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You may know this already. This is---in a minor sense at least---the end of the world. You may recall this 20 years from now---if you are still alive by then. We're in the Oval Office, on Feb. 28, 2025, in the presence of Donald Trump, VP Vance, and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine. This is an article form The Guardian, the UK newspaper, written by David Smith. 

“This is going to be great television,” Donald Trump remarked at the end. Sure. And the captain of the Titanic probably assured his passengers that this would make a great movie some day.

Trump has just presided over one of the greatest diplomatic disasters in modern history. Tempers flared, voices were raised and protocol was shredded in the once hallowed in the Oval Office. As Trump got into a shouting match Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a horrified Europe watched the post-second world war order crumble before its eyes.

A group of people sit in a room as microphones loom overhead

‘Dummies for Putin’: Democrats defend Zelenskyy after ‘shameful’ Trump meeting

Never before has a US president bullied and berated an adversary, never mind an ally, in such a public way. Of course reality TV star and wrestling fan turned US president had it all play out on television for the benefit of his populist support base – and a certain bare-chested chum in the Kremlin.

Zelenskyy had come to the White House to sign a deal for US involvement in Ukraine’s mineral industry to pave the way for an end to three-year war in Russia. There was a hint of trouble to come when he arrived at the West Wing, wearing black – not a suit – and Trump greeted him with a handshake and sarcasm: “Wow, look, you’re all dressed up!”

Inside the Oval Office, which has seen much but never anything quite like this, Zelenskyy thanked Trump for the invitation. At first all was sweetness and light as they fielded questions from reporters.

There was a minor wrinkle over how much Europe support has given Ukraine, which ended with smiles, a playful but pointed tap on Zelenskyy, and ominous words from Trump: “Don’t argue with me.”

But the last 10 minutes of the nearly 45-minute meeting devolved into acrimony and chaos. Zelenskyy found himself ambushed by Trump and his serpentine vice-president, JD Vance. He was expected to sit back and take a beating from Nurse Ratched and Miss Trunchbull. He refused.

Vance said Joe Biden’s approach had failed and that diplomacy was the way forward. Zelenskyy challenged “JD” on this, noting Russia’s betrayals of trust in the past.

Vance, who once declared he doesn’t care what happens in Ukraine, was riled. Finger jabbing, he told Zelenskyy: “Mr President, with respect. I think it’s disrespectful for you to come to the Oval Office to try to litigate this in front of the American media.”

Uh-oh. The politicians and journalists in the room could surely tell this was going off the rails. At one point the Ukrainian ambassador would put her head in her hands. She was all of us.

Zelenskyy tried to push back, asking if Vance had ever been to Ukraine. Vance got angry and spoke of “propaganda tours”. Zelenskyy tried to answer but Trump interjected: “Don’t tell us what we’re going to feel.”

The men spoke over each other. Raising his voice, the president said: “You don’t have the cards right now.”

Zelenskyy responded: “I’m not playing cards.”

Trump, pointing an accusing finger and descending into his worst self from the presidential debates, admonished: “You’re gambling with the lives of millions of people. You’re gambling with world war three and what you’re doing is very disrespectful to the country, this country that’s backed you far more than a lot of people say they should have.”

TV pro tip: Trump has spent so many campaign rallies warning about world war three that the phrase has lost its shock value.

Trump and Vance tried to scold Zelenskyy like an ungrateful child. Vance – who recently went to Munich to condemn Europe as being on the wrong side in the culture wars – demanded: “Have you said ‘thank you’ once?”

Zelenskyy tried to respond. Trump told him his country was in big trouble. He went on: “The problem is I’ve empowered you to be a tough guy and I don’t think you’d be a tough guy without the United States and your people are very brave. But, you’re either going to make a deal or we’re out.

“And if we’re out, you’ll fight it out and I don’t think it’s going to be pretty… But you’re not acting at all thankful, and that’s not a nice thing.”

Zelenskyy looked shellshocked and Trump commented on what great TV it will be.

No deal was done and a planned press conference was cancelled. Zelenskyy drove away empty-handed, having just endured own diplomatic Chernobyl. As for the rest of Europe, a bust of Winston Churchill, looming over the shoulders of Trump and Vance, may have shed a tear or two.

The "Great Read"...

 This is a screen shot of an internet page of the New York Times of today (Feb 27, 2025):

A great read? "Great Read"(!). Would that mean we're supposed to enjoy reading this? What would be the next great read? Trump refusing to follow rulings of the American courts? Putin starting WW3?

Perhaps we are too sensitive, or too  nervous, but still. 

"Call Me by Your name" -- our review -- reposted

So, here is our review of Call Me by Your Name---André Aciman's book (from 2007), not the new movie made from it in 2017.

Title & author

Most reviews of the book are fawning, and the few critical ones typically censure it for its not-so-happy ending---Aciman having apparently listened to his agent who told him that "the American public is not ready for a gay relationship that doesn't end in tears." Or he listened to his inner voice, which is Proustian by vocation (he's the director of the Proust Project at CUNY). Anyhow, this is not one of the books that "get stronger towards the ending" (as a judge of the Booker Price once put it). But its finale is not the only issue here, so let's do a little bean-counting and separate our critical pluses ("+") and minuses ("-") accordingly.

(+) There's something unique about the combination of high fiction and graphic expressions of longing and desire in this book. Ignorami that we are---we do believe this combination hasn't occurred in world literature before. THIS MAKES THE BOOK STAND OUT.

No? Well, here, Elio, the narrator (on p. 8), just warming up: 

"I know desire when I see it---and yet, this time, it slipped by completely. I was going for the devious smile that would suddenly light up in Oliver's face each time he'd read my mind, when all I really wanted was skin, just skin."

Okay, you say, that's just an example of erotic writing done well (more examples on our Handsheet for the Erotic Writer). Ampersant could have done it if he were a better writer. But...but little Elio (aged 17), is really a paragon of high fiction; he's inconceivable in any other kind of literature. Here (p. 29 now, Elio conversing with Oliver):

"And yet here he was in his third week with us, asking me if I'd ever heard of Athanasius Kirchner, Giuseppe Belli, and Paul Celan.
'I have.' [Elio replies]."

A paragon of high fiction

(These are all writers, we suppose, because Paul Celan was one). Okay, let's try to find a better example. Next page:

"I was Glaucus and he [Oliver] was Diomedes."

Not good enough? Here, Elio daydreaming (p. 39):

"Did you [Oliver] know that I came in your mouth last night?"

(+) Elio is blessed to grow up in an intellectual Acadia of the 1980's. Father's a renowned professor of something, there's money, an understanding mother, Jewish heritage, and an understanding house keeper (who inspects the bed sheets each morning for stains). There's also a villa on the Italian Riviera with a tree-lined driveway, a pool, and a tennis court (one wonders, given the hilly, seaside topology of the place). And there's TALENT. E.g., Elio is a serious musical prodigy who improvises Busoni improvising Brahms improvising Mozart on the piano, much to Oliver's delight. And this Oliver (aged 24) has already finished his Ph.D. on Heraclitus and come over to supervise the Italian translation of his thesis (among other things).

And there's TALENT

"Call Me by Your name"

We're (again) working on a review of "Call Me by Your Name," --- the novel of André Aciman from 2007, which was made ten years later into a film of the same name that provided the breakout platform for Timotée Chamalet. And, in so doing, we're discovering all sort of things, like this clip, for example, which gathered 600m (sixhunded million) views:

 Keep posted. We'll try our best (which is not much).

Our friend Glenn sends this picture from Baltimore and writes...

 

..."Schrödinger's dumpster."

(Got it? Hint: "Schrödinger's cat")

Freedom: Angela Merkel's memoirs.

Underneath you find a review by the Cambridge historian Christopher Clark of Angela Merkel's autobiography (Merkel, the emeritus German chancellor). Her book is titled "Freedom," which came out a few month ago. Most of the reviews were fairly so-so. We at Freedom Fries (our name is rooted in the Iraq War controversy of 2003) read a lot of reviews of her book, but never got from them an idea what she had to say (fairly typical, we'd say, of our times). This is the first review that has gets past the clichés. Here it is. Enjoy.

Christopher Clark in The London Review of Books.

Freedom: Memoirs 1954-2021 

by Angela Merkel with with Beate Baumann, translated by Alice Tetley-Paul. Macmillan, 709 pp., £35, November 2024, 978 1 0350 2075 1

Angela Merkel​ was 35 when the country in which she had established herself as a research scientist ceased to exist. Once that happened, the transition was instantaneous: her career in science ended and her career in politics began. For nearly half of the period that has elapsed since that moment in 1990 – 16 out of 34 years – Merkel was at the apex of the German state. She worked with four American presidents, four French presidents, two Chinese presidents, two Russian presidents and five British prime ministers. Merkel’s low-key, unflappable persona makes it easy to overlook how extraordinary her story is. A life composed of such unlike elements has never been possible before and will never be so again, at least in Europe. Only in a reunified Korea might there one day be a parallel.

Angela Merkel

A resonant encounter occurs at the point in Freedom, Merkel’s memoir, where the story passes from her first life into her second. At the beginning of November 1990, she had just been preselected as the Christian Democratic Union candidate for Stralsund-Rügen-Grimmen on the coast of the Baltic Sea. The GDR had ceased to exist a month before; the first elections of the newly unified Germany were a month away. As she toured her prospective constituency, she met with fishermen in a little town called Lobbe on the island of Rügen. She sat with them in their hut amid bottles, rubbish and equipment, making hesitant conversation but also enjoying their ‘sociable silence’. It was a complicated moment: the fishermen, hardy men of the Baltic coast, knew it was unlikely that their industry would survive the restructuring ahead. Most of them eventually went out of business. To them, Merkel writes, European fisheries policy seemed ‘a monstrous bureaucratic machine impervious to their concerns’. But at the heart of her recollection of this scene, we find the sentence: ‘It was the first time I had ever held a turbot in my hands and felt its distinctive stone-like bumps.’

Merkel brings to her encounter with the turbot the eye (and thumbs) of a scientist. Yet there is more to it than that, because on the shores of the German Baltic, the turbot is more than a fish. The garrulous central protagonist of Günter Grass’s meandering epic The Flounder (Der Butt) is not in fact a flounder, but a turbot (Steinbutt), distinguishable from the other flatfish, as Ralph Manheim’s translation of 1978 puts it, by ‘the bony, pebble-like bumps under his skin’. For the novel’s narrator, the encounter with the turbot is a moment of becoming: ‘His talking to me like that gave me a sense of importance. Of significance. Of inner growth. Self-awareness was born. I began to take myself seriously.’ The turbot, who speaks the spare dialect of the Baltic coast, ‘a language of few words, a wretched stammering that [names] only the strictly necessary’, begins his passage through Grass’s book as a spokesfish for patriarchal social order, but in the final chapters becomes an eloquent witness to the rising power of women. In that scene in the fishermen’s hut, charged with change and uncertainty, the turbot’s stony bumps are the hardest and surest thing: a fitting point of departure.

In defense of whom?

Of Elon Musk, of course---the most hated man on the planet. 

And who is defending him? A senator Kennedy---John Kennedy---who's not part of the Kennedy clan, and unrelated to the new US health hecretary.

John Kennedy, junior US senator for Louisiana

This is apparently a speech on the US Senate floor:

"I wanna try to put in perspective what many of my Democratic friends have been talking about today. They're very, very, very upset at president Trump, and they're very, very, very upset at Elon Musk. President Trump ran for president on a number of issues. One of the issues he ran on, he said it almost every day. He said, if you will make me president, I'm gonna go through the entire budget and review all the spending line by line."

"I heard if I heard him say that once, I heard him say it a thousand times. And that's what he's been doing. He went out and appointed through an executive order, Elon Musk, who, people some people like him, some don't, but he's not a dummy. He's a very successful business person. He's got a top secret security clearance."

"President Trump issued an executive order and he turned to mister Musk, and he said, mister Musk, I want you to do for me what I said I was gonna do in the election. I want you to go through all the spending line by line. Now let me ask you something, mister president. How are you gonna review the spending without reviewing the spending? How are you gonna audit the spending by an agency without auditing the agency?"

"That's what I mean when I say common sense is illegal in Washington DC. That's what mister Musk is doing. He's put together a crackerjack team and, they're going through everybody spending line by line, item by item. And my my Democratic colleagues are very, very, very upset. And they they're they've been very eloquent."

"They've talked about the process and, president Trump's executive order supposedly violates the constitution, and they've accused mister Musk of having conflicts of interest. And so I've heard people say he's sitting over there with a notepad copying down everybody's social security number, and he's gonna go use it to make money. I mean, people in this town, not just my democratic colleagues, they're really upset." 

Your inner Elon Musk (from The New Yorker)

Developmental Milestones of Your Elon Musk

By Cora Frazier, February 3, 2025

The way your Elon Musk plays, moves, and communicates offers important data about his development. Although every child is different, recognizing where your Elon Musk is on the curve can help you identify potential problems early and allow for intervention, under the guidance of your pediatrician and the federal regulatory agency.

Social/Emotional Milestones

By this age, your Elon Musk should be able to wave hello and goodbye and point to Cabinet employees he plans to fire. He should be able to hug stuffed toys, recognize the people who care for him, clap when a judge dismisses an insider-trading lawsuit, and blow kisses. If, at this age, your Elon Musk can show affection only through the social-media platform he owns, consult a pediatrician about whether he may be suffering from an underlying issue that could have broader emotional or geopolitical implications.

Language/Communication Milestones

Your Elon Musk should be able to say at least three words besides “Mama,” “Dada,” “Earth,” “wow,” and “billion.” If not, speech therapy may be recommended, or else otolaryngological testing, to determine whether your Elon Musk has a hearing impairment that is impeding his ability to form diplomatically appropriate speech. By now, Elon Musk should be able to point to objects when they are identified by others, including the more than ten billion dollars his companies have been given by NASA, and any household pets.

Cognitive/Reasoning Milestones

Ideally, by this age, your Elon Musk can stack two or more blocks in a model of the tunnel that his construction company built beneath the Las Vegas Convention Center. He can play with toys—for instance, pushing a recalled Tesla Cybertruck across the floor or mimicking adults as they drink from cups, brush their hair, or use their phones to post deepfakes.

Physical/Movement Milestones

Your Elon Musk should be able to walk at a domestic political rally in his company-branded shoes without holding on to anything. He should be able to feed himself with his hands and drink from a cup without a lid, although he may spill sometimes. Elon Musk should at least try to listen to shareholders and use a spoon.

When to See a Doctor

As you assess your Elon Musk’s development, consider it holistically. What are some non-downsizing activities that your Elon Musk enjoys? What are some activities that you enjoy doing with your Elon Musk? Ideally, he will have clear likes and dislikes that lie outside his early-school activities and his investment portfolio. Your goal is to raise a happy, healthy, socially conscious Elon Musk who will engage with family and peers. If, instead, your Elon Musk is showing signs of aggressive behavior, such as biting, hitting, spitting, or creating the largest platform for disinformation in the world, this could be a cause for concern. Consult with your day-care provider about whether time-outs involving quiet moon-sand play would encourage more regulated decision-making. Reinforce prosocial behaviors, such as shrinking his carbon footprint, and ignore his attempts to make fascist hand gestures in his stroller. If time-outs prove ineffective, and your Elon Musk in fact looks poised to take a prominent role in the most powerful anti-democratic regime in the world, you may want to consider a more active intervention, with the help of a licensed professional, such as occupational therapy, in which your Elon Musk can play with tubes and practice sharing balls of varying sizes. Ultimately, it’s important to remember that you can only do so much. Elon Musk is his own person with his own will. All you can do is hope that, one day, he will understand that throwing trucks at peers can lead to loneliness, as can rending the social fabric that has held our nation together since the New Deal. If not, you can always try sleep training. ♦

Published in the print edition of the February 10, 2025, issue, with the headline “Developmental Milestones of Your Elon Musk.”