Greetings from the Far Left coast where I road-tested a cranky ankle with short, slow, cautious, cold, wet two-mile runs on Monday and Wednesday. So far, so good.
Onward into the muck. Well. The Trump restoration wasted no time living down to our worst expectations.
Zealots, and toadies, and cretins. Oh My.
Well, so much for the it-could-be-worse crowd.
We’ll get to the gobsmacking choice of Peter Hegseth to be Secretary of Defense in a moment, but let’s start with the news that Kristi Noem has been named Secretary of Homeland Security, a position for which she has no discernible qualifications except her willingness to kill puppies. Her message to Trump: “I will kill dogs for you, just to show how tough I am.”
She will now be the public face of Stephen Miller’s mass deportation operation.(Charlie Sykes, What Could Possibly Go Wrong?, The Bulwark, November 13, 2024)
Hegseth would be the Fox News host who in 2019 informed his audience that he had not washed his hands for maybe ten years. “Really, I don't really wash my hands ever…I inoculate myself. Germs are not a real thing. I can't see them. Therefore they're not real” (Katherine Hignett, Fox News Host Pete Hegseth Says He Has not Washed His Hands in 10 Years: ‘Germs Are not a Real Thing,’ Newsweek, February 11, 2019).
This is the kind of cutting-edge critical analysis that Trump intends to bring to government at all levels.
Tom Nichols discussed the nominations in a column on Tuesday as early reports came in. Of Hegseth, he wrote,
a military veteran who has no experience in leading large organizations and no serious background as a senior leader in national-security affairs…exactly the kind of unqualified nomination that I was warning could be looming…and it explains why Trump is determined to bypass the U.S. Senate to get some of his nominees confirmed. (The Loyalists Are Collecting Their Rewards in Trump’s Cabinet)
And those crusader tattoos:
Annika Brockschmidt, Thomas Lacaque, What’s the Deal With Pete Hegseth’s Crusader Tattoos?, The Bulwark, November 14, 2024
Trump is rewarding Arab Americans and others who voted for him or Jill Stein or Cornel West or sat it out to send Democrats a message about Gaza by tapping Elise Stefanik to be ambassador to the UN and Mike Huckabee for Israel. That’ll show the Democrats.
“Huckabee has called Israel’s claim to the West Bank stronger than American ties to Manhattan and laid bricks in 2018 as ground was broken on a new housing complex in the settlement of Efrat.” On Israel’s Army Radio Wednesday he said that annexation of the West Bank and rebuilding of Israeli settlements in Gaza are possible. He has also reportedly said that there is no such thing as a Palestinian.
TOI staff, Trump ambassador pick Huckabee says administration could back West Bank annexation, The Times of Israel, November 13, 2024
It somehow got worse as the week rolled on. Matt Gaetz for attorney general, Tulsi Gabbard national security director. More from Nichols and Sykes, because this stuff just keeps coming:
Nichols, Tulsi Gabbard’s Nomination Is a National-Security Risk, The Atlantic, November 13, 2024
Sykes, They Broke it. They Bought It, To the Contrary, November 14, 2024
Per bio note at The Atlantic: Tom Nichols is “a professor emeritus of national-security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College, where he taught for 25 years, and an instructor at the Harvard Extension School.” He has some claim to expertise in this area.
Keeping with the program and no surprise was yesterday afternoon’s announcement that Jr. Kennedy is slated to serve as secretary of health and human services. I feel healthier already. Waiting for him to mount that dead whale’s head in his office.
Kennedy also played a part in one of the worst measles outbreaks in recent memory. In 2018, two infants in American Samoa died when nurses accidentally prepared the combined measles, mumps and rubella, or MMR, vaccine with expired muscle relaxant rather than water. The Samoan government temporarily suspended the vaccination program, and anti-vaccine advocates—including Kennedy and his nonprofit—flooded the area with misinformation. The vaccination rate dropped to a dangerously low level. The next year, when a traveler brought measles to the islands, the disease tore through the population, sickening more than 5,700 people and killing 83, most of them young children.
But Kennedy’s unorthodox views aren’t limited to vaccines. He’s suggested that certain antidepressants are behind the rise in school shootings and that a particular herbicide might be part of why more young people are identifying as transgender, neither of which is backed by any science. (Jessica MacDonald, FactChecking Robert F. Kennedy Jr., FactCheck.org, August 9, 2023)
Cathy Young, Trump Picks Anti-Vax Nut RFK Jr. to Run Health Department, The Bulwark, November 15, 2024
The best of the lot are dubious on grounds of expertise, experience, and judgment, and the worst, most of them, are a parade of clowns and dingbats who sound like the lineup for a satirical sketch on Saturday Night Live or from The Onion. I have to wonder if part of Trump’s calculation is to see how far Senate Republicans will allow him to go and if they will present any check at all.
Memo from the Sports Desk. Wemby! Twenty-year-old French phenom Victor Wembanyama dropped fifty points on Washington Wednesday in San Antonio’s 139–130 win. If you are into basketball at all scroll down in the story below for the highlight reel. Wembanyama goes about 7–4, so yes, he dunks, and he can shoot the three, eight for sixteen Wednesday night, some from Steph Curry range, but there is way more to him. He creates off the dribble for shots beyond the arc and on drives to the hoop where he exhibits a beautiful touch on an array of nifty moves around the rim. To top it off, the story includes a clip from the postgame interview where he comes off as a thoughtful and reflective young man. All of it a joy to witness.
Spurs’ Victor Wembanyama shrugs off 50-point eruption that leaves teammates in awe, The Guardian, November 14, 2024
Memo from the Cinema Desk. Sogongnyeo (Microhabitat). 2017. Dir. Jeon Go-Woon.
Mi-So is an independent-minded young woman who works diligently as a housekeeper and lives in small, unheated apartment, cigarettes, whiskey, and boyfriend Han-Sol her only relief. She lives frugally so she can enjoy the few indulgences that matter to her. To that end she carefully records earnings and expenses in a ledger: rent, food, cigarettes, whiskey. When the price of cigarettes skyrockets and rent is jacked up, she has to move out of her apartment with no place to go. Han-Sol tells her if he had some money they could live together, but he is as poor as she is. Mi-So says all she needs is cigarettes and him.
She makes the rounds of a group of old friends who used to play in a band. With each friend she shows up on the doorstep with a carton of eggs and asks if she might stay awhile. Each takes her in briefly, she cooks and cleans for them, but soon, usually after a single night, she is told that for one reason or another the friend cannot put her up any longer.
The sole exception is a guy who lives with his parents. He asks Mi-So to marry him so he can make them happy. He cannot have sex because of a prostate problem, so Han-Sol can still be her boyfriend. All he wants is to be married and please his parents. When Mi-So wakes the following morning after sleeping on the floor in his bedroom, the friend’s bed is empty, the house is deserted, and all the doors and windows locked so she cannot leave. After a frantic search she finds a window she can force open to make her escape after leaving a note, as she always does, thanking them for letting her stay the night.
Then Han-Sol drops the bombshell. He has volunteered to be transferred to his company’s Saudi Arabia office for two years. There he can make enough money to pay off his debts and get an apartment for the two of them when he returns.
Times passes. When the friends gather for a funeral, they wonder whatever became of Mi-So, who has disappeared from their lives without a word. The film’s final shot reveals the circumstances to which they have abandoned her. What lies ahead is uncertain.
Mi-So is played by an endearing young actress named Esom who has been nominated for and won South Korean film awards for best new actress, best supporting actress, and best actress for her roles in Microhabitat and other films. Deservedly so for Microhabitat, where she is quietly compelling. As the screen darkened at the end I found myself hoping that the resourceful and resolute Mi-So will make it until Han-Sol returns from Saudi Arabia.
L'étoile filante (The Falling Star). 2023. Written and directed by Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon. With dancer Kaori Ito as Kayoko and Abel/Gordon regular Phillippe Martz as Tim. I discovered the comedy duo Abel and Gordon with their film Lost in Paris at the 2017 Portland International Film Festival. In a brief review, I wrote, “The festival program dubs Lost in Paris a slapstick ode to Charlie Chaplin, Jacques Tati, and Buster Keaton. That's about right,” and summed up with this:
At the outset I found Lost in Paris a little heavy-handed for my taste, more in the neighborhood of Mel Brooks than Woody Allen, to give an idea of the flavor of it. But Fiona and Dom grew on me. By the end I thought it was cute and somewhat sweet. This is one of those films that grow more charming upon reflection in the days that follow.
Dominique Abel is Belgian; Fiona Gordon was born in Australia and grew up in Canada. They met in Paris and acted on stage before making films. In a May 2024 interview at FilmTalk Gordon says they are clowns (Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon: “Our films are about people who fall and get back on their feet”). The physical comedy that is their trademark is not usually up my alley but they are so clever and the scenarios they create so over-the-top absurd that I am won over. I know of no one like them.
On to the film. Boris (Abel), a most wanted terrorist in the 1980s, keeps a low profile with his partner Kayoko ( Ito) at their bar The Falling Star. One day a man walks in with a newspaper and says ominously to Boris, “I know who you are.” Without further ado the man pulls a pistol, points it at Boris, and pulls the trigger. The gun explodes and blows the man’s arm off (the action is all slapstick, no blood or gore). He leaves. Dom announces that “they” know who he is.
Next time we see the gunman he is at a hospital, the right sleeve of his jacket obviously empty. A nurse shows him into a room where through the glass in the door we see lights flashing on and off. Soon the man emerges with a prosthetic arm that swings erratically back and forth and rotates wildly out of control. This becomes an issue later when he tries again to shoot Boris.
One day while driving through Brussels, Boris, Kayoko, and Tim the doorman at The Falling Star spy a hapless fellow seated at the curb gathering up the contents of his wallet after recovering it from a pickpocket couple on a moped. Dom (also played by Abel) suffers from depression, lives alone with his dog in an isolated cottage, and happens to be a dead ringer for Boris. The trio contrive to install a drugged Dom as bartender at The Falling Star where he will be a target when “they” come back for Boris while the real Boris lies low at Dom’s cottage.
Meanwhile, Dom’s wife Fiona, a private investigator in a trench coat, is searching for him. Kayoko falls prey to Lima syndrome, the opposite of Stockholm syndrome, and bonds with Dom as Boris. In desperation she tells the real Boris they must flee. She has friends in Barcelona. It all comes together in a climactic frenzy that includes a mob of striking doctors and culminates in a shootout at The Falling Star.
Kaori Ito is a dynamo who fits in splendidly with Gordon, Abel, and Martz as they take us through their repertoire of comic pitfalls, pratfalls, fantastic dance numbers, and after the fashion of Gordon and Abel a pair of improbably tender romances. They fall and get back on their feet. The Falling Star is good one and a welcome diversion from the muck of politics and current affairs.
Keep the faith. Stand with Ukraine. yr obdt svt
parade of clowns. yesterday it came to me, here come the clowns
Hope the ankle holds up better than our politics! Remember, there is no bottom!