Crab cakes, a bet, and a chameleon

October 2, 2018

Remember those crab cakes I whined about not getting at Central Market? Sue and Teddy brought me some, and I had one tonight, cooked another for lunch tomorrow. The smoked salmon definitely adds a different taste, but it was so good. Sue, my Canadian sort-of-daughter, came for happy hour tonight, and I insisted on paying her for the crab cakes, over her objection. So then we bet—I don’t think Kavanaugh will be confirmed; she thinks he will be. We bet the $16 I paid her for crab cakes—she said she’ll set it aside and hope she has to return it to me.

I no longer have an excuse, I don’t think, for not eating what I don’t want, going to bed early, etc. Saw a nephrologist (kidneys) today, and she thinks I’m on the mend, especially since I’m feeling so much better and eating more. She had no firm answers to why I felt so awful during the summer and worse in August, but she made some educated guesses, and they pretty much confirmed what I thought. I still think digoxin, the cardiac medication, was at the root of all my problems. More blood work on Thursday to confirm that I’m getting better.

Panic moment of the day: I somehow saved a short file over the long one I’d assembled on the Alamo book I’m working on. Instead of a file of almost 10,000 words I had a file of barely 2,000. Calmed myself and reconstructed the long file under a new name—thank goodness I’d kept individual chapters before combining them. I figure in total I lost about 500 words, and I can reconstruct them. I remember where they were going.

Calm moment of the day: watching a lovely, bright green chameleon (may have been a gecko but looked a little large for that) climb up and down on the flexible screen on my patio door. Sophie didn’t discover this one—they drive her nuts when she tries to chase them—so I sat and admired him for a while.

Trivia recipe of the day: Fellow enthusiast of all things Scottish Ellen Kurtzman put me on to a three-ingredient fruitcake recipe. It calls for dried fruit, chocolate milk, and flour. I am intrigued by the use of chocolate milk. You make it in an 8-inch pan and it serves 30? Come on—Ellen says it’s rich and the servings are small, but how small? It’s a moot question—everyone in my house hates the dried fruit.

And on that note, good night all.

Exposing Angry America

Well, wasn’t yesterday fun? Many Americans, like me, watched the long, long day of hearings, and Facebook is full of comments, mostly disbelief at the anger displayed. Lots of us seem to feel Kavanaugh disqualified himself, and it had precious little to do with Christine Blasey-Ford. It had to do with his anger management issues, his belligerent partisanship, his total absorption in himself.

I have nothing to add except one point I haven’t seen belabored much: Lindsey Graham, who also disgraced himself, kept shouting, “You’re ruining this man’s life.” And Kavanaugh himself whined a lot about how hard all this has been on his family.

They miss the point: his future, his career, his happy family life is not what’s at stake here. It’s the future of our country, the future of women, of working people, minorities, even wildlife species. I don’t care a fig about his career or his family, and now I find it even harder to dredge up any sympathy.

By contrast, Dr. Ford did not mention her family. When asked, she admitted to claustrophobia which she traced to the high-school attack on her. And when a senator—Cory Booker, but I don’t think he was the first—asked how her family was doing, she simply said they are fine and, “Thank you for asking.” The contrast in styles is remarkable.

And, frankly, I would give two cents for the future of the Kavanaugh marriage. Mrs. K. looked neither proud nor happy while her husband spoke.

The committee will vote him out today, angry old white men predominating. There’s still a chance he will not be confirmed next week, but it’s strange to think that our fate is in the hands of so few. This is not democracy at its best. Nor have the cream of the crop of our population risen to the top.

Hear that shouting? It’s the Founding Fathers protesting from the grave what’s happened to their experiment in democracy.

Oh, Eve! Why did you eat that apple?

American women are almost unanimously united in the belief that justice was served yesterday with the sentencing of Bill Cosby and his classification as a violently dangerous predator. Certainly, I agree—women accused him in overwhelming numbers, he drugged and raped them, and he damaged or destroyed a lot of lives. Still I found it sad to see “America’s Dad,” old and blind, led away in handcuffs. The image chipped away another bit of our image of ourselves as a moral nation. We are not who we like to think we are.

Tomorrow I will rearrange my work on my desk to watch the Senate Judiciary Committee’s investigation of Christina Blasey-Ford and Brett Kavanaugh. I am interested to see Ford and hope she can conduct herself with dignity, but I’m afraid my mind is made up on Kavanaugh. His innocent “Oh gosh! Who me? I would never do that!” act or as someone called it his choir-boy image is too much to be believed. The way we see him fawn over government leaders on TV these days makes it easy for me to believe he would do whatever to be one of the boys back in the eighties.

It’s not just two accusers—one credible and one a bit uncertain—who seem to confirm his guilt. It’s the aura of nastiness that surrounds his high school and college years. Too many people testifying to the culture and groups he was part of, too much inuendo, too much guilt by association. If he truly is innocent, I would think he would be the one to request an FBI investigation. But no. I believe he even declined to answer some questions in committee because they were too personal. Not a privilege he can enjoy at this point.

We all know that this SCOTUS appt. goes beyond the irreparable damage he does and can do on the bench. The way our government treats women, the respect we’re shown, the control over our bodies, our freedom, our lives all hang in the balance. Along with other major issues such as fair treatment to workers, survival of endangered species—a whole frightening laundry list.

But I think, like the Cosby case, the significance goes beyond that and determines the image of America as a moral nation. It’s almost a morality play with the good guys in white hats and the bad in black. Are we going to allow ourselves to be bullied by scum like Mitch McConnell and John Cornyn who would ram an appointment through for the sake of party and not country, not democracy? Or are we finally at last ready to stand up and declare that it’s time for the good guys to win?

It’s not easy. Today a few men (and a couple of women) hold that power in their hands, and we are momentarily dependent on their sense of morality. The Founding Fathers wisely wrote checks and balances into the Constitution, but I fear they never foresaw a situation where an entire party would be as corrupt as we see today.

I am a bit cheered to hear the idea floated again of impeaching Clarence Thomas—apparently another woman has come forward to second Anita Hill’s accusations. I doubt anything will come of it, but it’s nice to know Supreme Court judges can be impeached in extremis. I read somewhere that if confirmed Kavanaugh will be “impeachable.” 

Call me Pollyanna, but I still believe the guys and gal in white hats will triumph. Sometimes I'm impatient about how soon.