It’s December and I feel a bustle. Many of the houses in our block and nearby blocks are brightly lit with Christmas lights. Ours are up, courtesy of my wife and daughter. They have outdone themselves this year. After several years with an artificial pre-strung tree from Sears, we have a live Doug fir this year. It smells great. When my wife brought it home from Home Depot and we stood it up and fluffed it out, I thought of the managed forests my brother and I drive through on our way into Washington each September. It sucks a fair amount of water each day. Needles on the hardwood floor. We have some inside lights, too, and the kids’ stockings hanging from an actual mantle. We’re in a new place this year and it feels good, a comfortable harbor against the strangeness of this period in time. Are we balanced between one way and another? Is that what is happening, is the world turning toward authoritarianism because we cannot agree on more fair and equitable means? The slogans are simpler, that’s for sure. Freedom! Liberty! Soil! The question is always freedom and liberty and soil for whom? Based on what, money or force, or both?
Here’s some irony for you. On Friday the normal political world, not MAGA Faux Outrage & White Fear world, stopped to pay tribute to Bob Dole, war hero, Senate titan (during the good old days when the Reagan gang sold arms to the Iranians in order to fund the Contras in Nicaragua), and GOP standard bearer in the 1980’s. Today, the Trump GOP would run the great and noble Bob Dole out of the party. Today, Trump would make fun of Dole’s war disability and belittle his legislative achievements, and then for good measure insult his wife, Elizabeth Today, would Bob Dole stand up to Trump or allow himself to be cowed along with a majority of his confederates? Would Dole turn a blind eye to Trump’s unprecedented corruptness? How corruptible was Bob Dole? As much as Mitch McConnell? Kevin McCarthy? That punk senator from Missouri? Ted Cruz?
Let’s turn to another depressing subject, the fate of Julian Assange, who a UK Court just ruled can be extradited to the United States to be executed or jailed under the Espionage Act, or whatever other statutes the American government can bury him under. Assange is a journalist, and he’s not an American. How does the United States even have jurisdiction? To me Assange is a historic figure. And what was his crime? Journalism. He collected information by as many means as he could, including sources, and published his findings. Isn’t that what journalism is supposed to do, the way it provides a check on the powerful? Yes, but when a journalist completely outs the Empire, exposes its crimes and hypocrisies in exhaustive detail, her, or she, will pay. And Assange has. With years of house arrest in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, and a long spell in Belmarsh Prison, which isn’t known to be hospitable. There are probably many people in London and Washington D.C. who wish Assange would die or hang himself. The US will go all out to mete out a maximum punishment for Julian Assange. Too bad our government can’t direct such righteous fervor against those involved in the attack on the US Capitol, starting with Donald J. Trump. Assange will pay, Trump will not. There’s the unfairness of this world. The powerful have too many tools.
On a different note altogether. I did a long training session this afternoon, mostly slow and cautious because my left shoulder/biceps is still wonky. I see a specialist in January. I may have done too much today. I have a decent range of motion and improved internal rotation, but it’s not pain free. Not that the pain is overwhelming, but it is constant. Every day I run through several rehabilitation exercises, and I do a lot of stretching on my breaks when I work at the store. I am sleeping better than I was. Now I wake up with a stiff lower back. It’s one ache then another.
My Chelsea football club isn’t well these days. I think the manager, Thomas Tuchel has done a very good job, but injuries have sidelined too many key players for too long, primarily N’golo Kante and Mateo Kovacic. Christian Pulisic missed a number of games. Ben Chilwell is out for an unknown period. Romelu Lukaku has just returned after a multi-match absence. Jorginho, the important pivot point in midfield, has also been injured. Trevor Chalobah, a young player emerging as a critical member of our back three, is out injured. We drew with a Manchester United side we should have beaten, escaped Watford with a win, but lost to West Ham on a late wonder goal. Our recent Champions League match in St. Petersburg saw us fail to hold a lead in the last minutes of the match. A defense based on amnesia. We drew, and consequently Juventas topped the group. We play Leeds United in the premier league next. Although we’ll be at Stamford Bridge, I expect this to be a tough match. Leeds play with a quick tempo and they face a Chelsea team that is tired, depleted, and in a ragged run of form.
I’m writing a review of a new book by Brian Klaas, Corruptible, for the California Review of Books, and reading A Field Guide to White Supremacy. Not exactly light, year-end reading. For that I’ve turned to True North by Jim Harrison, a novel I first read some years ago. I have since read nearly all the fiction Harrison produced. Definitely one of my favorite writers.
We’re almost to 2022. I’m still wondering, and unable to understand why so few journalists or writers are not doing the same, what Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin talked about for ninety minutes in Helsinki in 2017. I don’t imagine the needs of the people of their respective countries came up much. So what did these two kleptocrats talk about?
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