Trav Trivia

Volume 5, Number 2

April 20, 2009 -- All week long I’ve been haunted by an old song by Noel Coward: “I Went to a Marvelous Party.” I saw him do it once in the days of black and white television. Here are two out of its five refrains:

I went to a marvelous party

I must say the fun was intense

We all had to do

What the people we knew

Would be doing a hundred years hence

Dear Cecil arrived wearing armour

Some shells and a black feather boa

Poor Millicent wore a surrealist comb

Made of bits of mosaic from St. Peter's in Rome

But the weight was so great that she had to go home

I couldn't have liked it more.

I went to a marvelous party

We didn't start dinner till ten

And young Bobbie Carr

Did a stunt at the bar

With a lot of extraordinary men

Dear Baba arrived with a turtle

Which shattered us all to the core

The Grand Duke was dancing a foxtrot with me

When suddenly Cyril screamed out Fiddledede

And ripped off his trousers and jumped in the sea

I couldn't have liked it more.

In order to exorcise this from my brain I had to come up with this:

I went to a marvelous tea party

All the clowns from the right wing were there

like Rick Perry to say

“we’ll secede any day”

that’s our boy Texas Governor Good Hair

The country we’re proud

Of let’s leave it the crowd

Yelled In voices quite loud

I couldn’t have felt more despair.

Glenn Beck of FOX chose to lay siege

To the Alamo, Mission of fame

I can’t help but mock it

No Travis, no Crocket

Instead just a pocket

Of tea bagging deadbeats who came.

I went to a marvelous tea party

Sponsored by FOX news’ chief bore

Out of ego or vanity

That bane of humanity

Demented Sean Hannity

I couldn’t have hated it more.

I know I should not let the tea parties get under my skin and the thing to do is to treat them as casually as did most of the media except FOX News, who were the de facto sponsors of this faux grass roots event. But take a moment and watch this video of a Glenn Beck tea bag party.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yWYZVv1Jig

Now who in that group would you like to have as your next door neighbor, the fellow who rants about the fifty-year communist conspiracy of infiltrating our government, schools, and other institutions? Or would you like to have tea with the woman who says burn the books with all of that “evolution crap?” She could be sitting on the Texas Board of Education.

As for the fellow who exhorts us to pull our children out of college because they are being brain washed, this is a more common concern. I have conservative friends who believe that if their progeny attend an Ivy League college they will be brain washed by liberal professors. Let me see if I can allay their fears.

Due to interruption of World War II, demands by the navy, the difficulty of transferring credits at one time or another I attended five different colleges and taught a course at a sixth (caveat: that includes a one-week intensive course at NYU), for a total of considerably more than two hundred hours. At no time was I in danger of being brain washed. In my course in, say, Heat and Power? Calculus? Descriptive Geometry? Climatology? Food Stiffs? Not college English; nothing political about Emily Dickenson. World history? Too busy trying to separate one Chinese dynasty from another. Even my professor of basic economics was simply trying his best to explain to me stocks and bonds, a losing proposition if there ever was one. No, unless a student who goes off to one of those prestigious colleges chooses to sign up for a course with some famous professor, like a Noam Chomsky, say, there is no occasion for being brain washed. I assure you I got this way on my own.

No, the tea-bagging event was for me the last straw. It sent me over the cliff. (No man is an island, entire of itself). It comes after weeks of noxious, nauseous diatribes against any kind of civilized governance (every man is a piece of the whole, a part of the main, just as if a promontory were, or the manor of thy friend or thy own were). My milk of human kindness has curdled (Any man’s death diminishes me, for I am involved in mankind). I’ve lost all faith in my fellow man. To look at the people in that video is to wade in the wash of disaffected humanity (And therefore never ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee). May the participants indulge in tea-bagging as known in the gay community and choke. I am relegated to the role of dyspeptic old man. Or am I just becoming like them, in a kind of metamorphoses, as in the Ionesco play “Rhinoceros?” I did not see the New York production nor the movie with Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder, but I did see a regional performance. The premise that people get caught up in behavior of others to whom they are exposed (the rhinoceros) and turn into a rhinoceros themselves seems apt today. It covers our savage nature, and how easily we turn beastly. This is Theater Not So Absurd.

The tax theme of the event was an absurdly bogus excuse to attack the current administration and government in general. Nobody has told these people that the election last November was the time to select the kind of government they wanted. Unless they have an annual income of over a couple of hundred thousand under the proposed change their taxes will not go up, but will indeed go down. As Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post writes “Most of the tea-party types are basically anti-Obama protesters.” You might say they were at the Glenn ‘Beck and Call’ since Fox News beat the drums and sounded the trumpets, Unlike other real news media, “in the 10 days leading up to the protests, Fox News aired 107 ads promoting the parties” calculated Media Matters. They also invited viewers to "a virtual tax day tea party" at TheFoxNation.com.” Typical of their coverage was Fox Business Network anchor Cody Willard who said "I'm on your side. I'm trying to take down the Fed.” Take down the Fed sounds pretty Unfair and Unbalanced to me. But of course, as they say, they are just “fighting fascism.” So much for what is being called the “unhinged-o-sphere.”

All of these people must be mad at Obama for what he was handed by his predecessor, which Steven Benen of the Washington Monthly sums up nicely as “Obama really did inherit an economic crisis, an abysmal job market, a budget mess, a failing financial industry, a collapsing U.S. auto industry, global warming, an absurd health care system, an equally absurd national energy framework, two costly wars, a pessimistic electorate, and a nation that had lost much of its global prestige.” Plus Fortune Magazine’s annual report states “America's 500 biggest companies earned $98.9 billion in 2008, down 85 percent from $645.2 billion in profits the previous year.” But not to worry, Nobel Prize winning economist and NYT columnist Paul Krugman writes “things are getting worse more slowly.” Thanks a lot, Paul. I feel so much better now.

While the pugnacious right-wing pundit aria carry on as usual about “taxes and deficits and the same old schemes to cut the taxes of for the wealthiest citizens, deregulated the economy and despoil the environment”(courtesy of columnist Richard Cohen in the Washington Post) I heard someone talk and make some sense, on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. It was Elizabeth Warren, Chair, Congressional Oversight Panel on TARP. From its beginning, she said, this country has gone through roughly fifteen year cycles of boom and bust. Until the Great Depression of the thirties. In the recovery checks and balances came in, regulations and oversight were established, banking became boring according to Krugman, and we had roughly fifty years without boom/bust. About 1980 that changed. Deregulation and oversight went out the window. Banking became exciting and attracted the brightest who could game the system and make a lot of money (Bill Gates said that the financial sector was his biggest competition for IQ talent), and we had the Savings and Loan bust, the Enron bust, and the Mortgage bubble bust. What this Administration aims to do is to put the tiger back in the cage and go back to rules and regulations to break the boom/bust routine. I am now a fan of the cheerfully blunt Ms. Warren, the kind of woman who would simply tell you as a matter of fact that your fly was open. The beloved motto of the city of Austin, Texas is “Keep Austin Weird.” So let’s make “Banking Dull” again.

Another bit of absurd dialogue coming out of the ring-a-ding right-wing are howls of protest about a report The United States Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis just issued. Because it said many of the right-wing extremist groups “follow extremely conservative ideologies and that some may seek to recruit and “radicalize” veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.” Conservatives cry foul, partisan, but the study was commissioned many months ago by the Bush Administration. And according to columnist Charles M. Blow in the New York Times it backs up a previous report by the F.B.I., and according to Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, “Many white supremacists over the years have pushed their followers to join the military and enter either the special forces, where the training is judged to be the best in the world, or the infantry, where you will learn the skills necessary to fight the coming race war.” This is the fault of Obama yet? It is great to have those sharpshooters take out the Pirates as they did in Somalia but chilling to think of them loose among white supremacists. Do the right-wingers complaining about the report expect extremist groups to follow Martin Luther King Jr.? The rhinoceroses are out there. Watch it!

Guns. Now that’s a word that will pull the chain of any red-bloodied conservative. And while no, Nancy Pelosi does not want plan or intend to take away your gun we do pay a brutal price for the privilege of easy ownership. Since Sept. 11, 2001, when we began to focus on terrorism, nearly 120,000 Americans have been killed in non-terror homicides, most of them committed with guns. Eight kids are shot to death every day in America. Someone is killed by a gun every 17 minutes. In works now are bills to allow concealed guns on college campuses. Shoot-out 101.

Tom Diaz, a researcher with the Violence Project in Washington, had this to say about the flow of guns from the United States to Mexican drug Cartels: "If you wanted to create a system that is basically legal but designed to facilitate gun trafficking, you couldn't have a better system than you have here." It’s our good neighbor policy.

Hard to tell whether this item belongs under the heading of Taxes or Absurd but according to the Wall Street Journal Florida is considering a big tax break for yachts and private planes. It is called the “Aviation and Maritime Full Employment Act,” and who wouldn’t want full employment. It would cap the sales tax at $25,000 no matter what you paid for the equipment, so if you buy a boat or plane for $20 million you could saved as much as $5,975,000 on taxes. This would encourage more people to buy their boats and planes in Florida and keep their boats and planes in Florida which would keep more people employed.

Essentially, the state would give up $5,975,000, which is the equivalent of paying 128 people a year’s salary of about $50,000. So every time a sale was made would the state be buying jobs for $50,000 each (hypothetically of course). And making a wealthy friend. Perhaps there is a germ of a job creation program here. What if we encouraged the sellers of tennis shoes to make them in this country, pay workers the same wage those kids in China are being paid to make them now and let government make up the difference between that and a living wage? The difference would be in the form of a tax break of course (the only thing we know how to do), so many tax savings dollars per job. In time we will give out so many tax breaks there will be no revenue to run a government and the conservative movement will at last have fulfilled its mission. Theater of the absurd.

Volume 5, Number 1

April 13, 2009 -- To hitchhike on the old TV program “This Was The Week That Was,” I would say that to me, more or less, This Was The Week That Wasn’t.” Nothing seemed momentous. Perhaps that’s a good thing. Yes, the earth kept turning, yes the antic conservative commentators kept filling the airways with obligatory outrageous rhetoric but my hackles don’t seem to be rising to the occasion.

It does seem as though the rabid rabble rousers get together in a back room somewhere and decide the theme of the day.

Glenn Beck and Hannity / Predict a calamity

As storm troupers goose step to your door

Sniff Rove and the others / Of neocon brothers

Obama now divides us even more.

Scenes of uniformed marching Nazi troopers were on the screen as Beck spoke on his FOX program about Obama being a Manchurian Candidate going to drive many into concentration camps etc. so we better hang on to our guns before he takes them away from us (the reasoning, authorities say, the man in Pennsylvania who gunned down those policemen last week was that he thought they came to confiscate his guns). Others, including Newt Gingrich, used the Nazi metaphor. Karl Rove writing in the Wall Street Journal and on FOX led the choirs of ex White House denizens who are claiming Bush did much to bring us together while Obama is driving us farther apart. I’m with Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly on this one. He wrote: “For Karl Rove to argue that Bush, far more than Obama, worked to bring people together is simply hilarious.” You have to laugh at this crazy stuff. Howard Kurtz, of the Washington Post, reports Fox News's Glenn Beck's latest conspiracy: Foreign nationals have ‘penetrated’ the U.S., staging a Marxist revolution. I wish Obama would make up his mind: either Marxism or Nazism, the suspense is killing me.

But these, the days of Holy Week and Easter and Passover offer us a good time to think about the issues facing us from a strictly moralistic point of view. Not how they met the standards of a particular religion, because we need to separate church from state, but would this or that action we consider fair, ethical or moral, everything else aside.

Healthcare. I would say it’s pretty clear we will not get anything like universal healthcare. It will probably end up better; more people covered; policies will cost less; transportable; business will get off the hook and some will be in better competitive shape to compete globally; a larger number in the upper income strata will enjoy our best care. Even so a large number of Americans will remain uninsured and we will continue to fall behind other industrial nations and probably continue to spend more money.

When I think about this I think about a wildlife program I once watched. A herd of hoofed animals on the African grass lands, gnus I believe, came to the low spot in a river where they could ford it and get to grazing land on the other side. Lying there in plain sight was a number of huge crocodiles, waiting. The gnus simply plunged in, charged across, ignoring those among them picked off by the crocs, never looking back or to the side. Is this the way we see our healthcare? Should we try to change it or, all other considerations aside, are we content with it ethically and morally?

“We do not torture” but yes we do. There will be, it is reported, a reunion of Bush Administration officials in Dallas this week. There are six, who if they appear, should have a lot to talk about over their hot dogs. Three of them would be Douglas Feith, the former Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy; former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales; John Yoo, a former Justice Department lawyer; and David Addington, the chief of staff and the principal legal adviser to Vice-President Dick Cheney.

Columnist Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post reports that the “International Committee of the Red Cross concluded in a secret report that the Bush administration's so-called "enhanced" interrogation methods, used on "high-value" terrorism suspects, plainly constituted torture.”

Next we turn to a story in last week’s New Yorker magazine. A law professor and a certified Queen’s Counsel (you can‘t get up the counselor any higher than that) Philippe Sands, a Brit married to an American, wrote a book two years ago entitled “Torture Team,” after extensive interviews and investigations of his own. Now a Spanish Court, with his help, is starting a criminal investigation of the six Bush administration men. In Spain you say? Don’t blow it off. The Spanish judge, Baltasar Garzón, is the man who nailed Pinoche which established the principle in International law that there is no immunity even for the highest-ranking former government officials when they are accused of torture.

The bottom line is that it is possible that some day arrest warrants may be issued, in which case the Obama Administration, which has wanted to avoid pursuing cases against the previous administration may be forced either to extradite these six guys or to start its own investigation.

How do we stand on the subject of international prosecution of war crimes? At this moment members of Zimbabwe dictator Robert Mugabe are abducting and torturing officials and activists of their opposition party. We decry it. Then there was Kosovo. There was Nuremberg. We help prosecute war criminals. Except when they are our own?

The men we tortured were very bad guys we think, although there were no trials to prove it. And the men accused are our people. We are a little like Samantha in the TV program “Sex In The City” who bristled when her friends chastised her for giving oral sex to a Fed Ex man who came to her office. He was not “A” Fed Ex man she said, he was MY Fed Ex man. If it comes down to this, these men will be “our” war criminals. How do we feel about that?

A fairness question. There was some fuss when it came out that Lawrence Summers, now the head of the National Economic Council, made almost six million dollars last year working in the financial world. Without taking up for Mr. Summers, with whom I do not always see eye to eye, rather than complain about that should we not, as others have asserted, applaud him for being willing to take a six million dollar pay cut in order to do public service? As Richard Cohen of the Washington Post pointed out Summers “chucked it all for an office on the street of broken dreams, Pennsylvania Avenue. So did national security adviser James L. Jones, who was earning about $2 million a year. David Axelrod, who had been running public affairs firms before going into the White House, kissed away at least the $1.5 million he earned last year and sold his stake in his companies.” As Cohen says “whatever they are, we -- not they -- are the richer for it.” I think we call it public service.

By comparison, according to the Associated Press, “Time Warner reported a loss of $13.4 billion” but Jeffrey Bewkes, the chief executive officer of the media giant, “was awarded compensation in 2008 valued at about $21.5 million.” Wonder what he might have gotten if they had actually made a buck?

Respecting the lesser species. Fairness, ethical, and moral considerations arise in our relationships with the lesser species, especially with the advance of science. Through the magic of science we have just learned that seafood can feel and react to pain. Imagine a silent scream when you drop that blue crab into boiling water, or slide that raw oyster down your throat. Or take the stone crab, the little fellow who lives on the Florida coast, the one we catch, pull off one claw then return to the water live in order for it to grow its replacement (Researchers say it is so traumatized sometimes it doesn’t bother). Do we at least owe it an apology? Some places (Chicago? Los Angeles?) have or have attempted to ban the use of those tanks for live lobsters as inhumane, but the crustaceans still go screaming into the boiling water where they don’t turn red from just the seasoning.

Production of Fois Gras has been halted in parts of the country, the force-feeding of geese to enlarge their livers considered a form of torture. Even in France I don’t believe they nail feet of the goose to boards any more to prevent fat-reducing aerobic exercise. There are outcries about treatment of chickens for our food and for the production of eggs, confining them to tiny cages. The same for pigs, calves, and turkeys (speaking of which remember that video of Alaska Governor Palin with a man stuffing what appeared to be live turkeys into some kind of motorized chopper).

In our heartfelt desire to consider ourselves decent human beings we take up the free-range movement. But there is a but, as detailed in the journal Foodborne Pathogens and Disease, reported in the New York Times: scientists have found that free-range pork can be more likely than caged pork to carry dangerous bacteria and parasites. Is the pig, or chicken, happier running around outside picking up bad bacteria and parasites? Should we care? Legal protections to animals are now available. All animals? Rattlesnake is eaten in Oklahoma and Texas. Do they deserve humane treatment, too? How far should we take this? Did the worm in that bottle of Mescal die happy?

Actually, you can take it a lot farther. In Israel, the eating of strawberries grown there do not adhere to halacha, meeting Talmudic interpretationlll, and are forbidden. They are infested with tiny insects that cannot be removed with water or pesticide. Of course they are. So are fresh figs. There is an account of a Rabbi holding up lettuce leaves to let light shine through to reveal tiny bugs otherwise invisible. In 1945, our LST sailing solo in the Pacific for a number of days the only flour we had developed weevils. We called for instructions. Eat it we were told. It provides protein. Eat it we did, in raisin bread and dark gravies, but I wouldn’t want to do it again.

In India, certain monks and nuns wear masks to keep from inhaling small organisms. Kind of a reincarnation thing. Wouldn’t want to take a gulp of the late Aunt Nelly. This is not to denigrate Vegans Vegans are vegans in order not to consume things that lived and breathed, had fur, scales or feathers, certainly a noble cause. That probably includes insects, but not for ethical treatment reasons.

Somewhere I read recently that researchers have found that when certain plants are under attack, they emit some sort of inaudible warning to other plant. If it turns out they feel pain we are in big trouble. That sounds like a story written by the late Ronald Dahl. We will be down to milk and eggs, and I’m not sure about the eggs. Yet there may be a solution to the problem: Le Whiff, a small plastic cylinder which users breathe in flavors, like chocolate to satisfy a craving without actually ingesting calories. A chef in England, Two Michelin-starred Chef Thierry Marx, is working on developing three-course meals. Chew on anything, enjoy a two-star meal.

Before then, the next time I crack a crab claw I will beg it for forgiveness. So much for ethics.

A vegan woman in Colorado was denied a vanity license plate she requested reading ILVTOFU. Seems the state authorities read into it a different meaning. Shame on them. And shame on the conservatives who have organized what they are calling “Tea Parties”, all over the country on Wednesday intended to protest taxes. They are encouraged to bring tea bags to the rallies, some to be dumped in to the water. What they have done is confiscate a widely known and used derogatory term in the gay community that has ribald, sexual act meaning. Must they take away even verbiage from Gay people? Don’t they do enough? Can’t they leave those people alone? If they are really going to be tea-bagging everywhere on Wednesday I hope they do it in private.

And that is not all. Social conservatives are using 2M4M to stand for Two Million For Marriage, when in the gay community it means Two Men For Marriage. Well, we always wanted conservatives be more cooperative with the gay community.

Volume 4, Number 52

April 6, 2009 -- Apologies are due to the memory of Thornton Wilder, the original staging of “Our Town,” which currently has a revival playing in both Chicago and New York City, and to the thousands who have either appeared in or seen one of the myriad of productions of the classic, award-winning play, set in Grover’s Corner, New Hampshire, since it first opened in 1938, for the following, a little fantasy update:

The stage is bare except for a scattering of plain wooden chairs to be used as props. The stage manager, who looks remarkably a lot like Rush Limbaugh, makes his appearance to begin his role as our narrator. We are in Groveling Corners, New Hampshire, a town of remarkable mediocrity he explains with his usual jaunty leer, nothing like his home town of Palm Beach. Had they worked a little harder, taken more personal responsibility and adhered to strict conservative principals, he states, they might have been able to rise from the middle class, where household income has been dwindling, and move up the economic ladder where the fruits of economic growth have been flowing.

The first town resident to appear on the scene is Dr. Gibbs, who explains to his wife that he has just come from attending to a teenager who has brain cancer, the cost of treatment will run $150,000, her single-parent mother has insurance through her employer which will only cover $90,000, and does not know what to do. “That is regrettable,” says the stage manager, "but at least we do not have that European style socialistic universal health care” he states with some satisfaction.

Our attention is drawn to the Webb family on another part of the stage, as they begin their day at the breakfast table over coffee and a newspaper. “Gibbs, who publishes the local newspaper, is part of the liberal main-stream press,” sneers the stage manager. “Gibbs just published a column by syndicated columnist Maureen Dowd about ‘reptilian American desire for living large.’ Well, I know a little about living large. My contract calls for $400 million, my house is 31,000 square feet on2½ acres and I don’t have to share it with anyone since all three of my marriages are over. And when I smoke my Cuban cigars, as I like to say on my show I am ‘Amid billowing clouds of fragrant and aromatic first, second, and sometimes third hand premium cigar smoke.’ Recession? That’s for other people.”

Emily Webb, the bright young daughter, discusses a book mentioned in the Dowd column, “Affluenzam,” referring to “a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety, and waste.” Mrs. Gibbs earns the approbation of the stage manager as a “feminazi” by urging Emily to go out into the world of commerce and break the glass ceiling.

The play continues, except in this version Emily Webb does not die in childbirth after marrying George Gibbs, son of the doctor; it is George who dies on a tour of duty in Iraq. And Simon Stimson, the alcohol-driven church organist does not commit suicide. We learn that he had been haunted by fear as a closet gay, but as New Hampshire made same-sex marriages legal, as it did just last week, he recovers and leads a quiet, productive life. Through it all the stage manager struts and postures, verbally garroting the citizens of Groveling Corners at any effort they consider or make to pool their resources to try and make a better life for all.

If the world is a stage, more drama and farce than comedy are being played out upon it now. The Group of Twenty world leaders confab last week was more spectacle than scripted drama. From the moment our player and his supporting co-star made their entrance they took center stage. Critics were universally kind, particularly the Europeans. Our leader exuded charm, determination, leadership as called for by his role. Notably, at one point he took the leaders of France and China aside to broker a compromise on a contentious issue, like a camp counselor calming down a couple of hot heads in his charge. By all accounts Obama did not get all that he hoped for from the recalcitrant collection of political CEOs, whose faith and trust in America was kidnapped by the Bush Administration, but he got something. Made inroads. This is not the final curtain. Such players as China and India are vying for the leading role.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote about the Obama technique in dealing with people, taken from those who have worked with him in the past, and from his writings. “He can leave you thinking he agrees, when often he’s only agreeing to leave you thinking he agrees” says Charles J. Ogletree Jr., a Harvard law professor who was a mentor to the young Obama. As Dowd sees it, in Europe, “psychological finesse that has been missing from American leadership for a long time.” Sounds like an international game of chess.

Our first lady played her role to perfection, wining plaudits, hearts, and unrelenting press coverage every minute of the day. She survived the fierce scrutiny of the fashion world (what a relief, otherwise it would have been terribly gauche and our image as sophisticates would have suffered), and what was considered a terrible gaffe: she touched the Queen! It seems you must not touch the Queen (how does that poor little lady get a pedicure or a mammogram?), but as it turned out the Queen touched her back and took the gesture as a gentle sign of affection. Way to go, Queenie.

On Howard Kurtz’s Reliable Sources this weekend, he had a roundtable with Matt Frei (anchor of "BBC World News" on BBC America) as one of the participants. Here is a comment he made about Michelle and the Queen:

Frei: “I mean, when the queen is normally touched, she bristles like a hedgehog. There, she purred like a cat. And, of course, she returned the favor to Michelle Obama. She then put her hand on Michelle Obama's back and, what's more, was heard to say after the meeting, in which her husband, by the way, who's a grumpy old fellow, was basically smiling like a split watermelon, the queen said, "We should keep in touch."

The importance of action by the countries of the world at this time can’t be overemphasized. NYT columnist Roger Cohen writes of “this moment when the world’s tectonic plates are plainly on the move.” And “Anglo-American capitalism is on trial, the Thatcher and Reagan revolutions exhausted.” Then there is “China’s demand for greater power within the International Monetary Fund, its provocative questioning of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, and the ultimate dependence of a debtor nation like the United States on changed behavior from the mega-surplus powers of China, Germany and Japan are all indicators of American vulnerability.” Roger then looked for a silver lining and found this one: “A guiding intelligence has replaced a guiding anger at the White House.” Whew. For a minute there, Mr. Cohen, you had me worried.

Agreements are being worked out to close the door on use of protected banks of tax-haven principalities. This is a vast amount of wealth, which may exceed $12 trillion. Loss to the U.S. Treasury is thought to be more than $100 billion. Reports Joe Conason of the New York Observer, in the AIG scandal contracts were moved off-shore specifically for getting out from under regulation and tax evasion. So says Joseph Cassano, former head of American International Group’s Financial Products Group. We ought to move AIG officials “off shore” to, say, Haiti and let them live in slums already horrible now devastatingly worse due to the economic cries. We think we have it bad but NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof writes that the World Bank estimates this crisis will cause an additional 22 children to die per hour all through 2009. And I was just worried that in this country we now have 13.2 million unemployed, and in March bankruptcies ran at almost 6,000 a day.

Now picture Mr. Obama dressed as Nelson Eddy (you remember Nelson Eddy, don’t you? The tenor in all of those operettas movies that were made, singing to Jeanette MacDonald?) in his signature military jodhpurs, be medaled jacket, campaign hat singing “Give me some men who are stouthearted men who will…etc.” It was the NATO conference and our NATO comrades were not eager to pony up more men to serve in Afghanistan, although they came through with $100 million for the Afghan army and pledged up to 5,000 military troops and trainers. Many pundits are beginning to question the viability of NATO in the environment of today. Next in charge in Virginia, over the Allied command, is a French General. Pax Americana.

If you were in Japan this weekend you might have looked up and cried “It’s a bird, it’s a plane, no it’s a Taepodong II rocket launched by North Korean leader Kim Jong-II sailing overhead to fall into the Pacific.” That fun-loving Kim and his toys just has to be the center of attention.

The Broadway show Guys and Dolls opened with a musical number sung by three guys, “I’ve Got the Horse Right Here” that was a musical round. You could make a round of this explanation by columnist Thomas Friedman in the New York Times: “We built more and more stores in America to sell more and more stuff, which was made in more and more Chinese factories powered by more and more coal that earned more and more dollars to buy more and more U.S. T-bills that got recycled back to America in the form of cheap credit to build more and more stores and more and more houses that gave rise to more and more Chinese factories…” The late Abe Burrows would love it.

One new production that has been in the development stage is now ready to begin: the national budget, by a vote of 233 to 196 in the House, 55 to 43 in the Senate. Not a single Republican in either chamber voted for it. They had their own plan, which was described this way in the Huffington Post: it “rewards wealthy corporate executives while blocking any attempt to dig us out of the economic catastrophe they created, blocks discretionary spending for five years, cuts taxes by 10 percent for the same Wall Street executives whose actions largely got us into this economic mess in the first place.” And Democrats wouldn’t go for that? I don’t believe that Republicans would even really vote for that if they thought it had any chance of passing.

I am sorry to report a show business casualty. The soap opera “Guiding Light” will close in September after a run of 72 years, the longest running program in broadcast history. I believe my Mother was a loyal listener. At my time of life you mourn the demise of old familiar things, whatever they are. I can’t say I remember ever listening to Guiding Light but I was aware that it was there, and someday I might want to catch a performance. It seems the end of an era. Let us note its passing with reverence.

About the time Guiding Light hit the airways I was probably engrossed in reading the National Geographic’s magazine, source of photographs of exotic places around the world, often depicting intrepid American adventurers in far off lands photographed with pigmy people. I was reminded of this when I saw the photograph of the Obamas and the Queen although the skin tones have been reversed.