Letter From New York 04 27 2016

Twilight has passed and I am curled up with the laptop and a martini, allowing the day to begin to slip away.  It was not a bad day at all; quite the contrary.  My rambunctious students were less so today after I told them that if they were rambunctious today,  I was going to ask them to leave.  They knew when they had arrived they had gone a little over the top on Monday and were quite subdued as they arrived, giving me looks to see how annoyed I might be with them.

It was actually a bit amusing.

After office hours, I went to the gym and then to an early dinner at Coyote Flaco, a small Mexican restaurant not far from the cottage.  At home, there were lots of things to gather as I am going down to New York City tomorrow for an Odyssey meeting and a dinner at which Odyssey has purchased a table, all in support of a film they have made on “moral injury.”

It is beginning to shape up that I am going for at least a couple of weeks to help my friends who own the Edgartown Bookstore on Martha’s Vineyard.  Might be two weeks or a month but will be good for me to do that and I think they need the help in the time before college students start showing up looking for summer jobs so it looks like just before Memorial Day to sometime in June, with a trip down to New York to see my brother and sister-in-law when they are there to celebrate their wedding anniversary in between, I will be on the Vineyard, the place my friend Jeffrey calls “the land of off.”

It was a good day yesterday for Donald Trump, who swept all five races and for Hillary, who triumphed in four of the five.

The Donald said that Hillary was playing “the woman card” and that if she weren’t a woman she wouldn’t be getting five percent of the vote.  Like Hillary or not, she does have some pretty good credentials.

The Donald outlined his foreign policy directions today, carrying forward his America First! theme into foreign policy.  He criticized Obama for not standing with our allies and then went on to diss them himself.  Some thought it rambling and incoherent, others thought it a great step to the middle.  What I heard of it sounded like a big muddle.

Ted Cruz has chosen Carly Fiorina as his running mate.  Wait, don’t you have to be nominated before you announce your running mate?  Or is that just old politics? Regardless, it is not a pretty thought from where I sit.  Cruz is as concerning to me as Trump.

It was not a good day for Dennis Hastert, former Speaker of the House, who was sentenced to fifteen months in prison for a bank crime, committed while he was paying off a young man he had sexually abused.  Apparently there were five of them who Hastert abused, all distraught, now middle-aged men, with one of them dead.  The man he was paying off has now sued for the remainder of the money. 

The Saudis, in an overdue awakening, are working to get beyond oil and to diversify so that when, someday, the oil runs out — and it will — they won’t drift back into a medieval state.   It will be a hard road to success.  The Saudi kingdom is not as open or as business friendly as the United Arab Emirates, who saw the future long ago.

Elon Musk wants to land an unmanned craft on Mars as early as 2018 and I say: go for it!

Salah Abdeslam, the surviving member of the team that perpetrated the Paris attacks last year, is back in Paris.  His lawyers have described him as a “little jerk” who is “falling apart” in jail and is ready to cooperate.

The evening is fading.  My martini is gone and I am ready for sleep, grateful for the day and the day that is, I hope, coming.  Life is an interesting mystery.

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