Louisianna Purchase, 1804

Thomas Jefferson made one of the most famous land purchases ever on this day in 1804.  While the Americans had a more or less solid hold on the eastern seaboard, the central swath of the country, with the mighty (and navigable) Mississippi River and a large part of the Missouri River within the territory, was up for grabs.  The Spanish held it at one point and so did the French.  Napoleon was hoping to make a big comeback in the Caribbean, and by virtue of French presence there, to resurge in the New World.

Let's just say things did not go their way.  Jefferson sent James Monroe to join Robert Livingston in France to try to purchase New Orleans and West Florida for as much as $10 million. Failing that, they were to attempt to create a military alliance with England. Meanwhile, the French Army in St. Domingue was being decimated by yellow fever, and war between France and England still threatened. Napoleon decided to give up his plans for Louisiana, and offered a surprised Monroe and Livingston the entire territory of Louisiana for $15 million. Although this far exceeded their instructions from President Jefferson, they agreed.

When news of the sale reached the United States, the West was elated. President Jefferson, however, was in a quandary. He had always advocated strict adherence to the letter of the Constitution, yet there was no provision empowering him to purchase territory. Given the public support for the purchase and the obvious value of Louisiana to the future growth of the United States, however, Jefferson decided to ignore the legalistic interpretation of the Constitution and forgo the passage of a Constitutional amendment to validate the purchase. This decision contributed to the principle of implied powers of the federal government.

Tulip Fever (2018)

I watched this on a long flight home, and enjoyed it, in a light but historical period film kind of a way.  There is nothing new here, but it is set during the Dutch Renaissance, and that in and of itself sets it apart, but not enough to make it great, despite the cast.
The first half is actually fairly decent, occasionally threatening to be good. It follows Sophia (Alicia Vikander) from her life in a convent (where Judi Dench is the head) to her loveless marriage with the benign merchant Cornelis (Christoph Waltz). All Cornelis wants in life is a son and heir, and the montage of the Sandvoorts’ attempts at conception fail, despite his enthusiasm and Sophia's attempts to use old wives tales about increasing her chances of conception. As melancholy consolation, Cornelis hires a local artist, Jan Van Loos, to paint a dual portrait, so there will be at least some legacy.
And there in lies his mistake.  Sophia falls for him (for reasons that escape the viewer--which is where the film falls a bit flat.  Why would she give up everything for someone that she doesn't appear to have a fire for).  Their relationship is juxtaposed against her best friend's and the fishmongers, which is all that you would hope for.  It is not what it could be but it is diversionary.

An Abundance of Katherine’s by John Green

I am catching up on some Young Adult fiction, and John Green is my all time favorite in this category, if you take away JK Rowling, which I think is a given.  Or at least he is my second or third favorite, and he is still writing for the youth audience, which is a big plus. This book offers an offbeat, but ultimately wise, perspective on failed romance, even as it explores the challenges, hilarity and occasional moments of beauty on the path to adulthood.
At the book's core is Colin, a recent high school graduate and former child prodigy who attempts to apply mathematical principles to his checkered romantic history. Colin is determined to prove The Theorem of Underlying Katherine Predictability, which will help him understand why he's been dumped by 19 girls named Katherine.  His friend Hassan agrees to go on an epic road trip (which lasts only about a day, when they stop in a town and basically get stuck there) where he meets a girl who is not named Katherine who opens up a whole new chapter in his young adult life.

Norman (2016)

This is a movie that I winced through.  Thankfully I was on a long flight after a significant delay (it turns out when your airplane has a flat tire, it is not a matter of filling it with air, or jacking it up and changing it.  Instead it requires serious equipment that is hard to come by).
Norman (played convincingly by Richard Gere) is warm and friendly to everyone he meets, fancying himself as a magnanimous, well-connected power broker who’s eager to introduce people to each other for their mutual benefit.  But it’s clear that no one really knows Norman, and even though he is on screen for nearly the entirety of the film, we realize by the end that we don’t really know Norman, either. And that’s intentional; he is a tantalizing mystery.
What Norman is after, though, is not the money that closing a big deal would bring, but rather the prestige, something that’s more amorphous and harder to acquire. He finally achieves some semblance of the access and respect he long has sought, but in the end it is a bit of a bust, one that you can see coming from a mile away.I do think that how you feel about Norman the character will determine how you feel about “Norman” the movie. He’s a complicated man, and not necessarily a likable one. Is he a shameless hustler? Or is he merely an overbearing yet well-intentioned mensch?  I thought the former, but others may believe the later.

El Morro National Monument, New Mexico

 This is a fabulous place to stop on a New Mexico vacation.  Located about two hours west of Albuquerque, it is a nice stop to catch some Ancient Pueblo ruins, and do a short hike.  The entire area has been inhabited for thousands of years.
El Morro '“ the headland '“ is nestled along an ancient highway in central New Mexico between the Pueblo of Acoma and the Pueblo of Zuni. Once upon a time, a pool of dependable water at the foot of a great cliff dictated that travelers stop here. It was the only sure water for about 40 miles in any direction. Once it sustained a fairly large ancestral pueblo village atop the bluff before it successively quenched the thirst of Spanish Conquistadores, missionary explorers, and others of the Spanish colony known as Nuevo Mexico. Two hundred years later, they were followed by Anglo-Americans as they pushed a new nation'™s borders farther and farther west. Check out the graffiti on the backside of this stone edifice.

I love seeing the remains of where people lived.  I am not sure why, but the older the better.  There is something about seeing how people lived hundreds if not thousands of years ago that I find intensely interesting and almost peaceful.  The choices that we have made over the years about where and how to live and raise families makes me contemplative in a good way.  The American southwest is full of wonderful places to glimpse at the past, as well as enjoy natural beauty, so get it while you can.  The reduction in nationally held lands and the decision to mine them is abhorrent to me, but ultimately the people do not decide, money does.  Thankfully nothing valuable, besides a reliable but small water supply, has been found here.

Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson

I am catching up on some favored authors works that I missed along the way and this is one of them.

This is Kate Atkinson’s first novel, and it is interesting to read it having read Life After Life.  Much like Ursula’s repeated bad luck and multiple deaths in that book, in this one Ruby recounts her life through a series of deaths.  Death in Atkinson’s hands is a blackly comic trickster. Frank, the narrator's grandfather, who survived WWI, perishes when a German plane, having overshot the York railway yards, dumps its bombs on him as he takes a shortcut down an alley.   Some deaths are comically histrionic. Ruby's father, an incorrigible but inept womanizer, dies the death he might have wished, a coital coronary as he inappropriately has sex on the floor with one of the buffet waitresses at a family wedding.

Deaths are constantly foretold. We are told of Ada's sad demise several chapters before it happens. When we hear about Nell's elder brother Lawrence running away to sea, the narrator cannot resist telling us that, after two decades of travel and adventure, he will be blown up by a German mine in the North Sea.  Finally, as Ruby recalls her sister's death, she remembers and adopts the blackly unsentimental manner of her childhood self. She and her other sister, Patricia, look at the Christmas tree and wonder silently how Gillian's presents might be reapportioned. Ruby's coolness in her manner of narrating the novel's deaths is one reason why the novel is funny rather than mournful. But this coolness also has an explanation. A family saga will always have revelations, and near the end of Atkinson's novel we find that not every death has left her protagonist unshaken. There is a secret to be revealed that is not comic at all.

 

Home Again (2018)

This is a more or less feel good movie that will leave you smiling.  I was both amused by and resembled a review that read that his Reese Witherspoon brand loyalty was a factor in his enjoyment of this somewhat silly but none-the-less upbeat romantic comedy.
Witherspoon is a newly separated under employed mother of two tweens and the daughter of a once famous Hollywood director.  She moves back to SoCal into her childhood home, and is at odds with what to do with herself.  Her mother, played charmingly by Candace Bergen, incites three talented but broke playwrights to move into her guest house to help defray some expenses and provide some child care.  One of them provides romance for her, one is a mentor for her eldest daughter, and they all help parent the kids in a way that puts their actual father to shame.  The story of growing away from a marriage and then growing into yourself is just as cliche as it sounds, but an enjoyable and slightly off beat rift on a familiar theme.

Meow Wolf, Santa Fe, New Mexico

Outside of the Dali Museum in Figueres, Spain, this is the wildest museum that I have ever been too. It is an expensive experience, and the price did not dissuade many from attending, as we arrived in mid-afternoon and there was a 30-40 minute line to get in (pro tip: you can buy tickets on line, even when you are on sight, so get into the much shorter line for people who have tickets, and order them while you are waiting).
The concept is that you are entering a house, and then tumbling down a modern day Alice in Wonderland hole.  We read a couple of postcards, which give hints as to what the story line is, then we go to the kitchen and read the newspaper on the kitchen table.  Not to give too much away, there is a bit of a mystery that the rest of the museum is a pastiche of answers and possibilities that have a feel somewhere between being on psychedelics and exploring new horizons.  I found it perpetually disorienting, which initially is exciting, and then after about an hour, I felt like I really needed a break from the sensory overload.  Funnily, there is a vintage airline cabin installed right after you exit through the gift shop which we all utilized as a way to decompress before going back into the real world.  Highly recommended for all, but agility is a must.  You crawl through refridgerators and down tube-like staircase, as an example.

Turtles All the Way Down by John Green

I was really looking forward to this book, and in a lot of ways it delivered.  I was blown away by The Fault in Our Stars because it captured so much of the heartache I felt having a child who had cancer.  I cried through about the last third of the book, and wished that I had had it to give to people while my son was getting chemotherapy and radiation.  "Here is something to help you understand where I am at right now."  So it would have been almost impossible for this book to have a greater impact on me.
And it didn't.  But I did very much enjoy this tale of a young woman who has significant anxieties, obsessions, and ruminations.  She is getting help, taking medications, and yet, despite all that, it is hard for her to have a semblance of a normal young adulthood.  Green is best when he is exploring those who live on the edges during teenhood, and Ava is a great character.  The story he builds around her is less compelling and more what you would expect from a YA novel, but in many ways, he couldn't really top he last book in my estimation, and I was happy with this one.

Porutguese Garlic Seared Shrimp

We had a dinner that recapitulated what we loved about Portugal and the Iberian Peninsula--the food and the wine.
This is adapted from a George Mendes recipe, and is terribly simple.  The only catch is that you have to have smoke paprika, which is what gives the dish it's pizazz.

• 1 lb. shrimp, cleaned and deveined
• 4 tablespoons olive oil, divided
• 6 cloves garlic, minced
• 1/2 tablespoon pimenton
• 1 tablespoon parsley, chopped
• 1 tablespoon cilantro, chopped
• 1 lemon, juiced
• Paprika filament, for garnish (I did not use)
• Micro cilantro, for garnish (or something similar, if you have)

Make shrimp:

1. Season and sear the shrimp in 1 tablespoon of the olive oil for 30 seconds on each side to caramelize.  Remove from pan, set aside.
2. Lower the heat and add the remaining olive oil and minced garlic. Cook the garlic slowly, shaking pan, until golden. Add the pimenton and mix well. Return the shrimp to the pan and let cook another minute on each side. Add the chopped parsley, cilantro, and lemon juice.

Isle of Dogs (2018)

I really hope that I have just watched one of the nominees for best animated films for 2018, because this was so unusual and beautiful and sad and ugly and multi-layered.  I love Wes Anderson, and this film does not disappoint.  There were so many thoughts that I had during the movie about the way things were done and why that might be, and now, days later, I am still pretty sure that I don't totally get it.

The first thing is that the movie is complicated, in that there are moments where you just laugh out loud, and others where you are holding on just to see what will happen, still others where you have no idea what is going on exactly because while it is in Japanese and English it is also in dog.  The storyline takes place in Japan, the script is bilingual (the dogs speak English, the people speak Japanese and not everything is translated), and word has it that the Japanese voice acting is spot on.  The dogs are being exiled by a cat loving mayor, and the conditions that they live under are deplorable.  There are a number of ways to look at the message laterally, but suffice it to say that none of them support intolerance.  It is possible that you might be able to tell the values of a person based on what they think about this surprisingly complex movie.
 
Here is the deal.  Not everyone is going to love this new Wes Anderson animated movie, but I am willing to bet that if you love his auteur style generally, you are going to love this.  The thing about this is that it is not for kids.  The messages are multilayered and complex, which is not inherently different from other animated films, but it’s a bit grittier than Fantastic Mr. Fox, and certainly is unrecognizable when using Moana as a touchstone.
 

The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)

We started watching this movie a couple of years ago, back when we were trying to see all the movies that won best movie Academy Awards.  We got about 45 minutes in and then never got back to it, but in all, it is an excellent movie about the transition of servicemen back into civilian life post WWII.
There are three threads, one of which is the effects of war on a family.  Fredric March was a banker before he went to the European theater and he is one when he comes back.  His experiences in war leave him feeling like what he does in his job is fairly trivial, and he has trouble readjusting to civilian life, but is fairly well off with a wife and child who welcome him home.  Hoagie Carmichael is a sailor whose ship went down and he was amongst a few survivors.  He lost both his hands, which he struggles with fitting back in, despite his family and fiance welcoming him whole heartedly.  He finally accepts that he can have the life he left behind and gets married before the end.  Dana Andrews is a guy who was unskilled before he went to war, was a hero there, performing well under pressure and then coming home with PTSD and no job prospects.  His wife has also moved on without him, and to a large extent, his story seems pretty comparable with modern soldiers.  Really, a great film, maybe a tad on the long side, but well worth watching.

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

I love the voice in this novel, which spans generations of a Korean family in no time, crying out about the inequities in terms of gender, race, and politics.  This was one of the New York Times five best novels of 2018, and I see why.  This is the fourth of the five that I have read and it is my favorite.

The book tells the story of Korean immigrants living in Japan between 1910 and today, a family saga that explores the effects of poverty, abuse, war, suicide, and the accumulation of wealth on multiple generations. When the novel opens, we are introduced to Hoonie enters into an arranged marriage with Yangjin and they are bound together by their shared love for their daughter Sunja.

It is Sunja who is the character in the novel. As a teenager, she is seduced by a yakuza, Hansu, leaving her pregnant and unmarried, but when a sympathetic young missionary asks for her hand, it seems her disgrace will be avoided. She dodges that bullet, and a few more, but rest assured, her life is miserable, none the less.  The almost unimaginable degrees of hardship, disrespect and inhumanity suffered by the Koreans in this story makes for painful reading. They live in impoverished circumstances, are paid less than their Japanese counterparts, are spoken to as if they were dogs and, in one powerful scene, are forced to register time and again as strangers in a land in which many of them have in fact been born.  Hansu returns again and again, and without him, they would have died.  The Koreans tolerate this maltreatment with a stoicism that reflects the fortitude of their character. Surviving is what matters to them, not human rights.  Pachinko is a good metaphor for this book, in that the characters bounce off the edges of life and war in Japan, never knowing where they will be bounced next, and in the end, the game is rigged.  A beautiful read.  Do not miss this.

The Night Manager (2017)

This is a min series damatization of a John Le Carre thriller.  It is well written, well acted, and the tension is just right (which means that it was too much for me, but just about right for those who like that sort of thing.  I have more of an approach avoidance relationship with it myself).
The story goes that Jonathan Pine is the night manager at an upscale hotel in Cairo.  He did two tours in Afghanistan and has basically lost his interest in the things that most people love.  So he instead fulfills the wishes of the rich and famous.  Up until he gets involved with a guest who feeds him information about an international arms dealer, who then ends up brutally murdered.
That pisses him off, and when he is recruited by British intelligence he snaps up the undercover bad boy role, and suffice it to say, most of it goes about as well as can be expected, with some unprofessional entanglements aside.  Streaming on Amazon Prime, and well worth watching.

Meditation Park (2017)

There is so much to love about Canada, and one of those things is their movies.  And Sandra Oh.  This is set in British Columbia (I think) in a largely Asian immigrant community where the older generation struggles to speak English and many women still lead very traditional lives that are inherently isolated because they do not work, they do not speak the language, and their husbands would like to keep it that way.
The movie centers on Maria, who discovers a pair of sexy women's underwear in her husband Bing's possession and suddenly understands that it is possible that all the late nights he has been keeping where he is claiming to work are potentially about something else entirely.  She sets a two pronged course of response.  The first is to figure out exactly who this woman is and the other is to start to think about herself as separate from her husband.  How would she survive, what would she do?  She really has isolated herself to her husband and her daughter and that is just not going to be enough if Bing is leaving her.  It is equal parts charming and funny, not your typical romantic comedy but really filling that role in a lot of ways.  Streaming on Netflix to boot!

Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan

This author's first book made quite a splash and yielded her the Pulitzer Prize, but I wasn't such a big fan of it.  This book was on the New York Times notable books list and so I decided to give her a second chance and I am really glad that I did.  If you liked the multimedia in her first book, you are going to be disappointed that there is none of that here.  What is consistent is a feminist narrative that is soft and clear and true throughout.
The center of this story is Anna Kerrigan, the daughter of what appears to be a man who skirted the law for profit and disappeared under inauspicious circumstances.  Anna is left to care for her mother and her  sister with very disabling cerebral palsy.  She is fortunate that it is the height of WWII and women have entered the work force to do decidedly unladylike job of making machine parts at the Navy Yard, for which she is both well compensated and respected by her make peers. She goes on to do an even more specialized job diving, and when her mother leaves Manhattan after her sister dies, she stays.  It would have been unheard of before the war, but the world turned a bit upside down then, and Anna ran with it in an epic way.  The mystery of what happened to her father provides a side bar to the story, but this is a wonderfully well written story of the power of women.

The Incredible Jessica James (2016)

I have managed to escape my fate of last year's March and April, where I felt like everything I saw just did not add up to the quality of the Oscar nominated movies that I had spent the months before watching.  To be sure, one thing I have been doing a little bit of is watching the movies that I didn't quite finish up from last year's nominees (and I am also thinking of going back in time to watch other Best Picture nominees at the very least that I missed along the way, either because I wan't born or because I just never got around to it).
This is one I want to note because it is a romantic comedy streaming on Netflix, and I really liked it.  Jessica Williams is great as a sassy, but not altogether successful budding playwright who has gone through a break up and is not quite ready to get back on the relationship horse.  Along comes Chris O'Dowd, who is his usual likable self, and they manage to make something of their friendship.  Very enjoyable.

Meagan Leavey (2017)

This is a good movie that incorporates two things that are really true for war veterans returning home now.  They have a lot of trauma, and as women, they have had a lonely war.  So when Megan joins the military because she basically has no other viable options, and discovers that the Army is not her friend, she is a bit at sea until she gets a whiff of the canine units.  She inherits a dog, Rex, who is highly skilled at sniffing bombs and also a high maintenance dog who is hard for handlers.  Megan, who is not welcome with open arms into this unit either--women face a lot of battles before they even get to the battlefield--but the fact that Rex trusts her and he doesn't trust anyone wins her a lot of points, and they are basically inseparable. They are both wounded in an event that ends their war, but saves lives, and then Megan goes about finding a soft landing for Rex, against all odds.

Mrs. Osmond by John Banville

In order to read this book you would benefit greatly from having read A Portrait of a Lady recently enough to remember the characters and their motivations well enough to dive right in/. Where the one leaves off, this one begins.
I am not exactly sure how I feel about sequels that are written by another author in another time, but this one is very satisfying.  For one thing, Isabel Archer, now Mrs. Osmond, deserves a better ending than she got in the original.  That is of course the nature of a tragedy that the good inevitably suffer in a way that is understandable but inexorably sad.  This book gives her another path, one that is in keeping with her core character, but also tipping a hat to her intelligence and her potential.
Isabel supports the suffragette movement, manages to exact both her revenge and her freedom in a way that down's reflect badly on her, and one can see a path to happiness for her at the end.  Very satisfying.

Victoria (Season One) (2016)

Women leaders have always faced an uphill battle, and in the noble families of Europe, they got some real opportunities to shine due to an inherited disorder that disproportionately affected men over women.  Men bled to death and women took over for them more often than by chance alone.  Victoria had oodles of children, who were married off around Europe, in what was to be about the end of that practice world wide.
Victoria was a woman who rose to the throne at a very early age, luckily enough at an age of majority so the absolute requirement of a regent was avoided, much to her mother's chagrine.  The other commonality to these stories is that the women take over young and are long lived, so they have literally a lifetime to establish their legacy.  Victoria is lucky because while Albert struggled to find his role in life, he whole heartedly loved her.  Others around the two of them had high hopes that they could control the queen, either through him or through her, but he was having none of it, and largely supported her decision making obligations.  She had great support through him, and the only snafu is that he died young, and it is really tough to be a monarch and a good parent, and likely her children suffered as a result.  I enjoyed this series, but then I am a sucker for these BBC historical series.

Toni Erdmann (2016)

I still have one more movie to watch that was nominated for the 2017 Oscars, but while I wait to be able to see that, I am finishing up the handful of movies that I haven't finished watching from last year's nominees, and this is one of them.
It is a long and somewhat difficult film from Germany. When I say long, I mean three hours, and the gist of it is that after watching this movie, if you thought that you had an embarrassing parent, you will see that it could have been worse.  I remember reading Dave Berry some years ago, threatening his teenager with driving up to his high school in the Oscar Meyer Wiener mobile, shirtless and with a nipple ring.  This goes way way beyond that, and the daughter in this case is in her thirties, and he is showing up not just at family functions but also at her work place and to after hours business engagements.  It is just monstrously painful to watch, and finally the daughter, Ines, cracks, not from her father's antics it seems, but in that she finally sees the beauty of his ways.  I still have one more film in this category to watch, but the equally dark "A Man Called Ove" is still my choice for last year's winner (which is not what the Academy thought).

Portrait of a Lady by Henry James (1881)

I am almost positive that I have read this in some distant past, but decided to re-read it in order to read John Banville's recent sequel to it.  On the down side, nothing is familiar about it, not the character or the details of the story.  The good news is that it is absolutely wonderful to read.  I loved it, and was sorry to have it end, especially where it did.  So weirdly I got some insight into why Banville might have wanted it to go one.
Isabel Archer is equal parts vivacious and intelligent, with a mixture of naivete and a healthy portion of luck.  She is the sort of girl who lights up a room, who men of all ages fall for in no time.  She has suitors galore and no real interest in relationships or marriage. She is a woman at the end of the nineteenth century, still bound by some conventions, but certainly sensing that they are all about to undergo major change.  She wants to see the world, and she has an aunt who takes a liking to her, and makes it happen for her.
It is her goodness and lack of guile that lead her down a garden path that threatens to suffocate her spirit.  From the middle of the story onward she is slowly tumbling to that fact, and trying to figure out how to extricate herself.  It is charming and in a lot of ways, you almost forget that it is also quite tragic.  Recommended, whether you go on to read Banville's novel or not.

Hologram for a King (2016)

I am reminded of the Grateful Dead lyric: "sometimes you get shone the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right."
I read this book, and liked it very much, and that is how I feel about the movie as well (kudos to Tom Hanks, who really pulls off the right tone for the lead character, which makes all the difference), and strangely, I think it is better.
Hanks is a kind of Willie Lomanesque character on a last ditch effort to get his career back on track.  He is  trying to sell a hologram contract to the king of Saudi Arabia, who wants to build a city in the middle of the desert that will populate 1.5 million people by 2025. The irony is hard to resist from the beginning—a former failure of empathy, now selling a machine for impersonal business, to an enterprise that may as well be a mirage, for a king who never shows up.  But somewhere along the way, Hanks finds something to love in life after all, and rather than do what most of us would do, he seizes onto it like a life raft and it carries him to the ocean's surface.  Beautifully done.

Julieta (2016)

Pedro Aldomovar is not one to shy away from the uncomfortable.  Quite the contrary, he runs full steam ahead into uncomfortable situations populated by unusual people in an unflinching way that I find admirable as well as memorable.
This is his twentieth movie I read, which made me go and look to see how many I have seen.  Twenty just sounds like an awful lot, and I was right, I have only seen seven of them, so one thing to do is if you see this and like it would be to seek out some of his other work.
The young Julieta gets slightly freaked out by a guy on a train, and one thing leads to another, with her seeking comfort with another, becoming pregnant with his child, and starting a life with someone whom she really doesn't know.  The inauspicious beginning leads nowhere good, but certainly not where you would predict it to go (this is Aldomovar, after all), and it is really quite good.  Julieta is somehow almost, but not quite, set free at the ends.

Fifty Years Ago Today: Memories of MLK

Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968.  The events of the last several years have demonstrated that while laws have changed, in many ways the things he and others said then are still quite true now.  I remarked to a colleague and friend when he posted James Baldwin's quote that to be black " and to be relatively conscious is to be in a constant rage."  The profound incongruity based solely on race remains profound and somehow even harder to acknowledge today than it was then.
Fifty one years ago today, MLK delivered his speech decrying the war in Vietnam and the disproportionate price that people of color and people who are poor pay in times of war. I think there are a number of things about it that reflect on him as a compassionate man that sway me in memorable ways.  And this day,  the day after our President, in an act demonstrating how little he understands about the military, sought to deploy them to our border with Mexico, this speech about the consequences of such actions rings very clear indeed.
Here are some excerpts from it.  We have not moved beyond war and the tyranny of oligarchs, far from it. 
"A Time to Break the Silence"

For those who ask the question, "Aren't you a civil rights leader?" and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: "To save the soul of America." We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself until the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath --
America will be!

Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be -- are -- are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land....

And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond in compassion, my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the ideologies of the Liberation Front, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them, too, because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries.

...I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor.

in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/james_a_baldwin_146202

in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/james_a_baldwin_146202

in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/james_a_baldwin_146202]

 

in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/james_a_baldwin_146202

in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/james_a_baldwin_146202

A Most Violent Year (2014)

There are so many Jessica Chastain movies that I have not seen, and this one also stars Oscar Isaacs, and it is well worth seeing.  The only complaint I have is that the title really doesn't suit the movie.  Which is not to say that there isn't violence in it, there is, but it really has a much bigger picture, and the obstacles faced by immigrants in general as they navigate establishing a new business and that someone wanting to run a clean shop when everyone else is dirty is a very interesting topic, and more timely now than it was when the film came out.
The story revolves around the heating oil business which is really something unique to the Northeast.  Isaacs' character has married into the business through his wife's father, but he wants it to be clean.  He is well liked in his community, because he is fair and hard working and at heart he is a kind person.  Those are traits that work for him and against him as he jockeys for position in a movie that lays it all out clearly and reasonably concisely.  Great cast, good script, and well worth seeing.

Denial (2016)

This is a film about a real life trial of a case brought by a Holocaust denier, David Irving, against a Holocaust scholar, Deborah Lipstadt.  He accused her and her publisher of libel when she described him as a liar and a poor historian in her book "Denying the Holocaust".  She is confident that she will win, based largely on her ignorance of British law, which requires that she prove that he is the things that she has said about him.  As the defendant, she must prove her innocence, rather than that he must prove her to be guilty.
The Jewish community urges her to settle with him out of court rather than to essentially put the Holocaust on trial and risk the outcome that there might be a valid difference of opinion on whether or not the Holocaust happened.  There are still many survivors about and the whole experience was painful for them to listen to and yet unavoidable to attend.
She hires a crack team of lawyers who correctly predict that Irving will be the prosecutor and therefore should not be allowed to interrogate a survivor.  Firstly, they will be emotionally crushed and secondly, they are poor witnesses.  It is like any trauma.  For every three people there are four different accounts of exactly what happened.  So instead they go about showing him to be a racist, through reading his personal journals and a bad historian, through minute examination of his writings and the verifiable facts.  It is fascinating and painful to watch, but is also a window into the rise of overt racism and xenophobia in our own country today.

Holiday Paradox

It has been an unusual melding of religious holidays and secular ones this year so far.  Ash Wednesday fell on Valentine's Day, and now we have Easter on April Fool's Day.  Then add in that Good Friday is the first night of Passover and we are really onto something, because as we all know, the Last Supper was a Seder.
So what to make of this.  We as a country and myself in particular live in a mixed up jumble of cultures and religions.  We hang onto our pagan past, trying to dress it up with meanings that aren't strictly tied to ancient beliefs, so it is nice when we can truly mix it up a bit on the up and up.  There is something quite hilarious about the prankster edge of April Fools Day, mixed in with Jews celebrating their release from slavery and Christians celebrating the miracle that is at the center of their beliefs.  We are not a people who make sense, and we need to embrace those differences, both within us and between us and celebrate what we have while we work for a better world.  May the universe arc towards good, and hurry up about it.