POTHOLES IN PARADISE

 

I first sat down to write this as we prepared to celebrate Thanksgiving, a tradition we’ve brought from America and maintained for half a century. We did celebrate the holiday but there have been many distractions over the past five months to keep these observations from being set to paper. Life in Umbria, the green heart of Italy, provides much to be thankful for, from its beautiful medieval towns dotting the hilltops, relatively low population density, and wonderful food traditions, to its proximity to both Rome and Florence, two of the major repositories of cultural artifacts in Italy. By the reckoning of the UN, Italy holds the largest number of major treasures of art and architecture in the world. Less known is that it also has one of the most effective health care systems in the world, vying with Japan and Switzerland for having the world’s highest life expectancy.

At a time when my country of birth is enabling and collaborating in the world’s first live televised genocide, invading or threatening other sovereign nations and imposing illegal economic sanctions to destroy their economies, and my country of residence is doing disgracefully little to oppose or even criticize these actions, it may be in dubious taste to complain about minor flaws in the wonderful place where I live. On the other hand, how can defects be remedied if the public is blind to them or pitifully passive. Much of my time is taken up reading and writing about politics and the rapidly worsening things going on in the so-called western world. I’ll take a break from that to simply report on some of the little things that could be better in our green oasis in the growing precincts of the new feudal order now laying waste to the environment, our painstakingly evolved culture, and the rule of law. 

Potholes- Despite the title of this essay, I have no complaints to issue about potholes. I have mentioned some in earlier writing, such as the partial collapse of the road leading from our village down to the the Tiber, but after a mere six or eight years, that problem was resolved with a huge infusion of money and deep concrete piles that have created a fifty meter long tract of road which will surely outlast Hadrian’s Wall in the north of England. We also had a large sinkhole open up in the middle of the same road further down the hill. No one was injured and that hole, big enough to absorb a bicyclist and rider, was fenced off, filled and covered in less than twenty-four hours. The Comune (county or township) of Baschi, in which we live, is large (68.2 sq.km) and has less than 2800 residents. The job of the comune to maintain all the country roads that connect its villages, is nothing to envy. Given the circumstances, the pavements are rather good. 

big hole, eventually fixed years ago

The major two-lane road connecting Todi with Orvieto runs along the edge of the Tiber River, mostly through the Comune of Baschi, and over its 30-35 km length it has many bridges and covered galleries. This road is administered by the Provinces of Perugia and Terni or by the Region of Umbria and over the past five or six years most of these bridges and galleries have been slowly and carefully restored. The authorities are to be commended. There seems to have been a meticulously thought out plan to reduce the number of heavy trucks using this road to get to the toll-free E45 heading north rather than sticking to the autostrada. At each workplace, the road would be temporarily reduced to one lane so there would be a system of traffic lights to control the alternating direction of traffic, and each project would carry on for several months. The typical cycle of the lights is four minutes, which is a minor nuisance to us but it seems to have achieved the desired results. The road is safer and less trafficked. 

without and with paint, the difference
between night and day, especially at night.

In the past I’ve complained about road repaving being done in patches of about forty meters in length. That practice seems to have been reduced but one anomaly remains. Whenever a stretch of road is repaved, within a few days, the stripe painters arrive to paint stripes along the edges of the road, and/or the centerline of the road. These are extremely helpful in negotiating our narrow and curvy roads, especially at night. However, there must be some law or protocol that insists that such stripes be painted only following the repaving but never as routine maintenance. Roads that are pleasant, even scenic, during the day sometimes become a nightmare to negotiate in the dark when old pavement turns pale and is indistinguishable from clearings, driveways or flat bits of terrain. In some places, reflectors are installed at the sides of the road but where most needed they are often knocked down and seldom replaced, leaving dark zones where you just wonder where the road will be going just past the reach of your headlights. Some of the paving remains serviceable for as much as twenty years but the paint should really be redone every five years or at least within ten. 

 In recent years our area has become overrun with hikers from Camino dei Borghi Silenti. It’s all very organized, with three and five day itineraries of walking between destinations on trails in the woods where possible, but often there are connecting stretches that use the roads. For most of us, the hikers are a welcome and cheerful addition to the area. When I’ve spoken to any of them, I’ve found them engaging and interesting. They come from all over Italy, often from the northern provinces where people are perhaps more interested in hiking. Many stop at the Circolo Bar for refreshment, and now and then some will stop to eat at the restaurant in town. 

panicked walker jump-off point

As I’ve said, our roads are curvy and narrow so the presence of groups of walkers can create some potential for accidents. I would suggest that the Comune make a bit of an effort to keep the grass cut along the edges of our roads where people walking must step off the road to get out of the way of on-coming traffic. Vipers do exist here even if they are more a nuisance than a threat. They only have a strike radius of about 20 cm and they don’t come after people. Stepping off a road into waist high grass to avoid an on-coming bus is not something people should have to do, and that’s true for people who live here as well as for the hundreds of people who come here to walk through our scenic countryside. 

occasional surprises

small car on narrow road;  buses here are huge! 

Well intended laws with negative consequences, Abandoned villages and Flawed professions. These were to be three different subjects but they are all interwoven, and so I’ll try to suggest how they reinforce each other. 

The borgo at night

Our village of Acqualoreto was recently described in an Umbrian newspaper as having eighty-six residents, a figure gleaned from either Facebook or Wikipedia. CityFacts indicates the population as 107. Whatever the correct number was, it’s now about six less than it was when the newspaper story came out last September. Much of the original fortress/village was built about seven centuries ago. The population of the area usually refers to both the village and the surrounding farm houses which were added later to house large numbers of tenant farmers and their families. The population had its ups and downs over the centuries but is said to have peaked at five hundred around the start of the Twentieth Century. Following WWII, most of the farm houses were abandoned as people moved to the cities and the population dropped precipitously. 

I’m not sure how many people currently reside full time in “the borgo”, as the once fortified outpost is usually described, but I can count only nine. Many of the unoccupied houses are owned by people who live in Rome or other cities and come here for weekends or the summer so defining the population is always misleading. However, one thing is clear. The population is shrinking. The birth rate is extremely low and the average age of the residents is high. Few people who visit the area fail to acknowledge the beauty of the place. Our village overlooks the Tiber Valley but within a few kilometers there are many other villages overlooking valleys and a backdrop of often snow-covered mountains. Places such as Melezzole, Tuscolano and Santa Restituta are jewels but all suffer from declining populations. Why? The first obvious answer is that there is a worldwide move to cities and a vast abandonment of small scale agriculture. While true, both of these movements may be slowed or partially reversed in time as many large cities grow more unlivable, industrial agriculture continues to ruin more land and diminished aquifers can no longer sustain intensive mono-culture agriculture. Those are possibly long-term world-wide considerations but higher quality agriculture has already shown signs of making a comeback in Italy. 

For the present, what are the barriers to population growth or maintenance here? The abandoned farm houses are typically large and most have been bought by people from outside the area, and restored to serve as large vacation homes or to generate income from short term vacation rentals. The wave of such renovations happened mostly in the 70’s and 80’s and the people, often artists, professors, journalists, actors and other independent professionals, who brought about those renovations are now either old or dead. The values of those restored houses have now risen to where they are out of reach of young families raising children. 

Looking through today’s homes and gardens magazines in Italy, it is hard to believe that most of the houses in villages like Acqualoreto had no running water less than a hundred years ago. Most of theses houses have few rooms, thick walls with low doors, and many levels, which do not correspond to the levels in adjacent houses. Women of the village carried water in large terracotta jars on their heads for 400 meters from the public fountain to the village. Most of the washing of clothing and bedclothes was done in that same chambered public fountain. Today’s young Italians have grown up with all sorts of new conveniences, from things as basic as water, gas and electricity, to newer blessings, from cars and washing machines to telephones and computers, and they obviously expect all those modern conveniences. It is now common for families to have as many cars as family members. Cars and medieval villages were never a good match. 

People who dream of retiring to a small village may not demand large amounts of space but they invariably want at least a small amount of private outdoor space. Our villages were not built with this in mind. The early inhabitants worked in the fields from dawn to dusk and when they returned they might drink or play cards at a taverna but it’s unlikely that they would be having cocktails with neighbors in a private garden. If they had a garden, it was likely to be a small patch of land on the edges of town where they would grow fruit and vegetables for their own use. 

The lack of available garden spaces in the antique cores of the villages is an obstacle to their repopulation. However, there may be some potential solutions. The outdoor spaces are public and must remain so. They have been centers of social interaction until recently, when people still lived in the adjacent houses, and with more people, they will grow livelier again. Some of the newer desire for private outdoor space could be met by developing roof gardens, but this brings us to the subjects of rules, regulations and red tape. 

Very few Italians leave a Last Will and Testament. The government does most of the work for you. The country may seem to have a strong anarchist element but this is no libertine paradise. If you have a family but dislike them all and would prefer to leave all your earthly treasure to your dog, or perhaps to that longtime mistress that nobody knew about, don’t live in Italy, or at least don’t die here. Italian law, the last time I was informed about it, stipulated that at least half of whatever you own, will be divided equally among your surviving heirs. Without mention of the dog or other named beneficiaries, the whole estate will be divided equally. Individual heirs can reject their inheritance but most do not. 

This seems to me a humane and wholly well-intended policy. A few coddled ne’er-do-wells seems a lesser price for society to pay than a colony of privileged chihuahuas or dobermans being served filet mignon by people getting by on ground insects deemed edible by the likes of Bill Gates. Nevertheless, as always, good intentions have hidden costs. I’ve mentioned above that most of the medieval houses consisted of two or three rooms. Not so long ago families were much larger than families today. If you just think back two or three generations of the policies I’ve mentioned, you can imagine four children inheriting a house of three rooms. Maybe one of the children will move away to the village of his or her new spouse. The others will marry and have children of their own. After WWII many of these people moved away to jobs in Rome, Terni, Torino, Pomezia and even abroad, but some of them have tended to return to the villages in August, or to remember dead ancestors in November, so they have maintained their share in houses that by now might as well be turned into corporations, given the number of owners they have. Does anyone know, or keep an up-to-date record of the owners of all these houses? Are any taxes being collected on these houses, many of which have not been lived in for many decades? While all houses are subject to water and garbage fees, the houses specified as people’s principal place of residence are exempt from property taxes. We are well aware that some of those taxes and fees are being collected but just how systematically? How many of the people claiming the first house tax exemption are dead? 

My wife decided to sell the little two room apartment that her mother had lived in before she died nearly twenty years ago. She really did not expect that anyone would would want the place but when she mentioned her desire to sell it, four people expressed interest in buying it within a week. It wasn’t worth much, although more than the geometra overseeing the sale involved had suggested. An agreement was struck quickly with the son-in-law of some of our ex-pat friends in the village. Everybody, except those who also had wanted to buy it, was happy and eager to proceed with the sale. Two and a half years later, the sale was completed. As in all real estate transactions, there were some fees and some taxes to be paid. There may be explanations for a 2-1/2 years delay in the sale of a tiny property. As an architect I will admit that architects often have a degree of professional disdain for other related and sometimes competing professions. This conflict in mind-set is most often seen between architects and engineers; in Italy it is far more pronounced between architects and geometras, a category unknown is America, but closest to the British Quantity Surveyor. There are good and bad practitioners in every profession and I’ve had cordial relations with many geometras, including the one involved in this sale. A notary was also involved in this case, and some of the delay originated there. That’s a category of professional I’ve never understood at all, something like the fireman mandated by the union on diesel powered trains. I will not get into the possible errors or omissions of anyone in this particular case, but if the sale of a two room dwelling for a price more often associated with a used car than with a house can take something like thirty months, either the professionals involved are failing at their jobs or the system is broken. 

This was not a unique case. We have close friends from Ireland who bought a house in the country here about twenty years ago. When they sold the house four years ago they faced a problem in that a property line dividing their property ran diagonally through the covered space at the side of their house where they regularly hosted guests for drinks. All these transactions, the original purchase and the subsequent sale, were overseen by notaries and geometras attesting to the regularity of the documentation and proceedings. If they are certifying for a fee that everything is in order when there are significant defects in the building documentation, should this not be regarded as fraud, or at least negligence? 

Since the end of WWII the Comune of Baschi has made enormous strides in the improvement in the lives of its people. In the 50’s there was no public water system and there were no schools, as there was no mandatory schooling of children. Acqualoreto had three or four qualified teachers who taught from their own homes. Schools were then built in Acqualoreto, Morre and Collelungo, later to be replaced by a consolidated school at the intersection just up the road from the sports complex, another major addition, and about equidistant between Morre and Acqualoreto. Currently, that school is suffering from a lack of students, despite serving five or more villages. Given the remarkable advance in amenities, it is sadly ironic to see the area suffering from major depopulation. 

I have no idea when the catasto was established to record the ownership of buildings and land. I’m guessing but I suppose that land ownership was the more pressing concern. The catastale maps do say that they indicate recognized fields, forests, and olive groves, rather than being precise indications of surveyed dimensions, even as they record parcels of land in square meters. While the uses of land may change, those changes should not be so difficult to record. How do you record changes to a building that was built without detailed drawings and how do you approve modifications to bring buildings into compliance with laws created centuries after the buildings were erected? Quibbling over whether a primitive bathroom installed in a building built before there were bathrooms was ever really a bathroom is the architectural equivalent of theologians arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, and yet these costly debates do rage on. Houses these days need bathrooms, and if the people of the Comune, along with consultants operating within it, were working to serve the people they work for, they would be helping people to create the bathrooms they need rather than impeding their improvements based on a distorted sense of reality. 

I haven’t been involved in building activity here for three decades but when I was briefly involved locally it seemed to me that new building standards devised in Scandinavia or other Nordic countries were being imposed on Italy by the EU. While I fully support efforts to make buildings more energy efficient, there has been a lack of recognition of the realities of building, and especially of renovating, in the warmer countries of Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal, where the protection from heat has always taken precedence over the conservation of heat required in the northern countries. It is not all that difficult to adapt European-wide codes to new construction but more thought should be focused on the particular problems of modifying the vast existing stock of structurally and aesthetically sound buildings to meet modern needs. 

Railroad developments: About thirty years ago when my three daughters were all attending University in Perugia, there was a little two-car train that ran on a line that connected Terni with the center of Perugia. I believe it continued on to Sansepulcro in Tuscany on at least some of its runs. It was convenient for students and for other people who just wanted to go to either of the larger cities for shopping or sightseeing without the hassle of driving to them. Then, for reasons I’ve never understood, the line was allowed to degrade. The stations along the route all had ticket offices, usually with other functions. The fellow in Ponterio (Todi) also sold hunting supplies., from ammunition to camouflage outfits.  When such places closed buying tickets became more difficult unless you bought them on the train where they cost more, although I believe the conductors that checked the tickets were eventually eliminated since no one could get tickets. Cleaning of the trains was also shut down in further cost cutting moves and the trains began to resemble subway cars in the Bronx of the 1970’s. Italians stopped using the trains, which for a while left them to the exclusive use of prostitutes and supermarket parking lot assistants commuting from Perugia to Todi. It wasn’t long before it was decided to abandon the Central Umbrian Line entirely. 

Many years have passed and perhaps new officials have been elected or hired who have decided that the little railroad line wasn’t such a bad idea after all. Work has been going on now for several years to reset the tracks on new PC concrete ties. So far we haven’t heard when the tract from PG to TR will be reopened but assuming it is run better than the late stages of its defunct predecessor, it will be welcomed. 

In the late 80’s I commuted to Rome for a couple of years. I don’t recommend it to anyone since it was about a 2-1/2 hour trip each way. Five hours of travel is a lot to add to one’s work day, but it also destroys flexibility by creating rigid times to to leave the office to catch your train. At the time, it seemed that there were growing numbers of people living in the residential areas around Orvieto and working in Rome. The trip from Orvieto to Rome took about 70 minutes, which is not so much more than getting from one side of Rome to the other. Indeed, in my case, forty-five minutes of my commute was taken up by getting from the station to nearby Parioli on a crowded bus. Train service to and from Orvieto has been severely reduced since then. I wonder what’s happened to all those people. I also am curious about why InterCity trains have been reduced so much, but I think we know the answer. 

In recent years I’ve been going to Bologna every month where I stay with my daughter and her family for a few days. The InterCity train from Orvieto to Bologna takes about three hours, with five stops along the way. It’s an easy trip, where you can read, write, watch the passing scenery, stare at your phone, or maybe even talk with your fellow travelers. In any case, it’s less stressful than driving or riding in a car, and less expensive if you’re traveling alone. There are three main categories of trains connecting the many cities and towns of Italy: RV (Regional Veloce) which connect all those towns which otherwise have no train service at all. There may also be a RNV (Regional Not So Veloce) stopping at little places where they’re the only train of the day, or other more strictly local categories. The more stops they make, the cheaper the ticket and the longer it takes to get where you want to go. IC (InterCity) trains connect major cities, stopping at intermediate cities where many passengers start or end their journey. Most of my trains to Bologna start in Naples or Rome and go on to Milan or Trieste, but few travelers ride them from start to finish. 

More recently we've seen a vast expansion in the number of high speed trains such as the Frecce Rosse, run by Trenitalia, the successor or offspring of the FS (Ferrovia Italiana) or by Italo, a private competitor. They now connect most of the major cities of Italy at high speed and high cost. They cost about double the price of an IC train for a trip of similar length, which in turn costs about twice what a RV train ticket costs. The high speed trains are wonderful for businessmen and well-off people living in the major cities. They are certainly competitive with airlines in terms of speed, convenience and reliability. Their needs in terms of track access are prioritized by investors and managers of the empire in Milan, Brussels and New York, to the detriment of the smaller but culturally rich cities throughout Italy such as Orvieto. 

In the past couple of years, for a month or two, usually in the autumn, most IC trains going through Florence were terminated in Prato, the first stop north of Florence, forcing passengers to transfer to faster and more expensive trains from Florence to Bologna, or to transfer to a double decker bus in Prato for little additional money and an hour or two of extra time, which offers unusually high level views over the cars of the countryside alternating with an unending sequence of close visual encounters with drivers of huge trucks an arms length away while easing through the stop and start traffic jams in multi-lane tunnels. Interesting to experience one time and better than transferring from a late high speed train which starts far enough behind schedule to force the itinerary to slip to multiple changes and long waits in stations without seats and a total trip time of eight hours or more. All of this, as I understand it, was to allow improvements to the tracks so that more high speed trains could be accommodated. Travelers to Orvieto, and other intermediate stops along the way, deserve better. 

Before leaving the subject of Orvieto, I will leave one more observation. An enormous improvement to the city was made in 1990 when the huge new parking lot behind the existing Orvieto railroad station was built and connected by covered stairs leading up to a passage below the tracks and then up again into the station. From there it was only a few steps across Piazza Mattiotti in front of the station, which is just large enough for taxis and other cars dropping off train passengers, to the entrance to the newly rebuilt funicular. Originally constructed in 1885 with a hydraulically run mechanism and abandoned for twenty years in 1970, the funicular, rebuilt with an electrically driven mechanism, now carries passengers up 157 meters to Piazza Cahen at the top of the rupe at 15 minute intervals, where they can get smaller local buses to take them further into the pedestrian-friendly plateau city. 

This substantial project is referred to as the "Welcome Hub". The parking area at the bottom provides free parking for hundreds of cars next to a large parking area for tourist buses which charges a €45 fee per bus, and an area for campers. There is an adjacent building, open during the day, although closed in the off season, which offers, maps, souvenirs, tickets for transportation and tourist venues, luggage storage and bike rentals. The exterior construction of the project used local tufo, a porous sedimentary stone derived from volcanic ash, which has been used over the years for the facades of most of the buildings in Orvieto, for walls and stairs, with plexiglas canopies supported by steel beams and painted a bright shade of red along with all the metal handrails and trim. This continuous selection of materials and colors carries all the way up to the upper station of the the funicular at Piazza Cahen, combining aesthetic continuity with excellent functional design. 

The walls of the connecting passage below the tracks were finished with relatively impermeable polished granite in recognition of Italy’s age-old problem of graffiti in public spaces. A covered, open-air escalator was installed to the right of the stairs from the parking level to the passage below the tracks. On the other side a long ramp paved in textured rubber was built to accommodate travelers dragging wheeled luggage too large to be comfortably carried up or down the stairs. Inside the passage a smaller escalator also carried travelers from the passage level up the the main station level, although an elevator was also provided for people with wheel chairs or substantial luggage, just as there is for people ascending to the platforms. All in all, this project was an amazing achievement, considering the divided responsibilities between a number of local, national and private agencies, providing an attractive welcome for visitors to the city of Orvieto and for its residents. 

current state of tufo ramp wall with metal railing

Then something went off the rails. Was it owing to the new gospel of privatization of government assets, or by an uncoordinated  withdrawal of responsibilities for maintenance by the various agencies originally involved? The long escalator going from the parking level to the passage always seemed to be out of order since it was first installed, then boarded up and eventually removed. Then the smaller one inside the passage was inexplicably removed as well. Was the cost of occasionally repairing the mechanism really so much more than the cost of its removal and the cost of rebuilding those granite stairs?  Are there neither competent elevator technicians nor lawyers in Orvieto? Some of the tufo masonry has crumbled without ever being replaced. The rubber paving of the ramps has tears and holes and will probably only be repaired after someone is injured tripping over the irregularities, including the unremoved fallen bamboo branches. Perhaps worst of all, the distinctive red metal trim which visually links the entire project, has faded and sometimes corroded into a rusty brown symbol of decay. Every time I pass through that dismal mess, I think of volunteering to paint it myself. That thought vanishes as soon as I remind myself of my age and condition. Is a reasonable level of routine maintenance an unreasonable dream? 

Orvieto’s mayor, Roberta Tardani, has held that post since June of 2019, including reelection to a second term, and has been widely praised for her efforts on behalf of the city. Orvieto is currently a lively city whose street life includes good shopping, cafes with occasional live music, and plenty of good restaurants to go with its abundant artistic and historic treasures. It reminds me of the atmosphere of Rome of the 70’s and 80’s which I had the good fortune to live in for fifteen years. I would respectfully ask Mayor Tardani to focus her efforts on restoring the Welcome Hub to its original pleasing aspect and to using the power of her office to restore a better level of railroad service to the city. 

*****

That’s enough potholes for now. When I gather my strength for another go, maybe I’ll try a tale of the two very different cities, Todi and Bologna, that I spend a significant amount of time in, reporting on their efforts, successful and not, to improve living conditions in those cities.

250 Years After the Declaration of Independence

What Went Wrong?  

The Fourth of July, 2026 is scheduled to be the day we celebrate our nation’s founding. The US has the reputation of being the world’s longest standing democracy. Despite numerous blemishes in that history, it is a claim to be proud of. In 1787, at the end of the Constitutional Convention, when asked “what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”, Benjamin Franklin replied “A republic if you can keep it”. 

Well, we tried and succeeded for a long time but nothing lasts forever. Just as the Roman Republic changed into the Roman Empire with the elevation of its first emperor, the USA has become an empire, no matter the title of the man at the top. People are now saying that Trump wants to be a king. As I’ve pointed out before, his goals and his methods suggest a desire to be emperor rather than king. We have neither a monarchy nor a republic at present. Few historians or other knowledgeable people have spoken about the American Empire until fairly recently and now everyone seems to be writing about the decline of the American Empire. I’d be the last person to contradict them. Of all the various forms of government that we have names for, “oligarchy” seems to best describe what we’ve got now. The institutions established by the US Constitution still have buildings to house them and budgets to pay employees to keep the lights on but in essence, they have abandoned or been relieved of the functions they were created for. 

Before we reach for the gin and turn on another ball game, I would like to suggest some of the events that got us to where we are now and why it will be difficult to restore what we think of as democracy. 

If you live in a tight ideological bubble or you get your news from the mainstream media, you may have little idea what’s been going on lately. Right now the US is supporting and collaborating in an on-going and publicly announced genocide, which is being seen live by anyone curious enough to look. The military and economic assaults on any country or people who do not adhere to the policies we impose continue with increasing violence. As I write, it looks like Venezuela will be the next target. The current American president has taken an ax to all institutions, in education, broadcasting, medicine, basic research, trade, journalism, regulatory agencies and law enforcement. The growing gulf between the ultra rich and everyone else has brought us closer to a new age of feudalism. In the older feudalism the people had a belief in God for consolation. In the secular neo-feudalism the consolation for the masses lies in gadgets, fast food, pornography, drugs and spectacles, including sports events with military flyovers and the virtual orgiastic half-time shows that accompany them. 

Everyone will have his or her own views on what brought us to this state of affairs, and I don’t claim that my short list is definitive but here are a few events in the demise of US democracy that the public seems unaware of or unconcerned about. 

1. The Powell Memorandum 1971- Lewis Powell was a conservative corporate lawyer from Richmond, Virginia who wrote a memo to the Chairman of the Education Committee of the US Chamber of Commerce urging that corporations become more aggressive in promoting their own interests and those of their major investors. Two months after the memo was written, President Nixon appointed Powell to the Supreme Court. The memo leaked and its influence metastasized. Private foundations popped up like mushrooms to extend the influence of their ultra-rich and ultra-conservative founders beyond the grave. 

A few of the best known of these are: 

 -The Heritage Foundation (from 1973) which produced Project 2025, generally thought to be the blueprint for Trump’s assault on the government. 

 - The Koch Network - The Bradley Foundation 

 - The American Enterprise Institute 

 - The Cato Institute 

 - Young Americans Foundation 

The principal goal of all of them is to influence government policy. They vary slightly in outlook with some pushing hard-core Neocon pro-war policies while others are more libertarian and isolationist but mostly, they all promote tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, less government regulations, especially those protecting the environment and working people, and less investment in services and benefits for the general public. The effects of their efforts are all too visible, even if their role in the outcomes are not widely recognized. 

2. The Fairness Doctrine in US Communications Policy- 1949-1987 This Act, which derives from the Radio Act of 1927, required that all candidates for public office were to be allotted equal time by public broadcasters using the public airwaves. It was repealed in 1987 by the Reagan Administration over the objections of Congress. Anyone old enough to remember the Reagan Administration knows what a pitiful level US news broadcasting has sunk to since that time. CBS News, where Edward R. Murrow and his associates once provided serious investigative journalism, has recently changed ownership and is expected to compete with FoxNews in the sordid swamp of Neo-con propaganda interwoven with infotainment, gossip and commercial promotion. 

3. The Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) 1938 This Act was originally passed to limit the influence of foreign propaganda circulating in the USA, a seemingly reasonable goal, if rationally applied. A foreign agent is one who: 

     a. engages in political activities. 

     b. acts as a political adviser/consultant in the interests of a foreign principal. 

     c. solicits, collects or distributes funds in the interest of a foreign principal. 

     d. represents the interests of a foreign principal before any US official. 

FARA does have teeth. In 2015 US Senator Robert Menendez, representing my home state of New Jersey, was tried on bribery charges but got off with a hung jury, dropped charges, and censure from the Senate, none of which impeded his reelection in 2018. However, when he got into another multiple felony corruption scandal in 2024, this time including charges of acting as an unregistered foreign agent (for Egypt), he was convicted and sentenced to eleven years in prison, which I believe he started serving last January. While I doubt that Sen. Menendez sees any humorous aspect to his troubles and FBI agents did discover hundreds of thousands of dollars of cash-filled envelopes and gold bars in his house, it’s hard to suppress a chuckle when a senator is sent off to prison for steering a halal meat certification contract to an unqualified friend with ready cash, and for assuring Senate approval of arms sales and aid to a foreign country, at the same time that the president of our country is openly soliciting bribes from foreign countries and ultra-rich people, both foreign and domestic, raking in hundreds of millions of dollars in response, and bragging about it. Who was writing this script, Robert Crumb or Monty Python? 

By some divine(?) miracle, AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, has never been required to register, although its declared purpose is to influence American politics to promote policies favorable to Israel. Heads of state are exempted from registering with FARA so when Bibi Netanyahu accepts invitations to campaign for his preferred US presidential candidate in front of the combined Senate and House membership, he is not subject to FARA penalties, but one might suppose that all those making such visits possible would be, although it could be argued that treason charges might take precedence over whatever FARA penalties might be meted out. Of course, that would involve the entire Republican majority, so it isn’t going to happen. Why then are we not hearing meatier complaints from the Democratic opposition? First of all, by my conservative unofficial guesstimates, about 80% of Democratic members of Congress are also on the take from AIPAC. Besides, after the Democratic leadership constructed the Russiagate fairy tale in a sleazy effort to discredit Donald Trump, who would they be to complain about unethical tactics used to influence elections. 

4. Citizens United vs. FEC - 2010 The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Citizens United, another of the far-right groups established in 1988 in the wake of the Powell Memorandum. Rather than issuing a narrow ruling to settle the specific case which regarded advertising during a political campaign for “Hillary:the Movie”, a partisan film the company had produced, the court majority issued a decision to overturn provisions of the 2002 McCain-Feingold Law used to bar corporations from paying for advertising during election campaigns. Ironically, shortly before this Citizens United had lobbied to ban the advertising for one of Michael Moore’s films. The legal issues were complex but the effects of the decision were severe. It overturned several precedents and solidified the concepts that corporations were persons under the law and that spending money to amplify their voice was an activity protected under the Constitutional Right to Free Speech. The practical effect of this ruling was to legalize bribery and to cripple attempts to put limits on political spending. Fifteen years later, we now have a fully corrupt government, including all three branches, executive, legislative and judicial, which were established as separate entities to create checks and balances of power. Over the past decade academic studies have found that what the American public wants has virtually no effect on the legislation that the Congress passes. 

On a more subjective and intuitive level, I don’t believe that the majority of American citizens want the country to engage in a highly visible genocide. Maybe there are many who just don’t care about anything beyond their personal well-being but while I can’t produce any solid evidence, I don’t detect a collective lust for mass murder. We’ve seen that the Congress routinely approves funding of weapons and technology used for the genocide by majorities of about 85%. Either we have a representative government or we don’t. If it IS a representative government, then may the wrath of God bestow on us what we deserve, except that I don’t want to cop out by counting on any god to impose justice on the assassins among us. 

If the government is NOT representative of our collective will, then we must find a way to change it. This is not a partisan undertaking. While many clever writers document the unprecedented violations of international law, US laws, the Constitution of the United States and longstanding societal norms of decency by the current president, and his party colleagues give up their independence, their judgment and their decency to avoid his wrath, members of the “opposition party” do as they’re told by their patrons from AIPAC and the important corporations in the military industrial complex, the health industry, big pharma, big oil, and the financial sector. How does a country, an empire, or a civilization, when it has reached a level of widespread, all-encompassing corruption, ever recover? The short answer is that it doesn’t; it collapses, either from within, or from pressures brought by the world beyond its control. 

When the Roman Empire eventually collapsed it took Europe about a millennium to recover. Will that scenario be repeated? I doubt it as I think it more likely that the idiots who ridicule the risks of nuclear war, climate change and environmental disaster will manage to eliminate human life on our planet in less time. Is that too gloomy a view? Well, one of the most beautiful things about being here on earth is that life is full of surprises, some of them good. What can we do? Start by turning off the propaganda and face up to what we are doing, not what our designated enemies are doing, but us.

Designated Delays

 

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) was originally passed in 1946, then modified in 1966 to prevent its misuse to hide information rather than doing its originally intended function of making knowledge of government activities available to the public. It was further amended a number of times, notably in the post-Watergate period of 1974; in 1982 when Reagan limited its application in the interests of national security; in1995-99 when Clinton opened up much information on what the government had been doing during the Cold War and most things of historic interest from at least twenty-five years earlier. In 2009 and 2010 Obama permitted retroactive classification of documents requested under FOIA, and briefly exempted the SEC from some disclosure in the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2007. Despite these modifications, the law and the departments organized to handle information requests under FOIA have remained as established in 1974. It has been a useful tool for those few remaining journalists who keep trying to expose the truth about government activities which the government would prefer that the public not be aware of.

Such efforts are often resisted by government agencies but in the past year or two, there have been striking revelations which together led to an important conclusion regarding the designated time frame for the release of potentially embarrassing information.  All governments lie about their activities, or at least embellish them to improve their image, but since the US has been the world’s only superpower after 1991, its activities and misdeeds have greater worldwide consequences.

As an American citizen with a tendency to be hypercritical about almost everything, I believe it preferable to have a critical eye focused on one’s own activities and those of one’s tribe, despite the negative impact it may have on one’s economic prospects, than to blame all of the world’s ills on “the other”.

In the 1960’s the US was rocked by a series of major political assassinations which the country has never fully recovered from. Within the years 1963 to 1968, President John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Robert F. Kennedy and Rev. Martin Luther King were assassinated. All of them were moving the country toward a broader-based democracy and in every case that trajectory was derailed by their deaths. Each killing was followed by the growth and dissemination of a fairy tale explaining the event to keep the public from growing dangerously restive. These tales were remarkably successful except in the case of MLK, where the fury of the black population could not be so easily constrained. 

In 2024 a number of reports, interviews and videos on internet finally put the mysteries to rest. Remarkably, several were documentaries made in the late 1990’s based on, or featuring, death-bed confessions by participants in these events. How it happened that such reports were made nearly three decades after the events, without making headlines in the news, remains almost as big a mystery as how the basic facts of the assassinations were concealed in the first place. That the documentaries made in the late 90’s only came to wide distribution last year adds another layer of mystery. In all four cases the evidence that has emerged indicates that there was some level of collusion within elements of government. 

 Now, let’s turn to some of the specific revelations that have found wide exposure in the past year. An interview with Chauncey Holt made a few days before his death in 1997 had him describing his career working for both the Mafia and for the CIA when their activities overlapped. He was on assignment in Dallas at the time of the JFK assassination, his role being essentially logistical in terms of supplying weapons and fabricating fake Secret Service I.D. badges for participants in the plot. He mentions his bosses in the Mafia as well as his contacts at the CIA. Holt was an interesting man with a strange combination of skill sets ranging from weapons expert to circus acrobat. His long interview on YouTube is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3z5MgCG4COY

 While Chauncey Holt admitted to being involved in the JFK assassination, he said he did none of the actual shooting. Shortly after seeing that filmed report, I found a video of an interview with another participant, James Files, who admitted to being the person who fired the fatal shot. He was not the primary shooter but was stationed on the grassy knoll ahead of the motorcade in case the first shooter failed to kill the president, and so it was that he fired the one shot that completed the mission. His story seems credible enough, certainly ten times more so than the Warren Commission Report, although that’s a very low bar. Could this documentary have been created by AI? The assassination was in 1963 and the confession about thirty-four years later. The wonders of Artificial Intelligence are far more recent. Was he just seeking fame before he died? I doubt it but see for yourself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gp1E31tnTUU

The assassination of Malcolm X at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem on February 21, 1965 as he was preparing to give a speech to a crowd of about 400 people seemed to be a more straightforward story of a clash between rival religious sects. Malcolm had a falling out with Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam, the year before and had joined a more orthodox Sunni Muslim congregation. The Black Muslims were angry. Malcolm was shot as many as 16 times, with his autopsy revealing 21 wounds, some from a shotgun fired by Thomas Hagen, a thug from NJ. Hagen was shot in the leg by security guards and escaped from the angry crowd. He was apparently never arrested for the crime. Three members of Nation Of Islam were arrested, tried and convicted for the murder. The media published reports of the crime that varied in many details, reflecting a degree of confusion as well a strong antipathy for the groups involved. One of the three men convicted of the killing, Mujahid Abdul Halim, subsequently confessed but said that the other two men convicted were not involved. In 2021, after serving many years in prison, the two men were exonerated by a judge who said the prosecution had withheld evidence at their trials. In 2024, surviving members of Malcolm X’s family decided to sue the FBI, the CIA and the NYPD for $100 million, alleging their complicity in the crime. I have no further information of the outcome of their case. 

By the time that Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles on 05 June 1967 the American public was demoralized by the spate of killings and the changes set in motion by them. It seems to have leaped at the chance to believe that Sirhan Sirhan, a crazed Pakistani Muslim, was the sole killer. Evidence of the killing was quickly destroyed by the LA police and there was little official follow-up. Robert Kennedy Jr. was a thirteen year-old boy at the time of his father’s murder and unsurprisingly has spent a lot of time and effort doing what the FBI and the LA Police failed to do, i.e. finding out who the real killer was, although not necessarily who paid him. Spoiler alert: Sirhan was not Kennedy’s killer, despite being in the room and firing a number of shots, one of which critically wounded a member of the Kennedy entourage. RFK was shot from behind at close range by a security guard who left the country shortly after the killing. He was named by Kennedy Jr. in his interesting report, a summary of which you can see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_F._Kennedy_assassination_conspiracy_theories

When killed, RFK was campaigning in California to become the Democratic candidate for president to replace President Lyndon Johnson, who would step down rather than face a primary challenge. The assassination of Kennedy threw the party into disarray which contributed to Richard Nixon becoming president in the elections of 1968. 

James Earl Ray was blamed, charged and convicted of the killing of Martin Luther King on April 4, 1968. Given that the 40 year-old was both a racist and a fugitive from prison and was seen at the site of the crime, he was a convenient scapegoat, allowing the more important protagonists to escape scrutiny. A more plausible and detailed description of the crime has emerged which exonerates the long deceased Ray. He continued to insist til the day he died, in prison in 1998, that he was set up to take the rap and did not do the killing, except for the time when he took a guilty plea to escape the death penalty 

See the long wikipedia description, which includes most of the alternate theories and rebuttals, including confessions of involvement by other locals, and accusations by the King family.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Martin_Luther_King_Jr.

Besides the revelations regarding assassinations of the 1960’s, 2024 saw two attempts to assassinate former and future president Donald Trump. In the first instance, at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania, a 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks managed to wound Trump on his right ear, kill one bystander and seriously wound two others before being shot to death by the Secret Service. The Director of the Secret Service was removed after what was called the biggest failure of the SS since the Reagan shooting in 1980. Was the failure a matter of negligence or was it planned? Maybe we’ll know in thirty years. 

Two months later, another would-be assassin was found in a hedge on the perimeter of the Trump Golf Course in West Palm Beach before he could fire any shots. This one, 58-year-old Ryan Wesley Routh, a disenchanted former Trump enthusiast, had some shady associates from Ukraine to Latin America helping him to acquire heavy weapons. Routh fled and escaped by car when shot at by the Secret Service agent who spotted him but was later apprehended. He has been charged with attempted murder and terrorism and is likely to spend the rest of his life in prison. 

Had either of these two would-be assassins been successful and gotten away, we can assume that based on the history of the assassinations of the 60’s, confessions would start appearing around 2050 and information regarding all the people involved in any way would be released by 2084. These recent attempts may have simply been the gestures of crackpot loners with no government involvement. But what of the larger crimes the government has obviously had a hand in, from the color revolutions to all the coups d’etat around the world, or the deals with Israel to coordinate, supply and defend the on-going genocide? We’ve seen the results but how much was each member of Congress paid to support the massacre? Will the sordid planning details ever be revealed? And if so, when? We won’t know about them. Perhaps our grandchildren will but they won’t care. 

Yes, coverups are not exclusively about assassinations.  Another story that reemerged in the past year was about the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 for which Timothy McVeigh was executed. Rather than me trying to summarize the story, you can get a fuller version from Jeremy Kuzmarov with this link.

I’ll end this little essay on the long wait for concealed information to reach the public with a word of appreciation for Oliver Stone. In 1991 he made a film, JFK, a bio-pic with an all-star cast, which challenged the findings of the Warren Report. It received eight Oscar nominations, winning two of them, but it also drew criticism from the major media, ever ready to defend establishment orthodoxy, for fomenting conspiracy theories. Thirty years later, Stone made a documentary, JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, which provided solid evidence for many of the events which seemed to be based on rational conjecture in the earlier film.  If you haven't seen it yet, you should.

Post Convention Punditalia '24 Political Outlook

 In my post of July 8th  I described how things looked for the upcoming elections, as of early July, and what the choice between Democrats and Republicans entailed.  I have described what has transpired since then in a two-part illustrated piece called Satanic Summer which will appear on my Substack as soon as I can resolve, or work around, the technical difficulties related to my printer/scanner failure.  

The political conventions went on as scheduled and the Democratic Convention in Chicago avoided violence by keeping demonstrators several miles away by use of extensive barricades.  Bibi Netanyahu got to make his speech to  Congress with all the record number of standing ovations he was promised,   I had predicted, to anyone who asked me, that the party which managed to replace its candidate before the election, i.e. Trump or Biden, would win the election.  At first that seemed to favor the Republicans when Trump was convicted on all thirty-four felony charges in New York, and later when there were two attempts to assassinate him.  There was some talk of a conspiracy to kill him, with no evidence to support it.  However, the constant hysteria about the threat to democracy that Trump represented and how he must be stopped at all costs, and such talk by Democratic pundits and politicians including the Vice President, certainly fostered an atmosphere to bring emotional gun nuts out of the woodwork.  Those failed assassination attempts may have offset any election bump in the polls for the Democrats that derived from the Trump felony convictions. 

Meanwhile the principle change in the election outlook was the withdrawal of the candidacy of President Biden after his very shaky performance in the first scheduled debate with Trump in the campaign.  Joe didn't really want to go, as he had convinced himself  that he was the best man for the job, but he failed to convince very many of his fellow Democrats, as well as the major donors to the party and the campaign. His withdrawal came quickly after the debate performance but after most of the Democratic primaries had been held, with virtually no other candidates being allowed on the ballots, so the Democratic Party leadership got together and decided that V.P. Kamala Harris was their candidate.  That decision was announced before the convention, where she would be officially anointed  along with her choice for vice president. 

By late spring it looked fairly certain that Donald Trump would once again be elected.  While that is no longer a given, the result looks slightly more likely to be the opposite, although Democrats are very good at losing elections.  Trump seemed confident of defeating his visibly aging opponent and ridiculing him.  To his dismay, he is now facing a  candidate capable of turning the tables on him, by simply reminding people that Trump is almost as old as Biden and nearly as incoherent. Indeed, should Trump win the election, by the end of his term he will be the oldest US president in history.

Despite the long duration of US electoral campaigns, there is very little discussion of issues by the public, the main stream media, or the candidates.  There is no lack of issues worthy  of debate and in earlier election years I have made my own views on most of them clear.  This year, most of those issues fade into insignificance due to the two issues which are virtually absent from discussion in this campaign.  We are closer than ever to nuclear war which could escalate into a nuclear holocaust making all these discussions irrelevant.  Should we escape that through some rational thinking, which seems to be in short supply right now, we will have to face the devastating consequences of climate change.  This has been discussed a good deal in the past decade or so but in this election year, it has vanished from the agenda.  While we've seen pledges to reduce carbon emissions and to make heating and lighting ever more efficient, the constant push to war and increased military expenditures by the US Empire has more than offset all the efforts made thus far to combat climate change. 

I've mentioned the imminent threat of nuclear war and the effects of climate change as the two issues that make all the others insignificant, but I haven't forgotten the other important elephant in the room.  The new axis of genocide, formed by the US and Israel with the UK and the EU as junior members, shows no signs of going away, at least not due to any US elections.  The US "leadership"  declared its intentions three decades ago to take control of the world through its economic power, backed up by its military might.  The US has roughly 800 military bases spread over three quarters of the countries of the world so it is close to effective control of the planet by now. Ironically, the US government, and I include all three branches, is now controlled by Israel, a small dependency of the United States and the largest recipient of US foreign aid.  

Donald Trump won the election of 2016 in large measure by outpandering Hillary Clinton in her attempt to be Israel's strongest supporter.  We may see a repeat performance.  Genocide has bi-partisan support and US efforts at world hegemony may run into opposition as its alliance with a pariah nation destroys the trust, the good will and good reputation the United States has built over the past eight decades.  

We've seen who Donald Trump is and the damage he can wreak.  The only conceivable positive trait we've seen in him is that he may be less enthusiastic than the current regime about promoting unending war.  We know little about Kamala Harris and how she might handle the decision making in the White House.  She was a candidate for the Democratic candidacy in 2016 and she was a terrible candidate who dropped out early.  So far she's given no indication that she would deviate from the policies of the Biden Administration.  Both candidates fully back the genocide that we're participating in. At the Democratic Convention, Harris announced a new politics of joy.  A little joy may be needed in these dismal times, but at a moment when our country is participating in the most visible genocide in eighty years and we're spending precious resources on the promoting, inciting and escalating of war all over the globe, speaking of the politics of joy appears tone deaf. Hillary Clinton was tone deaf about all the "deplorables" and she lost an election regarded as one she couldn't possibly lose.

We've seen some bizarre reversals of positions in recent years, especially this year.  Whereas the Democratic Party has traditionally been seen as the party of the rights of minorities and of civil rights in general, and the GOP as the party of business interests and of the wealthy, that been reversed to some degree.  The GOP has always tended to have an authoritarian element, and abortion enthusiasts will correctly point to its promotion of restrictions on abortion as evidence of that, but recently, the authoritarian push to limit free speech, promote censorship and illegal surveillance has come from what used to be thought of as the Left, but in reality is the ever more right-wing Democratic Party.  The oligarchs can claim to be Democrats or Republicans but they are much the same in promoting their own interests by investing in both. 

Other radical reversals of associations have been popping up all over.  Robert Kennedy Jr., who has deep family ties to the Democratic Party, after being kept off the ballot in Democratic primaries, and then being kept off state ballots when trying to run as an independent candidate, all by lawfare brought by the Democratic Party, has now joined the Trump campaign where he hopes to have a say in Trump Administration policy.  Similarly, Tulsi Gabbard who was a Democratic Representative from Hawaii, as well as being a member of the Democratic National Committee until she resigned from that ruling body in 2016 in protest of its corrupt and undemocratic procedures, has joined  the Trump campaign, just a year or two after resigning from the Democratic Party. She has been, and remains, among the most vocal critics of Kamala Harris.

Not to be outdone, the Democratic Party has been seeking Republican turncoats who oppose Trump, and there are plenty of them.  That they have abandoned Trump is reasonable but it would be more honorable if they just stayed out of sight and prayed forgiveness for backing him the the first place.  That some popular person who seeks public service in a red state might go along with the local party is understandable, and the same could be said in Democratic states.  However, the recent headliners are Liz Cheney and her father Dick, the Acting President for much of the Little George Bush Administration. While I may obsess about when he and Bush will be brought up on War Crimes charges in an international tribunal, he doesn't usually occupy much of my thoughts. 

However, in recent weeks Liz Cheney has been out campaigning with Kamala Harris and Dick Cheney has announced his support.   Politics can make strange bedfellows and unlikely coalitions are not a new thing but is there anyone whose support Kamala Harris would reject?  I, for one, would not vote for anyone who accepted the support of Dick Cheney.   

Usually I am free with my voting suggestions, which too often involve picking the least awful candidate.  This time is different.  Both major party candidates are totally totally unacceptable.  Most people will vote with the party they identify with.  I usually do that myself.  However, I will not vote for a pro-genocide candidate for president or senator or representative.  After one or two anti-war and peace candidates have been eliminated through bureaucratic maneuvering, there is only one presidential candidate on my ballot who opposes genocide.  Thus, Jill Stein will get my vote again.  Her chances of winning are about the same as my chance of winning a big lottery.  She is running ahead of Kamala Harris in recent polls in a few places in the country where our involvement in genocide is regarded as an issue.  The results of this election will change little or nothing but we can just send a tiny message that the status quo is unacceptable.

Things sometimes change quickly but in June of  2021 I posted a cartoon that commented on the US Empire and its relationship with Israel.  You can see it here.

 

Lewis Lapham and Other Heroes

 

In the midst of this summer from Hell, sandwiched between the withdrawal from the presidential race of Joe Biden and the speech by Bibi Netanyahu to the assembled Houses of Congress in the Nation’s Capitol, came the news that Lewis Lapham had died. 

At this dark moment, when there are few protagonists on the world stage who project anything that could be regarded as heroic and most news makers appear to be competing to reach never before seen levels of incivility, it seems obligatory to publicly note the passing of one of the best writers and editors of the past hundred years. 

foto by Nicole Bengivino for the New York Times

Lewis H. Lapham was one of my heroes and will remain so as long as I am able to read and write. Do we need heroes? Should we have them?  Blind devotion to to imperfect people can lead to irrational and dangerous cults. We saw that a few decades ago with the Jonestown Massacre and more recently politics have come to be dominated by personality cults in place of policy discussions. However, most of us do look to people we respect and who can serve as models for how we hope to conduct our lives and achieve the goals we set for ourselves. 

In my experience, boys’ early heroes are often sports figures, and those early enthusiasms can sometimes last for a lifetime. For me, Ted Williams remains the greatest baseball player ever and as soon as someone figures out how to bring his carefully frozen corpse back to life, everyone will get to see what I mean. With adolescence, the sex drive comes into play and all the many variations of the mating game begin to take over and often dominate the consciousness of newly energized youth. Music plays an integral role in these mating rites and it is no accident that one’s lifetime musical enthusiasms are shaped by our experiences of adolescence and those post-adolescent years, lately extended to the edge of middle age by ever longer periods of academic study and economic dependency. Our heroes in this period are often musicians and usually about a decade older than we are. They will have achieved fame as up and coming artists of their era in the genre to which they were assigned. Decades later, you can usually tell the age of people, regardless of their state of conservation or decline, by knowing their musical heroes. 

As we develop our own interests, the people we esteem tend to be those whose work and goals set an example for what we hope to achieve. Being an architect, my architectural hero was Frank Lloyd Wright, as he probably was to more than half the people in the western world who went on to become architects over the past one hundred years. With the possible exception of Albert Einstein in the realms of physics and mathematics, I can’t think of a similarly dominating figure in any other field. 

While as a boy I had sports heroes across all popular sports, none of them had much of a tangible effect on my life because no matter how strong my interest in sports, I just wasn’t very good at any of them. However, I did go on to draw and to paint, activities which spawned a whole new personal Olympus of inspirational figures, from Rembrandt to Klimt, with Thomas Nast, George Grosz and Giorgio Forattini stimulating my appreciation of the art of cartooning. While I would never claim to have equaled any of the work of these role models, they have all influenced what I do. 

Most of the heroes of my lifetime have been musicians. As with all the sports heroes, they have had little direct effect of what I do since I am even less of a musician than I am an athlete. At least I tried to play basketball, even breaking a hand once in the effort. However, the musicians, even more than the sports figures, brought me an abundance of joy and a fuller appreciation of the gift of life that we have received. 

 I’ve thought of myself as a an architect, a painter and a cartoonist, but I’ve rarely thought of myself as a writer. We all write! Sometimes it’s to friends, or lovers, teachers or government officials, impersonal corporate offices, or even in a diary, but we all write. I’ve been writing this blog for nearly twenty years and before that I wrote two books, never published, first on the joys of Italy, and later on the darker side of life here. In the course of doing some of this writing I started to recognize what it was I appreciated in writers. 

There were a few models that I related to, starting with Jean Shepherd, who wasn’t so much a writer as he was a speaker, running an hour-long radio show every night for many years featuring nothing and no one other than himself telling stories about a remembered or invented youth. Through all those years he revealed nothing about his rather singular private life. His fame was never really acknowledged by the cultural establishment, except by the fact that his program continued for years on New York’s most powerful commercial radio station. His silent band of listeners, Night People he called us, ran to the hundreds of thousands, a fact which he played with, exhorting his listeners to show up at a given time and place to do something both harmless and mysterious to all those not in on the prank. 

Another writer who I identified with was Bill Bryson, an American from the Mid-West who has become something of a fixture in the UK Establishment. You can now hear his recorded voice explaining every British tourist attraction to the tourists. However, in his earlier books I had the sensation of identity theft, that is, I had the sense that he’d written exactly what I had wanted to say before I had the chance to write it down. If he needs a ghost writer, I’m always ready to help; if I need a ghost writer, well, I couldn’t afford him, but I do try to keep a similar sense of humor, along with a bit of an edge. Maybe that’s the common denominator in all the writers I admire. 

Tom Wolfe was another fitting that description but I have no illusions about being able to match his colorful creativity in language usage. He satirized the cultural elite that he succeeded in becoming a part of, creating his own celebrity identity for a celebrity culture. 

I’ve been reading Harper’s Magazine for most of my life, starting, if I remember correctly, back in my college days. I’ve let my subscription lapse a few times when I moved from one place to another, but I’ve always managed to return to the fold. Lewis Lapham was managing editor or editor-in-chief of the magazine from 1971 til 2006, with a year off during the magazine’s economic crisis of 1982. That long period covered much of my extended readership of the nation’s oldest continuously published monthly. IMHO it remains the best publication produced in the United States, filled with excellent essays on all manner of subjects, poetry, paintings, photographs, book reviews and readings from sources you would never be exposed to otherwise. It was, and still is, where the work of America’s best writers first appeared, among them Mark Twain.

Lewis Lapham had his own heroes, the most important of which was Mark Twain, whose honesty, sarcasm, irony and humor shaped Lapham’s own writing and outlook. He retired from running the magazine to found his own Lapham’s Quarterly, but his impact on Harper’s lives on in its outlook and in several features he introduced. The Harper’s Index, a one-page list of statistics which provides a snapshot of the state of the world at the moment; Annotation, a line-by-line analysis of documents that usually do not draw much attention; and Findings, a random but carefully curated sampling of curious happenings in the natural world. Featured writers may have an agenda to promote or a partisan view regarding a particular topic under discussion but the magazine seeks to present thoughtful essays on issues that exist now with the goal of informing the readership of what drives the issue at hand. That’s a role that the major media have abandoned some time ago. 

Bicentennial Heroes

About forty years ago I did a painting, Bicentennial Heroes, to celebrate my favorite Americans of the first two hundred years. Lewis Lapham does not appear in it. Indeed, until I saw his obituary in the New York Times, I don’t recall ever having seen a picture of him. The last time I visited the United States, ten years ago, I did visit both the offices of Harper’s, and the offices of Lapham’s Quarterly, in a vain effort to get some writing of mine published. In subsequent years I was not even sure if he was still alive or not. Now I know from his NYT obituary that he moved to Rome with members of his family in January of this year and he died there on July 29th. For a classical scholar, which he was, that seemed like perfect planning. 

I’ve mentioned a few of my heroes and how they’ve influenced what I do. With Lewis Lapham, it’s slightly different. I try to think about how he would say what I want to write, but more than that, I feel that he’s looking over my shoulder offering comments, maybe not spoken aloud, just thoughts, like the cat’s comments in some of my cartoons. “wordy”, “clumsy”, “too long”, too emotional”. I do try to make the adjustments that seem to be called for but it’s like having a very exacting English professor standing over you and watching your every word. Lacking a flesh and blood proofreader, I am grateful for this otherworldly presence. Lewis Lapham, rest in peace, but may your spirit endure.

PUNDITALIA '24 Political Outlook

Since 2008 I have been offering thoughts and recommendations on US elections, especially in presidential race years, on my website punditalia.net. These earlier editions can be seen with the links below. 

2008 – I made 41 numbered proposals, most of which were not implemented. 

2012 – I pared down policy recommendations to a more sharp and forceful 17. 

2016 – dealt largely with Obama’s failed trade policies. 

2020 – Noted the centrality of climate change and our passage from democracy to oligarchy. 

 

In 2024 the US is facing the collapse of its status as the world’s unitary superpower just as the reach of its empire has extended further than any other in human history. It now faces a presidential election, in which the US public will be the loser no matter the outcome, between an incumbent president and a former president. Both are old, unpopular and mostly incoherent in their speech. They performed in what was billed as the first of two presidential debates, in which Biden set the rules and the dates. Neither of these presumed advantages helped him. The shutting down of the opponent’s microphone while one candidate was speaking kept Trump from interrupting in the manner of an adolescent brat, as he had appeared in their debates four years earlier. 

The consensus of pundits and insiders across the political spectrum was that Biden performed very badly, exposing his diminished mental state, while Trump was more vigorous and self-confident, the same bold liar and braggart that we’d come to know during his first term. The type of damage that either man could inflict on the country over the next term can be predicted on what each has already done over his four years. 

Another clue to the future lies in the contrast between the cabinets they’ve appointed in the first go around. Trump’s picks had the air of the division of spoils that a top Mafia boss might dole out. All were picked to downgrade or destroy the agency they were picked to run. 

Louis De Joy, a commercial delivery service executive, was made Postmaster General to run the US Postal Service into the ground and he has succeeded rather well. The fact that he still holds that job can be seen as one of Biden’s domestic failings. 

Mitch McConnell’s wife Elaine Chao, whose family runs a Chinese shipping company, was appointed Secretary of Transportation. 

Betsy De Vos, the sister of Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater USA, the serially renamed private military contractor, which sought to replace citizen soldiers with mercenaries, was brought in to destroy or at least diminish the public school system and replace public schools with private schools run for profit. 

The post of Attorney General went to Jeff Sessions, an Alabama law and order advocate. He was ousted when he failed to support some of Trump’s more egregious floutings of the law. 

Rick Perry, an ex-Senator from Texas who had spoken of abolishing the Energy Department, was put in charge of the Department of Energy. 

Nikki Haley, the rather non-diplomatic ex-Governor of South Carolina, was named Ambassador to the UN to stir up anti-US sentiment there. 

Scott Pruitt, a lawyer with close ties to the fossil fuel industry, was named Head of the Environmental Protection Agency to take the bite out of its rules and regulations. 

Mike Pompeo, a Kansas Representative with a military background and a Cold War mentality, was named Director of the CIA despite, or perhaps because, of his intention to pursue information on Russian interference in US elections. While in office he shocked colleagues by suggesting the kidnapping and/or murder of Julian Assange. He was subsequently made Secretary of State. 

Tom Price from Georgia, a leading opponent of the Affordable Care Act (better known as Obama Care) was put in charge of Health and Human Services. 

Carl Icahn, a billionaire corporate raider, was made special advisor to eliminate business regulations. 

Rex Tillerson, the retired Chairman of ExxonMobil was made Secretary of State. 

Steven Mnuchin, another billionaire with a shady history of off-shore tax havens for himself, was named Secretary of the Treasury. 

The post of Secretary of Defense was assigned to retired General James Mattis, affectionately nicknamed Mad Dog Mattis. 

Montana’s Ryan Zinke, a former Navy Seal, was appointed Secretary of the Interior to oversee public land development, coal, oil and gas exploration, and policies affecting solar and wind generated power. 

Sonny Perdue, ex-Governor of Georgia where his family was a major player in industrial agriculture, was made Secretary of Agriculture. 

Wilber Ross, a pluri-billionaire and new Secretary of Commerce, said the US must free itself from bad trade agreements, while not addressing the question of bad for whom. His task may have been grounded in the idea that they were not bad enough to benefit him. 

Steve Bannon, media executive currently serving a four month prison sentence for contempt of Congress after defying a subpoena relating to his role in the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection, was named Chief Strategist. He currently holds no government post and may not in a future Trump Administration, even though he is popular with the MAGA people, since he is radically more anti-government than Trump. He is an efficient agent for his goals, more than most on this list whose ideological goals tend to take a back seat to dreams of personal enrichment, much like Donald Trump himself, who may not have any ideological goals at all. 

 The list goes on and on, but it consistently elevated people seeking to eliminate the functions of government, especially oversight and regulations established to protect the country from a lawless reign of oligarchs, and the list doesn’t get any better with those I’ve omitted. It looks like a WANTED list posted on a post office wall. Many of these people were fired for not being bad enough and others just quit, notably Rex Tillerson, because working with such a bunch of imbeciles, especially Trump, was just too much for him to bear. 

Joe Biden was crowned the 2020 Democratic candidate by the Neo-Con establishment, including the DNC, the Neo-Con media, nominally affiliated oligarchs and their various foundations, and perhaps most of all, by AIPAC, the Israeli interests group which after all these years of controlling US foreign policy, is still not registered under FARA, the Foreign Agents Registration Act. His elevation to the candidacy and his successful dethroning of Trump brought sighs of relief and hopes for a breath of fresh air after the gang of thugs cited had stunk up official Washington with levels of nepotism and corruption that made the Harding Administration look like it had been run by Snow White. On the domestic front, Biden’s appointees attracted little negative attention and coped reasonably well with the many unusual problems brought on by the pandemic, the huge deficit created by the massive Trump tax cuts, and the out of control military budget approved by an unusually bi-partisan Congress. 

It was only when reading down to the Biden appointments in the State Department and some of the vast departments of Defense and Homeland Security that I was enveloped in a dark cloud of gloom. 

The State Department was straight out of PNAC, that stealth cabal of Neo-Con-Lib crusaders organized in the 90’s to empower the USA as the world’ s solitary superpower to rule the world, under a regime of a rules-based order with rules made by the US and  enforced by its powerful international economic institutions, such as the IMF and the World Bank, and by its vast military establishment, backed up by NATO countries and others willing to commit to vassal status. 

It was the wet dream of all previous world conquerors/saviors from Genghis Khan and the Roman Caesars to Napoleon, Stalin and Hitler who, with absolute power, could unify and improve the civilization with their ideas and policies. 

The State Department was to be run by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, assisted by the ever-present coup maker Victoria Nuland, wife of Robert Kagan, co-founder of PNAC, with Jake Sullivan as National Security Advisor. While none of them had the luxury of excusing their lame, out-of-touch and absurd statements on the impairment that comes with age, as their boss could, they have continued the barrage of such pronouncements, although sometimes the administration relies on John Kirby, a man who appears to be immune to shame or embarrassment. 

Despite the shocking success of the Neo-Cons in reducing both the EU and the UK to vassal status, in the Biden years they may have bitten off more than they can chew. They got the war with Russia that they wanted, using Ukrainians as cannon fodder, and to the delight of Lindsey Graham and others of his ilk, killing off a lot of Russians. Overconfidence has played a big part in the debacle but as deindustrialization has spread through the western world and NATO is running out of ammunition for a long war, Russia, originally incredulous at the US belligerence, has upped its military production in response and is now involved in organizing the larger and poorer nations of the world into trade agreements not using the dollar. As the administration had barely gotten started with its proxy war in Europe, it started planning the coming war with China, which despite its remarkable economic and industrial success, had made no military moves outside its own confines. 

All of that would have marked the Biden Administration as a catastrophic failure but Israel has now put the cherry on the cake. US imperialism has been shrugged off by most of the American public as a non-issue, as well as by its vassal states, but now that the US Government is funding, supplying and coordinating a highly visible genocide carried out by the Israeli government, just how long can this go on? The bi-partisan US Congress has voted overwhelmingly to support the genocide. There may have been a few dissenting comments, but the funding continues unabated. 

The UK and the EU continue to follow the US position. The French Vichy Government deported more than 72,000 Jews to their death during WWII. That has been a source of embarrassment in France ever since. The EU is now supporting the elimination of more than 2,200,000 Palestinians in Gaza. 

How can the US Congress continue to act like the enabling German Parliament of the 1940’s? Jamaal Bowman, a black progressive incumbent Congressman from the Bronx, had the temerity to publicly criticize Israel for its policy of oppression and to speak out against our involvement in the genocide. AIPAC spent $15 million to defeat him in the most expensive Democratic primary ever and they succeeded in having him lose to an Israeli loyalist. 

That’s the situation in July folks. Three years ago I predicted that neither Trump nor Biden would be standing for election in 2024. My predictions are sometimes influenced by wishful thinking, and here, my wishes are shared by the majority of the American public. While this prediction may now seem doomed, hope is the last to die. Trump may be in prison by November. While hard-core MAGA people will vote for him anyway, a number of traditional Republicans, unless they are more afraid of what Biden and his tone-deaf minions might wreak, would be happy to see Trump off the ticket. I suspect that the backlash against a convicted felon might prevent his election, especially against anyone but Biden. Most Democratic pundits and politicians are distraught about Biden’s collapsing chances and agonizing over how to effect his replacement without looking bad. 

In August the Democratic National Convention will convene in Chicago, where in 1964 there was another controversial convention with significant violence and police brutality. While we all hope that the violence will not get out of hand, I do wish that literally millions of people will be in the streets of Chicago to protest the on-going war-mongering, war profiteering and genocide by the current administration, and to demand an open convention to select a rational and decent candidate. 

Demonstrators can practice up in Washington DC on July 24th when Bibi Netanyahu will speak to the joint Houses of Congress. At his last pre-election speech to Congress in 2020, he received a large number of standing ovations and some of the more perverse GOP leaders have pledged that his earlier record will be broken. Good luck America! 

                                                                 *** 

Many good writers now contribute to Substack. I too write on Substack and welcome future subscribers. 

For those of you who lean toward supporting Trump, I recommend that you read the work of: 

Robert Reich- objective and rational critic of Trump 

Jim Hightower- a lighter touch but on target 

Thom Hartmann- a highly partisan but accurate critic of Trump. 

 Michael Moore- a rare democratic Democrat

 For those of you who drink the Neo-Con Kool-Aid and support the Biden Administration as a lesser evil, please read: 

Professor John Mearsheimer - a realist point of view

Professor Jeffrey Sachs - 

Scott Ritter - from a military perspective

Caitlin Johnson - a conscience for those in need of one

Joe Brumoli (Euro Yankee)