by intensive use of the touchpad on my new MacBook. Of course there's nothing more boring than people whinging on about their maladies, so I'll stifle myself now.

Yarrow by Charles de Lint

Yarrow by Charles de Lint

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In this enjoyable work of speculative fiction, Cat Midhir has a foot in two worlds. In ours, she's an award-winning author of fantasy novels. But in her dreams she visits The Otherworld, which is the source of her best story ideas. When the dreams stop coming, Cat becomes untethered and strange things happen.

Set in Ottawa, Yarrow is a fine feat of imagination by de Lint. My only mild complaint is that he introduces so many characters in the first 20% of the book that I had to make a list of them to keep their relationships straight. But I have this problem regularly with other authors, so let's not blame de Lint for my own failings (which are no doubt due to my advancing age and my habit of reading late at night and falling asleep in the process). His characters are well drawn - interesting and very human. Fans of this genre will appreciate the name-checks he dishes out to other fantasy authors, including Ursula LeGuin, Jack Vance, Patricia McKillip and Christopher Stasheff. He even makes his heroine a winner of the World Fantasy Award, just like de Lint himself.

Dry Bones in the Valley by Tom Bouman

Dry Bones in the Valley by Tom Bouman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This novel has all the merits of Bouman's "The Bramble and the Rose" (Henry Farrell, #3). Farrell is a police officer -- in fact, the only police officer in his rural Pennsylvania town. Among other things, I like the way Farrell solves problems and resolves conflicts without shooting, beating, kicking or humiliating the backwoods ruffians and corrupt rich men that cross his path with alarming regularity.



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The Bramble and the Rose by Tom Bouman

The Bramble and the Rose by Tom Bouman

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Quarantined at home due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I read this in about two days. It was a fine way to pass the time. As soon as I finished it, I started reading the first book in the series, which will give you an idea of how much I liked this one.

When it comes to crime and detective fiction, having run through the classic crime writers (Hammett, Chandler) and plenty of mediocre ones, I've become picky about what I'll read. I'm not particularly interested in procedurals or trying to figure out who committed the crime. I'm looking for realistic (and flawed) characters, and local color on areas that interest me. I like the Henry Farrell character because he's an underdog, the only police officer in a tiny township in rural Pennsylvania. Farrell has to act alone against vicious backwoods characters when help is far away. When help does arrive, in the form of the Pennsylvania State Police and an investigator from the Attorney General's office, suspicion falls on Farrell himself and things get very sticky.

N.B.  I am not sure why the title is "The Bramble and the Rose." Fortunately, I bought this book in digital format. I'll use the awesome power of the Kindle to search for "bramble" and "rose" to untangle this mystery.

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Facts, Fears and Conspiracy Theories

Fox News Channel is the most-watched U.S. cable news network, according to this October 2019 story in Deadline.com. 

Viewers in 3rd Quarter 2019 (millions)

• Fox: 2.4 
• MSNBC: 1.5
• CNN: 1.0

I have acquaintances who emphatically refuse to watch CNN News. I've been told that nobody who knows what's going on watches CNN any more; that CNN has been completely discredited; and that MSNBC has been caught reporting "fake news."  

This is a great example (as if we needed another one) of how party politics have divided the U.S.

I don’t view CNN as discredited. Neither is Fox or MSNBC. To me, the issue is that all of them go too far in trying to push back against what they perceive as bad reporting from the other side. All three serve up much more partisan, point-of-view material than national newscasts used to.  I like to think I'm mature enough, and educated enough, to identify bias and separate fact from opinion. I'm not sure everyone is, though. These channels broadcast opinion and debate mixed in with hard news in ways that sometimes make it hard for the casual observer to distinguish one from the other. 

It seems to me that the fear of fake news and conspiracies has become so pervasive that people have come to doubt everything unless it comes from a source they have already decided they trust.  And the message they get from the trusted source is some variation of:  “Listen to me. Don’t trust those other guys. They're giving you bad information. I’m the one who will tell you what’s really happening." 

Talk radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh bear huge responsibility for this state of affairs. It's bad enough that Americans are so polarized that they can't agree on who is telling the truth. But the problem became much worse when we learned that Russia launched "a social media campaign to provoke and amplify political and social discord in the United States," in the words of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, before and during the last presidential election. As we now know, Russia's aim was to favor Donald Trump's campaign and put Hillary Clinton at a disadvantage. When that came to light, Americans were handed a legitimate reason to trust nobody. The result is described by James Clapper, a former director of U.S. national intelligence in his memoir: 

“…my fear is that many Americans are questioning if facts are even knowable, as foreign adversaries and our nation’s leaders continue to deny objective reality while advancing their own alternative facts.… Getting its target audience to believe that facts and truth are unknowable is the true objective of any disinformation campaign… the primary objective is to get readers or viewers to throw up their hands and give up on facts.”

I share Clapper's concerns. Our national conversation has become a toxic hell-broth of finger pointing, name-calling and bizarre conspiracy theories like QAnon. With these distractions, it's hard to see how we're going to come to grips with pressing concerns like health care, climate change and immigration policy. 

Conviction by Denise Mina

Conviction by Denise Mina

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I've read most of Denise Mina's novels. For some reason I can't quite recall, I read the first 50 pages or so of this one, then set it aside and picked it up again a couple of weeks later. I rarely do that, and in this case it was a mistake because this novel has a complex plot. One key character has a secret identity and a backstory that the others don't know about. Another is mentioned throughout the book but never actually appears in person until page 355. All of this made it necessary to re-read and mark up the early chapters to figure out who was who and how they were related.

The fact that I felt motivated to do that tells you how good this novel is once the action gets started. Once I picked it up again, it became one of those situations where everything was put on hold to read the hell out of this one until there was no more to read and the story was over.

Apart from the fact that I admire Mina as a writer, I also like the fact that she's active on Twitter and has even responded to my own tweets a few times. if I was a literary agent I'd urge my clients to do that. It builds the author's brand loyalty.

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Walk The Wild With Me

Walk the Wild With Me by Rachel Atwood
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a nice read for fantasy fans, followers of folklore and Anglophiles (all of which include me, for what it's worth). Mortals, aided by Robin Goodfellow, The Green Man and Father Tuck, try to defeat cruel faerie Queen Mab. In this telling, certain characters are magical creatures who can take the form of humans. For example, Robin Hood is the human form of the gnomish Robin Goodfellow, Little John is The Green Man (and also a tree) and so on. Herne the Huntsman makes a few brief appearances as well, although that character is curiously underdeveloped.

I thoroughly enjoyed Walk the Wild With Me and was sorry to see it end. A sequel is planned. Rachel Atwood is one of the pen names of prolific author Phyllis Irene Radford. 


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Mind the Gap

A recent article in The Londonist makes the startling observation that "mind the gap" announcements on the Underground were once made by live people -- not by recordings, as is the case today today. 

Mind The Gap! The Forgotten Tube Pioneer, Minnie Smith

The Londonist, January 15, 2020

I find this odd. I thought everyone knew that.  During the period 1966 - 1970, Underground platform attendants (or sometimes “guards”, who rode the trains) routinely shouted out “Mind the gap” as well as “Mind the doors” when trains were discharging and taking on passengers. I know this was the case, at least during the busiest hours at big stations like Waterloo, Piccadilly and Baker Street. During those years I rode the Bakerloo and Northern lines every weekday.

I was a schoolboy then. Some 30 years later, when I returned to London after a long absence (or "gap", if you will), I found myself a middle-aged man, amazed to hear recorded voices making these same announcements.  It saddened me. A bit of my childhood had vanished forever. Mind that gap.

The Shropshire Hoard

The Shropshire Hoard

These coins, found in a farmer's field in England, are roughly 2,000 years old. The metal detectorists who unearthed them didn't follow the rules for reporting the find to the authorities. As for me, I have made it a lifelong endeavor to follow the rules... all the rules... whether they make sense or not. But these rogues evidently do not agree. They still haven't come forward. 

Most of the coins are attributed to a tribe known as the Dobunni (which sounds like Dubonnet... but that is another story).

Further Reading
BBC News. Mystery of Shropshire Iron Age coin hoard detectorists. May 22, 2019.
Pirani, Steve. How to Make a Gin and Dubonnet, the Queen's Favorite Cocktail. August 3, 2019.

Chances Are... by Richard Russo

Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2019
ISBN 9781101947753 (ebook)

In this splendid novel by one of my favorite writers, three men in their mid-60s - longtime friends Lincoln, Teddy and Mickey - spend a weekend on Martha's Vineyard mulling over the disappearance of Jacy, their mutual fantasy girlfriend from college days.

I've read most of Russo's novels. This one has all the things I love about his writing. It's highly readable, with a compelling story and believable characters. But then there are passages such as this one, which appears after Lincoln wonders: "If there was such a thing as do-overs, if we all had a bunch of chances at life, would they all be different? .... Or would they play out exactly the same?"

"To Teddy's way of thinking - and he'd thought about it a lot - this depended on which end of the telescope you were looking through. The older you got, the more likely you'd be looking at your life through the wrong end, because it stripped away life's clutter, providing a sharper image, as well as the impression of inevitability. Character was destiny. ...Why? Because... well, that's just how the story went. Nor, as the ancient Greeks understood, was it possible to interrupt or meaningfully alter this chain of events once the story was underway."

Russo doesn't bludgeon us with his insights. He has the knack of blending them together with plot, character development and believable dialogue.  Chances Are... will appeal to readers of my generation who remember the Vietnam war, the draft and the late 1960s in general. Russo fans will also notice that poignant sense of regret that runs through much of his work.

NB - I could hardly believe it when I read it, but this book contains the following passage: "Staring out to sea, she said, 'How come everything has to be so fucked up?' "  This is quite a coincidence, because in jest I have often asked my wife that same question, in almost exactly the same words. I have yet to find the answer.

Further Reading
New York Times Book Review. The Old Men and the Sea (or Richard Russo's New Novel). Alida Baker. July 30, 2019.

Neil Armstrong: Deist

In recent weeks, much ink has been spilled over the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Among the more interesting tidbits: astronaut and moon walker Neil Armstrong once listed his religious affiliation as “deist.” Could I do the same?

Deists believe in a Creator, who was the first cause of everything. But the Deists' Creator is not involved with or concerned about mankind, and may not even be aware that mankind exists.  Deists do not believe in divine miracles, one true faith, or a true and authentic holy scripture.

I’m willing to accept the possibility of a Creator. Everything I can think of was created in one way or another.  Plato's Timaeus dialogue holds that "Everything that becomes or is created must of necessity be created by some cause, for without a cause nothing can be created." In this view, since the universe exists, it must have been created, and something must have caused that to happen. 

But does the same argument apply to the Creator itself? What created the Creator?


Some religions believe that the Creator has always existed. It was the first cause, and was caused by nothing. That would make it a totally unique being. Likewise, some say the universe itself was not created, but has always existed. This concept of an entity with no beginning puzzled me as a child, and still does.

Some say that you can't use the existence of the universe as an argument for a Creator unless you accept the possibility that the Creator was itself created by something else, just like the universe.  This leads to a dizzying scenario "wherein each newly presumed creator of a creator is itself presumed to have its own creator" (Wikipedia, Problem of the Creator of God).  Sometimes known as "infinite regress," this seems almost a paradox. It's like "turtles all the way down," the myth that the world stands atop a World Turtle, which stands on another turtle, which in turn stands on yet another turtle, and another and another, all the way down to....what? Infinity, I suppose. If this is true, reality is a hall of mirrors and infinite reflections.  

Some Gnostics believed in an artisan god, the demiurge, which fashioned what we perceive as the universe but was itself created by a higher being. That higher being created the raw material with which the demiurge worked. This, Gnostics reasoned, explains why the world we perceive is not perfect. But who created the higher being? Where did the process begin? We are searching for the first cause, not something that was acted upon by something else. 

All of these possibilities are difficult to grapple with.  I keep coming back to the question of what came before. (This reminds me of the cleverly titled Who Came First, Pete Townshend's first solo album. But that is another story.)

Timaeus handily disposes of this problem by stating that "the father and maker of all this universe is past finding out."  This is a good point. There’s an inherent mystery here that cannot be solved by logic and reasoning.  I suppose it is ultimately a matter of faith, something which I do not have. Creator? No Creator? Supreme Being? First cause? Turtles all the way down? To me, the answers are unknowable. 

The Tooth Picker: A Poem

Dedicated to Walt Whitman

I am a man of the narrow spaces

There no space remains

To breathe, to grow, to live

To chew, to brush, to floss.

Something is stuck in the narrow spaces

A morsel lodged between my teeth

I yearn to be free of it 

I am the tooth picker. 

In my dreams rotten teeth crumble

My mouth a horror of broken stumps

I must choose new teeth

I am the tooth picker. 

Broken-down busboy, trailer park carny

We share the same fate, grimacing and ashamed

Yet hope remains for smiles and laughter

A new day dawning in my mouth. 

False teeth sustain me.

New mouth set me free.

Nightmare Alley (1947)

Last night, watching Turner Classic Movies, I stumbled across a film that I've been searching for since childhood. I saw part of it on television as an adolescent, and while I’d forgotten the title and most of the plot, two scenes made a big impression on me all those years ago. 

The Geek

 In one, a carnival barker tosses a live chicken to a sideshow performer styled The Geek, announcing: "And now ladies and gentlemen, it's feeding time."  In the second, a pretty female carny demonstrates her electric chair act for a sheriff. He’s snooping around because he’s been told of performances involving live chickens and women in scanty outfits. 

 I can now report that the movie containing those scenes is Nightmare Alley (1947). It's an excellent film noir with many redeeming features, including some great acting by Tyrone Power, Joan Blondell, the fetching Colleen Gray (who plays Molly/Electra) and Helen Walker. 

 I was hoping Nightmare Alley might also contain another scene from a movie whose title I’d forgotten, involving a runaway carousel. But as it turns out, that’s in Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers On A Train (1951).

Trump-Induced Constitutional Crisis

I'm very proud of myself for not posting this on Facebook, which I almost did a moment ago. So I'm going to vent here and now. 

According to this article in today's New York Times, "Some who previously urged caution are now saying impeachment may be inevitable." 

Facing Defiant President, The Democrats Aim for a Get-Tougher Strategy

By Sheryl Gay Stolberg, New York Times

Let's back up for a moment. Special Counsel Robert Mueller has concluded his investigation and submitted his findings. I've read Volume II of the report (well, the executive summary and selected pages, at least).

Congress is seeking an unredacted copy of Mueller's report. They are also pursuing multiple investigations of Trump's doings.  Mr. President and Attorney General Robert Barr are refusing to cooperate and "fighting all the subpoenas", as Trump puts it. 

After the Mueller report was released, over 400 former federal prosecutors released a statement which included the following: 

Each of us believes that the conduct of President Trump described in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report would, in the case of any other person not covered by the Office of Legal Counsel policy against indicting a sitting President, result in multiple felony charges for obstruction of justice.

It's hard to ignore a statement like that, coming from so many legal professionals. To me, it's a call to action. And it is Congress which must act now.  Trump cannot be indicted as a sitting president. He is effectively above the law unless Congress decides to impeach him. 

I once hoped this country would never have to endure another impeachment. But sadly, my view is that Congress must impeach to uphold the rule of law and the Constitution. This is part of the system of checks and balances that has held our democracy together for centuries.  

There are others who agree with me. In an April 27 article, The Economist opined that impeding an investigation and accepting help from an enemy (which interfered in the 2016 election "in sweeping and systematic fashion", as the Special Counsel's report put it) are precisely the sort of actions the founding fathers would view as grounds for impeachment. That article went on to say: 

Democrats fear an unsuccessful effort to remove Mr Trump would help the president. But just moving on as if it were business as usual seems unacceptable too, signalling as it would that the only limit to the power of presidents is what they can get away with politically. How Congress and American political institutions respond in the coming weeks to Mr Mueller’s report will set precedents that could last for decades. 

A few final, dismal observations: not so long ago, the President and some of his supporters in Congress called for an investigation as to why the Special Counsel was appointed in the first place. Others would like to see the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton investigated.  And in a particularly mind-bending twist, there are those who call for an investigation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, to determine whether the FBI spied on the Trump campaign. 

Our federal elected officials are stuck in a seemingly endless cycle of investigating one another. This activity is a huge distraction. They should be dealing with critical issues facing this country: health care, gun control, national security, the federal deficit, climate change. But there's no time for that now. We've got a constitutional crisis on our hands.