I was watching Mr. Deeds Goes to Town the other day.

Please don’t confuse it with Adam Sandler’s Mr. Deeds (2002), which is a perfectly enjoyable film in its own right, but isn’t in the same league as the original. And let’s draw a curtain over the dreadful 1969 television series starring Monty Markham.

I’m talking about Frank Capra’s 1936 classic, starring Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck.

I chose it because I needed something to ease my reentry into the United States—a vision of America I still recognized. An America of decency, optimism, and common sense. Not the version currently being narrated by a news cycle trapped in a death spiral and relentlessly cultivated by the Potentate of Perpetual Prevarication.

If you have never seen the movie, you can find it on Prime. Here is a brief synopsis: Longfellow Deeds, played to perfection by Gary Cooper, is a small-town tuba player and greeting-card poet who unexpectedly inherits a fortune and moves to New York City. There, he finds himself surrounded by opportunists, social climbers, and cynical reporters eager to exploit his naïveté. As Deeds struggles to navigate wealth, power, and public scrutiny, he ultimately proves that common sense, kindness, and integrity can be more powerful than money or status.

Yes, Virginia, in this vision of America, driven through the lens of the Great Depression, common sense, integrity, and kindness defeat wealth and power. A concept not really embraced in the dystopian reality where celebrities are famous for being famous and where, to my chagrin and our collective shame, we currently reside.

Gary Cooper was famous for making decency look effortless. As Irving Berlin put it, everyone was “trying hard to look like Gary Cooper (super duper).”

Ninety years later, America could use a few more people trying. (Tom Hanks, keep up the good work.)

One of the lines in the movie that really sent me down a rabbit hole about how different our current reality is from that depicted in the film is when Deeds is told that he has inherited $20 million and is now “one of the richest men in America.”

By our standards, that is not a lot of money. It is a single-week Mega Millions lottery win.

John D. Rockefeller, whose fortune at the time was approximately $1.5 billion, controlled wealth equal to roughly 1.5% of America’s GDP.

The richest man in America, let alone the world, is Elon Musk. And he makes John D. look like a piker, with a fortune of over $800 billion, or roughly 3% of GDP. Not being a socialist, I can still say that is a scary amount of money and economic power for a single person to control.

But there is a bigger difference between the richest man in America then and now. By the time John D. died in 1937, he had given away nearly one-third of his total wealth to charities that supported education, medicine, science, and public health.

Elon Musk, by any standard, has given far less of his fortune. To date, the value of his charitable donations is generously estimated at $7 billion, or less than one percent of his fortune. But the actual number is much less because, in many cases, he has donated Tesla stock that he retains control of. In actual cash, he has given approximately $620 million.

What a guy. He is making Scrooge McDuck look generous.

What Elon Musk gives to charity is up to him. I don’t think we should force him to give a dime of his fortune to charity. But I think it is illustrative of what he is actually paying in income tax. His donation of stock to foundations allows him to eliminate capital gains taxes. Private donations lower that bill even more.

In other words, he no longer needs to give money to charity because he can avoid taxes by giving the appearance of a donation while still building his own personal fortune. Not something the average citizen can do.

What it means, in technicolor, is that the wealthiest Americans—those who have used the most of our resources—are asking those of us in the middle class not only to finance the running of our government, but also their extravagant and self-indulgent lifestyles.

Clearly, there is something wrong with our tax code. We are in this together, and we all need to pay our fair share.

Longfellow Deeds would have. John D. Rockefeller did.

So what is the solution? Let me throw out a couple of ideas and see if they stick.

Minimum Tax: Regardless of your deductions, you must pay a minimum tax on your income. You can use as many fancy, rich-person tax dodges as you like (I’m talking about you, Baron von Bluster), but you still pay some income tax.

The problem with this method is that the wealthy can afford to be paid in stocks and other instruments that don’t strictly count as income. They can then go to the bank and use those assets as collateral to obtain cash, which they can use to finance the construction of gold statues of themselves on golf courses.

Progressive Tax with No Deductions: Our current tax code is riddled with carve-outs that favor the wealthy. A Republican construct based on the canard known as “trickle-down economics,” which, according to its creator, was utter nonsense but sounded good to the Republican base.

Get rid of all deductions. You pay a graduated percentage of your income based on prosperity, period. This has the added benefit of simplifying tax returns and eliminating a large percentage of IRS bureaucracy.

Wealth Tax: If your net worth is more than $10 million, you pay a percentage of your net worth in taxes. A tax like this would raise approximately $3 trillion a year. This would completely eliminate the current annual deficit and contribute $1.5 trillion to debt reduction.

The main criticism of this plan is that it would force wealthy individuals to flee the country. While I am tempted to say, “See ya,” a simple way of preventing this would be to add a clause stating that if you spend more than 30 days per year in the United States, you will be taxed as a citizen.

Frank Capra’s America was hardly perfect, but it possessed a radical notion that now seems almost revolutionary: the rich owed something to the society that made them rich. Longfellow Deeds understood it instinctively. Rockefeller eventually learned it. Today’s billionaire class often appears convinced that society owes them a thank-you note for paying taxes at all. Perhaps that is why a black-and-white movie from 1936 feels more modern than the headlines of 2026. One world celebrated decency and regarded greed with suspicion. The other celebrates greed and regards decency as a branding strategy. Given the choice, I’ll take Mandrake Falls every time.

I was watching Mr. Deeds Goes to Town the other day.

Please don’t confuse it with Adam Sandler’s Mr. Deeds (2002), which is a perfectly enjoyable film in its own right, but isn’t in the same league as the original. And let’s draw a curtain over the dreadful 1969 television series starring Monty Markham.

I’m talking about Frank Capra’s 1936 classic, starring Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck.

I chose it because I needed something to ease my reentry into the United States—a vision of America I still recognized. An America of decency, optimism, and common sense. Not the version currently being narrated by a news cycle trapped in a death spiral and relentlessly cultivated by the Potentate of Perpetual Prevarication.

If you have never seen the movie, you can find it on Prime. Here is a brief synopsis: Longfellow Deeds, played to perfection by Gary Cooper, is a small-town tuba player and greeting-card poet who unexpectedly inherits a fortune and moves to New York City. There, he finds himself surrounded by opportunists, social climbers, and cynical reporters eager to exploit his naïveté. As Deeds struggles to navigate wealth, power, and public scrutiny, he ultimately proves that common sense, kindness, and integrity can be more powerful than money or status.

Yes, Virginia, in this vision of America, driven through the lens of the Great Depression, common sense, integrity, and kindness defeat wealth and power. A concept not really embraced in our current reality, where celebrities are famous for being famous, influencers are famous for being influencers, and actual accomplishment is often treated like an unfortunate character flaw.

Gary Cooper was famous for making decency look effortless. As Irving Berlin put it, everyone was “trying hard to look like Gary Cooper (super duper).”

Ninety years later, America could use a few more people trying. (Tom Hanks, keep up the good work. At the moment you’re carrying an alarming percentage of the nation’s decency portfolio.)

One of the lines in the movie that really sent me down a rabbit hole about how different our current reality is from that depicted in the film is when Deeds is told that he has inherited $20 million and is now “one of the richest men in America.”

By our standards, that is not a lot of money. Today it is roughly a single-week Mega Millions jackpot or about three hours of volatility in Elon Musk’s net worth.

John D. Rockefeller, whose fortune at the time was approximately $1.5 billion, controlled wealth equal to roughly 1.5% of America’s GDP.

The richest man in America, let alone the world, is Elon Musk. And he makes John D. look like a piker, with a fortune of over $800 billion, or roughly 3% of GDP. Not being a socialist, I can still say that is a scary amount of money and economic power for a single person to control.

But there is a bigger difference between the richest man in America then and now. By the time John D. died in 1937, he had given away nearly one-third of his total wealth to charities that supported education, medicine, science, and public health.

Elon Musk, by any standard, has given far less of his fortune. To date, the value of his charitable donations is generously estimated at $7 billion, or less than one percent of his fortune. But the actual number is much less because, in many cases, he has donated Tesla stock that he retains control of. In actual cash, he has given approximately $620 million or less than .1% of his net worth.

What a guy. He is making Scrooge McDuck look like Andrew Carnegie and Mother Teresa rolled into one.

What Elon Musk gives to charity is up to him. I don’t think we should force him to give a dime of his fortune to charity. But I think it is illustrative of what he is actually paying in income tax. His donation of stock to foundations allows him to eliminate capital gains taxes. Private donations lower that bill even more.

In other words, he no longer needs to give money to charity because he can avoid taxes by giving the appearance of a donation while still building his own personal fortune. Not something the average citizen can do.

What it means, in technicolor, is that the wealthiest Americans—those who have used the most of our resources—are asking those of us in the middle class not only to finance the running of our government, but also their extravagant and self-indulgent lifestyles.

Clearly, there is something wrong with our tax code. We are in this together, and we all need to pay our fair share.

Longfellow Deeds would have. John D. Rockefeller did.

So, what is the solution? Let me throw out a couple of ideas and see if they stick.

Minimum Tax: Regardless of your deductions, you must pay a minimum tax on your income. You can use as many fancy, rich-person tax dodges as you like (I’m looking in your direction, Baron von Bluster), but eventually you must write at least one check to the government that doesn’t bounce off a Cayman Islands shell company.

The problem with this method is that the wealthy can afford to be paid in stocks and other instruments that don’t strictly count as income. They can then borrow against those assets and use the cash to finance increasingly ambitious monuments to themselves, whether those monuments take the form of gold statues, vanity space projects, or social-media platforms purchased at prices normally associated with small nations.

Progressive Tax with No Deductions: Our current tax code is riddled with carve-outs that favor the wealthy. A Republican construct based on the canard known as “trickle-down economics,” which, according to its creator, was utter bullshit but sounded good to the Republican base.

Get rid of all deductions. You pay a graduated percentage of your income based on prosperity, period. This has the added benefit of simplifying tax returns and eliminating a large percentage of IRS bureaucracy.

Wealth Tax: If your net worth is more than $10 million, you pay 5% of your net worth in taxes. A tax like this would raise approximately $3 trillion a year. This would completely eliminate the current annual deficit and contribute $1.5 trillion to debt reduction.

The main criticism of this plan is that it would cause wealthy individuals to flee the country, a threat that is issued with such regularity that one would think private jets are idling continuously on runways awaiting the signal.

While I am tempted to say, “See ya,” a simple way of preventing this would be to add a clause stating that if you spend more than 30 days per year in the United States, you will be taxed as a citizen.

Frank Capra’s America was hardly perfect, but it possessed a radical notion that now seems almost revolutionary: the rich owed something to the society that made them rich. Longfellow Deeds understood it instinctively. Rockefeller eventually learned it. Today’s billionaire class often appears convinced that society owes them a thank-you note for paying taxes at all. Perhaps that is why a black-and-white movie from 1936 feels more modern than the headlines of 2026.

One world celebrated decency and regarded greed with suspicion. The other celebrates greed and regards decency as a branding strategy.

Given the choice, I’ll take Mandrake Falls every time.

Six years ago today I returned to the United States after being marooned in Brazil because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

It was a hell of a trip. A cab from Rio to São Paulo. A masked plane ride from São Paulo to Houston and then Houston to Newark. Every cough sounded like a death sentence audition. Every surface felt radioactive. But underneath the fear was relief — relief that I was going home to a country that was still recognizable. A place where I spoke the language, trusted the doctors, and believed the adults were at least pretending to be in charge.

I remember the applause when the plane landed and the tears running down my cheeks.

I remember my much, much younger sister showing up masked at my doorstep with a care package like a suburban pandemic resistance fighter.

I remember Rosie first ignoring me out of principle and then exploding into hysterical dog joy five minutes later.

I remember how good it felt to come home. America still felt like home then.

Today, I am once again leaving Brazil to return to the United States.

Like six years ago, I am sad to leave because Elaine is staying here. But this time, going back no longer carries the same sense of comfort or safety. To be blunt, America now feels less like a country and more like a second level reality show where the winner in the octagon wins the nuclear codes and a drone contract.

The country I loved has become a spray-tanned tribute band version of itself — louder, meaner, greedier, and somehow deeply impressed with its own mediocrity. We are governed by a man whose relationship with truth resembles Tommy Flannagan, Jon Lovitz character on SNL.

We used to admire people who worked hard, raised families, built communities, and quietly carried the country on their backs. Now we idolize hedge fund sociopaths, crypto grifters, and billionaires who cosplay as populists while flying private jets to explain why school lunches are the real fiscal problem.

We used to believe in science. Bell Labs. NASA. The Mayo Clinic. Real institutions staffed by people who actually read books voluntarily. Now public health policy gets workshopped somewhere between a podcast ad for beef liver supplements and a YouTube comment section written entirely in capital letters.

We used to believe in due process and the rule of law — not prosecuting people because they bruised the ego of an overripe authoritarian who thinks the Constitution is a loyalty pledge written specifically for him. The Attorney General was supposed to serve the country, not function as the President’s personal crisis-management intern.

We once understood that war was a last resort. Something entered into soberly and reluctantly. Not because an aging narcissist wanted better poll numbers, cable news applause, or the geopolitical equivalent of jangling keys in front of voters.

We used to aspire to be the shining city on the hill.

Now half the country seems content being the comments section underneath it.

So yes, I may cry when I land tomorrow. But not out of gratitude for returning home.

I will cry for the country we lost somewhere between the lies, the algorithms, the worship of wealth, and the collective decision to hand the car keys to the loudest idiot in the parking lot.

This week the Justice Department opened a criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll, the woman who beat the Grifter-in-Chief twice in a court of law.

Let’s be precise about what that means.

A jury of his peers — Americans, presumably some of whom voted for him (juries drawn from the entire Southern District of New York which includes counties that are deep red) — found that this man sexually abused her. Another jury, in separate proceedings, awarded her $83 million in damages for the defamation she suffered when he opened his mouth, as he always does, to make himself the victim.

His high-priced legal cavalry charged the hill and lost. Appeals went nowhere. He is 0–4.

The courts, functioning as designed, said: guilty.

Now prosecutors are examining whether Carroll committed perjury when, in a 2022 deposition, she said no one else was paying her legal fees — a question that arose after it was revealed a nonprofit connected to billionaire Reid Hoffman had covered some of her costs.

(The irony here is the Abuser-in-Chief’s legal bills were handled by donors, not him.)

But that’s his excuse and he is sticking to it. This is the fig leaf. The Emperor of Mar-a-Lago doesn’t need a good reason — he just needs a reason. Any reason. A reason thin enough to fit under a courtroom door to muddy the water and keep him from taking responsibility for his own despicable behavior.

The Carroll probe joins Donnie’s Revenge of the Turd Tour, which already includes multiple attempts to prosecute former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

Comey was indicted on charges of making a false statement to Congress and obstruction. A judge eventually dismissed those cases, scolding the Justice Department for a “disturbing pattern of profound investigative missteps” and potential prosecutorial misconduct.

Letitia James, who had the audacity to sue the Debt-Ridden Don and win, was indicted, re-investigated, dismissed, and indicted again. Two federal grand juries and a federal judge threw out the charges, yet the department reportedly pressed on.

Grand juries, to be clear, indict ham sandwiches.

When even a grand jury looks at your case and says no, you have not merely lost — you have achieved something special. You have assembled a prosecution so bereft of merit that citizens, average citizens dragged in off the street, looked at it and said: we won’t put our names on this.

This is about the oldest impulse in the authoritarian playbook: using the machinery of the state to punish your enemies, reward your loyalists, and remind everyone else what happens when they get in your way.

Where the attorney general’s job title should technically read:

Personal Counsel to the Grievance.

Calling it a “revenge tour” undersells the structural problem. Revenge is personal. What’s happening here is institutional.

The Justice Department — an agency founded on the radical notion that no person is above the law — has been converted, in the span of a few months, into a billing department for scores that needed settling.

Carroll. Comey. James. Others in the queue. The Southern Poverty Law Center. Democratic lawmakers.

The list has the rhythm of a grudge list, not a docket.

And lest we focus only on what the Justice Department is doing to his enemies, let’s spare a moment for what it’s doing for his friends.

Earlier this month, the department announced a $1.776 billion fund — drawn directly from public coffers — to compensate Trump loyalists deemed victims of “weaponization.”

The money flows through a commission appointed by his own attorney general, with recipient names and payout amounts deliberately hidden from public view.

No specific recipients have been named yet, but the intended audience is obvious: the January 6th rioters, most of whom the Pardoner-in-Chief had already sprung on day one.

Capitol Police officers who were beaten during the assault have filed suit. The Treasury Department’s own top lawyer resigned in protest.

The lawsuit that generated this windfall — a $10 billion action filed by Trump against his own IRS — was filed months past the statute of limitations and described by the IRS’s own lawyers as one that should have been tossed immediately.

To recap:

Prosecute the woman who beat him in court.
Cut checks to the mob that stormed the Capitol for him.

Punishment for enemies. Payday for loyalists.

The two-tiered justice system, now with a budget line.

This is how banana republics are created.

Not dramatic. Not cinematic.

Just: a bureaucracy pointed at enemies instead of criminals.

The Tangerine Tyrant has done us the unintentional favor of clarifying something important.

Our republic was founded on the concept that those we elect were men of good will and strong character. Our founders did not anticipate us electing a convicted felon who thinks morals are a type of mushroom.

He has taught us rules don’t protect us.

Laws do.

For decades, the independence of the Justice Department from direct presidential control rested on norms, traditions, and a gentleman’s agreement that presidents would behave like presidents and not like mob bosses with nuclear codes.

The Norm-Shredder taught us that norms are tissue paper.

He taught us that a determined bad actor can do extraordinary damage before anyone finds a statute to stop him.

We need laws. Not rules.

Here are a few places to start:

Prohibit direct presidential communication with DOJ prosecutors on specific cases

Right now, nothing formally stops a president from calling his attorney general and saying: “I want that woman investigated.”

There is a memo. There are norms.

Memos are not laws. Norms are for people who respect them.

A statute criminalizing direct presidential interference in specific prosecutorial decisions would do what the memo cannot: create consequences.

Require Senate-confirmed U.S. Attorneys to sign off on investigations involving political adversaries

The cases against Carroll, Comey, and James all originated in circumstances where the subjects had direct, documented legal or political conflict with the man in the Oval Office.

That conflict of interest should trigger mandatory independent review before a single subpoena gets issued.

Create an Office of Special Prosecutor empowered to challenge retaliatory prosecutions

Right now, the accused must mount that defense themselves, at enormous personal and financial cost.

The Grifter-in-Chief is betting that the process is the punishment — that even failed prosecutions drain the targets of money, time, and dignity.

An independent watchdog with the power to intervene early changes that calculus.

Mandate disclosure when the president or his staff communicates with DOJ about ongoing matters

Sunlight is still the best disinfectant.

If the Acting Attorney General gets a call from the West Wing about E. Jean Carroll, America should know about it — not in a leak, but in a filing.

None of this is complicated. None of it is radical.

All of it is, compared to what we’ve tolerated, embarrassingly overdue.

The courts have been doing their job — throwing out indictments, scolding prosecutors, upholding jury verdicts.

But the courts are downstream and increasingly MAGA-stacked. By the time a case reaches them, the damage is done.

Carroll is 82 years old and being dragged back into the legal system by the man a jury found had assaulted her.

Letitia James has been indicted twice for what amounts to the crime of doing her job well.

Comey spent a year as a criminal defendant before a judge ended it.

What protects the next Carroll?

The next Comey?

Us?

Not rules.
Not norms.
Not the good intentions of whoever happens to be sitting in the big chair.

Laws.

Passed by Congress. Signed into statute. Enforceable in court.

The only things that hold when the man at the top decides the rules don’t apply to him.

As Maya Angelou warned:

“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”

My codicil to her advice would be:

“And then do something about it.”

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Jon Stewart once described Chuck Schumer as a “human flat tire.”

Seth Meyers described Mike Johnson as “the human embodiment of a forwarded church email.”

An internet wit described John Thune as “having the energy of a man explaining ethanol subsidies at a Marriott bar.”

Earlier this year, just before Whosit’s State of the Union address, Hakeem Jeffries urged Democrats to give him the silent treatment. Stephen Colbert responded:

“For Democrats who did attend, Hakeem Jeffries urged members not to make a scene, an approach he dubbed ‘silent defiance,’ which I believe is a bold rebrand of doing jack squat.”

Great jokes, I guess. But like a lot of humor, they point to something darker: the current leadership of both parties has failed us in nearly every possible way.

Not convinced? Okay. To refresh your memory, here is an abbreviated list of the things Congress has failed to do:

• Stop the ill-advised, poorly planned, badly executed war with Iran. Yes. That is their job. Congress has voted on the War Powers Act four times. And it has failed four times. That is a failure of leadership — not to mention backbone and several other vital body parts — in the face of a despot-wannabe president whose philosophy seems to be: shoot, aim, fire.

• Prevent Don the Destructor from tearing down part of the White House so he could build a $1 billion vulgarian ballroom — one he claimed political donations would fund (aka bribes), but now apparently being paid for by taxpayers.

• Hold the DOJ and the president accountable for failing to release the Epstein files as required by statute, then botching the release they did manage.

• Congress holds the purse strings, not the guy currently farting behind the Resolute Desk. Yet they allowed CheetoMan and his sidekick Muskboy to decimate the EPA, NASA, USAID, Veterans Affairs, and other agencies without reason, planning, or shame. This has led to more pollution, endless waits for veterans seeking treatment, and Musk becoming even richer, but also to between 500,000 and 1,000,000 deaths from starvation and disease. Oxfam estimates that by 2030, a child under five will die every 40 seconds as a direct result of these cuts — the first increase in under-five child mortality this century.

• Allow the baby-in-chief to run the executive branch without adult supervision. He has fired twenty-one inspectors general and replaced only eight. Those replacements have not exactly pledged to be stewards of the public trust so much as interns for the royal court.

• Fail to push back when the midnight tweeter used imaginary crises to overturn treaties approved by Congress.

Congress is supposed to be a coequal branch of government, not a retirement community with subpoena power. But under the current leadership it has become as useful as fact-checkers at a conspiracy convention.

Still not convinced?

Think of all the bills they have passed to help average Americans.

I’ll wait.

You probably will too.

Because other than the bill with the naming convention apparently created by a six-year-old who thinks gold filigree is the answer to every design problem, this Congress seems capable only of naming post offices and forwarding strongly worded fundraising emails.

And let’s not pretend no one is noticing. We all are. 90% of voters disapprove of the job Congress is doing. And those of us who are supposedly wiser because we have more wrinkles are the ones who disapprove most.

• 18–34: 12% approve
• 35–54: 12% approve
• 55+: 7% approve

By the way, and for shits and giggles, this is regardless of party.

• Republicans: 20% approve — down catastrophically from 63% in March 2025
• Independents: 11% approve — essentially flat and low all year
• Democrats: 3% approve — nearly matching the all-time record low of 2%

At this point, you may be thinking what every good boss I’ve ever had has said to me when I kindly and tactfully explained the problem with their latest, greatest, most innovative idea.

“Great Paul. You have identified the problem. Now what is the solution.”

Oh, now you want a solution? How dare you!

Okay. Let me try.

First, each party should pass a resolution that no one in a leadership role should be older than retirement age. This is not ageism. Well, maybe a little. But the world is changing too fast for people who still print MapQuest directions.

I mean really, to paraphrase Stephen Colbert, “Do we really want the republic run by the cast of Cocoon and the management team from a regional casino buffet?” Or give the board of The Villages subpoena power?

In an ideal world, the ballot box would constantly renew those serving us in Washington. Sadly, the Citizens United decision changed all that. The ruling held that government cannot restrict independent political spending by corporations, unions, and nonprofits because such spending is protected under the First Amendment as free speech.

We can debate later whether corporations should have the same free speech rights as humans, but money pouring into campaigns has tripled since then. Most of that money comes from corporations and billionaires who think democracy is a concierge service.

It means Congress no longer works for the people who elected them. Those people can’t afford the table minimum. They are too busy funding campaigns to care much about we the people. Without a constitutional amendment, we cannot fix campaign finance.

What we can do is limit entrenched power, increase accountability, and encourage citizen legislators by limiting members of Congress and the Senate to 12 years in office through a bipartisan bill. Not perfect, but still more realistic than expecting Congress to suddenly rediscover shame.

And can you imagine a member of Congress trying to explain to constituents why this is a bad idea? Would love to be there for that example of double talk. I assume it would involve a flag pin, three lobbyists, and someone explaining why twelve years is not enough time to get things done. Hey dude, haven’t you heard it’s a gig economy.

Yes, Naomi, this will certainly be challenged in the courts. In America, every good idea eventually is. But I believe it is likely to be upheld because strict constructionists Thomas and Scalia both authored opinions suggesting such a law would be constitutional.

Term limits are no longer a political reform. They are a defibrillator for a patient who has already written its own eulogy. Congress, in its current form, is not a coequal branch of government — it is a green room for lobbyists, a billionaire donor-funded daycare for the professionally shameless, and a monument to the proposition that mediocrity, if sufficiently funded, is eternal.

The Founders gave us a republic. We gave it back. We traded it, in fact, for a system so thoroughly marinated in corporate money and cowardice that it can no longer tell the difference between representing constituents and billing them. So yes, term limits. Or pitchforks. History, as it turns out, is not particularly picky.

It is storming here in Rio. Thunderstorms. Rain so heavy it is hard to see the end of the garden. The kind of storm that makes you want to roll over in bed, pull the covers over your head, and drift back to sleep.

A different kind of storm is raging in Washington.

A Category 5 hurricane of corruption, greed, and moral bankruptcy that feels unprecedented in modern American history, though depressingly familiar to anyone who has ever cracked open a history book about collapsing republics or banana republic strongmen with gold-plated bathroom fixtures. Different storms, same effect.

After reading the news about the Grifter-in-Chief establishing what amounts to a slush fund to reward supporters convicted of rioting, vandalizing the U.S. Capitol, assaulting police officers, and even seditious conspiracy — combined with reports of an IRS settlement that appears to shield him and his family from prosecution — who wouldn’t want to pull the proverbial covers over their head and pretend the Wi-Fi went out permanently?

The problem is that storms do not disappear because we close our eyes. Ask any Floridian who ignored a hurricane warning while standing outside in flip-flops grilling hot dogs.

As I mentioned in my Substack, Signs of the Apocalypse, the only positive thing Don the Con has done for us is expose the breathtaking fragility of our institutions and democracy. They were built on assumptions. Assumptions that the people who rose to the highest office in the land would possess at least a passing relationship with ethics, patriotism, or shame.

Oops.

The felonious one has demonstrated that not everyone who rises to power is decent, interested in the good of the republic, or even operating within shouting distance of sane.

Moving forward, if we want to avoid more mornings like this — or worse — we need to repair our institutions, conventions, and democracy before the country ends up run like a third-rate casino where the house always loses and somehow the owner still files for bankruptcy six times.

Over the next few “stacks,” I am going to present some thoughts on what needs to be fixed. It is not meant to be a definitive list. More like emergency duct tape for a constitutional system currently being held together with wishful thinking and Tony Robert’s lectures.

Getting back to yesterday’s “don’t want to get out of bed” moment: one of the first laws Congress must pass is that a president may not approve any settlement by the executive branch that benefits himself or his family in any way. Yes, apparently we now need laws that essentially say, “The President may not use the government like a family Venmo account and get out of jail free card from Monopoly.”

Let’s get a little nerdy.

In the wake of Richard Nixon’s corruption, Congress passed Section 7217, which made it illegal for political officials within the executive branch — including the President and Vice President — to request an audit or investigation of a specific taxpayer or interfere with an ongoing audit.

You know… back when Congress still occasionally responded to corruption with legislation instead of fundraising emails.

Here is the problem with the Trump situation: enforcement falls to the DOJ, currently headed by Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal attorney. Which is sort of like appointing your bartender to run Alcoholics Anonymous.

(Ken, can I have “conflict of interest” for $1,000, please?)

Normally, this would be flagged by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, but you already know the punchline. There is no meaningful independence when the watchdog answers to the same guy currently trying to turn the Justice Department into the legal version of a mall food court security team. Oh, and for the cherry on top of the sundae, there is no inspector general because spray tan guy fired them all.

The new law must be specific. Any violation should be handled by a special prosecutor appointed by Congress, with investigative authority fully independent of the executive branch.

Now, you may say to me, “Paul, we don’t need more laws. This is already covered by the Domestic Emoluments Clause.”

Technically true.

But laws are only useful if someone is willing to enforce them. And right now, the guy overseeing enforcement used to bill Trump by the hour.

Three guesses who would oversee that prosecution. And if you didn’t guess the Felon-in-Chief’s former personal attorney, please report to the back of the classroom where the remedial civics students are eating paste.

Which brings us to the slush fund — a tactic used by Hitler and every dictator wannabe since: using state resources to financially reward a loyal political militia that helped gain or maintain power.

Historians generally draw the line between a normal political movement and an authoritarian one right about here: when the machinery of government stops serving the public and starts operating like a rewards program for loyalists. At that point you no longer have democratic governance. You have a mob boss with a nuclear arsenal.

It would be wonderful if we had an Attorney General willing to stand up to the president, but we already covered fantasy fiction earlier in the article.

How about a law that states:

“No funds appropriated by Congress, including the Judgment Fund or any permanent appropriation, may be redirected into a discretionary compensation pool administered by executive branch appointees removable at the President’s will without explicit Congressional authorization naming the fund, its purpose, its eligibility criteria, and its oversight mechanism.”

Yes, it sounds dry. But so do most fire codes until your house is engulfed in flames.

By the way, if you still don’t think he wants to be the “Don” of America, please let me know what brand of gummies you are taking so I can avoid them at all costs. Because clearly, they are strong enough to perform lobotomies without surgery.

Now excuse me while I head back to bed. It is still raining here, and I do not currently possess the emotional bandwidth required to read another headline about America speed-running its way through the “decline of empire” chapter of future history textbooks.

I am sitting in the Flagship Lounge at the Admirals Club in Miami International Airport.

Don’t think of me as a fancy boy. American Airlines does not give you a gold watch for flying almost 3.5 million miles with them. (They should consider it, considering the amount of money I have thrown their way.) But they do give you permanent status, which is nice because it means that when I am flying internationally (seat 31J — told you I am not fancy), they let me spend time in their premier lounge.

Which is nice.

They have a buffet. A free bar. Showers. And a quiet room with recliners that allow you to bank a few winks before an overnight flight where you get far fewer than the required forty. Apparently this is what passes for luxury in commercial aviation now: hummus, warm chardonnay, and horizontal seating.

The thing that I like most about these clubs is that they take you out of the frenetic, confused, and anxious energy of the 153,000 people who transit through MIA every day. (Imagine the entire city of Eugene, Oregon, passing through an airport in one day and the noise and negative energy it would create.) The Admirals Club gives me a place to catch my breath and contemplate the world in relative peace and quiet before I dive back into the sea of stressed-out travelers, delayed flights, and people arguing with gate agents like that has ever once changed the outcome.

I was sitting in the quiet room, contemplating nappage and doomscrolling. (I know I told you I wouldn’t do that anymore, but I gave myself a traveler’s dispensation. And yes, it is called doomscrolling, Marissa, when you are flicking your fingers through social media… look it up.)

When I came across a news report — clickbait, of course — that said that for the first time since the 1960s, more people are emigrating from the U.S. than immigrating to it.

I would love to tell you that this news shocked me. But it didn’t.

The image it created for me was the old trope of rats leaving a doomed ship.

I mean, honestly, considering all that Trump has done to make the USA brand toxic over the last 18 months, who has not considered packing it all in and going somewhere else? At this point, the country’s international reputation feels like a Spirit Airlines customer service line in human form.

Which made me think of two classmates of mine from Franklin Elementary School: Dave Manley and Chris Lutkin. Dave emigrated to Portugal, and Chris Lutkin now lives in the Azores.

It meant that, counting me, roughly 5% of my elementary school classmates have chosen to live outside the United States. Which either says something profound about America or something deeply troubling about Franklin Elementary.

Is this a sign of the apocalypse?

Or, if I am being less of a drama king and less of a clickbaiter, is it a sign that people in the United States have lost faith in our country?

My flight was not leaving for a couple more hours, and I had nothing better to do, so I decided to see if I could find any corroborating evidence that people believe we are going to hell in a handbasket.

I wish I could tell you that these facts were difficult to find. But they were not. They were remarkably easy to find. Almost suspiciously easy. Like the algorithm was saying, “Oh, you’re anxious about civilization collapsing? Right this way, sir.”

Here are just a few:

• A recent Gallup poll found that 1 in 5 Americans would like to emigrate, including 40% of women aged 15–44 — a 400% increase over a similar poll taken 10 years earlier.

• Latitude Group reported that U.S. applications for second citizenship or residency have surged 1,000% since 2020.

• A 2024 Boundless Immigration survey found that 1 in 5 American professionals under 40 are interested in obtaining a second passport within the next decade.

• Italy saw such a surge in Americans claiming birthright citizenship that it has effectively put the kibosh on the programs that allow it. Apparently even Italy has a “we’re at capacity” setting.

• More than 125,000 people obtained Mexican nationality through U.S. consulates in 2025 — a 153% increase over 2024 and more than the combined total of the three preceding years. (Perhaps Mexico needs to build its own wall.)

Which made me wonder: are there other signs beyond emigration that point to disillusionment with the future of our country?

Again, the facts were far too easy to find:

• Americans are sending their money overseas. They currently own over $35 trillion in assets abroad — a 40% increase from pre-pandemic levels.

• According to the APA’s Stress in America 2025 survey, 63% of adults aged 18–34 have considered leaving the U.S. because of “the state of the nation.” Which is the polite clinical term for “gestures broadly at everything.”

• Young adults today are delaying the typical milestones of adulthood — marriage, homeownership, and children — because of financial instability, something the Trump economy has only exacerbated with tariffs and inflation. Eighty-four percent of Gen Z respondents said they are postponing at least one life decision until they can afford a home, which they don’t expect to achieve until they are 40. So apparently the new American Dream is owning a townhouse before Medicare eligibility.

• Doom spending — the practice of buying “little treats” instead of saving for the future — is at epidemic proportions. Seventy-three percent of Gen Zers are hesitant to set long-term goals, according to Intuit’s Prosperity Index Study, and more than a quarter of all Americans admit spending on unneeded items to escape stress. Which explains why candle sales are booming while retirement accounts resemble post-apocalyptic wastelands.

• Between 20 and 25 million Americans self-identify as preppers — roughly 9.1% of the population. That is nearly double the figure from 2017. In other words, preppers have gone mainstream. A clear indication that folks are planning for the worst instead of hoping for the best. Somewhere there is a Costco executive wondering whether to put freeze-dried lasagna next to the patio furniture permanently.

And all that before I get to the statistics on how little we trust our institutions anymore.

• One in ten Americans trusts Congress. Frankly, I’m impressed it’s that high.

• Only 14% of Americans say the justices are doing an excellent or good job of keeping their political views out of their decision-making.

• Americans’ confidence in the mass media has reached a new low of 28% — down from 40% five years ago. Turns out screaming panels and “breaking news” banners every six minutes may not build long-term confidence.

Yeah, I know. Depressing.

Especially for a person who grew up in the post–World War II glow, when America truly was the shining city on the hill. A time when being an “ugly American” was something you could almost take pride in. Back when we at least had the decency to be confidently obnoxious instead of chronically confused.

The question is whether the pendulum has swung so far that we can never put things right again.

Is our best course of action to sit back, relax, enjoy the flight, and figure out how to put the pieces back together when everything collapses?

Or can we pull ourselves together, figure out a new way forward, and pull ourselves back from the brink?

I don’t know the answer to that question.

But I have some thoughts.

Which I will share in the next couple of posts.

And if you want to share your thoughts, please do. I will happily listen. I may even steal them…

Who were our first friends.

Had the most welcoming shoulder.

Our fiercest defenders.

Who pushed us the hardest.

Were maddening and exasperating.

And did everything they knew how to help us thrive…

This can be a very sad day.

Because while we hide it most of the time.

We miss them most of the time.

When things go well and when they don’t.

When you arrive at a destination after a journey.

Or when we are bored and just looking for a chat.

We miss them.

And we think about all the opportunities we had to say I love you and did not.

Times we could have helped them and did not.

Opportunities we could have spent time with them and did not.

I could go maudlin over this.

Like I see on Facebook.

With people posting pictures of their moms who have gone on that final holiday.

But showing that side of me on Facebook is not as Mom might have said “my cup of tea.”

What I am trying to do is remember all of the things that made Mom mom.

Whether that was digging in the garden in search of wormy dermy or singing me songs while she dressed me or clutching my hand in a vise-like grip when she was older and thought she would fall or our Sunday night dinners.

They make me happy.

And then make me terribly sad.

But they are mine.

And they make me me.

And I am grateful for that.

But I still wish I could have gotten up early this morning.

Driven to her house and picked lilacs from the bush that dad planted.

And put them in a glass and brought them to her with her coffee and toast.

Eighty-one years ago, this week the Second World War ended in Europe.

Four major powers — the United States, Soviet Union, France and the United Kingdom — along with troops from Poland, Yugoslavia, Greece, the Netherlands, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Norway, Denmark and Brazil put troops in the field to fight Nazi Germany. They came together because they understood that one-party dictatorship, state terror, suppression of free speech, and aggressive nationalism were not just bad for the world — they were incompatible with the ideals that made them free people.

They were committed. They sacrificed their youth so that, to paraphrase Lincoln, their nations might live. Or as Churchill put it: “If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’”

That cost was enormous:

· Soviet Union 11,000,000

· Yugoslavia 300,000

· United States 185,000

· United Kingdom 265,000

· France 210,000

· Poland 240,000

· Canada 45,000

· Australia/NZ 30,000

· Italy 30,000

· Greece 20,000

· Brazil 1,000

But it was not just the warriors who paid the ultimate price for this war. Nearly fifty million civilians died during the war.

Numbers this large are hard to comprehend. Consider this: if the entire population of the United Kingdom were to vanish today, that would still fall short of the total lives lost in World War II.

Their sacrifice was not in vain. It created a better world.

It created NATO. An organization that has kept Europe from fighting each other for over 80 years. The greatest sustained peace on that continent since the dark ages.

It ended colonialism. At the end of 1945 there were only 50 countries. Today there are over 193 nations within the UN. I am not saying that American democracy led the way. But our example of country that used to be a colony now being the most powerful nation on the planet did not hurt.

It created the greatest economic boom in the history of mankind. It ended the Great Depression. It retooled the United States and the world through the Marshall Plan. The GI Bill created the largest and most powerful middle class in the history of the world. It built institutions — the IMF (International Monetary Fund), the World Bank, and GATT (the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) — that established free and fair trade so that nations would become economically interdependent, and interdependence would reduce the appetite for war. Harming one nation would harm them all.

I am ashamed to say that eighty-one years later, the United States has lost the thread — not only on why we fought World War II, but on the institutions and alliances that have kept the peace ever since.

Let’s start with the statement the White House released on VE Day. It was not about the sacrifices made by all of the Allies. It was about how great the United States was, to the exclusion of others’ sacrifice. Perhaps its most ominous line is this: “Their feat reminds us that the freedoms we cherish were paid for by sacrifice and must be resolutely defended both inside and outside the country.”

Who are we fighting inside our country?

I believe the only people those soldiers would recognize as the enemy today — the ones who fit the definition they fought and died to defeat — are the people currently controlling our government.

Let’s boil it down.

We fought WW2 to overthrow a one-party dictatorship that concentrated power in the hands of a few at the expense of everyone else. How is that different from the state-mandated gerrymandering that has already been enacted in Texas, North Carolina, Missouri, Tennessee, Florida, and Ohio — and is now being actively pursued in Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina and Georgia? These states are not even pretending otherwise. The stated goal is to keep the House and preserve Trump’s grip on power. You can’t quite call it a dictatorship yet — but it isn’t what “Willy and Joe” fought for. (If you don’t know Willy and Joe, they were the battle-worn GI characters in Bill Mauldin’s legendary WWII cartoons — the best portrait of the ordinary American soldier ever drawn.)

But gerrymandering is just the mechanism. The deeper assault is on speech itself. In WW2 we recognized the suppression of free speech as an existential threat to freedom — the thing that had to be stopped before everything else fell. The current administration has threatened Kimmel, The View, Colbert, Comcast, CBS, the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Pulitzer Board for the crime of speaking their minds. Has anyone gone to jail? Not yet. But when companies and individuals are frightened into silence, the jail is the fear itself. Free speech doesn’t require a prison cell to die.

And then there is the matter of what the state does to its own people. Our soldiers fought and died in WW2 because they understood that state-sponsored terrorism against citizens was wrong. Sending people to concentration camps was wrong. Discriminating against people because of their race, creed or color was wrong. Today our government practices all of those things. It explicitly or implicitly declares the country has one religion: Christianity. ICE terrorizes, brutalizes and murders citizens with impunity and anonymity. MAGA serves as a street-fighting force in precisely the same way the SA served Hitler’s rise — doing the dirty work the state prefers not to put in writing. As we speak concentration camps are being built across the country.

Which brings us to expansion. Hitler’s aggressive nationalism found its ultimate expression in his Lebensraum — “living space” — the doctrine that Germany had a natural right to seize the territory of lesser peoples. It was the justification for invading Czechoslovakia and Poland. There is no meaningful difference between that logic and this administration’s use of military force in Venezuela, Yemen, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, and Ecuador — or its openly stated desire to take Greenland, Colombia, Mexico, Cuba and Canada by whatever means necessary. (I have left Iran off this list because the nuclear argument is at least worth debating separately — though I will note: if it truly was about nukes, why did he tear up the Iran Nuclear Deal the moment he took office?)

Here is my point.

We celebrate VE Day to honor a victory over fascism. The men and women who made that victory possible — who gave everything Lincoln called the last full measure of devotion — did not do it so that eighty-one years later we would debate whether what is happening here at home meets the technical definition. They did it so we would know it when we saw it. And so we would have the courage to say so.

Here at home.

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I was searching for comfort on my streaming services the other day.

You all know what kind of a week it has been.

• The former director of the FBI being indicted by the Justice Department because he posted a picture of seashells on the beach that “whomjamacallit” didn’t like.

• Frat Boy Pete raspberried Congress, which attempted to get him to answer serious questions about our national security, the war in Iran, and his use of the Bible as a prop.

• The Supreme Court ruled that it was okay for states to gerrymander districts to disenfranchise people of color because prejudice doesn’t exist anymore.

• One of whosits’ nominees for the federal bench couldn’t/wouldn’t/didn’t answer whether a president could run for a third term. Whether he is a dolt or just a toady is unclear, but either should disqualify him, though it probably won’t.

• The King of England gave a master class on what American democracy is all about. The King of England. The guy we fought against to create our country, lecturing us on why we fought two wars against his five-times-great-grandfather. Let that sink in.

You get the point. And while we are at the point-making part of this ditty, you may have noticed that I have decided not to mention the guy who can’t speak in full sentences and whose tie is too long by name, because he puts his name on everything. Why should I contribute to his terminal narcissism? For that matter, the mention of his name has become a triggered response that leads to anxiety, nausea, along with a whiff of despair. Who needs to do that to himself?

———

Where was I? Yeah. I was looking for solace from my streaming services because, after I took the anti-doomscrolling pledge three weeks ago:

I hereby pledge:

To stop scrolling like breaking news personally depends on me.

To recognize that “just one more headline” is the internet’s second-oldest lie.

To treat outrage as junk food—fine in small doses, nauseating in bulk.

To remember I am not on the editorial board of the apocalypse.

To remember a stranger’s bad opinion is not my emergency.

And to occasionally look up and verify that the world is, in fact, in 3D.

One of the only places that I can find peace from the emotional sciatica caused by this administration and the deplorables who continue to act like everything is copacetic is in movies and television.

Here is the problem. There is just too much of it. I subscribe to Netflix, Paramount, Peacock, Apple TV, HBO Max, and Disney. That is between 25,000–30,000 different shows and movies for me to choose from. Instead of being distracted from the rampant toxic masculinity and incompetence (redundant?) of the Red Tie League, I was doomscrolling movie and television titles. It almost caused me to relapse. At least doomscrolling had some satisfaction, but a quick call to my sponsor, Ron Swanson, put me straight again. He suggested that I imagine social media didn’t exist and choose a movie that I had enjoyed in the past and watch that. It would be like getting reacquainted with an old friend.

It made me recall what it was like to grow up in NYC when there were only six channels, and they had to fill major portions of their programming with classic movies from the thirties and forties. It made me nostalgic for programming—someone with a better sense of cinema than me picking what I was going to watch. (Okay, the Three Stooges are not strictly “cinema,” but the physical humor was top drawer.) No stress. Just enjoyment. Just what I wanted right now.

I made a mistake. I typed “Classic Movies” into the search bar of Netflix. It seems my definition of “classic” is somewhat different than theirs. My idea of a classic movie is a black-and-white film from the ’30s or ’40s with actors like Gable, Stanwyck, Stewart, Bogart, or Bacall. The Netflix bot thought I meant movies from the eighties and nineties like Smokey and the Bandit and Kindergarten Cop. I thought, “How can these be classic movies?” Then I realized that the movies I watched on New York television in the sixties and seventies were thirty to forty years old. And so were the movies Netflix was suggesting I watch.

It made me feel ancient. Thanks, Netflix. See if I renew my subscription.

———

Enter Frank Capra

I decided I needed a more directed approach. Directed. Director. Who was my favorite director from that era? That was simple: Frank Capra. His movies all shared a common theme—an ordinary, decent man, slightly naïve and stubbornly principled, gets chewed up by a corrupt system that mistakes his decency for weakness until the moment it doesn’t. His movies were about goodness and how it was more durable than cynicism.

After sixty-six consecutive weeks of watching the most indecent man ever to occupy the White House, I need a Capra infusion. But which one should I choose? It’s a Wonderful Life is a Christmas movie. Mr. Deeds Goes to Town is great, but I’d want to watch it back-to-back with Adam Sandler’s remake, and I didn’t have the time. It Happened One Night—Colbert and Gable—it doesn’t get better than that.

But then it hit me. Meet John Doe would be the perfect movie to lift me out of my sixty-six-week funk and perhaps give me hope for the next one hundred forty-two.

———

The Plot (Stay With Me)

A fired reporter, Ann Mitchell (Barbara Stanwyck), fabricates a letter from a fictional “John Doe”—an everyman who threatens to jump off City Hall on Christmas Eve to protest society’s indifference to the common man. To keep the story alive, she and her editor hire a down-and-out drifter, Long John Willoughby (Gary Cooper), to play the role.

The hoax unexpectedly ignites a genuine grassroots movement—ordinary Americans form “John Doe Clubs” across the country, rallying around the message of neighborly decency and democratic ideals. But the movement gets hijacked by D.B. Norton, a wealthy, fascist-leaning media mogul who funded the whole operation and plans to ride the John Doe wave to political power.

When Willoughby realizes he’s been a puppet for a proto-fascist machine, he tries to expose Norton—and is destroyed for it. The film ends on an ambiguous note of fragile hope: the “real” John Does, ordinary people, pull him back from the ledge.

———

Sound Familiar?

“Dumbasadoor” in the White House is D.B. Norton—the wealthy publisher who bankrolls a populist movement, genuinely believes he’s the people’s champion, and is completely blind to the fact that he’s the thing the movement was supposed to be fighting. Norton doesn’t think he’s the villain. That’s what makes him dangerous. And that is what makes “whozit” dangerous too. Well, that and the fact that he has dementia, is blatantly corrupt, and has the IQ of a garden snail.

The only thing that bothered me about the movie was the ending. The corrupt publisher walks away clean. The system that produced him is untouched. A man almost died, and nothing changed except that one man chose to live.

We can’t let our movie have that ending.

Our John Doe Clubs need to fight for real change in Washington that “shitforbrains” has revealed. We need to fight for tax reform where the rich and uber-wealthy pay a minimum tax on their income. We need a constitutional campaign amendment that reforms campaign finance laws so that our representatives consider people, not corporations, first. We need to hold social media responsible for what they publish like any other form of media.

We need to ensure that our government returns to being by and for the people…

And Hollywood, would you please get busy and make a remake of this movie—but this time, give it a more satisfying ending.

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Many years ago, when magazines were an important part of the media scene and did not carry the prefix “legacy,” I used to sell advertising for Rolling Stone.

I knew then—and looking back on it now—it was an incredible job. Rolling Stone was at the intellectual center of popular culture. As Jann Wenner, the founder and editor-in-chief, wrote in the first issue:

“You’re probably wondering what we are trying to do. It’s hard to say: sort of a magazine and sort of a newspaper. The trade papers have become so inaccurate and irrelevant, and the fan magazines are an anachronism. Rolling Stone is not just about music, but also about the things and attitudes that the music embraces.”

That gave the magazine a very large and colorful palette with which to paint the world. Writers such as Ben Fong-Torres, Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Cameron Crowe, Joe Eszterhas, P. J. O’Rourke, David Marsh, Joe Klein, and William Greider, to name just a few. The work of artists such as Annie Leibovitz, Ralph Steadman, Richard Avedon, Herb Ritts, Albert Watson, and Mark Seliger. Their stories on Manson, the Patty Hearst kidnapping, Altamont, the Jonestown massacre, and AIDS were journalistic firsts.

Rolling Stone was the voice and conscience of a generation. It was what you read if you wanted to be “in the know.”

My job at the magazine was pretty plum. I was the “Beverage Alcohol Manager,” which I used to describe sardonically as “having to drink booze and listen to rock and roll…oh damn.” It was actually a bit more than that. I had to convince booze company executives (picture ad men, only tipsier) that they should run advertising in a magazine about sex, drugs, and rock and roll. It seems like a natural combination now, but back then—when people actually wore suits to the office—it was not.

The first brand I got to bring into Rolling Stone was Absolut Vodka. At the time, it was just another vodka looking to build its brand. But it was about to embark on one of the most legendary advertising campaigns in marketing history, built on one of the simplest ideas: turn the bottle into a cultural icon by commissioning artists, designers, and cultural figures to reimagine it in ways that fused the product with wit, geography, and celebrity. In other words, a perfect fit for Rolling Stone.

The campaign, which made the Absolut bottle one of the most recognizable shapes in advertising history, was largely shaped by TBWA and Michel Roux, who owned the rights to Absolut in the United States. Part of the brilliance of the campaign was that it inspired people to come up with their own Absolut ads. TBWA and Carillon leaned into this by inviting publications, once a year, to pitch new ideas for campaigns to run in their pages. Having one of your ideas accepted by Absolut was huge—not only because your concept would be seen by millions, but because it translated into large advertising budgets that could make or break your year, if not your career.

At Rolling Stone, we began prepping for these meetings months in advance. The legendary publisher Dana Fields would call me and folks from the marketing and art departments into her office, and we would brainstorm ideas until we had three or four that hit the high mark needed to be embraced by Absolut. With so much on the line, the meetings at Carillon were always tense—not only because so much rode on the outcome, but because let’s just say, things were different then and people behaved in ways that are no longer acceptable.

I don’t recall which campaigns we sold Absolut. I’m sure we sold a few. But I do remember the relationships those meetings created. Decades later, I still consider Dana Fields a friend. Richard Lewis, who ran Absolut at TBWA and literally wrote The Absolut Book, is also a good friend—and someone I had lunch with earlier this week.

It is always fun to get caught up with Richard. He is the perfect combination of smart, goofy, sarcasm, and wit. Our lunches are never long enough, leave me smiling, and on occasion even (gasp) thinking.

Our lunch on Wednesday was no exception. We spent a good part of the conversation talking about “the situation, the situation we are in…” It left me pondering on the commute home: if I were at Rolling Stone today and had to pitch a campaign to Absolut that was of the times, what would I pitch…

As I don’t have an in-house marketing or art team, I decided to enlist ChatGPT to help me create these images. Yes, I know the world is going to go to hell due to our use of AI. But considering what I hope to accomplish, I beg for your forgiveness.

Absolut Patel

The very first thing I thought about was low-hanging fruit. Kash Patel and his over-fondness for alcohol and good times, as documented in The Atlantic. I described to Chatty what I wanted, and after a few iterations, it produced this…

It was funny. Well, it made me laugh. But it lacked what most of the Absolut campaigns had: simplicity. Just the image of the bottle, its circumstance, and a headline telling the rest of the story.

For the life of me, I could not figure out how to simplify the Patel image, so I decided to move on.

Absolut RFK Jr.

More low-hanging fruit. RFK Jr. He was, to the joy of most, not having a great week in Congress, and there were some places we could go. But I didn’t want to belittle his sobriety, so I made the Absolut bottle home to his pet brain worm.

Perhaps a little mean—but you do reap what you sow.

Absolut Tariffs

Then I struggled a bit. I wanted to do something on other cabinet members who are equally incompetent, self-destructive, and parodiable. Despite it being a target-rich environment, I couldn’t land on something that was both true to the Absolut campaign’s parameters and funny.

So I switched gears.

Something Richard had mentioned during lunch: TBWA had pitched “Absolut Washington”—a bottle wrapped in red tape—for years before it got approved.

So I stole the idea.

More tragicomic than funny.

Absolut Resistance

Not people. Ideas.

What could Absolut say that was positive and uplifting while still maintaining a point of view?

This is what ensued.

Absolut Trump

What bothered me—and what wouldn’t leave me—is that if I were pitching this to Absolut from Rolling Stone, we couldn’t leave Trump out of the mix. Too rich a target.

It took two runs and a few conversations to land on this.

Absolut Deplorable

But you can’t talk about Trump without MAGA. They empower him.

Which reminded me of something Hillary Clinton said.

Her words were prophetic.

Absolut Worst

I thought I was done. Ready for show and tell.

But as sometimes happens, inspiration struck while I was writing this piece. (Yes, I know… phrasing.)

Regardless—this one felt inevitable.

Because without any doubt…

He is the worst.

It has been an Absolut pleasure writing this.

That said—this is satire.

The images and concepts presented are intended as parody and political commentary, not as statements of fact or endorsements. Any resemblance to real brands, people, or events is used deliberately for expressive and critical purposes.

Many years ago, when magazines were an important part of the media scene and did not carry the prefix “legacy,” I used to sell advertising for Rolling Stone.

I knew then—and looking back on it now—it was an incredible job. Rolling Stone was at the intellectual center of popular culture. As Jann Wenner, the founder and editor-in-chief, wrote in the first issue:

“You’re probably wondering what we are trying to do. It’s hard to say: sort of a magazine and sort of a newspaper. The trade papers have become so inaccurate and irrelevant, and the fan magazines are an anachronism. Rolling Stone is not just about music, but also about the things and attitudes that the music embraces.”

That gave the magazine a very large and colorful palette with which to paint the world. Writers such as Ben Fong-Torres, Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Cameron Crowe, Joe Eszterhas, P. J. O’Rourke, David Marsh, Joe Klein, and William Greider, to name just a few. The work of artists such as Annie Leibovitz, Ralph Steadman, Richard Avedon, Herb Ritts, Albert Watson, and Mark Seliger. Their stories on Manson, the Patty Hearst kidnapping, Altamont, the Jonestown massacre, and AIDS were journalistic firsts.

Rolling Stone was the voice and conscience of a generation. It was what you read if you wanted to be “in the know.”

My job at the magazine was pretty plum. I was the “Beverage Alcohol Manager,” which I used to describe sardonically as “having to drink booze and listen to rock and roll…oh damn.” It was actually a bit more than that. I had to convince booze company executives (picture ad men, only tipsier) that they should run advertising in a magazine about sex, drugs, and rock and roll. It seems like a natural combination now, but back then—when people actually wore suits to the office—it was not.

The first brand I got to bring into Rolling Stone was Absolut Vodka. At the time, it was just another vodka looking to build its brand. But it was about to embark on one of the most legendary advertising campaigns in marketing history, built on one of the simplest ideas: turn the bottle into a cultural icon by commissioning artists, designers, and cultural figures to reimagine it in ways that fused the product with wit, geography, and celebrity. In other words, a perfect fit for Rolling Stone.

The campaign, which made the Absolut bottle one of the most recognizable shapes in advertising history, was largely shaped by TBWA and Michel Roux, who owned the rights to Absolut in the United States. Part of the brilliance of the campaign was that it inspired people to come up with their own Absolut ads. TBWA and Carillon leaned into this by inviting publications, once a year, to pitch new ideas for campaigns to run in their pages. Having one of your ideas accepted by Absolut was huge—not only because your concept would be seen by millions, but because it translated into large advertising budgets that could make or break your year, if not your career.

At Rolling Stone, we began prepping for these meetings months in advance. The legendary publisher Dana Fields would call me and folks from the marketing and art departments into her office, and we would brainstorm ideas until we had three or four that hit the high mark needed to be embraced by Absolut. With so much on the line, the meetings at Carillon were always tense—not only because so much rode on the outcome, but because let’s just say, things were different then and people behaved in ways that are no longer acceptable.

I don’t recall which campaigns we sold Absolut. I’m sure we sold a few. But I do remember the relationships those meetings created. Decades later, I still consider Dana Fields a friend. Richard Lewis, who ran Absolut at TBWA and literally wrote The Absolut Book, is also a good friend—and someone I had lunch with earlier this week.

It is always fun to get caught up with Richard. He is the perfect combination of smart, goofy, sarcasm, and wit. Our lunches are never long enough, leave me smiling, and on occasion even (gasp) thinking.

Our lunch on Wednesday was no exception. We spent a good part of the conversation talking about “the situation, the situation we are in…” It left me pondering on the commute home: if I were at Rolling Stone today and had to pitch a campaign to Absolut that was of the times, what would I pitch…

As I don’t have an in-house marketing or art team, I decided to enlist ChatGPT to help me create these images. Yes, I know the world is going to go to hell due to our use of AI. But considering what I hope to accomplish, I beg for your forgiveness.

Absolut Patel

The very first thing I thought about was low-hanging fruit. Kash Patel and his over-fondness for alcohol and good times, as documented in The Atlantic. I described to Chatty what I wanted, and after a few iterations, it produced this…

It was funny. Well, it made me laugh. But it lacked what most of the Absolut campaigns had: simplicity. Just the image of the bottle, its circumstance, and a headline telling the rest of the story.

For the life of me, I could not figure out how to simplify the Patel image, so I decided to move on.

Absolut RFK Jr.

More low-hanging fruit. RFK Jr. He was, to the joy of most, not having a great week in Congress, and there were some places we could go. But I didn’t want to belittle his sobriety, so I made the Absolut bottle home to his pet brain worm.

Perhaps a little mean—but you do reap what you sow.

Absolut Tariffs

Then I struggled a bit. I wanted to do something on other cabinet members who are equally incompetent, self-destructive, and parodiable. Despite it being a target-rich environment, I couldn’t land on something that was both true to the Absolut campaign’s parameters and funny.

So I switched gears.

Something Richard had mentioned during lunch: TBWA had pitched “Absolut Washington”—a bottle wrapped in red tape—for years before it got approved.

So I stole the idea.

More tragicomic than funny.

Absolut Resistance

Not people. Ideas.

What could Absolut say that was positive and uplifting while still maintaining a point of view?

This is what ensued.

Absolut Trump

What bothered me—and what wouldn’t leave me—is that if I were pitching this to Absolut from Rolling Stone, we couldn’t leave Trump out of the mix. Too rich a target.

It took two runs and a few conversations to land on this.

Absolut Deplorable

But you can’t talk about Trump without MAGA. They empower him.

Which reminded me of something Hillary Clinton said.

Her words were prophetic.

Absolut Worst

I thought I was done. Ready for show and tell.

But as sometimes happens, inspiration struck while I was writing this piece. (Yes, I know… phrasing.)

Regardless—this one felt inevitable.

Because without any doubt…

He is the worst.

It has been an Absolut pleasure writing this.

That said—this is satire.

The images and concepts presented are intended as parody and political commentary, not as statements of fact or endorsements. Any resemblance to real brands, people, or events is used deliberately for expressive and critical purposes.

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It has been a tough week, after weeks of tough weeks, so I decided to call my friend Kilroy to see if he was up to a serious Olive Therapy session. We met at the River Grill. Not a fancy place but an establishment that is generous with the pour and famous for bartenders who don’t engage in small talk.

After two Chopin Martinis, six blue cheese stuffed olives and forty-five minutes of listening to me list the indignities perpetrated by the Trump administration this week, he turned to me and with a wicked grin said in mildly slurred speech “What if this is a very elaborate episode of ‘Punk’d.’ Imagine this…

“Karoline Leavitt stands at the podium and in her best “‘Bride of Chucky”’ manner introduces Ashton Kutcher. He steps up to the podium and after tapping the microphone says, with a large shit-eating grin, “‘America, you have been Punk’d.”’

“With the complete support of this administration, who felt the country was not taking our FAFO policies with the correct sense of humor they are all intended, we launched an elaborate series of practical jokes in the hopes of “‘Making America Laugh Again.”’ Or MALA.”

“While we don’t have time to go into all the practical jokes that this administration has played on the American people during its term in office, I would like to mention just a couple of recent “‘Punk’d”’ moments that seem to have caught the public’s attention. We believe how they were received by the press and how they have been vilified on social media proves President Trump’s allegation that immigrants, the radical left, Democrats and non-MAGA women have destroyed our national sense of humor.”

At this point, Karoline Leavitt steps back up to the podium and says “Excuse me, Ashton, but the Jokester in Chief has just texted me. It says: ‘We used to live in a country where we could tell jokes about Jews being cheap, Polacks being dim-witted, Irish as hopeless drunks, Blacks as lazy and immigrants eating neighbors’ pets. Most people thought these jokes were hilarious. It allowed people to feel good about themselves at the expense of others. These people can’t take a joke anymore. Really, not smart people. Like radical Democrats and women. We need to bring those days back to make America laugh again regardless of how many people are insulted or made to feel less than. These people, they can’t take a joke anymore. Very sad. Very weak. Let’s Make America Laugh Again.’”

The reporters begin shouting questions to the Bride of Chucky. “What about the jokes about marrying men old enough to be your father? Are those still funny?” Karoline shoots the reporter a glance, inadvertently giving the world a glimpse of the character she was modeled after, and turns the podium back over to Ashton Kutcher.

“Thanks Tiffany, I mean Karoline. The President was insistent that we start off the MALA campaign with a bang, and he strongly suggested we begin it with a meme of him as a divine healer. He thought it would be so off brand that, in his words, “‘people will go crazy over it.”’ We suggested a number of Christian artists to him but he was insistent that we call his buddy Sam Altman at ChatGPT and have them create an illustration directed by Paula White-Caine because ‘between her three divorces and the Senate investigations into her finances’ she really gets me.

“When we saw the finished image we all thought it was hilarious. No one would take it seriously. How could they? We would let it build for a couple of days and then hold a press conference announcing “‘America, you just got punk’d.’”

Kutcher paused. “Unfortunately, this particular joke went over just about as well as when Zach Braff beat up a kid. Which is surprising because I thought you, the press, would get the joke.”

“Ashton, Peter Doocy, Fox News. Was it your idea or the President’s to claim that he thought the image was of him being a doctor? I thought that was hilarious.”

“That was the President being a brilliant ad-libber.”

“I thought so. It had his wit smeared all over it.”

“Ashton, Megyn Smelly, Influencer News Network, first-time questioner and a big fan of your work. I mean making Justin Timberlake cry. Classic. Did you work with the Vatican to have the Pope issue the statement about ‘the Prince of Peace is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs’? It seemed so perfect for the President and gave him a real opportunity to express his hysterical remarks about the Pope.”

“No. No. If you’ll excuse the pun, it was just divine intervention. By the way, let’s give props where props are due — JD Vance’s suggestion that he knew more about Catholic religious teaching than the Pope…wow. It was gold.”

Ashton waits while the White House Press Corps, now balanced with MAGA bloggers and influencers, murmur positively about JD Vance’s keen sense of religious humor. When it quiets down he adds “Which is a perfect segue into our next prank. With the President’s ‘huge’ success of our first prank of the week we decided to continue on with our religious theme and prank the god of war, I mean Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth. The Prankster in Chief thought he would make a perfect victim not only because he has the sense of humor of a frat boy doing keg stands but because he often cites Bible quotes when he is considering carpet bombing schools and civilian infrastructure.”

Kash Patel — a huge fan of Quentin Tarantino’s vibe of nonlinear retribution and “rules don’t apply to me” — suggested we send GI Bro an email from one of his commanders that pretends to be a Bible verse but is actually the made-up verse from Pulp Fiction. Kash, who is no stranger to bro humor, thought it would work in two ways. If the chief Crusader read it and realized it was a made-up quote he would know he had been pranked and we could all laugh about it at the next cabinet meeting. Our laughter might even wake Dozing Don. But wouldn’t it be fucking hilarious if he read it in front of his non-mandatory/mandatory worship services at the Pentagon.

Well, we all know what happened. I mean, classic Punk’d. It’s only sad that there were no cameras around when Hegseth caught up with Kash. Let’s just say that the banter and physical humor were no worse, in the opinion of Markwayne Mullin, than many of his MMA fights.

Ashton asked “We have time for a few questions. You over there in pink Lululemon.”

“Thank you, Morgana from Facebook. Will the secretary get his next prayer service reading from Reservoir Dogs or go straight to Kill Bill?”

“You will have to ask War Dawg about that directly. But after this Punk’d we are going to be laying off him for a couple of days.”

The bartender returned with two fresh martinis and a side of blue cheese stuffed olives as a nutritional supplement. I took a sip and turned to Kilroy and said, “So what you are saying is we are being Punk’d and the Jester Chief who is off in some bunker surrounded by a battery of screens laughing so hard he soils his Depends.”

He smiled and said, “That about it.”

“But if that is the case, then why aren’t we laughing. Shouldn’t we be laughing?”

Kilroy took a big gulp of his Martini and says, “Ever notice the people getting punk’d never laugh.”

“Well there is that.”

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We all have thoughts we wish we did not have. It is part and parcel of the human condition. Writers have been commenting on this since there were scribes etching their thoughts on wax tablets.

The Scottish verse goes:

“From ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggedy beasties and things that go bump in the night, good Lord, deliver us.”

Fyodor Dostoevsky, in Notes from the Underground, wrote of thoughts “which a man is even afraid to tell himself, and every decent man has a considerable number of such things stored away. The more decent he is, the greater the number of such things in his mind.”

Or as John Irving put it:

“Your memory is a monster; you forget—it doesn’t. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you—and summons them to your recall of its own will. You think you have a memory; but it has you.”

It is a constant theme in popular culture, such as U2’s “Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of,” whose refrain goes:

You’ve got to get yourself together
You’ve got stuck in a moment
And you can’t get out of it
Oh love, look at you now

These errant thoughts can be anything: a moment when you were unnecessarily cruel or mean to someone you love; a breakup you didn’t see coming and can’t forget; a memory of tenderness that can never be replayed because the person who shared it with you has died; a bill you cannot pay; or a moment you wish you could revisit because what you said wasn’t nearly as good as what you later came up with. A moment of embarrassment that becomes more vivid with time.

These mental mutinies are what keep psychologists’ couches full, liquor companies in business, and drug dealers on street corners (and dispensaries, depending on your zip code).

And if our own meditations are not enough to metastasize our thought processes, we also live in very troubling times—especially here in the United States, where we have watched the systematic erosion of the American brand. We used to be that shining light on the hill. We stood for decency and honor. Even though our democracy was imperfect, we strove to evolve—to be better, do better. We saved the world from fascism and stood up for the little guy whose voice and power were not as strong as ours.

Today, we have a government that believes the big guys come first, mistakes strategic blunders for historic victories, and builds triumphant arches where there have been no triumphs. One that claims we cannot afford healthcare but has no problem spending $40 trillion to achieve goals ratified a decade earlier. One that treats allies as vassals and enemies as pals. One that sees human rights, common decency, and empathy as new-age concepts rather than the keystones of democratic civilization.

I could go on. But you get the point. We live in feckless times, with feckless leaders who, instead of making us feel safe and secure, only add to our “ghoulies and ghosties.”

You might ask: why am I going on about all this?

The other day, I was doing something I’ve done for decades—traveling to New York City on a New Jersey Transit train. In the time I have taken the train, virtually everything about that trip has changed. We go to New York Penn instead of Hoboken. The trains are usually double-deckers, when they used to be single-level. The seats are no longer wicker, no longer attacking women’s stockings back when women used to wear stockings. Instead of punching paper tickets, conductors scan an app on your phone. You get the idea.

But the change that struck me most that morning was the absence of newspapers. There was a time when the train would have been a sea of them—pages folded with the precision of an origami swan, some handled delicately, even with white gloves, to keep the ink from staining fingers.

Commuters today don’t look up at newspapers. (I could get snarky and say many have never even bought one, but that would be well, snarky.) They look down—at their phones. They may be watching a show or annoying the rest of us with a too-loud phone call about their latest medical issue or business problem. But most of them are simply scrolling their commute away.

Here is the thing: newspapers and doomscrolling serve the same purpose—keeping the ghoulies and ghosties at bay at a time when errant thoughts and mental mutinies are likely to metastasize into a spiral of unpleasant thinking. They help passengers remain, if not pacified, at least thoughtless.

What I thought in that moment is that while the ride into the city had been upgraded, the way people distract themselves had not.

Newspapers generate new thoughts to block out the old. You learned about things, usually with depth and an editorial commitment to reporting the truth—even if it came from a biased lens. They forced you into confronting the world around you with more than a meme, a clip, or some influencer trying to build his audience so he did not have to ride the train anymore. Newspapers—even tabloids like the New York Post, blazing headlines like “Headless Body in Topless Bar”—provided far more facts than the average Facebook Reel. And they did it without the aid of an algorithm. The editor made choices for everyone—not just you. It meant that if the newspaper had a bias, it did not become an echo chamber of your own personal biases.

Newspapers force you to think the ghoulies away, which may be one of the reasons we did better as a country when our fingers were stained with ink.

I am not denigrating people who are doomscrolling. I get it. Who can resist two dogs telling dad jokes? Or Brazilians explaining why they find gringos amusing? Or endless clips from Game of Thrones? I do it myself. It has fewer calories than a martini, is easier on the lungs than weed, and far less expensive than a therapist’s couch. The trouble is, while it keeps the ghoulies away momentarily, it has the same intellectual nutritional value that cotton candy has in our diet.

Worse, algorithms force-feed you your own sugar. They exploit your biases so you keep clicking, stay a little longer, so they can meet their end-of-year revenue goals. Their goal isn’t to provide “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” but “All the Dreck to Keep You Scrolling.” It takes scrollers to deep, dark, ugly places where your biases and fears exist and exploits them for the platform’s benefit—not yours.

Social platforms make you thoughtless—in every sense of that word, which may be one of the reasons we are failing as a country right now.

Am I going to stop doomscrolling? Probably not. But I am going to be more conscious of it and limit it to waiting rooms and waiting for the microwave to reheat last night’s Chinese food.

Am I going to start reading more newspapers? No. Come on—newspapers are dead. But I am going to read more trusted news sites, including legacy media like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

We used to stain our fingers with ink and come away thinking.

Now we scroll until our fingerprints disappear and end up thoughtless and worse than we began.

I grew up with the space program. My brother David and I watched every Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo launch. We knew all the astronauts’ names. We built models of their spacecraft. We turned appliance boxes into capsules to explore space from our living room.

When Apollo 11 landed on the moon we watched with burning interest along with our fellow campers at Camp Skoglund on a small black and white television set up in the rec hall.

The space program gave me a love ofscience and science fiction. It made me think and dream of a world that is better than my own. It made me think the impossible and improbable could be achieved with belief, determination and an adequate amount of brain sweat.

Which is why I was so excited aboutArtemis launch last week. We were returning to the moon! A space launch with meaning, again.

I cried as the rocket lifted off the pad. Not just because it was beautiful. Not just because it was a ray of hope in an otherwise shit stinking vile mess our beautiful country has turned into under this feckless and reckless President. But mostly because it reminded me of the simpler and arguably better times of my youth. When the “space age” would turn the world into a more ideal world like I saw on Star Trek.

Which is why I turned on the broadcast of Artemis’s mission yesterday afternoon. They were about to disappear behind the moon and for a time they would be all alone without contact with earth. A big moment to be sure. And just like when I was a child I wanted to be there.

And here is what I heard.

Astronaut Glover said: “As we get close to the nearest point to the
moon and farthest point from Earth, as we continue to unlock the mysteries of
the cosmos, I would like to remind you of one of the most important mysteries
there on Earth, and that’s love.”

He then invoked Jesus directly: “Christ said, in response to what was the
greatest command, that it was to love God with all you are. And he also, being
a great teacher, said the second is equal to it. And that is to love your
neighbor as yourself.”

He then said: “As we prepare to go out of radio communication, we’re still
going to feel your love from Earth. And to all of you down there on Earth, and
around Earth, we love you from the moon.”

And just like that the magic was over for me. Ruined the mission.

I am not saying love is not an important message to send to earth. The world can deal with a lot less hate, Donald Trump and MAGA and the hate they produce and are spreading worldwide.

But you don’t have to invoke Christ. Not necessary. To me, yet another example of evangelicals trying to force their belief system on us. Like Pete Hegseth’s “voluntary” Christian services at the Pentagon, Labor Department’s prayer meeting, The Anti-Christian task force, orthe ironically named Religious Liberty Commission made up of only evangelicalChristians.

This is a country founded on the ideal that religion has no place within government. It is a private issue between you and your god.

Please don’t get me wrong. I am glad you love Christ. Good for you. You have found your way to God. But 2/3 of the world has a different way to God and your bringing up Christ dilutes your message to them. It may even make them not listen. Especially at a time when much of the world sees us as waging a religious war against Islam.

I am not saying that sitting out in space
would not bring on thoughts of God and the universe he created. How could it
not. But there was a better more palatable way of doing it.

Buzz Aldrin, second man on the moon, a Jersey boy from Montclair, and Catholic quietly brought wine and bread with him so he could have communion on the moon. It was for him. Not the world. And I admire that type of religion. You be you. But don’t get me involved in your mishigas.

Or if you are going to go public with religion, do it in a way that is nondomination like the astronauts of Apollo 8 who orbited the moon over Christmas 1968. This is what they said.

Bill Anders: “Weare now approaching lunar sunrise. And, for all the people back on Earth, thecrew of Apollo 8 have a message that we would like to send to you. ‘In the
beginning God created the heaven and the earth…’”

Jim Lovell: “And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night…”

Frank Borman then read through verse 10: “And God said, ‘Let the waters under the
heaven be gathered unto one place…’”

Here is what they said was different than Astronaut Glover. First, it was Christmas and they were a long way from home. Second, they read from the Old Testament which allows Jews into the picture. But more importantly, all religions have origin stories. Many of them just like the one in the Old Testament. It is relatable especially when one is seeing the cosmos in a way no one has seen it before.

But you don’t have to invoke Christ. Not necessary. To me, it was yet another example of evangelicals trying to force their belief system on us. Like Pete Hegseth’s “voluntary” Christian services at the Pentagon, the Labor Department’s prayer meeting, the Anti‑Christian Task Force, or the ironically named Religious Liberty Commission made up of only evangelical Christians. This is a country founded on the ideal that religion has no place in government. It is a private issue between you and your god.

Sorry for the rant. But evangelicals and their need to push their religion on others and look down their noses those of us who see the world differently. Well I have enough. Practice religion anyway that brings you peace. But I urge you to keep it in your pants.

Sorry for the rant. But it is better than me going off on Dithering Don’s “end their civilization” tweet.

Because when I was a kid, sitting in a cardboard capsule next to my brother, the
universe felt enormous—full of possibility, full of futures we hadn’t ruined
yet.

I tuned in to Artemis to feel that again. To remember that the world could still
surprise us. To believe, even for a moment, that we could rise above our
pettiness and reach for something larger than ourselves.

I wanted the moon. What I got was a homily.

And that’s why I’m angry. Not because I don’t believe in love—but because I still
believe in wonder without religious subtitles.

Tell me if you have heard this old Russian parable.

A wedding party sets out by sleigh on a cold winter’s night, with singing, the jingle of sleigh bells, and perhaps a little more vodka than was entirely prudent. The group is full of hope for the newlyweds, and the groom and bride have eyes only for each other and for what lies ahead.

They all knew wolves were bad that winter, so when the first howl came, they were not too alarmed. Their bellies were full and their brains too soaked in vodka for a single wolf’s cry to deter them from their fun.

But the first howl was soon met by others, echoing with quickening repetition. Awoo. Awooo. The wolves were forming a pack. There was no moon, but the starlight shone clearly on the snow. Soon the passengers in the sleigh could see a cluster of black wolves trailing behind them. Others dashed in and out of the trees lining the road.

The wolves were like apparitions—there one moment and gone the next. But there were hundreds of them. The gaiety of the party disappeared in an instant. A black drove came up over the hill behind the wedding party—the wolves ran like streaks of shadow, no bigger than dogs, but there were hundreds of them.

Something happened to the last sleigh. Perhaps the driver had too much to drink, but the horses left the road, hit a rut, and the sledge overturned, tossing its passengers into the snow. The wolves were quickly upon them. The cries of anguish sobered everyone instantly.

The drivers, now standing, began to whip their horses. Perhaps a little extra speed would allow them to outdistance the wolves. But with extra speed came greater risk, and another sledge overturned. The screams of the horses were even worse than those of the people as the wolves fell upon them. Nothing seemed to check the wolves. The bride and groom clung to each other, their vision of an unlimited future and long life darkened by the reality of survival.

The lead driver, a man named Eugeny, reached the crest of a hill. Looking behind him, he could see only two sledges where once there had been three—and behind them, a roiling pack of wolves in relentless pursuit. The groom screamed at the sight of the sledge carrying his parents and sisters. He sprang up as if to jump, but his wife shrieked and held him back. She covered his ears so he would not hear the screams of his family as the wolves set upon them.

They were within a few miles of their village and safety. The only other remaining sledge was not far behind, but its lead horse was flagging. Beside a frozen pond, three big gray wolves came abreast of the horses and took them down. Again screams shattered the winter night.

Now the only sleigh left was driven by Eugeny, carrying the newlyweds. The wolves were gaining on them. He turned to the groom and yelled at him to throw the bride off the sleigh, hoping she would distract the wolves long enough for Eugeny and the groom to make it back to the village. The groom refused, so Eugeny threw them both off the sledge, screaming, “You loser—I could have saved you.”

He drove on into the village to the sound of bells pealing from the monastery.

I don’t know where I originally heard this story. Apparently, there are a lot of variations in literature from Russian folk stories to Willa Cather. But it is exactly what I thought about on Thursday morning when news broke that his fecklessness had fired Pam Bondi.

I thought “He is throwing her to the wolves.”

Don’t get me wrong. I think Pam Bondi gives vile a bad name. But she has been a loyal attack dog for Donald Trump. She turned the Department of Justice from the paragon of fairness in criminal investigations into a Trump sump of investigations into his political enemies. She gleefully brought her burn book to congress so she could insult Congressmen and Senators instead of answering questions as is required to do by statute. She protected the felon from full release of the Epstein files even after Congress passed a law requiring her to release them. And to add insult to injury protected Trump’s wealthy friends by redacting their names and surreptitiously leaving in the names of their victims to intimidate and embarrass them.

To paraphrase, Amy Poehler, this is a woman whose permanent tan is from Donald Trump’s rectoplasm.

So why do I care about Pam Bondi. I don’t. What struck me in that moment is throwing people to the wolves is Trump’s signature move as much as Pele’s bicycle kick or Michael Jordan’s fadeaway jumper.

Think about it.

He went from thinking Kristi Noem was doing a fantastic job in February, to firing her in March. Why? Not because of her job performance. But because the wolves in congress and the press were gaining ground on him.

James Mattis was the greatest secretary of defense of all time until Trump’s policies backfired during the Syria withdrawal, and the wolves were nipping at Trump’s heels. Mark Esper was brilliant until criticism of the use of military force during protests made the wolves howl and he was gone. I could cite many more examples, Kirstjen Nielsen at DHS, Jeff Sessions at Justice but the pattern is clear.

When the wolves start forming a pack, Trump throws even his most devoted acolytes off the sled to keep the wolves from taking him down.

You can’t argue with the strategy. Sad to say it works.

Criticism of DHS and ICE’s gestapo tactics will be tamped down to give the former MMA fighter, plumber and poster boy for anger management classes time to re-evaluate and reassess their tactics. This despite the fact that the man setting the policy has not changed. Calls for the Justice Department to comply with production of the Epstein Files, questions about the legality of criminal prosecutions against Laetitia James, James Comey and others, clamor to release Jack Smith’s report will all fade into the background as the search for a new AG progress.

That is the bad news.

The glimmer of hope comes from the end of the Russian parable. Instead of being greeted as the man who survived the wolf attack, Eugeny was reviled. His own mother spit on him and said she would never look at him again. He was forced to leave his village. But he could not escape the story. Everywhere he went people knew the story and when they found out it was he who threw the bride and the groom to their death he was run out of town on a rail. He died alone and as abject lesson of cowardice and dishonor.

We can only hope that Donald Trump’s fate is the same if not worse than Eugeny. So, keep howlin.

Airports can be magical places. Or so I keep telling myself.

I should know. Over the course of my misspent life, I have managed to accumulate 3,300,000 miles on American Airlines. If you don’t want to do the math at home that conservatively equates to a little over 275 days on an airplane and probably the equivalent number of days in airports.

If this seems like a lot of time to you, it is. Yet I still, or at least up until recently, found airports magical. Why? Because for a guy like me, someone who was born with a profound sense of wanderlust, it is the gateway to the next adventure. Going to a new destination or a city I have visited so many times that I don’t need to ask for a map rental desk, it doesn’t matter. For me, it is all about the adventure I am about to embark on.

Don’t get me wrong. There are things about airports that make me want to stab myself in the eye with a fork. But over time you develop strategies to cope with those things. Noise cancelling headphones to help drown out the sounds of crying babies and other cantankerous and annoying noises. You join airline clubs so that instead of being confronted with the hustle, bustle, and angst of your fellow travelers you can enjoy dulcet murmurs, warm nuts or a meal and perhaps an adult beverage.

But mostly you learn how to avoid lines. You apply and get TSA Pre-check approved. You get Clear, a concierge service to escort you through long lines. You get Global Entry, which allows you to re-enter the country with little more than a wink, nod and “welcome home.” In short, you pay a small fortune for the privilege of being treated the way air travel used to work for everyone.

I am thinking about this a lot today because in two days I am going to get on an airplane to return to the United States and transiting through one of my least favorite airports, Miami International (MIA.) I have been stranded there one too many times, their people moving light rail is often out of order, so you are forced to walk miles (no exaggeration) to get to your gate for me to have any great fondness for the airport. But that only dims the magic, not eliminates it.

But what does take a giant steaming dump on my wanderlust this time is the current TSA situation. I mean the thing that you want to do the least at 6am, after an eight-hour overnight flight is stand in a line to re-enter the airport. But you learn to deal with that (remember pre-check). What makes it hard this time around is you know the line is going to be far longer when there is absolutely no reason for it should be.

Nearly 2/3rds of all Americans, Democrats and Republicans, feel that ICE and its tactics have gone too far in its attempt to arrest undocumented people. Whether its masked Gestapo-Esque tactics, the death of American citizens exercising their constitutional rights, their flagrant disregard of judicial orders or establishment of what can only be called concentration camps, it is an agency out of control. Which is why Congress purposely did not fund Homeland Security in its continuing funding resolution. They wanted, their constituents wanted, to see fundamental changes to ICE before they passed funding. Unfortunately, the current occupant of the Oval Office, whose ego is so big he needs to put his name on everything from the Kennedy Center to prescription plans to signing currency won’t allow him to admit that he is wrong about ICE.

In other words, Trump would rather inconvenience 2.5 million Americans everyday than admit he was wrong about ICE.

To be fair, he did say he would allow a bill to pass if it included SAFE act provision. Once again this is about his pathological ego. The SAFE is all about him losing the 2020 election. His ego won’t allow him to believe that the majority of Americans voted him out of office. So he created a myth of voter fraud. And it is a myth. 60 cases, 60 dismissals. Going back 40 years there have been 1000 cases of voter fraud reported. To put that in perspective, more people have been struck by lightning while simultaneously being audited by the IRS.

In other words, he would rather inconvenience 2.5 million Americans everyday than admit he lost the 2020 election.

You might say, especially if you are fond of corpulent men wearing who like oversized baseball caps with writing on them, have no fear. We have sent ICE officers to the airport to supplement the diminishing ranks of TSA officers. Here is the problem. Not only are the ICE officers untrained for their current duties, but they have not trained for TSA duties. Which means they’re sitting around looking butch and little else. Truly a master class in solving a staffing shortage by adding staff who can’t do the job.

In other words, Trump would rather put at risk the safety of 2.5 million Americans everyday than admit that ludicrous and breathless campaign promises designed to stir fear and foster hatred are not good public policy.

I could go on and on but if you have been paying attention (Need to Know by David Rothkopf | Substack, (29) Marissa Rothkopf-Bakes: The Secret Life of Cookies | Substack) you know all this already. So let me make this personal.

Donald Trump has taken the magic of airports from me and it pisses me off. This place that has been the start and end points of so many wonderful memories has become infected with the malignancy of MAGA and its platform of hate and despair. It makes me want to travel with my “8647” ball cap on my, wearing my Foxtrot Delta Tango Tee and wearing my “Justice for Alex and Renee” pin screaming “Attica, Attica” (dated movie reference.”

But I probably won’t. I want to make it home. Rosie needs me. However, I will be thinking it. Loudly.

In a week where Donald Trump:

• While sitting next to the Japanese Prime Minister, answered a question from a Japanese reporter about why the US had not informed Japan — one of its closest allies — about the plan to attack Iran by saying: “We went in very hard and we didn’t tell anybody about it because we wanted surprise. Who knows better about surprise than Japan?”

• Used images of the “distinguished transfer” of US service members to fundraise.

• Celebrated the death of Robert Mueller, a disciplined nonpartisan civil servant with a reputation for integrity and restraint because he refused to compromise his ethics to whitewash Trump’s reputation.

Where Pete Hegseth:

• Exploited the grief of a family whose loved one died in Iran by putting words in their mouth — claiming they urged him to “finish the job,” a quote at least one bereaved father flatly denied ever saying.

• Declared the US was fighting religious extremism in Iran — apparently without a hint of self-awareness about his own “Deus Vult” tattoo (”God wills it,” the rallying cry of the Crusades), his monthly Pentagon worship services, his Bible-verse military videos, or his stated belief that America is a Christian nation.

When Pam Bondi and the DOJ:

• Moved to dismiss the remaining federal charges with prejudice against two former officers — Joshua Jaynes and Kyle Meany — who had provided false information in the search warrant used to raid Breonna Taylor’s apartment, resulting in her death.

• She, as the chief law enforcement officer of the US, refused to commit to honoring a subpoena on the Epstein File.

• Had a prosecutor thrown out of court by U.S. District Judge Zahid Quraishi, who was castigating the office for operating illegally — after the prosecutor repeatedly ignored his direct orders to stop talking.

I could go on, but you lived through this week too — and bitching about the abuses of Trump and his cadre of calamity is a more target-rich environment than Kharg Island. For some reason this week had me particularly worked up, which is why I found myself in a lengthy DM exchange with my friend Morgan, who is far calmer about these things than me. I was hoping the bitching would have a cathartic effect — enough to let me enter the weekend with my chi intact.

After patiently wading through my DMs and aerobic thumb exercises, they responded simply, saying “Don’t worry my friend, Karma will get them in the end.” And then, quickly and probably wisely, added “GTG.”

Which left me hanging, and led to me lacing up my sneakers and heading out for a walk — because when you’re trying to exorcise the week’s demons, thumb therapy just isn’t enough.

Our neighborhood is beautiful. It sits in the shadow of Pedra da Gávea — a massive granite monolith rising 2,769 feet above sea level, whose homes do little to displace the rainforest in which it was built. It delivers on all fronts — tamarins swinging overhead, morpho butterflies the color of a swimming pool, toucans watching you from the canopy like bouncers, and everywhere orchids, heliconia, and jacaranda doing their best to remind you that the world is still beautiful despite everything.

Sadly, none of this distracted me enough to move beyond Morgan’s karma comment. Because I don’t believe in Karma.

I mean, it is a lovely idea, but to me it is no more than a lovely fairy tale that people invoke when they want to feel good about the awful things people are doing. The idea that the universe will even the score or punish people for their lack of decency does not make sense to me. First, it assumes that the universe seeks justice — and that is too great an assumption for me. Not only do we not know whether the universe seeks justice, we have no idea of its true nature. For all we know, we are just a petty amusement, and the universe delights in our misfortune. Man plans and the universe giggles hysterically. I won’t even get into the math (two trillion galaxies, averaging 100 billion stars each) and how unlikely it is that the universe would pay attention to us at any given moment, let alone settle the score.

However, I do believe that you reap what you sow — that if you offer kindness, respect, and decency to the world, it stands a good chance of being reciprocated. When you are down, suffering, or in need of a helping hand, those you have shared those gifts with will return them. Conversely, if you disrespect people, think empathy is a made-up emotion, or take whatever you want without regard to its impact on others, there is a good chance it will come back to bite you squarely on your ass. When you need a helping hand, it is far more likely it will not be offered.

And maybe, just maybe, this week was an example of that.

• Having spent years denigrating, belittling, and reviling NATO, the Bloviator-in-Chief turned to the alliance this week to help keep the Strait of Hormuz open. NATO’s response was, diplomatically speaking, a magnificent collective raspberry.

• When Senator Markwayne Mullin, the poster boy for anger management and toxic masculinity, appeared before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, he had to face its chairman, Senator Rand Paul — a man he had called a snake and whose neighbor’s felonious assault on Paul he had publicly said he understood. The dressing down was epic and ended with Paul saying “I just wonder if someone who applauds violence against their political opponents is the right person to lead an agency that has struggled to accept limits to the proper use of force.” (He was saved by Fetterman, but there is little doubt he will reap what he sowed, sooner or later.)

• The Powell Boomerang — Trump has spent months trying to get rid of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. Instead of pushing him out, the DOJ’s criminal investigation could end up extending Powell’s time at the top of the central bank even after his term formally ends in May. The move could delay rate cuts, fuel Wall Street jitters, and make it harder for Trump to replace Powell with a loyalist — with Sen. Tillis vowing to block any Fed nominee until the legal questions are resolved.

The walk helped. And just as I reached home, a Blue Morpho butterfly landed on a bright yellow orchid near our gate. It was a rough week — but that butterfly was a sign of hope, and I can live with that.

There are a lot of myths about George Washington.

The famous “I cannot tell a lie”Cherry tree story is complete fiction. It comes from a biography published shortly after he died in which the author wanted Washington to serve as a “moral example” for young Americans. So, he created the cherry tree story out of whole cloth to serve his purpose.

He didn’t have wooden teeth. His dentures were made of ivory, human and animal teeth, and metal springs. They stained easily, which probably helped give credence to the myth.

He was not America’s first president. That title belongs to John Hanson, who served as the presiding officer—president—of the country under the Articles of Confederation. Washington was the first president under our current Constitution.

Another myth is that Washington was a perfect military leader. He was not. During the Battle of Long Island, he allowed the British general William Howe to outflank him, which could have ended the War of Independence before it had truly begun.

None of this is to say that George Washington was not an honorable man. He was the only slave-holding founder to free his slaves upon his death.

Nor does it deny his military brilliance. His strategy during the Revolutionary War—one he likely absorbed from Native American warfare during the French and Indian War—was brilliant. He understood that fighting the Redcoats head-to-head was a fool’s game. They were better equipped and better trained than the ragtag army the Continental Congress had assembled.

Washington realized the best way to win the war was simply not to lose it.

He understood that keeping British troops on American soil was expensive and that the King and Parliament would not tolerate the outlay forever. He also knew British soldiers were not made of stone. They had families and homes they missed. Extend the war long enough and their desire to fight would fade until our untrained, undisciplined army could defeat them—which it did at the Siege of Yorktown.

This became one of the founding strategic doctrines of the Republic.

Yet we forget it from time to time. What is it they say? “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

We should have relearned that lesson in the Vietnam War. The North Vietnamese fought the same type of war George Washington did against the British, and it cost the United States nearly 60,000 American lives, over 300,000 wounded, and roughly $1.2 trillion in today’s money.

We forgot that lesson again in the War in Afghanistan—even after Vizzini warned us in The Princess Bride: “Never get involved in a land war in Asia.” That was a $2.6 trillion, 175,000-lives error born of historical amnesia.

Which brings us to our current journey of historical dementia, perpetrated by a president who is no doubt psychologically altered, a secretary of defense who is more concerned about bringing on the rapture than the consequences of war, and a Congress that is vertabraically challenged. These are the men who not only forgot history but are now rediscovering it at a cost to the American taxpayer of roughly $1 billion a day.

Here is the irony: the Iranians understand history better than these men. They understand what George Washington understood—that to defeat us, all they need to do is not lose. They can be pounded by every weapon in the U.S. and Israeli arsenals and, as long as the regime is still intact when the smoke clears, they win.

Before going further, let me be clear. The Iranian government was and is a bad actor. It has sponsored terrorism against the United States, Israel, and others. It cannot be allowed to possess nuclear weapons, let alone delivery systems capable of threatening the world.

That said, we had an agreement to halt their development of nuclear weapons, and Donald Trump ripped it up. The current mess we are in large part due to his recklessness in moving away from that treaty. Was it perfect? No. Should it have been renegotiated? Maybe. Tearing up an agreement may work in real estate, where the consequences are hurt feelings and money, but not with nuclear weapons.

So this mess—largely on Trump and those who wear his Florsheim shoes.

And what has forgetting George Washington’s strategy gotten us? Oil at record levels. Inflation driven by that spike. The loss of respect from many of our allies and, of course, aid and comfort to our enemies. When you take restrictions off Russia selling its oil worldwide, you are giving them more money to pound Ukraine with Iranian-made drones.

All because Donald Trump trusts his gut more than he trusts George Washington’s lesson in history.

And folks, we are not done with the fallout from this unmitigatedly stupid unforced error.

Our allies no longer trust us. They no longer look to us for leadership. They are now trying to school us. The president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said:

“My message to the United States, Israel, and Iran is simple: the world is tired of your conflicts. Diplomacy is not a sign of weakness; it is a sign of wisdom. The path of war only produces destruction, hunger, refugees, and instability that affects all nations. The world needs dialogue, negotiation, and respect for international law.”

If there is any bit of good news in all of this, it is that Trump has really stepped on his own dick with this war. (Metaphorically, of course. He has famously small hands.) Nearly 60 percent of U.S. voters think this war is a bad idea. And with every day we spend a billion dollars, lose more American lives, and watch inflation tick upward, his support wanes.

Which should translate, with any luck at all, into a blue November and an impeachment January.

Which brings me back to George Washington’s strategic brilliance.

All we need to do is not lose.

Washington beat the British Empire by outlasting it. Surely the American republic can outlast one loud man who thinks history began the day he walked into a room

Oh, and the Epstein Files.

First, I apologize for making a departure from my normal writing to embark on a journey of self-indulgent sentimentality.

If that is not your cup of tea that is okay. I will be back to my normal irascibility later this week and you can tune in later.

Fourteen years ago, I arrived in Brazil for the first time. Little did I know then how it would profoundly change my life and world view. The following story was written at the beginning of that journey. I hope you enjoy it.

“Photographs and Memories

Christmas cards that you sent to me.

All that I have are these

To remember you. “

Jim Croce

I am in my cousin Lia’s apartment in the Jardin district of Sao Paolo Brazil.

It is an upscale neighborhood not far from the Avenue Paulista marked by steep hills and trees planted in the European style of urban planning at the beginning of the last century. The buildings are far more European than American. They tend to be more compact, curved, and simple than buildings where I live in New York. No legions of doormen and concierge to greet you. Here it is a single fellow, albeit in uniform, that simply opens a gate and after calling upstairs to announce your arrival leads you to a single tiny elevator that holds four quite uncomfortably.

When the door opens to her floor the light in the hallway flashes on. This strikes as me as sensible and odd at the same time. Odd because it is not how we do things back home and sensible in the way it makes no sense for the light inside a refrigerator to shine unless the door is open.

The door to Lia’s apartment and she is there all energy and shock of frizzy red gold hair that looks remarkably like my sisters. There is a white mezuzah on her door frame so I touch it on my way into her home. Like her mezuzah Lia’s home is all white. The walls are white. The furniture is by and large white. The only exception to this tone on tone design scheme are the floors which are wood and the table in her living room which is a circle of brown and black wood.

Lia insists of giving me the grand tour of her apartment. It is very spacious at least compared to New York standards. It has a huge living room with enough space for both a seating area and a dining room table. The kitchen is an eat in with modern appliances and granite counter tops. There is a large master bedroom and a somewhat smaller second bedroom that doubles as an office. And in each room the walls are covered with works of art, design pieces, and photographs that might have seemed cluttered in another home but somehow seem just right for Lia.

Before today I have only spent time with Lia once at a lunch in my parent’s home 30 years previous. I recall not really wanting to be there but being present because my father insisted. At the time I did not understand my old man’s sense of family. Perhaps I was too young to understand, although I was in my twenties, but it is something that overtime I have grown to appreciate more and more until it now it serves as a true north in my life’s navigation. I do recall that Lia was full of energy. That she and I had a long conversation about Rock and Roll and that she loved Pink Floyd and Deep Purple.

My first recollection of meeting her brother Roberto was that morning at the reception desk of my hotel in Sao Paolo. He actually took me by surprise. I had gone to the front desk to inquire about a message he left me late the night before. He had left his phone number and I had no idea how to dial locally so I had gone downstairs to ask how when this slight curly haired man approached me and said “Paul?” and when I nodded in agreement he said “I am Roberto!” And so my day of Strauss began.

Roberto and I went into the breakfast room where he and I sat and had coffee and noshed on scrambled eggs, roasted ligurica sausage and hot dogs with a roasted tomato and onion sauce…I love breakfasts in other countries. How people start their day tells you so much of who they are as people. I must admit I was very nervous. I had never met Roberto. If I hadn’t seen his picture on Facebook I would not have been able to identify him in a lineup. His Facebook posts are all in Portuguese and mostly seem about him driving around in a Winnebago.

So this is where I begin my conversation with Roberto. I say “Roberto, I don’t read Portuguese but when I see your Facebook postings, they seem mainly about Winnebago’s. Do you own one? He laughs and tells me that when he was 12 he wrote the Winnebago company and they wrote him back and ever since then he has been obsessed with them and that it has become a big joke between him and his friends and that his posts are often about mythical adventures that he has been having in this “dream” RV.

I can tell that I am going to like him. That we are at least relatives in that we share a similar sense of humor and life outlook and just as I am reaching this conclusion Lia breezes into the room like the force of nature that she is. She hugged me and kissed me and then looked at Roberto and says “He looks just like Ernesto.” It is only then that I noticed that she has shopping bags in each hand and as we sit down she says “I have presents for everyone.” And indeed she does…..a design book for my mother and for my sister, a bolt of native cloth also for my mother to brighten the house. , frames for my brother and myself made of Brazilian wood, a desk card holder for me, little boxes-also of Brazilian wood for sister again.

My first thought was oh my god how completely generous and then of course my second thought was “My God how am I going to get these home.”

After taking the three bags of presents upstairs, and gathering myself for the day, I met Roberto and Lia in the lobby of the hotel to commence my tour of Sao Paolo. The tour was a compliment to Lia’s personality. It was exuberant, frenetic, eclectic and full of a passion for a city that she considers an extension of her own family.

At first we drove through the city with her giving me a running description of the neighborhood…when they were built, what type of people who live there, how beautiful some of the homes were. She took me to an art museum to see some piece of modern art to show me some particularly beautiful Brazilian pieces. We stopped at folk art store in the heart of Sao Paolo’s “soho” and drove down a street where local artist had painted the walls with their works of art. We stopped at a a furniture store that had a tree growing through its middle with modern beautiful pieces all created in Brazil. We visited the University where she and Roberto studied and where Roberto’s daughter is a student. At some point we took a moment and went to Fago a Brazilian churoscuro and had enough food for the day and my first in country Caipirinha.

At one point I called my father on the phone because I knew how much my spending time with our cousins meant to him. I think I understand this more than any of his children…so many of our trips together have been exploring his past.

Not having a big family was a part of my childhood. I never missed it because I never had it. My father grew up with a large family whom he loved in a way that an only child could love a family. It is only as an adult that I have begun to understand the hollowness losing them caused and how much it meant to him to have a family of his own. So I wasn’t surprised to hear the emotion in his voice as he spoke to Roberto and Lia. They are the last shadows of the memories that are all that left of that family. I was surprised that hearing this conversation affected me in the way that did and was grateful for dark sun glasses so that my cousins could not see how touched I was.

Our last stop of the afternoon was at an Art Museum in what they told me was Sao Paolo’s central park. The park was beautiful in the way that European Parks normally are….manicured, planned, clean without the frenetic chaos, naturalness and trash I associate with parks back home. The museum itself was not much of a museum, it was really more of an art gallery with works of Brazilian artist none of whom I was familiar with. But Lia walked me through them with the type of love and pride that a parent reserves for their children.

Back in the car, Lia asked if I was tired and would like to rest before our dinner. In truth I was exhausted. I had not slept much on the airplane and the excitement of being in a new place accompanied by the anxiousness of being on a new adventure had kept me from sleeping well the previous night so I welcomed the opportunity for a nap before meeting the rest of the family. Back in my hotel, I flopped on my bed and after only a few moments of a reflection on the day that had been I entered the land of nod.

We are at the table in Lia’s living room. Roberto is sitting next to me and says “Look I have brought something to show to you.” I can see that he has an old brown file folder that you would expect to see when excavating a steamer trunk in someone’s attic. It has completely lost its shape, its edges rounded and bent from use.

He opens the file and pulls out a photograph sepia with age of two beautiful young women. Their hair, short and pulled back in the style of the day. They are leaning together, their faces almost connecting at their elegant cheekbones and while they both have a wisp of a smile, you can tell that something else is lurking just below the surface perhaps sadness or an uncertain future or both. You can tell just by looking that these two love each other very much. There is a date at the bottom of the photograph that reads in lovely hand 1922.

Roberto says “The woman on the right is my grandmother, Sidi and it is your Grandmother on the left” The realization of who this and when this was taken makes the world stop around me and I wrapped in a cocoon of my own thoughts.

There is no doubt that it is my grandmother even though my memories of her come only after time and the harshness of the world had worn at her. It is same kind eyes. It is the same face. I flash to memories of her hugs which were always warm, soft and generous and full of a love that would forgive anything. Of birthday cards full of quarters, and of the matzoh ball soup and Wiener Schnitzel with cucumber salad she would make for us whenever visited. Of her smell earthy and real. I think of how she always called me “mein Paulschin” and how when something bad we happen she would say “Guttesvillen”. I think of the “Stern”Magazines my father used to buy for her and how she liked to sip a little “Cherry Herring” to help her sleep.

I remembered a time when I thought I would have children how I was wanted to call my little girl Jeni hoping she would grow up as sweet and kind as she.

I think of a meadow in Farafeld near the local train station which was really nothing more than a shack. It was a warm spring morning and the field we were walking in was full of yellow flowers and small creeks that glittered in the sunlight. We were here because as a boy my father had been sent here to escape the heat of the Viennese Streets and spend time with his grandmother. He told me that day that when he heard a train blow its whistle he could always tell whether or not his mother was on the train and how at the time he thought he was psychic. So I told him my own story. How the winter of my senior year I had lost the ring that he had given me that was his father and how I had been scared to tell him. That one night I had a dream and my grandmother came to me and told me where I could find the ring. When I awoke that morning I had checked the place my grandmother had told me to and found the ring. A few moments later the phone rang, it was my brother telling me that my Grandmother had passed away. I told him that it was not he or I that was psychic, it was Jeni.

I realized that from the date on this photograph it must have been taken shortly before Sidi had immigrated to Brazil. I have no doubt that this photograph was taken so that the two sisters would have a keep sake of each other as they were to live a third of a world apart. I have no doubt that both sensed that after Sidi left they would never see each other again. The world was a far bigger place in 1922. I wondered, that despite my grandmothers’ gift could she really imagine the world to come.

In 1922 she was years away from meeting my grandfather. My father, not even a gleam in her eye.

Could she foresee that he world would be turned upside down a by a former army corporal turned convict turned supreme leader. That before it was over almost her entire family and most of the world she knew would be destroyed and lost forever and she living in the Americas although separated by a third of the world from her Sidi.

I am sure that she could not foresee all that. I am sure that at the time all she could focus on was the nearness of her sister now and the loneliness that would come in time.

Roberto was saying something and I broke free from my thoughts and I said “I am sorry. I missed that. What did you say?”

“Your grandmother and my grandmother, they write to each other all of the time. I have some of the letters and the photos they sent to each other. Here,” he said pointing at the folder I will show you.”

I turn to him and say “I knew they wrote to each other but I cannot never knew what they shared. And until I saw this photograph, I never realized how much they must have missed each other but it pulls together some random bits of family trivia for me.”

Roberto looks at me inquiringly and I respond “My father once told me that he offered to send my Grandmother to Brazil many times and she would always refuse. When he would ask her why she didn’t want to go she would say “It was too hard to say good bye the first time, I couldn’t say good bye to her again.” Looking at this photograph I totally understand that feeling.

The next picture he pulled out was of a man with a long face, a mustache that did not quite reach the end of his lips, who had lost much of his hair. There was a faint smile on his face but from the laugh lines around his face you could tell that this was a man who liked to laugh. You could easily imagine him telling a joke. Roberto said “Do you know who this is?” when I replied that I did not he said “This is our grandmother’s brother, Ede.”

I flashed to a graveyard in Sopron, Hungary. At my request, my father had been on a journey to trace his roots. We had come to Sopron because it was the town in which his mother had been born and he had visited frequently as a child. That morning, despite the fact that my father had been sick with a stomach ailment, he had insisted that he wanted to find the Jewish cemetery in town. It had not been an easy find. We had gone over hill and dale, down one street and the next looking for this place. With no GPS and no Hungarian language skills we had gotten lost countless times and were on the verge of giving up when we stumbled onto the place.

The cemetery was a mess. There were overturned gravestones and overgrown plots but somehow it had managed to preserve its dignity and beauty. I have a vivid memory of my father walking down one of the tree lined paths. It is sunny and with the trees casting shade on many of the graves. From his posture you can tell he is a man on a mission and he is followed by a black and white dog trails whom seems eager to provide assistance should he need it.

The dog it turns out belongs to the graveyard caretakers, three young Hungarian rockers….punks…who lived for free in an apartment in the cemetery in exchange for looking after the place. When we told them what we were looking for them they fanned out through the place looking for the grave we had been looking for. Eventually, one of them finds it.

Although the edges white stone of the monument are tinged with the grey of time and pollution the grave is one of the best kept in the graveyard. The monument simply states his name “Hess Ede” and his dates 1896 – 1968. My father and I stare at the grave for a while and I can tell that he is recounting moments his childhood that I will never be able to access. I recall saying a prayer for Ede and thinking while I never knew him I wish that I had. After while we place a rock on his headstone and make our way quietly out of the cemetery.

Later in the car I ask him about Ede as I have gotten to be nearly a half century old and know nothing about him. He tells me that he remembers a jolly man. Someone who loved to dance and enjoy himself. That when he would visit Sopron with his mother that Ede’s sons and he would take part in secret “Zionist exercises” in the woods near the town. He can’t quite recall how his uncle survived the war but he knew that his first wife, Helen…the best pastry chef my father has ever known was transported and murdered at Auschwitz. That after the war he remarried and drove a bus and that his sons immigrated to Israel.

I say to Roberto “This is the first photograph I have ever seen of Ede. I have been to his grave but I have never seen him.” As if to cure me of my fifty five years of ignorance he proceeds to pull more pictures of Ede out of his magic file folder.

One shows Ede and his son in a formal portrait both solemn with their face at angle looking as if they should have a flag waving behind them and their hearts crossing the check. I ask Roberto the name of Ede’s son and he tells me he can’t remember.

There is a picture of Ede in front of one of buses and ask Roberto if this is where he gained his love of Winnebago and he laughs and pats me on the shoulder and says “Perhaps.”

Another picture shows Ede in a restaurant in front of all things a Christmas Tree having a bowl of soup. I point the tree out to Roberto and all he could do is raise an eyebrow.

He then shows me a photograph that is very worn and faded. At the bottom of the photograph it says Bruckner on one side and Sopron on the other side with a small coat of arms. The man in the photograph is quite natty. He has short hair and a van dyke beard. He is wearing a dark cravat, with a wing collar and a suit that buttons high with short narrow lapels. It is clearly from the latter part of the 19^th century. When I look at Roberto enquiringly he says “This is our Grandmother’s father. “

I have had a fascination with this man for a long time. As I have heard the stories, he was man who had 13 children with 3 wives. But he died when my grandmother was very young, and his wife like the old lady and the shoe had so many children he did not know what to do so some of the children including Jeni were sent to live with relatives. It is how my Grandmother came to live with her sister Josefine or Pepi in Farafeld, who would in turn become a Grandmother for my father.

I have never understood how a man could go through so many wives….wouldn’t the trauma of losing one or two be enough to put you off marriage for at least a while and to have so many children that you cannot afford them…..I know that my prejudices are based in the second half of the twentieth century and that my Great Grandfather lived in the second half of the nineteenth . I know at the time romantic love was often reserved for the rich and in most cases was neither practical nor advisable. I also know birth control was not something most people practiced and that often having many children was the only way that ensures that at least a few would survive but I can imagine having so many you cannot afford them.

At the end of the day though, Great Grandfather showed a better understanding of the world than me. Of his thirteen children only 3 managed to survive the war. If he had less children there would be no me.

Roberto then shows me a collection of photographs that had they been named by AA Milne would have been titled “When We Are Were Very Young.” It is a collection of photographs that shows the very early beginnings of my parent’s life together.

One shows my mother in her wedding dress looking elegant and beautiful. She is only 22. My father is looking at her with an adoration that all newly minted husbands should look at their wives. I know from the stories that they have told that this day was very hot…family myth has it that it was so hot that my father sweated through his new blue suit…but in this picture they look cool and calm and collected.

Another shows my grandparents on that same day. Marcus is wearing a new suit and shoes and stares into the camera as if he is the cat who just ate the canary. What a journey he had so far from Polish stetytl to Siberian Prisoner of War camp to his son’s wedding on Park Avenue in the capital of the world. My grandmother looks more pensive, as if she is worrying about something or thinking about some far away time and place. Perhaps she was thinking of her own wedding day, pregnant with my father a new dress and gloves courtesy of my Grandfather. Was she reflecting on their journey as well?

There are many pictures of my brother David and I as infants and toddlers. One shows my brother wearing his lunch, fingers, face and clothes covered with whatever he was eating. He looks quite pleased with himself. Another shows him stealing my teddy bear and me seemingly happy with the theft. One shows me age 2-ish animated conversation with him and he listening as if he understands every word.

There are so many of us as children that Roberto is speeding through them one after another but I stop him when he comes to a photo that I have not only never seen but I am having a hard time placing. It shows my father and grandfather each holding my brothers arm while he sits on Jeni’s shoulder. David is trying to break free of their grip and looks unhappy. My grandmother is smiling and looks as if she is about to giggle. My mother is certainly behind the lens of the camera.

Looking at the picture I realize that this picture has to have been shot in the backyard in Denver probably during the summer of 1956.

I am sitting in a hospital room in Berkley Heights NJ. My father is here trying to recover from surgery on his neck and various other elements they have come as a consequence of his hospitalization. For some reason we are talking about my parents move to Denver where I was to be born. He tells me that he had gone on to Denver by himself while David and my mother went to New York to visit with her parents. He tells me that he would work all day long and then spend his evenings looking for a house for his new family to live in. He recounts how lonely a time had been for him…missing his infant son and wife. When he found the house in Cherry Creek he couldn’t wait to call my mother and tell her to get on the next plane to Denver. He tells me that he will never forget the first sight of them getting off the plane and how it filled with him a joy that he didn’t know he possessed. As he tells me this his voices gets deep with emotion and he wells up.

Curious I ask him what month this all takes place in. He tells me that he is sure that my mother and brother came just after the July 4^th holiday and it is then that I realize that this is when I was conceived.

The picture I am looking at now has very likely been taken within a few days of my creation.

Roberto hands me a photograph of my brother and I, ages 7 and 8, standing with my Grandmother on her porch on Delay Street in Danbury. The picture is dated, in my mother’s near perfect penmanship, November ’64 and it is cold out and we are all wearing coats. David and I both have comics in our hands that we no doubt got 2 for quarter at the Kresges at the other end of the parking lot from my Grandmothers house…just my Grandmother’s as my Grandfather Marcus has passed away a few months previously and the grief of that loss is clearly etched on her face.

I have so many memories of that house, both good and bad, and at the sight of the photograph they seep into my brain like water into a dry sponge, plumping my memory with thoughts long since forgotten.

I see my grandmother in the kitchen of this house. There is an old white stove with a large blue can of Crisco sitting on its control panel. There is a pot of Matzo Ball soup on the stove waiting to be served and she is frying Wiener Schnitzel that she will serve to us with a cucumber salad that is sour and sweet and delicious. She serves it to us on plain plates and glasses she has won at the Danbury State Fair. Above the table there is a ceiling lamp that has a chain pull to turn it on and off. The end of the chain pull is a red weight that resembles a stop light. I loved the kitchen and the hugs my grandmother gave me while she cooked.

I have an image of my grandfather in the parking lot behind their house. He has a stick in his hand that has a nail at the end. He is patrolling the parking lot for litter and when he sees it he spears in it and places it a messenger like bag that he has slung over his shoulder. I can remember being so embarrassed at the time that my grandfather was so poor that he had to collect trash. It would be years before I understood the life Marcus had lived and how really impressive it was that he managed to make it as far as he had.

When we would come to town it went without saying that my Uncle Max, my grandfathers brother, would come to visit. Like my grandfather he was compact man with a wet gravelly voice from years of smoking way too much. Unlike my grandfather he had come to the United States as a young man and after a time had started a successful liquor store. He was in part responsible for my father and parents to have made it to this country before they were swept from the face of the earth. But I remember most was his pleasure on seeing us, we were his only living blood relatives his sisters have the great misfortune of making their home in the town the Germans called Aushcwitz, and the pinky ring he wore with the diamond embedded in it whose sparkle he used to make dance across the room to my brothers and my delight.

The house on Delay was old and crumbling. The stairs, that led to the upstairs apartment smelled of must and decay. Throughout the house decay would show through by curling and cracked linoleum and unpainted window sills and other things that always made me think that the house was partially haunted.

On almost every visit, my grandmother would insist on taking us to the Buster Brown shoe store on Main Street. There, are feet would be measured and a new pair of brown lace up shoes would be fitted, a thumb placed in front of your toes to make sure you had room to grow, and where we would be asked to walk up and down the aisle of store to make sure they were comfortable. I remember loving the picture of Buster Brown and his dog Tyge that were in the heel of each shoe. Years later, in a plaza in Vienna, I can remember my father telling me of Marcus’s buying him shoes in an eerily similar ritual.

By the time I met my grandfather, life had taken a great toll on him. He had fought in the war of wars and been captured and sent to Siberia for 7 long years. He had lost a wife, a woman he cared for at least enough to name my father after. He worked long hours in abattoir taking unused animal parts and turning them into brushes. He was arrested on Kristallnacht and thrown into a cell so small that the men had to stand up to sleep… an incident in his life so terrible he never wished to talk of it. When he came to America he had to work hard making hats in a factory. A job that I am sure gave him no great satisfaction from life. He never learned to speak English well and must have felt like a stranger in a strange land. I don’t recall him ever speaking to me directly…he always used my grandmother and father as interpreters.

He was very intimidating to a small boy. And his presence scared me and as much as I lived for my Grandmother’s hugs I shied away from him. The thought of this embarrasses me as an adult but it is completely logical to the six year old that I was and the memory of him lurks in the picture Roberto is showing me.

By now I am a little punch drunk with the pictures my cousin is showing me. Each new photograph seems to be a jab at the body of my emotions. If I were in the ring, I would be clutching my opponent hoping the bell would ring at any second. But I am not in the ring and I have no way of asking Roberto to stop the onslaught of photographs.

Had this been a prize fight the next photograph would have been the knockout blow.

The image Roberto has laid in front of me is of an officer in the United States Army. He looks vaguely Slavic with high cheekbones and mezzaluna face and is far more boy than man. His hair is cropped short and brushed back making his ears appear slightly too large for his head. His peak cap is at a jaunty angle and bears the single bar of a freshly minted lieutenant. His smile is relaxed and confident, the horror of the war he is about to enter ahead of him not behind. You can tell from his posture that he is proud and confident of his abilities.

It is a picture of my father that I have never seen and the sight of it and the understanding of what it is and when it was taken overwhelm me and without any warning I gasp a little and let out a sob. Roberto puts his hand gently and kindly on my shoulders to comfort me. Lia brings me Kleenex so that I can wipe away the snot that is now dripping from my nose.

I am embarrassed by this emotional outburst in front of these cousins that I barely know and I want to explain to them why it is that I have reacted to this picture in the way that I have. But I can’t not only because I am finding it hard to get words past the massive lump that has developed in my throat but because it goes far beyond a single sentence or even a paragraph.

Nearly two years ago my father fell in his bedroom injuring his neck and causing weakness and paralysis. A subsequent operation stabilized his neck but his rehabilitation has proven far more challenging than his original condition. His catheterization has caused numerous infections and massive consumptions of antibiotics which has caused other infections. There have been more hospitalizations and trips to the emergency rooms than I can count. I have seen him make numerous strides in his physical rehab only to slide backward when infection has overtaken him. I have seen his temperature spike and listen to him hallucinate when he had an allergic reaction to the medication he was taking. I have seen him lose hope and let frustration get the better of him and I have seen him find the strength and the will to carry on.

Despite all this. Despite his decline in health, despite being confined in a wheel chair for nearly two years, despite his occasional irascibility, his courage has always been front and center and a clear example how to deal with the shit hand life sometimes hands you.

I see this photograph of my father. He is so young. So willing to take on the world’s fight and I clearly see the warrior that lies within him now and begs to be set free. I see the man I have always known and the man that I have tried to discover on the journeys we have taken together.

It is a mild spring day and my father and I are sitting in a café in Vienna at 48 Ottakringstrasse. It is the building my father spent the first 14 years of his life. He is looking debonair wearing his signature Ray Ban Aviator glasses and tan safari jacket. We have come to Vienna at my request because I am fascinated by his “back-story”.

Born into the working poor of Vienna he suffered through the rise of the Nazi party. On Kristallnacht, weeks before he was to become a bar mitzvah, they burned his temple and arrested his father. After being denied access to his school and running the streets for the better of a year and a failed attempt to immigrate to Israel he and his family escaped to the United States. He learned English by watching Ronald Colman films and reading the dictionary. He excelled in school and eventually made it to Syracuse University where in the spring of 1944 he was drafted. By December he was in the Italian theatre, a shave tail lieutenant with the 88^th infantry division 913 Artillery.

It took almost a year from the time the war ended until he made it back to Vienna even though he was headquartered only a few hundred miles away in the Italian Tyrol. SNAFUs and different theatre of wars had conspired against the journey, but I had always wondered what that trip must have been like for him? What must have been like to flee a place fearing for your life only to return a short 6 years later as an officer in the conquering army? To leave as a child and come back as a man…to search for all of those he had loved and to find that they had been swallowed up in Hitlers’s horrors.

That afternoon we walked around his neighborhood. He has shown me where his temple was before it burnt down…. where he played soccer with his friends before he was not allowed to anymore. Where his cousin Litzi lived and where he went to school before he could not. He has told me stories about an evil land lady who would be vile to the Jewish tenants of her building and especially vile to their children. I have learned of his gang that he would run the streets with and how in an effort to defend himself he had bought a pellet gun that his mother made him return. Of his desire to immigrate to Israel and become Zaki ben Mordecai and of how his mother and other women in their building would take on sewing piece work to earn money.

I can tell it has been an emotional day for him evoking echoes of a world whose music has long since faded and while I don’t want to open any old wounds I am obsessed with what his return to Vienna was like for him.

Taking a sip of my beer, I let my curiosity get the better of me and ask, “Did you come back here to this building when you returned to Vienna.”

“Sure.”

Trying to imagine the scene in my head I ask, “Wasn’t it military regulations at the time that if you were a visiting officer you were required to wear your class A uniform?”

“Yes.”

“So, when you came back here was there anybody left?”

My father shakes his head and says “no.”

Thinking about it I ask “Was the awful wife of the superintendent here?”

He says “yes”

I say, “So there you were, grown six inches, wearing the uniform of United States Army Officer, did she recognize you?”

He replies simply “yes.”

I ask him, “How did she react to seeing you?”

He pauses before answering and then says quietly, “She was scared.”

I wonder so I ask, “How did it make you feel?”

He looks away not wanting to catch my eye and then says “Good” and then changes the subject.

Now I am seeing, for the first time, what this woman saw. Until this moment I have never seen a picture of Lt. Ernst Rothkopf before. He has only existed in my imagination. But instead of feeling fear I feel love. And, instead of seeing a conqueror, I see a hero, a member of the greatest generation, a person who like many of his time saved the world and created a new one so his children could live without the burdens that were placed in front of them.

I see the hero that only a son can see. A hero that has shown courage every day for the last two years.

Roberto pats me on the shoulder, and I hand the photograph back to him and he says “Let’s go to dinner.” So, we do

Much later I am back in my hotel room. The room is dark the only light the faint glow from my computer on a desk across the room. I am lying on the stiff mattress and rough sheets that my hotel features. The room is quiet and there are no sounds except my own thoughts.

I think of Roberto and Lia. Two people who I knew of but didn’t know before today. Family without context or emotion…now they are my brother and my sister…I think about how I can repay them for the kindness and love they have shown me today but quickly realize that it is a debt that cannot be quantified, it is priceless, yet it never needs to be repaid because we are family which is yet another gift they have given to me.

I think of my grandmother and her sister Sidi. How they created a collage of their life apart through photographs and letters. How they saw their families grow sharing the moments that meant the most to them…of soldiers going off to war…of weddings and new families created from the ashes of the past…I think of their last photograph together and all it said of the love between these sisters.

I think of how the world has changed since my grandmother and her sister said goodbye to each other 80 years ago. For them to communicate with each other was not the simple task it is today where can just turn on a computer and within seconds be seeing each other wherever you happen to be in the world. For them communication took a commitment of time and of effort. Pictures needed to be taken, developed and printed. Letters need to be handwritten and thought through. Stamps needed to be bought, and the post office visited. Then the long wait for a reply.

I am old enough to remember what waiting for a letter was like. The crushing disappointment when that day’s mail brought you nothing but bills. The excitement and exhilaration one felt when the letter you had been hoping for finally arrived. I wonder what it is better, today’s instantaneous conversations or the more elegant, letters of days gone by. I can think of positives and negatives on both sides but in the end my thoughts turn to Jeni and Sidi.

I think of the love that they had for each other. How for most 60 years they waited by their mailboxes for word from one another. How they shared the triumphs of their families and the losses that they both must have felt when they found that their family had been swept away by the war. I think of the joy they must have felt when they recognized each other’s handwriting on an envelope and how many times each letter was read over and shared.

I think about two sisters who loved each other so much that they could never see each other again.

When sleep finally comes I dream of family.