What Do Trump Voters Look Like?

 

This week I talked to a guy I have known for three decades--a lifelong conservative Christian. He is a retired professor of literature.

We like some of the same books and authors, but never agreed on politics.  From things he said, it seemed he did not vote for Trump in the last two elections. He certainly did not vote for the Democrat. But this election he is voting for Trump. Enthusiastically.  

When we spoke he was parroting Trump's lies about President Biden, about VP Harris, and despite his comfortable suburban life is willing to say the country is a disaster with 10 million illegal aliens killing Americans.   

Like his hero, this Trump voter dodged the draft.  He did it more artfully than Bone Spur Deferments, but he, like so many Trump lovers, is a Never-servative. He and Trump and other rich kids stayed home. Poor kids went in their places.  

Thirty years ago the professor felt a little bad about dodging the draft. Not now. He has been justified by his orange god.   

In 2016, I met a Trump voter with a 12-car garage. Also a draft dodger.  

Thunder Ridge Family Event: Lauren Runs, I Ride

After my rain-soaked descent of Thunder Ridge on the Blue Ridge Parkway, my daughter Lauren, who lives in Richmond, returned with me for Round Two, two days later.

She runs. We drove to base of the hill and started together for what would be a slow climb for both of us.  Lauren ran uphill until her Garmin said six miles, then turned around and ran back.  She climbed 1,400 feet then descended.  

I rode to the top of the ridge and a little past the top.  It was a slow twelve miles. I kept checking my Garmin and keeping my heart rate down so I could make the climb in 90-plus-degree heat. The elevation gain was more than 3,400 feet.  (1,047 meters)

The descent was so long that my neck started to get tired. The road is smooth and most of the turns are wide sweepers with only a few hairpins and even those are not really tight. Most of the way down I was either side of 40 mph.  The grade is averages 5 percent with a few steep places. The fastest I went was 48mph but that was on just a few of the steeper straight stretches. 

In my usual way, I was one of the slowest on the climb.  On the longest uphill segment, 19.93km,  I was an hour slower than the fastest guy in my age group.  Bernie Sanders (no kidding) climbed the hill in 1:17.  I did in 2:19.  Apparently, Bernie went down another way. He has no time on any of the descent segments. On all of the descent segments, I am the fastest by 20-30 seconds. 

What goes up must come down.  Unless it's Bernie. 

Lauren and I talked the whole 2.5-hour drive to the climb. On the way back, we were both exhausted and subdued. But after an hour we got food, felt better, and figured out how to bring peace to the Middle East as we drove back to Richmond. 

Pain Up; Rain Down: Riding the Blue Ridge Parkway

 

The climb to Thunder Ridge on Virginia's Blue Ridge Parkway is a smooth, steady, winding climb of 3,300 feet at five percent for just over twelve miles. I drove to the base of the climb on the James River and began the climb in bright sun; the temperature just over 90 degrees.

The forecast was for more of the same.  

That was true until the tenth mile. The sky to the east was bright and sunny. The sky to the west was suddenly gray.  Sprinkles began, but it was so bright to the east, I thought I could get to the top before it got bad.  

The sprinkles became light rain. The mountain to the east almost disappeared in haze.  Then with one kilometer to go, I heard thunder.  

Shit. I was too late.

I turned around and rode in increasing rain at down the hill for about a mile, then sheets of rain and crosswinds hit me.  I watched water swirl and eddy on the road in front of me.  I took off my sunglasses and tipped my helmet low so I could see.  I let myself roll for a while at 35mph then started squeezing the brakes. After riding slower for a while, I let the brakes go and went back to coasting in the torrents.  

Raindrops stung my face and arms when the wind turned and whipped toward me.  At one point after miles of descending I thought, 'At least there are no bugs!' Bugs buzzed around me all the way up.

I passed the turnoff for the ranger office and knew I was close to the bottom of the hill.  The grade lessened.  Then I was pedaling slightly uphill across the James River to the parking area.  I pulled up to the car, opened the door and emptied my pockets onto the passenger seat. Then I took the wheels off the bike, put it in the car (I have a 2001 Prius; the bike rides in the back seat; it won't fit in the trunk.) and stripped off my soaked clothes. 

I dried off with an old sheet I had in the trunk and sat on an old camouflage shirt.  It was so humid I turned on the AC and the rear window defroster. 

Tomorrow I am going back to Thunder Ridge.  The forecast is good and I want to get all the way to the top!

----

When I arrived in Richmond for a few days, I  searched on line for the toughest climbs in the area. A group called PJAMM listed their top ten climbs in Virginia.  Thunder Ridge was the longest. Here is their site.

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt seemed a very different book this year than when I first read it the first time in 2011.  Twelve years ago, I had never visited a Nazi Death Camp. I had not even visited a Holocaust museum. Since 2017 I have visited ten death camps in four countries.  The book was much more vivid in this reading. 

Since 2018, I have been a member of the Virtual Reading Group of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. Over the past three months, I have listed to weekly 30-minute introductions of the chapters of the book by Roger Berkowitz, the director of the Hannah Arendt Center.

The book is a compilation of essays first published in the New Yorker magazine in 1963 in five parts.  Later in the year the essays were published as a book.

Arendt reported on the trial for the New Yorker and considered both her essays and the later book as a work of journalism. The "journalist" in this case was a philosopher of considerable renown and a Jew who narrowly and early escaped the Holocaust.  She was a refugee in France before finding her way to America.  

The essays and the book cover the trial and give background on the life of Adolf Eichmann as well as a country-by-country accounting of the Holocaust. Arendt makes clear that Eichmann's role in transporting Jews to death camps required the  cooperation of Jewish leaders to be as terribly effective as it was.  

In Bulgaria and Denmark, the Nazis got very little cooperation from Jews or the government and most Jews survived the war.  In the countries conquered by both the Soviets and the Nazis, the Jews were almost completely wiped out. Less than one percent of the Jews in the Baltic Republics survived the war. Poland was not much better.  More Jews survived in Germany than in the worst countries in the east.  

Eichmann was most effective in Hungary where cooperation by Jewish leaders made possible deportation of a half million Jews in less than a year.  Arendt makes clear that Eichmann was a mid-level Nazi bureaucrat with a talent for logistics who was able to move three million people to death camps. He was a horrible person who deserved death, but he was not a titanic evil person with a plan like Adolf Hitler.  

The waves of criticism that crashed on Arendt after the publication of the book had much to do with the portrayal of Eichmann as a shallow functionary rather than a personification of evil.  The controversy that began in 1963 continues today as evidenced by comments in the Virtual Reading Group from people who strongly disagree with Arendt on Eichmann.  Some of the discussion were heated (but polite).

The reading group is recorded and available in the podcast "Reading Hannah Arendt with Roger Berkowitz" hosted by Jana Mader, the Director of Academic Programs at the Hannah Arendt Center.

Twenty Guns: A Sign of Mental Illness?

 

A fire-proof gun safe for pistols, long guns and ammo

Available on Amazon...

A very smart friend just posted that the father of the 20-year-old who tried to assassinate former President Trump owns 20 guns. He thought that indicated Dad was mentally ill.  

If Dad is mentally ill, he is part of a mass psychosis.  There are nearly 400 million guns in America yet the majority of Americans don't own guns, so a large, vocal minority owns a lot of guns.  

Twenty is not far from average for an avid gun owner.  When I was deployed to Iraq, I asked soldiers I served with how many guns they owned.  I should have made a careful but the number that came up most often was sixteen.  They included soldiers of every rank, enlisted and officers.  

According to Pew Research, 32% of Americans own guns, just over 100 million people.  

The majority, 62%, own one hand gun. That's more than 60 million people.

More than 25 million people own three to seven guns. 

The top 14% own 8 to 140 guns.  The average of 17 guns was in line my informal survey in Iraq. That's about 15 million people who own an average of 17 guns, or a total of 250 million guns.  

If you combine all the multiple gun owners that group is more than 40 million people. Can 12% of the population be mentally ill?  Not in any sane definition of mental illness.  

The 40 million people who own multiple guns are part of a community in which owning many guns is normal.  Nearly all of them have jobs and are part of communities.  They made a choice the majority would not make, but they are not mentally ill.

Today, I talked to an 80-year-old guy who is a life-long resident of Lancaster County. He volunteers with community groups and has been part of emergency communications teams that help in disasters. He has five guns: two pistols, two shotguns and a hunting rifle. They are locked in a gun safe.  He is part of a community in which five guns is not even remarkable. 

 

 

Mundolingua: A Word Museum Paris

Near Luxembourg Gardens in the 6th Arrondissement of Paris is Mundolingua a museum of words: "Stacks of books and dictionaries share space with dozens of digital screens, the intimate exhibit spaces at once cozy and quirky. Words in many languages and alphabets adorn the walls, and, as you wander from the first floor down to the building’s 17th-century cellar, you are surrounded by languages at every turn."

   

Please follow the link above if you are interested. Better yet, if you get to Paris add ths odd museum to your list of sites to vist.

So Many Mennonites on Bicycles!

 

Last Saturday, I was riding between Leola and New Holland in Lancaster County. On that five miles of PA Route 23 I saw more groups of Mennonite men than I have ever seen in more than 40years of living in Lancaster County.  Every few hundred yards I saw another group of three to five guys in straw hats, suspenders and farm boots riding and talking.  

On  the way back I caught up to one group and asked why there were so many bikes on the New Holland Pike.  They told me I was seeing people leaving Horse Progress Days at the end of the two-day trade show/event/festival.

In a huge field on South Groffdale Road, south of Leola, were tents and displays of manure spreaders, tillage equipment, sprayers, and then the haying equipment--all designed for horse-drawn (and mule-drawn) farming. 

Over the two days ofthe event, 30,000 people came from all over the U.S.and Canada to see the latest in horse-powered farm equipment.  

Along with the bicycles were several pairs of Amish men riding high-wheeled scooters along Route 23.

The next day I rode the same road and saw a few buggies, but no bicycles or scooters.  I will have to wait until next year.  

 

Moving to Panama--For a Year

 

The Panama Canal

For the third time in my life, I will live in another country beginning on August 15.  My wife got a Fulbright grant to study abroad for a year, so I will join her in Panama City on the Pacific Coast of a very narrow country. She is going to study math and to teach in a community outreach math program (She is fluent in Spanish). 

While she works, I will make dinner and ride coast to coast! I have never ridden coast to coast before on the six continents I have visited, but Panama will be the place I make my first transcontinental ride from Pacific.  The distance is 75km or 45 miles ocean to ocean. A lot less distance than New York to San Francisco.

The last two times I lived overseas, I was a soldier. I carried a gun.  This time, no gun.  

In Iraq I had the gun all the time. 

In West Germany during the Cold War, I rode inside my gun. I also carried a sidearm. 

I have never been to anyplace between Tijuana, Mexico, and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, so there are many places to explore.  Panama is a beautiful place from all I have read and heard, and the canal is a marvel of engineering.  So it should be an amazing year. 

In Terror of Ducatis on Sestriere: My First Climb in the Italian Alps

In 2000, I made the first several climbs up to the Sestriere ski resort.  It was a beautiful September day as I toiled the seven-mile climb. At several point on the way up, I was riding through avalanche tunnels--they are a roof over the road, open on the cliff side. 

 It's dark inside the tunnels, not totally but dark compared to ride in bright sun.  As I rode through first tunnel I could hear the roar of Ducati race-replica motorcycles climbing between the turns, then the odd silence as they coast through the hairpins and roar to life again out of the turns. 

I have this experience before on Mount Palomar in San Diego county.  But there are no tunnels on Mount Palomar.  As the bikes got closer I pedaled faster, not that it would make any difference, but I wanted to get out of the tunnel. I had a sudden vision of the bike at the back of the group moving right to pass one of his mates then slamming into me.  

The roar went from deep rumble to deafening howl as the pack swung out of a hairpin and accelerated into the tunnel. The tunnel had about a six percent grade so the roar swelled as they approached, throttles wide open.  I put my head down and kept pedaling.   I could see the end of the tunnel. I hoped the roaring bikes could see me.  

Then it was over. The bikes flew past me in a line. Clearly they had passed many bicyclists on this mountain.  They shot from the tunnel into the light and disappeared. I continued to pedal, a little more slowly.  

Mount Palomar has many more motorcycles than any alpine climb I have ridden, but they are almost always single or in pairs.  They also are mostly four-cylinder high-revving Hondas, Kawasakis and Suzikis.  When they were near me in a turn, I could hear the best riders dragging the hockey-puck pad on their knee as they leaned into the turn at 45 degrees or more.  

Only on Sestriere did I have packs of motorcycles fly past. In 2005, three different packs flew past me on my way up. 

Usually, the excitement on these rides is descending and feeling the rush of speeding around the hairpin turns. On this ride, the biggest rush was the pack of Ducati race-replica motorcycles that shot past me on the way to the summit.

-------

On Tuesday, July 2, 2004, the Tour de France will climb to Sestriere then to Col de Montgenevre, through Briancon, up to Col du Lauteret on the way to Col du Galibier then downhill to the finish in Valloire.  

A Russian Journalist Defies Putin on War in Ukraine

Zhanna Agalakova Жа́нна Леони́довна Агала́кова

Journalist working at Russian Channel One until the War in Ukraine

Zhanna Agalakova has an Instagram page with stunning photos of Paris.  She lives and works in the city near Clichy. I followed her for several years, admiring her photos.  But one day the image on March 17, 2022, Zhanna posted a video of her cutting off her Первеу Канал (Russian Channel One) ID bracelet.  

She ended a three-decade long career as a journalist in defiance of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.  Her husband and daughter were with her in Paris where they now make their home.  Zhanna's career is outlined on a Wikipedia page.

I met Zhanna in 2013 at the Ig Nobel Ceremony at Sanders Theater at Harvard University.  Marc Abrahams, emcee of the ceremony and impresario of all things Ig Nobel, asked me to escort Russian and Japanese camera crews when they filmed. Sanders theater had very clear guidelines about the amount of time the crews could film. The Russian and Japanese crews were notorious for not understanding the restrictions, year after year.  

From 2013 to 2018, I escorted Zhanna and Boris her cameraman into and out of the theater.   In 2019, Zhanna returned to Paris where she had worked previously for Channel 1 Russia.  Then in 2022, she quit very publicly and began a new life and career. 

In 2023, Zhanna and I had coffee near Clichy. She told me about her break with Channel 1 and with Russia and President Vladimir Putin over the Russian invasion of Ukraine.  I had hoped to talk to Zhanna again this trip, but maybe next time.  

 

Fascists Fail in France! One Bookstore at Least

 

A very funny pair of neighboring bookstores is no more.  The fascist bookstore La Librairie Nouvelle went out of business in its posh location opposite Luxembourg Gardens at 10 rue de Medicis.  Until last month the fascists were located between the two shops of The Red Wheelbarrow English-language bookstore on either side of them: a children's bookstore to the left at 9 rue de Medicis and a general bookstore to the right at 11.  

In May, the fascists folded and Penelope, the quiet, determined owner of The Red Wheelbarrow leased the former fascist store and is renovating it as her new children's bookstore.  Penelope said they may lease the current children's shop to another bookstore. From my first visit in 2019 until my most recent visit, I noticed Penelope always had a selection of anti-Facist books in her window display.

If they keep all three shops, The Red Wheelbarrow currently has many books more than three meters above the floor, accessible only by ladder. They could certainly fill the space.  

While I was at Red Wheelbarrow, I saw a new book by Kazuo Ishiguro, a book of lyrics, which I will be reading on the flight to America. 

Last week The Red Wheelbarrow had an author event and book signing. When I first visited the store in 2019, I met Nita Wiggins, and American professor living in Paris who just published a memoir. She had an author event at The Red Wheelbarrow.  

Among its many fascist tomes, La Librairie Nouvelle displayed Le Grand Remplacement  by Renaud Camus.  The Great Replacement Theory that is at the center of the beliefs of Tucker Carlson and other American fascists was written by Camus in 1946. It has been a favorite of international Jew haters ever since.   

It seems strange that with fascism growing in popularity in France and across Europe that the fascist bookstore would fail now.  But Penelope told me 2017 that the clientele of La Librairie Nouvelle thought Trump and his acolytes were idiots. So maybe it is just intellectual fascism that is in decline. Pandering populist fascism is the preferred style.  

May fascists everywhere fall as easily as La Librairie Nouvelle.

Cool Hand Luke: "What we have here is a failure to communicate"

A few nights ago, I saw the 1967 movie "Cool Hand Luke" starring Paul Newman.  Several minutes into watching the movie, I was realized I had never seen it before.  I saw clips of the movie--I could remember Newman eating the last of 50 hard-boiled eggs. He ate the eggs in an hour in prison. The character Luke Jackson claimed he could eat fifty eggs in one hour.  All of the other inmates bet on whether he could or couldn't.

He could.  

For those who know the movie, that may be the most famous scene.  The most famous and still-quoted line form the movie is said twice by "The Captain" who runs the prison in rural Florida.

He says, "What we have here is a failure to communicate."  The Captain first says this when he puts the beaten Luke in "the box" after he was caught trying to escape for  the first time.  The next time the Captain says the same phrase, Luke is in the window of a Church waiting to be re-captured after this third attempt to escape.  After the Captain says, "What we have here is a failure to communicate" Luke is fatally shot in the neck by the prison sharpshooter.  

The movie has many funny moments. Paul Newman is funny even in the sadistic world of a southern road-gang prison. The movie is brutal and violent when it is not funny.  Newman's character Luke is a decorated World War II veteran with a silver star and a bronze star for gallantry under fire. But he has PTSD.

The movie opens with Luke drunk and drinking straight from the bottle. He is on a walkway between parking spaces in a southern town.  Parking meters mounted on 3-inch pipes lines the edges of the walkway.  Luke has a large pipe cutter. He staggers from meter to meter cutting the pipe and watching the meters drop to the ground. He doesn't rob the meters, just cuts them off.  After several sliced meters, he is arrested.  

In the military, in corporate offices and just kidding around at lunch, I have heard the phrase, "What we have here is a failure to communicate" and did not know its origin, until now.