![]() (I can write this, since I carry an Irish passport, courtesy of my grandmother, along with my beloved American passport) Stephen K. Bannon runs our country, pushing the buttons of the distracted oaf who is technically the president. Trump shows what is under his personal rock when he refers to Jon Stewart as “Jonathan Leibowitz” (the comedian’s original name) after a TV gig. Guess Trump forgets he was passing as Swedish as long as he could, neglecting his family origins as Drumpf. Behind him is Bannon, pulling the strings, telling him how to keep Muslims out of the country. I looked it up. http://www.surnamedb.com/Surname/Bannon Bannon means “white” or “fair” – in the complexion sense, you may be sure. As an Irish passport holder, I can say, some of Trump’s closest advisors are named Flynn and Kelly and Bannon. It was not that long ago that “real” Americans considered people from Ireland the unwashed, the others, the threat. The Flynns and Kellys and Bannons were not considered good enough to haul trash or dig graves for “real” Americans, who had, of course, killed and dislodged as many original Americans as they could. There is reasonable debate about how many Irish ever encountered signs that said NINA -- No Irish Need Apply. Butongoing research proves it was there, in some windows, some newspapers, many hearts. The Irish persevered, and a descendent of Fitzgeralds and Kennedys became president. Now another president talks about a “ban” of Muslims, a registry of Muslims. He backtracks, but we know. In a dangerous world, the U.S. was already vetting people from dicey parts of the world. But with his tiny attention span, the new president tries to stop legal residents of the U.S. from coming home. Doctors. Scholars. Husbands. Wives. He is unashamed. He knows no history. Knows only fragments of things that flutter in front of his eyes. Knows only what Bannon tells him. It’s easy to spot the sneer on Bannon’s face. We want this guy advising our shallow president?
Joshua Rubin
2/2/2017 01:23:42 pm
Nice piece. A short memory is very helpful if you want to deny others the very freedoms that benefited your own and made your success possible. I'll see your Irish passport and raise you my genetic birthright to emigrate to Israel, which allows me to complain about Kushner. Bringing a son-in-law into the family business is a fine Jewish tradition, but Kushner is not holding his end up. First, a Holocaust rememberance without Jews and now trump calling to abolish the wall between church and state? that wall, envisioned by our deist, unitarian and quaker founding fathers, has been very important in making th US perhaps the most consistently stable and safe place for Jews to settle in the entire history of our diapora. So, is jared silent on all this, or simply disregarded? . .
George
2/2/2017 01:48:49 pm
Josh: my 47 percent Jewish DNA gets me another card: i totally agree. Jared is ambitious. Wants to be like Donald. (Sad) no trace of him. Maybe Bannon has something on him. Jared has replaced Cantor as the designated "Putz."
Brian Savin
2/2/2017 02:12:06 pm
Faith and begorrah, George! Some of the biggest anti-Semites have been Jews. And similarly down the line of ethnics. Et tu, Buarchaill?
Joshua Rubin
2/2/2017 03:16:57 pm
In that csse, gotta go with the Quaker, even though a Quaker playing football seems somewhat oxymoronic. Nice piece today in NYT on Penn Charter school.
bruce
2/6/2017 10:54:58 am
hmmm. wasn't nixon a quaker?
Brian Savi
2/2/2017 06:38:24 pm
Actually, Josh, their both Irishmen! I just thought I'd make it interesting by throwing religion in! I'm making wings and my wife chili. A great secular holiday!!
Brian Savin
2/2/2017 06:42:43 pm
Every time I do any typo on they're I get "their" iPhones haunt me!! I remember George writing about that kind of thing!
George Vecsey
2/2/2017 06:56:41 pm
Brian, we ought to make a list of errors the iPhone makes on our behalf. Fortunately, mine tries to correct or give me fail-safe pause....but you think you have typed it right, and it whizzes into the ozone wrong.
Michael Andre
2/4/2017 05:54:14 am
Looking though apartment listings in London in 1967 I was surprised to see one annotated "No Irish!"
George Vecsey
2/4/2017 08:20:33 am
I can imagine. Our earliest visits to London, 70s, lots of inspections at museums, theatres. Yet renovation in neighborhoods like Paddington and South Kensington seemed to have Irish workmen (later, Polish)
Brian Savin
2/4/2017 09:04:57 am
While visiting one of our kids in college years ago I got to talking with a German professor and somehow we began trading politically oriented ethnic jokes circulating in various countries. He said an interesting thing: The reason ethnic jokes are so funny is that there is a grain of truth that rings in the good ones! In my view, absent the humor, you're left with only bigotry.
bruce
2/6/2017 11:00:56 am
george,
Brian Savin
2/6/2017 11:05:52 am
Yesterday's Super Bowl was the greatest comeback I ever watched unfold in that sport. Breathtaking particularly because in an age of empty hyperbole I actually saw meaning in the word "greatness"!
bruce
2/7/2017 11:40:26 am
it was a great comeback helped by atlanta's--and i said so to the person i was watching the game with--inexplicable decision not to run the ball for three plays to get a basic chip shot for a field goal later in the game. i thought a sack might put them back or a fumble/interception would make them lose possession. didn't think about a penalty being added into the equation tho. 2/7/2017 12:18:07 pm
Bruce. I agree with you assessment that Atlanta's lost field goal opportunity was a turning point in the game. We do not know what was happening on the field and whether NE was beginning to change the dynamics on the line, but the three additional points would have put additional pressure on NE during their forth quarter recovery. 2/6/2017 11:49:25 am
Brian Savin
2/6/2017 12:34:17 pm
Alan, this is George's blog, not ours, and in my view trolling the group for support for personal political views is highly inappropriate.
George Vecsey
2/7/2017 02:27:50 pm
Brian (and Alan, et al) I am fine with your comments. I think once or twice I have proposed cutting something that was personal, but I don't think this is. It's a public forum...and the hardy little band of regulars is well-informed and opinionated in many directions.
George Vecsey
2/7/2017 02:31:48 pm
Alan, I would not chime in on most backgrounds, but with clear ties to England and Ireland (and maternal Irish-Belgian relatives who were war heroes) I feel comfortable pointing out that I would expect Irish =Americans to have some respect for the bad stuff they faced. Bannon is a white supremacist -- when I saw his name in Gaelic, (via Google Translate) -- I felt the need to point out that he is one of those pull-up-the-ladder-Jack types that I despise. Not hard to despise that mug. GV
bruce
2/7/2017 12:45:35 pm
alan, 2/7/2017 05:44:06 pm
Bruce
bruce
2/7/2017 06:00:05 pm
alan,
bruce
2/7/2017 02:47:24 pm
george,
Hansen Alexander
2/12/2017 08:44:35 pm
Yes, George
bruce
2/12/2017 09:02:14 pm
hansen,
Hansen Alexander
2/12/2017 08:22:13 pm
Well George,
Hansen Alexander
2/13/2017 09:53:20 am
Bruce, 3/1/2017 03:41:58 am
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QUOTES
Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online. The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal…. After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness. The progress stems mostly from three factors: First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot. Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.) Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year. “Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.” That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.” That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data. One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines. Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks. Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths. The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions. Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately Republican and white. Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.) *** From the great Maureen Dowd: As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop. But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels." --- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing. *** "Putting out the paper," we called it. Much more than nostalgia. ---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html |