My Ten Favorite "Seinfeld" Episodes

H. L. Mencken once wrote: "What is primarily needed, in order to write short stories of any dignity, is not a thimble rigging technic, but a capacity for accurate and original observation. The best short story writer, like the best novelist, is that one who observes the life about him with the greatest clarity and shrewdness, and sets it forth in the simplest and most understandable way. The materials of fiction are not to be got out of books, but out of life itself....The best short stories in the world teach nothing and preach nothing; they do not expostulate, and neither do they mourn; they simply set forth what has been seen and felt."

When I recently came across this passage, I immediately thought of the TV shw "Seinfeld". The rule of thumb for "Seinfeld" is "no hugging, no learning"; it simply seeks to depict the oddities and quirks of everyday life. The show has its roots in Jerry's standup comedy, which was developed while he was still in high school, keeping a notebook in which he chronicled the oddities of human behavior which he observed daily.

The show has become known as "a show about nothing", but Larry David has recently said that in the beginning the show set out to be a show about "how comedians get their material". Here are my ten favorite episodes.

1. The Yada Yada (S8, E18). This is my all-time favorite episode. There is so much going on that I had no trouble coming up with a 25-question trivia quiz about the episode. The title refers to the phrase "Yada Yada Yada" that George's girlfriend Marcy liked to user to shorten her stories, and during the episode the others started using the phrase also.

During the episode Jerry's dentist, Tim Whatley, memorably played by Bryan Crasnston, converts to Judaism and starts telling Jewish jokes. This offends Jerry, not as a Jew, but as a comedian. Jerry complains that "If Whately ever gets Polish citizenship, he'll have total joke-telling immunity".

Kramer and his midget friend Mickey meet two women at The Gap, but can't decide which each one likes the best. The matching shirts they bought are hilarious.

Elaine is a character reference for her friends Beth and Arnie, who are trying to adopt a child. Elaine tells the adoption agency that Arnie has a temper, and this scuttles the adoption. Elaine tries to make it up to her friends by dating the adoption official.

Kramer calls Jerry an "anti-dentite" for his disparaging remarks about dentists. In the final scene, in which Mickey marries Karen, one of the women he and Kramer had met, Karen's parents are played by Robert Wagner and Jil St. John. The Wagner character calls Jerry an "anti-dentite bastard".

Jerry cmes to the wedding with Beth, who by this time has broken up with Arnie. The episode ends with Beth telling an anti-dentist joke, and Jerry says "Yeah, dentists, who needs them", to which Beth replies, "Not to mention the blacks and the Jews".

Whatley was a character in four other Seinfeld episodes besides this one. These include "The Mom and Pop Store" (in which he hosts a party on the evening before Thanksgiving), "The Label Maker" (in which he is called a "re-gifter"), "The Jimmy" (in which he is discovered to have a Penthouse magazine in his waiting room), and "The Strike" (in which he gives charity donations as Christmas gifts).

2. The Contest (S4, E11). This is the most famous Seinfeld episode. It is this episode that first made me aware of the series, due to all the newspaper publicity leading up to the airing of the episode. The characters have a contest to see who can go the longest without "pleasuring themselves".

3. The Invitations (S7, E24). This is the episode in which George's fiancee, Susan, dies from licking the envelopes containing their wedding invitations. What makes the episode memorable for me is the stunning guest appearance of Janeane Garofalo as Jerry's girlfriend. She is just like Jerry, a fact which intrigues Jerry so much that he proposes to her, and then regrets this. They later have "the first totally mutual breakup in relationship history". Garofalo's guest appearance is one of the most memorable in the history of the show.

Kramer has a story line in which a bank has offered $100.00 if a customer is not greeted with a "hello". When a teller instead greets him with "hey", Kramer tries to claim the $100.00. The bank exective says "You got a greeting, it started with an 'h", how does twenty bucks sound?", an offer which Kramer snaps up immediately.

The Susan character was never remotely appealing, and the actress who played her never fit in with the show's cast. Her relationship with George was never believable, and her exit from the show was most welcome.

4. The Soup Nazi (S7, E6). Another memorable episode. The actual guy who the character was based on disliked the portrayal so much that he banned the entire "Seinfeld" cast from his restaurant! "No soup for you!"

5. The Apology (S9, E9). This episode features a guest appearance by the great James Spader, who is in AA and working the 12 steps. George is upset because the Spader character has not apologized to him for a perceived slight years ago, whivh George sees as a violation of step nine. The episode depicts three different types of 12-step programs--for alcoholics, for rageaholics, and then for germaphobes. The ending has Puddy and Elaine and one of Elaine's co-workers having supper at Kramer's apartment, and then recoiling in horror when they realize he prepared the food in the shower.

My favorite scene is when Kramer calls Puddy to ask for help in installing a garbage disposal in his shower. "Is David Puddy there?" "This is Puddy." "Puddy, this is Kramer." "Yeah, I know."

The David Puddy character appears in ten episodes, two in season six and then eight more in season nine. The appeal of Puddy is that he is such a simple man, a delightful contrast to the sophisticated Elaine character.

6. The Wife (S5, E17). In this episode Jerry and his girlfriend, played by the beautiful Courteney Cox, pretend to be married so that she can get a 25% discount on dry cleaning. Jerry initially loves being in this pretend marriage, and he seems happier than he has ever been. But eventually, he concludes that he is "not ready for a pretend marriage". Jerry has had many beautiful girlfriends, but none of them are as attractive as the great Courteney Cox.

7. The Race (S6, E10). There are two great themes in this episode--Superman and Communism. The episode starts out showing Jerry dating a woman named Lois, and she says "Boy, you sure like saying my name".

Lois is working for Duncan Meyer, an old high school classmate of Jerry's who still insists that Jerry got a head start in a race they'd run against each other in ninth grade. Jerry and George concoct a scheme wherein George will show up at Monk's, pretending that he hasn't seen Jerry since high school, and then confirm that Jerry did not get a head start in the race. Elaine is daitng a guy, Ned Isakoff, who is a Communist, and she is intrigued by the idea of dating a Communist. Elaine gets blacklisted from Hop Sing's, a Chinese restaurant, for refusing a delivery. But her boyfriend Ned wants to continue patronizing the restaurant, as that is where his father used to hang out after being blacklisted in the '50s. So he places an order, but when the delivery man sees Elaine at the apartment he also blacklists Ned.

Kramer and Mickey get jobs at a department store, Kramer as Santa and Mickey as his elf, but they get fired when Kramer starts spouting Communist propoganda to the kids.

George gets his hands on a copy of the "Daily Worker" from Ned, and is instrigued by a personals ad from a woman who said "appearance not imortant". When they talk on the phone, a secretary overhears the converation and suspects that George is a Communist. Far from being outraged, Steinbrenner likes the idea, and sends Geroge to Cuba to recruit ballplayers for the Yankees. When George meets with Fidel Castro, Castro blabbers on and on, just like Steinbrenner, and George quietly leaves the office.

Duncan and Jerry arrange to have a rerun of their ninth-grade race, but Kramer's car backfires and Jerry again gets a head start, while Duncan is left waiting for the actual starting gun. Duncan has promised Lois a two-week vacation in Hawaii if he lost, and so after the race she asks Jerry, "Will you come to Hawaii with me." Jerry says, in true Superman style, "Maybe I will, Lois, maybe I will." He then winks at the camera, the only time in the history of the show that the fourth wall is broken.

8. The Marine Biologist (S5, E14). This episode featuresd the longest sustained laugh in the history of the show, when George pulls out the golf ball that he took out of the whale's blowhole. Kramer then follows up with "Is that a titleist?".

9. The Junk Mail (S9, E5). What makes this espisode special is the guest appearance of Wilford Brimley as the Postmaster General of the United States, who travels to New York to meet with Kramer after Kramer decides he doesn't want his mail anymore. The meeting with Kramer is a take-off of Brimley's memorable role as the Attorney General in the Paul Newman movie "Absence of Malice".

10. The Finale (S9, E23&24). The Finale was an inspired episode which brought back an amazing number of secondary characters. Chief among these was Jackie Chiles as the lawyer for the four friends in their trial for violating the "Good Samaritan" law. Chiles, a parody of the O.J. Simpson lawyer Johnny Cochran, had previously appeared in three season seven episodes ("The Maestro", "The Caddy", and "The Friar's Club), and the season eight epiasode "The Abstinence".

Many "Seinfeld" fans have expressed their dislike of this epiosde. I feel sorry for them, as it seems they don't undertand that the episode is an inspired parody of "Inherit the Wind", the great movie abnout the Scopes monkey trial.

Larry David admitted they blew the ending when he ended "Curb Your Enthusiasm" with Larry getting a prison sentence for proividing water to a woman waiting in line to vote in Georgia, and then, when he was released on a technicality, he said "This is how we should have ended the final episode". But despite this drawback, the finale episode still ranks among the best, in my opinion.

On Birthright Citizenship

On President Trump's first day in office, he signed an Executive Order changing the rules for birthright citizenship. This Executive Order has been struck down by every federal judge who has considered the issue. The problem for Trump is that the Order violates the plain language of the 14th Amendment, which says that if you are born here, you are a citizen.

The substantive issue was not before the Supreme Court in yesterday's argument. What was before the Court was whether a single federal district court judge can issue an injuncton which applies nationwide.

All 21st-century presidents have complained about this. The problem is the judge-shopping which both sides have been guilty of. Conservatives file cases in red Texas, and liberals file cases in blue California, and the judges then issue injuntions which apply nationwide.

The problem for the Supreme Court justices is this: how do we fashion a rule which limits the ability of a single judge to issue these sweeping rulings? What the justices want to do is allow such a sweeping ruling when the issue is clear, as it is in the birthright citizenship case, but limit it in the more questionable cases. In their questioning yesterday, all of the justices recognized the problem, but none proposed a workable solution.

The problem with allowing a district court ruling to apply only to the litigants who brought the case to court is that every single aggrieved person would then have to bring their own lawsuit to obtain justice, a clearly untenable result. Amy Coney Barrett seemed to be joining the three liberal justices yesterday, but it is not clear what sort of ruling will command the support of a court majority. This is a hard case which will likely result in bad law.

"Pitfall" and "Nora Prentiss"

These are two film noirs from the '40s that I have watched online in the past two days. In both of these movies, we have a middle class white collar worker with a happy family life, who gets involved with a femme fatale, to disastrous consequences.

In "Pitfall", the happy family man is played by Dick Powell, who meets the femme fatale, played by Lizabeth Scott, in the course of his work, and he falls for her. She is not really a typical femme fatale, in that she is not portrayed as being particularly seductive; rather, she presents a wholesome image. In the end, he shoots a recently released prisoner but it is deemed to be self-defense, while the femme fatale is arrested for shooting the cad who has been stalking her. An interesting back story is that the script got the movie in trouble with the Hays Code, because the adulterer was not sufficiently punished for his errant ways. The director solved the problem by meeting with two of the Hays Code members, telling them he knew that they were both married and had mistresses!

"Nora Prentiss" starts with the main character being imprisoned, and the whole movie is then shown in one long flashback. He is a doctor who meets the femme fatale, played by Ann Sheridan, by chance when she is involved in a car accident. She is more like the stereotypical femme fatale, a lounge singer who can be quite seductive. There are more plot twists and turns in this movie than in "Pitfall", and we wonder throughout who the doctor has killed.

Both movies are rated 7.1 on IMDB, and that sounds about right to me, as both are entertaining, with believable characters. Both movies reveal the underlying tedium and pointlessness of the supposedly ideal American life, with the white picket fence, wife and kids, and days which are all way too much alike.

Three Cheers for Rory McIlroy (and for CBS)

Wonderful drama Sunday in the last round of the Masters golf tournament. Rory McIlroy led by two strokes going into the last round, but he promptly lost his lead to his playing partner, Bryson DeChambeau, when he double-bogeyed the first hole. He then fell behind when DeChambeau birdied the second hole. But McIlroy gamely fought back, and by the end of the front nine he had built up a four-shot lead.

McIlroy then stumbled, with two bogeys and a double bogey, and after the 13th hole he found himself tied with Justin Rose, who had started the day seven shots back. It looked like Rose had all the momentum and that Rory was done for. But McIlroy persevered, and hit some good shots on the last few holes. He missed a five-foot birdie putt on the 18th which would have won him the tournament, and a sudden death playoff ensued.

On the first hole of the playoff, a par four, Rory was closer to the pin after his approach shot, and he then sank his birdie putt for the win, after Rose had missed his. Rory then fell to the ground, crying uncontrollably.

McIlroy thus became the sixth player all-time to win the "career grand slam". He had the first three legs of it ten years ago, but this final leg had proved elusive. Something disastrous always seemed to happen whenever he got close during those frustrating ten years. But the waiting is all over now, and he joins Gene Sarazen, Ben Hogan, Gary Player, Jack Nicklaus, and Tiger Woods as the only winners of the career grand slam.

McElroy grew up in a working class Catholic family in Northern Island. His parents recognized his intense interest in golf at an early age, and they took on extra jobs to facilitate Rory's development as a golfer. McIlroy turned pro in 2007 at the age of 18, and won his first PGA Tour event in 2010, just before his 21st birthday. By the end of 2014 he had won three of the four majors, but then came a 10-year majors drought, broken Sunday in majestic style.

CBS had its usual superb coverage, with every shot looking like a painting, displaying the wonderful ambience of Augusta National. I never grow tired of the trees, the grass, the flowers, and the water, and CBS augments the stunning photography with intelligent, understated commentary. This was the 70th year CBS has covered the Masters, which it always calls "a tradition unlike any other", a phrase coined by Jim Nantz in 1986 and used every year since. I have been watching about as long as CBS has been covering it, and this final round was as exciting as any of them.

The Limits of Executive Power

This topic has been much in the news lately, so a review of the relevant history might be useful to get a handle on this issue.

The Articles of Confederation, adopted in 1777, provided for a very weak central government. It was essentially a confederation of thirteen autonomous states. By 1787 it was obvious a stronger central government was needed, one that could collect taxes and conduct foreign policy, and a constitutional convention was convened to propose needed improvements.

The convention early on adjourned into a committee of the whole, so that discussion could proceed unfettered. While this meant there were no official minutes, many of the delegates kept journals, and most regularly wrote home to their wives, so there is an ample written record of the proceedings. My main source here is "A More Perfet Union", by William Peters, which provides a detailed, almost day-to-day, account of the deliberations.

It was agreed early on that the central government should consist of three branches--executive, legislative, and judiciary. One of the main issues was the nature of the executive branch. Edmund Randolph, a delegate from Virginia, proposed a three-man executive, calling a single executive "the foetus of monarchy". Others argued for a single executive. I think here of the saying in the NFL that "if you have two quarterbacks, you have no quarterback". The idea here is that someone has to be in charge, the buck has to stop somewhere. Eventually the single executive was agreed to, by a vote of seven states to three.

Having settled on a single executive, the Convention then debated what the powers of that executive would be. One issue here was whether the executive would have an absolute veto on national legislation, an approach favored by Alexander Hamilton and James Wilson. Pierce Butler of South Carolina spoke eloquently against the absolute veto, observing that "in all countries the executive power is in a constant course of increase". Ultimately the absolute veto was voted down, and the ability of two-thirds of each legislative branch to override a veto was chosen.

A similar dispute arose when the issue of ratifying treaties was taken up. James Wilson and Rufus King of Massachusetts spoke against the proposed two-thirds requirement for Senate ratification, feeling that would give a minority undue power, but the two-thirds rule prevailed.

As an example of the truth of Butler's observation about executive power constantly increasing, we have only to track the increase over the years in presidential use of "executive agreements" rather than treaties. In "The Imperial Presidency", Schlesinger says that in 1930 the U.S. made 25 treaties and only 9 executive agreements, while in 1971 the count was 214 executive agreement and only 17 treaties. In other words, in 1971 Nixon entered into 231 agreements with foreign governments, and only submitted 7% of them to the Senate for confirmation! When a Senate committee subpoenaed a state department expert to testify on the difference between the two types of agreements, his testimony was characterized as "a treaty is something we have to submit to the Senate; an executive agreement is something we don't have to submit to the Senate."

While the Trump violations of presidential norms have been nauseatingly numerous, I want to focus on the issue of what happens when a president ignores court orders. Historically this issue has been framed in a way that stresses the duty of the Supreme Court to not get too far ahead of the electorate; hence the saying that "the Supreme Court follows the elections returns". I well remember my Constitutional Law prof lecturing on this point. He gave as an example Andrew Jackson's famous statement that "John Marhsall has made his decision, now let him enforce it". At the time the Nixon tapes case was in the courts, and the prof gave, as another example, what happens if Nixon would ignore a Supreme Court order to turn over the tapes to the Watergate prosecutor.

The Jackson issue needs some fact-checking. Historians now say that Jackson probably did not actually say this. The case, Worcester v. Georgia (1832), involved a dispute between the state of Georgia and the Cherokee Nation. The court ruled that the Cherokee Nation was an autonomous nation, not subject to the Georgia law at issue. While this ruling did not directly require any federal action to enforce it, the holding (or, perhaps, better described as "dicta"), did have broader application to other cases and was repeatedly violated by Jackson and other federal officials who consistently refused to honor the rights of Native American tribes.

While Jackson's abuses of federal power are certainly troubling, they pale in comparison to that greatest abuser in the history of the U.S. presidency, Abraham Lincoln. I won't repeat my prior critique, but here is how Schlesinger described Lincoln on page 58 of "The Imperial Presidency":

"Throughout the war, even with Congress in session. Lincoln continued to exercise wide powers independently of Congress. He asserted the right to proclaim martial law behind the lines, to arrest people without warrant, to seize property, to suppress newspapers, to prevent the use of the post office for "treasonable correspondence", to emancipate slaves, to lay out a plan of reconstruction. His proclamations, executive orders and military regulations invaded fields previously the domain of legislative action. All this took place without a declaration of war by Congress."

Schlesinger explains how Lincoln deliberately delayed convening Congress until July 4, 1861, in order to prevent Congress from stopping his illegal actions. Schlesinger says that "Lincoln ignored one law and constitutional provision after another. He assembled the militia, enlarged the Army and Navy beyond their authorized strength, called out volunteers for three years' service, spent public money without congressional appropriation, suspended habeas corpus, arrested people 'represented' as involved in 'disloyal' practices and instituted a naval blockade of the confederacy."

Ultimately the question comes down to how do we respond to serious abuses of presidential power. Resorting to the court system is no answer, if you have an administration which refuses to abide by court decisions. The real answer is that the people have to push back. In many countries this "pushing back" takes the form of mass protests in the streets, as has been taking place in Turkey recently. In our country the tradition is to push back at the ballot box, in town halls, and through targeted protests. This has been going on recently with respect to our current president. Especially noteworthy are the elections the past two weeks. Last week Democrats won a State Senate seat in Pennsylvania (in a district including Lancaster) that hadn't been won by a Democrat in over 100 years! And last week Democrats won the Supreme Court race in Wisconsin by ten points, despite Elon Musk's $25M spent in opposition.

Encouraging signs indeed!

"Hangmen Also Die" (Dir: Fritz Lang, 1943)

This is a very entertaining film set in Czechoslovakia during the 1942 Nazi occupation. The Nazi in charge of the occupation, Reinhard Heydrich (known as "The Hangman" for his brutality), is assassinated, and the Nazis are trying to locate the killer. They round up 800 hostages and vow to kill 40 of them every few hours until someone comes forward to identify the killer. The Czech underground resists, showing extraordinary bravery.

The movie starts with Heydrich being shot, and a woman directs the Gestapo the wrong way to puruse the killer. We are inroduced to other minor characters among the Czech citizenry, and they show up near the end of the movie as part of a masterful plot to frame a two-faced traitor. I had to watch it a second time to be able to match up the characters from the beginning to those at the end.

The dignified, soft-spoken professor is the heart of the story, wonderfully played by Walter Brennan. (I didn't realize the first time through that it was Brennan, but I recognized his voice the second time through.) When the professor is scheduled for execution, as part of one of the groups of 40, his adult daughter is allowed to visit him, and he dictates a letter for her to give to his 11-year-old son when the son was older. Part of that poignant letter was this: "Don't forget that freedom is not something one possesses, like a hat or a piece of candy. The real thing is fighting for freedom. And you might remember me, not because I'm your father, but because I also died in this great fight". If only we Americans were as united and diligent in the cause of fighting tyranny as these brave Czech patriots were!

Some of the Nazis are portrayed in a semi-comic way, but this adds to the entertainment value of the film, without detracting from the serious nature of the effort to identify the killer. Over two hours long, but worth every minute. Filmed in stunning black and white, as befits the grim subject matter it is depicting.

Historical fact check. Reinhard Heydrich was in fact in charge of occupied Czechoslavakia, and he was in fact assassinated in the Spring of 1942. At the time the movie was made the details of the assassination were not yet known. It eventually came to light that the Czech government-in-exile, trained by the British Special Forces, formed a grouop which parachuted into Czechoslavakia on December 28, 1941, and lived in hiding until shooting Heydrich on May 27, 1942.

Mencken Gets It Right on Lincoln

Commenting on the Gettysburg Address in 1920, H. L. Mencken wrote this.

"It is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words of everyday. The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburgh sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination--that government of the people, by the people, for the people, should not perish from the earth.

"It is difficult to imgine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves. The Confederates went into battle free; they came out with their freedom subject to the supervision of the rest of the country--and for neearly twenty years that veto was so efficient that they enjoyed scarcely more liberty, in the political sense, than so many convicts in the penitentiary."

MLB Predictions for 2025

I was 26 positions off last year, two better than the year before. The AL West was again my best with only two off (I flip-flopped the A's and Angels). The AL Central was the worst with eight off, with the Guardians surprisingly finishing first, the Tigers and Royals tying for second, and the Twins dropping down to fourth. The White Sox were dismal, setting a record with 121 losses. The other divisons were four off.

And now we turn the page to a new year.

AL East: Yankees, Blue Jays, Red Sox, Orioles, Rays

The Yankees have been beset with Spring Training injuries, but I can't find another team to pick for first. The Rays have really gone downhill, and will be playing in a minor league park in 2025. I can't see a future for them in Tampa Bay, a city which refuses to support them.

AL Central: Guardians, Tigers, Royals, Twins, White Sox

I really don't think the Guardians are going to win their division again, but I don't know which team, the Royals or the Tigers, is going to edge them out for first. The Twins made no offseason moves to improve, and may even sink to last place, as the White Sox will surely be better than last year (they could hardly do worse!).

AL West: Astros, Rangers, Mariners, Angels, Athletics

The Astros burst into the upper echelon in 2017, and Jose Altuve became my favorite player. But then the cheating scandal hit, and now they are universally hated. But they probably have one more year left at the top of their division. Like the Rays, the A's will be playing in a minor league park in 2025, and this has to be demoralizing to their players.

NL East: Phillies, Mets, Braves, Nationals, Marlins

I have a strange fascination with the Phillies. Their owner has tried hard to build a championship team, and I applaud his efforts. Their fans, while notoriously rowdy (they once booed Mike Schmidt!), at least care about their team. Either the Mets or the Braves could win the divison, but I'm going with the Phils as a sentimental pick.

Like Tampa Bay and Oakland, Miami refuses to support its team. I don't know why MLB doesn't move these sick franchises. Florida has proven that it won't support MLB, and MLB needs to pay attention to this reality and proceed accordingly.

In 2003, a year the Marlins won the World Series, their average home attendance was only 16K, the third lowest in MLB, ahead of only the Rays and the Expos. The next year, as reigning World Series champions, it went up to 21.5K; better, but still the fifth-lowest in MLB. In 2012 the Marlins got a new stadium, and attendance per game went up to 27.4K, still only 18th out of the 30 teams. By last year, attendance fell back down to 13.4K, ahead of only the woeful A's.

NL Central: Cubs, Reds, Brewers, Pirates, Cardinals

The Cubs and the Reds have improved, while the Brewers have not, and hence I pick the Brew Crew to fall to third. The Cubs and Reds have two of the best managers in MLB, with Craig Counsell and Terry Francona, and I think these two fine managers will get the most out of their players.

The Cardinals have made no efforts to improve from last year. They have historically been the best-run franchise in baseball, so I give them the benefit of the doubt that they know what they are doing in deciding to build for the future rather than going after free agents. But that does not augur well for the coming year.

NL West: Dodgers, Padres, Diamondbacks, Giants, Rockies

The Padres are one of my favorite teams, playing in the best baseball city in the country. Hence I am picking them over the D-Backs for second as a sentimental pick. The Rockies have not improved, and surely will again finish last.

"The Real Lincoln", by Thomas J. DiLorenzo

This important book seeks to set the record straight regarding Lincoln's presidency. Historians tend to revere Lincoln as a great president, a view that DiLorenco exposes as totally ignorant.

After an introductory chapter, Chapter Two documents Lincoln's opposition to racial equality. Lincoln consistently argued that blacks were inferior to whites, and his opposition to allowing slavery into the new territories was based on his desire to keep the territories free of blacks. As a member of the Illinois legislature, Lincoln supported removing all of the free blacks from the state, and he supported a Constitutional amendment prohibiting free blacks from migrating into the state. A Republican U.S. Senator who Lincoln was close to explained that "We, the Republican Party, are the white man's party. We are for the free white man, and for making white labor acceptable and honorable, which it can never be when Negro slave labor is brought into competition with it".

The author debunks the idea that people in the North were friendly to blacks. He says that 'The overwhelming majority of white Northerners cared little about the welfare of the slaves and treated the blacks who lived among them with contempt, ridicule, discrimination, and sometimes violence." He quotes Tocqueville in "Democracy in America" as observing that "the prejudice of race appears to be stronger in the states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists; and nowhere is it so intolerant as in those states where servitude has never been known".

In the third chapter DiLorenzo writes about peaceful emancipation. He stresses that only in the U.S. was a war needed to free the slaves. In every other country, "slavery ended through either manumission or some form of compensated emancipation". He points out that slaveowners could have been compensated for their lost slaves, plus each emancipated slave given forty acres and a mule, for less cost than the horrific Civil War that Lincoln presided over.

In Chapter four the author writes about 'Lincoln's Real Agenda". From the time he entered politics in 1832 when he first ran for public office, Lincoln was always a Whig. DiLornezo writes that Lincoln was "almost single-mindedly devoted to the Whig agenda--protectionism, government control of the money supply through a nationalized banking system, and government subsidies for railroad, shipping and canal-building businesses."

The tariff issue is still relevant today, with Trump's policies currently under discussion. DiLornzo writes that "Convincing consumers that higher prices are in their best interest is an absurd proposition on its face, but clever protectionist propagandists have always taken advantage of the public's ignorance of economics to pull the wool over its eyes." Certainly apropos of what Trump is doing today.

In Chapter Five the author talks about the myth of secession as "treason". He points out that our country was born with an act of secession when we separated from Britain. The Declaration of Independence was based on the idea that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed, and that whenever government becomes destructive of the peoples' rights, the people have the right to secede and form a new government.

The author describes how there was a strong secessionist movement in New England during the entire Jefferson administration and most of the Madison administration (1801-1814). I had previously known that opposition to the War of 1812 had led to a serious secesionist movement in New England, but the length of the movement was a surprise to me. The main point here is that all during this vigorous debate about secession in New England, the wisdom of secession was debated, but never was the inherent right of secession questioned.

The author describes how there were strong secesionist movements in the "middle states"--New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland. These states contained three types of secessionists: those who wanted to join the Southern Confederacy, those who wished to form their own "Central Confederacy", and those who wanted to alliow the South to go in peace.

An analysis of 495 editorials from Northern newspapers during the late 1860 to mid-1861 time period shows overwhelming support for the right of the Southern states to secede. Horace Greeley aptly summed up the sentiment when he wrote that "We hope never to live in a republic whereof one section is pinned to the residue by bayonets". Here again, duirng this whole secssion debate, never was the right to secede questioned. Lincoln's idea that secession was treason was something he made up out of whole cloth.

In Chapter Six DiLorenzo exmaines the question of whether Lincoln was a dictator. Certainly he was, as he shredded the Constitution, and committed all of the same abuses that King George III was accused of in the Declaration of Independence. He declared martial law and suspended habeas corpus, and ordered the arrest and imprisonment of virtually everyone who disagreed with his expreme views of presidential war powers. Chief Justice Roger Taney issued an opinion that the presidenrt had no lawful power to suspend habeas corpus, but Lincoln simply ignored it.

In May of 1961 a special election was held in Maryland to fill ten empty seats in the House of Delegates. Suspecting them of harboring secessionist sympathies, Lincoln had the candidates arrested and sent, without being charged with any crime, to military prison. Lincoln conitnued to interfere in Maryland poiltics, sending soldiers into the state to arrest and detain anyone opposing his war policies durng the regular November election.

Lincoln's suppression of the press was eqally despicable. When a list of more than a hundred Northern newspapers that had editorialized against going to war was published, Lincoln orderd his Postmaster General to deny mail delivery to those papers. His Secretary of State Seward had his own goon squad of secret police, which "scoured the countryside for the editors of any newspaper, large and small, that did not support the Lincoln administration's war policy and had them arrested and imprisoned."

In sum, nothing the current Trump administration is doing comes close to the evils perpetrated by Abrham Lincoln during his brutal presidency.

Chaper Seven documents the atrocities against civilians committed by Lincoln's soldiers, against all laws of war. The remaining chapters discuss the centralization of power in the national executive that Lincoln was responsible for. The author's Libertarian views cause him to give undue attention to this part of the story. I would have preferred more info on the evils of the war itself. He had already established in Chapter Four that Lincoln was a dyed-in-the-wool Whig who favored increased federal power at the expense of the states. And in Chapter Six he had already established Lincoln's dictatorial inclinations.

"In a Lonely Place" (dir: Nicholas Ray, 1950)

This film noir has Humphrey Bogart playing a Hollywood screenwriter, an unusual role for him. The characters are fairly one-dimensional, and we never really get to know any of them well enough to care about them.

Bogart brings a hat check girl home so she can tell him about a book he is supposed to read so that he can write the screenplay, but he is too lazy to read it himself. The girl then gets murdered on her way home from his apartment.

The police suspect him of murdering her, and in the process of the police investigation he gets to know, and falls in love, with a beautiful neighbor. It turns out Bogart has a Jeckyll and Hyde personality, capable of flying into uncontrollable rages.

The ending is rather unsatisfactory and unimaginative. I can't recommend the movie, though Bogart and his love interest, played by Gloria Grahame, are worth watching.

The Upheaval in TV News

Both CNN and MSNBC lost 50% of their audience during the first month after the November election, but in January they bounced back somewhat. Still, massive layoffs are taking place and both networks are reworking their lineup of daily shows.

Thankfully, MSNBC got rid of Joy Reid, who I found to be unwatchable due to her abrasive nature. It almost made me sick watching the other MSNBC hosts slobbering all over themselves last night expresing how tragic they thought losing Reid was. Give me a break!

Alex Wagner will still be with MSNBC as an analyst, but she won't be hosting at 9 PM anymore. Rachel Maddox bemoaned the loss of the two primetime anchors of color, an obnoxious example of political correctness which I could have done without. The fact that Wagner is more white than black adds to the ridiculousness of this whole over-emphasis on race.

CNN has really shot itself in the foot with their use of the idiot Scott Jennings as a Trump apologist. The problem isn't that he's pro-Trump, but rather that he comes across as totally obnoxious, constantly interrupting anyone he doesn't agree with, and never having a friendly word or smile for anyone else. Abby Philip, who I really love, is forced to have him on her nightly panel, which totally ruins the show for me. What a shame.

CBS made a drastic change to its evening news show, with disastrous results. Ratings have continued to plummet, and critics have universally panned the new format. A sad plight for the once-great CBS news department.

NBC, which took over from CBS as number one after the retirement of Walter Cronkite in 1981, has faced a decline in its flagship program, "Meet the Press", after the sudden death of popular host Tim Russert in 2008. There were disastrous replacements tried in David Gregory and Chuck Todd, until the network finally found a winner, Kristen Welker, in 2023.

The market is changing, and TV will never again be the primary place where people get their news in this country. Neither will newspapers, unfortunately.

Roberta Flack

I heard an interesting backstory this morning from Joe Scarborough on "Morning Joe" about Roberta Flack's great song, "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face". Her producer wanted her to do it faster and she insisted on doing the slow version.

The song went nowhere, but three years later Clint Eastwood heard the song and chose it to be part of his 1971 movie "Play Misty for Me". The song then took off and charted.

To me Roberta Flack represented the best of music in the 70s, the last decade in which pop music was special, before the depressing slide into country, disco, and rap. R.I.P. Roberta Flack (1937-2025).

"Contrary to Popular Opinion", by Alan Dershowitz

Alan Dershowitz was once known as one of the best attorneys in the United States. Unfortunately, he pretty much self-destructed after the turn of the century, when he became more and more obsessed with issues relating to the state of Israel, and less and less concerned with U.S. legal issues. His credibility was completely destroyed after he joined the Trump defense team in January of 2021 for the second impeachment case. He argued that proof of a crime was necessary for an impeachment to succeed, a pathetically weak argument, and the exact opposite of what he had argued during the Clinton impeachment in 1998-1999. To cement his dishonor, he lobbied President Trump for clemency for his past clients still in federal custody, and his efforts played a role in at least twelve clemency grants.

"Contrary to Popular Opinion" is a collecton of Dershowitz's newspaper columns during the period of 1988-1992, when he was still at the height of his legal abilities. The book is divided into five parts, containing a total of fifteen chapters.

Part One deals with the state of our legal system. Dershowitz writes that "Our judges, including Supreme Court judges, are among the least qualified in the democratic world today....Many judges are incredibly lazy, regarding their position as a kind of benign retirement from the rigors of law practice." He concudes that "There is no excuse for our present system of judicial selection, which focuses so heavily on rewarding poitical hacks. We are entitled to better."

In contrast to his low opinion of judges, Dershowitz gives high marks to juries. He likes the fact that jurors are "independent of the powers that be", and are thus free to vote their consciences.

Regarding the Supreme Court, Dershowitz bemoans the loss of Marshall and Brennan to reitrement, and oberves that "Big government is beginning to win nearly every case in which the rights of individuals are pitted against the power of governments". But he is enouraged that a centrist plurality in the Court may be emerging, consisting of O'Connor, Kennedy, and Souter.

Part Two consists of three chapters devoted to free speech issues. Dershowitz is a strong advocate of the first amendment's free speech provisions, and he skewers both the left and the right equally when either side calls for censorship of the expression of ideas from the other side. This book was publioshed in 1992, before the rise of the Internet, so it's possible Dershowitz may have moderated his zealous free speech views.

Part Three consists of three chapters on issues relating to individual rights. He says that the right-wing emphasis on increasing penalties and decreasing defendants' rights in the interest of achieving "law and order" is just plain wrong, and would result in no real decrease in violent crime, which is "primarily a function of factors beyond the control of the legal system". Regarding drugs, he thinks that decriminalizaton should be considered.

Part Four consists of four chapters on sex, life, and death. Abortion is extensively discussed, as the repeal of Roe v. Wade was on the table in several Supreme Court cases during this period. Capital punishment and the right to die were also burning issues.

But the issue Dershowitz devotes the most attention to is that of rape. His greatest ire is reserved for the rape shield laws, which protect the itentity of the alleged victim from being reealed. He sees these laws as a residue of outdated thinking that there is a stigma attached to being a rape victim. He points to the unfairness of the names of defendnts being made public, but not that of their accusers. He points out that if the name of an alleged victim is published, people who know her might come forward with information useful to the case. He repeatedly cites a case in which, once the name bcame known, it was discoverd that she had made eleven false rape reports in another state!

Dershowitz emphasizes that the presumption of innocence before trial is vitally important. He points out tht FBI statistics show that 8.6% of rape reports are unfounded, compared to 2.3% for other crimes. He correctly points out that we need to be extra skeptical about all "single-witness cases". His well-reasoned conclousion is that "Only when we come to realize that rape is a crime of violence, an aggravated assault, will we be able to treat it like other crimes of violence--both in court and in the media."

Part Five consists of four chapters on the rise of anti-Semitism. Here Dershowitz veers off away from the law and into politics, so I won't comment further.

The value of this book is threefold. First, it provides a useful historical snapshot of the burning issues during the 1988-1992 time period. Scond, we get the benefit of seeing how a gret legal mind analyzes some important legal issues. And third, the insights are provided in succinct two-page bites, never failing to hold the reader's interest.

My Ten Favorite "Criminal Minds" Episodes

1. Empty Planet (S2, E8). This is the most memorable "Criminal MInds" episode, and the one I have watched the most often. The team travels to Seattle to pursue a serial bomber who has stated that Seattle is "where it all began". Reid wonders what the "it" is, and Morgan says that all he can think of is "grunge music and overpriced coffee". When Gideon talks by phone with the bomber and asks what to call hinm, the guy says "Allegro". Reid hears the name and he recalls that Allegro was the name of the adopted son in a book, "Empty Planet", that he had read as a child. On the way to interview the author, who happens to be a professor right there in Seattle, Reid asks if they can stop by a bookstore to buy a copy of the book because he wants to reread it, saying "It'll only take ten minutes." When Gideon asks, "To buy it or to read it", Reid responds "Both, actually".

By this time the team has the bomber's manifesto, a la the Unabomber, and the team asks the prof if she can identify which of her students it might remind her of. As the team is leaving, Reid asks, "Mind if I ask you a question?" She consents, and he asks, "Why didn't you ever write another book?" She responds that she guessed that she had nothing more to say.

Another memorable moment occurs when the team identifies a professor who is next on the bomber's hit list. They call him in and offer to provide security for him, and he responds, "Do I look like the kind of guy who wants to be followed around by a government goon squad?"

The bomber comes to see the prof who wrote "Emopty Planet", and we discover that he is convinced that she is his birth mother. He takes her hostage, and the team rescues her. On the way back to D.C., Morgan tells Gideon, "I heard you were worried about me back there...'A young man who I grestly respect and admire'", referring to what he had said to the prof earlier in Reid's presence. Gideon then utters the greatest episode-ending line, "And what he said I said, I said."

2. Jones (S2, E18). This is the second-most memorable episode. The team goes to New Orleans to catch a serial killer who is killing men in the night club section of town. They eventually figure out, about half-way through, that the killer is a woman. They search for past rape cases, and Garcia discovers the police reports of an incident nine years earlier in which a young woman was assaulted, but the PD refused to pursue criminal charges.

It turns out that the police chief is the son of the man who had worked the case, along with his partner. The dad had died in the recent Katrina storm, but the partner is still alive. When they visit the partner, he is quite hostile and explains that he was convinced that she was "asking for it" and that in his opinion no rape had occurred. They obtain the name of the victim by interviewing the assailant, Prentiss uttering the memorable line "Does she make an impression now?" They discover her current location at a motel, through her credit card records, and they interrupt her latest assault.

Two side stories are seen thoughout the episode. Reid makes contact with a friend who dropped out of the FBI Academy on their first day, and is now a piano player in a New Orleans bar. The encounter comes at a time when Reid is struggling, but at the end he tells Gideon, "I'll never miss another plane". The other side story is the connection made between J.J. and the police chief, William LaMontagne Jr.; in later episodes they re-connect and eventually get married.

3. Pleasure Is My Business (S4, E16). The BAU team goes to Dallas to investigate the murder of corporate executives. It turns out that a high-priced call girl is doing the killings. We sympathize with her because she is damaged by resentment against her father. She endearingly sees Hotchner as a man she can trust, a sort of substitute father. At one point she asks Hotchner, "How could your wife have ever left someone like you? You're the first man I ever met who didn't let me down. Will you stay with me?"

The opening voiceover narration has Hotchner saying, "The prostitute is not, as feminists claim, the victim of men, but rather their conqueror. An outlaw who controls the sexual channels between nature and culture. --Camille Paglia."

4. Lessons Learned (S2, E10). The BAU team gets word that a terrorist attack is being planned to take place in the next 36 hours, involving anthrax. Gideon, Reid, and Prentiss fly down to Guantanamo Bay to interrogate the man believed to be the mastermind of the attack. Gideon interviews the man while Reid and Prentiss study his mannerisms. Gideon treats the man with respect, in stark contrast to the brutal torture the people running Guantanamo have been subjecting him to. Gideon tricks the man as to the time of day it is, resulting in finding out enough to foil the attack, which was due to take place at the Grand Opening of a shopping mall. On the way back from Guantanamo, Gideon beats Reid in a chess game and Reid decides to take a nap. Gideon then aske Prentiss, "Do you play, Prentiss?" She says, "Yes sir, I play." This exchange illustrates that Gideon has now accepted Prentiss into the group, after his initial skepticism at the start of the episode.

5. The Tribe (S1, E16). The team goes to Terra Mesa, New Mexico, to investigate the brutal murder of five 19-year-old students in a vacant house. The killers have staged it to look like it was the work of Apaches, but, with the help of a local tribal policeman, the team figures out that the killers were not Apache.

The appeal of this episdoe is that it spotlights the difference between the Anglo and Native Americn cultures. The tribal policeman, John Blackwolf, explains why he doesn't carry a gun: "Inside twenty-one feet, I win. Outside twenty-one, I have other options besides shooting a man."

When Blackfoot tells Hotchner, "There are many paths to the same place", Hotch tells him that he "sounds like a fortune cookie". However, at the end of the episode Hotch repeats Blackfoot's aphorism, showing that he has learned from their time together.

6. Somebody's Watching (S1, E18). In Los Angeles for a seminar, the team gets invloled with solving a series of murders. All the murders involve associates of beautiful actress Lila Archer, wonderfully (and winsomely) played by Amber Heard. Reid gets assigned as her bodyguard while the others investigate, and he develops feelings for her that he has trouble dealing with.

7. The Longest Night (S6, E1). The bad guy here is a crazed man who calls himself The Prince of Darkness, memorably played by Tim Curry. He kidnaps a yung girl, and the team works to free her from his clutches. The evil of the Prince of Darkness is illustrated by his quote, "The question isn't why do I kill people, the question is... why I don't kill everybody. I decide who dies... but mostly I decide who lives. I'm like... God." The girl is an awesome character, full of spunk, and she matches her captor's repartee all the way through.

The ending, in which Morgan and the girl reunite in a touching scene, set to Leonard Cohen's "Who by Fire", brings tears to my eyes every time. Other Cohen songs appearing easrlier in the episode are "Night Comes On", "The Sisters of Mercy", and "Dance Me to the End of Love".

8. Entropy (S11, E11). The whole episiode has Reid and the "bad guy", played by the awesome Audrey Plaza, talking in a restuarant. Sounds boring, but it is anything but.

9. Conflicted (S4 E20). College kids at South Padre Island for Spring Break are getting murdered. The team profiles that there are two unsubs working together, a submissive female who lures the victims, and a dominant male who does the raping and killing. It turns out that the two unsubs belong to the same person, a guy with a split peronality. Reid bonds with the guy in an attempt to understand him/her.

10. Riding the Lightning (S1, E14). A very poignant episode. The team is looking into the case of a woman shortly before her scheduled execution. At the end they locate the son she was convicted of murdering, but they allow the execution to go forward, honoring the mother's wish to give up her life for the sake of her son's happiness.

Mencken's Musings on the Presidents

Here are some passages from H. L. Mencken's many years of journalistic excellence, commenting on five presidents from the late 1800s and early 1900s.

1. Ulysses S. Grant. "Intelligence has been commoner among American presidents than high character, though Grant ran against the stream by having a sort of character without any visible intelligence whatever. He was almost the perfect military man--dogged, devoted and dumb. In the White House he displayed an almost inconceivable stupidity. Whatever was palpably untrue convinced him instantly, and whatever was crooked seemed to him to be noble....A more honest man never lived, but West Point and bad whiskey had transformed his cortex into a sort of soup."

2. Chester Alan Arthur. Arthur was a Broadway character on the order of Jimmie Walker--fond of good living, full of humor, but with no more character than a Prohibition agent. He made, on the whole, a good president--certainly a better one than Garfield would have made. He was too intelligent to attempt any great reforms, and so the country got on very well during his term....Washington, in his time, was gayer than it has ever been since. The oldtimers there still talk about his parties."

3. Theodore Roosevelt. "He was, by long odds, the most interesting man who ever infested the White House. He was full of odd impulses, fantastic ideas, brilliant phrases. He was highly intelligent, and, for a politician, very widely read....

"Unfortunately, Roosevelt's extraordinary mentality was not supported by a character of equivalent voltage. He was, on occasion, a very slippery fellow, and he knew how to sacrifice principle to expediency. His courage, which he loved to display melodramatically, was largely bluster: he could retreat most dexterously when ballot-boxes began to explode. He seems to have had no settled convictions: he was, for example, both for a high tariff and against it. He belabored the trusts publicly but granted them favors behind the door."

4. Warren G. Harding. "He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale-bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless night. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it."

And then there is this: "The whole inaugural address reeked with just such nonsense. Thw thing started off with an error in English in its very first sentence--the confusion of pronouns in the one-be combination, most beloved of bad newspaper reporters. It bristled with words misused: civic for civil, luring for alluring, womanhood for women, referendum for reference, even task for problem. 'The task is to be solved'--what could be worse? Yet I find it twice. 'The expressed views of world opinion'--what irritating tautology!"

5. Calvin Coolidge. "If anything is plain today, it must be that another Coolidge administration, if it is inflicted upon us, will end inevitably in scandal and disaster. The day good Cal is elected every thieving scoundrel in the Republican party will burst into hosannas, and the day he is inaugurated there will be song and praise services wherever injunctions are tight and profits run to 50%. There will follow, for a year or two, a reign of mirth in Washington, wilder and merrier, even, than that of Harding's time. And then there will come an explosion."

And later: "The Coolidge Administration will be worse than that of Harding for the plain reason that Cooliodge himself is worse than Harding. Harding was an ignoramus, but there were unquestionably good impulses in him....Coolidge is simply a professional politician, and a very petty, sordid and dull one. He has lived by job-seeking and job-holding all his life; his every thought is that of his miserable trade. When it comes to a conflict between politicians and reputable folk, his instinctive sympathy always goes to the politicians."

Note: Mencken's analysis is noteworthy for its use of the characteristics of intelligence and good character in evaluating presidents. However, if that is all there is, than FDR would be considered a poor president and Jimmy Carter a good one. There is a third, equally important, consideration, and that is the ability to get along with people. In a democracy this trait is the most important, and when it is taken into account FDR becomes a good president and Jimmy Carter a poor one.

The Hateful, Mean-spirited Scott Jennings

Why CNN has given Scott Jennings a prominent role as a right-wing commentator is beyond me. There are plenty of right-wing commentators who are pleasant, gregarious, and easy to listen to. Jennings, by contrast, is hateful and perpetually angry; he never smiles, never has a friendly word for any of his fellow commentators, and doesn't have a modicum of affability. He is like fingers on a blackboard, and it is no wonder that CNN's ratings are plummeting.

"Jimmy Breslin: The Man Who Told the Truth", by Richard Esposito

This book, published just last year, claims to be the first biography of Jimmy Breslin. To me it doesn't qualify as an actual biography, because it is more about Breslin the writer than Breslin the man. A collection of columns Breslin wrote over the years would be just as informative as this supposed biography.

Esposito's writing style can be off-putting. Consider this passage, from page 144: "This, then, is what Breslin brings to a story...It is people. Living their lives. With you. At a very painful time." Now there may be a point to this sort of staccato-like writing, but if there is, it escapes me.

I have recently read a biography of another journalist which is more successful. That book is "The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken", by Terry Teachout. The Mencken biography flows smoothly the whole way through, following Mencken's life from birth to death, as a biography is supposed to. It reads like a novel, and held my interest from start to finish. Teachout writes as well as Esposito writes poorly.

As a side note, I have recently read Breslin's book "Can't Anybody Here Play This game", about the 1962 New York Mets season. It is a brilliant piece of writing. Breslin can write with the best of them.

"King George III: A Biography of America's Last Monarch", by John Brooke

This is a comprehensive and sympathetic 387-page biography of George III, published in 1972. I will highlight several aspects of it which stand out to me.

The main thing which stands out is the trouble George had getting along with his Prime Ministers. While today the Parliament chooses the PMs, and the monarch only rubber-stamps the pick, in George's time the monarch chose the PM, picking out someone they think that they can work with, and that the members of Parliament can work with also. George had to deal with six different PMs during the 1760s, the first decade of his reign. Then in 1770 he appointd Lord North, who lasted for twelve years. Then there were three in quuick succession, until William Pitt the Younger took over in 1783 and lasted eighteen years. Then in the decade of the 1800s there were five PM changes. In 1811 Parliament passed the Regency Act, which provided for the future George IV to act as regent due to his father's illness, bringing an end to the effective reign of George III. The picture that emerges is one of constant turmoil, except for the two eras of relative stability with Lord North and the younger Pitt.

My second takeaway is the insight the author provdes concerning Britain's handling of the American War. The author believes that historians have been too critical of Geroge III for "losing" the American colonies. He states that war with the American colonies was inevitable, and "The real charge against the British government is not that they unnecessarily provoked war but that they did not make preparations for war while the Americans were yet weak." He says that "From a military point of view it would have been better for Great Britain to have taken up arms in 1766 rather than in 1775." Brooke concludes: "Far from reproaching George III for having lost the American colonies, subsequent generations should be grateful that he preserved the British constitution with all its possibilites of peaceful change. America was a small price to pay for that blessing."

It is striking to me that Lord North repeatdly tried to resign as Prime Minister because of how poorly the American War was going. But the King refused to accept the resignation, for he had noone else to turn to. Brooke states that "There was no one on the Government benches of North's stature: no one who could repel the attacks of Fox and Burke as North did night after night: no one who could labour as North laboured and still preserve his geniality and good temper and the respect and liking of the House."

A third takeaway is the conflict between the heir apparent and his Monarch throughout the 18th century. In every case the heir apparent (oldest son) csme into severe political conflict with his father (or his grandfather, in George III's case, as he outlived his father and succeeded his grandfather in 1760). Brooke explains this odd phenomenon: "It was the unavoidable lot of the heir apparent that he was excluded from all responsibility...This was perhaps the reason why the heirs apparent of the Hanoverian kings went into opposition. Politics gave them something to do and provided an outlet for their energies."

A fourth takeaway is the devotion Geroge III showed to his wife. Unlike other monarchs, he avoided mistresses and fathered an amazxing fifteen children with his wife. By contrast, Geroge's oldest son, the future Geroge IV, detested hs wife and "it was widely believed that the Prince and Priincess slept together only on their bridal night."

My fifth and last takeaway has to do with the King's illness, which at the time was diagnosed as "insanity", or, in today's parlance, "manic-depressive psychosis". Brooke analyzes the available historical evidence and says that "the diagnosis of manic-depressive psychosis does not explain the facts of the King's illness as the historian knows them." His conclusion is that the diagnosis of porphyria "does not violate the facts of history...On the basis of present evidence we can say that the King was not mentally ill. The myth of King George III's insanity is exposed."

On a scale of one to ten, I would give the book a seven for readability, but a ten for its educational value. George III's reign was an impressive one, especially for his strong support of science and the arts.

"Strangers on a Train", by Patricia Highsmith

This is a 1950 novel by the underrated writer Patricia Highsmith, made into a movie by Alfred Hitchcock the following year. I will discuss both the book and the movie.

I became aware of this author only recently, due to the Netlfix limited series "Ripley", based on Highsmith's 1955 psychological thriller, "The Talented Mr. Ripley". The book "Strangers on a Train" is 90% or more based on what the characters are thinking, which might cause one to ask, how could Hitchcock make this into a movie, as there is little actual action. The opening scene in which the two main characters meet on a train is very faithful to the book. After that, Hitchcock veers off on his own.

The Guy Haines chacter, an architect in the book, becomes a famous tennis player. Guy's fiancee is depicted in the movie as the daughter of a U.S. Senator, and her sister becomes a central charcter in the movie, probably my favorite character. I was surprised to discover that the sister is played by Hitchcock's daughter. She is totally delightful, because she provides an element of childlike wonder and honesty amidst all of the deception and intrigue going on around her.

In the book the bad guy, Bruno, self-destructs in the end due to his alcoholism, and Guy self-destructs due to his guilt over what he has done. The movie ending is much more upbeat. Guy resists Bruno's urging him to carry out his end of the supposed "bargain" and kill Bruno's father, and Guy and his new wife face the future with their marriage intact.

The Verdict (Dir: Don Siegel, 1946)

Sydney Greenstreet burst onto the movie scene in 1941 with his Oscar-nominated perormance in The Maltese Falcon. Now, five years later, he finally gets top billing in The Verdict, a wonderful murder mystery, and he is magnificent in the role. Peter Lorre also shines as Greenstreet's co-star.

Greenstreet plays Scotland Yard Superintendent George Grodman, who finds out at the start of the film that he has sent an innocent man to the gallows, resulting in him losing his job to the smug, pompous John Buckley. When another murder occurs, we watch as Buckley tries hard to solve the crime.

The pacing of the movie is good; it moves right along and holds our interest nicely. Grenstreet dominates the film, but Lorre is also good for semi-comic relief, and Joan Lorring is absolute dynamite as showgirl Lottie Rawson.

There are a number of viable suspects, but everything is explained in the shocker of an ending.

Ten Famous People Who Spectacularly Self-destructed

1. Oscar Wilde. Oscar Wilde's self-destruction stemmed from an ill-advised libel case he filed. In 1895 Wilde sued the Marquess of Queensberry for libel, the Marquess having accused Wilde of being a sodomite. As the defendant's part of the case was getting started, his counsel was prepared to present a parade of young men with whom Wilde had had carnal relations. Wilde's counsel accordingly dismissed the case.

But this was not the end of it. The information the counsel for the Marquess had put together was forwarded to the authorities, and Wilde was arrested for sodomy! His first trial ended in a hung jury, but on retrial he was convicted and served two years in prison.

2. Alger Hiss. The Hiss self-destruction was quite similar to Wilde's. The case arose in the anti-Communist hysteria of the post-WWII period. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was holding hearings trying to identify Communists and Communist sympathizers in the U.S. One Whittaker Chambers testifed that Hiss had been a Communist in the 1930s. Hiss denied this, and challenged Chambers to repeat his allegations away from the protected confines of the HUAC committee room. Chambers did so, on "Meet the Press", and in August of 1948 Hiss sued him for libel.

The Justice Dept. initially determined that no criminal charegs were warranted. But in November, after some pre-trial discovery in the libel case, and some investigative work by Congressman Richard Nixon, a grand jury was convened and Hiss was indicted on two counts of perjury, alleging that he lied when he said he didn't see Chambers after January 1, 1937, and when he said he never turned over any documents to Chambers. Hiss was convicted after his second trial, the first having hung 8-4 for conviction, and he served 44 months in prison.

3. Douglas MacArthur. The MacArthur self-destruction also came about in the environment of the post-WWII red scare, though it didn't involve any court case. MacArthur's administraton of post-war Japan was known for its wisdom and humaneness, and of course his exploits in the Asian theater during WWII had made him a household name. His downfall was due to his acts of insubordination during the Korean War, when he repeatedly ignored orders from the Joint Chiefs of staff and tried to involve Red China in the war. His basic idea was that World War III was necessary to combat the Communist menace.

President Truman finally fired MacArthur in April of 1951, and MacArthur returned to the U.S. Upon his return, MacArthur addressed a joint session of Congress, and was interrupted by applause 30 times in his 34-minute address. One representative shouted out, "We heard God speak here today. God in the flesh, the voice of God!" "Life" magazine reported that the audience was "magnetized by the vibrant voice, the dramatic rhetoric and the Olympian personality of the most controversial military hero of our times". His biographer, William Manchester, says that MacArthur was "lucid, forceful, dignified, and eloquent; though he clearly thought his message urgent, his delivery was unhurried and rhythmic. All his life had been a preparation for this moment."

This speech represented the high point of MacArthur's popularity, and it was all downhill for him after that. Letters and telegrams to the White House were running twenty to one for MacArthur and against Truman, whose approval rating plunged to 23%, still an all-time low for a sitting president. After the speech, a joint Senate committee immediately began an inquiry into MacArthur's actions. MacArthur tetified, followed by seven weeks during which the administration methodically rebutted MacArthur's position. Manchester says that "One by one, officers who admired MacArthur seated themselves before the Senators and sadly rejected his program for victory." Manchester goes on to state that "Against this array of fact and expertise, the general's Republican defenders had little to offer but a welter of party loyalty and conservative intuition."

After the hearings, MacArthur spent a full year traveling around the country giving rabble-rousing speeches. But the result was that MacArthur's star gradually dimmed, as people got tired of his constant bad-mouthing of Truman and the Truman administration. People were interested in the future, while all MacArthur was doing was re-litigating past personal grievances. Manchester says that "each time he took a swipe at Truman he descended a little". The crowds gradually dwindled, civic leaders started walking out of his speeches, and local leaders started calling him a "demagogue". In particular, MacArthur's keynote address at the 1952 Republican conventon was a complete dud.

MacArthur lived out the rest of his life in relative obscurity in a New York hotel. He finally died in 1964 at the age of 84.

4. Avery Brundage. Avery Brundage was president of he International Olympic Committee (IOC) from 1952 to 1972, and prior to that had been president of the United States Olympic Committee since 1928. Growing up in the 1950s, I used to often see his name in the sports pages, usually in the context of his relentless advocacy for amateurism in Olympic sports.

Besides his fetish for amateurism in sports, Brundage had a hstory of anti-Semitism, pro-Nazi sympathies, and misogyny. Despite this history, he was selected as IOC president in 1952, the only non-European to ever hold the post. Part of his appeakl was that he was independently wealthy and served for free, even paying his own expenses.

Brundage's problem was that he was unable to adjust to the changing times. He condemned the Black power demonstration of the two U.S. sprinters in Mexico City in 1968, and then refused to cancel the 1972 games after the massacre of Israeli athleetes in Munich. Historan Alfred Senen sums up Brundage's legacy: "After Munich, Brundage departed the Games, which had grown beyond his comprehension and his capacity to adjust. The NOCs and the [ISFs] were revolting against his arbitrary administration; violence had invaded his holy mountain and was giving every indication of returning; despite all his efforts to reach out to the world through athletics, he stood accused of bigotry and both race and class prejudice, not to mention the denunciations proclaiming him politically naive ... Few mourned his departure from the Olympic scene."

In 1973 Brundage, who had long expressed his wish to marry a German princess, did in fact marry a German princess who wass 48 years his junior, his longtime wife having died two years earlier. Brundage died in 1975 at the age of 87, leaving a decidedly mixed legacy.

5. Pauline Kael. Pauline Kael dropped out of college in 1940, and spent the '40s living a Bohemian lifestyle while struggling to support herself as a free-lance writer. She got into movie criticism in the 1950s, and became nationally famous in 1965 when her first book of movie criticism, I Lost it at the Movies, became a surprise bestseller. This first book of movie reviews was followed by five more: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang(1968), Going Steady(1969), Deeper into Movies(1973), Reeling(1976), and When the Lights Go Down(1980). I enthusiastically bought and read these books, and still have them in my own personal library.

Her downfall can be traced to a scathing review of When the Lights Go Down by Renata Adler, a writer who, like many of us, had always admired Kael's reviews; but when Adler took a closer look after being commissioned to write a review, she found that it was "jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless." Adler's 26-page tour de force is included in her 2017 collection of non-fiction, After the Tall Timber". Adler states that "It is overwhelmingly clear...that one thing Ms. Kael has ceased to care about is films. She hardly praises a movie any more, so much as she derides and inveighs against those who might disagree with her about it." Adler documents in great detail how "Ms. Kael's quirks, mannerisms, tics, and exscesses have...taken over her work so thoroughly that hardly anything else, nothing certainly of intelligence or sensibility, remains."

I am unable to dispute a single word in Adler's epic takedown. In retrospect, it is obvious that over the years Kael grew to love being in the limelight and basked too much in her fame, causing her writing to become more and more over-the-top, at times bordering on the hysterical. By the time she died in 2001, at the age of 82, her star, which once had burned so brightly, had completely faded.

6. Howard Cosell. Howard Cosell was a successful New York lawyer when he decided to switch careers and go into sports broadcasting in the 1950s. He started with radio and expanded ito television, becoming a mainstay on ABC's Mondday Night Football when it debuted in 1970. You either loved or hated Cosell's brash, bombastic, pompous style, but you couldn't ignore him.

By 1985 Cosell's star had faded, and he was taken off ABC's announcing team for that year's World Series, and was fired from ABC. What happened to Cosell is similar to Pauline Kael's fate, in that he fell in love with his public persona, and exaggerated it until he became a caricature of himself. I personally trace his downfall to an appearance on Barbara Walter's interview show in early 1984. When Barbara asked him how he wanted to be remembered, he said, "That's easy. That he was a good husband, a good father, and a good grandfather." Walters asked, "Nothing about carer?", and Cosell responded, "No, it's not important." To me this established his whole broadcasting career as a big fraud, as he had spent his entire career bragging about how he had single-handedly transformed sports reporting from unabashed adulation for the home team to critical, objective analysis; he always claimed that he had introduced journalism to sports reporting. And now he is saying it's "not important"? I cry foul.

Cosell's fall from grace actually took place gradually throughout the first half of the 1980s. Boxing had been his first love and had made him famous during the 1960s, but after announcing a one-sided fight on November 26, 1982, he decided that he was done with boxing forever. Similarly, football was the other sport which had made him famous, but he quit his Monday Night Football gig in August of 1984. In his book I Never Played the Game, Cosell claimed that he never watched an entire MNF game during the 1984 season. He added that "I watched enough to know, however, that the telecasts were dreadful. There was never a story line, only discussions of play upon play upon play. No perspective. No reportage beyond the game. No humanization of the players. Only feeble attempts at humor, trying to prove they could prosper without me. There wasn't a skilled performer among them." Cosell proceeded in his book to criticize all three of the new team--Frank Gifford, Don Meredith, and O.J. Simpson. Not content with that, he also criticized his replacement on the half-time highlights of the prior day's games, saying that they "were a joke. I had turned them into one of the most popular moments on television. My replacement, Jim Lampley, couldn't match my delivery."

The unrelenting criticism of other sportscasters in I Never Played the Game really sealed Cosell's fate. It left him estranged from his former broadcasting colleagues, and, like MacArthur, he retreated to his New York apartment, rarely leaving home and rarely having any visitors, until he died in 1995 at the age of 77.

7. Sarah Palin. When Sarah Palin was picked to be John McCain's running mate in 2008, she seemed poised to become the next right-wing superstar. She had incredible good looks, loads of charisma, and strong conservative credentials.

However, she started self-destructing almost immediately. When Katie Couric interviewed her, Palin was unable to answer even the simplest of questions. When asked "What magazines do you read", the best she could do was "Whatever comes across my desk." After her defeat in the 2008 election, she resigned her governorship the next year, citing a slew of ethical complaints against her. She tried her hand as a FOX analyst, but got cut loose at the end of her contract period, as the network came to realize that she had nothing worthwhile to say.

In 2017 Palin filed a defamation lawsuit against the New York Times for accusing her of "political incitement" in the run-up to the 2011 shooting of Democratic congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. The case finally came to trial earlier this year, and the jury unanimously found against her.

In 2022 Palin ran for Congress from Alaska and lost to a Democrat, even though Alaska is solidly Republican. During the campaign the man hired to prep Palin for her VP debate with Joe Biden in 2008 was interviewed on one of the news networks, and said that when he had asked Palin what her position on NATO was, she responded, "What's NATO?"! Her self-destruction had become complete.

8. Alan Dershowitz. In a famous article in the late 70s, Esquire magazine called Dershowitz the "best lawyer in America". His many successes during the next three decades supported this honor.

But after the turn of the century Dershowitz started to self-destruct. His fanatical, over-the-top advocacy for the state of Israel cost him much of his credibility. What little honor he still had left was destroyed in January of 2020 when he joined the Trump defense team for the second impeachment case. Dershowitz argued that proof of a crime was needed to impeach a president, a totally lame position, and the opposite of his position in the Clinton impeachment, when he had said just the opposite. To cement his dishonor, he lobbied President Trump for clemency for his past clients still in federal custody, and his efforts played a role in at least twelve clemency grants.

9. Rudy Guiliani. Rudy Guiliani's star burned brightly during his career as a U.S. Attorney and then as mayor of New York City. But when he undertook to help President Trump steal the 2020 election, he completely self-destructed. Today he is a pathetic figure, respected by nobody. He currently faces contempt of court charges for his failure to turn over assets to the Georgia election workers whom he has defamed.

10. Joe Biden. Joe Biden self-destructed twice. The first time was when he ran for president in 1988, and he had to leave the race in disgrace after he was discovered to have engaged in plagiarism of a British labor leader, and to have lied about his law school record.

Biden managed to rehabilitate himself after this debacle, only to self-destruct again when he decided to run for re-election in 2024, after promising to be a "transition president". The pathetic debate performance which sealed his fate was a fitting end to a career by a guy who finished third-from-the-bottom in his class at a third-rate law school.