Thursday, June 30, 2022

the last book I ever read (Andrey Kurkov's Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev, excerpt eleven)

from Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev by Andrey Kurkov:

Saturday 22 February

Yesterday afternoon, Yanukovych signed an agreement with the opposition, setting the expected presidential election for December and a return to the 2004 constitution, which limits the powers of the president and makes the prime minister the essential figure in the government. The witnesses to the agreement–the German and Polish foreign ministers–signed the document, but Putin’s representative refused to do so. Soon afterwards, in an interview, he described this agreement as ‘a worthless scrap of paper’.

And in the evening, much later, Yanukovych fled. He seems to have flown to Kharkiv with his inner circle. But where could he have taken off from? It’s a mystery. Boryspil is blocked by the Automaidan and the Maidanistas, and roads to the airport are closed. Maybe from Zhuliany?



Wednesday, June 29, 2022

the last book I ever read (Andrey Kurkov's Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev, excerpt ten)

from Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev by Andrey Kurkov:

Wednesday 19 February

The Berkut, mounting a counter-attack, took the barricades in Hrushevskoho Street, and seized Ukraine House and the October Palace. At the same time, its men began moving on Institutskaya Street, forcing the Maidanistas back. The retreating protesters gathered in the Maidan, about eight thousand of them. They set fire to anything they could find in order to create a barricade of flames. All night, there was fighting and gunshots. Who shot at the berkutovtsy? That is a mystery. Who shot at the Maidanistas, given that the Minister of Internal Affairs stated that the Berkut were not using real bullets? It would seem that, in parallel with the Berkut, there exists a group of plain-clothes officers, armed with sniper rifles, assault rifles and ordinary pistols. About one in the morning, they stopped a taxi driving Vyacheslav Yeremey, a journalist from Vesti (‘News’), near my office at the corner of Vladimirskaya Street and Velyka Zhytomyrska Street: after beating him up, they shot him in the chest. He died in hospital.

The hospitals are overflowing right now. But many of the wounded are in hiding, from their friends as well as from strangers. They are afraid of going to hospital because the police have often abducted injured protesters from there to take them to the station, without offering them any medical care.



Tuesday, June 28, 2022

the last book I ever read (Andrey Kurkov's Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev, excerpt nine)

from Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev by Andrey Kurkov:

Monday 17 February

In the afternoon, Piatras and I took the car to go and see Yura and Alisa. All over the city, and along the roads to Kontsa-Zaspa and Obukhov–every five hundred yards, by the roadside–there were two or three police cars. The officers were stopping all cars flying Ukrainian flags. So now the national flag has become a sign of anti-government activity!



Monday, June 27, 2022

the last book I ever read (Andrey Kurkov's Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev, excerpt eight)

from Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev by Andrey Kurkov:

Tuesday 14 January

Snow fell, pretty and fluffy. No one was answering the phone. I stood outside the front door. Galya arrived soon afterwards. She told me she never took her phone with her, so she was only contactable early in the morning or late in the evening.

The renovation work in her apartment is nearly finished, and she has new Laura Ashley furniture. She is supposed to receive a sideboard and a bed tomorrow. At the moment, all her savings are going on Laura Ashley furniture, which she orders from a catalogue. In the apartment, I was greeted by her two cockatiels. I miss Kuzi, the male she had before and who is now dead.



Sunday, June 26, 2022

the last book I ever read (Andrey Kurkov's Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev, excerpt seven)

from Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev by Andrey Kurkov:

Friday 27 December

Recently, people have been offering free classes in English and self-defence in the Maidan for all those who aspire to a glorious European future. The classes take place every day at 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. at the Trade Unions building. There are only thirty people in the English class. That’s not many. If we want to join Europe any time soon, we need to put more effort into learning foreign languages. I wonder how many people are going to the self-defence classes, and what they are learning.



Saturday, June 25, 2022

the last book I ever read (Andrey Kurkov's Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev, excerpt six)

from Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev by Andrey Kurkov:

Saturday 14 December

My mum complained about my dad, as usual. He broke the headphones again, which he uses to watch television every night. At three this morning, he was watching it with the volume turned as high as it will go. That woke her, and she had it out with him in the living room. She was worried he would wake the neighbours. My brother promised to come round and repair the headphones. Nothing new. Apparently this is not the first time that these headphones, which have a ten-foot lead, have been damaged. During my conversation with my father yesterday, however, I had the impression that his hearing was improving. His deafness is sometimes selective: he hears only what he wants to hear. I remember how he never used to hear the questions my brother and I asked him about his communist beliefs.

We stayed about an hour and a half with Grandma Raya and Grandpa Yura, then we went home. I attempted to get back down to work on my Lithuanian novel, but I didn’t write anything. There is a heaviness in my head that makes my ideas seem as clumsy as a tortoise.



Friday, June 24, 2022

the last book I ever read (Andrey Kurkov's Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev, excerpt five)

from Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev by Andrey Kurkov:

Friday 13 December

The Russian Orthodox Church has once again spoken out against the Maidan, this time through the mouth of Archpriest Andrey Tkachev, leader of the St Agapit Church. The simplest thing is to quote him in full: ‘Such a manifestation of anarchism does not, on the whole, please me. Because, for us, democracy is not direct; it is parliamentary, representative. If not, we have to destroy all the foundations of our state. I have never had representatives in power in all the twenty years of this country’s independence. That does not mean that I should go to the Maidan and yell. I will not go, and I will not let the children go, because it is futile. I do not bless anyone who goes to the Maidan. Because I do not believe that a million people with limited ideas will create the right decision simply by virtue of numbers. Once again, the question is asked of this country’s citizens: do you want to join Europe, or do you want to build communism in one country? In the same square are gathered people who simply want Europe, those who do not, and those who want something else altogether. They have only one point in common: they are all against the government. But anti-establishment minds do not produce anything creative.’

I wonder what creative thing the Russian Orthodox Church is going to produce.



Thursday, June 23, 2022

the last book I ever read (Andrey Kurkov's Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev, excerpt four)

from Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev by Andrey Kurkov:

Saturday 7 December

Today is Anton’s birthday: he is eleven years old already!

At one o’clock this afternoon, his friends came to our apartment and we all went to the Hidropark. We found the Paintball Planet club fairly quickly, and there we all put on our outfits and masks and picked up our guns. We divided into two teams, the Greens and the Blues. We each tied a headscarf in our team’s colour around our neck. Then we spent almost two hours shooting paintballs at one another. It was cold outside. We took regular breaks and went inside the club building to warm up and drink cocoa from a vending machine. When we ran out of ammunition and the battle was over, we went home to eat pizza. The party ended at 7 p.m. Everyone was happy, especially the birthday boy. Only one of Anton’s friends was slightly upset: he hadn’t put his mask on properly and, during the first battle, he got hit on the lip by a paintball. After that, he didn’t want to take part any more. But a couple of the club’s employees took him to the shooting range and, once he’d calmed down, he practised knocking over beer cans.



Wednesday, June 22, 2022

the last book I ever read (Andrey Kurkov's Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev, excerpt three)

from Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev by Andrey Kurkov:

Saturday 30 November

In the old days, Soviet schoolchildren used to learn about Bloody Sunday in their history lessons. Now, Bloody Saturday has been added to the contemporary history of Ukraine. Very early this morning, about 4 a.m., police special forces committed a massacre in the Maidan. The mobile phone network was cut while there were several hundred protesters in the square. They were sleepy, and to begin with they didn’t understand what was happening. All of them were beaten with truncheons: students, elderly people, everyone. Those who tried to save themselves were caught, thrown to the ground and beaten with sticks. A group of students, men and women, cornered in a dead-end street, began to sing the Ukrainian national anthem. They sang it while they were punched and kicked and dragged to waiting police vans, which took them into custody. Some of the protesters escaped towards St Sophia Square and St Michael’s Square. They ran faster than the berkutovtsy, who were slowed down by their knights’ armour, but who pursued them all the same.



Tuesday, June 21, 2022

the last book I ever read (Andrey Kurkov's Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev, excerpt two)

from Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev by Andrey Kurkov:

Tuesday 26 November

I am increasingly convinced that the entire Ukrainian legal system has not only entered the shadowlands, like the country’s economy, but has sunk into a deeper darkness. There are more and more legal judgments made in the middle of the night, when the country is supposed to be asleep. If the judges who are working nights are sleeping during the day, we can be somewhat reassured as to their mental health. But if they are working twenty-four hours a day, it has to be doubted whether they can even remember the judgments they made one hour earlier. And anyway, as has been proved on several occasions by journalists, judges have been handed judgments written in advance without their agreement, already unsealed and signed. This is, in any case, how they deal with opposition representatives–and, indeed, with anyone who is unhappy with the authorities and does not conceal their feelings.

In Kharkiv today, almost two hundred people gathered in the central square. They were here the night before, with gauze strips on their mouths like gags. The local authorities immediately banned all mass protests and rallies, justifying this measure by claiming it was taken against the risk of an epidemic of flu or other contagious diseases. The city truly is sick: in 2004, at the time of the Orange Revolution, its inhabitants were much more active.



Monday, June 20, 2022

the last book I ever read (Andrey Kurkov's Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev, excerpt one)

from Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev by Andrey Kurkov:

Monday 25 November

Because of the protests, the day to commemorate the victims of Holodomor went unmarked. It was the governor of the Donetsk region who suddenly remembered it. In his brief speech, he acknowledged that the great famine was entirely planned, because during that period, in the parts of Ukraine that belonged to Romania and Poland in 1932 and 1933, no one went hungry. One wonders if he will now suffer the wrath of the Party of Regions, to which he belongs, and who deny any responsibility on the part of Stalin and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the famine that caused the deaths in Ukraine of between three and five million people.



Friday, June 17, 2022

the last book I ever read (This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America's Future, excerpt twelve)

from This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America's Future by Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns:

To the delight of her audience, Sinema sounded more like a Republican as she went on: “Arizonans don’t like taxes, and we don’t really like government. We love our country. And we love our military. And that’s about where it ends.”

Had Sinema’s Democratic colleague been in the room, they might have been startled to hear her speaking warmly about several House Republicans whom Democrats regarded as among the worst of Donald Trump’s henchmen.

Kevin McCarthy and Steve Scalise, she said, were “friends of mine.” Andy Biggs, a far-right lawmaker from Arizona who had peddled outrageous lies about the 2020 election, was a “dear friend.”

“I love Andy Biggs,” Sinema said. “I know some people think he’s crazy, but that’s just because they don’t know him.”



Thursday, June 16, 2022

the last book I ever read (This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America's Future, excerpt eleven)

from This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America's Future by Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns:

For all his abiding partisanship, McConnell was out of step with his party on this singular issue, and closer in his worldview to the well-educated elites among whom he lived in Louisville and Washington than to the bulk of voters who kept electing him to the Senate.

Among those voters, Trump’s dismissive attitude toward the coronavirus had taken root many months before. The president’s endless complaints about masking had encouraged an attitude of resentment and disdain toward health officials, and right-wing media had increasingly depicted even basic instructions from public-health agencies as burdensome acts of a liberal nanny state. And Republican leaders around the country were not joining McConnell in challenging those attitudes, but rather tapping into them for their own political benefit.

“Don’t Fauci My Florida,” was Ron DeSantis’s slogan on koozies and T-shirts, even as the Delta variant began tearing through his state. There were few better indications of the Republican Party’s insular and angry turn than that a soft-spoken octogenarian physician had become a prime villain in the right-wing imagination.

In the summer of 2021, DeSantis and many other GOP governors were focused on passing laws to block localities from drafting or enforcing safewguards like mask mandates. By the fall, multiple governors would bar business in their state from requiring their employees to take the vaccine. Most prominent among this group was Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, who was facing primary challenges from multiple far-right fringe candidates and seemed desperate to show that no one could outflank him in his contempt for public health.



Wednesday, June 15, 2022

the last book I ever read (This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America's Future, excerpt ten)

from This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America's Future by Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns:

There was no indication at Mar-a-Lago that Trump was sharpening a set of political arguments or policy promises to fuel his return to the presidency. His worldview was as vague and primal as ever. Mere days after calling for a boycott of Coca-Cola products because of the company’s support for voting rights, Trump sipped a Diet Coke that a waitress broughT to him unbidden. Despite all his tough rhetoric about China, he was delighted to show off the room where he had served chocolate cake to Xi Jinping, and he appeared unfamiliar with one of the most basic and urgent political questions about the Asian superpower.

Asked whether he believed China was committing genocide in Xinjiang, Trump betrayed no sense that he knew what Xinjiang was or that the Chinese regime had been carrying out a barbaric campaign of ethnic cleansing against Uyghur Muslims there.

“Where?” Trump asked. “I’d rather not say at this moment, but I will let you know, maybe before your book.”



Tuesday, June 14, 2022

the last book I ever read (This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America's Future, excerpt nine)

from This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America's Future by Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns:

There were bipartisan talks under way on a few subjects where lawmakers were trying to forge filibuster-proof compromises. In the Senate, the Connecticut Democrat Chris Murphy and the Texas Republican John Cornyn were holding quiet negotiations on gun regulation. A small group of Black lawmakers were trying to find a middle ground on police reform. Democrats has empowered Karen Bass in the House and Cory Booker in the Senate to lead bipartisan talks on policing legislation. On the Republican side, Mitch McConnell had promised Tim Scott of South Carolina, the Senate’s lone Black Republican, that if he could strike a deal, then the GOP leader would not obstruct passage.

But at the start of the spring none of those negotiations seemed on track for a quick breakthrough, and Democrats wanted to keep up the momentum they felt they’d achieved with the rescue plan.



Monday, June 13, 2022

the last book I ever read (This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America's Future, excerpt eight)

from This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America's Future by Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns:

Anna Eshoo, the senior California lawmaker close to Pelosi, had a painful conversation with her daughter about the experience of interacting with Republicans after the riot. To the seventy-eight-year-old Californian, after a quarter century in Congress, the physical space of the Capitol felt defiled. There was a pervasive sense of violation, she says: “I think it’s with all of us—that they were there, what they did, what they said, how they desecrated the place and how close we came to the government being overthrown.”

When her daughter asked how it felt to go to work with Republicans who were still denying the election results, Eshoo offered one of the most wrenching comparisons imaginable.

“It feels like being in the same room with your rapist,” she recalls saying.



Sunday, June 12, 2022

the last book I ever read (This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America's Future, excerpt seven)

from This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America's Future by Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns:

Donald Trump did not attend. The departed president, then bracing for his imminent impeachment trial, left the White House on the morning of Inauguration Day, decamping to his South Florida estate hours before Biden’s swearing-in. His absence was neither surprising nor disappointing to the event organizers. Trump had announced two days after the Capitol attack, in his very last tweet before the social-media site banned his account, that he would not join the ceremonies. His early escape made him the first president since Andrew Johnson, the failed and impeached successor to Abraham Lincoln, to skip his own successor’s inauguration.



Saturday, June 11, 2022

the last book I ever read (This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America's Future, excerpt six)

from This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America's Future by Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns:

In his eagerness to calm the waters in his own party, McCarthy had essentially resolved that there would be no further action or discussion related to January 6. Punishing Mo Brooks could only divide his party. Reiterating criticism of Trump would do the same. To McCarthy, even letting bad blood linger with the former president was starting to feel like an intolerable risk.

Trump had spent much of January in an incommonly quiet state, finally stripped of his office and, perhaps more painful for him, banned from social media platforms. Behind closed doors, Trump had menaced Republicans by chewing over the idea of starting his own party—a “Patriot Party”—and continuing to trash a long list of Republicans he saw as insufficiently committed to him. One of them was McCarthy, whom Trump had taken to calling a “pussy.”

Another officeholder might have been so enraged by the crude shot as to turn away from Trump permanently. But like many men Trump belittled, McCarthy responded not by defying the former president but by more or less setting out to prove him right.



Friday, June 10, 2022

the last book I ever read (This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America's Future, excerpt five)

from This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America's Future by Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns:

The one thing McCarthy was clear about—even as he wrestled with impeachment, censure, resignation, and more—was that the country needed to know the truth of what happened on January 6. And the way to make sure that happened, he believed, was through a bipartisan commission.

“We need to have all the facts, especially for all of us,” he told a gathering of House Republicans several days after the attack. “And we should do it in a bipartisan manner.”

Before the end of the month, McCarthy’s appetitie for punishing Trump would disappear completely. He would be photographed on January 28 posing happily beside the ousted president at Mar-a-Lago. By the spring, McCarthy’s interest in a bipartisan inquiry would vanish, too. At Trump’s encouragement, McCarthy and his leadership team whipped votes against legislation to enact the very idea he had proposed in the wake of the attack on the Capitol.



Thursday, June 9, 2022

the last book I ever read (This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America's Future, excerpt four)

from This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America's Future by Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns:

Most troubling to the House minority leader seemed to be Mo Brooks, the Alabama Republican who had joined Trump in riling up the mob on January 6. McCarthy was not initially familiar with what Brooks had said that day, and an aide spoke up on the call to read Brooks’s comments about “taking down names and kicking ass.” The top House Republican reacted with horror.

“You think the president deserves to be impeached for his comments—that almost goes further than what the president said,” McCarthy said.

Scalise told him there was already talk among House Republicans about stripping Brooks of his committee assignments. McCarthy sounded intrigued, asking what committees Brooks served on. An aide told him Brooks was on Armed Service, the powerful panel overseeing the American military.

McCarthy ended the call with no certain plan. He told his colleagues he wanted to lay out the facts, as he knew them, to the Republican Conference. But when he hung up, he had not committed to do anything concrete—whether it was urging Trump to resign or backing a censure motion.



Wednesday, June 8, 2022

the last book I ever read (This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America's Future, excerpt three)

from This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America's Future by Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns:

His plan, McCarthy said on the January 10 call, was to approach the president and tell him it was inevitable that Congress would impeach him and it was time for him to go.

He envisioned telling Trump of an impeachment resolution: “I think this will pass, and it would be my recommendation you should resign.”

“I’ve had it with this guy,” McCarthy said near the end of the call. “What he did was unacceptable. Nobody can defend that and nobody should defend it.”



Tuesday, June 7, 2022

the last book I ever read (This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America's Future, excerpt two)

from This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America's Future by Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns:

It was not only in Georgia that Trump was testing the mettle of Republican officials with demands that they engage in a version of election tampering. He may not have been a sophisticated political strategist, but the president recognized he needed to flip several states to win the election, all of which Biden had carried by far more than his 11,779-vote margin in Georgia.

The absurdity of that task did not deter Trump from attempting it. One November 20, he summoned the Republican leaders of the Michigan legislature to the White House. The president wanted to speak with them in the Oval Office about the outcome of the presidential race there and apply pressure on them to block Michigan’s sixteen Electoral College votes from going to Biden.

It was precisely the scenario that Gretchen Whitmer and other Michigan Democrats had anticipated the previous fall, before Biden carried the state by more than 150,000 votes. Should the state legislators attempt to appoint a separate slate of pro-Trump electors, in defiance of the popular vote, Whitmer was prepared to name another slate consistent with the will of the people.



Monday, June 6, 2022

the last book I ever read (This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America's Future, excerpt one)

from This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America's Future by Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns:

On June 1, the day after Biden’s outing to downtown Wilmington, Trump convened the nation’s governors on a call. It was ostensibly one of the state executives’ weekly gatherings to discuss the coronavirus with the administration, but when the governors logged on that Monday it was immediately clear they were in for a different kind of meeting. Trump was on the call, joined by a team of advisers that included Bill Barr, the attorney general, and Mark Esper, the secretary of defense.

Savaging the racial-justice protesters around the country as “terrorists,” Trump urged the governors to exact “retribution” while demanding a swift return to public order. Esper, a buttoned-down West Point graduate and former Raytheon executive, advised the governors that they should seek to “dominate the battlespace” in their states. In the Rose Garden later that day, Trump threatened to deploy federal troops if the governors did not move swiftly enough.

The executives were in shock. Up early at the governor’s residence in Salem, Oregon, the Democratic governor, Kate Brown, called out to her husband in a nearby room: You’ve got to hear what this guy is saying.

“You can’t make this shit up,” Brown remembers telling her husband. “You cannot believe that this is happening in the United States of America.”



Sunday, June 5, 2022

the last book I ever read (My Autobiography by Charie Chaplin, excerpt fourteen)

from My Autobiography by Charlie Chaplin:

‘What floor is this?’ Don asked.

‘The seventeenth.’

‘Jesus! Do you realize what room this is? The one where the boy stepped out on the ledge and stood for twelve hours before plunging off and killing himself!’

This news was a fitting climax to the evening. However, I believe Monsieur Verdoux is the cleverest and most brilliant film I have yet made.



Saturday, June 4, 2022

the last book I ever read (My Autobiography by Charie Chaplin, excerpt thirteen)

from My Autobiography by Charlie Chaplin:

Occasionally we spent a week-end at the John Steinbecks’. They had a small house near Monterey. He was just on the threshold of fame, having written Tortilla Flat and a series of short stories. John worked in the morning and averaged about two thousand words a day. I was amazed at how neat were his pages, with hardly a correction. I envy him.

I like to know the way writers work and how much they turn out a day. Thomas Mann averaged about 400 words a day. Lion Feuchtwanger dictated 2,000 words, which averaged 600 written words a day. Somerset Maugham wrote 400 words a day just to keep in practice. H. G. Wells averaged 1,000 words a day, Hannen Swaffer, the English journalist, wrote from 4,000 to 5,000 words a day. The American critic, Alexander Woollcott, wrote a 700-word review in fifteen minutes, then joined a poker game – I was there when he did it. Hearst would write a 2,000-word editorial in an evening. Georges Simenon has written a short novel in a month–and of excellent literary quality. Georges tells me that he gets up at five in the morning, brews his own coffee, then sits at his desk and rolls a golden ball, the size of a tennis ball, and thinks. He writes with a pen and when I asked him why he wrote in such small handwriting, he said: ‘It requires less effort of the wrist.’ As for myself I dictate about 1,000 words a day, which averages me about 300 in finished dialogue for my films.

The Steinbecks had no servants, his wife did all the housework. It was a wonderful ménage and I was very fond of her.



Friday, June 3, 2022

the last book I ever read (My Autobiography by Charie Chaplin, excerpt twelve)

from My Autobiography by Charlie Chaplin:

Since my return to the States something quite wonderful was happening. The economic reverses, although drastic, brought out the greatness of the American people. Conditions had gone from bad to worse. Some states went so far as to print a fiduciary currency on wood in order to distribute unsold goods. Meanwhile the lugubrious Hoover sat and sulked, because his disastrous economic sophistry of allocating money at the top in the belief that it would percolate down to the common people had failed. And amidst all this tragedy he ranted in the election campaign that if Franklin Roosevelt got into office the very foundations of the American system – not an infallible system at that moment – would be imperilled.

However, Franklin D. Roosevelt did get into office, and the country was not imperilled. His ‘Forgotten Man’ speech lifted American politics out of its cynical drowse and established the most inspiring era in American history. I heard the speech over the radio at Sam Goldwyn’s beach-house. Several of us sat around, including Bill Paley of the Columbia Broadcasting System, Joe Schenck, Fred Astaire, his wife and other guests. ‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself’ came over the air like a ray of sunlight. But I was sceptical, as were most of us. ‘Too good to be true,’ I said.

No sooner had Roosevelt taken office than he began to fit actions to his words, ordering a ten-day bank holiday to stop the banks from collapsing. That was a moment when America was at its best. Shops and stores of all kinds continued to do business on credit, even the cinemas sold tickets on credit, and for ten days, while Roosevelt and his so-called brains trust formulated the New Deal, the people acted magnificently.



Thursday, June 2, 2022

the last book I ever read (My Autobiography by Charie Chaplin, excerpt eleven)

from My Autobiography by Charlie Chaplin:

We parted in a cordial way. I believe I made a date with him to dine the next evening, but he never showed up. And lo! instead of talking to a friend, I discovered I had been talking to a news reporter; and the next day a front-page spread was in the newspapers: ‘Charlie Chaplin no patriot!’, etc.

This is true, but at the time I did not want my private views aired in the Press. The fact is I am no patriot–not for moral or intellectual reasons alone, but because I have no feeling for it. How can one tolerate patriotism when six million Jews were murdered in its name? Some might say that was in Germany; nevertheless, these murderous cells lie dormant in every nation.

I cannot vociferate about national pride. If one is steeped in family tradition, home and garden, a happy childhood, family and friends, I can understand this feeling – but I have not that background. At best patriotism to me is nurtured in local habits; horse-racing, hunting, Yorkshire pudding, American hamburgers and Coca-Cola, but today such native yams have become worldwide. Naturally, if the country in which I lived were to be invaded, like most of us, I believe I would be capable of an act of supreme sacrifice. But I am incapable of a fervent love of homeland, for it has only to turn Nazi and I would leave it without compunction – and from what I have observed, the cells of Nazism, although dormant at the moment, can be activated very quickly in every country. Therefore, I do not wish to make any sacrifice for a political cause unless I personally believe in it. I am no martyr for nationalism – neither do I wish to die for a president, a prime minister or a dictator.



Wednesday, June 1, 2022

the last book I ever read (My Autobiography by Charie Chaplin, excerpt ten)

from My Autobiography by Charlie Chaplin:

I met Gandhi shortly after my stay with Churchill. I have always respected and admired Gandhi for his political astuteness and his iron will. But I thought his visit to London was a mistake. His legendary significance evaporated in the London scene, and his religious display fell short of impressiveness. In the cold dank climate of England, wearing his traditional loin-cloth, which he gathered about him in disorderly fashion, he seemed incongruous. It made his presence in London food for glibness and caricature. One’s impressiveness is greater at a distance. I had been asked if I would like to meet him. Of course I was thrilled.