Barack Obama's Ugly Presidential Library and a Classically Beautiful 19th Century Synagogue in Flyover Country

 I spent No Kings Day in a deer blind in North Louisiana, so I missed the opportunity to spend the day with a bunch of overweight, dyspeptic baby boomers. 

However, it was a glorious autumn day, and I was grateful to spend it in the woods, even though I missed an easy shot at a fat deer. I consoled myself that evening with a plate of enchiladas and a frozen margarita in the Gonzalez Restaurant in the little town of Homer, where the dress code permits men, women, and children to dine wearing camouflage and international orange hunting vests.

Usually, I drive home through small Louisiana towns, which collectively have assembled the longest speed trap in North America. All my hunting buddies have gotten at least one speeding ticket on the treacherous route between Arcadia and Alexandria. I am proud to say that I've only been ticketed once--in the despondently named village of Dry Prong. The local cop assured me my offense would not be reported to my insurance company, and he kept his word.

Yesterday, however, I chose to return home through Mississippi. I drove east on Interstate 20 until I crossed the Mississippi River bridge in Vicksburg and then traveled south down Highway 61, following the river's course.

South of Vicksburg, I drove through Port Gibson, where a Yankee army had passed in 1863 on its way to breaking the Confederate blockade of the Mississippi River. General Grant was struck by Port Gibson's beauty, declaring the town "too beautiful to burn." 

Indeed, Port Gibson is a lovely Southern town graced by antebellum and post-Civil War homes in a variety of architectural styles: Greek Revival, Federal, Victorian, Queen Ann, and Italianate Revival.

Presbyterian church steeple

I've driven through Port Gibson many times, and my favorite building is the Jewish synagogue, built in 1891-1892 and now closed. As its historical marker attests, the building blends Moorish, Byzantine, and Romanesque Revival architectural styles and is topped by a Russian dome.

Temple Gemiluth Chassed

Coastal elitists deceive themselves into believing that the vast stretch of America between New York and Los Angeles is a cultural desert, which they derisively dismiss as Flyover Country. Port Gibson attests to how wrong they are.

Port Gibson's architecture is eclectic, but there is grace and beauty in almost all its historic homes, churches, and businesses. The people who built these structures had a refined aesthetic sensibility--an appreciation for visual appeal in the structures they designed and built.

Contrast the nineteenth and early twentieth-century architecture of small-town America with the ugliness of today's suburban malls and tract homes. We've created a drab and monotonous environment for ourselves, which James Howard Kunstler accurately described as "the geography of nowhere."

However, it is our society's public architecture that is most offensive. We see it on display in courthouses, city halls, and university buildings. Some of it has been pugnaciously labeled as brutalist--and brutal it indeed is. 

This brings me to Barack Obama's presidential library, which is currently under construction in Chicago. This monstrosity is an insult to the eye, the landscape, and the human spirit.

Barack Obama has often been described as brilliant and almost supernaturally empathetic. Yet how intelligent and sensitive can a guy be who allows his architects and sycophantic donors to talk him into approving a presidential library so ghastly, so inhumane, and so goddamn ugly?

Maybe Barack doesn't care what his presidential library looks like. After all, he owns four homes. If he gets sick of looking at his library in Chicago, he can always fly to his digs on Martha's Vineyard or Hawaii. 

Is Barack mooning the American people?

People with Rigid Political Views Should Read More Widely

The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.

Thomas Jefferson 

America is more divided than at any time since the Civil War. The country is split into two hostile camps. The MAGA crowd is mostly addicted to Fox News. The Trump haters get their news from the legacy media: The New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and other progressive news sources.

I advise Trump's supporters to read the New York Times, which occasionally takes a breather from Trump bashing and objectively reports on current events. They might even tune in to The View. The View ladies will not convert anyone from MAGA Land to their political philosophy, but it's always edifying to get a glimpse of an alien culture.

Trump haters should also read more widely. In addition to the New York Times, they should peruse the New York Post. If they subscribe to the Washington Post, they should also read the Washington Examiner.

And everyone--left-wing or right-wing, MAGA ideologues and leftist Never-Trumpers--should stop reading The Guardian, which is a rabidly anti-Trump screed sheet. In a recent funding appeal, The Guardian proclaimed: "We're funded by readers, not billionaires--which means we can publish factual journalism with no outside influence."

In fact, as Andy Gorel wrote, citing Wikipedia:

The Guardian is owned by The Guardian Media Group (GMG), which is “wholly owned by the Scott Trust Limited, which exists to secure the financial and editorial independence of The Guardian in perpetuity. The Group's annual report (for the year ending 2 April 2023) indicated that the Scott Trust Endowment Fund was valued at £1.24 billion.”

While there may be a degree of separation, this means The Guardian is backed by a $1.56 billion endowment.

Readers can read The Guardian online, which is posted without a pay wall, making it readily accessible for free. If you read the publication's content for just a few days, you will understand how biased it is against President Trump. 

My advice: skip The Guardian and look for fairer critical coverage of the Trump administration.

Finally, I advise everyone to read two premier bloggers: James Howard Kunstler and Matt Taibbi. Both have stellar journalism credentials, and both think outside the box. 

Image credit: Your Dictionary

 

Alligators in October: Can You Say Brumation?

 I wasn't thinking about alligators when my wife and I purchased a home on Lake Mary in southern Mississippi two years ago.  

If alligators lived in my new neighborhood, I assumed they would hang out in nearby Lake Foster, a lake ringed by cypress swamps and aquatic plants. My property was clear of marshland, presumably no habitat for an alligator.

Anyway, wasn't Wilkinson County, Mississippi too far north for alligators? After all, it can become bitterly cold on Lake Mary Road in winter--surely too frigid for cold-blooded creatures to survive.

Therefore, I was surprised when I saw a six-foot alligator sunning on my dock the summer after I settled into my Lake Mary home. I assumed it was an anomaly. Alligator hunters bagged him during the first weekend of Mississippi's alligator hunting season, and my lakefront home was rendered alligator-free.

Or so I thought. A few days ago, my five-year-old grandson reported seeing gators hanging around our neighbor's pier. Mom investigated and discovered six small alligators and one larger one lounging in the shallows.

Were the little ones siblings? Was the large one their mama? Do female alligators have maternal instincts like feral hogs, which will kill you if you mess with their piglets?

Anyway, it's mid-October. Why weren't those alligators hibernating?

I did a little Google research and learned that alligators don't hibernate. Rather, they bruminate, which means their metabolism slows in the colder months, they become lethargic, and stop eating.

These alligators are just another bit of evidence that Lake Mary, Mississippi, is unlike the idyllic Golden Pond of New England, where Henry Fonda and Katherine Hepburn spent their peaceful summers, troubled only by infrequent visits from Jane.

We've got feral hogs, venomous snakes and spiders, and Asian carp that leap from the water and occasionally injure boaters. We are visited by annual spring floods. Deer run across Highway 24 at night and collide with passing cars. And we've got alligators--at least seven.

Perhaps that is just as well. After all, it's a dangerous world.  We need to look up from our cellphones from time to time and scout about for hidden dangers.

On Golden Pond: At least we don't have alligators.

What goes around, comes around: Letitia James indicted for mortgage fraud

As a young man,  I practiced civil law in Anchorage, Alaska. Anchorage was a city of 200,000 when I lived there, and the town supported about a thousand lawyers--one lawyer for every 200 residents.

Indeed, the Anchorage bar was small enough that I knew most of the attorneys and their reputations for honesty, probity, and fair dealing. In those days, most Alaska lawyers were honorable, and I often settled commercial disputes with a phone call or a handshake.

However, I occasionally got burned by a shady legal practitioner through some sort of dirty trick. These betrayals of ethical norms always stung me deeply, but my law partners always reassured me with this oft-repeated observation: "What goes around comes around." 

In other words, unethical lawyers nearly always get caught out. Eventually, most of the scoundrels who abused the legal system to bamboozle my clients came to grief--bankruptcy, disbarment, legal malpractice lawsuits, or an embarrassing public scandal of some kind.

Letitia James is about to learn the meaning of what goes around comes around. She campaigned for the office of New York Attorney General by promising to investigate Donald Trump, whom she described as an "illegitimate president." She kept that promise.

James's office cobbled together a sweeping fraud claim against Trump, accusing him of including false information on a loan application. She won an enormous judgment in an arguably biased New York courtroom.

Now, AG James has been indicted for making a fraudulent claim on a loan application--the very thing she accused Trump of. 

Her supporters claim that James's indictment is an act of revenge on Trump's part, but I disagree. As James herself said, "No one is above the law."

In other words, what goes around comes around.

What goes around comes around.

90-Seconds Book Review: Look, I'm Gone by James Howard Kunstler Exorcises Catcher in the Rye

 Look, I'm Gone by James Howard Kunstler is a coming-of-age novel set in New York City over the 1963 Thanksgiving holiday season. 

Jeff Greenaway, 12 years old, is a student at Ponsonby Hall, a New Hampshire boarding school for troubled adolescents from wealthy families. President Kennedy’s assassination disrupts the orderly life of the school, and school authorities decide to release the kids a few days early for the Thanksgiving holiday.

Jeff returns to his parents' home in Manhattan and spends the next several days exploring New York City, watching movies, and spending a wad of cash he obtained at a schoolboy poker game. 

On a whim, Jeff enters "Dreamboat Landing," a dance studio advertising "Girls, Girls, Girls... 25 cents a dance." He dances with Yvonne, a young, working-class woman who teaches him the box step and the foxtrot. 

During their brief encounter, Yvonne decides that Jeff is a screwed up but decent kid, and she impulsively gives him her copy of J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. "Here," she tells him, "the story of your life."

Jeff is enchanted by the novel, which he reads three times over a few days. He identifies with Holden Caulfield, the book's depressed and morose main character, and soon adopts Holden's persona, including the fictional character's habit of inserting the word "goddamn" into casual conversations.

Like Jeff, Holden Caulfield is a boarding school student on holiday in Manhattan. Jeff is amazed at how much Holden Caulfield's world resembles his own. He begins to feel that Catcher in the Rye was written specifically for him, like "a message in a bottle."

 Thanks to Salinger's book, Jeff recognizes "the phoniness and pointlessness of everything around him," and he embraces Holden's view that the “goddamn world is full of phonies." 

However, Jeff Greenaway is not Holden Caulfield, and his holiday odyssey in New York City differs from Holden’s. In a bold move, he talks his way backstage at a Broadway theater and persuades a beautiful child star to have dinner with him at a swank restaurant. 

And Jeff has another un-Holden-like experience. Jeff believes that the Russians assassinated President Kennedy, which leads him to stake out the Russian UN embassy. The Russian ambassador, touched by Jeff's naive intensity, tells Jeff that "truth will set you free," and that the CIA, not the Russians, killed President Kennedy.

Jeff's initial attraction to Catcher in the Rye leads him to search out Salinger's other books: Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters. He hopes these works will be as inspiring as Salinger's blockbuster, but he finds them boring and incomprehensible.

On his return trip to boarding school, Jeff finds out where Salinger lives, and he manages to have an extended conversation with the reclusive author on a snowy New England night. I won’t tell you about that passage in the book, because that would spoil Kunstler’s story for people reading Look, I’m Gone.

Catcher in the Rye is often described as a coming-of-age novel, and the book is required reading at some American schools. But Salinger’s novel is not a coming-of-age tale, because Holden never achieves the mature self-awareness that young people must obtain to transition from youth to adulthood. At the novel's end, Holden is as depressed as he was at the beginning.

Look, I’m Gone is an exorcism of Catcher in the Rye. Unlike Holden Caulfield, Jeff Greenaway engages with the world around him, takes chances, and embraces new and unsettling experiences—like his meeting with a Russian diplomat and his brief encounter with a vibrant child actor.

Millions of young Americans will read Catcher in the Rye and become depressed, cynical, and world-weary. Thus, as an antidote, I recommend all Salinger fans to read Look, I’m Gone immediately after reading Catcher in the Rye.

However, one need not read Catcher in the Rye to appreciate Kunstler's novel. Look, I'm Gone stands on its own as one of the great American coming-of-age tales beside Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, Richard Bradford's Red Sky at Morning, John Knowles's A Separate Peace, and Robert Anderson's Tea and Sympathy.

Image credit: Slate

The Governmnt Shuts Down But the Hummingbirds are Still on the Clock

 My wife and I recently returned from an extended vacation in the Desert Southwest. We spent a few days at our family cabin in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico, and then motored on to Utah, where we toured Canyonlands and Arches National Parks.

Our timing was fortuitous because the federal government shut down a few days after we returned home. Most national parks, including those in Utah, remain open, but who knows when the shutdown will affect park operations.

So far, at least, I haven't been inconvenienced by the government shutdown. My faithful postman still delivers my mail, and the politicians assure me that my Social Security checks will continue being deposited in my checking account.

Life goes on. I spied a hummingbird in my garden this morning, sucking nectar from a lavender plant. He's still on the clock.

 In another part of the garden, a mourning dove pecked around our sunflower patch, because doves adore sunflower seeds more than life itself. I walked within three feet of the creature, and it did not startle.

In the coming days, Progressive journalists will comb the country looking for hard-luck stories about people suffering because government offices are closed. However, most Americans are unaffected by the government shutdown, and many who are impacted will blame Senator Chuck Schumer and the Democrats.

For the present, I will enjoy the change of seasons in southern Mississippi, plant a fall garden, and give thanks for living in Flyover Country. The political turmoil in Washington, DC, has nothing to do with me or my family.

Lake Mary, Mississippi

Should Pregnant Women Who Hate Trump Keep Taking Tylenol?

In a recent news release, the Food and Drug Administration announced findings that pregnant women who take acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, may run an increased risk of autism for their unborn child.

In a news conference, President Trump and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr emphasized the importance of the FDA's advice. In his inimitable way, Trump urged pregnant women to "tough it out" rather than ingest Tylenol Tablets.

Democrats quickly renounced Trump and Kennedy's advice. Representative Rosa DeLauro, the purple-haired Democratic congresswoman from Connecticut, denounced Kennedy's Tylenol warning. In a prepared statement, DeLauro called Kennedy's warning "absurd" and urged women to ignore it.

The claim from President Trump and Secretary Kennedy is baseless. Scientists and doctors agree that Tylenol, or acetaminophen, is one of [the] few safe pain relievers available to women during their pregnancy. President Trump and Secretary Kennedy’s claim is misinformation and it should not be taken seriously, as it could lead to women taking dangerous alternatives. 

NPR, ever ready to criticize the Trump administration, also cast doubt on Kennedy's Tylenol warning. NPR began its story on the topic with this headline: "Trump blames Tylenol for autism. Science doesn't back him up."

However, Kennedy and Trump's warning about the dangers of taking Tylenol during pregnancy is not baseless. In an internal email message, Rachel Weinstein, director of epidemiology at a Johnson & Johnson subsidiary (manufacturer of Tylenol), alerted J & J's global head of epidemiology about a disturbing scientific review. 

As reported in the Epoch Times, the review "concluded that nine studies suggested that use of acetaminophen—the active ingredient in Tylenol—by pregnant women was linked to autism and other neurodevelopmental issues in the women’s children." Weinstein added that “[t]he weight of evidence is starting to feel heavy to me.”

Professor Zehan Liew of the Yale School of Public Health had this to say on the Tylenol controversy:

We do not know yet for sure whether acetaminophen [Tylenol's active ingredient]causes autism. Multiple observational studies conducted across different populations have shown associations between frequent and long-term use of acetaminophen in pregnancy and some negative effects on a child’s neurodevelopment.

In addition, a Harvard study reached similar findings. Andrea Baccarelli, Dean of the Harvard School of Public Health, reported on a "rigorous review" that "found evidence of an association between exposure to acetaminophen during pregnancy and increased incidence of neurodevelopmental disorders in children.” The study recommended that "[a]ppropriate and immediate steps should be taken to advise pregnant women to limit acetaminophen consumption to protect their offspring’s neurodevelopment."

Americans can conduct their own review on the possible link between Tylenol and autism; it's easily accessible online. Nevertheless, everyone should know that the Trump administration's advice about Tylenol is not baseless or absurd. 

Congresswoman DeLauro urged her constituents not to take medical advice from Secretary Kennedy. I encourage them not to take medical advice from DeLauro or the rabidly anti-Trump media.

Pay no attention to the purple-haired lady wearing green glasses.