Author: carlzeitz

There is a long, thoughtful review and intellectual reprise of the film “Zone of Interest” posted on today’s New York Times (Dec. 19, 2023).

Written by Giles Harvey about the film conceived and directed by Jonathan Glazer, it should be read, the film should be seen and will be by me soon enough.

It is as you know another albeit different film about the Holocaust. It does not show any of the things that happened or any of the people, real or imagined to whom it happened.

It shows the domestic life,, reasonable tranquility, and settled marriage of Rudolph Hoss, twice commandant of Auschwitz. It is a view of the plain satisfying life of this work-a-day German burgher and his wife and five children as they lived in the commandant’s house literally outside the wall of the camp.

Inside, almost everyone dies. Outside they don’t. The film does not show the camp inside, you what that is. It is a factory where they make dead people and dispose of their bodies, where the means of production is murder and in which the product is death. This is a movie about the factory manager.

Part of this was/is from my comment to The Times (adapted for more exact references). It is a bad habit, responding to Times stories with comments (reporters call everything in the newspaper a story, they write and read stories, not articles), but I persist. It may be a bad habit but it occupies the mind.

This response purposefully refrains from any reference to current events and their troubling circumstances – tempting, so tempting as that is. It is there nonetheless.

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I have read extensively, too much perhaps a friend once said, about these events, their history, and the totality of what at best we can call their politics in Germany and internationally before, during and immediately after the cataclysm.

I think always about this sentence from the charge to the International Tribunal by Justice Robert Jackson, who took leave from the U.S. Supreme Court at the behest of President Truman to serve as chief prosector at the tribunal in Nuremberg at the end of 1945.

In that remarkable, detailed document Justice Jackson told the court in clearest terms, “The real complaining party at your bar is civilization.”

Ever since we have continued civilization’s complaint. Harvey’s essay is a good one, another reminder of what happened, including of that aftermath at Nuremberg and it is a good one about a very important film.

Yet of itself, Harvey’s writing gets to no better explanation. It contains no more, no new revealed truth about the factories where the Germans and their friends all over Europe, but principally their Eastern European friends, made death.

In the certainty of praise, it does not explain the inescapable fact that this happened; that nothing – nothing explains it though we keep trying to understand it as this film does, as Justice Jackson so plainly set out in the jury’s charge.

That we cannot is the reason we keep writing about it, referring to it, making and watching films about it, building museums to remember it that exhibit its remnants, depict its deadly advance through Europe, preserve and retain its artifacts.

Still, the most important, cogent, revealing film I have ever seen about this is “Wansee”, the version directed by Kenneth Branaugh. (There is a later German version for television in German, which I do not speak.) Perhaps it its way “Zone of Interest” equals it. Perhaps.

The Branaugh film is about a business meeting, albeit in a lavish setting, a very real one.

It is a representation of the event but it is not fiction.

The film was peformed mostly in the very same Wansee Villa in Wansee, an exclusive, wealthy enclave in Berlin where it took place efficiently during two hours on Jan. 20, 1942. Eerie isn’t it? You don’t have to imagine the actual setting. It is shown to you.

The meeting involved the same 15 people it identifies and depicts the woman who recorded the details in what came to be known as the Wansee Protocol. Each participant received a copy. Only one was found in German files after the war. It was enough to reveal all.

All 15 of those in attendance were government or Nazi Party officials of the
Third Reich and its colonies (Poland under the Reich was not a country but a German colony divided into a section incorporated into Germany, while Germans ruled a large rump portion in an enslaved so-called “General Government.” The six death camps, Treblinka, Sobibor, Chelmno, Maydanak, Belzec and Auschwitz were inside the territory of the General Government. The choice made sense, was busines- like after all – given that 2.9 million million of the 6 million were Polish Jews.)

The film is based on the lone surviving summary. To a significant extent what is said is what they discussed that day.

No one dies. No victim is shown. Mention is made of already accomplished mass shootings. A break is taken for refreshments. – brandy, delicacies and cigars, which were indeed served at the session.

It is an ordinary meeting of the board you might say, among the participants were eight Ph.Ds and several who held law degrees from venerable German Universities. Among them were Adolph Eichman, we all know who he was, his boss who had convened the session, Reynhard Heydrich, second in the SS to Heinrich Himmler, and Herman Muller, the chief of the Gestapo who also worked for Heydrich.

There is a hierarchy to the Holocaust. It was Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich.
The first one ordered it. The second one commanded it and the third, Heydrich, was its architect . Also the Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia (the Czech Republic today), Heydrich died in May 1942, assasinated by Czech partisans. Slovakia under the Fascist Priest Father Tiso, had broken away from the Czechs and was a rump German puppet (the facts get in the way of the narrative but they matter).

As they did that day, the “Wansee”attendees discuss, plan, define, and move ahead with genocide – it is their routine business. It is why they have convened – to be apprised of the next phase of that business, its expansion, and its new means of production, and to learn what will be done by and expected of their departments, agencies, and party offices.

Eventually, the execution of the industrial plan will be handed off to plant managers like Hoss. No one dies in the film. But you know millions of people already have and millions more will. The film tells you about the new means of achieving product.

No film, no writing ever gets to the whole of it, the center of it, the deep interior of it, the why, why, why of it. Because it cannot be done. Because unreasonable, unyielding hate does not have a findable center. It is a vortex spinning endlessly into eternity.

Even still, we continue to look for it, for the bottom of the vortex. We should and the creative among us, like Glazer, should never stop searching even though they will never get to it. It spins endlessly.

It cannot be gotten to but, as they say, never forget. Never forget.

We could though learn from it, we should learn from it, especially just now.

That is another why. Why don’t we?

The current House of Representatives is the 117th in the history of the United States since the first one gathered in 1789.

It convened for the first time on April 1, 1789 with 65 members, which increased to 69 members in the next session and then continued apace as the nation added states and people. The only time in American history the House decreased in membership was during the Civil War, when the 11 states confederated in rebellion against the United States were not represented.

In the 67th Congress from 1913 to 1915 the membership (always apportioned on the basis of a population that included slaves until 1861, who until then were counted as three fifths of a human being for the purpose of representation) became fixed at 435. It marked a decision to keep the number within reason.

Thenceforth the number of people per district would increase, but not the number of districts.

Representation, ever since fixed at 435 members, is still apportioned by population. So Wyoming, though the Constitution gives it two senators like every state, gives it by constitutional apportionment just one representative in the House. That’s because with 591,000 population in 2020 Wyoming has fewer people than apportionment allows per district, 760,000 people. After all, the notion of fractional people went out of fashion in 1861.

Wyoming’s representative was Liz Cheney until this congress, when her support for the very same Constitution cost her the seat, now occupied by an extremist maga zealot, Harriet Hageman – maga having become a recognized descriptive political adjective in American English.

California by comparison also gets only two senators but under apportionment has 52 members of the House, one of whom is – at least in political terms – the late Kevin McCarthy.

The Constititon sets out in detail in Article I, the article establishing and empowering the Congress, a litany of things the Congress can do, must do or absolutely may not do like pass a bill of attainder. That’s a law assigning by legislation guilt to a person or group of people without a trial. A worst case example, maybe the worst ever? The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 in Germany.

The Constitution places initial authority for revenue bills in the House, a power that thus applies to all budget as well as appropriation bills because you can’t spend money you haven’t raised.

But as to how the House is to operate and to manage its business, the Constitution says almost nothing.

In Article I, Section 2 the 6th paragraph directs, “The House of Representatives shall chuse (choose) their Speaker and other Officers; …)

What other officers? The officers the House decides to create and empower according to Article I, Section 5, 2nd paragraph where it says, “Each house may determine the Rules of its Proceedings …”

That’s it. Sounds simple, but not so. Each session, the rules change, sometimes hardly at all sometimes more. The Republicans on taking power last January used the rules to establish a partisan inqusition they call the the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. Who chairs the subcommttee? Why Jim Jordan, who else.

Today the Rules of the 117th Session of the House of Representatives are 47 pages of dense, almost undecipherable parliamentary language. In all there are 29 such rules.

It is unlikely any outside the Office of the Parliamentarian, an office itself created by those rules, knows them. The House Parliamentarian and his staff might not even know them but do know where to look when one of them has to be consulted.

In the dense language of Rule I (worse even the rules use Roman numerals to enumerate them) concerning the power of the Speaker as those rules have evolved since 1789, the sole power to bring a bill to the floor resides in the office and thus the person of the Speaker. In the 117 Congresses of the United States only one woman – one woman – Nancy Pelosi, is among the 55 who have served as Speaker.

It doesn’t say it directly – after all that would be simple and direct – but the power to post is there and only there in the rules governing the House and the Speaker.

So what happens in the House if there no speaker?

Other than a convening prayer by the House Chaplain, another one of the officers created by the very same rules, saying the Pledge of Allegiance, a custom, and a few other ministerial functions the rules demand, the rule is that without a speaker nothing happens.

Nothing.

As we know or should know, it has been 16 days since the House removed Mr. McCarthy, who is now a political corpse, albeit one who sees himself as politically Christlike, harboring hope of resurrection in his former august political office. But in all likelihood, the Gospel of Kevin has been written unalterably by the Gaetz eight – the avenging Republican disciples.

So the press/media tells us the House is in stalemate, checkmate in fact. That it cannot move. There is no reason for any Democrat in the minority to cross the aisle to vote for a Republican, especially the likes of Jim Jordan, the Ohio wrestler without a jacket.

That is not the way of politics and legislatures and never has been except in the so rare instances when a state legislative chamber is literally tied; or when a member of a one becomes Brutus or Judas, as occurred in North Carolina earlier this year. There Rep. Tricia Cotham elected as a Democrat, crossed the aisle to become a Republican, thereby giving her new party a veto proof legislative majority as her ambition betrayed those who elected her. Either way, it is a rare, rare occasion.

Then is there really no way out of the impasse after the Republicans so far have been unable to muster the 217 votes they need to elect a speaker notwithstaning three candidacies so far?

Well maybe there will be a 4th, or 5th, or maybe one day soon an 11th on whom they can finally agree. But as Republican impotence and anger increases that becomes exceedingly unlikely – albeit not impossible. Implausible is a word in politics. Impossible is not in the political lexicon. Nothing is. Everything is possible. Always.

There is after all the other party with 212 totally united votes and ready to deal. It would take but 5 Repuiblicans to make a deal with the Democrats. What kind of deal? Up to them to decide whatever deal they are willing to negotiate and enter for 14 months (the 118th Congress will convene Jan. 3, 2025).

Implausible? Of course. Impossible? No. Very soon to become essential? From the perspective here? Yes and not next week,, but tomorrow.

But even if there is, how does it get to the floor, how do they change the rules to accommodate the deal? Well, rules are made to be changed, especially congressional rules.

The Constitution doesn’t say you can’t change the rules, it only says make them. The House needs to do some new bipartisan rule making.

And fast.

Babies are new life, smelling of sweet spring and talc and, yes, of soiled diapers – that too.

They are tiny, pink, brown or tawny, with bright eyes that have not yet focused and arms and legs that twitch and move when least expected, who coo and cry, whose tiny hands grasp our fingers, who make us laugh and smile and wonder at the why and wonder of it all.

We bring them home and say oh my God what did we do, what do we do now? Let’s begin and watch what happens.

They have hurt no one. They know nothing, least of all anger, hate and hurt. They barely think, just respond and make us realize that we all, each and every one of us, began that way; in all ways the same way if only for a moment until life begins to sort us out and assign our destinies.

Babies never hurt anyone. They can’t because of course they could not physically but profoundly because they have not even begun to learn differences, much less learned there is hate.

Like the song says, “You’ve got to be taught, you’ve got to be carefully taught…”

Unlike us, having but just arrived they do not live in tribes, do not know there are tribes that we call nations, religions, nationalities, ethnic groups, even neighborhoods. They simply live not even knowing what there is beyond hunger, thirst, sleep, twitching, soiling, yawning, spitting up, crying, cooing, feeling being swaddled or held.

Babies do not know there are Palestinians, Israelis, whites, blacks, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, or Zorostrians for that matter.

Babies don’t even know there are other babies. They do not hurt other babies. Other babies do not hurt them.

Babies don’t hurt grownups. Grownups hurt babies.

Grownups did those horrific, unimaginable, monstrous, wicked, evil things to babies that we have now seen in the photos from the carnage of Oct. 6.

Like everything else before and since in the 125 years since Theodore Herzl proposed what became Zionism – the call for a Jewish state, a homeland for Jews – all of this here about babies, all babies, babies everywhere, everyone’s babies, has been and is eternally so.

So too is it for every baby in Gaza.

So too is it for every dead Gazan. So too is it for every dead Israeli. Every one of them, we all of started life the same way – babies all.

Now, Israel tells the United Nations this – move 1 million Gazans south in 24 hours. That means among other things, move the babies and the little ones.

It would take what? How long? A month, at a minimum, who knows, to systematically and sanely move that many people. But move them where? To the bottom of Gaza where Egypt is the stopper in the bottle?

Even if you could safely evacuate 1 million people in one day, there is no room and literally there are no rooms for them in southern Gaza. There is hardly anything there to sustain life and Egypt won’t let them into Sinai, which itself is one of the worst, emptiest, most forbidding deserts in the world.

So this demand? It is understable in a military sense and because of the justified rage in Israel, of Jewish Israelis, but it not understandable in any other terms, in any human sense.

Sticks and stones… Or? Or the way the Bible has it? “An eye for an eye…”

Is it to be 1,000 eyes for an eye?

One violation should not beget another. One does not allow another.

If we Jews don’t know this, then who in the world can, who does, who ever will?

Does this recompense every dead Jew in the Holocaust? Never. There is no recompense equal to the crime.

Among the 6 million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust we don’t know exactly how many were babies but we have sure estimates that between 1.2 million and 1.5 million were children below the age of 12.

Dead by untreated illnes, slavery and starvation in the ghettos. Dead by gas in the camps. Dead by bullets in the shtetls, villages, towns, and cities of Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Slovakia, Hungary,Romania. Dead from the Einsatzgruppen, from the complicit Wehrmacht and the local peoples.

Dead from the Germans industrialization of murder in the six killing camps, all of them in pre-war Poland.

Chelmno, Majdenak, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Auschwitz. These were the worst places ever on earth in the history of mankind, in the history of the planet, which is not a good one. There is bad. There is terrible. Then there is worse.

And then – then there are those six places, six monuments forever to maximum cruelty, to premeditated murder by an entire nation.

The animal and plants don’t make war, we do, mankind does. It has done so without end for the 7,000 years of recorded history. It is all there. It is in the history of every people and every nation in all of that recorded history.

But the most, most, most terrible places in recorded human history were the six killing camps.

Say their names again,Chelmno, Majdenak, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Auschwitz. There can never be recompense for what happened at them, in them. Gaza cannot be recompense. Does anyone want that? Do Israelis want that? Do we Jews want that as recompense?

It is all of a piece. All of it reduces to what our good president told us Golda Meir said to him in 1973, and we heard repeated on American TV by an Israeli officer when he said:

“We have nowhere else to go.”

Jews have no place else to go. Neither do Gazans. No one wants Gaza and Gaza’s 2 million people, and that certainly includes the Palestinian Authority and the West Bank.

The Arab street urged on, fomented, organized by Iran and its insufferable evil, flies the Palestinian flag as it screams with hate against Israel and Jews. But it does not want the Gazans or it would have taken them long ago as brothers and sisters. Iran certainly does not want them. It uses them and throws them away.

No one wants the Gazans, they are orphans of war. They are orphans of 1,000 years of turmoil and tribalism in the Middle East. No one anywhere wants Gaza’s babies.

This Jew, Democrat, American, American Army veteran says go ahead if you want, if you must, go ahead and hate the children of Gaza, the babies of Gaza, the mothers of Gaza.

But know that like the Jews of Israel, like all us Jews outside Israel if it came to it, they too have nowhere else to go and they did not do what happened on Oct. 6. Iran and its compatriots are responsible for that just as surely as night follows day.

Now, Gaza City has begun to look like the Warsaw Ghetto at its end. Is this what we want again? What anyojne wants? Well someone must, because that is exactly, exactly what Russia has done to Kharkiv and a hundred other Ukrainian towns and cities causing us to recoil in horror. We know what it look like. The Russians have forced us all to look.

The rage of Israel is right and righteous. But Gaza’s babies didn’t do that, their babies did not murder and mutilate Israel’s babies.

Then what?

In 20 years the babies who remain on both sides will be grown. Will they then kill one another?

The reality, the unbearable reality that must be borne is that this is utterly, utterly hopeless. Anyone who thinks or says otherwise is a liar, a fool or both. It is hopelessly, hopelessly, hopelessly without hope, an endlessly looping tunnel of war.

Is that an answer? No. Why? Because there is not and never will be one except this:

“We have nowhere else to go.”

They have nowhere else to go.

Israelis have nowhere else to go.

If it comes to it, Jews everywhere have nowhere else to go.

It has no end. It has to end, but it has no end.

There is nothing to do on either side but weep for it all and for all who will die on both sides.

But more and more death changes nothing – and still there is nowhere else, nowhere else for the babies to go.

“Stop the world, I want to Get Off”

But we can’t, can we?

Netanyahu’s statement Monday was not a Churchillian appearance, it was churlish.

In the gravest moment in Israel’s history, worse even then 1973, he is trying to use this politically, calling on the opposition to join his government.

He didn’t mention they offered coalition and a national unity government 48 hours before. He didn’t offer to purge his cabinet of the two most odious nationalist/religious maniacs in it.

He didn’t suggest Lapid should become deputy P.M. or that Bennet would step in at Defense. Both should happen as quickly as possible.

With well over 100 hostages, Netanyahu’s sturm und drang was provocative without sensible, measured purpose.

He did not appeal to the better nature and patriotism of his people, he called for vengeance. Yes, it is what is wanted and understandably what Israelies what but it is not the way a real leader speaks to his nation. Everyone understands that but a leader doesn’t say it.

And – and he did not say he would put aside his entire divisive initiative on the judiciary, which a serious man would do and do right now.

Netanyahu is a bad leader and a bad man. Israel needs better and soon, as soon as possible.

The boy whose mother cried was 2 years, 11 months of age, not 3 years 11 months.

A friend wrote tonight with the notion or perhaps fact that 99 percent of everyone born between 1930 and 1946 has died.

I wrote back to say:

I suspect 85%& of that 1% remainder are under 85, or some such, which would be us. Though we know we were born during the war, I doubt any of us remember it, not really.

I think the first thing I remember is the day FDR died, I would have been 3 years and 11 months.

I don’t remember that he died. At that moment I had no idea he existed, much less who he was or what that meant.

Bur I remember my Mom weeping, standing at the window in the living room or our apartment looking out, weeping.

And I remember a feeling of alarm, asking what was wrong because – because little boys will be, are pretty scared when their Mom cries like she did just then. What did I do? What could I do to make it better?

I think she took my hand and told me “A wonderful man died, a wonderful man is gone…” 

I would not have, could not have know, what died meant.

Yes,  that may be me putting words in my memory. Still, I think, I am certain she said that and I know that she cried and, for sure, that that she cried so is why I have the memory. 

Did I know it was April 12, 1945? Of course not. I didn’t know the year or that there were years, or the day or the date. 

Time? Time was now. Time was morning, afternoon and night. Time was waking up. Time was supper time, bath time, bedtime. 

Today was today, the day before was yesterday, the next day would be tomorrow and  for me that was time then and all the time there was – or that I needed.

But I have kept the remembrance all the long time since  and, because I know and have long known the date and about the man, I know why she cried and I know the day and time she did. 

And that helps me place the memory not just in time, but in my soon to begin to be remembered life and to have certain memory of her from that moment forward.

I have been remembering ever since.

Now, in these late years, we approach the edges of memory.

Ours will end.

Then – then it will belong to others.

St. Petersburg, the seat of the Romanov dynasty, became Leningrad, and then again St. Petersburg. Kaliningrad is the former easternmost German city of Koningsburg, seat of the Hohenzollern Prussian dynasty and its brief empire.

The first city was not founded, no not founded, but was created – think about that – literally created by Tsar Peter I, Peter the Great – to give Russia trade and naval access to the Baltic Sea and the world beyond. It one of the two bases of the Russian Baltic Fleet. It is ice free only part of the year.

The second of the two, Kaliningrad, a German city for hundreds of years, was ceded to the Soviet Union by the WWII Potsdam agreement between the USSR, England and the United States in late 1945. In 1946-1947 all Germans were expelled, replaced mostly by Russians but also Balts and Ukrainians.

Wedged on today’s European map between Lithuania and Poland, 400 miles west of present day Russia, it is the headquarters and the other main base of the Russian Baltic Fleet. It is mostly ice free year around.

This map shows the Baltic Sea and the nations on its shores. Notice St. Petersburg, east of the Baltic Sea through the Gulf of Finland (located on the map just above and east of Estonia) and Kaliningrad to the west, the small territory shown in yellow between Lithuania and Poland.

With the acceptance and admittance first of Finland and now of Sweden to membership, the Baltic has become the NATO Sea.

For the first time in history nearly every shore on the Baltic Sea belongs to one alliance, in this case formed in the first place to check the power of the Soviet Union and – since Soviet disintegration 32 years ago – to balance naval power in the Baltic region with that of the successor state, Russia.

Over centuries one kingdom or empire or another dominated the Baltic but none ever controlled it virtually entirely. Sweden, Poland, Germany all had their turns in the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th Centuries.

Except for the narrow entrance to the Baltic throught the Gulf of Finland, and at Kaliningrad, Russia now has no access to the Baltic.

Once its submarines and Baltic fleet sailed from the ports of the Baltic nations when after WWII they were incorporated in the USSR. Once, after German naval power was destroyed during WWII, it dominated the Baltic. No longer.

One of the greatest strategic changes in the history of Europe, on the map of Europe has taken place now, right now, with the advent of Swedish membership in NATO, joining Finland in the alliance in an achievement engineered by the United States.

It is as briliant a diplomatic and military undertaking and accomplishment of any American presidency and administration ever – ever.

It would be admired by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the undisputed canny architect of post-WWII American world hegemony.

Accomplisehd by the administration of President Joseph R. Biden, this is a monumental historical moment for Europe with antecedents as long ago as 500 years.

No matter where you look now on the shores of the Baltic except Kaliningrad, there is a NATO Nation.

For the first time in more than 300 years, anything that Russia does in the Baltic will be watched, monitored, and opposed if it must be by a single, united adversarial force.

Russia’s Baltic Sea access and access beyond to the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean is now circumscribed. Except for the neutral small Republic of Ireland in the North Atlantic, there is not a Russian allied shore on any of them.

This map shows NATO’s ascendant position now on the Baltic. Notice particularly (highlighted in purple) the Kaliningrad enclave separated from Russia proper by the three Baltic nations and then the Russian access through the Gulf of Finland, and how strategically diminished those points are on what is now otherwise a sea ringed by eight NATO nations.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, this map says far more than that.

When a tsar died there was a line of succession to his son, right?

Not exactly, in fact not until the death in 1796 of Catherine II – the Great – born Princess Sophia in a minor German principality. She was not a member of the ruling Romanov family. She married one and purportedly gave birth to another.

Within the Romanov dynasty, primogeniture, the rule of succession of a male heir to the throne, came into being only by deceree of Tsar Paul I, the son of Tsar Peter III and Catherine the Great. Except Paul might not have been a Romanov, he might have been the son of Catherine and the first of her many, many, many paramours. That being said, history has him a Romanov and views the line, however piecemeal, as unbroken

Catherine had been brought to Russia to mary Peter III by his aunt, Empress Elisabeth, second daughter of the second marriage of Peter the Great. Peter III was the son of Elisabeth’s sister Anna. Elisabeth chose him to be her heir.

In Romanov history there were many marriages, many affairs, many children born in and out of wedlock. In all that confusion, Peter the Great, whose namesake son Peter II died before him, had three succesors in the time between his death in 1725 and 1740.

So in 1740, when Peter’s other successors had all expired, including possibly by murder, Elisabeth declared herself Empress on the strong claim of being his daughter.

A childless widow, she installed her nephew, the future Peter III, as heir apparent and married him off to Sophia, who upon her marriage took the Russian name Yekatarina (Catherine) – destined to become Catherine the Great.

Somewhere in all that is the bloodline of Peter the Great – accepted as continuing when Catherine gave birth to Paul I nine years after her marriage to Peter III, who because of an infantile, foolish personality had failed to consumate their marriage that long (if he ever did). She more than managed, she took numerous lovers.

But history and the Romanovs said Paul was indeed the son of Peter III. When Elisabeth died in 1762 her chosen heir, Peter III, husband of Catherine, took a turn, a bad one, and suddenly – and conveniently – died.

Catherine as his widow became empress with expectation she would step aside in favor of her son Paul when he reached majority age. She barely knew him because Elisabeth had taken him away from Catherine immediately after his birth and kept him from Catherine while raising him as the tsar in waiting.

Catherine ignored that expectation. She reigned supreme with vast historical sweep and universal remembrance of her as Catherine the Great until she died in 1796. She presided over the first two partitions of Poland by Russia in combination with Prussia and Austria, which incorporated the greater part of the Polish kingdom into Russia, including modern Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, and some of modern Ukraine.

At last then, Paul I became tsar. If you are keeping a scorecard, he was Peter the Great’s great grandson. Paul had nine children, two of whom became tsars. Alexander I, his eldest, became tsar in 1801. His brother, 18 years younger, succeeded him in 1825 as Tsar Nicholas I when Alexander died, leaving two daughters but no sons. Recall that since the reign of their father, Tsar Paul I, only men could succeed to the throne, so tsardom passed to brother Nicholas.

Somehwere in all of that murk, madness, murder, plotting, family dystopia and fasinating history made by some of them, amidst great historical changes in Russia and Europe during the reigns of the two “greats” among them, the mechanism of heredity always operated to legitimize the succession. There was heredity and heredity meant legitimate continuity.

Continuity continued. Nicholas I begat Alexander II who after being assassinated in 1881, was succceeded by his son, Alexander III. When he died unexpectedly of illness in 1891 his son, Nicholas II, became Tsar. Famously he said he was not ready to be. He was prophetically, ominously right.

In all these successions there were of course marriages. Tsars had affairs with Russian noblewomen but did not marry within the nobility to avoid creating factions. Romanovs like other European royals looked elswhere for wives, usually to the lesser German principalities, or to Denmark -places where were found, among likely dukes, princes and kings, suitable husbands for the many daughters and grandaughters of Queen Victoria of England.

By dint of this network of intermarrying and begetting, Tsar Nicholas II married a favorite grandaughter of Queen Victoria and was himself a 3rd cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, himself the son of Victoria’s first child and eldest daughter. To one another, the tsar and kaiser (the titles mean emperor in their respective languages) were Cousin Nicky and Cousin Willy.

Further, both were nephews of Prince Edward, eldest son of Victoria who upon her death in 1903 became King Edward VII. Upon Edward’s death in 1910, his son became King George V – another cousin. George was indeed cousin to Cousin Nicky and Cousin Willy. You could call WWI the cousins’ war, a war in which millions literally died in the names of the three cousins.

Then came 1917, the unraveling chaos of WWI, the total failure of the army of the last of the tsars, Nicholas II, in his ruinous war allied with Cousin George’s England against Cousin Willy’s Germany.

By February 1917 Nicholas, the great, great, great, great, great grandson of Peter the Great, faced overthrow because of unending defeats in battle, speading military mutinies, massive casualties, and ensuing chaos, unrest, strikes and famine at home.

He abdicated in favor of his uncle, the grand duke, who wanted no part of it. He turned down the title and handed rule in Russia over to a provisional government of the Duma – the parliament that had been created with limited powers after the failed 1905 Revolution. The mechanism was abdication.

So the dynasty ended, by an act of state and statesmanship. There was continuity in that the dynasty had given way to a provisional government. But, foolhardidly, the new government kept Russia in the war, sowing its own destruction.

The Provisional Government lasted less than a year, overturned in October by the radical socialist element who called themselves the Bolsheviks preaching peace and bread and sowing massive upheaval in all the fertile ground of Russian anger and discontent. But even in this violent overthrow there was order of sorts in the assertion of power by Bolshevik elites claiming to speak for soviets – councils – of the workers and peasants of Russia from within their nascent political structure.

Their leader, in many ways self-selected over decades in the wilderness of tsarist prison camps and a nomadic existence in other European countries, preaching on the edges of Russian socialism and socialist plotting against the tsars, was Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Inserted into Russia in a sealed train by the German army with leading compatriots, Lenin and the Bolsheviks seized power. In a sense then, the mechanism of this change of power in Russia was foreign intervention.

Cutting to the chase, during the ensuing six years Lenin ended Russia’s participation in the war, and drastically reduced its European terrtory in the Brest Litovsk Treaty in return for peace with Germany; led it through a victorious civil war; changed statist economic policy in midstream to accommodate incentive and profit; and retained and vastly expanded the model of the secret police that once had worked for the tsars pursuing him and other Bolsheviks.

Lenin and the Bolsheviks did not believe in a democracy of the people but of a democracy of the vanguard of the people – their faction of the Socialist Party in its radical-most form and system. In time it came to be called the Communist Party.

In the satire “Animal Farm” onetime British Communist George Orwell summed it up this way: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

Above all, Lenin established principles and mechanisms of organization, leadership and succession in the party and through the party in government.

When Lenin died unexpectedly in 1924 what was the succession to be? What mechanism of transition would the revolution legitimize? It came in the form of the Politburo, in effect the executive of the party within the party structurally designed by Lenin and his cohorts.

In time the Soviet Union had a national government with legislative and executive authority ostensible lodged in the Supreme Soviet and its Presidium. But not so in actuality. In actuality the Communist Party and its structure reigned supreme. It could endorse or undo anything the Supreme Soviet or Presidium did or require it to take an action like pass a law. No one doubted where the real power lay.

The Leninist party structure was a pyramid with the Party Congress at the base, a Central Committee resting on the base, and the executive Politburo atop that. At the pinnacle stood the party general secretary. After Lenin, leadership came down to an internecine struggle among a half dozen longtime Bolshevik leaders, especially between Joseph Stalin (born Josip Dugashvili) and Leon Trotsky (born Lev Bronstein), neither a Russian – one a Georgian, the other a Jew. Trotsky, the man who organized and directed the Red Army in the civil war that cemented revolutionary power, against Stalin, decades-long party operative and schemer.

They say nature abhors a vaccuum and a multi-headed leadership is that politically. Cutting to the chase, it took but five years for one member of the Politburo to rise, to plot and plan, and consolidate power and emerge by 1929 as the undisputed leader after Lenin. It was not Trotsky,forced into exile ultimately in Mexico City, where he was assassinated in 1940 by an agent of his nemesis.

Joseph Stalin held among his titles that of General Secretary of the Communist Party. It was not exalted. It was functional. But it placed him at the center of the party, all its personnel and doings. With that as his his base he emerged by 1929 as Lenin’s successor, as first among equals. For the next 24 years until his death, he had no equals.

Russia once again had a tsar, chosen not by heredity but by party mechanisms.

Stalin led the country through his purges, imposed the Hlodamar (the great killer famine) on Ukraine to subordinate its Kulak peasant class to collectivized agriculture, industrialized Russia, and recreated tsarist terror on an historically monumental scale. Millions died, millions more were imprisoned in the Gulag Archipelago, the name the writer Alexander Solzhynitsyn gave to the network of prison camps set up throughout the far reaches of the geographically immense territory of the Soviet Union.

Stalin led Russia and the 14 other “socialist republics” it gathered from the former imperial territories into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics through “The Great War”, the one we call WWII.

In the war 26 million Soviet citizens died in battle, as prisoners of Germany, victims of the Holocaust, among the immense civilian casualties like the 900,000 starved to death by the German blockade of Leningrad, or fighting as partsans and in the Red Army. Ultimately Stalin took Russia into the nuclear age, stealing some of its first secrets from us.

When he died in 1953 there could have been a void. For 25 years he had taken, consolidated and ruthlessly used singular power that suppressed so much as a thought to challenge his rule.

The tsars had the mechanism of heredity succession. Now with Stalin gone, the USSR and its ruling party had a mechanism as well, albeit one not used for 25 years. It had the Politburo as agent and executive of the Central Committee of the party, Lenin’s vanguard.

With lessons learned from the Stalinist era, the Politburo elevated member functionaries named Nikolai Bulganin and Georgy Malenkov to leadership, then saw another member, Nikita Kruschev push them aside legally, at least legally within terms of how the party operated, to emerge as number one. When in time he over-reached Alexei Kosygin and Leonid Brezhnev succeeded him in 1964 in another Politburo coup, again one within the boundaries of the mechanisms of Soviet succession.

Ultimately General Secretary Breshnev bested Kosygin in becoming most powerful though Kosygin remained as Soviet premier and in government until just before his deagth. Like all the others from Stalin forward- Brehznev consolidated his power by dint of being the party General Secretary. On his death in 1982 two others came and went in quick succession, each dying. In 1985, the Politburo raised one of its newer members, Mikhail Gorbachev, to the post of General Secretary. He would be the last.

The system was by then rotten to the core and notwithstanding his efforts to open and reform it, rebellion came from recalcitrant Communists against Gorbachev’s reforms that had produced a new form of government in which he emerged as the first President of the Soviet Union. In the aftermath of their failed rebellion, Gorbachev resigned. His first deputy, Boris Yeltsin, succeded him.

But the die were cast and the changes created the political framework for a new Russian state that asserted its independence. It suplanted the USSR, which disappeared as its Republics broke apart into separate nations – Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldava, Belarus, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Khazikstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikstan,Turkmenistan and Kyrgisatan.

In all of that, legal mechanisms flowing from and linked to Gorbachevian reforms operated to frame and legitimize the transition.

Russia remained. It adopted a new democratic constitution and elected Yeltsin president. This constitution thus became a new mechanism to institutionalize transition to the new government and for that government to move from one administration to another going forward.

Yeltsin failed. Drunk and inept he was persauded (forced?) to resign, ostensbily by the new democratic parliament but as likely by the men he had allowed to take over entire sectors of the former Soviet state economy. They came to be called oligarchs. Many were former officials of the former KGB secret police or former Soviet administrators and Communist Party functionaries.

In Yeltsin’s government a onetime secret policeman from Leningrad/St. Petersburg with consumate bureacractic skill managed and connived his way from obscurity to the top to become Yeltsin’s chief deputy as executor of the government.

Vladimir Putin moved into the Yeltsin vacancy using the mechanism of the new Constitution. He is still there but has had the constitution changed so that he can be elected and reelected until 2036. He is 71 years old. If he gets there he will be 84 years old – if he gets there.

From 2000 he accumulated absolute power reminiscent of Stalin, bringing back Stalin-like oppression and repression in Russia with cunning use of modern tools like the Internet and satellites. In 2014 he seized the Crimean. In 2022 he began his war in Ukraine.

Then came the very recent rebellion by Putin’s chief bully boy, Yevgeny Prigozhin and his private army the Wagner Group. We know the denoument at least to date: The intervention of Belarus President Alexsandr Luykashenko, a subservient Putin vassal, Prigozhin’s apparent removal to Belarus, Putin’s chest-beating reemergence.

Now come stories swirling in the news of U. S. intelligence agencies gaining prior knowledge of the Wagner rebellion, of tying it to elements of the Russian high command disastisfied with the conduct of the war in Ukraine. Just as our intelligence apparatus revealed Putin’s war plans, it has revealed details of the uprising such as it was, again with the seeming aim to weaken him.

In all of this, the world asks will Putin, can Putin survive?

Is it the right first question or perhaps the question to be asked first is this:

What is the mechanism to remove Putin? Whose hands, collectively or singularly, hold that mechanism? Who can pull the levers that will engage it? On whose behalf could or would it be engaged? On what excuse, on what legal pretext would or will power be taken or transferred in the nation with the largest nuclear arsenal.

It is not tsarist hereditary succession, that is long overturned. It is not the machinations of the Politburo. They are done. Can it be the Russian constitution? But isn’t that now malleable instrucment already in the hands of the tyrant himself?

Then what? What mechanism, what device is there in Russia to remove him and replace him and then by whom and with what? Is it by yet another revolution left afterward to pivot to its own explanations and after-the-fact legitimazation?

Winston Churchill called Russia “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”

So too, now, is the means – the mechanism – of its next succession.

If and when we divine that, we can know what comes after Putin.

This could go into the history of issues used historically by the nativist right wing in this country in its various iterations from the beginning of American time.

You know the question, one way or another: “Are you now or have you ever been…?”

But it is really very simple why this is happening now.

It is the nationwide Republican war on children who are in, or believe they are in sexual transition, and then by extension such people when they reach the age of majority.

And their parents. And their doctors. And their clergy. And their friends. And, of course, Democrats. Why Democrats? Well isn’t that the point of creating horror and fear? Defeating Democrats?

But why this, why now?

When did it start, did you hear about it before last June?

No, you did not.

But then the U.S. Supreme Court handed down the Dobbs decision, suddenly taking away from Republicans the one issue they could rely on for 50 years to tar their opponents, portray them as evil, as enemies and use to galvanize their base voters – all that good stuff and worse.

Suddenly abortion was not the issue to rouse the Republican base but only the Republican base. Suddenly it did the opposite.

All at once with Dobbs abortion became the overriding isssue – the political issue above and beyond all issues — for everyone else.

It became an issue that immediately began to show – in state elections — on state constitutional referenda, in high state court elections and the 2022 congressional elections – that the vast majority of voters disagree with Dobbs and the resuilting rigid, cruel anti-abortion state laws pressed by Republicans.

Reeling politically – and the midterms proved that – Republican strategists needed to come up with something else to galvanize their malleable, fearful, easily led believers.

They came up with “trans”, with the charge that Democrats are working to turn children trans, that doctors are their agents in this plot, that trans children and their parents are dangerous and being used and manipulated. All of that reeking political horse manure began to be spread across the fertile ground of resentment politics.

The phony trans politics did not really begin to take off until the mid-terms showed Republican professionals they had a big, big problem. They had lost their galvanizing issue, they needed to find a new one.

As with everything else they had manipulated for generations, it would sell if they could make their voters believe it was about one of two things, black people and or sex – sex that three letter dirty word in their constituency’s vocabulary.

They’d focused on crime in the elections, which among white people is political code for black people. It hadn’t worked nearly so well as the famous Willy Horton ad in 1988.

Then, what else to pivot to going forward? Sex and how to make their voters really cringe with alarm about it? Make it about trans. Make that seem threatening, dirty, foreign, a plot, a monstrous unnatural evil aimed at the sanctity of their voters lives, hearths and homes.

Make men cover cross their legs and women cross their arms across their chests at the very thought of it and pass laws to ban eveything and anything trans with a peculiar, perverse focus on children.

When nearly two dozen states introduce and pass like legislation it is not spontaneous, it is a deliberate manipulated campaign. Everyone who has ever been near politics knows that.

This has been and is a campaign by seasoned political pros in the national and state Rpublican party apparatus. You can be sure it’s been polled, given to focus groups and scripted for the legislators who have taken it up.

Well, what of it?

First there is nothing to their malicious, malignant campaign, it is a lie, medically, socialogically and legally a lie. Second it involves the most personal and for many the most painful realizations, choices and decisions in their young lives or the young lives of their children – choices that belong to them and them alone in privacy with their families.

And how many people are we talking about? Published estimates place the U.S. transexual population at less than one-half percent (0.005%), perhaps 600,000 people. Perhaps. Of that number how many are children?

The whole campaign is artificial, drummed up, wicked and evil in its dimension.

But it is no accident. It is a purposeful national campaign by Republican strategists and their henchmen in Congress and state legislatures to turn attention away from what is now a completely losing political issue for them, abortion, to something else that can be used to manipulate and bring out their vote.

That’s why this is happening and all the attendant garbage with it – book banning, attacking the entire LGBQT population, commercial boycotts, and of course the preposterous focus on “drag queens” – these are all part of the campaign package. When except in the movies is the last time you ever saw a drag queen?

The Republcian war on transexuals and LGBTQ people sadily is all too American – as American as NINA, as the KKK, as Joe McCarthy – as American as the most rancid cheese and the stalest apple pie.

And it was entirely predictable after June 20202.

These are the numbers to think about in thinking about the chance that legislation to raise the debt ceiling can be passed, will pass in the Congress, the 2-house Congress.

They are 435,222, 218, 213, 210, 3, 4, 5, 1, 48, 43, 51 and 60 and for good measure, 7 and 9.*

Sounds like a multi-state lottery, doesn’t it? In fact it is. It is a 50-state lottery in which the winner or loser to be is 1 nation and 340 million of us, we Americans.

There are 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Republicans have 222 of them. George Santos sits in 1 of them.

Democrats hold 213 seats.

It takes 218 votes to pass a bill in the House, the simplest, barest majority. With Santos, the Republicans have 4 votes to spare, without him 3; and as 4 is 1 more than 3 he remains, because the Republicans need him. In 2 years Santos is likely to be in federal prison. For now he stays in the federal House.

The Democrats in any case are always 5 votes short of being able to control anything, except maybe on a very long shot this time.

The bill that is the basis for House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s discussions with President Biden passed in April with that bare 218 votes, all Republicans of course.

The other 4 Republicans refused to vote for it, saying it was not enough. They declared they would never vote for anything less though by its very definition, somethng less is guaranteed to come out of the present negotiation.

The Speaker therefore needs every one of those 218 votes in his Conference, which he managed to get over the objections of many only by convincing them they needed to present a united front. It is telling that the last of the 218 to post a yes vote on the Speaker’s bill was Santos.

But the Speaker knows, the President knows, everyone knows that McCarthy cannot get 218 votes again, not hardly and that he will need votes from Democrats.

How many? One report says the White House calculates it could be as many as 100 Democrats needed to combine with what would be a rump of the Republican conference to get to 218. That is a lot. Indeed it is as big an ask as there is in politics -which is all about asking – to ask big numbers of Democrats to rescue against interest a fuddled, fumbling Republican conference.

So far 210 Democrats have signed what in the parlance of House rules is called a Discharge Petition, which is a device to move legislation to the floor. The petition seeks to force a vote on a bill called a “clean debt ceiling lift”, that is one with no conditions.

If a discharge petition gets 218 votes the legislation to which it pertains must be brought to a vote by the full House, even over the objection of the Speaker who otherwise controls what gets a vote.

At last report 3 Democratic signatures were missing, owing to absence from Washington not opposition to the petition. Effectively then the petition has 213 signatures.

Democrats thus need the signatures of 5 Republicans to bring the petition to bear and force a clean debt ceiling bill vote. The terms of such a bill would set a a new cap on the debt limit and define the period for which it would be valid, presumably at least past the 2024 presidential and congressional elections. No one who isn’t crazy wants to do this again in an election year, in any election year.

Does that mean any 5 Republicans could combine to negotiate separately with House Democrats and their leader, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York? Yes, and who knows but that could be going on in the background now, as likely as anything else. From reporting, there is not 1 much less are there 5 House Republicans who would support a clean debt ceiling lift. But could there be 5 willing to unite behind and talk with Democrats about less onerous demands than McCarthy is pressing?

Are there 5 such Republicans? Maybe Mr. Jeffries knows, we sure don’t. But if the aroma of any such talks is in the air in D.C., so far the bloodhounds of the Washington Press corps and the cable TV news chatterers and clamorers have not scented so much as a whiff of it.

Ok, so far we have covered and explained the significance in all this of 435, 222, 218, 213, 4, 3 and 5. What about 1?

Among the concessions to the extremists in his already extreme party to get their votes on a 15th ballot to elect him Speaker, McCarthy agreed that if so much as 1 member of the House requested reconsideration to remove him from the speakership, it would be enough to cause the full House to take up the question. So his 4 vote majority is, really, sort of just 1 vote.

This makes him? Choose your bad analogy: A lion without a roar, an empty vessel, a toothless tiger, a 55 pound lightweight, a shadow of a man, a dog with no bite, humpty dumpty on the wall. You get the idea. Everyone knows already McCarthy can’t deliver even if no one, including him, yet knows what it is he will finally take back to his conference. Any way you cut it, he doesn’t have and won’t have the votes of 218 Republicans, not nearly.

Then there is the Senate. As to that august body, think of this as a poker hand. I’ll see you a Sinema, raise you a Manchin and hope you don’t have a McConnell up your sleeve and a 9 tops everything.

That is because Democrats presumably have 51 of the Senate seats or 51 votes anyway counting 48 Democrats and 3 independents, 1 of whom is the always unpredictable Kirsten Sinema of Arizona while 1 of their own is the man ever poised behind your back, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin – both of them in tenuous reelection situations next year.

Another is Sen. Diane Feinstein of California who in a harsh but necessarily realistic assessment is here today, sort of, but might not be tomorrow. Cruel? Washington is a very cruel place.

But – but the fillibuster. Oh right there’s that.

To take up any bill to bring the debt ceiling to a vote requires 60 votes in the Senate. Only then can it be passed by a simple majority of 51 votes. The last time it was raised in 2021, Senate Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, making one of his usual surgical political calculations, waived the 60 vote requirement and the debt ceiling was raised with Democratic votes only at a time when Democrats controlled both houses.

Ask yourself, why would 9 Republicans vote yes so they could then vote no and lose? Makes no sense right? Right.

Because on this 9 of the 49 Senate Republicans have to be persuaded to yes and no more than 40 can vote no to get a debt ceiling increase of any kind passed by the Senate. Still, only 1 of them, McConnell, has the influence to make that happen if he chooses and is satisfied. So far he has been and is silent.

Right now 43 Republicans have declared they will oppose a vote on a debt ceiling without conditions to which they agree. So even if 5 Republicans join 213 Democrats to get a vote and then pass a clean debt ceiling bill or even one with lesser conditions in the House, it is, as they say in Washington, dead on arrival in the Senate unless 9 Republicans agree to join 48 Democrats and 3 independents to get to 60.

But at best there are only 7 Republicans who so far have not declared themselves on that one. So, another number, unlucky 7, which even if it could be added to theirs only gets Democrats to 58, 2 too short.

These then are the many, many, many numbers and equations bouncing around in the talks between the House majority, mind you a decidedly slim majority, and the White House with the filibuster flim flam bound Senate watching and waiting.

But they are not mere numbers on paper, they are not just an equation to be or that can be solved by math.

These numbers are incarnate, they are people – and people in this situation who are politiicans, who might very well not be able to get to the 2 most important numbers- 218 and 60 – no matter how they calculate.

Dauting, isn’t it?

-0-

* It is customary in writing style to spell out single digit numbers except for this writing the numerical figures have been used for consistency and emphasis.

The case of the death of Jordan Neely in a chokehold while on an F Train in the New York City subway has become a cause celebre as has the case of Christopher Penny, the man now charged with manslaughter in his death.

It is already reverberating in politics with potential to make serious damned if you do/damned if you don’t problems for Democrats wheras it is an easy call for Republicans aboard the train of just and justifiable deserts.

A story in the New York Times today (MAY 13, 2023) describes Neely’s presence on a list of the most severe cases of anti-social and/or mentally ill homeless people in New York City that is maintined and reviewed by city authorities weekly – weekly as in every week.

Actually, as the story explains, there are two lists, one of homless people like Neely living mostly in and on the subways and the other of homeless people living on the streets. Together in that city of 8 million people they contain fewer than 125 names betwen them.

If you did not know Jordan Neely, if Christopher Penny did not know him, if New York Mayor Eric Adams did not know him, the city knew him all too well.

Yes, the City of New York knew who Neely was. It knew of his more than 40 arrests, violent behaviour, the assault he made on a woman more than twice his age in a subway car when without provocation he smashed his fist into her face hard enough to break her nose and occipital bones. It knew notwithstanding as in that case for one, that again and again he had been released by its courts onto its streets and subways.

It knew of his many flights from hospitals and treatment facilities and who his family is, where they live in the city and that they had abandoned him as a problem for society in the form of the City of New York.

The Times artricle repeats the reports it and other news sources have provided of his purported talent as an immitator of the late pop star Michael Jackson, reporting that he “performed” Jackson’s “Moonwalk” dance for subway passengers.

But that is likely not quite so, not the way that happened. Much more likely if you have been on a subway is that he did not dance his dance for subway passengers but despite them. Much more likely is that he imposed his performances on them, a captive audience with nowhere to go on a train hurtling between subway stops or, worse, delayed between them (it happens).

Whether he announced- as so many unwanted subway “performers” have done now for decades before engaging in acrobatics on subway cars – whether he announced “It’s Showtime!!!” is irrelevant. It is entirely likely no one asked him to perform his dance, or hardly wanted it. He just did it and no doubt then begged for tips or, perhaps, pressed for them.

Note that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority which operates the subways has rules governing public busker performances. With prior approval the MTA permits them in stations at specific locations for specific periods of time. It does not allow them on its trains.

Did the system and its efforts to help Neely, as amply recorded in the accompanying Times story, fail him? Perhaps it can first be said his family failed him, failed him utterly, and is it just as true as not to say he in turn failed the system that gave him so many, many chances for rescue and recovery?

If a man wanders the countryside declaring himself the son of god could that be true? Anything can be – especially if it can’t be proved or disproved. Or, these days, could it be simply that he is off his meds? Today, that definitely can be proved and discernably so.

Whatever the facts of Neely’s demise and whether a jury of Manhattan residents (it will be hard if not impossible to find 12 who are not or have not been subway riders) finds a crime in those facts, there was ittle redemptive or redeemable in the husk of a man in the state into which he had fallen.

He should have been in an institution unless and until he could be restored to and maintained with sufficient mental balance. But more than four decades ago we as a society concluded, through our politicians and the laws they enacted, to shutter most long term facilities, the ones we colloquially called insane asylums, and reintroduce medicated mentally ill people into our communities on the theory they would be better cared for and do better themselves in society than in such places. Like others, both the States of New York and New Jersey did that.

If this event in the lives of Neely and Penny is the result, if the disturbingly sad story about a homeless man in San Diego, also told today in The Times, is the result then it was what? Then it was to be expected and so expectations have been met.

The next time someone on a subway in NYC announces, “It’s Showtime!!!” tell him no, no wants the show, they just want to get to their stops.

But, of course, doing that, doing that could get you killed, and that – THAT is what is really crazy.

There have already been hundreds of millions of words written and spoken about the next presidential election.

There will be, no kidding, there will be billions and billions and gazillions more on the subject.

This, however, will not add many.

That is because when all is said and written it comes down to this.

You have to know how to be president.

Right now, in all of the United States, among all its citizens who will be 35 years of age on Jan. 20, 2025 there is only one person who has that knowledge.

At a time when it was never more important to have that know-how, Joe Biden knows how to be president.

For all the billions of words to come, the only ones that matter are these.

Joe Biden knows how to be president – and he is very good at the job.

Never thought about this, but think about it.

If Adam was the first man and Eve was the first woman.

And if they had two sons, Caine and Abel, and Caine killed Abel.

And then if they had a third son, Seth.

Then?

Then, who was the second woman?

How, biblically, did the rest of us get here?

Was Seth a hermaphrodite?

Did he have intercourse with a sister, what sister?

Or, or his …?

Really? Oh,

OH! WOW!

Well, whatever the answer, probably not OK in a red state.

On Monday two county legislative bodies with jurisdiction in Tennessee will most likely appoint the two Black Tennessee Democratic legislators expelled by the willfull Tennessee White Party to fill the vacancies created by their expulsions.

The Tennessee governor, also a willfiull radical member of the White Party, will eventually set the date(s) for special elections in both expelled Democrats’ districts probably in a few months.

Once appointed to fill the vacancies the two expelled legislators will present themselves to the White Party Tennessee House, controlled by the White Party majority, to take their seats.

Best guess, the White Party majority will compound its execrable racism, intolerance for democracy, and downright plain stuidity by refusing to seat them.

Then?

Then there will be democracy in the streets.