The Question O'The Day — ¿Qué Está Cocinando? (What's Cookin'?)

This coming Sunday (Domingo) this blogger will make his way to a hole-in-the-wall Mexican food joint at the far eastern edge of his neighborhood. In his quest to become a "Regular," the blogger will follow up on last week's Menudo with Caldo de Res (beef soup). The blogger is confident of "authenticity" (a dirty word to John Paul Brammer, today's essayist. The vast majority of the customers are Spanish-seaking families. Last week, this blogger was the sole Anglo in the place. On deck, the 2^nd Sunday afterin June, this blogger will give Sopa de Tortilla (Tortilla Soup) a chance to complete the Trifecta Bowl. If this is a (fair & balanced) adventure in good eating, so be it.

[x WaPo — DC Fishwrap]
I’m From A Mexican Family: Stop Expecting Me To Eat "Authentic"
By John Paul Brammer


TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the following piece of writing

Americans authentic bacon bar bread cook cuisine culinary culture eat enough experience family fetishes food hate lens lives looking Lopez marginalizes memories Mexican microwave mother nonwhite outside pain Parmesan people point poverty restaurants reviews someone something sometimes story taco tastes things think tourists truth turn whatever white writing wrote York

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I’m from a Mexican family that can’t cook. When I took up food writing, I joked to my mother, who is almost proud of our culinary incompetence, that I had already discussed all the recipes in our family tree after just two essays: tortillas and caldo de pollo. “Maybe I’ll learn another one for you,” she said, laughing. I doubted it. Once, I saw my mother microwave an egg and two slices of bacon, roll it up in a slice of bread, and eat it for breakfast. She is not ready for the Bon Appétit test kitchen — none of us is, but at least it’s our food and we make it, or don’t make it, our way.

Maybe that’s why I hate the word “authentic.” I hate how it intrudes on my memories, looking for things it can use. As a kid I ate at a fast-food taco chain, Taco Bueno, every other day with my abuelos, who had little money and carried their dollar bills in a plastic sandwich bag. We’d pillage the salsa bar. We’d eat at a table next to a mural of a corpulent iguana wearing sunglasses and a sombrero. We would scarf down cheesy quesadillas, hard tacos and bean burritos in a corporate caricature of an old hacienda, then return home with our bounty of dips and sauces in little white cups covered with napkins. “Authenticity” has no interest in these things. It tosses them aside.

Like many other queer writers and nonwhite writers, I have become an expert in trolling the seabed of my memories for trauma I can turn into content. For those of us who didn’t go to a fancy college and who weren’t born into family connections, it’s what’s most readily available. Anyone can be an expert in themselves. I’ve learned to identify which of my painful memories — and there are so many — would do well as a written piece. I’ve grown skilled at accounting for the foreign gaze of those I can only call tourists: white people, straight people, whoever. And tourists want authenticity.

A recent study of Yelp reviews for New York restaurants that serve nonwhite cuisines illustrates this clearly. Reviewers tend to give Mexican and Chinese restaurants, in particular, lower ratings if they don’t perceive them as authentic. What makes something “authentic”? As with writing, most of the hallmarks seem to be about pain: dirty floors, plastic chairs, anything that aesthetically connotes struggle. The cooks and waiters ought to have accents. There should probably be a framed photo of someone’s dead grandpa [abuelo].

Paradoxically, many of these traits are also ones that America actively punishes, which is why immigrants are often desperate to sieve them out of their families. But the pain is the point. Pain is what makes things real, from the sweat on the kitchen staff’s brows down to the spiciness of the cuisine that scorches the tongue. If the joint has no air conditioning, if it’s off the beaten path, if the voyeur into struggle has to “work” to find it, then the experience is supposedly richer for it. It makes the voyeur better, more worldly for having brushed up against it.

“Authenticity” is for tourists. When invoked, it assures the visitor that whatever they’re experiencing, be it a meal or a poem or a human being, is rarefied and exotic, something they can’t get anywhere else. People going about their ordinary lives, whatever their ordinary lives look like, don’t have to think about authenticity any more than my mother has to think about whether her microwaved eggs and bacon in bread is “Mexican.” At that point, calling something authentic can help you sell it.

On the flip side, “authenticity” is restrictive. It limits the imaginations of nonwhite people. According to a beautiful, sad story in Eater, the demand for “authentic” Mexican food is threatening to wipe out a unique kind of taco in Kansas City. The taco, found at restaurants throughout the area, is fried and then blanketed in Parmesan cheese. David Lopez, who runs one of the establishments that features it, said his grandmother had embraced Parmesan because it was “cheap and around,” thanks in part to the proximity of Italian communities. “My grandmother made tacos with peas and with potatoes,” Lopez said, because she couldn’t always afford ground beef.

For some Mexican Americans, this gets at the essence of the way we eat. I can’t think of a better example of the fraud of authenticity than this story, which shows that too many people are more interested in the aesthetics of poverty than in poverty itself — more invested in the feeling of realness than in any kind of truth.

Sometimes, people ask me for my recommendations on authentic Mexican food. It’s become even more common since I moved to New York, where people ask even while we’re eating Mexican, as if apologizing for subjecting me to counterfeit: “So where should we really go?” I have no clue, of course. Food either tastes good or it tastes bad, but that’s not enough for some people. (You shouldn’t have to be a culinary anthropologist to go out for dinner.) If I’m in a nice enough mood, I’ll pretend: “There’s this one place with good mole.”

But it’s not just white people who enforce these rules. Marginalized groups often police themselves, waging our own authenticity wars. Pain is, in the end, an heirloom of sorts, one there is a certain pride in holding. For Mexican Americans, or at least for me, these battles play out in the theater of the mind: Do I speak Spanish well enough? Can I cook enough of our foods? Is my butt big enough? Is my personality fiery enough?

These are not signifiers of true legitimacy. They are fetishes. But we are taught, sometimes by people who look and sound like us, to confuse the two.

“You can write about other foods, you know,” my mom told me over the phone a few weeks ago. The idea had never occurred to me. Even before food writing, I mostly wrote about my own experiences. I rarely ventured outside things I knew, things I had touched, tasted, felt. I wrote a lot of essays about being Mexican, about being gay, with the unifying theme: Being a minority sucks. The notion that someone would trust me to write about something outside of myself was alien.

Heritage and tradition are important, there’s no doubt. But it’s also important to free our imaginations from the tyranny of authenticity. That’s not entirely possible in a consumer culture, of course. But in looking at our lives through a different lens, a lens that is more our own, we can give ourselves more room to be. We can see something that is closer to the truth.

Our culture — any culture — isn’t static. It is a living thing. It pulls from its surroundings to adapt in a world that in equal turns marginalizes and fetishizes it. The truth is, I see myself more in Taco Bueno, in my abuela [grandmother] sacking the salsa bar, in the Parmesan crispy taco, than I do in whatever Yelpers think is authentic. I see our foods, our art, our people as products of survival, as evidence of our will to continue. I can’t think of a more time-honored tradition. ###

[John Paul Brammer is the managing editor at The Trevor Project and creator of the advice column, ¡Hola Papi! He received a BA (journalism and mass communication) from the University of Oklahoma.]

Copyright © 2019 The Washington Post




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Copyright © 2019 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves

The Anthem For Regulars Who Make Repeated Visits To Eating & Drinking Establishments — Billy Joel's "Piano Man"

It's Thursday and this blogger will head out for his main meal in the afternoon for his weekly visit to the Outback Steakhouse in far reaches of his neighborhood. It is the sole corporate place in a nationwide chain of restaurants. When the blogger lived on the far limit of civilzation known as the Texas Panhandle, the Outback organization planted a restaurant in the vicinity of the newest mall at the outskirts of town at that time. So, years later, the blogger wandered into neighborhood Outback and slowly, week-by-week became a "Regular": that are described in today's essay., Waling into the bar area of the restaurant, the blogger will be greeted by Joe (actually "Mr. Joe" to the blogger) who will be preparing the blogger's traditional pre-meal apéritif, Dewar's scotch and club soda, as the blogger takes his seat in a booth near the bar that is served by the bartender. And so it goes from there. If this is a (fair & balanced) account of the quest for community, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Regulars — Where Everybody Knows Your Name
By Helene Stapinski


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Adda Aiello alone apartment author BAM bar bartender Berlyn Bowne coming couple dining early eat end felt food friends Gabriel gone group guy lives Louie love McKissack Mr Ms music name night open party phone recently regular restaurant room Siddiqui sit staff street times Umrigar visit week Weinstein works years

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For years, they came out night after night. Born of a time before internet and smartphones — or at least before Seamless — the regular is as old as the bar stool, and possibly poised for extinction.

But is the tradition really endangered?

We posed the question to our readers: What makes a regular? And are you one?

More than 500 responded to the callout, and they were as varied a group as you could imagine. The regulars come from every ethnic group and occupation, making certain restaurants and bars their living rooms and dining rooms, where they discover community, nourishment, sometimes even love. They tend to be over 40, though the tradition also seems appealing to millennials.

But no matter the establishment — cafe, trattoria, dive bar, coffeehouse, doughnut shop, pharmacy, even — those who make themselves permanent fixtures almost all say the same thing about what makes a regular. When they walk in, the people behind the counter know who they are.

THE EARLY BIRDS
Adda, Long Island City, Queens

One afternoon recently, Raymond Umrigar was out buying goat brains, which are not easy to find in New York City. But when he returned to Adda, the restaurant that he runs, his most regular regular was seated in her usual spot, waiting for a big bowl of shrimp curry.

Her name, which he knows, is Susan Weinstein. Ms. Weinstein works across the street as a sign-language interpreter at LaGuardia Community College, a job she has had for 32 years. Every Thursday, before her 5:35 calculus class, she has dinner at Adda at 4:30, even though the place doesn’t open until 5 PM

This particular Thursday, she and Mr. Umrigar talked about a trip she took and about the eggplants that just arrived. They have an easy rapport, as if they had been friends for years, but she visited Adda for the first time only this past fall, not long after it opened. Back then she came during normal lunch hours. But when her schedule changed, she poked her head in at 4:30 — not wanting to be pushy — and asked if she could get takeout. “They knew me by then so they said, ‘No, have a seat.’”

Mr. Umrigar and Ms. Weinstein bonded early on when he asked her at the end of a meal if she wanted some chai. She had to leave for class; he insisted on putting it in a to-go cup. “After that,” she said, “we adopted each other.”

She is not the only regular. Ahsan Siddiqui, a 28-year-old engineer who also works across the street (at the School Construction Authority), was the first person to visit the restaurant. He had gone a couple of times to the taco place that had been in the space before, so he decided to stop by to see who had moved in.

“I pulled the door open and asked if it was halal, and they said yes, come in,” said Mr. Siddiqui, who was born in Pakistan but grew up in New Jersey. He now comes a couple of times a week for the masala fried chicken. He even has the phone numbers of the owner and the chef, Chintan Pandya.

“Now they know my face and my name,” he said.

Adda has recently had some good fortune. The little cafe looks unassuming, but it was recently nominated for a James Beard Award. It didn’t win, but the attention has definitely made it harder to get a table. The regulars are proud of Adda’s popularity.

“I told Chintan,” Mr. Siddiqui said, “‘Dude, it’s crazy how much success you guys are having.’” But because they were early fans of Adda’s unapologetically spicy food, Ms. Weinstein and Mr. Siddiqui are guaranteed a table.

Now and then, Mr. Umrigar brings Ms. Weinstein something new to try. She was an early taster of the goat brains, which she enjoyed and which have a texture like scrambled eggs.

But the food love goes two ways. Ms. Weinstein recently brought her boyfriend, Brian, into the restaurant for the first time and he was immediately treated like family. “Somehow it came out that Brian cures and smokes his own bacon,” said Ms. Weinstein, who now brings bacon in for the staff. “I love that we are giving them food.”

ALONE AMONG FRIENDS
The Knickerbocker, Greenwich Village, Manhattan

The jazz duet was playing “Bye Bye Blackbird” as Dewey Louie swiped through the photos on his phone. (Yes, that’s his real name. He produced a driver’s license to prove it.) Mr. Louie and a few other regulars were snug at the bar at “the Knick,” reminiscing about their comrades who are either dead or married: Bill, the realtor; Cal, the ad man; Allen, the stockbroker; Bruce, the lawyer; Roslyn, the clothing designer; all gone. Many of them were memorialized on Mr. Louie’s phone.

Mr. Louie, an electrician who was raised in the Village by his Chinese immigrant parents, is the most regular of those who are still left, coming here nearly every night for as long as the place has been open, 41 years. He gets the comfort food: the half-order of short ribs or the mac and cheese. The staff are like his younger siblings. The chef, Clara, has been here over 30 years, the busboy Muji for 15 years.

The bartender, Hazel, who simultaneously manages to be cordial and keep her distance, has been serving Dewar’s to Mr. Louie for a very long time. “Hazel has been here forever,” said John Burbank, the maître d’. “But she won’t say how long. We would have to cut her in half and count the rings.”

Mr. Louie, 63, now lives in Chinatown and has never been married. “When you live in a studio, you have no dining room. So that’s why I come here.” He looked around, taking in the wood paneling, curved leather booths in the back, the Al Hirschfeld originals on the walls and over at Bob Valeiko, a 20-year regular who was quietly enjoying a giant plate of calf’s liver from the corner seat under the muted basketball game on the television.

Mr. Valeiko, who works in advertising, comes a few nights a week but never on weekends, since he goes to the Jersey Shore to be with his wife at their home there. Here he can be alone but among friends. Mr. Louie silently waved to him. “Bob holds up that corner,” he said.

Mr. Louie always has a mystery novel with him on the marble-topped bar, tonight a copy of James Lee Burke’s Robicheaux (2018), so he can be by himself if he wants to be.

Every Tuesday a rotating group of authors has lunch here. On this particular night, Salman Rushdie, who lived under a fatwa for years, felt comfortable enough to dine.

Mel Watkins, an author and professor who once wrote for The Times Book Review, reminisced about the Christmas parties at the Upper West Side apartment of Charlene, the former bartender, who hosted not only the staff but the regulars. Those days were long gone.

Mr. Watkins, 78, chatted up a couple in their 30s at the bar. They were from upstate but inherited an aunt’s apartment in the village, and they come to New York every couple of weeks. When they’re in town, they always drink or eat at the Knick.

“This is our spot,” said Jamie Anadio, an administrator at Herkimer College who started coming here as a girl when she visited her aunt. She extended a hand to show how small. “But back then I wasn’t allowed at the bar.”

THE WANDERING REGULAR
The Quarter, Fort Greene, Brooklyn

For five years, Jason Guy was a regular at Berlyn, across the street from the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), where he sometimes works as an usher when he’s not acting. Mr. Guy, 46, had never been a regular anywhere before.

“I’m from Maine,” he said. “Nobody in Maine eats out.”

He liked Berlyn because of the good food, its proximity to BAM and the weird décor — the white Chewbacca fur chairs, the tiny gnomes way up on the bookshelf, the pretzel, ham hock and log pillows on the bar benches, the casual use of antlers.

But somewhere between the second and third year of visiting Berlyn twice a week, he realized something: when he walked in, the staff would wave and say, “Hey, Jason.”

“I was like, ‘Oh, my God. I’m Norm at Cheers,” he said. “Norm!’”

At Berlyn he felt like even more than just a regular. Maybe the fact that he has to wear a uniform at BAM — black shirt, black pants and black tie — set him apart from the other regulars.

The staff started comping him. He got to know the waitress who seemed to hate everybody; was invited to see the hostess’s band perform at another bar. A waiter named Hugo would sit down at the end of the night and dish the dirt. “It felt like the ultimate honor,” Mr. Guy said. “Sitting down and sharing three minutes of humanity.”

Then Berlyn had a 350 percent rent increase in 2017, and it closed. Mr. Guy was invited to the regulars goodbye party and to the final staff party.

Since then, he has auditioned several restaurants to find a new regular spot. One place had great food but a nasty bartender. One was two blocks too far from BAM. One had great people but closed too early.

Finally, he discovered the Quarter, a Mediterranean bar and restaurant in a basement on Lafayette.

The music was low, the lighting was dim, the tacos and spicy cauliflower were delicious, and there was a neon sign that proclaimed, “Open Late.” The pretty back room with the retractable roof reminded him of Berlyn’s garden. On his sixth visit, Mr. Guy was recognized by the manager and given a free glass of Turkish beer.

“I think,” said Mr. Guy, “the audition period is over.”

THE EVER-EXPANDING DINNER PARTY
Gabriel’s, Midtown Manhattan

For 28 years, Gabriel Aiello has been curating a kind of dinner party at the 34-foot-long bar in the cavernous restaurant that bears his name. Over the years, the guests have come, alone or in pairs, lured by the famously good martinis, or just because it’s close to work or home. But those who recognize their tribe have remained.

“It’s kind of magic,’ said Steve Heaslip, a Tiffany executive who visits with his fiancé, Lori Hume, a nurse. The guy on the next stool piped in.

“There’s this crazy atmosphere here you can’t duplicate,” he said. His name was Stephen Bowne. “I can’t say why exactly. But we’ve all become friends.”

In addition to eating and drinking together most nights, the regulars here go beyond the bar. They go to movies and museums with one another, they send concerned texts when a few nights go by without a drop in. They take vacations with one another.

“We’re in each other’s lives,” said Julia Kirchhausen, a classical music publicist who started coming to Gabriel’s in 2005 because it was a safe place for a woman to sit alone at the bar and “not be propositioned or #metooed.”

It can get complicated. Nancy Bento, who lives across the street, has gone to Nashville and Puerto Rico with Dan and Mary Eccles, whom she met here, and who met each other after being introduced three years ago by Scott Chandley, the beloved bartender. Mr. Chandley was the best man at their wedding. On a recent Friday night, they all celebrated Mr. Chandley’s birthday at the bar with a cake and candles

Mr. Bowne, a dentist with a practice a few blocks away on Madison Avenue, has been coming to Gabriel’s for 27 years, the year after it opened, back before the Time Warner Center arrived, when the neighborhood was not so well lit and was slightly dangerous, shattered car window glass sparkling on the sidewalk from break-ins. Now Dr. Bowne does everyone’s teeth. In his office, of course.

Cheryl McKissack Daniel, who runs the oldest African-American-owned architecture and engineering firm in the country, McKissack & McKissack, uses Gabriel’s as her kitchen since her husband went vegan. “I can’t deal with his vegan stuff,” she said.

Mr. Aiello, who never leaves, and Scott, the bartender, help facilitate introductions and keep the conversation and martinis flowing. But this summer, the party will come to an end — at this address anyway. The landlord is demolishing the building to make way for a high-rise condominium.

“We all have to be out by July 31,” said Mr. Aiello, who has already broken the news to the regulars. Mr. Aiello is hoping to move to a new place a block away and has faith the faithful will follow.

Ms. Kirchhausen has no doubt Gabriel’s will be a movable feast. “This,” she said, “is our chosen family.” ###

[Helene Stapinski began her career at her hometown newspaper, The Jersey Journal. She is the author of three memoirs: Five-Finger Discount: A Crooked Family History , Baby Plays Around: A Love Affair, with Music, and Murder in Matera. Her essays have appeared in several anthologies, most recently, Drinking Diaries: Women Serve Their Stories Straight Up. Helene has also written extensively for The New York Times, for The Washington Post, Travel & Leisure, Food & Wine, Salon, Real Simple, New York magazine and dozens of other newspapers, magazines and blogs. She’s been featured on NPR’s "All Things Considered," "The Today Show" and as a performer with "The Moth" (NPR). Stapinski received a BA (journalism) from New York University and an MFA (writing) from Columbia University (NYC).]

Copyright © 2019 The New York Times Company.




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Copyright © 2019 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves

The Theme Song Of 2019 Is "I'm All Worn Out"

The Cobra (Maureen Dowd) has written a perceptive analysis of our national ennui. This blogger, and many people he knows, are all worn out with endless spewing of the despicable and disgusting words and actions in the daily media bombardment. We are sick of the HA (Horse's A$$) in the Oval Office whether we know it consciously or unconsciously. This is another tactic pursued by traitors: "destroy their will to resist." If this is the (fair & balanced) exposure of the existential threat to our well-being, so be it.

PS; The source of this blog's noms de stylo serpent reference to the three women on the NY Fishwrap's Op-Ed staff began with this 2001 essay by The Cobra (Maureen Dowd) who's been joined by her distaff colleagues: The Krait (Gail Collins), and — most recently — The Viper (Michelle Goldberg)

[x NY Fishwrap]
Crazy Is As Crazy Does
By The Cobra (Maureen Dowd)


TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the following piece of writing

agencies almost Barr Buttigieg columnist comes complete Congress cover-up crazy crosses debate everyone fixated going history investigate keep knows life line Memory Mueller Nancy nasty O'Brien outrage Patrick Pelosi Pete Post president puppet remarked report saying shows someone something Story things think told town tried Trump TV video wearing words

created at TagCrowd.com

Sometimes, as the light comes in my bedroom window and I start to wake up, my mind drifts to other things.

I think about how talented Phoebe Waller-Bridge is, with her two mordant shows, “Killing Eve” and “Fleabag.” I think about how cool it will be to see Idris Elba resume his role as a world-weary London homicide detective in “Luther.” I think about what a harrowing tale Patrick Radden Keefe has woven in Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland (2019).

But once I’m completely awake, a gravitational pull takes hold and I am once more bedeviled by our preposterous president.

I flip on the TV and gird for the endless stream of vitriol coming from the White House, bracing for another day of overflowing, overlapping, overwrought news stories about Trump. I’m sapped before I rise.

As Mayor Pete said on his Fox town hall about the national Trump preoccupation, “It is the nature of grotesque things that you can’t look away.”

My head hurts, puzzling over whether Trump is just a big blowhard who’s flailing around, or a sinister genius laying traps to get himself impeached to animate the base ahead of the election.

A minute ago, we were fixated on the half of the Mueller report that vividly details how Trump tried to shut down and hinder the Mueller investigation. But now the president has triggered the media’s shock collar, so everyone is fixated on how he gave William Barr vast new powers to use the intelligence agencies to investigate the investigators.

Just as Trump once wore out contractors, bankers, lawyers and businesspeople in New York with his combative, insulting and wayward ways, now he’s wearing out the political crowd, as he tries to beat everybody here into submission with his daily, even hourly, onslaught of outrage piled upon outrage.

Journalists must not become inured to Trump’s outlandish, transgressive behavior. Mitch McConnell, Barr and almost everyone else in the GOP have made themselves numb to his abhorrent actions because of self-interest.

But for those who are concerned about the scarring of the American psyche, it’s exhausting to find the vocabulary to keep explaining, over and over, how beyond the pale and out of the norm the 45^th president is.

How do you ratchet up from “remarkable,” “extraordinary,” “unprecedented”?

What words can you use about someone who considers pardoning war criminals on Memorial Day? Who wants to make it simpler for adoption agencies to bar same-sex couples? Who circumvents Congress to complete arms deals to benefit the same Saudis who are clearly culpable in the case of the dismembered Washington Post columnist?

Pete Buttigieg and Nancy Pelosi have both mastered the art of puncturing Trump — far better than his Republican primary debate rivals did.

“I don’t have a problem standing up to somebody who was working on Season 7 of ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ when I was packing my bags for Afghanistan,” Buttigieg told The [DC] Post’s Robert Costa, saying he took a dim view of Trump’s bone-spurs excuse to get out of serving in Vietnam.

Pelosi winds Trump up when she drips condescension worthy of a Jane Austen grande dame, saying she will pray for the president or pleading for someone to stage an intervention with the poor soul.

After Pelosi remarked that the president was engaged in a cover-up, Trump dynamited his own meeting with “Crazy Nancy,” as he called her. His I’m not crazy, you’re crazy rebuttal to Pelosi echoed his I’m not a puppet, you’re a puppet line to Hillary Clinton during the debate.

Trump tweeted a video of Pelosi that was manipulated to make her look as if she were slurring her words.

“Well, I don’t know about the videos,” the president told reporters as he left on his trip to Japan.

“He does outrageous, nasty, destructive things, knowing full well he’s crossing a line, and then he pretends he didn’t,” said Trump biographer Tim O’Brien. “He has spent five decades going to gossip columnists, radio shows, TV interviews and newspapers to stick a knife into almost anybody who crosses his path that he doesn’t like and he revels in it. There is something amazing in the Energizer Bunny aspect of his nastiness and his ignorance. He doesn’t care what people think about how mean or dumb he is. He just keeps going.”

O’Brien said Pelosi “hit on something that is core to his con. His whole life is about the cover-up. He has covered up his academic record, his health reports, his dalliances with women, his finances, his family history. Even while he was saying he was the most transparent president in history, his Treasury secretary was across town telling Congress, ‘I’m not giving you the president’s tax returns.’

“One of the biggest motivating factors in Trump’s life — other than food, greed, sex and revenge — is mythmaking. Deep down, he knows he’s a pathological liar and he’s not the person he says he is. But any time anyone pierces that veil, it sends him into a rage.”

It’s wearing, not letting this petulant man wear us all out. ###

[Maureen Dowd received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1999, with the Pulitzer committee particularly citing her columns on the impeachment of Bill Clinton after his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Dowd joined The New York Times as a reporter in 1983, after writing for Time magazine and the now-defunct Washington Star. At The Times, Dowd was nominated for a 1992 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, then became a columnist for the paper's editorial page in 1995. Dowd's first book was a collection of columns entitled Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk (2004). Most recently Dowd has written The Year of Voting Dangerously: The Derangement of American Politics (2017). See all of Dowd's books here. She received a BA (English) from Catholic University (DC).]

Copyright © 2019 The New York Times Company




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Copyright © 2019 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves

This Past Weekend, The Jillster (Jill Lepore) Offered A Memorial Day 2019 Civil Homily For All Of Us

The Jillster (Harvard history professor Jill Lepore) offered a ringing rejection of the half-baked nonsense both uttered and "tweeted" by the HA (Horse's A$$) in the Oval Office & in front of his beloved TV cameras. Of course, when the HA proclaimed to one of his Hitler-rally crowds in Houston this past October, he faithfully uttered an untruth in proclaiming himself a mere "nationalist." He lacked the intestinal fortitude to refer to himself as a WHITE nationalist because that is what his dog-whistled "nationalist" reference was intended to convey to his knuckle-dragging listeners. In fact, the HA was not honest enough to call himself a Neo-Nazi. The HA's continuous "rallies" are the present-day equivalent of the Nuremberg Rallies (1923-1939) staged by the National Socialists (Nazis) in Germany that were staged by HA's hero, Adolf Hitler and his minions. In fact, the HA plans to convert the 4^th of July observance in Washington, DC into one of his disgusting Neo-Nazi rallies. If this is a (fair & balanced) indictment of the HA's treason (an impeachable offense), so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Don’t Let Nationalists Speak For The Nation
By The Jillster (Jill Lepore)


TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the following piece of writing

America ascertained best campaign case century citizens commitment dangerous dedicated defeated Democrats denouncing equal far fear flies form founded government guarantee half humanity idea ignore include justice laws liberalism mistake moral nation nation-state nationalists past patriotism people please political problem proposition pussy require rights speak States Trump truth United world

created at TagCrowd.com

Every political campaign involves a choice between elevating political discourse and degrading it. The 2016 election brought a pornographic film star into prime time and made “pussy” front-page news. How it could get any worse in 2020 is difficult to imagine. But the problem isn’t the word “pussy” and the pornification of politics, however demeaning; the problem is the word “nationalism” and the abandonment of liberalism.

“I’m a nationalist, OK?” President Trump said at a rally in Houston last year. “Use that word.”

Please do not use that word. But please do use the word “nation” — the nation of the Gettysburg Address, “a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” — and please do use the word “liberalism,” which is what Lincoln meant by that proposition. [italics supplied for emphasis]

Candidates who swat at Mr. Trump’s tweets like so many black flies will only find themselves eaten alive. But anyone running in 2020 who is willing to ignore the flies has an opportunity to speak with clarity and purpose about what’s at stake: the liberal nation-state itself.

The United States is a nation founded on a deeply moral commitment to human dignity. All of us are equal: We are equal as citizens and we are equal under the law. Notwithstanding the agony and hypocrisy of the nation’s past and the cruelty and pettiness of its present, these truths endure, in the form of liberalism. Liberalism is not a species of partisanship. Liberalism is the belief that people are good and should be free and that people organize governments in order to guarantee that freedom. That guarantee includes protecting a habitable planet.

Nationalism is an abdication of liberalism. It is also the opposite of patriotism. To confuse nationalism with patriotism is to mistake contempt for love and fear for valor.

In the first half of the 20^th century, nationalism devastated Europe and destabilized much of the rest of the world. At the end of the Cold War, it appeared to some globalists that nationalism had died, but their error can be witnessed every day in the rule of Vladimir Putin in Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Viktor Orban in Hungary, Jaroslaw Kaczynski in Poland, and Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines. Nationalism has shaken Britain. It has all but unhinged the United States.

Denouncing nationalism doesn’t require breaking a rhetorical sweat. The hard work isn’t condemning nationalism; it’s making the case for the liberal nation-state.

This is an argument of political necessity and moral urgency. So far, Democrats haven’t made it. Instead, in much the same way that they gave up the word “liberalism” in the 1980s, they’ve gotten skittish about the word “nation,” as if fearing that to use it means descending into nationalism.

This election’s presidential campaign slogans include Joe Biden’s “Our Best Days Still Lie Ahead,” Pete Buttigieg’s “A Fresh Start for America,” Kamala Harris’s “For the People,” and Andrew Yang’s “Humanity First,” not to mention “Win With Warren” and “Amy for America.” (Julián Castro’s “One Nation. One Destiny.” is the exception.) For sure, it can be dangerous to talk about the nation. But it’s more dangerous to cede the idea of the nation to make-the-nation-great-again nationalists.

What is the liberal case for the nation? Nation-states are people with a common past, half-history, half-myth, who live under the rule of a government in the form of a state. Liberal nation-states are collections of individuals whose rights as citizens are guaranteed by the government. The United States is a liberal, democratic nation held together by the strength of our ideas and by the force of our disagreements.

The enemies of liberalism find this maddening, as Frederick Douglass observed in 1869, denouncing opponents of the 14^th Amendment: “A government founded upon justice, and recognizing the equal rights of all men; claiming no higher authority for existence, or sanction for its laws, than nature, reason and the regularly ascertained will of the people; steadily refusing to put its sword and purse in the service of any religious creed or family is a standing offense to most of the governments of the world, and to some narrow and bigoted people among ourselves.” Those words are no less true a century and a half on.

Nationalism can’t be defeated by ignorance or malice; it can be defeated only by knowledge and courage. A government founded upon justice requires a cleareyed and unflinching reckoning with its own history, its sorrows and atrocities no less than its glories and its triumphs. “Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things,” W.E.B. DuBois wrote in 1935, taking the measure of the brutality of slavery and the legacy of Jim Crow. “And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable?”

Make the case. In a world made up of nations, there is no more powerful way to fight prejudice, intolerance and injustice than by a devotion to citizenship and equal rights under a nation of laws. A national campaign in 2020 would promise not greatness but benevolence. It would explain national prosperity as inseparable from an unwavering dedication to a sustainable environment the world over. It would call for a steadfast commitment to liberal ideals and to fearless inquiry, an Americanism as tough-minded as it is openhearted. It would hold the past to account, truth dear, and the earth in the balance. ###

[Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University as well as the chair of its History and Literature Program. She has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2005. Her most recent book is These Truths: A History of the United States (2018). See other books by Lepore here. She earned a BA (English) from Tufts University (MA), an MA (American culture) from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and a PhD (American studies) from Yale University (CT).]

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Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins) Imagines A Nightmare In November 2020, But There Is A Preventative Alternative: ITMFA!

Along with today's horrifying 'toon, Tom/Dan wrote:

Hey All,

This one addresses such an obvious topic, it feels like I should have already written it — the likelihood that Trump actually concedes, should he lose in 2020. (And don’t assume that it’s a given that he will lose.)

Things got weird this week (which is, in itself, an evergreen statement), with Trump raging about the possibility of impeachment and insisting once again that he is a Very Stable Genius, and Democrats continuing to dither on impeachment — I don’t know if this is twelve dimensional chess or simply spinelessness, but I’m hoping it’s the former. If a tree commits impeachable offenses in the woods and no one is willing to open an impeachment inquiry — ah, you know what I mean....

Of course, I spend most of my time alone in my apartment, unshaven and mumbling to myself as I try to write, but occasionally I manage to venture outside and do something interesting.

Until next week …

Dan/Tom

It's obvious that our 'toonist (like most of us) suffers from impeachment-dithering-fatigue. This blogger has several T-shirts in various colors, in his closet that have block letters on the chest: ITMFA and that is a slogan first enunciated by the polemicist Dan Savage against POTUS 43 when that loser took this nation to war over WMDs (Weapons of Mass Destruction) in Iraq. That worthless scumbag should have been sent out of the White House in disgrace. Unfortunately, after the 2016 election, the slogan holds true for the Oedipal scumbag who leaves trails of slime everywhere he goes. Impeach The Oedipal Scumbag (Mother F*cker) Already! Truer words were never uttered aloud. Impeach the HA (Horse's A$$) and let the Dumbo Senators deal with every sleazy act the HA has committed since despoiling the Oval Office in January 2017. Impeachment-dithering-fatigue will be replaced by righteous anger at having the worst of the worst in the Oval Office for even another minute. If this is a (fair & balanced) patriotic call to ITMFA, so be it.

[x TMW]
Tomorrow's News Today
By Tom Romorrow (Dan Perkins)

Tom Tomorrow/Dan Perkins

[Dan Perkins is an editorial cartoonist better known by the pen name "Tom Tomorrow." His weekly comic strip, "This Modern World," which comments on current events from a strong liberal perspective, appears regularly in approximately 150 papers across the U.S., as well as on Daily Kos. The strip debuted in 1990 in SF Weekly. Perkins received the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Excellence in Journalism in both 1998 and 2002. When he is not working on projects related to his comic strip, Perkins writes a daily political blog, also entitled "This Modern World," which he began in December 2001. More recently, Dan Perkins, pen name Tom Tomorrow, was named the winner of the 2013 Herblock Prize for editorial cartooning. Even more recently, Dan Perkins was a runner-up for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning.]

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Which POTUS Is Eags (Timothy Egan) Describing When He Writes About "...A President Who Is Ahistoric, Borderline Literate, And Would Fail A Sixth-Grade Reading Comprehension Test"? (Guessing Is Allowed)

Today, Eags (Timothy Egan) turns bookish and devotes his column to the persistence of the printed word (from the 1450s (Gutenberg Bible) to the present day. However, politics even creeps into Eags literary account with the amazing success of the memoir by Michelle Robinson Obama, the last great First Lady of the United States. This blogger will never forget Mrs. Obama's steely silent contempt toward the HA (Horse's A$$) in the current Oval Office at the funeral of POTUS 41, "Poppy" Bush. And she probably disinfected her right hand upon leaving the funeral service. It is interesting that the HA has not tweeted about Mrs. Obama's memoir comparing her book to his The Art of the Deal (actually written by Tony Schwartz). If this is a (fair & balanced) rejection of the canard about the death of books and the printed word, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
The Comeback Of The Century
By Eags (Timothy Egan)


TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the following piece of writing

adults age ago Americans Barack become best-selling bit book century Chicago copies country date die digital effect food forgotten happened health help hurry Jobs memoir million nearly Obama old-fashioned pages people president printed read sales season senses share sold something States Steve storytelling times touch Trump United written year young

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Not long ago I found myself inside the hushed and high-vaulted interior of a nursing home for geriatric books, in the forgotten city of St.-Omer, France. Running my white-gloved hands over the pages of a thousand-year-old manuscript, I was amazed at the still-bright colors applied long ago in a chilly medieval scriptorium. Would anything written today still be around to touch in another millennium?

In the digital age, the printed book has experienced more than its share of obituaries. Among the most dismissive was one from Steve Jobs, who said in 2008, “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore.”

True, nearly one in four adults in this country has not read a book in the last year. But the book — with a spine, a unique scent, crisp pages and a typeface that may date to Shakespeare’s day — is back. Defying all death notices, sales of printed books continue to rise to new highs, as do the number of independent stores stocked with these voices between covers, even as sales of electronic versions are declining.

Nearly three times as many Americans read a book of history [PDF] in 2017 as watched the first episode of the final season of “Game of Thrones.” The share of young adults who read poetry in that year more than doubled from five years earlier. A typical rage tweet by President Trump, misspelled and grammatically sad, may get him 100,000 “likes.” Compare that with the 28 million Americans who read a book of verse in the first year of Trump’s presidency, the highest share of the population in 15 years.

So, even with a president who is ahistoric, borderline literate and would fail a sixth-grade reading comprehension test, something wonderful and unexpected is happening in the language arts. When the dominant culture goes low, the saviors of our senses go high.

Which brings us to Michelle Obama. You can make a case that we owe a big part of the renaissance of the written word in recent months to her memoir, Becoming (2018). In the first 15 days after publication last year, it sold enough copies to become the best-selling book in the United States for all of 2018. By the end of March of this year, it had sold 10 million copies and was on pace to become the best-selling memoir ever written in this country.

I was late to her book, having my doubts about platitudinous, focus-group-neutered memoirs by political personalities. As it turned out, she’s a luminous, observant, self-aware writer, even if she had some help from a team of ghostwriters. Consider these passages describing her early dance of romance with Barack Obama, when she worked within “the plush stillness” of her Chicago law firm.

“Barack was an ambler. He moved with a loose-jointed Hawaiian casualness, never given to hurry, even and especially when instructed to hurry.”

And here is the effect he had on her: “Until now, I’d constructed my existence carefully, tucking and folding every loose and disorderly bit of it, as if building some tight and airless piece of origami.” But then, “Barack intrigued me. He was not like anyone I’d dated before, mainly because he seemed so secure. He was openly affectionate. He told me I was beautiful. He made me feel good.”

This is old-fashioned storytelling, taking us from an upstairs apartment on the South Side of Chicago to the White House. As someone who makes his living in the business of storytelling, I couldn’t be happier to see her book smash records and help the printed word amble confidently, like young Barack, through another century.

Storytelling, Steve Jobs may have forgotten, will never die. And the best format for grand and sweeping narratives remains one of the oldest and most durable.

But also, at a time when more than a third of the people in the United States and Britain say their cellphones are having a negative effect on their health and well-being, a clunky old printed book is a welcome antidote.

When people go on a digital cleanse, detoxing from the poison of too much screen time, one of the first things they do is bury themselves in a book — that is, one to have and to hold, to remind the senses of touching Pat the Bunny (1940, 2001) in infancy, a book to chew on.

“I think it’s somewhat analogous to what happened with food,” said Rick Simonson, longtime buyer at the Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle. “We came of age when the commercial messages about food were all to make it instant. Now look at how food has changed ‘back’ — the freshness, the health aspect, the various factors like community.”

While our attention span has shrunk, while extremists’ shouting in ALL-CAPS can pass for an exchange of ideas, while our president uses his bully pulpit as a bullhorn for bigotry and ignorance, the story of our times is also something else. It’s there in the quieter reaches, in pages of passion and prose of an ancient technology. ###

[Timothy Egan now writes a semi-monthly column at the NY Fishwrap online. Egan — winner of both a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 as a member of a team of reporters who wrote the series "How Race Is Lived in America" and a National Book Award (The Worst Hard Time in 2006) — graduated from the University of Washington with a BA ( journalism), and was awarded a doctorate of humane letters (honoris causa) by Whitman College (WA) in 2000 for his environmental writings. Egan's most recent book will be the forthcoming (October 2019) A Pilgrimage to Eternity. See all other books by Eags here.]

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A Bracing Rejoinder To A Couple Of Old Friends, Thanks To The Viper (Michelle Goldberg)

Within the week nearly passed, this blogger received from a couple of old (emphasis justified) college friends expressing existential rage at the HA (Horse's A$$) in the Oval Office and his despicable antics and his whiny despicable voice. The tone of those e-mails made the blogger receptive to yesterday;s NY Fishwrap Op-Ed essay by The Viper (Michelle Goldberg) that calls all who hate the presence of the HA in our lives and consciousness to virtually grow a pair (of cojones), regardless of gender, and convict the son of a female dog (a terrible insult to bitches everywhere in the land) of high crimes and misdemeanors and have US Marshals perp walk the HA out of the White House and place him in a seat in a Greyhound bus bound for NYC that waits at the curb. No boarding the Marine One helicopter for a ride to Andrews AFB and Air Force One for a flight to NYC. At the end of the bus trip, the HA would be ejected onto the sidewalk in the worst Harlem neighborhood in the dead of night. No Secret Service, no black SUV, no media TV; just a washed up grifter on that sidewalk stumbling to nowhere. If this is a (fair & balanced) dream scenario, so be it..

PS; The source of this blog's noms de stylo serpent reference to the three women on the NY Fishwrap's Op-Ed staff began with this 2001 essay by The Cobra (Maureen Dowd) who's been joined by her distaff colleagues: The Krait (Gail Collins), and — most recently — The Viper (Michelle Goldberg)

[x NY Fishwrap]
Impeaching Trump Is Risky — So Is Refusing To
By The Viper (Michelle Goldberg)


TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the following piece of writing

Amash American believe campaign caucus Center chairman Clinton conference courage cover-up covering Democrats election engaged enough faced fear freedom held help House impeachment infrastructure inquiry insists investigation kept later obstruction offense Pelosi pointed political president Progress public refusing remove Representative Republicans responsibilities Schiff seat Senate term told Trump vote ways

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On Wednesday, Donald Trump stormed out of a meeting on infrastructure with Democratic leaders and held a tantrum of a news conference. He was indignant that the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, had said earlier in the day that he was engaged in a cover-up, and insisted he wouldn’t work with Congress unless it stops investigating him. “You can’t do it under these circumstances. So get these phony investigations over with,” he said.

Shortly afterward, Pelosi was interviewed onstage at a conference of the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. “The fact is, in plain sight, in the public domain, this president is obstructing justice and he’s engaged in a cover-up, and that could be an impeachable offense,” she said, to applause from a crowd full of Democratic operatives and donors. She pointed out that the third article of impeachment against Richard Nixon involved his refusal to comply with congressional subpoenas, which, of course, Trump has done as well. A few moments later she described Trump as an “existential threat to our democracy.”

Yet even as a growing number of Democratic lawmakers are calling for an impeachment inquiry, Pelosi insists that the time has not yet come for such a serious step. The “House Democratic caucus is not on a path to impeachment,” she told reporters on Thursday.

This position is increasingly incoherent. If Trump’s outrageous misdeeds are visible for all to see — and they are — you don’t need further investigation to justify beginning an inquiry into whether impeachment is justified. Pelosi has suggested that impeachment will distract from the affirmative Democratic agenda, but the Republican-controlled Senate is no more going to pass progressive legislation than it will vote to remove Trump. And now the president has ruled out action on bipartisan initiatives like infrastructure investment, essentially refusing to fulfill his constitutional responsibilities whether he’s impeached or not.

Given all this, some of the public arguments leading Democrats are making against impeachment have the slickly disingenuous feel of slogans crafted by political consultants. “Political calculation has nothing to do with the manner in which we are proceeding,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the chairman of the House Democratic Caucus and a key Pelosi ally, told me at the Center for American Progress conference. But minutes later, he said, “We didn’t campaign on impeachment. We did not campaign on collusion. We did not campaign on obstruction of justice. We did campaign on lowering health care costs.”

Of course, the real reasons for Democratic hesitation on impeachment are obvious enough. Democrats don’t have the votes in the Senate to remove Trump, and fear an acquittal in that chamber could embolden him. A majority of voters is not yet convinced that impeachment is warranted, even if they believe Trump is a criminal. Many newly elected Democrats in swing districts don’t want to have to vote on impeachment, and Democrats fear a backlash similar to the one Republicans faced after impeaching Bill Clinton in 1998.

All these hazards are real. But there are also dangers if Democrats fail to take their appraisal of Trump to its logical conclusions. Following public opinion on impeachment, as opposed to attempting to shape it, makes them look weak and vacillating. Endless calls for further investigation send the message that the staggering corruption and abuse of power that Trump has already engaged in is somehow tolerable. And as Brian Beutler has pointed out, if Democrats don’t seize the offensive in both procedural and narrative terms, Republicans will, pressing on with their Benghazi-style investigations into the origins of the Russia probe while inviting even more foreign help in 2020.

The point of impeachment is not to remove Trump before the 2020 election. It is to make clear, in the starkest possible way, why Democrats believe he should be removed. The remainder of his term should be consumed by a formal, televised presentation of all the ways he’s disgraced his office. It’s true that were Trump to be re-elected after such a reckoning, he might be even further unleashed. But were Trump to be re-elected in the absence of impeachment, it would still be seen as a vindication for him, and would leave Democrats humiliated by their excess of caution.

Some Democrats might fear a repeat of the mistakes Republicans made when they impeached Clinton two decades ago, but this suggests a lack of faith in their own leadership. Clinton was impeached for covering up sex with an intern. Were Trump to be impeached, it would be for covering up his entanglements, financial and otherwise, with a hostile foreign power, blatantly profiting from his office, declaring himself above the law, and demanding freedom from oversight as the price of fulfilling ordinary presidential responsibilities. If Democratic politicians don’t believe they can make the public see the difference between these two impeachment scenarios, perhaps they are in the wrong line of work.

Besides, the notion that Republicans suffered a devastating rebuke as a result of the Clinton impeachment is overblown. Republicans kept the House in the 1998 midterms, though Democrats gained five seats. Clinton was damaged enough that his vice president, Al Gore, held him at a distance while running to succeed him. In the 2000 election, Republicans won the presidency, kept the House, and narrowly took the Senate, giving them trifecta control of government for the first time in nearly half a century. Can this really be the cautionary tale that’s frightening Democrats from doing all they can to hold a lawless president to account?

At the Center for American Progress conference, Representative Adam Schiff of California, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, praised Representative Justin Amash, the Michigan Republican who, on in a Twitter thread on Saturday, laid out the ways that Trump had “engaged in impeachable conduct.” Responding to Amash’s case against the president, members of the wealthy family of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said they were cutting off their financial support for the congressman. The conservative House Freedom Caucus, which Amash helped found, condemned him, and he’s facing a primary challenge.

“The fact that he is willing to risk his seat shows a lot of the courage of that conviction, and that has been in very short supply,” Schiff told the audience. He added, “Courage is contagious, but so is cowardice.” He’s right, but not just about Republicans. ###

[Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues. She received a BA (English) from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo and an MS (journalism) from the University of California at Berkeley.]

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