Sometimes newspaper columnists post articles that are miscellaneous bullet points. That’s what this blog entry is.
In the face of great hostility from the current occupant and his minions, PBS and its flagship news operation have shown a combination of grit, courage, and clear-eyed determination to tell the truth without sanewashing it.
The “News Hour” has run some powerful segments about the extreme excesses of DHS, on the devastation wrought by heavily extra-legal actions by the current “administration,” on the utter incompetence of the gaggle of sycophants in cabinet offices, and most tellingly about the effects on everyday people of the loss of baseline protections under the present regime. Their “Politics Monday” with Amy Walter (Cook Political Report) and Tamara Keith (NPR) and the Friday commentaries, usually with David Brooks (formerly of The New York Times, now with The Atlantic and Yale University) and Jonathan Capehart (formerly of The Washington Post, now with MSNOW), pull no punches at all.
With the relatively recent exception of Gary Abernathy, substituting for David Brooks and smirkingly echoing “administration” talking points, the substitute pundits in the Friday segments provide even-tempered, cogent analysis, tinged, of course, with their personal political views.
An example of very focused and clear-eyed coverage is Fred De Sam Lazaro’s deceptively low-key but relentless reports on the DHS devastation in Minneapolis. His reporting was cumulatively damning. Nick Schifrin’s interviews of foreign leaders have demonstrated the dismay, sadness and sheer disgust other countries feel for the United States. It is bracing to listen to them.
The “News Hour” is not doing their work to depress us, to make us turn away, to anger us, however much those might be the results for some people. They are making certain that, in a sea of untruth and poisonous blather, we have facts and good information. Their people are dedicated journalists who don’t take crap from anyone and who are clear-eyed observers and inveterate diggers. They deserve our attention, support and plaudits.
Criminal Governments
When I see or hear about the horrors unleased upon the world by the Nazis in WWII, a visceral, gnashing anger threatens to consume me, an anger that has no place to go, no place to express itself this near-century later.
Sometimes news of governments – and heads of governments – of our own time engenders a very similar anger, and it similarly cannot be resolved directly.
I cannot do anything about Vladimir Putin, a criminal of the highest order. Nor can I take action against the regime in North Korea. The increasing awfulness of China’s leaders grinds at one’s guts with each new repressive episode. The terrible actions of Netanyahu in Gaza and the West Bank terribly tarnish my admiration for Israel; his clear need to stay in office to stay out of jail for corruption is too frighteningly similar to the situation with our own occupant. His coddling of an extreme cabal of far-right-wing religionists and hard-liners to keep himself in power is horribly cynical, and it has cost thousands of lives, most of them in the service of keeping Bibi out of striped clothing.
I remember a lovely elderly blind woman from my late youth. I visited her on Sundays to read the New York Times to her. In so doing I schooled myself in the more recent history of Africa, among other regions of the world. I can remember being quite aghast at some of the reading I was doing, especially about what were then the emerging independent countries, including Congo, Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana and the many other nations that achieved independence in 1960 and thereafter. The decades-long mess called Nigeria is beyond depressing, with long-standing rampant corruption. That country is not alone in Africa. The legacy of colonialism has been horrible governance, often by long-term authoritarian heads of state who have enriched themselves and their families. They have criminally impoverished their countries such that medical care current in the U.S. and the E.U., for example, is denied their people. The result is that curable and even preventable diseases such as tuberculosis and HIV-related illnesses run rampant.
Maddeningly, our own national government now is one of those criminal governments. And on this one I can focus my anger, as can we all. Our current occupant tried to take us out of the community of nations between 2017 and 2021, but President Biden repaired a lot of the damage. Now that occupant has torn the international order asunder in ways that will be a real trial to repair. Worse, the people he’s brought along, the ones who sit in the background tearing at the fabric of our democracy and the functions of government, never mind the incompetent poseurs and imbeciles he put in his cabinet, don’t care a whit about you, me, the guy down the block or any other citizen of this great country. Some of them have an ideology, buttressed by numerous plans hatched over decades. Those plans shove aside facts, evidence, scientific rigor, and the experiences of accumulated progress, never mind the shared resources of our nation, such as national parks, clean air and unpolluted water, not to mention the measures that have, for tens of years, kept dread diseases at bay. In place of those things are absolute personal “freedoms” they profess to be paramount, and dissolution of our shared sense of safety and long-term health.
In a few recent “Antiques Road Show” episodes, the resident experts have declared certain artifacts from the 19-teens to be “Art Deco.” While it’s true that the decorative arts, as opposed to painting and the plastic arts, had evolved certain distinctive styles by the 19-teens, the generally accepted kickoff of what we now call “Art Deco” occurred in Paris in 1925 at the Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes – The International Exhibition of Modern Decorative Arts. Several featured elements of what we now term the Art Deco style came from that exhibition, which drew some of its design details from the 1922 discovery of King Tutankhamun’s tomb, a sensation of the time. It is, therefore, probably better to limit “Art Deco” identification to items made after 1925. By the way, the term “Art Deco” itself had its first use in the title of Bevis Hiller’s 1968 book, Art Deco of the 20s and 30s. Prior to that, the style was known as Style Moderne or Jazz Moderne.
Thanks for listening. That’s my potpourri of the moment. I hope it didn’t feel too much like the lurching one feels on a carnival ride. If it did, take two acetaminophen and call somebody in the morning. ©
February 2026
Edmund J. McDevitt