On a Russian political prisoner and an American TV show; the Meijers of Michigan; a violinist at work; children of war; and more
Alexei Navalny, as you know, is the Russian opposition leader. He is also a political prisoner. He was serving a sentence of two and a half years. Now the state has given him nine more. In 2020, you remember, they tried to kill him — tried to kill him in one of their poison attacks. Rushed to Germany, he survived. After he recovered, he returned to Russia — only to be promptly arrested.
Putin is very popular in Russia, I am told — and maybe he is. But he seems awfully scared of Alexei Navalny, doesn’t he?
Navalny had a response to the new, nine-year sentence — a response you can read about here. He quoted a line from an American television series, The Wire (which ran from 2002 to 2008): “You only do two days. That’s the day you go in and the day you come out.” Navalny actually had that line printed on a T-shirt. But the prison authorities confiscated it from him, on grounds that it was “extremist.”
To be honest, I’m not sure — not sure exactly — what the line from The Wire means. But I know that Navalny is a stunningly brave man.
• Turn, now, to the domestic front — to America. “Come home, America!” (You remember that one?) (George McGovern, accepting the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972.) “MIT Will Require SAT, ACT Again.” (Article here.) That is really interesting news. I will quote an MIT official:
At MIT Admissions, our mission is to recruit, select, and enroll a diverse and talented group of students who are a good match for MIT’s unique education and culture. Everything we do in our process is grounded by our goal to find and admit students who will succeed at MIT and serve the world afterward.
After careful consideration, we have decided to reinstate our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles. Our research shows standardized tests help us better assess the academic preparedness of all applicants, and also help us identify socioeconomically disadvantaged students who lack access to advanced coursework or other enrichment opportunities that would otherwise demonstrate their readiness for MIT.
Isn’t that terribly interesting? Interesting and believable?
• David Frum had a really interesting comment on immigration. Someone asked him, “Don’t we need immigration?” He said, “Of course we do. But when the homeowner worries that the basement is flooded, it’s not helpful to answer, ‘But you need water to live.’”
Good sense on immigration is rare, I find. Extremism and stridency are as common as water — water in Michigan or Minnesota, I mean, not New Mexico.
• “Brooklyn teens jump Hasidic man as police report hate crimes against Jews skyrocket across NYC.” An evil that needs to be stopped in its tracks. I will quote the article:
A group of teens jumped a Jewish man in an unprovoked Brooklyn beatdown caught on video, police said Saturday.
The hate-fueled attack comes as hate crimes against Jews quadrupled in the five boroughs over the last year, the NYPD confirmed.
• On the matter of Justice and Mrs. Clarence Thomas, I recommend a column by George F. Will — a home run of a column. (GFW likes baseball.) When it comes to politics, writes Will, Mrs. Thomas is “mad as a hatter.” Have you read the texts between her and Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s last White House chief of staff? They must be read to be believed.
More from Will: “To say that she was ‘strategizing’ with the White House is akin to saying that the guy in the stadium’s upper deck yelling ‘Roll Tide!’ and shouting suggested plays is strategizing with Alabama’s football team.”
Not often does Will make reference to football, instead of baseball. When you ask him what he has against football, he says that the game combines two of the worst elements in American life. You get violence punctuated by committee meetings (in the form of huddles).
In his column, Will goes on to say that Justice Thomas can do his job perfectly well, regardless of the antics or activities of his wife.
I’ve thought of Martha Mitchell — wife of John Mitchell, Nixon’s first attorney general. His wife, Martha, was causing him all kinds of headaches, and causing them for the administration, too. Occasionally, someone would bring up the subject, delicately, with Mitchell. He was known — rightly — as a tough son-of-a-gun. But he would always say, simply, “I love her.”
(This information can be found in William Safire’s memoir of Nixon’s first term, Before the Fall.)
• A statement from Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Republican congresswoman from Georgia:
Murkowski, Collins, and Romney are pro-pedophile.
They just voted for #KBJ.
Does that kind of thing fly in today’s Republican Party? Oh, fly it does — high.
• I was writing about the Republican Party on Twitter recently. Or rather, about the American Right. Many things have surprised those of us who came of age in the 1980s and embraced Reagan conservatism, with its emphasis on freedom. One of the most surprising things? The rise of the right-wing tankie. The guy who purveys Kremlin propaganda. Who sneers at the Ukrainians, even as they are trying to hang on to freedom, and independence, and life.
A woman wrote, “My dad was a Reagan Republican and introduced me to Solzhenitsyn, which inspired my graduate study of Russian history and politics.” Her dad, she continues, has “become a Kremlin supporter and anti-Ukrainian. It’s devastating.”
Yes. Devastating, and tragic.
• In Michigan, where I’m from, “Meijer” is a royal name. Meijer is a chain of superstores. For us, knowing Meijer is like knowing McDonald’s.
Actually, we say “Meijer’s,” most of us. “What are you doing this afternoon?” “Oh, picking up a few things at Meijer’s.”
We apostrophe-ess everything. “His dad worked out to Ford’s for 40 years.”
“Meijer” is a Dutch name, and the Meijers are from Grand Rapids, the capital of Dutch Michigan, and the capital of Dutch America. I have written about Hank Meijer, the co-chairman and CEO of the company, and Peter, his son, who’s in Congress. Here, for example.
Speaking to a rally in Michigan the other day, Donald Trump was inveighing against Peter Meijer, for his impeachment vote in January 2021. He mocked Meijer’s name — or rather, its spelling: “A guy who spells his name M-e-i-j-e-r, but they pronounce it ‘Meyer.’ The hell kind of a spelling is that?” Etc.
Peter went to universities in New York. He went to West Point, Columbia, and NYU. It was a relief to be out of his home territory for a while, he told me in a podcast. Not only did people not know his name — they didn’t even know how to pronounce it.
By the way, do you teach your children to make fun of people’s names? Trump does it all the time. Has for years. Should a president behave that way? An ex-president? But that ship sailed long, long ago.
• Talor Gooch, my man. (The hell kind of spelling is that, by the way? Not “Taylor”?) I will explain. Or rather, a news report will explain:
Masters rookie Talor Gooch didn’t realize shorts aren’t allowed at Augusta National Golf Club . . .
On Saturday afternoon, Gooch was putting on the practice green adjacent to the driving range . . . For at least 15 minutes, no one said anything before co-head pro J.J. Weaver approached. A few minutes later, a pair of black rain pants arrived, Gooch put them on over his black shorts and continued his practice.
Shorts on a hot day. Certainly on a hot day at the golf course. Yes, sir. I could compose a song: “Gooch’s Song.” But the title has been taken. (Did you ever hear this?)
• Speaking of music: This is my “New York Chronicle,” in the new issue of The New Criterion. A variety of performers, composers, and issues is under discussion.
• Hilary Hahn, the great violinist, is affording us something rare: a glimpse into the life of a working musician — the life of a practicer, away from the stage. Have a look at this video. Commenting on the video, Hahn says, “Taking a recovery day, but it’s not a nothing day.”
Fascinating, this stuff, these glimpses.
• Speaking of greatness: The three contestants on Jeopardy! were asked to identify a multi-sport athlete. “A few career highlights: He won the Heisman Trophy at Auburn. Ran for 221 yards in one game for the Raiders. And was an American League All-Star.” None of the three knew. Above a video of this flop, Bo Jackson tweeted, “I just wanted to let y’all know that I forgive each one of them.”
What a gent.
(By the way, I was sitting in the Superdome, in New Orleans, on January 2, 1984, for the Sugar Bowl. Bo Jackson’s Auburn beat my Michigan Wolverines 9 to 7. All of Auburn’s points came on field goals. I think our defense must have been pretty good. But not quite good enough.)
• Estelle Harris has died at 93. She played George Costanza’s mother on Seinfeld. This character yelled a lot. How about Mrs. Harris in real life? “I yell at my husband,” she once said, “but he doesn’t mind. He’s grateful for the attention.”
I love that.
• Charles G. Boyd — an American life, and a difficult one. The first line of his obit tells us that he was “an Air Force fighter pilot who was held captive as a prisoner of war in Vietnam for nearly seven years, rose to the rank of four-star general and later forged a civilian career as an expert on homeland security and foreign policy.” My gosh, do we need such people.
• Would you care to see a yard in Houston? I was walking by it last week and took a picture for you.
Here’s another angle:
• A final obit — one that knocked me out. Knocked me flat. “Vera Gissing, Who Was Rescued by ‘Britain’s Schindler,’ Dies at 93.” The obit, for the New York Times, is by Sam Roberts, that master.
On July 1, 1939, about three months after Nazi troops goose-stepped into Prague and three days before Vera Diamantova’s 11th birthday, she was bundled onto a train bound for Britain with hundreds of other Jewish children. All but three of the 16 relatives she left behind would perish in the Holocaust.
That is the first paragraph. Here is the second:
Vera survived. As Vera Gissing, she became a translator in England and raised a family there. She would often recount the moral courage of the parents who sent her and her older sister to safety, the English couple who offered her sanctuary, and Nicholas Winton, the young London stockbroker who, she learned only belatedly, had anonymously organized convoys, known as Kindertransport, to evacuate vulnerable children, most of them Jewish, by train from what was then Czechoslovakia before Germany invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939.
I want to quote more, much more, but I would wind up quoting the whole thing. Make time to read it. It is worth the while, I think you will find.
We have been reading about children in Ukraine — orphaned, displaced, terrified. In need of love and comfort. And parents. Nothing changes, it seems. Evil is always doing its work. But so is goodness, so let’s have as much as of it as we can.
Thanks, everyone, and see you later.
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