I knew the Jewish Conspiracy would come up...

and by god, it has.   The left, of course, has given Israel the back of its hand for years, yammering on about the poor Palestinians.  But now anti-semitism has cropped up on what can be described as the nutter right.  Apparently, my people are big-time plutocrats, controlling banks and newspapers and generally telling others what to think while themselves rolling in money.  A nice lifestyle, I think, particularly the financial part.  So where's my cut?

  I have been left out of this Vast Jewish Conspiracy and forced to work for local government.  and not even the political part, where I understand bribes are an honored tradition, but in the library.  It is well known that when politicians want to cut spending, they cut back on funding the library. Politicians don't read anyway, so no-one is harmed.

  

A fortuitous find

I am always one book short of clinical depression without a book to look forward to. Sometimes I feel that I have read everything worth reading by my crochety tastes, andf will be stuck re-reading "When Patty Went to College" for the rest of my life.

  Then I get lucky.  On a pile of discards at the Good Will, I discovered "All Our Worldly Goods" by Irene Nemirovsky.  I almost skipped it because I noted that the author had been killed in the Holocaust and I thought her work might be gloomy and depressing. Au contraire!


I find it difficult to express  anything positive or approving about a book or movie.  Dislike is so much easier to articulate.  Nemirov, though, delighted me.  I think you will like her work if you like Tolstoy, or maybe Balzac.   The milieu is bourgeous France between the wars, and she is a keen observer of manners and mores, with a dazzling lightness of touch. 

  I downloaded another of her books to my Kindle, "Suite Francaise," which is even better, also taking place just before the German defeat, a period of great despair, confusion, and hysteria in France.  The advancing German troops disrupt everyone's lives and turn everyone into a refugee.  The fabric of society is torn and can never be reclaimed.  Except it is, after a fashion.

  Read the damn book!

I gave up on trying to understand politics a long time ago

I can't understand the brouhaha about President Trump.  He's probablly not the most charming man in the world but.  what has he done that's so awful?  Has he sent the secret police to your house at 3 a m to drag you away to prison in chains?  Stolen your bank account?  Kidnapped your children?

  I would prefer Winston Churchill, but that's just me.  He was not on offer.  And Trump has done some stuff I really like, like beat ISIS.  Increased employment.  And my personal favorite, caused, or permitted, the stock market to rise spectacularly, making my small savings, which could be accurately described as the widow's mite, a bit more mighty.  So he has orange hair and tweets a lot.   Compared  to Caligula, he's not so bad.  And he will serve for a minimum of 4 years and a maximum of 8, and will be gone.

  I long ago gave up trying to understand politics. I remember the exact moment when this happened..  It was when the Watergate break-in occurred.  I read the newspapers, listened to the news, and read the books ghost-written by the participants, but was still baffled.  And I am still in that state, but I don't try to understand it any more.  I felt a flicker of interest when Scooter Libby was jailed for spitting on the sidewalk or something, but it soon subsided, and I resumed my customary calm, not to be confused with torpor.

  I've got my own troubles.