July 2021

I accidentally ran an old column again this morning. Here’s a new one.

I remember it like it was yesterday, but it was the fall of 1966.

I was a new freshman at Duke University. I had taken my first trip below the Mason-Dixon line to get there and was adjusting to the food (hush puppies and Brunswick stew), clothes (alpaca sweaters and tassel loafers), and language (drawls and y’alls). I was also adjusting to being one of the only Jews on campus.

This article by Alyssa Lukpat in The New York Times on July 19 tells a mighty sad story. Apparently people are getting lost and even dying while hiking on mountains in Europe and the United States because they arm themselves for the hike with just a smartphone. They use Google maps and other apps as guides to ascend what turn out to be dangerous hills because the trail indicated on the phone is the most direct, but not the safest and the screen on the phone is so small as to give insufficient detail for safe ascent and descent.

Maureen Dowd always calls them as she sees them. She’s been one of my favorite columnists for years and her piece in The New York Times on Sunday, July 18 demonstrates why her work is of such importance.

Mimi Swartz is the executive editor of Texas Monthly and is based in Houston. Richard Parker is an author writing about the Southwest. They both had opinion pieces in The New York Times on July 15 about the great state of Texas and how the political agenda of the Texas GOP has veered the state off course.

If you can’t win a political argument, I guess you can run away. That’s what the Democrats in the Texas State Legislature decided to do to avoid the passage of the voter suppression legislation pushed by Republican legislators and Governor Abbott. Abbott is furious that the Dems left and broke the needed quorum in the state legislature. My guess is that he will deploy the Department of Public Safety to arrest and jail the Democrats when they return home and then call another special session of the legislature until he gets what he wants.

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page was replete with stupidity issues on Tuesday, July 13.

In The New York Times on Sunday, July 4, Alexander Burns writes about the immutability of the current split in the American electorate. No matter what President Biden accomplishes, about 53% of the voters will approve and 47% will not. Despite the awful loss by President Trump in 2020 (by 7 million votes), he still won 25 states. Between that, the deep divide between whites and everyone else being exploited by the GOP, the suppression of voting by Republican state legislatures, and even the financial misdeeds alleged of the Trump Organization, Mr. Trump is still popular and has a strangle hold on the Republican Party. It is frankly amazing.

It had been a while since I had been in Washington, DC in the summer. I had almost forgotten. Almost, but not quite. As soon as I emerged from the huge, air-conditioned Ford Expedition I had to drive to cart around four suitcases, two golf bags and four people from Philadelphia to the Jersey shore to Baltimore and on to DC, my skin and nose immediately recalled that sensation from so long ago. It was Washington’s unique hot air—heavy, dirty and humid. Playing golf in it was way worse than playing in the same temperature in Houston.

It’s a nice two-story overpriced house in Potomac, Maryland. We went and visited it today after driving from New Jersey to the DC suburbs to visit our cousins whose youngest son was just married on the Jersey shore.