Category: People

Presidents’Day and the Enigma of George Washington and a Nation

Painting: John Trumbull. George Washington resigns as Commander-in-Chief, Continental Army.

I grew up in an America that celebrated George Washington’s February 22 birthday as a national holiday, signed into law by President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1879 as a federal workers’ holiday, then extended nationally in 1885.

Things changed in 1968 when Congress passed the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, providing longer weekends and consolidating observances. Washington’s Birthday was reassigned to the third Monday in February, still legally designated as his birthday, though some congressional members proposed including Lincoln’s February 12 birthday under the broader aegis of Presidents’ Day.

That broader title caught on. Retailers and state governments increasingly adopted “Presidents’ Day.” Like so many holidays, it became a corporate sales opportunity.

Accordingly, the first item in my email this morning was a Presidents’ Day furniture sale—the first of what will no doubt be a barrage as the third Monday approaches.

Historian Jonathan Horn finds it absurd that we no longer distinctly celebrate Washington’s Birthday, given that it was observed in the young nation even before the framers of the Constitution met in 1787 (“Just Call It Washington’s Birthday,” Free Press, Feb. 11, 2026).

We owe much to this exemplary leader. Ken Burns credits Washington as “the glue that held it all together” in his PBS documentary The American Revolution. Facing superior, disciplined British forces, Washington understood that victory would require patience: knowing when to retreat, striking unexpectedly, and prolonging the war.

After defeats in New York, expiring enlistments, and desertions, matters reached their nadir during the winter encampment at Valley Forge outside British-occupied Philadelphia in 1777. Starvation loomed. Smallpox ravaged the ranks. Soldiers were unpaid, underfed, and poorly clothed.

With sagacity, Washington enlisted the Prussian officer Baron von Steuben, who molded the army into a disciplined fighting force. Recruits followed in greater numbers.

After General Gates’ victory at Saratoga, Washington was able to engage French support, working through liaison with the Marquis de Lafayette.

The decisive blow came when French naval forces blocked Cornwallis’s escape at Yorktown. Washington had deceived Cornwallis into believing New York was his objective while covertly moving his troops south. The British capitulated, leading ultimately to peace in 1783.

Washington had endured criticism without vindictiveness, even surviving a mutiny threat by disgruntled, unpaid officers.

For Burns, Washington’s greatest moment was not Yorktown or Trenton, but his resignation of his commission in Annapolis in 1783. As Burns tells it, he “knew how to defer to Congress, knew how to inspire ordinary people in the dead of night, knew how to pick subordinate talent—just had a kind of presence to him that, without him, we don’t have a country” (Chadwick Moore, New York Post, Nov. 11, 2025).

He did something similar in refusing a third presidential term. His 1796 Farewell Address remains prescient in its warnings against partisanship, permanent foreign alliances, sectionalism, and constitutional usurpation: “Let there be no change by usurpation; for though this, in one instance, may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed.”

Yet Washington has come under fierce attack, criticized for slave holding and judged by contemporary moral standards. Some view him primarily as a symbol of racial oppression and seek removal of his name and likeness from public spaces.

In the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing in 2020 and the ensuing unrest, efforts accelerated to eliminate reminders of racial injustice, including monuments to Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson. Streets, buildings, and schools were renamed; statues toppled or defaced.

In Portland in 2020, protesters toppled and defaced a statue of Washington in a public park.

At the University of Washington, protesters called for removal of his statue.

In 2020, a statue of Washington at George Washington University was beheaded.

In 2021, the San Francisco Board of Education voted to rename a school honoring Washington, later reversing course after public scrutiny.

A Washington, D.C. working group, commissioned amid racial justice protests, recommended reviewing public names and monuments, suggesting federal sites be reconsidered for contextualization or renaming.

While some of this fury can be understood as anger over longstanding injustice, historian Howard Zinn argues in A People’s History of the United States that Washington’s mythic stature obscures his slaveholding and his violent campaigns against Indigenous peoples. Jill Lepore, in These Truths, likewise underscores the inseparability of his leadership from slavery.

It is painful to read, but much rings true.

Burns recounts Washington’s 1779 campaign against the Iroquois, ordering the destruction of settlements in retaliation for their alliance with the British: “Lay waste all the settlements around… that the country may not be merely overrun, but destroyed.” Towns and crops were burned. Many perished in the ensuing winter from famine and disease.

America was founded on a compromise that would lead to civil war and immense loss of life. Our history is marked by both courage and cruelty, liberty and bondage. We diminish ourselves if we pretend otherwise.

But we also diminish ourselves if we forget the magnitude of what was achieved: a fragile republic wrested from empire, sustained not by perfection but by discipline, restraint, and the voluntary surrender of power.

We are a nation still struggling to reconcile our ideals with our conduct. The work of ordered liberty, of constitutional self-government, of moral reckoning without erasure, remains unfinished.

The Revolution continues—not in the toppling of statues or canceling history, but by whether we can tell the truth about our past without losing the capacity to honor it.

—rj

Learning What Is Enough

On winter mornings, before the day has decided what it will become, the fields hold a stillness that feels provisional—frost clinging to the grass, fence lines darkened with damp, the land waiting without impatience. It is a good hour for reading slowly, for choosing words that do not hurry ahead of their meanings.

I have begun the year reading Wendell Berry. Now in his ninety-second year, he continues—more slowly, more deliberately—to farm and to write, unchanged in his fidelity to limits: the authority of place over abstraction, the moral claims of the local over the corporate, tradition understood not as nostalgia but as knowledge earned through use and endurance.

I read him most mornings. His work steadies the day. It does not offer solutions so much as orientation—toward what is given, what is sufficient, and what must be borne. Berry has always made room for joy, but never without sorrow, nor for hope without the acknowledgment of failure, including one’s own.

Some of his most influential prose appeared early, when his voice was still finding its public footing. The Long-Legged House and The Unsettling of America argued, quietly and insistently, that culture and agriculture are inseparable, and that when land is treated as commodity rather than community, both soil and people are diminished.

I return often to his poetry, especially A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems. Written on Sundays and largely free of polemic, these poems are acts of attention. They move patiently through the stages of a human life—birth, labor, love, diminishment—offering a sacramental vision of ordinary days lived close to the ground. Among them is Berry’s most widely known poem, “The Peace of Wild Things,” whose calm acceptance of life’s ephemerality offers not escape from anxiety, but release from the burden of false mastery:

“I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.”

The peace the poem offers is not consolation so much as proportion. Its discipline lies in relinquishing the anxious reach into the future and reentering creaturely time—where life is finite, local, and sufficient.

That same discipline governs Berry’s essay “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer,” first published in 1987 and often misread as a rejection of technology itself. It is instead a meditation on the moral weight of tools. Berry does not deny their usefulness; he questions their claims. Certain technologies, he suggests, quietly privilege speed over deliberation and convenience over care, reshaping habits of attention until efficiency becomes an unquestioned good.

The good life, in Berry’s accounting, is not optimized. It is inhabited. To live well requires learning the difference between what is necessary and what merely promises ease.

Barbara Kingsolver, another Kentuckian, names this work plainly when she writes:

“I consider it no small part of my daily work to sort out the differences between want and need. I’m helped along the way by my friend Wendell, without his ever knowing it. He advises me to ask, in the first place, whether I wish to purchase a solution to a problem I don’t have.”

Berry’s essay is not finally about computers at all. It is about scale and consequence. It asks not simply what a tool can do, but what it may undo—what forms of patience, responsibility, and mutual care it quietly displaces. It asks how our choices shape our relationships to family, to community, and to the land that sustains both.

Berry still writes with pencil on a yellow legal pad. He still farms, though within the limits age imposes. He still publishes—new poems, even a recent novel. The persistence itself feels instructive.

In a culture bent on expansion and acceleration, Berry’s life suggests another measure of success: fidelity to place, restraint in use, and the long patience required to learn what is enough.

—rj


Why Wendell Berry Still Matters

I’ve been absent from Brimmings for nearly a week, recovering from a serious bout with the flu—the fever lingering for ten days. A chronic cough remains my daily companion.

That hasn’t stopped me from reading—slowly, attentively—six books already this year.

As I’ve previously shared, alongside my annual eclectic reading list, I’ve committed to a topical approach to reading as a way of resisting intellectual grazing and cultivating sustained attention (Topical Reading). I’ve begun with Kentucky sage Wendell Berry, now in his ninety-second year.

I didn’t want to one day come upon his obituary and feel the guilt pangs of having neglected an agrarian pacifist, a champion of the local, often described, without much exaggeration, as America’s “moral conscience.”

Berry has farmed a 125-acre hilly tract adjacent to the Ohio River at Port Royal in Henry County, Kentucky, for more than forty years. Farming, for him, is not metaphor but moral practice. As he writes, “The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility.”

Academically, Berry is no lightweight: a BA and MA in English from the University of Kentucky, a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, and a Guggenheim that took him to Italy, he taught briefly at New York University before returning—against the counsel of colleagues who believed he was jettisoning a promising academic career—to rural Kentucky and the family farm.

They were wrong.

Berry has since written more than fifty books spanning essays, novels, and poetry. His great theme is stewardship—not management or control, but reverent care. “The idea that people have a right to an economy that destroys nature is a contradiction,” he writes, insisting that economic life must answer to ecological reality.

For the farmer Berry, stewardship begins with the soil: an antipathy to chemicals, a reverencing of the biosphere, and a life lived according to natural rhythms. He is deeply opposed to industrial agriculture, which he regards as a cultural as well as ecological calamity: “Industrial agriculture is not just bad for farmers; it is bad for land, for rural communities, and ultimately for culture.”

Among American environmental writings, the two most salient works I’ve encountered are Thoreau’s Walden (1854) and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962). Thoreau’s aphoristic brilliance lends itself to endless quotation: “Our life is frittered away by detail… Simplify, simplify,” while Carson’s prose approaches poetry. Her opening paragraphs of Silent Spring remain, to my mind, the finest in environmental literature, exposing the arrogance behind what she called “the control of nature, a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy.”

I’m only in the early stages of getting acquainted with Berry, but he keeps distinguished company with Thoreau and Carson in his passion for preserving nature’s bounty and the pulchritude of a simplified life lived in fidelity to place and community.

In this sense, Berry reaches back to Thomas Jefferson, whom he quotes more than any other figure: “In my own politics and economics I am Jeffersonian.” Jefferson believed liberty was best secured in small, decentralized communities of independent producers, warning that distant power—whether governmental or economic—inevitably corrodes responsibility and freedom.

Though Berry was an activist who vehemently opposed the Vietnam War and has voted Democratic, his politics resist easy classification. He has lamented that America’s two major parties have grown increasingly to resemble one another.

There may appear, at first glance, to be overlap with libertarianism—his opposition to big government, military expansion, and imperial intervention—but the resemblance is superficial. Libertarianism exalts the autonomous individual; Berry emphasizes communal obligation. “We do not have to sacrifice our economic well-being in order to act responsibly toward our land and our neighbors,” he writes. “Rather, we must do so in order to preserve our economic well-being.”

Berry has his critics. His suspicion of technology strikes some as untenable in a hungry, overpopulated world. Can an aggregate of small family farms feed a wired and burgeoning global population, particularly in parts of Africa?

I find myself grappling with his apparent parochialism. Only a tiny fraction of Americans now farm. What of the rest of us who earn our livelihoods elsewhere? And in an interconnected age, can the local truly stand apart from the global?

Berry would respond that the issue is not technology itself, but dependence. “There is a difference between being technologically advanced and being technologically dependent,” he reminds us—a distinction too often elided in contemporary debates.

Ironically, Berry would fit comfortably in an Amish community. He still plows with horses. He owns no computer, television, or mobile phone, and has no internet access. He writes first in pencil, then types. He uses electricity sparingly, supplemented by solar panels, and his writing studio is without electricity. He walks the talk, living a life rooted—quite literally—in the land. Thoreau would have approved.

An iconoclast, Berry remains well worth reading. Growth, he reminds us, is not synonymous with the earth’s welfare. Economies, like soils, can be exhausted. Big government and industrial systems, he argues, erode local responsibility, foster dependency, and inflame military and international tensions. Rural poverty in places like Appalachia persists, in his view, because urban prosperity has been purchased by the plundering of these regions.

In 2013, President Barack Obama awarded Berry the National Humanities Medal.

In 2015, he became the first living writer inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame.

That same year, the Library of America published a boxed set of his work—an honor accorded to only two living American writers at the time.

Berry may be impractical. He may be impossible to scale. But he leaves us with an uncomfortable and necessary reminder: care, once abandoned, is not easily restored—and neither are the land, the culture, nor the communities that depend upon it.

—rj

Brigitte Bardot: Beauty, Activism, Controversy

Brigitte Bardot : ses photos quand elle était jeune.

French movie star Brigitte Bardot died on Sunday at age 91. Sometimes referred to as France’s Marilyn Monroe, her startling beauty and engaging singing voice won her instant international fame with her initial film, “And God Created Woman.”

Like Marilyn, she was an intelligent, sensitive woman. But also controversial, given her right wing political views and support for Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party.

She inspired young Beatles John Lennon and Paul McCarthy, who insisted their girlfriends dye their hair blonde.

Intellectuals admired her as well. In 1959, ardent feminist Simone de Beauvoir penned her landmark essay, “Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome,” lauding her as France’s most liberated woman.

A non-conformist, she withdrew early from making films to support animal welfare, founding the Brigitte Bardot Foundation, and engaging in activist politics: “I gave my youth and beauty to men. I give my wisdom and experience to animals.”

I do not subscribe to her political views—she detested Muslims and gays. But as a passionate lover of animals and a vegetarian, I have admired her devoted witness on their behalf, protesting dolphin hunts in the Faroe Islands, religious sacrificial rituals, cat slaughter in Australia among other international cruelties.

This was her truest blooming.

In his tribute, French president French president, Emmanuel Macron wrote, “Her films, her voice, her dazzling glory … her sorrows, her generous passion for animals, her face that became Marianne, Brigitte Bardot embodied a life of freedom. A French existence, a universal radiance. She moved us. We mourn a legend of the century.”

Repozez en paix!

—rj

A Legacy of Righteous Minds

Existence exerts a randomness in its distribution of fate. The wicked, as Job tells us, often live long, escaping their misdeeds with impunity; the just and talented, curtailed lives amid their greatest promise.

The list of those I deem the “righteous,” those who’ve especially influenced who I am, the values I embrace, and my hopes for a better human future taken from us early, their age at death indicated in parentheses, includes Princeton sage Walter Kaufman (59), biologist Stephen Jay Gould (62), astronomer Carl Sagan (62), science fiction writer Octavia Butler (58), essayist and novelist George Orwell (46), political sage and philosopher John Stewart Mill (66), and, not least, poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (44).

I’m tempted to write a series of extended separate tributes to each of them in Brimmings, but will limit my commentary for now.

I was in my early twenties. a college student just out of the military, when I somehow came upon Walter Kaufmann’s The Faith of a Heretic (1961), which I’m re-reading now. He was the first to admonish me to accept only the empirical in the quest to discern the probable, to find courage to change course, and live daringly: “The question is not whether one has doubts, but whether one is honest about them.”

Evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould impressed me early with his clear cutting, scintillating prose endowed with grace, teaching me that science is not simply pursuing the factual, but a way of thinking that enlarges one’s humanity. Life is by-product of chance and contingency: “Human beings arose, rather, as a consequence of thousands of linked events, none of which foresaw the future.”

Astronomer Carl Sagan demanded the imprimatur of evidence for any accepted belief. Rationality demands we not cloister ourselves in cultural hand downs—that extraordinary beliefs merit skepticism: Compromising truth invites demagoguery and superstition’s advance: “We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers.”

African-American Octavia Butler has been a remarkable recent read, writing eleven science fiction novel standouts resonating urgency in confronting systemic collapse of ecosystems consequent with climate change. Her Parable of the Sower, a must read, has proven chillingly prescient. Change is life’s inevitability, morally indifferent, demanding adaptability to survive: “Human beings fear difference, and they fear it so deeply that they will not only oppress but destroy what they see as different.”

George Orwell, well known for his clairvoyant 1984, has always impressed me with the clarity of his writing, achieved through disciplined study; his wariness of manipulative despotism and its verbal deceit stratagems such as ’doublespeak,” timely and precise in their warnings of euphemism and abstraction: “Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.”

John Stewart Mill, “the saint of rationalism,” remains a seminal influence, ahead of his time, a champion of classical liberalism and its advocacy of the minority’s right to dissent. He taught me about nature’s indifference and logic’s necessity in a world absent of revelation. I return to him repeatedly for wisdom and inspiration: “If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins has long been my most esteemed poet with his vibrant “sprung rhythm,” latent with emotion, a passion for nature and for those who suffer—so many—life’s inequities. His poetry sings, reenacting experience via the sensory, capturing the essence of all things. As a Jesuit priest, while not resolving the problem of suffering by resorting to a cozy theodicy or relying on sentimentality, he helps render its endurance: ‘I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.”

I am forever grateful for their stalwart witness to life’s truths. Their lives argue by example rather than system—that meaning isn’t guaranteed by justice, nor extinguished by its absence. Fate distributes arbitrarily; conscience does not.

—rj

Fran Lebowitz: Just Plain Irresistible

On my morning romp through The Guardian, I bumped into Fran Lebowitz—a new acquaintance for me—and immediately took to her sardonic take on so many of the things, often political, that keep one awake at night.

Now 75, Lebowitz’s essays are well worth reading, even if they sometimes make you wince—saber-toothed witticisms worthy of jotting down. She does not suffer fools gladly, and she’d make a terrific talk-show guest; in fact, she often has.

Her best book, The Lebowitz Reader (1994), remains thoroughly timely, a compendium of sharp observations on our cultural absurdities.

It may surprise you that she never attended college. A self-declared misfit, she spent high school hiding books under her desk, frequently getting caught and suspended.

She has no illusions about the times we live in, the reluctance to resist conformity, and the challenge of being an authentic self. We’d be great friends.

A consummate non-conformist, she owns no computer, no cellphone, not even a typewriter. But she does own 10,000 books and reads deeply—especially Baldwin and Fitzgerald. On Fitzgerald, she says:

“Most of my adult life I’ve been very irritated by the legend of F. Scott Fitzgerald. So every five years, I reread The Great Gatsby, hoping it’s not that good—but unfortunately it is.”

Her political commentary is cutting. She laments the resurgence of book banning—driven largely by one political party that still enjoys the support of nearly half the nation’s voters.

A liberal Democrat, she rejects centrist Democrats who fail to stand up to corporate power. Clinton, she thought, seemed like a Republican. Reagan, to her, proved the prototype of the “dumb president,” and Trump the worst incarnation of incompetence—a “cheap hustler, lazy, but mostly dumb.”

On the indulgence of the wealthy in politics, she is characteristically blunt:

“I object to people who are rich in politics. I don’t think they should be allowed to be in politics. It is bad for everybody but rich people, and rich people don’t need any more help… No one earns a billion dollars. People earn $10 an hour; people steal a billion dollars.”

Her acerbic wit can be genuinely funny. Regarding mountain climbing—an enthusiasm she cannot fathom—she says there’s simply no substitute for a warm shower and a well-cooked meal. “Oh, but the camera views are spectacular!” Plenty of photos already exist for that. She walks extensively in New York, but always to a destination.

Space confines me, as usual, but I think my drift is clear: Lebowitz is a voice worth knowing, irritating, insightful, and just plain irresistible.

—rj

Confronting Our Fears Grants Happiness

This morning I’ve been reading Thich Nhat Hahn’s Fear: Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm. Many of you are familiar with his books, wise in counsel, encouraging mindfulness engaged in the present, not burdened with trauma from the past or worries about the future.

I reached for Hahn, my amygdala working overtime, given the White House maelstrom.

Hahn reminds me that we are linked to an infinity beyond ourselves. We are all connected: sun, water, forest, and sentient animal friends.

That there is no permanence.

That entropy is life’s law.

I venture that our ultimate anxiety concerns our mortality

Peace comes, however, with its acceptance and doing good for others. Our passing doesn’t mean extinction, but rejoining that eternally existing phenomena that gave rise to our being.

Fundamental to Buddhism is that there is neither birth nor death, but continuum only. The Buddha perceived this truth 2500 years ago, confirmed by the Conservation Law of Mass-Energy —that mass is not created ex nihilo, nor destroyed into nothing. It simply changes its manifestation.

A cloud never really dies in becoming rain or snow.

We must confront our fears, not deny them, if we are to find peace, not seek escape in accumulation or media overload.

While I find the history of religion to be no less than a bloodbath, I think of true Buddhism as a way of life rather than a religion. It posits no deity. I completed an impressive course from a Dutch university several years ago that introduced me to its major tenets and, especially, to mindfulness enhanced through meditation.

I’ve been subsequently amazed with brain imaging results that show serious meditators experience neural changes at several levels, including an increase in gray matter density and cortical thickness in the hippocampus, responsible for learning, memory and emotion.

What impresses me most is that amygdala activity, the brain area responsible for our anxiety, is decreased, often after just eight weeks of consistent practice. I’m all for less anxiety.

With this new brain imaging technology now available, science is just catching up with the intuitive truths of Buddhism. I know of a Princeton professor who has dedicated his research to studying the liaison.

Several years ago, I undertook training in Transcendental Meditation. I didn’t really catch on how to do it effectively until last year when I read Yongey Mingyur Ripoche’s The Joy of Living and learned specific techniques. Unfortunately, I have failed to practice it consistently. I need to mend my ways.

The late film director David Lynch did meditation twice daily, busy as he was, never missing, until the end of his life and wrote a book about it, Catching the Big Fish, which I’ve read.

I am grateful for my time out with Thich Nhat Hahn’s book, a refresh on those values than quiet our anxieties and grant us peace.

Wishing all of you well, I trust my affection for all of you vibrates into a day of happiness.

—rj

On My First Reading Cormac McCarthy

Lone windmill on a Texas ranch

Not since Faulkner…

A staggering talent dwarfing rivals.

Flora and fauna. West Texas plain. Nothing missed.

Vernacular of everyday people, wrestling with life, each day’s sameness, yet not without hope of life’s longshot lottery breaking their way.

Sensory, escalating, you-are-there cumulative syntax, landscaping America’s dark soul, foregrounded in cosmic indifference to individual fate of man and beast.

At the very least, Faulkner’s equal:

As he turned to go he heard the train. He stopped and waited for it. He could feel it under his feet. It came boring out of the east like some ribald satellite of the coming sun howling and bellowing in the distance and the long light of the headlamp running through the tangled mesquite brakes and creating out of the night the endless fenceline down the dead straight right of way and sucking it back again wire and post mile on mile into the darkness after where the boilersmoke disbanded slowly along the faint new horizon and the sound came lagging and he stood still holding his hat in his hands in the passing ground-shudder watching it till it was gone (Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses).

—RJ

We Will Not Have a King! America Says No to Donald Trump

I know I’m preaching to the choir for the most part, but silence is not an option given a White House ogre who would be king, trampling the bounds of our Constitution and violating every norm of moral decency

Not a single day passes without his intrusion. He is everywhere — America’s unprecedented micromanager — overriding the citizenry’s right to dissent and Congress’ constitutional sovereignty over the nation’s purse.

He persecutes critics with vitriol, weaponizes the Department of Justice for revenge and governs, not by law, but by impulse and ego.

It was not enough for him to pave over Jackie Kennedy’s iconic Rose Garden. Now a $200 million, 90,000-square-foot ballroom extravaganza is under construction — an East Wing expansion with bulletproof glass and ostentatious design that mocks the White House’s classical restraint.

Three days ago, during a dinner for corporate behemoths — Amazon, Apple, Meta, Google, Microsoft, T-Mobile, and Comcast among them — he unveiled plans for an American Arc de Triomphe to rise across the Potomac, opposite the Lincoln Memorial. Contributors, he promised, will have their names engraved.

Within the White House he’s installed a “Presidential Walk of Fame” lined with photos of his predecessors, except for former President Joe Biden, represented by an autopen image.

On his orders, massive flagpoles have been installed on the White House south grounds. It appears he wants to emulate France’s Louis XIV and facsimile Versailles.

Meanwhile, our nation suffers as his tariffs induce seismic consequence for world markets, a boomerang policy ensuring economic stress here at home. Consumers already feel the pinch.

Yesterday, the would be King informed visiting Ukrainian president Zelensky he’ll not be getting those coveted tomahawk missiles after all. Russia and Ukraine must stop their war, even if it means Ukraine must surrender much of its land. In coming weeks, he will meet a second time with despot Putin in Budapest to hammer out Ukraine’s fate. He deems himself a peacemaker even as he plots Venezuelan intervention and guns down boats at sea.

Today, media reports Ukraine’s defenses are rapidly buckling; more so, its morale. Trump’s misfire, propelled by egotism, promises to outweigh Russia’s nightly onslaught of missiles and drones, delivering a coup de grâce assuring Ukraine’s doom.

Yesterday, Trump pardoned the notorious George Santos, sentenced to seven years for multifarious deceit. Will Epstein’s collaborator Ghislaine Maxwell be next?

In this time of climate challenge posing a future earth transformed into a version of Mars, Trump has systematically, unhesitatingly, chosen to war on the environment, auctioning off public lands for fossil fuel development, sanctioned logging the nation’s remaining pristine wilderness, suspended curbs on air and water pollution, subsidies for renewable energy technology—electric vehicles, solar and wind—visionary endeavors prodigious with promise.

Ominously, yesterday he sent 80% of our nuclear arsenal guardians home, surely sheer madness in a time of mounting Russian, Chinese, and North Korean intimidation.

Implementing his autocratic reach for fascism are his incompetent lackeys and sycophantic Republican enablers, who conflate loyalty with virtue.

Let him build his Versailles of glass and steel. We choose otherwise, our priority a republic defined by courage and conscience.

March boldly, my fellow warriors for freedom. Let your voices fill every street and square: “We will not have a king!”

–RJ

Diane Keaton: Rare and Superb

We’ve just added “Something’s Gotta Give” to our streaming collection—Diane Keaton’s own favorite among the seventy films in which she starred.

I’ve never been much drawn to romantic comedies, but this one—also featuring Jack Nicholson and Keanu Reeves—has held a special place for me.

A compassionate woman, Keaton was more than a Hollywood icon. She gave freely of her time and means to causes close to her heart, including animal welfare. I hadn’t known she refused to eat meat: “I don’t eat meat. I’m a vegetarian, and I’ve been a vegetarian for twenty-five years—and I’ve stopped even eating fish.” Learning this, I admire her all the more.

Art, as Keats reminded us, transcends mortality. We’ve lost you, Diane, but through your movies—and the goodness that shaped you—your legacy endures.
RIP.