Mark ends our discussion by emphasizing the beauty and protean wonder of the English language. He is both a guardian of our language and a pride of it.

This fellow is important to me and many others.

Dear readers: The previous parts of this journal can be found at the following links: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII.

Riding from the Adriatic coast into the center of the peninsula, I’m reminded of something: the great geographical variety of Italy. There are coasts (two). There are mountains and hills—Alps, even. There are flatlands, islands. A splendid variety.

(I might have mentioned lakes, too.)

We Americans like to compare countries to our states, in size. To which of our states does Italy compare, in size? Arizona.

Although what different shapes!

***

Perugia is much loved by foreign visitors and Italian visitors alike. It’s a hill town, the capital of Umbria. It is known for its beauty (like many towns in this country, let’s face it). And for chocolate. And for language instruction—the instruction of foreigners in Italian.

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Let’s talk chocolate. Perugia styles itself “la città del cioccolato,” the City of Chocolate. There’s a Chocolate Museum here. The Perugina company is in Perugia, naturally, and they are known for their Baci, or Kisses, wrapped in silver and blue foil.

Baci are not to be confused with our Hershey’s Kisses (bless ’em).

A square in Perugia is named the “Piazza del Bacio,” Kiss Square. (It now sounds like I’m talking about a rock band.)

Check out these discs, these dinner plates:

***

Behold the Università per Stranieri, the University for Foreigners:

I like the word “foreigners.” It is so much straighter than the euphemism “international students.” Personally, I like being a foreigner, when I roam (including in Rome).

***

Man, are these hills steep. My friend Clarissa Pryce-Jones once said, “All the old ladies in Italian hill towns have great legs, because they’ve been climbing those hills their whole lives.”

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***

Have a view:

Have another view, no extra charge:

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Perugia has a Corso Cavour. A “corso” is a boulevard or avenue, often grand. I wonder how many “Corso Cavour”s there are in Italy. People want to honor Cavour, but also, “Corso Cavour” is so beautifully and irresistibly alliterative.

***

I have some pear ice cream, with chocolate chips. Eating this ice cream is like biting into a pear picked right off the tree—with accompanying chocolate, of course.

***

A typical view, a typical look:

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I see a sign for the Rotary Club here in Perugia. Rotary is such a valuable, admirable organization, as I’ve written many times, in columns over the years. To borrow Bush 41’s formulation, it is a point of light, international.

***

Coming upon the Piazza Giordano Bruno, I pause, thinking back to my student days. I delved into the life of Giordano Bruno—the philosopher, scientist, etc., who lived in the second half of the 16th century. They burned him at the stake. Murdered him.

What an example of conscience and integrity he set. And courage, tremendous courage.

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***

If you’re like me, you worry that you are not exploiting your time, that you are not doing justice to a city like Perugia, that you are not taking enough in.

But how can you? Maybe a few tastes—good tastes—is enough.

***

Two American ladies go into a chocolate shop. The husband of one of them—the other lady might be his sister or sister-in-law—says, “Nah, I’m not goin’ in there. I’ll see you down the road. I’ve had enough.”

I love that.

***

To open a door, they often want you to push in this country. My instinct is to pull. To pull it open, not push it.

There must be studies of this subject …

***

One more view, before leaving Perugia?

***

But listen: Spoleto is pretty easy on the eyes as well. It is another hill town, which many know for a music festival, the Festival of the Two Worlds. It was founded by Gian Carlo Menotti in 1958. Menotti was a composer (and writer) “of the two worlds”: born in the Old World, Italy, he made his career in the New, America.

In 1977, Menotti founded a companion festival in Charleston, South Carolina: the Spoleto Festival. You wanna see a hotel here in Spoleto, Italy?

***

Have a look at the Duomo, the big church, in town—and the run-up to it:

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Such a typical sight, in this part of the world:

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An attractive, appealing entrance to a home:

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This is not a street name you see every day: Via dell’Assalto, or “Assault Street.” In the twelfth century—1155—Spoleto was invaded, assaulted, by the forces of Frederick Barbarossa, the “Holy” Roman Emperor.

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So, I’m walking up a hill—a very steep hill. I’m exerting myself, almost to the nth degree. Semi-sorta proud of myself. This kid, about 16, is walking home from school. We’re going in the same direction. He’s wearing a backpack, looking at his phone, and listening to music via his headset. He passes me like I’m standing still. Never looks up from his phone.

And let me say—without a trace of meanness—that this is not an especially fit-looking kid.

I console myself by thinking, “Well, he’s had practice. This is normal for him. He’s done it all his life, day after day.”

Still …

***

In Spoleto, groups of old men gather together, to talk. These groups are like little fraternities, and their sessions have been going on for … how many years?

Italy would not be Italy without groups of old men, gathered together to talk.

It is almost comforting to see.

***

Very comforting, and delicious, is a torta al testo, a special kind of Umbrian sandwich. Mine this evening is with eggplant and cheese. Man alive.

***

The banana ice cream tastes like—well, bananas, right off the tree. And very special—to me at least—is the Calabrian licorice. (Another flavor of ice cream, I mean.)

Boy, do they have an assortment of flavors over here. And when I was growing up, I thought 31 was a lot.

***

My eye is drawn to a sign that says “Largo Melvin Jones.” (A largo is a kind of public square.) I am used to seeing Italian names on these signs, making an English one stand out. Who was Melvin Jones?

A civil-society leader—the founder of the Lions Club International. (He was born in 1879 in the Arizona Territory.)

***

Piazza Giovanni Bovio is interesting to me. Its name, I mean. I’m not sure who Giovanni Bovio was. But I remember that, in student days, I lived at No. 20 Giovanni Bovio Street in Florence.

Wikipedia, Source of All Knowledge, tells me that Bovio was a “philosopher and politician of the Italian Republican Party,” who died in 1903, having been born in 1837.

When Mussolini came along, the Republican Party was strongly anti-him, anti-Fascist. Therefore, the dictatorship banned the party (in 1926). The party reemerged in 1943 and is still going today.

Earlier in my journal, I spoke about The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, Giorgio Bassani’s book (and Vittorio De Sica’s movie). The Finzi-Continis are Republicans; their populist resenters—no.

There’s a lot in that book.

I don’t know whether “all roads lead to Rome,” but that’s where I’m going and I’ll see you later.

… our guest today is Conrad Kottak, one of the leading anthropologists in the world. He is a cultural anthropologist—rather than an archeologist, say, or a primatologist—but he has his fingers in many pies.

He is a professor emeritus at the University of Michigan, where he has taught since 1968. I myself had the privilege of taking one of his classes. He has done extensive fieldwork in Madagascar and Brazil. He is the author of several textbooks in wide use.

In this Q&A, he tells me something interesting—well, many things that are interesting, but I am now thinking of this: He has been writing all his life, since he was a little boy. He always wanted to be a writer, and the writing came before the anthropology. For all these years, he has been writing as an anthropologist.

He went to Columbia University, home of anthropology. Is that what introduced him to the field? Got him hooked on it?

“Well,” he says, “I had a fourth-grade teacher who did a unit on South American Indians that I thought was pretty interesting. It fascinated me. But that lay in abeyance for quite a while until I got to college.”

One of his teachers at Columbia was Margaret Mead, whose name for a long time was virtually synonymous with anthropology. In addition to being an anthropologist, she was a generalist, writing on a variety of subjects for a variety of publications.

Conrad Kottak, too, is an anthropologist and generalist.

Mead was controversial—is controversial—and I ask Professor Kottak to get into it a little, which he does, illuminatingly.

The two countries of his fieldwork, Madagascar and Brazil—they seem to me remote, exotic, romantic. (Those are all forbidden words in anthropology, I’m sure. I almost specialize in forbidden words.) Professor Kottak has seen many sides of life. Indeed, he has examined them up close.

I ask whether he was amused when a hit movie called “Madagascar” came out (2005). The people in Madagascar were not amused, he says. The world seemed more interested in saving wildlife than in addressing human problems.

A blunt question, and a natural one: Did anthropology get flaky? Did a field that once attracted brilliant minds go all soft and political and granola?

In the course of his answer, Professor Kottak says something central: Respect for fact must be paramount. Without a respect for fact, you don’t have science, social or otherwise.

Here is another question: Are differences between peoples more interesting than similarities, or vice versa? Well, any anthropologist worth his salt studies and accounts for both.

One thing Professor Kottak is known for is his inclusion of television. What I mean is, he writes about the impact of television on societies. Here in the United States, we used to be bonded by TV shows. Those bonds are … loosening, as we all look at select material on our phones.

Oh, there are so many things you can discuss with an anthropologist, and with Conrad Kottak in particular. You will enjoy getting to know him.

Dear readers: The previous parts of this journal can be found at the following links: I, II, III, IV, V, VI.

Porto Recanati and Recanati are not to be confused. They are distinct towns. The first is on the coast—on the Adriatic—as “Porto” tells you, and the second is about eight miles inland. But high on the ridge in Recanati, you can certainly see the sea.

***

In Porto Recanati, there is a “Beniamino Gigli Arena.” Gigli (whose name means “lilies”) was a great tenor, who lived from 1890 to 1957. Was he from Porto Recanati? He was from Recanati—close enough.

And what’s playing at his arena? A poster in town tells me Jethro Tull, the British rock band formed in 1967.

I’ll be damned.

***

Recanati bills itself as the “città dell’Infinito”—the City of the Infinite. Why? Because it is the hometown, not just of Gigli, but also of Giacomo Leopardi, the great poet and philosopher (1798–1837). But what does that have to do with infinity? One moment, please.

There is a cult around Leopardi, but “cult” seems too harsh and pejorative a word. There is nothing kooky about this appreciation—and appreciation it is. A loving, grateful appreciation.

Leopardi was not just a literary and philosophical genius, he was also a beautiful soul. An engagement with his work elevates the engager.

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Earlier in this journal, I quoted Dante Della Terza, the eminent literary scholar. I went to see him in 2018, when he was 94. Let me quote, once more, from the piece I wrote, after that visit:

Asked about his favorite writers, Della Terza makes a tender statement: “Leopardi was always very dear to me.” … “He was often physically ill, but he had a great lucid mind, a creative mind.”

One of Leopardi’s poems is “L’infinito,” “The Infinite.” It is something like the national poem. Schoolchildren memorize it. We have no equivalent in America. I myself memorized the poem a few years ago, and wrote about the experience here. I will quote just a little, from my article:

[Leopardi] composed “L’infinito” in 1819. It is beautiful simply at the level of words—sentences, if you like. It is also “deep,” philosophically. Something to puzzle over, if one chooses.

The poem is universal, reaching into the cosmos. (It’s called “L’infinito,” after all.) But it is also specific to Recanati, which is why so many of us come here. The poem begins, “Sempre caro mi fu quest’ermo colle”—“This lonely hill was always dear to me.” That hill is Mount Tabor, also known as “il colle dell’Infinito,” “The Hill of the Infinite.”

Here is a little monument, upon the hill, and pardon my awkward angle:

I will use a translation of Leopardi’s poem by Jonathan Galassi:

This lonely hill was always dear to me,
and this hedgerow, which cuts off the view
of so much of the last horizon.

You know, I can see it. Feel it. Something like this:

This is less obscured, less cut off:

The poem continues,

But sitting here and gazing, I can see
beyond, in my mind’s eye, unending spaces,
and superhuman silences, and depthless calm,
till what I feel
is almost fear. And when I hear
the wind stir in these branches, I begin
comparing that endless stillness with this noise …

You know, I can hear the wind stirring in these branches, on this warm June day. I really can.

… and the eternal comes to mind,
and the dead seasons, and the present
living one, and how it sounds.
So my mind sinks in this immensity:
and foundering is sweet in such a sea.

A short poem, but deeply meaningful, to millions.

Do I recite the poem, upon Mount Tabor? You know I do (in Italian). There is no one around to hear me. In fact, I recite it three times.

The first time goes pretty well. The second time, less well (I am concentrating too hard). The third time is the charm.

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I must say, it has been affecting to be here on the hillside. Usually, place means nothing to me, or not much, as I have detailed in many columns over the years.

Since 2002, I have worked every August at the Salzburg Festival, in Austria. For the first seven years, I stayed around the corner from the house that Mozart was born in. Since then, I have stayed around the corner from the house he grew up in. Both of these homes are museum-like and open to the public.

You know, I have never been in either one of them? I have no interest in the tables and chairs and whatnot. They have nothing to do with Mozart, really, who is in his music.

I have been to Richard Strauss’s house in Garmisch, shown around by his grandson. There was nothing of Strauss in it, for me.

I have given a talk on Bruckner in Saint Florian itself, where the composer lived and worked. The place had no effect on me whatsoever. Bruckner is way, way beyond that.

And don’t get me started on the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. Really, you don’t want to get me started.

But to be in Recanati, setting (of a sort) of “L’infinito”? A beautiful experience.

***

A couple is having wedding pictures taken in the Park of the Infinite (along the hillside). Good choice, venue-wise.

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You know what the gelaterie in Italy have that they did not have when I was a student, back in ’84? Vegan ice cream. I bet it’s good, though I don’t try it.

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Another difference between now and ’84? You can take as many pictures as you want, without worrying about allotting your film. You had to think carefully about the pictures you wanted to take. Now, you just click click click, ad infinitum.

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A further difference? No wrestling with maps—physical maps. Now you can gripe at your phone, that miracle.

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Here are some “creeping trumpets,” creeping beautifully:

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Bougainvillea don’t never disappoint, wherever it appears:

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I see the name—the male first name—“Virginio.” It occurs to me: in our English culture, we have “Virginia,” but not its male equivalent. Curious.

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There is a street named for Aldo Moro. And the sight of his name gives me something like a painful jab. I remember this drama, this nightmare, very well. I was 14, and getting ever more engrossed in the affairs of the world.

Moro had been prime minister for five terms, in the 1960s and ’70s. In 1978, he was kidnapped by the Red Brigades, the terror group, and killed after 55 days.

The Pope, Paul VI, had offered himself in exchange for Moro. (They were good friends.)

Moro wrote a farewell letter to his wife, saying, “They have told me that they are going to kill me in a little while, I kiss you for the last time.”

***

Here is something to know about Beniamino Gigli: he is the kind of great who is esteemed by other greats. He is a model for all other tenors. Pavarotti, for instance, revered him.

The tomb of Gigli, here in Recanati:

Inside:

There is a guestbook, signed by travelers from all over, and I duly add my name.

***

Piazza Giacomo Leopardi is really a fine square, the kind the poet deserves. Check out this tower, built long before Leopardi’s time—in the 1100s:

The tower is called the “Torre del Borgo.” I think of a pun, so help me: “That’s a torre.” (In the 1950s, Dean Martin popularized the song “That’s Amore.”)

***

The poet, in the center of his square:

Oh, I have so much to tell you, but I don’t want to weary you, and we have had enough for one day, I’m sure. Thanks for reading and subscribing. Back at you soon.

Dear readers: The previous parts of this journal can be found at the following links: I, II, III, IV, V.

On a train down the Adriatic coast, we pass Pesaro, birthplace of Rossini. (Also, it is the site of the summer opera festival in his name.) Rossini made a great contribution to the happiness of the world. Always, he will bring smiles and delight.

I’m speaking of his comedies (The Barber of Seville, The Italian Girl in Algiers, etc.). But we should not overlook his tragedies, less popular though they may be.

An all-around genius, this fellow.

***

It’s enjoyable to overhear Italian teenagers talking about school. “È proprio banale la materia,” a boy tells a girl. I wish you could hear his tone, which conveys weary contempt. “It’s frickin’ boring, the subject matter.”

***

Wait a second, let me go back up to Rimini, north of Pesaro. (Does this journal have to be in strict chronological order?) (Probably.)

I want to show you a handsome sight—even a beautiful one:

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In the middle of Rimini is Three Martyrs Square. It used to be Julius Caesar Square. On August 16, 1944, three partisans were hanged by the fascists (Italian and German): Mario Capelli, Luigi Nicolò, and Adelio Pagliarani. They were between 19 and 23 years old. There is a poignant memorial to them, on what I believe is the spot of their execution.

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Now, down to Ancona—which makes me think of a Wolf song and a British journalist.

Matthew d’Ancona was once the editor of The Spectator (when I read it avidly). Today, he writes around, I think. And the Wolf song? The song by Hugo Wolf?

It comes from his Italienisches Liederbuch—Italian Songbook—and begins, “Ich hab’ in Penna einen Liebsten wohnen” (“I have one lover living in Penna”). He has them all over.

“Another in the plain of Maremma, / One in the beautiful port of Ancona …”

Oh, my, it is beautiful, a jewel of the Adriatic.

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***

The name of the town derives from the Greek word meaning “elbow.” Ancona looks like an elbow—that is, its coastline curves like a bent arm. You can see the sunrise over the sea. And the sunset over the sea as well. And never leave Ancona.

This is one of the few places in all the world where such a thing is possible.

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Here is a shot of the sunrise side (though in late afternoon):

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In a supermarket, I meet a woman working in the deli. She makes a superb panino. When I tell here where I live—for she has asked me—she exclaims, “New York is my favorite city! My favorite place in the world!”

It has been so since she was a little girl. Her dream was always to go to New York—and she did it, for the first time, last year.

“Did it meet your expectations?” I ask her. “More than,” she answers.

With her family of four, she stayed three nights. They did not go to a Broadway show. As it was, the trip—for the four of them, for three nights—cost … $8,000, door to door. (Ancona is not exactly New Jersey.)

But it was worth every penny, she tells me.

Her plan is to go to New York again for her 60th birthday—which will be in seven years.

I get very, very mixed receptions to New York. What I mean is, I get a broad range of reactions when I tell people where I live. Some are like that of the lady in Ancona. Others?

For years, I was on a kind of political circuit. And I learned to avoid telling people where I lived, if I could help it. Often, New York would be anathematized (to use a Bill Buckley word). (Now there was a man who loved New York.)

“New York?” they would say. “Why, I wouldn’t live there if it were the last place …”

I wanted to tell them: “Don’t worry. No one is going to make you.”

Anyway, I could regale you with stories, but I have told them elsewhere, and I think maybe we should move on with things Italian …

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***

In Ancona, I stay on Michele Fazioli Street. Chi è? Who is he, or was he? He was a nobleman, a count, who became the first mayor of the city in 1861. It all has to do with Italian unification …

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Here is the Monumento ai Caduti—the Monument to the Fallen. It was erected after World War I.

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In back of the monument, a couple is having their wedding photos taken. An older woman looking on calls out, “Viva la sposa!” (“Long live the bride!”). The older woman’s husband then calls out, “E anche lo sposo!” (“And also the groom!”).

***

The entrance to this office building—pretty attractive, I think:

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Above, I mentioned a count (Fazioli). Now, here’s a count:

Formally speaking, we’re talking about Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour. Or to speak really formally about it: Camillo Paolo Filippo Giulio Benso, Count of Cavour, Isolabella, and Leri.

Is he the No. 2 hero of the Risorgimento, after Garibaldi? Or would it be Mazzini?

I have heard it said: “Garibaldi is the George Washington of Italy. Cavour, the Alexander Hamilton. And Mazzini, the Thomas Jefferson.”

Unfortunately, I’m not equipped to judge these analogies—but I can offer them to you …

***

Up and down the pedestrian viale, young men tend to walk in pairs and trios, and young women do the same. The boys eye the girls, and the girls pretend not to notice, while glancing furtively.

Age-old …

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Heh, get a load of this:

Here is a front window:

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You know what’s good to see here in Italy? At least the towns I have been in? Bookstores. Plenty of bookstores, courtesy of Feltrinelli and Mondadori, those longtime publishers.

Viva il libro—and vivano le librerie. (Remember, a libreria is a bookstore in Italian, not a library.) (Those are biblioteche.)

***

A beautiful theater with a beautiful name: “Theater of the Muses”:

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This statue was controversial when it went up in 2013. It has a blunt title: “Violata,” i.e., “Raped.” The statue is meant to honor, and call attention to, female victims of sexual violence. The more discussion of this sometimes-taboo subject, the better, I think.

***

Let me end on a door—an old and monumental door: the Porta Pia, near the sunset coast of Ancona:

My gosh, what a beautiful and interesting place. See you in our next installment for another one, or two.

N.B. I had originally identified the Porta Pia as Trajan’s Arch. A classics scholar set me straight. The arch is elsewhere in Ancona. Thank goodness for classics scholars.

Dear readers: The previous parts of this journal can be found at the following links: I, II, III, IV.

One thing that draws a person to Ravenna is Dante. But wasn’t Dante from Florence? Wasn’t he a proud, archetypal Florentine? Yes, but he was forced into exile and spent his last years in Ravenna.

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In the center of town, there is a restaurant called “Mr. Dante.” I am not translating. That’s its name: “Mr. Dante.”

***

A leading citizen of Ravenna now is Riccardo Muti, the great conductor. He is from southern Italy, but has chosen to make Ravenna his home. That is, Ravenna is where he’s based between engagements.

Like Mr. Dante, this is in the center of town:

***

At the hotel where I’ll stay, the clerk is familiar with my hometown, Ann Arbor, Michigan. One of his friends played for the University of Michigan football team in the early 1980s: Jerry Diorio.

I’ll be darned. Small world.

Jerry died in March of this year. For an obit, go here.

***

In Part I of this journal, I gave a line-up of great Italians—including, of course, Galileo Galilei. “Incidentally,” I said,

Galileo was not merely one of the greatest scientists in history (“merely”!). He stands as a shining example of conscience: of the refusal to surrender right for wrong.

You know, I should have said the same of Dante Alighieri. Yes, he was one of the greatest literary artists in history. But also, he stands as a shining example of conscience.

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I will not recap his life, but I will offer a few lines. In Florence, Dante was a politician and diplomat. He got on the wrong side of the Pope and others. They banished him from Florence, threatening death if he returned.

Later, they invited him back, but only if he would confess guilt, pay a fine—abase himself. He said, Hell, no, I’ll stay in Ravenna.

Dante was in his mid-thirties when he was banished from Florence. He wandered from one place to another, in his exile, before settling in Ravenna. He broadened—mentally, emotionally, geographically …

If he had been allowed to proceed with his life in Florence, he probably would have remained a political and diplomatic figure. Chances are, he would not have written the Comedy.

I’m glad he did—that he was led (however involuntarily) to his true calling.

Like you, maybe, I think of what Joseph, in Genesis, said to his brothers: “You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.” (The way King James’s translators have it is, “… ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good …”)

Anyway, a few paltry lines, as promised. You might enjoy delving into fuller accounts.

***

Here in Ravenna, there is an entire “Dante zone”—a “zona dantesca.” And a sign bids that there will be silence—a respectful silence—in this zone.

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The poet’s tomb—or rather, the run-up to it:

Up close:

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In a museum, there are many objects and artifacts, including a kind of plaque given by the Dante League of America in 1921—the 600th anniversary of the poet’s death.

A few blocks from me in New York is Dante Park, which has a towering statue of this towering poet. The park opened that same year, 1921.

The 700th anniversary was just a few years ago—2021. You know, I don’t remember much, Dante-wise. Maybe we were still caught up in the pandemic?

Maybe it relates to a diminished interest in high culture, including literature?

Dunno.

***

Ravenna, here in the Dante zone, holds a perpetual reading, a lettura perpetua. The cantos are cycled through, evening after evening. At 6 o’clock, a canto is read aloud. (Let me note that 6 is the starting time from April through October. In the other months, it’s 5.) The readers are various and sundry. Each reading is livestreamed, too. This is a ritual—an edifying rhythm in life, I would say.

On only one day of the year is there no reading: Christmas Day.

The evening I attend, two women, taking turns, read “Paradiso” XXXI.

***

I think back to Oscar Büdel, with whom I studied the Comedy (in my not very rigorous fashion, I’m sorry to say). He was a real scholar, with real training—a bona fide dantista.

Born in Germany, Professor Büdel was in the Luftwaffe and held as a POW in Italy. Remarkable story. I would like to ask him about it, today. (He died in 2001.)

I also think back to Dante Della Terza, whom I went to see in 2018, when he was 94. He was a dantista of legend. I wrote a piece about him, titled “Dante and Dante: The tale of two lifelong companions.”

Maybe I could paste a quick portion:

Up in Widener Library, I ask Della Terza, “What would you ask Dante, if you could meet him? Any mysteries you would like cleared up?” Della Terza thinks for a moment and says, “I would ask for forgiveness. We do not have the knowledge of him that he deserves.”

Maybe just a little more, from my piece:

How many times has he read the Comedy? Hundreds? Many hundreds? Della Terza sort of shrugs and smiles. I then ask how much of the poem he ever memorized. (There are 14,233 lines.) Many cantos, he says. It was compulsory when he was a student. And then he starts, from the beginning, unbidden.

“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita”—he goes on for eleven more lines, four stanzas. He recites the poem musically and dramatically. He is utterly focused and his eyes are lit up.

Maybe I can show you a photo I took of Professor Della Terza that day:

***

But, hang on, there’s another poet in town—in Ravenna, I mean. What do I see but the Hotel Centrale Byron?

(Lord Byron was a brilliant italianista, knowing the language and its literature intimately.)

***

I walk into John F. Kennedy Square. All through Italy, there are squares and streets named after JFK. His murder in 1963 had an impact.

***

In front of schools, I see a sign that says, “This school repudiates war.” Wonderful. A fine sentiment. But who can fail to think of Trotsky? “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” “You may repudiate war, but bear in mind: war may not repudiate you.”

***

Not changing the topic entirely—there is a memorial listing Holocaust victims, beginning with Hilde Fanny Abraham and ending with Massimo Zamorani.

***

I can tell you that Mr. Dante serves a delicious lemon cake—called in Italy “torta della nonna,” or “Grandma’s cake.” I note how small the slice is, comparatively. Compared with what?

Well, I come from America. And being abroad makes me realize how large our portions have become. When I see a muffin in a European café, I think, “Ah—I remember when our muffins were that size.”

Been a while.

***

I like a phrase, spotted in a pizzeria: “magra margherita.” “Skinny margherita”—that is, a narrow, narrow slice of that kind of pizza.

“Magra margherita” has the charm of alliteration.

***

Wait a second now, isn’t the Leaning Tower in Pisa? What is this leaning in Ravenna?

It is the Torre Civica, or Civic Tower. Twelfth century. Hang in there, torre!

Dear readers: The previous parts of this journal can be found at the following links: I, II, III.

I have come to Mantua, as we call this town—and we pronounce it “Manchua.” The Italians call their town “Mantova.” Same with “Padua”/“Padova.”

You remember the song from Kiss Me, Kate, don’t you? “I’ve come to wive it wealthily in Padua.”

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Across the street from the train station is the Hotel Rigoletto—which makes sense. Mantua is the setting of Verdi’s opera, Rigoletto.

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That notwithstanding, I see a poster for someone else’s opera—an opera by Rossini, set over in Spain:

(According to the poster, The Barber played here in December.) (That’s our English-language shorthand for The Barber of Seville: “The Barber.”) (Not to be confused with works by America’s own Samuel Barber.)

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Rigoletto’s house—or what is designated as such:

And here’s the jester himself, in the courtyard:

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Kind of nice, right? The ducal palace:

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Here is the police station—which looks out of an opera set:

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There are lakes surrounding Mantua. They are nice enough, but … what can I say? I’m from Michigan …

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My friends, if you ever have the chance to have dragon-fruit gelato—certainly here in Mantua—grab it.

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I hear, behind a wall, a kid (I presume) piping out the “Ode to Joy” on a recorder …

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Do you like these blooms? I do.

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In the evening, down by a lake, there is an international food festival, with booths offering just about every kind of food the mind can imagine. I have one shot for you—of the Indian station:

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Hang on, how do you turn on the water in this sink? Ah—a foot pedal. He is an inventive animal, man.

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On a train, the conductor greets me with “Buondì”—“Good day.” Nice. (An informal way of saying “Buon giorno.”)

***

As our train passes the town of Bevilacqua, I think, “I wonder whether you can drink the water there.” I take myself for a comedian, sometimes. (“Bevilacqua” means “Drink the water.”)

***

On arriving in Ferrara, I see a restaurant called “Brunch Republic”—in English, I mean. Clever name. How many locals know the term “brunch”? Plenty, I bet.

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I like this color, very much. Works particularly well in a warm environment.

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If you’re like me, you can’t think of Ferrara without thinking of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. Giorgio Bassani wrote this novel in 1962, and Vittorio De Sica made a movie of it eight years later. The story concerns Jews in Ferrara. Bassani himself was one.

I have a lot to say about The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, and have said most of it elsewhere. Suffice it to say now: the story tells us a lot about fascism, populism, history, and human nature.

We may not want to know—but it tells us.

I go to the old Jewish quarter here and stand in front of the synagogue. On either side of the door, there are moving plaques. Powerful statements. Before the Holocaust, there were 300 Jews in Ferrara. Ninety-six of them were deported to the camps; five survived.

Here is the entrance to the Jewish cemetery (in which Giorgio Bassani and some of the real-life Finzi-Continis are buried):

Ferrara has a museum called “MEIS”—whose initials, in Italian, stand for “Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah.”

***

Want to say hello to our friend Giuseppe Verdi? You can see him all over Italy—as you should—and here he is in a Ferrara park:

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I have come from New York, but you can’t escape Andy Warhol—who has enjoyed a lot more than 15 minutes …

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Huh.

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A street is named after a composer—1583 to 1643—who was born here: Girolamo Frescobaldi. That is one of the most beautiful names in music.

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A division of the University of Ferrara does not bother to translate the final word, which I regard as interesting: “Economia e Management.”

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As in the Forster novel, I have a room with a view:

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Years ago, I was petting one of Bill Buckley’s dogs—a King Charles spaniel—and he (Bill, not the dog) said, “Isn’t that the most beautiful dog in the history of dogs?”

I liked that formulation.

A few years later, I texted to a friend of mine, “I have just met the most beautiful girl in the history of girls.”

This became a thing between us. Every now and then—every year or two years or so—I’ll announce, “I have just met the most beautiful girl in the history of girls.”

He’ll sometimes say, “Remind me: who’s the current most beautiful girl in the history of girls?”

Well, today, she works in a Ferrara pizzeria.

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This white poplar isn’t bad either:

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Very much not bad is a pistachio croissant—I have never had its like before.

Wow.

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Thank you for joining me today, my friends. Forgive my abrupt changes of tone. My zig-zagging around. That’s par for the course in these parts (my column, I mean, not Italy).

I’d like to close this installment with a plaque I see at the Ferrara train station, as I am leaving for Ravenna.

At this station, on October 19, 1943, the Shoah train stopped with 1,023 Jews from Rome deported by the Nazis to be exterminated at Auschwitz.

May I make a confession to you (since it’s just us friends)? When I was younger, I thought these things were too much noted. I don’t think that anymore, at all.

Dear readers: Part I of this journal is here, and Part II, here.

Hard by the train station, there is an amusing sculpture of a string instrument—which lets us know we’re in Cremona.

Now, why would a string instrument let us know we were in Cremona? This is the home of Antonio Stradivari (Antonius Stradivarius) and other famous luthiers (such as Giuseppe Guarneri).

Cremona is synonymous with violin-making and the like.

Would you like a glimpse of Antonio?

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On a Sunday afternoon, there is hardly anyone on the streets. This is a tranquil town. Others may want to describe it as … sleepy.

***

There is, however, a young African man, who asks me for money. He gives me the kind of spiel I’m used to hearing in New York. I know that not a word of it is true.

This kind of thing—panhandling—is going to be bad for all African immigrants. Better that they worked their tails off, assimilating ASAP.

Maybe most of them do. We ought to spend a lot of time on this subject, and I will spend a little time on it later in my journal …

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***

You see these lawyers, Antonio and Maria? I bet they’re real (legal) artists.

***

I meet a young woman, on the staff of a hotel, and say how pretty I find Cremona. She gives me kind of a sullen look. “Boring,” she says. “Well, maybe Sunday afternoons are a little slow,” I hazard. “No,” she says. “It’s like this every day.”

I hope she can get out and live elsewhere. (So does she.)

***

A main street in this town is Via Solferino. That is a name to send a shiver down one’s spine. Do you mind if I quote from my history of the Nobel Peace Prize? The very first prize, in 1901, was shared by Henry Dunant, the Swiss businessman and writer who was the primary founder of the Red Cross.

It was in June 1859 that the pivotal event occurred. For a North African business venture, Dunant needed water rights, and he needed them from the emperor of France, Napoleon III, himself. The emperor happened to be in the field at the time, in Lombardy, near the town of Solferino. So Dunant went to him. He never gained an audience with the emperor, but he saw one of the most horrific battles of the entire 19th century.

This was the Battle of Solferino, an event of the Second Italian War of Independence. It pitted an alliance of Napoleon’s army and the Sardinian army against the Austrian Empire. The Franco-Sardinian alliance proved victorious, and the casualties proved high: over 30,000 dead, thousands more wounded or missing. Dunant was traumatized—but not so traumatized as to fail to do anything. He organized relief efforts, calling on the women and girls of the area. They tended to the wounded, heedless of which side they were on. The soldiers, said the women, were “tutti fratelli,” all brothers.

Three years later, Dunant wrote a book, A Memory of Solferino, which he published at his own expense. It caused a sensation, going around the world in its many translations.

Anyway, the Red Cross was soon born.

***

In Cremona’s main square, a band and chorus are performing. (Strange for Cremona to be without strings!) I’m in time to hear the final chorus from Puccini’s Turandot, in its completion by Franco Alfano. (Puccini died before he finished this opera.)

My heart swells.

***

Speaking of that which makes the heart swell: can I show you a photo of this glorious square?

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In the square, there are plaques, remembering the war dead. They are moving, in what they say—and in the names that are listed.

Also moving is the kind of plaque, the kind of memorial, I have never seen before. Here is a translation:

In memory of the citizens of Cremona who died from COVID-19
Of the courage of their families
Of the care of the health professionals
Of the work of many, many people in confronting the pandemic together

So as not to forget the passion to have a stronger community and, after so much pain, to build new paths for the future

The attitude in my environment was very different—more along the lines of blasting public policies and minimizing the danger of the virus.

Some of the blasting was justified, no doubt. Anyway, this is the subject of a long essay, or books …

***

In Italian towns—in many European towns—there’s a pedestrian lane and a bike lane, and, if you’re on foot, you’d better be in the right one …

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Claudio Monteverdi, the great composer, a father of opera, is associated with the Republic of Venice, where he made his career. But do you know that he was born in Cremona, in 1567? Here he is:

Amilcare Ponchielli was born nearby, in 1834. People tend to know the “Dance of the Hours,” from his opera La Gioconda.

***

What could be better than eggplant parmesan? Not much. When I sent this photo to my mother, she replied, “Now that’s a blue-plate special!”

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In the reception area of my little hotel, which doubles as a breakfast room, they have a cake available all day. Today, there is an apple one—moist and delicious. What a civilized practice, the offering of a cake.

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An observation about Italian staircases: they tend to be handsome, thoughtful things, of stone and such. Care is taken in their construction, even in modest places.

***

A receptionist in this hotel likes country-and-western music. I hear “Achy Breaky Heart” a couple of times. But her real favorite is Elvis: “He won me over when I was 15.”

She loves America, a country she has never been to. “I even learned the national anthem,” she tells me. “Let’s hear it,” I say. “I can’t sing,” she says. “Don’t worry,” I say.

She turns off the radio—or whatever is playing the country-and-western music—so she can concentrate.

She sings every word, without missing a syllable—even the tricky, semi-archaic constructions such as “o’er the ramparts we watched.”

When she finishes, I tell her how impressed I am. “Brava!” I say. She grins and says, “Whitney Houston.” (The late singer made a famous, cherished recording of our anthem, and this Cremonese lady must have listened to it many times.)

What a pleasant, affirming encounter.

Thank you for reading, my friends.

Dear readers: Part I of this journal is here. It dealt with Milan, as this one does.

I keep seeing street names that relate to the Risorgimento, i.e., the effort to unify Italy in the 19th century.

There’s Viale dei Mille, which refers to the “Expedition of a Thousand.” There’s Corso Plebisciti, which refers to the plebiscites, the referenda, throughout the peninsula. There’s Via XX Settembre. What happened on September 20?

That’s the day the unifying troops took Rome—their destined capital.

Hang on, what about Piazza della Conciliazione? Ah, that refers to something a bit later: when the Italian state and the Vatican reconciled.

In Italy, perhaps more than in most places, street names and the like are replete with history.

***

Guys, am I missing something here?

Michelangelo is identified as a sculptor and an architect, and he was certainly those. But … not too shabby a painter?

This must be left out for a reason, which I cannot discern.

***

As a bus idles beside me, I think of something. I hear a dog not barking. Milan is so … clean now. Big cities were not like this when I was a student in Italy, in the 1980s. Buses and trucks belched exhaust.

Sometimes, when you blew your nose, your Kleenex would be black.

We’ve come a long way, baby (to quote an old cigarette ad). (We’ve come a long way from cigarettes, too, come to think of it.)

I have always said, as a conservative, “You can’t separate conservation from conservatism. They go together. The words are almost identical.” At the same time, I have always opposed the “hard greens,” the extreme environmentalists, who tended to dominate the public square.

(In 2000, Peter Huber published a book called “Hard Green: Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists: A Conservative Manifesto.”)

Here and now, I would like to credit the environmentalists. I would like to give at least two cheers for them. Where is the soot and grime in Milan? It is nowhere. Where is the black and gray stuff pumping out of buses and trucks? It is nowhere, so far as I can tell.

Sometimes, in some ways, things get better.

***

I overhear a boyfriend and girlfriend—American—as they walk down the street. This is what I hear, as they pass me, going the other way:

Him: “You bought it!”

Her: “Just carry it for a little bit!”

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***

In a little park, boys and girls play ping-pong. City kids need parks more than other kids do. I wonder how many apartments have ping-pong tables.

***

Milan honors not only poets and artists and statesmen—it also honors journalists, by naming parks, streets, and other things after them. I see the name of Italo Pietra. And of Alberto Vigevani.

And I think of Moneta—Ernesto Teodoro Moneta. I became familiar with him when I wrote a history of the Nobel Peace Prize. He shared the prize in 1907, the seventh year of the Nobel prizes. I would like to quote my book at length, where Moneta is concerned.

But I realize I’m supposed to be doing a breezy lil’ journal here, and I’ve already discoursed on environmentalism …

***

I should not say this, because it makes me a bad guest, a bad visitor—a chauvinist or something. But when I’m walking through Milan’s Sempione Park—a very large park, and a perfectly fine one—I realize how great Central Park, back home in New York, is.

How beautiful, how interesting, how intelligently conceived and brought to fruition.

I have taken Central Park for granted …

***

A warm, smiling, polite young African asks me for money. His name is Theophilus. I have never met one. I know the name from the first verse of Acts: “The former treatise have I made, O Theophilus, of all that Jesus began both to do and teach …”

Finding out where I’m from, he asks, “How’s Donald Trump doing?” I say something about looking forward to the post-Trump era (should it ever arrive).

***

Here’s my man—our man—Verdi. The statue could be better taken care of, and so could the grounds around it.

Verdi takes care of people in the building across the street. It is the Casa di Riposo per Musicisti, or the “Rest Home for Musicians,” better known as “Casa Verdi.”

This is what the composer said in a letter to a friend:

Of all my works, that which pleases me the most is the Casa that I had built in Milan to shelter elderly singers who have not been favored by fortune, or who when they were young did not have the virtue of saving their money. Poor and dear companions of my life!

***

Before we leave music—which we’re kind of on—do you want a review? Whatever your answer, here is a review of the Filarmonica della Scala, in a concert of Beethoven and Brahms. I have published it at The New Criterion, my artistic home, so to speak, for 25-plus years …

***

You can take the boy out of America but—this boy still likes butter with his bread (and ice with his drinks). A particular restaurant here in Milan—a good one (inexpensive)—has no butter at all. For bread or anything else.

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But you know what this restaurant does have, as so many places on this continent do? Good paper napkins—thick, large, sturdy. Damn near washable.

I’ve seen our napkins at home get flimsier and flimsier, waxier and waxier …

***

Here’s an idea that had crept up in my head: the food in Italy is not as special as it once was, because people all over the world—certainly in the United States—have learned how to do it. You can get good Italian food pretty much anywhere, rendering a visit to Italy less special on this score.

Let me say: my current visit has disabused me of this idea.

***

I’m not saying this is the best ice cream I’ve ever had; I’m not saying it’s not:

(The parlor in question is Chocolat Milano, Via Giovanni Boccaccio 9.)

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The subway in Milan? I can’t speak for all trains, but the train I’m on at the moment is so clean and even pretty, it might as well be Japanese.

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Scene from a playground, early in the morning. I kind of liked those birds atop that little roof.

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I like the word, or phrase, for “escalator”: “scala mobile,” or “mobile staircase.”

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A man at a lunch place handles the sandwiches with his bare hands. This startles me a little, because we stopped doing that in America. But it had been perfectly normal before, and no one ever thought to object.

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When my train to Cremona leaves Central Station on time, I think, “Insert Mussolini joke here.”

“Malpensa” is a curious name for an airport. It means, in essence, “bad thinking.” How did the airport get its name?

I am speaking of the airport in Milan—Italy, not Michigan. (My home state has a Milan. We pronounce it to rhyme with “stylin’.”)

The origins of “Malpensa” are fairly complicated, but I’ll give the nub. Long ago, people decided to farm in this area. But the soil turned out to be very poor. Therefore, the decision was badly thought out.

Is there an airport name, anywhere, stranger than “Malpensa”?

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In Italy—at least at Malpensa—bulky luggage is known as “bagagli fuori misura.” That’s what the sign says. “Bags outside of measure,” or “beyond measure.”

I like that phrase.

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One of the most interesting words in Italian is the simple “eh.” It has a thousand meanings, uttered in a thousand tones …

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Sorry to be a bit crude, but—the heights of urinals, in various countries, would make for an interesting study. There must be thinking behind it. It can’t be random.

Or can it?

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I am greeted in classic Italian style: the rail workers are on strike. Therefore, I can’t take the express into the city. We all line up for buses.

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The day is warm—even hot—but the mountains are capped in snow. Such beautiful mountains, they are.

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At home, bus drivers tend to drive gently. Con misura. Maybe there is a fear of litigation? The driver of my bus into town, however—drives like an Italian. He might as well be in a Ferrari.

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We get off at Central Station—Milano Centrale. It is vast, the biggest train station in Europe. You can put two Milan Cathedrals inside it. Davvero. Honestly.

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Ah, pay toilets. When I was a student in Italy—back in the 1980s—you had to have exact change. That could be … a problem. There were times when you would have given 50 dollars for 25 cents (or the equivalent in liras).

These days? You can pay with your phone. Just tap. Even a conservative like me has to admit that things can get better, in various ways.

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***

In 2017, I did a Milan journal, in two parts: here and here. I hope not to repeat myself this year. But if I do—who will know or care?

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One of my favorite street names is “Via Fatebenefratelli.” There was an order of monks. They’d collect alms for the poor. They would call out, “Fate bene, fratelli!” “Do good, brothers!”

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You want proof of globalization? At the end of my block in New York, there is a Venchi ice-cream parlor. At the end of the block where I’m staying in Milan, there is a Venchi ice-cream parlor.

***

You know what’s a minefield, for us americani, and others? “Signora” vs. “signorina.” When to use one, not the other? Same with “madame” and “mademoiselle,” and “señora” and “señorita.”

Beware! Rules and customs shift from country to country. I believe they shift in regions within countries.

Then we have the formal “you” vs. the informal “you.” “Tu” vs. “Lei” in Italy. “Tu” vs. “vous” in France. And so on.

The second you think you know—you don’t. And you can give offense either way. Minefields.

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A young Milanese and I are chatting in English. “All good,” she says at one point. I teach her the expression “All good in the ’hood”—which she loves and immediately adopts.

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I am staying on Metastasio Street. Many streets in this area are named for writers. Virgil, Leopardi, Eco (who died only in 2016).

There is even a street named after one of our own, an English poet: Milton. “Giovanni Milton”!

***

Giacomo Leopardi, that divine being, wrote the poem that Italian schoolchildren traditionally commit to memory: “L’infinito.” I myself memorized that bad boy a couple of years ago. I have refreshed it in recent days.

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I really like this color. I see it in Europe—in a number of countries. I don’t see it at home (though I may not be looking in the right places).

***

In a neighborhood well off the beaten track, a young Milanese is having a slice of pizza. She has French fries on top of that slice.

Well, I never …

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There is a chain of sandwich places here called “Panino Giusto”—“The Right Panino.” At home, we order “a panini.” In Italy, panini is plural, strictly. Two panini, one panino.

***

Earlier, I noted a difference between Italy now and Italy in my student days. There are many such differences (obviously).

As in other European cities, many, many service-industry workers in Milan are immigrants. I saw none of that, or little of it, in the 1980s.

Italy used to be known for big families—think of the traditional Sunday dinner, attended by scads of cousins.

For a long time now, Italy has been below “replacement level.”

Here in Milan, I buy a panino from a young woman whose parents must come from East Asia. She speaks in snappy, northern Italian—those familiar inflections. To see that face, paired with that speech—it is a new experience, for me.

***

I was thinking: Who are the greatest Italians in history? And let’s not count Rome. Let’s leave antiquity off the table.

The roster that comes to mind is Dante, Galileo, Verdi, and Garibaldi.

Incidentally, Galileo was not merely one of the greatest scientists in history (“merely”!). He stands as a shining example of conscience: of the refusal to surrender right for wrong.

I recite my roster to my friend Franco Debenedetti. He adds Manzoni, the writer and general cultural-political leader.

Franco Debenedetti is quite an Italian himself. Born in 1933, he is a businessman, a writer, a patron of the arts—many things.

When he was a boy in the war, and Holocaust, he took refuge in Switzerland. Two years ago, he wrote a memoir of this period: Due lingue, due vite (“Two Languages, Two Lives”).

We have dinner in his Milan apartment. I am sitting in front of a large Hockney—a painting by David Hockney, the British artist. The next day, I will read in the news that Hockney has died, at 88.

Would you like to see Franco at La Scala, the opera house that is virtually his living room?

***

Well, let’s look at Manzoni’s home too—one entrance of it. It houses the National Center of Manzonian Studies.

***

Who is this beautiful young woman? She is in front of her house—her family home—next to Manzoni’s. She is Cristina Trivulzio di Belgiojoso, a writer and aristocratic heroine of the Risorgimento (i.e., the Italian unification in the 19th century).

Brava, Cristina.

***

I have long marveled at the top of the Galleria—its roof. But don’t forget to look down. The floor is something too (and everything in between).

***

Pretty swanky store, for pinkos:

(Maybe I had better explain. We used to call leftists—those who were not quite commies—“pinkos.”)

Oh, I’ve barely begun. But maybe you have had enough for one day? I’ll see you soon for Part II. Thanks for reading (and subscribing). Grazie and arrivederci.

Democrats in Maine have nominated Graham Platner for the Senate. He is a deeply problematic character. Better that he get it together than that he offer himself for high office. Kevin D. Williamson made this point in an article, here.

As I see it, Democrats have given Republicans a tremendous gift in Platner. Republicans in politics and the media can talk of little else but him. For years, they have been carrying water for … deeply problematic characters. Their sense of relief—a change of script—is palpable.

When you give up the moral high ground, you give up a lot. And the Democrats of Maine have given Republicans nationwide a patch of moral high ground.

Now, it’s true: one senatorial nominee in one state is not the same as the president, the vice president, the attorney general, the defense secretary, the FBI director, the DHS secretary, the HHS secretary, and so on.

Then there are such Senate nominees as Herschel Walker and Ken Paxton.

But still …

When I made this point on social media, another tweeter responded,

It so happens that “Shut up, he’s it, get over it” is exactly what I heard from the Right in 2016 (and later). I said no then, and say it now.

“Binary choice!” they yelled at me. I remain deaf to it.

To be continued (alas) …

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***

Let us turn to Texas politics (speaking of “alas”). Paxton is the Republicans’ senatorial nominee, the Democrats’, James Talarico. Republicans are doing their best to paint Talarico as … a girlie man, to borrow a catchphrase of the late 1980s.

See what the governor of Texas did. He literally depicted Talarico as a girl.

I admire Greg Abbott for his personal courage. (He was paralyzed from the waist down when he was 26.) But this is a jerk move, to put it mildly.

Regular readers must be sick of hearing me say: We need the recovery of a proper sense of patriotism—as distinct from braying jingoism. And we need the recovery of a proper sense of manliness—as distinct from mindless machismo, or brutishness.

Maybe I could throw a little Scripture at you on Sunday morning?

“Now the man Moses was very meek, above all the men which were upon the face of the earth.”

“Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart ...”

“Meekness, temperance: against such there is no law.”

Whoa, enough of this crazy talk!

Hang on, this just in:

So, is he a “gay vegan pagan”? Or a lothario? Whatever is handy, I suppose.

***

Stick with matters—semi-sexual? For years, I’ve heard from Republicans, “They can’t even say what a woman is!” This is sometimes a fair charge.

And what is the equivalent on the other side? A few days ago, yet another Trump nominee refused to say who won the 2020 election.

They can’t even say it. (Or won’t.)

***

Friedrich Merz was stand-up in the Bundestag, the German parliament, the other day. (Merz is the country’s chancellor.) He was talking about Ukraine. “Ukraine has been defending its freedom for more than four years,” he said.

Then members of the AfD—the Alternative for Germany, the populist-Right party—started to laugh.

Said Merz, “That’s a telling sign, ladies and gentlemen. They laugh about it. They laugh at the fate of millions of people in Ukraine, and they travel to Moscow for their champagne receptions. Have a good trip. Bon voyage.”

To see it, go here, and to read an article about it, go here.

You know, the AfD may soon be in power, making Europe darker.

***

In related news:

***

As you may have seen, Pete Hegseth, our secretary of defense, spoke at the D-Day ceremony in France. He used the occasion to decry what he called the “invasion” of Europe by immigrants today.

You know what he did not mention (of course)? The invasion of a European country, Ukraine, by Putin’s Russia.

Will Saletan made this point here. A good point, and a painful point, at the heart of our era.

***

All right, an old issue—another one. For years and years, President Trump and his allies have said that elections they lose are “rigged.” Another play in the book is this: During the campaign, say that, if you lose the election, it will have been rigged.

There have been thousands of articles on this subject. I have written dozens of them. Today, I will be brief.

If you lie about election results—“Rigged!”—there are a lot of people who, in their innocence and gullibility, believe you. They may even commit violence as a result.

You yourself know better, of course. You know that, in lying, you’re jes’ playin’—just playing politics. But others do not know better and do not know you’re jes’ playin’. They take you seriously.

Therefore, our democracy is weakened.

Several days ago, the Speaker of the House was asked what evidence there was that the recent mayoral election in Los Angeles was rigged. He answered, “Some of these efforts are so diabolical and so far upstream, it is impossible to prove. But I think everybody knows instinctively, something is wrong here.”

I recall the title of a famous biography (1983)—a biography of Joe McCarthy: “A Conspiracy So Immense.”

(A Republican failed to make the run-off in the L.A. mayoral race. At the same time, a Republican made the run-off in the California gubernatorial race. Lazy Democrats, forgot to rig that one.)

***

Well, shoot. “Raimondo backs away from 2028 presidential run.” Gina Raimondo was governor of Rhode Island and then, under President Biden, commerce secretary. The article whose headline I’ve quoted is here.

“Look, I would like the job, I’m not going to lie,” said Raimondo. “But politics is—it’s in a crazy place right now, and so I’m just going to let it all unfold.”

She also said that her fellow Democrats had “gotten a little far from the meat-and-potatoes issues that matter to people in their day-to-day lives.”

“A little far” is a funny phrase. Anyway …

In 2023, I did a podcast with George F. Will. Let me quote from my write-up, which accompanied the podcast:

In recent weeks, Will has written about two former governors—one R and one D. The R is Doug Ducey, of Arizona. The D is Gina Raimondo, of Rhode Island. It is hard to imagine either one as a presidential candidate—because their parties’ electorates would not put up with them.

Ducey said that Trump lost Arizona in 2020, which he did. Raimondo stood up to public-employee unions. Big no-nos, in the respective parties.

A Ducey–Raimondo contest seems a lovely dream. And a little faraway …

***

You know the first sentence. Do you know its successor?

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away.

(Thoreau, Walden.)

***

“No man ever wished it longer.” That’s the way it has come down to us. Here is what Dr. Johnson wrote, precisely:

Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is. Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure. We read Milton for instruction, retire harassed and overburdened, and look elsewhere for recreation; we desert our master, and seek for companions.

Do you know about John Basinger? He has died at 92. And, as this obit tells you, he … memorized Paradise Lost. All twelve books.

And I thought I was doing pretty well to memorize Joan of Arc’s quatrain (18 words)!

Have a great day, my friends. Thank you for reading.

“Q&A,” by the way, is the name of my podcast. For an interview show, it is not an especially imaginative name, but it serves.

Professor Gage grew up outside Philadelphia. “When you were a girl,” I ask her, “did you read history like a fiend or did that come later?” She read “pretty widely,” she says. This reading included the trilogy by John Jakes about the Civil War—North and South. They were huge sellers, those books.

Beverly was a musician: violinist, pianist, conductor. In college, however, she gravitated to other interests. She went to Yale and then, for graduate school, to Columbia.

Can she name us a few of her favorite historians? Historians of the U.S., that is? She gives me two names: W. E. B. Du Bois (who, in addition to everything else he did, wrote a history of Reconstruction) and Richard Hofstadter. One thing those two had in common is: they could write like angels.

That counts, when it comes to engaging a reader …

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In 2022, Professor Gage published a biography of J. Edgar Hoover, G-Man. It won the Bancroft Prize, the top award in U.S. history. And the Pulitzer Prize and yet others.

I ask her a few questions about Hoover—including, “Was there anything good about him?” Well, he was “a believer in nonpartisan professional government service.” He was an “institutionalist.” He would not have liked the current FBI director.

Was Hoover guilty in the matter of Martin Luther King? Did he and the FBI treat the civil rights leader unfairly? Very much so, answers Professor Gage.

One more question, which is interesting in light of the FBI’s hounding of gays: Was Hoover himself gay? By all appearances, yes.

Professor Gage’s new book, This Land Is Your Land, takes its title from a famous song: Woody Guthrie’s number from 1940. The song was, in part, a response to Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.” Guthrie was a leftist, a supporter of Stalin’s Soviet Union.

His song is an interesting story, but suffice it to say, here and now: it is part of the American treasury. You know the words:

This land is your land, this land is my land,
From California to the New York Island,
From the Redwood Forest, to the Gulf Stream Waters.
This land was made for you and me.

The subtitle, remember, of Professor Gage’s book is “A Road Trip through U.S. History.” That is an American rite, and right, you could say: a road trip. I’ve always wanted to do the Maine-to-California thing. Never have. Beverly Gage has, two or three times.

In this new book, she starts in Revolutionary Philadelphia and winds up at Disneyland, in SoCal.

I tell her, “I think your book belongs in the category of civic education, which has been one of my causes in recent years.”

“Very much so,” she says. “I mean, it’s not civic education in the sense of saying, ‘There are three branches of government, and here’s how they work,’ but it’s civic education in that it prods people to go out and get to know their country.” (I have paraphrased.)

Last year, Yale formed a Committee on Trust in Higher Education. It delved into a number of issues: grade inflation, tuition prices, admission policies, political bias, etc. Professor Gage was a co-chairman of the committee. It issued its report in April.

We talk about this a bit. And I ask her, “If you were czar—if you could wave a wand—what would you do, to improve higher ed?” She would get costs down. And she would get laptops and the like out of the classroom (except where strictly necessary).

Maybe I have typed enough and should let you get on with hearing or watching our podcast. Beverly Gage is an excellent conversationalist and teacher.

Maybe your impression is different from mine, but I get the sense that American political campaigns are largely devoid of ideas. I hear little arguing over the size and scope of government. Little arguing over America’s role in the world.

No, it tends to be personalities, “vibes,” and memes. Our political culture has been badly degraded. This degradation is perhaps symbolized by the current look of the White House:

***

Linda Chavez made a wise observation the other day: “We are into a bread-and-circuses phase. But not so much bread,” given our economic challenges.

***

Have a look at this, if you would:

I am in the argument business. (At least that’s one of my businesses.) I must say, though, that if a person doesn’t see that this is wrong—in multiple respects—I don’t know what I would, or could, say to him.

Maybe that’s a bad admission, on my part …

***

For five-plus years, I have written a fair amount about January 6, and I’ll touch on it lightly today.

“The J6 Rioter Now Working at the Pentagon.” That is the heading over this piece from The Atlantic. The subheading is, “His hiring is part of a dangerous trend in the Trump administration.”

Yes. I will make a single point. Donald Trump was very clear in the 2024 campaign. He promised to pardon these people—all of them—and he hailed them, repeatedly, as patriots and heroes.

“We the People” voted with our eyes wide open. “Here, the people rule” (for better or worse).

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***

Did you catch wind of this?

Donald Trump’s Department of Justice has erased hundreds of press releases from its website that detailed the charges against January 6 Capitol rioters—information the DOJ deemed “partisan propaganda.”

I think of a term associated with the Soviet Union: airbrushing. Hope it fails.

***

For about ten years, I’ve had a theme—well, many, but I’m thinking of this one: “Young people must think this is normal. How could they not?”

They have never known politics outside the Trump era. If they were twelve when the Republicans first nominated Trump—the first of three times (so far)—they are 22 today.

Here is the president of the United States, pronouncing on a political opponent:

Politics doesn’t have to be this way. It really doesn’t. But is it reasonable to expect a young person to know that? Except in the realm of theory?

***

A couple of weeks ago, I was talking with a lady about her family—her grandparents and their generation in particular. “They had no money, but they had class,” she said. “They knew right from wrong.”

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***

Speaking of money: Once upon a time, our national debt and the federal budget deficit were a pretty big issue. We had a “tea party” movement, fired by this issue. Do you hear anything about the debt and deficit today?

Republicans control Washington: the House, the Senate, and, of course, the executive branch. During this period of “unitary control,” have they tackled the debt and deficit? Have they made a dent?

Do they even pay lip service?

This country is stuck with two major parties, and these parties are essentially statist.

Am I being cynical here? Hyperbolic? If so, only a little.

After the 2012 election, I interviewed Paul Ryan, who had been Mitt Romney’s running mate on the GOP ticket. He told me that he and Romney had been prepared to serve one term only, in order to accomplish hard and necessary things.

I would have liked to see that administration. I really would have.

***

This news report begins,

The Trump administration’s hesitancy in signing a major drone deal with Ukraine is slowing the U.S. military down in an area where it’s already trying to play catch-up.

Even as Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has urged Washington to make a deal, with talks between the two nations stretching back to at least September, the U.S. has so far refused to embrace Kyiv as a partner in its drone development.

The headline over the article says, “Trump drags feet on drone deal with Ukraine, mystifying experts.”

I am not in the least mystified. You?

***

Only one House Democrat joined the Republicans in voting to block aid to Ukraine, and sanctions on Russia. Can you guess who it was? Ilhan Omar, of Minnesota.

That’s just perfect.

***

The White House put out a little video, aimed at Republicans who have expressed concerns about the Iran war. Along with the video were these words:

To those negatively chirping: quiet. 🤫

It will all work out well in the end - it always does.

I was reminded of Ring Lardner’s classic line: “ ‘Shut up,’ he explained.”

***

This report, by Will Sommer, is really weird—but true to our time: “Inside MAGA’s Fake Gay Motorcycle War.” Apparently, the “influencers” have decided that Harley-Davidson is “woke” and, well, “gay.”

The things influencers know …

I could not help thinking of Tommy Thompson’s line. He was governor of Wisconsin, where Harley-Davidson is headquartered. “Wisconsin!” Thompson would say. “Where eagles soar and Harleys roar.” Sometimes he’d add “and Packers score.”

***

Is this the kind of thing a news network normally puts out? Well, this is a “new normal,” I suppose (a new normal that’s getting kind of long in the tooth, to be sure):

***

Behold what they have erected on Lincoln Center Plaza, here in New York. Reminds me of a TV show we had in the 1980s: Solid Gold—with the Solid Gold Dancers!

***

A confession: Once my Detroit Pistons lost in the second round of the NBA playoffs—the seventh game of that round, a nightmare night—I checked out of the playoffs. I was too bitter and angry to continue following them.

I am not yet mature enough for sports. Maybe someday.

But I must say, the young people around me are rooting so hard for the Knicks. I have caught their fever. Or rather, I so want them to be happy, and to get this championship.

The Knicks have not been NBA champions in … 53 years. It was 1973 (during Watergate, and more than a year before Nixon’s resignation).

***

Care for a little music? Here is a review of the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Semyon Bychkov. Their concert had a single work on it: the Bruckner Eighth. And here is a review of the soprano Lise Davidsen, in recital at Carnegie Hall with the pianist James Baillieu. Their program had a single composer on it: Franz Schubert.

The guy merits a night, or a hundred.

***

Robert Coles, the child psychiatrist, and multi-purpose writer, has died. For an engrossing obit in the New York Times, written by Douglas Martin, go here. I would like to paste an excerpt:

He told searing accounts illustrating elusive truths of a fast-changing society, beginning with the tale of Ruby Bridges, who as a 6-year-old walked through a screaming mob in 1960 as part of an effort to integrate a public school in New Orleans. . . .

The girl was threatened daily on her way to class. She was told her food was poisoned and she was kept isolated in a classroom without other students for a year.

Dr. Coles noticed that she seemed to be talking to the hostile white people, and asked her why. She said she was praying for them.

But why? “They need praying for,” the little girl said.

I so appreciate talking with you today, my friends. Thank you for reading. See you later.

Last month, I jotted a Copenhagen journal, which I published in two parts: here and here. It began with a few words about boarding—boarding at the airport in New York. Let me paste a paragraph:

The [gate] agent invites members of the military, past and present, to board first. This is a nice tip o’ the hat. A nice honoring. But I wonder: Does any serviceman or vet think it’s a little condescending, a little embarrassing, or a little unnecessary?

I invited readers of mine to give me their thoughts. Which they did. Today, I will publish a sampling of their responses. These responses are varied, and they include some interesting stories.

Here and now, let me thank all readers, for their responses.

Several were along the lines of this one:

I think it’s great—and speaks highly of us as a nation—that the invitation to board first is extended to servicemen and vets. If someone feels condescended to—which I can understand—he or she does not have to accept the invitation. But I appreciate that the option exists.

Another reader writes,

As an active-duty Coast Guard officer whose father and brother also serve, I can say that it’s nice to have a little “tip o’ the hat.” If I’m with my fiancée, though, I will wait with her so we can board together.

I’ll likely not see combat given my service and specialty, so I do feel a little unsettled about joining a combat vet in the queue. Everyone in the military sacrifices, some sacrifice more than others, some give all.

Another:

I have two active-duty sons: one a Marine pilot, the other a Navy pilot. While they are occasionally willing to accept the odd military discount for this or that admission to a museum, or the waiving of baggage fees, neither would dream of getting on a plane before other passengers because of his service. It just doesn’t fit with their concept of serving rather than being served—if that makes sense?

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Brace yourself (and I appreciate the candor of this reader, and others):

It’s condescending to the military. It infantilizes them. It puts them in a category with people “needing extra time to board” (which means the elderly, the handicapped, and so on) and “families traveling with small children.”

Also, it’s offensive to the rest of us. Why do they get special treatment? We pay their salaries and benefits. (The latter can last a lifetime.) Employment by one of the armed services doesn’t automatically represent a sacrifice or make you noble or heroic.

Some students are in law school because of a passion for the rule of law or a desire to do justice; others are there because they see it as a ticket to wealth. Likewise, some people join the military out of patriotism or a desire to serve, but others join because they have no better option.

Conscription hasn’t existed for our entire adult lifetimes, so no one has a gun to anyone’s head; the military is a career that people choose.

This boarding first is profoundly anti-egalitarian, smacking of nomenklatura-like privilege. I resent the practice deeply (as you may have gathered).

Says a reader,

I agree that singling out vets for special treatment can be embarrassing and unnecessary. I was a Supply Corps officer onboard a destroyer (1969–72), mostly off the coast of Vietnam. I am always happy to get my veteran’s discount, but I don’t need the “Thank you for your service.” I joined and served honorably and well, but that was 50-plus years ago, and it was just part of my duty as an American.

Many non-veterans have also served our country honorably and well—in all sorts of fields.

I’m going to let the tape run a little on this one—settle in:

I served in the Submarine Force from 1988–93. I was more favorably disposed toward receiving perks when I was active-duty than I am now, when I’ve been out for decades. A few examples come immediately to mind.

Once, I was in my dress-blue uniform attending a college friend’s wedding outside Detroit and ordered a meal at a fast-food restaurant. The staff gave me the meal for free. I didn’t feel too embarrassed about it. At the time, one of my motivations for being in the military was to be part of an elite group, a special fighting force, and getting that special consideration felt pretty nice.

During the Gulf War, I was stationed on a submarine undergoing repairs in San Diego, so I was in no way part of the action. I watched events unfold on CNN as everyone else did. But in that town at that time, parks and museums all offered free admission to active-duty military and their families, and again I didn’t blush much when presenting my military ID to take advantage of those things.

I definitely feel good about perks for today’s active-duty service members, particularly those with small children, given the demands on the family that military service almost always involves.

Being a veteran is a different story—it has been for me, at least. Perhaps I’d feel differently if my five years of service had involved loss of limb, or mental trauma from active-combat danger. But my submarine never fired a shot in anger, and while there are inherent risks to serving in a submerged environment packed with high-energy systems, I came through with all my fingers and toes.

So I blush a bit more these days when, for example, I wear a ballcap that clearly pegs me as a veteran and a store clerk says, “Thank you for your service.”

I don’t begrudge any special consideration for anyone else who served. I don’t know anyone else’s story, what he may have endured. I want us to have a well-run, well-funded Veterans Administration to support all those who need it.

But I can say for me and my time in the service, I got more out of it than America did. …

During my post-military career in the private sector, the company I worked for started to honor the veterans in our midst on November 11. I didn’t always “opt in” and divulge my status as a veteran. Sometimes I did, but I never felt perfectly at ease. As already stated, my service was quite country-club compared with the service of those for whom Armistice Day was originally created.

I’m not above taking a veteran’s perk. Having recently learned that the National Park Service offers free lifetime “America the Beautiful” passes to all of our parks, I jumped through the hoops to obtain one. But should this really be a perk? I have mixed feelings.

For one thing, my own tax dollars are at work. For another, I’m at a stage of life where I’m much more able to pay my own way—and a few others’—than when I was a young’un.

Final thought: My feelings about Social Security and Medicare largely mirror the thoughts above about veteran’s benefits. I’m just a few years away from being eligible for Medicare, and know that my health premiums will drop significantly then, even as I’m perfectly able to pay for private insurance. I find credible the analysis saying that I’m actuarially likely to get more out of these programs than I contributed to them over my lifetime, and I’d be A-OK with reforms that lowered benefits or means-tested recipients, raised required annual contributions, or some combination.

America owes me nothing—and I owe America quite a lot.

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One more response, from a reader:

The question of caps for veterans has come up in my family. I am a Vietnam veteran. I was assigned to a MACV advisory team in the Mekong Delta. It was a moderate-risk situation, somewhere between a rifleman in the jungle and a staffer in air-conditioned Long Binh. I think I did useful work, in the context of the time, for a cause that was both noble and unrealistic and very badly managed.

My wife and daughters have asked several times whether I want a cap with a unit logo and earned ribbons and medals. I have declined. I am proud of my service, and offer respectful regards to wearers, but don’t see the need to be public about it.

To all active-duty military and veterans: thank you for your service. Now, that is a phrase, a sentence, about which many people feel ambivalent.

In 2017, I asked Ash Carter about it. We were doing a podcast. Carter had worked in military affairs for a long time, from Reagan through Obama. His last position was secretary of defense.

About “Thank you for your service,” he said, “If you mean it, you should say it.” He further said,

I’m so glad that I wasn’t secretary of defense during the Vietnam period, because it would have broken my heart to see our troops treated the way they were, as though they were decision-makers. I understand a lot of people didn’t want to be in that war—and, by the way, a lot of the troops didn’t want to be in that war—but they had done their duty, and they did not deserve to be disrespected when they came home, and they were.

In a column two years ago, I wrote,

There are all sorts of people one might thank for their service: teachers, cops, nurses, clergymen, moms, dads. Entrepreneurs. (No one ever thinks of them. But without them, our lives would be so much poorer.)

Thanking—err on the side of too much, I would say.

So, thanks to one and all.

President Trump was commenting on his cabinet, with Marco Rubio to his right and Pete Hegseth to his left. “Secretary of war, Pete Hegseth,” he said. “Central Casting. He loves war.” Then he gave Hegseth a couple of playful pats, while Hegseth grinned.

Hegseth is, in fact, the secretary of defense, not the secretary of war, no matter what Trump and his administration assert.

Then there is “Central Casting.” Trump loves to use this phrase. He uses it about the Chinese dictator, Xi Jinping, repeatedly. (I touched on this in an article last week, here.)

In Trump’s eyes, Hegseth, a onetime Fox News host, looks the part—looks like a defense secretary. That is in the eye of the beholder, I suppose.

But then there is “He loves war.” Can you think of another defense secretary—almost another human being—who would fail to object to this?

The words “He loves war” made me think immediately of “I hate war.” Those words are associated with Franklin D. Roosevelt.

In August 1936, he spoke at Chautauqua, saying,

I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen men coughing out their gassed lungs. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed. I have seen 200 limping, exhausted men come out of line—the survivors of a regiment of 1,000 that went forward 48 hours before. I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war.

(During World War I, FDR was the assistant secretary of the Navy. In the summer of 1918, he went to France, where he visited the front lines.)

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I also think of George C. Marshall: chief of staff of the Army, secretary of state, and secretary of defense. In 1953, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, chiefly for the Marshall Plan, which he was the only one not to call it. He called it by its formal name, the “European Recovery Program.”

In his Nobel lecture, Marshall said,

There has been considerable comment over the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to a soldier. I am afraid this does not seem as remarkable to me as it quite evidently appears to others.

I know a great deal of the horrors and tragedies of war. Today, as chairman of the American Battle Monuments Commission, it is my duty to supervise the construction and maintenance of military cemeteries in many countries overseas, particularly in Western Europe. The cost of war in human lives is constantly spread before me, written neatly in many ledgers whose columns are gravestones.

I am deeply moved to find some means or method of avoiding another calamity of war. Almost daily I hear from the wives, or mothers, or families, of the fallen. The tragedy of the aftermath is almost constantly before me.

While researching a history of the Nobel Peace Prize, I learned a fair amount about Marshall. The kind of man you want in positions of authority.

***

The Ukrainians are fighting for their lives, making the ultimate sacrifices. They are fighting for their country, their independence, their freedom. They ought to have the admiration of the whole world, certainly of Americans.

Every morning, I wake up to news such as this: “Russia launches a massive drone and missile strike on Ukraine, leaving 17 dead and nearly 100 injured.” (For the article in question, go here.)

It is possible to become numb to such news. “Russia kills 17.” “The temperature today will reach 81, with a low of 64.” Numbness should be resisted. It is an aid to the aggressor.

***

Here was some good news, from my point of view:

Defying Republican leaders, the House voted on Wednesday to take up a bill to impose sweeping new sanctions on Russia and provide additional aid to Ukraine, after a bloc of G.O.P. defectors joined Democrats in an effort to ratchet up pressure on Moscow more than four years into the war.

(Article here.)

Six Republicans joined every Democrat to help Ukraine. That made the vote 218 to 204. Bless those six: the few, the proud …

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I was a Republican once. For many years, in fact (until May 2016). If you had told me, “Putin’s Russia will invade an ally of ours, Ukraine, and one of our major parties will refuse to support Ukraine,” I would have bet on the Democrats, for sure.

The world can be awfully tricky.

I wish to call the roll—the roll of those six Republicans who joined the Democrats in support of Ukraine: Don Bacon (Neb.), Brian Fitzpatrick (Pa.), Mike Lawler (N.Y.), Michael McCaul (Texas), Max Miller (Ohio), and Joe Wilson (S.C.).

In music, we have a phrase: “Les Six,” or “The Six.” (These were a group of composers in the early 20th century based in Paris.) We have another phrase: the “Mighty Handful.” (These were Russian composers in the 19th century.)

Again, bless those Republican six, that mighty handful.

***

Did you happen to see this? You are looking at a post from Kirill Dmitriev, who is Putin’s “peace envoy” (and also his money man). (On the other side, “our” side, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are the “peace envoys” and money men.)

The AfD, as you know, is the far-right party in Germany, a favorite of Vice President JD Vance and other such Americans.

Anyway, that post:

“Looking forward to building a great FUTURE together.” Have we seen such a German-Russian alliance before? Lovers of freedom will oppose both the AfD and Putin with all their might.

***

This has not been a very fun column, my friends. I have lots of lighter items—humorous items, feel-good items. I will save them.

There has been a great deal written about the firings at 60 Minutes. I will not say much about them, here and now. But there is one point I will not refrain from making. It pertains to Scott Pelley, in particular.

People who stick up for their fired colleagues are very, very rare. This is understandable. People are worried about their own jobs, and the fired are like lepers. No one wants to catch what they have. People even have trouble looking the fired in the eye.

I say: bless the stickers-up.

Later on.

Before I get into the political muck, maybe we could have a line of poetry, appropriate to the day—and week and month? “And what is so rare as a day in June?” Yes, what a month. Stellar, at least in the places where I have lived.

The line opens a poem by James Russell Lowell, a 19th-century American. He was a man of parts: our ambassador to Spain and then to the United Kingdom, for example.

***

Before we get to the political muck—well, maybe we can touch on Brazil’s political muck. It is a sticky situation indeed. Brazil is an important country with an important democracy—a democracy that is precarious, caught in a pincer of extremes.

Onward and Upward has become a magazine, in a sense. I have published a piece by someone else—by Andre Spritzer, a Brazilian intellectual (political scientist, computer scientist) who keeps a close eye on the politics of his country. His piece is called “The Agony of Brazil: A democracy battered from left and right.” It gives us the picture, in broad strokes and fine.

Needless to say, I recommend it. That piece is here.

Okay, now to the homefront …

***

Texans have long been among my favorite people, and Texas Republicans, in particular. I knew a lot of Bushies, back when. And Phil Gramm was one of my favorite politicians.

(He was born, raised, and educated in Georgia, but he had his career in Texas—and Washington, D.C., of course.)

Last week, Texas Republicans decided they would not renominate John Cornyn for the Senate. Instead, they would nominate—well, frankly, a picture of degeneracy. A picture of corruption, deceit, demagoguery …

“Here, the people rule.” That is an axiom in a democracy. We say who we are, by our votes. We certainly say what we value.

To some of us, recent years have been both illuminating and heartbreaking. I think of a phrase: “sadder but wiser.”

My critics sometimes say, “Jay blames the people!” I would not put it that way. I respect people enough to hold them responsible for the choices they make. I acknowledge their agency.

“Vox populi, vox Dei”? No. I think that is one of the most misguided (and blasphemous) notions ever conceived.

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***

All of my life, I’ve had to look up the difference between “blasphemy” and “sacrilege.” Maybe I’ll get it locked in the noggin someday.

***

The Democrats are on the verge of nominating a doozy in Maine—a doozy for Senate. It starts with a Nazi tattoo. And goes downhill from there?

It is not too late to nominate someone else. But if they go through with this fellow—I hope he gets flattened in the general.

***

Young people would be shocked, I think, to learn how much emphasis Republicans and conservatives placed on character. This was years ago, I mean.

Character in office. Character in society. Personal responsibility. All that jazz.

Maybe it was hypocritical—but at least it paid tribute to virtue (to borrow an old line).

***

Back to Texas. I don’t know about you, but I don’t hear Republicans putting much effort into defending their nominee. Arguing for him. Instead, they are demonizing his opponent, painting him as “a gay vegan pagan.”

Will that fly? Will that be enough to win in Texas? I’d bet so.

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Again, young people might be shocked: Republicans once prided themselves on being “the party of ideas.” Let me walk down Memory Lane a little.

In 1980, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D., N.Y.) made a widely quoted statement: “Of a sudden, the GOP has become a party of ideas.”

Years later, I took a friend of mine, Howard Kissel, a well-known theater and music critic in New York, to a gathering at Bill Buckley’s. Afterward, he said, “It was so strange to attend something where everyone was talking about ideas. It was wonderful.”

***

On social media the other day, someone reacted to a statement of mine by saying, “The Buckleyites just won’t die off soon enough.”

I have terrible news for this fellow: I know some Buckley conservatives in their twenties. Not an army—but a decent platoon, for sure. Maybe even a company.

***

Every moment of every day, the snorters snort, the dunkers dunk, and the owners own. Bill (Buckley) referred to this as “attitudinizing.” He warned against it, arguing instead for recta ratio, or “right reason”—with flair, if possible.

(He even titled a collection of his “Right Reason.” It came out when I was in college, and I inhaled it.)

How much of what you and I are consuming, or producing, is “attitudinizing” and how much is something more substantial and edifying? I have thought about this lately—and by “lately,” I mean for the last many years …

***

Classically, socialists were thought of as utopian whereas conservatives were realistic—grasping the world as it is.

Last week, Stephen Miller, the presidential aide, said, “The American people understand the hell that we inherited and the extraordinary paradise that President Trump is building.”

I thought of Josh Muravchik, who in 2002 published an excellent book: Heaven on Earth: The Rise, Fall, and Afterlife of Socialism.

***

Want a little music? Music mixed with politics? I was thinking about how to explain the sudden shifts of certain media figures. This brought to mind the opening of The Music Man, where salesmen are conversing on a train.

“How far you going, friend?” says one. Harold Hill replies, “Wherever the people are as green as the money—friend.”

Yet “Professor” Hill went straight …

***

Okay, more music—without con men? (Well, there may be a few.) For my “New York chronicle,” published in the June New Criterion, go here.

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June is the month of Father’s Day, not Mother’s Day, but I must share with you a sign, or billboard—almost an artwork—from New York:

Hear, hear. Bless you all. Thanks for your subscriptions. Talk to you later.

Dear readers: Today, Onward and Upward publishes its first guest post, although “post” is not the best word. It is a comprehensive essay on an important topic by an informed and judicious analyst.

Former president Jair Bolsonaro may be under house arrest for plotting a coup d’état, but Brazil’s democracy is not yet out of the woods.

In 2018, Jair Bolsonaro—a far-right congressman and former Army captain long regarded as a joke—was elected president on a wave of anti-establishment sentiment unleashed by the combination of a major corruption scandal and the deepest economic crisis in Brazilian history, both closely associated with more than a decade of Workers’ Party (PT) rule. The perfect storm engulfed the entire political establishment, but it hit the PT especially hard, culminating in the impeachment of then-president Dilma Rousseff—the handpicked successor of popular former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva—and the arrest of Lula himself.

Bolsonaro’s administration was a disaster. He governed in permanent confrontation, assembled a cabinet of military officers and far-right ideologues, and engaged in corruption himself. Instinctively contrarian and prone to mimic Donald Trump—whom he idolized—he sabotaged public-health measures during the pandemic and worked to erode electoral legitimacy by insisting that Brazil’s electronic voting machines were rigged. He also waged war on the press and built a parallel information ecosystem to spread propaganda and inflame his followers.

To stave off impeachment, Bolsonaro installed a friendly Prosecutor General and struck a deal with those he once demonized: the Big Center, i.e., the alphabet soup of pragmatic, right-of-center, pork-loving parties that dominate Brazil’s political landscape, and the legislature in particular. By giving it the keys to the government—and most of the federal budget—he helped further swing the balance of power toward Congress, essentially outsourcing the administration while staging motorbike rallies and spending weekends on jet skis. With Congress coopted by Bolsonaro, the Supreme Court took it upon itself to curb the president’s excesses, becoming, along with the press, the primary object of his ire.

The Court took a two-pronged approach. First, it engaged in course correction.

One of the factors that led to the rise of Bolsonaro was Operation Car Wash, a sweeping anti-corruption probe that uncovered a kickback scheme involving state-owned oil company Petrobras and most major construction firms during the Lula and Rousseff years. Hugely popular, the operation turned the federal judge who oversaw it, Sérgio Moro, into a national hero and implicated not only the PT but politicians across the spectrum, destabilizing the entire party system.

Yet the probe’s methods were controversial from the start: it relied heavily on aggressive plea bargains, strategic leaks, and the extensive use of pre‑trial detentions—tactics critics argued stretched the limits of due process. Even so, the Supreme Court had ratified most of its actions. Only later, when evidence emerged that the operation had become politicized and that there had been improper coordination between Judge Moro and prosecutors, did the Court reverse course, overturning convictions and revising its own legal interpretations.

Many observers praised the Court for finally addressing problems they had highlighted for years. Others—including some who had supported the reversal in principle—criticized it for throwing the baby out with the bathwater, arguing that invalidating critical evidence wiped out major convictions and erased billions in fines. A few critics went even further, accusing the Court of political bias. And, indeed, the Court’s shift was as legal as it was political: its most consequential effect was restoring Lula’s freedom and political rights at a moment when he was widely regarded as the only figure popular enough to stop Bolsonaro from winning reelection in 2022.

That was the first prong: the course correction. The second was the Court’s adoption of a “militant democracy” stance—the idea that democratic institutions may take exceptional measures to defend themselves against actors who seek to use democratic freedoms to erode democracy from within. In practice, this meant the Court assumed an unusually proactive role in policing threats to the constitutional order.

The clearest example was a broad “Fake News Inquiry” the Court opened to investigate coordinated disinformation campaigns and intimidation efforts aimed at undermining the electoral system. By launching the inquiry on its own initiative—bypassing the usual prosecutorial channels—the Court granted itself unusually wide investigative authority. Under this mandate, it authorized sweeping measures, from search warrants and social‑media restrictions to preventive arrests. Supporters saw these actions as necessary to contain organized attacks on democratic institutions; critics argued they pushed the boundaries of judicial authority and risked conflating the defense of democracy with judicial overreach.

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In 2022, Bolsonaro lost to Lula by a sliver. His supporters reacted with outrage and disbelief, blocking roads and demanding military intervention. The movement’s anger exploded on January 8, 2023—one week after Lula was sworn in—when thousands of protesters who had spent months camped outside barracks stormed Brasília and wrecked Congress, the presidential palace, and the Supreme Court.

Investigators later uncovered a full-fledged coup attempt involving draft decrees, pressure on military commanders, and operational planning aimed at reversing the vote and even assassinating figures such as Lula and Supreme Court justices. Although many legal experts and media outlets supported the convictions, they also criticized aspects of the trial as overly politicized or procedurally irregular.

Still, the evidence against Bolsonaro and his aides was overwhelming. They were ultimately convicted for their role in the plot, and Bolsonaro is now serving his sentence under house arrest.

Democratic normalcy, however, did not return.

The movement that lifted Bolsonaro to the presidency lives on: a coalition of cultural conservatives, evangelicals, and anti-establishment voters. We are now in another election year, and Lula is running again—it would be his fourth term. The first round of voting will take place on October 4, and if a two-candidate runoff is needed, that will be on October 25.

The cult of personality around Bolsonaro is strong enough to give his son Flávio, a senator and his anointed political heir, a commanding advantage over rivals in the same lane, making him the clear favorite to secure a spot in the runoff. Until recently, most polls had him running essentially neck and neck with Lula, with some even showing him narrowly ahead in the second round.

As has been the case since Bolsonaro’s rise, the few remaining centrists tried to field a more moderate, “Third Way” candidate to break the polarization between the PT and the far right. With no significant party of their own, they hoped to do this through the PSD (Social Democratic Party), one of the largest parties of the Big Center. But Gilberto Kassab, the PSD’s boss, had other plans.

Despite pressure from the centrists—including prominent business figures and the mainstream economists who helped stabilize Brazil’s economy in the 1990s during Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s administration—Kassab chose the conservative Ronaldo Caiado over a more liberal name, with Kassab himself expected to take the running-mate slot. With an increasingly conservative electorate, a right-leaning candidate better positions the PSD to maximize its seats in Congress, where the balance of power currently lies. By weakening Flávio, this move also helps Lula, keeping open a path for Kassab to remain in government—his party currently holds three ministries—into a possible fourth Lula term.

This leaves Lula facing a divided Right: Flávio Bolsonaro remains the clear favorite, while Caiado—who has so far failed to gain traction—and other minor candidates compete for space in the same anti-PT lane. They differ in style but converge on fiercely anti‑PT rhetoric and support for amnesty for Bolsonaro and the January 8 rioters. Even though the election is likely to hinge on the centrist vote, for the first time there will be no centrist candidate even in the first round. The result may thus depend less on enthusiasm than on which side centrist voters dislike more—hardly ideal for Lula, whose comeback has stirred little passion of its own.

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Lula’s victory in 2022 was always more a rejection of Bolsonaro than an embrace of his return—and his government has underdelivered. His appeal relies on nostalgia and the mythology surrounding his persona, but many voters are too young to remember his first terms, and his class-struggle language resonates less with today’s workers, who are far removed from his old unionized base. Despite having campaigned at the head of a broad pro-democracy coalition, he sidelined centrists from his sprawling cabinet, handing secondary ministries to the Big Center while reserving the core for the PT. The government has often seemed adrift, rehashing old ideas, wasting energy on infighting, and picking losing political battles, while doubling down on the PT’s old spending-heavy instincts and turning a delicate inherited economic situation into a looming fiscal crisis. Congress has worsened the picture through irresponsible lawmaking, and the Supreme Court through corporatist rulings that protect judicial earnings above constitutional limits.

Lula’s weakness was further underlined in late April, when the Senate rejected his most recent Supreme Court nominee—the first such defeat in more than a century, and a humiliating rebuke for a president who once dominated congressional politics—and Congress overrode his veto of a bill reducing penalties for Bolsonaro and others convicted over the coup plot and January 8 attacks.

The government has blamed its unpopularity on poor communication—and it has indeed been poor—but no amount of spin can make a bad package look good. The government has also been rolling out voter-friendly measures—from renewed consumer-debt relief and farmer-debt renegotiation to labor proposals such as reducing the workweek from six days to five—in an effort to make voters feel material improvement before October. But not even populist policies have yet produced the intended boost: instead of the promised beer and picanha, Brazilians have found themselves indebted and paying more for groceries.

The government’s position was further complicated by the tacit alliance it forged with the Supreme Court against Bolsonaro. Even after Lula’s reelection and Bolsonaro’s conviction, imprisonment, and subsequent placement under house arrest, the militant-democracy genie the Court let out of the bottle never went back in. Instead of exercising self-restraint, the Court has increasingly used its powers against perceived adversaries and to shield itself from scrutiny, even as it finds itself at the center of Brazil’s latest corruption scandal.

Liquidated in 2025 after fraudulent, non-existent loan portfolios came to light, Banco Master has become a loose cannon in Brazilian politics, at the center of a multibillion-real banking scandal. Its owner, Daniel Vorcaro, currently in pretrial detention, cultivated ties across all branches of government and is negotiating a potentially explosive plea deal. At least two Supreme Court justices are seriously implicated, damaging the Court’s legitimacy and putting impeachment of justices at the top of the opposition’s agenda. The bank’s connections cut across the political class, reaching figures such as Lula’s chief of staff, the recently resigned justice minister (himself a former Supreme Court justice), congressional leaders, and Ciro Nogueira, Bolsonaro’s former chief of staff and a Big Center boss who had been floated as a possible Flávio running mate.

The scandal has also reached Flávio himself, raising questions about his electoral viability. The Intercept reported that he had asked Vorcaro for money tied to Dark Horse, an English-language biopic about his father starring Jim Caviezel. Leaked WhatsApp audio later showed him personally pressing Vorcaro for the money after he had denied ties to the banker. Flávio denies wrongdoing and says the relationship was limited to a private investment deal, but he was forced to backtrack after acknowledging that he had visited Vorcaro at home while the banker was under electronic monitoring following his initial arrest.

Press reports based on the Federal Police investigation say Vorcaro was the project’s main financier, with around R$61 million routed to a Texas-based investment fund linked to associates of Flávio’s brother, former congressman Eduardo Bolsonaro. Investigators are reportedly examining whether the money was actually used for the production of the film—one of the most expensive Brazilian film projects ever—or diverted to support Eduardo’s self-exile in the United States. From there, Eduardo used his connections in the MAGA world to lobby for sanctions against Brazilian authorities as part of a pressure campaign to free his father—an effort that became entangled with Trump’s tariffs against Brazil.

The first major poll after the revelations showed Lula opening a clear lead over Flávio, while the episode rattled allies and revived talk on the right of alternatives to his candidacy. Whether the damage lasts is another question: if the news cycle moves on, voters may yet forget.

Banco Master is not the only corruption scandal. A parallel scheme involving the country’s pension system is also swallowing Brazil’s powerful and may even reach one of Lula’s sons. With so many interests converging, Brazil’s political class is moving to hobble investigations: congressmen turn inquiry committees into clown shows, the Prosecutor General looks the other way, and the Supreme Court uses its self-assigned powers to shield itself and its allies.

As the incumbent, Lula bears much of the political burden for the current disarray—from the corruption scandals and a lack of trust in institutions to everyday worries such as affordability and public safety. Even if he is not fully responsible, Lula is hardly an innocent bystander. Bolsonaro’s contempt for democratic restraints is cruder and more openly authoritarian—an acute threat that culminated in a coup attempt and required an immediate institutional response. Lula’s is softer, but real: a chronic condition that Brazil’s institutions have long had to manage.

Far from the democratic standard-bearer he likes to present himself as, Lula has always treated institutions less as neutral constraints than as terrain to be occupied, bent, and negotiated around—through patronage, dealmaking, and corruption that helped sustain a broad congressional coalition the PT could not hold together on ideology or policy alone. His indulgence toward regimes he perceives as leftist or anti-imperialist such as Russia, China, Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela underscores how selective his democratic language can be. That does not make him equivalent to Bolsonaro. But it does mean the 2026 election is not shaping up as a clean contest between an anti-democratic camp and a democratic one.

For all the drama, the deeper problem in Brazil is that its crisis is no longer confined to one faction or one institution. The country enters the 2026 election with a compromised, unbalanced, and discredited political establishment and a society that is still deeply polarized after years of crises, scandals, and radicalization. What is at stake is not merely who wins but whether Brazil can begin to recover faith both in democracy and in the institutions meant to uphold it, along with a shared sense that law is a constraint on power rather than just another weapon in the hands of whoever happens to wield it.

Andre Spritzer is a political scientist, computer scientist, and writer working at the intersection of politics, data visualization, and journalism. He holds a BSc in politics and international relations and a PhD in computer science, specializing in data visualization and human–computer interaction. His academic work has appeared in a variety of international journals, and his articles on Brazilian and international politics have appeared throughout Brazil.

Yesterday, I mentioned that Grand Rapids is known as “Furniture City.” It has been a seat of furniture manufacture since the mid-1800s. (I mean no pun on the word “seat,” believe it or not. It just came out.)

Grand Rapids has made a lot of things, over the years.

Around town, there are plenty of factories, some converted to other uses. (Most of them?) My eye catches “The American Box Board Company.” Those are the words at the top of the building.

What’s going on there now? This:

Bet they’re nice, too.

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In another neighborhood, I see kids on a basketball court, playing soccer. (Nets have been set up for the purpose.) Makes me kind of sad. I’m not anti-soccer. It’s just that I have long seen it … encroaching, I want to say.

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An attractive sign, I think. I like the colors and the font.

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I like this, too: the name “McInerney,” the ampersand, the “Co.” …

(The name makes me think of Jay McInerney, the author of Bright Lights, Big City, which was a huge hit when it came out in 1984.)

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***

Grand Rapids has an Amtrak station named after Vern Ehlers—Vernon J. Ehlers, who represented this district in Congress from 1993 to 2011. Do you know he was a physicist? I mean, a real physicist, a nuclear physicist, with a Ph.D. from Berkeley?

No disrespect to politics—which is very important in life—but I can’t help thinking this is a bit of a comedown …

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A handsome old building, as I see it:

According to the relevant website, this is “Michigan’s oldest community foundation,” established in 1922.

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There are many street people in this city, asking for money. Some people are in obvious and wretched need. Others are … more professional, shall we say? They are organized, too. An informed source tells me that some people work in shifts, at various intersections. A daily schedule is made.

There is even a guy who makes signs for people to hold. He charges for these signs, of course. “… the labourer is worthy of his hire.”

For “professional homelessness,” I feel a little contempt, mixed with pity. But let me say again: in this city, as in others, there is obvious and wretched need.

***

My hotel—motel, rather—is not the Ritz-Carlton. I think of an old phrase: “no-tell motel.” You would not be shocked, shocked to find that prostitution and drug-dealing were going on here.

Maybe I could show you one thing: a box, like a newspaper box, outside the motel lobby, containing Naloxone, free of charge.

Naloxone, a Google search tells me, is “a life-saving medication that rapidly reverses an opioid overdose.”

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Below is a picture of another motel. I love the phrase “A-OK.” Now and then, I’ll text someone, saying, “How’re you doin’? A-OK?” Well, this is the A-OK Motel. Whether it’s A-OK, I can’t tell you, but I certainly like the name.

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On the campus of Grand Valley State University is a statue of Noahquageshik, otherwise known as “Chief Noonday.” He was a leader of the Ottawa in this area, and his dates are something like 1770 to 1840. (When I think of 1770 as a birth year, I think of Beethoven.)

The sculptor is Antonio Tobias Mendez, whose dad, by the way, was Tony Mendez, the CIA officer who, when he retired, wrote several memoirs.

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Seriously, this is something to look out for. These guys—the males—will dive-bomb the hell out of you, if they sense you are encroaching …

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I thought this was a moving slogan (one I have seen before): “A hand up, not a handout.”

The website tells us,

Exodus Place is a non-profit organization in Grand Rapids, MI, dedicated to helping men transition out of homelessness through housing, life-skills training, and rehabilitation programs. Our mission is to provide the support needed for men to regain independence and achieve long-term stability.

A blessed mission.

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Here is an ad for an injury law firm. Is it reflective of today’s spirit or what? The raised fist and all that …

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I pass a church—a Spanish-language church—called “Maranatha.” This is from the Aramaic: “Our Lord, come!”

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Back to that (flea-bitten, woebegone) motel of mine. I talk to one of the clerks. It is a moving conversation. I’ll paraphrase him:

I’ve been divorced twice. Wives cheated on me. I keep going, one day at a time. I don’t give up. I take each day as it comes. I thank God, and I feel blessed to be alive.

You know what my motto is? It comes from The Fast and the Furious [a 2001 movie]. The guy says, “I live my life a quarter mile at a time.” That’s what I do.

I’m glad to be alive, and I thank God.

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Just outside Grand Rapids—part of Greater Grand Rapids—is the town of Wyoming. The city of Wyoming. It has 76,500 people. Heck, the state of Wyoming has just 589,000 people.

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I like the slogan of The Breakfast House (a restaurant): “Eat well. Sip slow. Smile often.”

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I get into an Uber, whose steering wheel is very colorful. Unusually colorful. The driver explains: “It is the colors of the flag of my country.” I naturally ask him what country he comes from. The answer: South Sudan.

In my time, I’ve talked to a number of Lost Boys. Maybe I could supply a quick definition, from Wikipedia:

The Lost Boys of Sudan refers to a group of over 20,000 boys of the Nuer and Dinka ethnic groups who were displaced or orphaned during the Second Sudanese Civil War (1983–2005). Two million were killed and others were severely affected by the conflict. …

The boys embarked on treacherous journeys to refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya where thousands were sheltered for several years. Some of the Lost Boys were offered shelter and residence in the United States through official resettlement programs.

My driver is, in fact, a Lost Boy. Or a found boy, as I say to him, getting a warm, delighted affirmation in return.

He walked for about a month, into Ethiopia. I ask him, “Did you have shoes?” He gives me a kind of pitying look. “Shoes? No, we barely had any clothes. Just a kind of shorts.”

The group had little water and was very thirsty—dehydrated. They walked through the night, when the temperatures were down and they might have less need of water.

He says that he has been in Grand Rapids for 20 years. “You don’t look old enough to have been here for 20 years!” I tell him. He looks like he’s in his early thirties. “Oh, no,” he says. “I’m in my forties, or maybe even 50, or 51.” He does not know his birth year. Few must be the Lost Boys who do.

For all these 20 years, he has worked at a packaging company, and he is now in charge of his division. On the weekends, he drives Uber. He tells me, “When I was in my country, I could not imagine that I would ever even touch the steering wheel of a car. And now I drive for work.”

En route to my destination, we pass the college that he attended—a community college. “I went to college!” he says, wondering at the miracle of it all.

His gratitude is great.

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Well, here’s a bit of a jumble: a Dominican restaurant with a French name:

(The “petite,” by the way, should be “petit,” to match the masculinity of “chateau”—which should be “château.”)

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Evening at Reeds Lake. A lovely setting, but those damn mosquitos …

Thank you for joining me, Grand Rapidians, Michiganders, and even foreigners. Talk to you again soon.

“If you ain’t Dutch, you ain’t much.” That is an old slogan here in West Michigan. Notice that I’ve said “West Michigan,” not “western Michigan.” This part of the world is like a state unto itself, or a state within a state.

And Dutchmen predominate: tall, civic-minded, and prosperous. (I generalize.)

The capital of West Michigan is Grand Rapids, not Holland—a town 30 miles southwest of GR. (We Michiganders often refer to Grand Rapids as “GR,” and to East Grand Rapids, a swanky part of the city, as “EGR.”)

In 2018, I did a journal from Holland: here. (Not to be confused with the journals I’ve done from the Netherlands, across the pond.) (Not Lake Michigan.)

The most famous native son of Grand Rapids is Gerald R. Ford. He was not Dutch.

Neither was he a native son, though he grew up in Grand Rapids and represented the district in Congress. He was born in Omaha, Nebraska, as Leslie Lynch King Jr. (Ford is something of a Horatio Alger story. We don’t have time to get into it, but it’s interesting.)

Another famous native son of Grand Rapids is Arthur Vandenberg—a true native son. He was born in the city in 1884 and died in the city in 1951. From 1928 until his death, he was a U.S. senator, and a key one.

In 2017, Hendrik Meijer published a biography: Arthur Vandenberg: The Man in the Middle of the American Century. I reviewed this engrossing book here.

Hank Meijer (as the author is known) has a side job—a gig apart from his researching and writing. He is head of the family store, founded by his grandfather. To us Michiganders, Meijer outlets are part of daily life, part of the furniture.

Speaking of furniture, Grand Rapids has long been known as “Furniture City,” but we’ll get into that later.

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When you fly into GR, you fly into Gerald R. Ford International Airport. The airport was renamed for Ford in 1999, about 23 years after his presidency. As you may have seen, the Palm Beach airport has been renamed for Donald Trump. Republicans in Florida—the governor and others—have seen to that.

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There is a scandal attached (if renaming an airport for an incumbent president is not problematic enough). I will quote from the Miami Herald:

Palm Beach County commissioners approved a trademark deal with one of Donald Trump’s family companies to rename the county’s airport after the president …

The agreement gives Trump extra power over how his name is used in the airport rebranding, including giving him veto power over how his image and biographical information is used in marketing materials. It also requires airport stores to source airport-branded merchandise from retailers Trump’s companies choose.

And so on. (For the full article, go here.)

You may be familiar with one of President Ford’s vetoes, in 1975:

I have today vetoed H.R. 11897, a bill which would name the United States Courthouse and Federal Office Building in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the “President Gerald R. Ford Federal Office Building.”

Although I appreciate the honor expressed by the Congress in enacting this legislation, I intend to continue the policy of past Administrations that the executive branch not endorse the naming of Federal office buildings. Generally, the executive branch has deferred to the desires of the Congress on such matters.

However, I know of no Federal office buildings that have been named for a President while still in office. This legislation might begin a precedent I believe it best not to establish.

The proposed naming of this facility for me in my home community is a great honor, and one for which I am deeply grateful; however, for the reasons I have assigned above I feel I cannot sign H.R. 11897.

Autres temps, autres mœurs. Better ones, too.

***

Outside of the Grand Rapids airport—Ford Airport—there is a designated smoking area. I find this interesting. We have gone from (1) you can smoke anywhere, including on airplanes, to (2) we have a smoking section on the airplane, to (3) you have to smoke outside, to (4) you can’t smoke outside, except in a designated area.

I know I’ve skipped a step or two.

Is it good, this progression? I think so. There is the question of personal liberty: the right to smoke. But then there is the question of the effect of your smoking on others.

Cigarette-smoking has been thoroughly stigmatized in our country and has been dying out for a long time. But there are always attachments, vices, and addictions waiting to take over.

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Grand Rapids, and its environs, has a Plaster Creek. Not a very attractive name, right? (Not a very attractive creek either, from what I can see.) I look up the origin of the name: the creek has a large deposit of gypsum at its mouth.

And plaster is made from gypsum …

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You have heard, over and over, about the “nature-vs.-nurture debate.” I think Flowerland has a wonderful slogan here:

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Ah, the sister cities. (A fine old tradition, I think. A little quaint, maybe—but that is no sin.) How many of these have you been to?

I have been only to Perugia, that wonderful hill town in Umbria, a seat of Italian-language education. That is, they teach foreigners Italian in Perugia—chiefly at the Università per Stranieri, i.e., the University for Foreigners.

I appreciate a straightforward name.

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Speaking of names: how about “Wealthy Street”? Any relation to “Easy Street”? I don’t know about “Easy,” but there’s a “Wealthy Street” here in Grand Rapids, and it may be the only one in the country.

Let me quote a source:

Jefferson Morrison was a merchant in the early days of Grand Rapids. He named two streets in the city: one to honor himself (Jefferson Avenue) and one to honor his wife, Wealthy … Mrs. Morrison’s unusual first name proved to be somewhat ironic, as the family went into serious debt after building an extravagant house between modern-day Ionia and Monroe avenues.

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In recent weeks, Cesar Chavez’s name has been taken off buildings and such, in various states. But there is a “Cesar Chavez Avenue” here in GR. Big ol’ boulevard. Here is a news report:

People are considering asking Grand Rapids to change the name of Cesar Chavez Avenue back to its original name: Grandville Avenue.

The conversation comes after multiple women in March accused labor leader Cesar Chavez of sexual harassment and assault, including allegations involving minors.

(For the full article, go here.)

Is this “political correctness”? “Wokeness”? We have been through these debates over and over, especially where Confederates are concerned. I have said a lot about this general matter. In brief: I think you have to go case by case, weighing all elements, and I don’t think dishonorable people should be honored.

(I, personally, would take Chavez’s name down.)

***

Where education policy is concerned, a lot of us have been hot on school choice for decades. So, I’ve smiled on learning that the slogan of the Grand Rapids Public Schools is “My Choice.”

Have a glimpse:

And have some official language:

Maintaining brand consistency in all promotional materials is essential to upholding the identify of Grand Rapids Public Schools (GRPS). Adhering to the Brand Guidelines ensures all communications align with the district’s credibility, values, and messaging—reinforcing its reputation and fostering trust within the community.

The GRPS logo is built around the fiery academic virtue that serves as the foundation of our school system and should always be treated with respect. It may only appear in GRPS palette colors and must always be locked with the flame exclamation and “My Choice” mark.

Dang! “Fiery academic virtue”!

I have a lot more to tell you—and I’ve barely begun with pictures—but maybe you’ve read enough for today. I’ll see you tomorrow with more things Grand Rapidian. Thank you.

Lamar Alexander is one of these golden children: Eagle Scout; president of his high-school class; governor of Boys State; editor of the college newspaper; Phi Beta Kappa; governor, which is to say real governor; university president; cabinet member; U.S. senator; presidential candidate.

The presidency, by my calculation, is the only thing that ever eluded Mr. Alexander.

He is a Republican. At the outset of our conversation, I suggest to him that he could not get anywhere in GOP politics today. His credentials and abilities would work against him. “Am I cynical or realistic?”

“I hope you’re not realistic,” Alexander says.

He has written his memoirs: The Education of a Senator: From JFK to Trump.

Alexander is a seventh-generation Tennessean, a native of a mountain district that was Lincolnite. It was a Union area. When asked about his politics, Alexander’s great-grandfather would say, “I’m a Republican. I fought with the Union, and I vote like I shot.”

Today, you can see Confederate flags in that district, as you can in my home state of Michigan—including way up north, in the Upper Peninsula. Curious phenomenon. In our podcast, Alexander and I discuss it a bit.

His parents were teachers and public-spirited. When Lamar was ten, his father took him to the courthouse to meet Congressman Howard H. Baker Sr.—father of the future senator (and majority leader). “I was sure that I had just met the most respected man I was ever likely to meet,” says Alexander, “other than my dad and the preacher. I was raised to respect public service.”

Alexander went to Vanderbilt and then to New York University Law School. It was quite a switch, living in Greenwich Village. Alexander has had a broad experience.

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In the Nixon White House, he worked under Bryce Harlow, the legendary staffer and adviser. (Harlow had advised Eisenhower previously.) He is known by some of us for a particular saying: “Trust is the coin of the realm in Washington, D.C.”

Says Alexander,

What I mostly remember about him is his wisdom and ethical attitude. At 29 years old, I sat 50 feet from the Oval Office at a desk crammed up next to his. I listened to his telephone conversations and saw other White House aides come in with difficult issues. The question he asked more often than not was, “What would be the right thing to do?,” and for many of them, that would clear up what they ought to do.

I got my Ph.D. in politics and government from that remarkable person.

Alexander also worked for Howard Baker (Jr.). I have an easy question: Would he have made a good president?

Here is Alexander’s answer (and I will lightly paraphrase, as is my custom in these articles):

In my opinion, the most important attributes of a president are character and temperament. And it would help if the president were very broad-gauge—if he had had a broad-gauge life.

Then, I would hope the president leaned right, because I’m a conservative, but I’d rather have one with superior character and temperament, someone I could introduce my grandson to, someone about whom I could say to my grandson, “I hope you grow up to be like him.”

Howard Baker was that kind of person.

In our Q&A, we talk about Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Reagan. We talk about the difference between being a governor and being a senator. (Alexander is well positioned to discuss this issue.) We talk about education policy. (Same. Alexander was education secretary under Bush 41.) We talk about running for president.

I ask him something cheesy, and something important—something along the lines of “Will our democracy survive?” Sure it will, he says. But then he holds up his smartphone: This is a problem, our “digital democracy,” which does a great job of setting people at enmity, driving them into little tribes.

One of the people Alexander has most admired is John Minor Wisdom, the appeals-court judge, one of the “Fifth Circuit Four.” Young Alexander worked for him, down in New Orleans, where the court is based. The “four” were instrumental in the advancement of civil rights.

In addition to his legal duties, Alexander played at Your Father’s Moustache, a bar and nightclub on Bourbon Street. Alexander plays the piano and the trombone.

During one of my campaigns, a reporter said, “Mr. Alexander grew up in a lower-middle–class family in the mountains of Tennessee,” where I live today, and my mother—I talked to her that weekend, and she was reading Thessalonians to gather strength for how to deal with this slur on the family.

She said, “Son, we never thought of ourselves that way. You had a piano lesson from the day you were three and a library card from the day you were four. You had everything you needed that was important.”

What a joy, to speak with Lamar Alexander. As I say at the end of our podcast, I wish I could go out and vote for him today.