It is Monday morning and I am riding an overcrowded train from Baltimore to New York after spending the weekend there visiting friends. At one point I thought I might end up sitting on the floor but found a seat at the very front of the train.
Outside ruined building pass; we are somewhere just north of Philadelphia. Exotic graffiti adorns them while the sun blasts down. Beyond the ruins lie bedraggled row houses that probably will someday be gentrified. What contrasts we have in this country.
Baltimore is in a resurgence, at least near the water, where my friends live. We dined on Saturday night at Peter’s Inn, a wonderfully, quirky little row house restaurant, rough around the edges with handwritten menus, food arriving in the order that the chef has prepared it which is not necessarily the way you ordered it. Good chill martinis and a nice little wine list, friendly people and that wonderful thing called “atmosphere” that has not been scrupulously concocted but which emerges from the quirkiness of the place and people.
It was a time of sitting around and visiting with Lionel and Pierre and my friend Allen Skarsgard, with whom I had some long philosophical conversations over the weekend. We had known each other in the long ago and faraway, reconnecting just enough that we can mark the present without dwelling in our past.
There was, of course, talk of the brutal politics of this election cycle. I don’t remember a question that was asked on MSNBC on Sunday morning but recall the response: it’s 2016, ANYTHING can happen.
So it seems.
As it seems all over the world. A far right candidate is deadlocked with his rival in Austria. If Herbert Norber of the right wins, it will be the first time a far right candidate will have won a European election since the end of Fascism, a warning shot across the bow of the world.
Troubling for Hillary are national polls, of which we have several a day it seems, that have her potentially losing to Trump. They have Bernie beating Trump by 10.8 points.
Predictions are that a “Brexit” from the European Union will spark a year long recession. The drive for a British exit from the European Union is, at least partially, being driven by anti-immigration and nationalistic feelings in the country.
Is this a bit like what the 1930’s felt like?
In the meantime, Emma Watson of “Harry Potter” fame and fortune is playing Belle in a live action version of “Beauty and the Beast.” Somehow that seems comforting to me this morning.
In Syria, IS has claimed the responsibility for killing scores in that poor, broken country in areas considered Assad strongholds. A suicide bomber killed many Army recruits in Aden, Yemen.
And a drone strike killed the leader of the Taliban, Mullah Mansour, who opposed peace talks. His death was confirmed by Obama, who will be the first sitting President to visit Hiroshima, struck by the US with an atomic bomb in !945, a move which forced the Japanese to move to surrender. He has been in Viet Nam, where he lifted a fifty year old arms embargo, a move to help counter the rise of China in the South China Sea.
Moves and counter moves, the world is in play. It always has been. It just took longer in other times for the moves to be made and to feel their repercussions. Now it’s almost instantaneous.
Letter from the Vineyard 
Letter From Claverack 01 29 2017 The Game is afoot…
January 30, 2017It is a little past seven at the cottage; the weekend is winding down, “Swing Jazz” is the Amazon music station playing. Marcel, Lionel and Pierre’s poodle, is situated comfortably on the couch, looking at the door to see when they will return, which will be in a few days. The flood lights illuminate the creek and I am at the freshly polished dining room table, writing.
It’s the end of a good weekend, mostly very “hygge.” [Pronounced hoo-ga, it’s Danish for living a cozy life.] And it’s been a cozy weekend. Young Nick has returned from his walkabout and came over Friday afternoon and helped me prepare for what turned out to be a most excellent dinner party.
Saturday was cleaning up and being domestic, a solo lunch at the Dot, dinner with Lionel and Pierre at their house, home to sleep.
But all the hygge in my life has been overshadowed and squeezed by the events in the world around me. President Trump has been issuing Executive Orders to his heart’s content. They feel a bit like Imperial Edicts. Do this. Ban that. It’s been stunning. And equally stunning is the response of the American public.
When he banned individuals from seven countries, all primarily Muslim, from entering the United States, hordes of lawyers went to airports and became filing appeals, sitting on the floor in the terminals, laptops plugged into whatever outlet could be found.
It made me proud.
At those same airports, crowds appeared. At JFK, several New York Congressmen were there, attempting to help. One quarantined gentleman was an Iraqi citizen who was on his way to the US because he had been an interpreter for our soldiers and his life was in danger. Thankfully, he was released.
People with green cards are in limbo, depending on the airport they flew into. Federal Judges are ordering limits on Trump’s ruling and some officials are ignoring them.
Excuse me, what? What?
Heads are spinning.
Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief political operative, has been given a seat on the National Security Council while the Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staffs and the Director of National Intelligence have been demoted.
What? What?
In the morning now, I get up, make my coffee and call my Senators and my Representative in Congress and tomorrow I don’t know what issue to focus on. There are so many.
A relative sent me a clip of a State of the Union Address given by Bill Clinton, in which he talked about the dangers of illegal immigration. The headline before the clip was “The hypocrisy of liberals!”
Well, really, hypocrisy? Take a look at this article. Mike Pence opposed what Trump has done and now is praising it. Is that not hypocrisy? Political opportunism?
Immigration has been an issue ever since we stopped accepting just about everybody. Don’t know about you, but I’m here, an American citizen, because my great grandparents came over from Germany and settled in Minnesota. Back then, almost everyone was taken in. [Though my great grandparents arrived in First Class so they didn’t have to go through the indignities of Ellis Island.]
Then it changed and immigration has been an issue ever since. Okay, I get that. And what President Trump has done is unprecedented. His list of excluded countries does not include Saudi Arabia from which came many of the 9/11 hijackers. It does not exclude Pakistan, one of whose citizens was part of the Riverside massacre. It’s a bit bewildering. The banned countries have barely contributed to the numbers who have died from terrorist acts in the US.
And, amazingly, it appears the list was compiled during the Obama Administration but never activated. Boggles the mind.
Not even during Viet Nam was I this agitated. Agitated does not describe my mood when I am not working very hard at hygge.
In an article I scanned two days ago, it speculated that Trump may be to Millennials what Viet Nam was to my generation, a catalytic event.
You see, there is a movement to stop abortions. There is a generation of young women who have grown up believing they had the right of choice. Now some people want to take that it away from them. No, not happy. And abortions have been decreasing and in 2014 were the lowest since 1973.
There are young people who are in college whose friends are in limbo because they come from one of the banned countries and went home over winter break and may not be able to come back despite having valid visas.
And there are people like me, a Baby Boomer grown old, who is incensed in a way I have not been for god alone knows how many years. The protests will not stop. They will not go away. The country is fired up in a way that hasn’t been seen since Viet Nam.
Wow! The games have begun.
To be completely clear, I am one of the founders of Blue DOT [Democracy Opposing Trump] Hudson Indivisible. It is my time of being an activist. This Presidency must be opposed. It is divisive. It is immoral. It has in its first week demonstrated a willingness to flaunt conventional order.
Tomorrow I am calling the office of John McCain and Lindsey Graham who are opposing Trump to thank them for their efforts. We are all in for a rocky ride and maybe this was a good thing to happen.
The Left is galvanized the way the Right was when Obama was elected and already seems, and I hope it continues, to be more emphatic than the Tea Party movement.
The game is afoot…
Tags:Amanzon, Baby Boomers, Bill Clinton, Blue DOT Hudson, Hygee, immigration, Lionel White, Mike Pence, Muslim ban, Obama, Pierre Font, President Trump, Saudi Arabia, Steve Bannon, Tea Party, The game is afoot, Viet Nam, Young Nick
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