It is Saturday night at the cottage. “Swing Jazz” is playing on my Echo, the floodlights illuminate the creek and I am cozy in the cottage. A load of dishes is in the dishwasher and I have spent the day, partially working, running a few errands. Every week I try to buy some canned goods for the food pantry at the church and bring them in on Sunday. That was one of today’s errands.
When I finish this, I will rehearse the readings for tomorrow as I am lector at Christ Church tomorrow. It all feels very hygge. [Pronounced hoo-ga; the Danish word for living a cozy life.] It seems the best time of all to be hygge, what with everything that is happening around us in dizzying array.
Honestly, right now, I am not sure who’s on first. The refugee ban seems to have been lifted with the ban on immigrants from the seven predominantly Muslim countries. Or is it? I am doing my best to keep up and it’s hard. Really hard…
I think President Trump hung up on the Australian Prime Minister. Mine eyes dazzle.
And then President Trump told Putin that sanctions remain until he leaves Ukraine which is not what I think Putin was thinking would happen. Putin did a few “provocative” actions in Ukraine this past week [thing what you can do with artillery] that ended badly for him. The pro-Russian rebels were rebuffed by the Ukrainians. And The Donald rebuked him.
Or perhaps it was Steve Bannon, who appears to be becoming the Lord Chancellor to King Donald. Time Magazine has a frightening portrait of the man on its cover. It is feared this is the man who is pulling the strings. Look here.
Apparently, per reports, Kelly, the Secretary of Homeland Security, had to remind Steve Bannon, he only takes orders from the President when Bannon was bossing Kelly around.
Oh, just gosh…
Kellyanne Conway, the most skillful swinger of truths encountered this side of Paradise, is being skewered everywhere as she justified the travel ban by referring to the “Bowling Green Massacre.” Well, a couple of men were arrested in Bowling Green for attempting to aid and abet terrorists but there was no “Bowling Green Massacre.” She is saying she misspoke one word and is being eviscerated by “haters.”
Must say, mine eyes dazzle.
The king of Executive Orders, our Donald, is now issuing one that will roll back Dodd-Frank, the regulations that were to save us from another meltdown like 2008. Carpe diem!
While most of me is horrified by the political spectacle around me, there is another part that is amused. In a gallows humor sort of way, which is not a good way. Most of the American public is not amused. President Trump’s approval ratings aren’t good.
Well, who approves of chaos and confusion and flirting with unconstitutionality?
Ethicists are appalled at the flimsiness of Trump’s separation from his business interests.
And all of this is hurting his business interests and those of Ivanka. Nordstrom’s has dropped the Ivanka Trump line. In an earlier post, I mentioned I was at Lord & Taylor on 5th Avenue and there was no one in the Ivanka Trump section. Last time I was there, there was no Ivanka Trump section to be found. Poof! Gone.
And, frankly, I have grown a little fond of Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner. It is rumored they weighed in with The Donald and prevented him from signing an Executive Order that would have stripped the LGBTQ community of rights they had received under the Obama Administration.
On the other hand, it is, I’m sure, not making Steve Bannon happy. Nor is it making happy the evangelicals who supported Trump despite his raunchiness.
Me? A gay man. I’m pleased. Woo! Saved for another day.
Truly, I’m just a little bit scared. And a little bit amused. And a whole lot unhappy.
So, now it is time to return to hygge. I’ll make myself a martini and finish reading “The Romanovs,” a six hundred plus page book outlining the rise and fall of the world’s longest ruling dynasty. That’s a saga and it didn’t end well, as we all know.
May all this end well.
Letter from the Vineyard 
Letter From Claverack 03/02/2017 From Saba to a Trump Speech…
March 3, 2017It has been about ten days since I’ve written; I just went back and looked. Last time, I was on Saba, writing when I wasn’t able to sleep. Tonight, I am back at my dining room table, floodlights on, looking out over the creek, having just returned from Coyote Flaco with Pierre, sharing chicken fajitas.
When I reached the cottage this afternoon, I felt I’d been away for a week, at least. Monday morning, I went down to DC for some meetings for the Miller Center on the Presidency and then to New York last night to have a wonderful dinner with my friends, David and Annette Fox. It’s a quarterly event; we gather at their marvelous UWS apartment, order Indian and catch up on our lives.
It is very hygge. As was the dinner party I gave last Friday night for Fayal Greene, her husband, David, Ginna and Don Moore, Lionel and Pierre. Leek soup, sautéed scallops in a brown butter sauce, and carrots in a lemony oil garlic sauce, with a baked polenta to die for, followed by a flourless chocolate cake provided by Ginna and Don, via David the baker.
It was an extraordinary evening.
And I, at least, need evenings like this to keep me sane in these extraordinary times.
On Tuesday evening, in Washington, after an early dinner with my friends Matthew and Anne, which followed drinks with my ex-partner and his now fiancé, I watched the address to Congress by our President, Donald Trump.
To the great relief of almost the entire world, he did not go off the rails and sounded presidential. It was, Tuesday night, all about the delivery. Wednesday morning people started to parse what he said. Even the conservative writers that I read, and I do read some, found a lot of flaws with the speech.
Short on specifics.
Fact checkers found a lot of fault, pointing out Trump claimed as victories some things which had been in play for a year at some corporations. Ford isn’t keeping production in the US because of Trump; they are pulling back on their Mexican plans because those plants would have built small cars and people aren’t buying them. They’re buying gas guzzlers because gas is cheapish again.
When talking with David and Annette, I said that if Trump had not held it together last night, his presidency would have begun to unravel. He would actually be President but, in reality, his claim to power would have begun collapsing. Lots of people on his side of the aisle are slightly unhinged by his behavior. McCain and Graham are frankly, I think, apoplectic.
And he held it together and while he should have been able to take a victory lap, Wednesday morning brought the revelation that Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who had said in confirmation meetings he had not met with any Russians in the run-up to the election, actually had two meetings with the Russian Ambassador, one in his office on Capitol Hill.
Republicans are excusing while Democrats and some Republicans are accusing.
This is a wild ride and I’ve never seen anything like it.
Sessions has since recused himself from all investigations regarding anything Russian but there are those on both sides of the aisle who smell blood in the water.
While we were having political meltdowns, Amazon’s vaulted cloud computing world went offline yesterday for 4 hours and 17 minutes because of a typo in a command. OOPS.
It’s a little scary. 150,000 websites were affected. Amazon is the king of cloud storage and that’s a big oops for the King. I would not have wanted to be the head of that division yesterday.
And, before Tuesday’s Trump speech, we had the foll der wall of the biggest Oscar mistake in history. First “La La Land” was announced as Best Picture but it really was “Moonlight.” Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway were humiliated and PwC, the accountants, were more than humiliated. They handed out a wrong envelope.
OOPS.
When it happened, I was safely in the arms of Morpheus, having strange dreams of Mike Bloomberg dating the pastor of my church, Mother Eileen.
Snap Inc. had a very successful opening on the market today; it was the biggest initial offering since Facebook and they have a rocky road to travel and they are a force to be reckoned with and it will be wonderful to see how it plays out. The next Facebook? Or the next troubled tech company, which is where Twitter is today.
It’s time for me to say goodnight.
By hygge. Regardless of your political persuasion, it will help us all get through.
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