The cold that has held the Midwest throttled for the last two days is heading east and will be with us tomorrow.
It is time to pull out the long underwear and the heavy sweaters and to be concerned that pipes don’t freeze.
This will be a short letter as I have spent the day in languid pursuits, a long leisurely lunch with my friend Larry Divney at his favorite place, Ca’Mea, the best northern Italian north of New York.
We met so I could return to him the various containers in which he had brought wine to Christmas celebrations, part of the best Christmases I have ever had. He and Alicia, his wife, are very special people and fill a special place in my life. We celebrated both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day together and it will remain with me as two of the best Holidays of my life.
The market is volatile. The world is volatile. The New Year did not bring some magical changing of the tenure of the times. The troubles of the old year have blended into the New Year and we continue on.
The Republicans have taken control of both the Congress and the Senate and so I suspect we will have a very rocky couple of years while they do their best to demonstrate they can govern as opposed to being the party of “No!”
I grew up Republican, one of those good cloth coated Republicans that Nixon described in his famous “Checkers” speech, back when we actually believed in Nixon. My parents did. They were one of the few people in our neighborhood who supported Nixon when he ran against John Kennedy in that long ago, much studied election.
But I haven’t been able to recognize the Republicans in the last couple of decades. They seem so far away from the party I grew up. Now they have the entire Congress and it will be interesting to see if they can govern and govern with some sense of responsibility, which I haven’t felt they’ve had for quite some time.
Boehner is once again the majority leader in the Congress but not without some pushback within his own party.
The Republicans seem fractured. They are trying to hold it together but I’m not sure they can. It will be interesting to watch. I would like to see them manage but I’m not sure they can.
So, on this first day of the new Congress, I hold my breath and wait to see what occurs.
In the meantime, I must head for bed as I go back to the city for the first time in three weeks to begin facing the challenges of the year.
Letter from the Vineyard 
Letter From New York 01 07 15 Je Suis Charlie
January 7, 2015The night was bitter cold as the frigid weather from the Midwest began to barrel into the Northeast. Outside the cottage, the wind blew and you could hear the wind swooshing through the barren branches of the trees. It was a good night to be snuggled in the cottage, watching episodes of Netflix’s Marco Polo series.
When I woke this morning, I did, as I usually do, check what emails have come in while having my first cup of coffee. There was one from CNN Breaking News that announced that three masked men had entered the offices of France’s satiric magazine, Charlie Hebdo, and killed ten. The number would later rise to twelve, including two policemen.
Eleven more staff were wounded, four seriously.
It was an operation carried out with military precision, happening on the one day a week that all staff would be at the office for the weekly staff meeting. As I write this, the three killers are still on the loose. America and the UK have pledged assistance. It is presumed the masked men were Islamic radicals offended by Charlie Hebdo’s unrelenting satire of Islamic Radicalism.
While constantly shocked by mass killings on our home ground, we are unaccustomed to stories like this from Paris, which has not suffered an attack like this since 1961.
Fear of all kinds walks the streets and boulevards of the City of Light tonight. Parisians are afraid. French Muslims are afraid; worried that this will accelerate the anti-Muslim sentiment sweeping secular France and give more wind to the sails of the Far Right.
Interestingly enough, even as anti-Muslim sentiment rises so has anti-Semitism. Not just in France but across Europe.
Thousands gathered in Germany to protest the presence of Muslims within that country’s borders. The Cathedral in Cologne turned off its lights in protest of the protest.
There will be a national day of mourning in France tomorrow and, for a while, at least, the shock of what has happened will hold the country together. Thousands have gathered in Paris to hold their pens in the air as a sign of solidarity with the dead journalists. The same is happening in Trafalgar Square in London.
Everywhere, people are holding signs that pronounce: Je Suis Charlie. I am Charlie.
Charlie Hebdo was raucous, outrageous and often controversial. It was firebombed three years ago after it published a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed, a thing forbidden in Islam. So, today, there was no sign that let the attackers know which offices belonged to Charlie Hebdo. They forced that out of a woman at gunpoint.
Among those who were killed was Stephane Charbonnier “Charb”, the editor, one of two who had a police officer assigned to him after previous death threats. Also dead is an eighty-year-old cartoonist, Georges Wolinski, considered one of the world’s great cartoonists and one with a wicked sense of humor.
Really, an eighty year old?
While what Charlie Hebdo does is often outrageous and perhaps a bit profane, it exists in a country where free press and free speech are constitutional rights. And that is why so many are carrying signs that say Je Suis Charlie. I am Charlie.
They are supporting the right to free speech, not just in France but around the world where there are those, including these three masked men, who would extinguish that right. They pronounced themselves Al Qaeda when they stormed the building.
They wanted to turn out the lights at one establishment in hopes it would cause fear in others – as it probably will – but against that are the thousands standing in the cold in London and Paris and other places saying, Je Suis Charlie.
Je Suis Charlie.
Tags: Charb, Charlie Hebdo, Georges Wolinski, Je Suis Charlie, Mathew Tombers, Paris, Stephane Charbonnier
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