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Weekend Butler: Forrest Gump 2021? Sherlock Holmes returns. Sassy Julia Child. Weekend reading: a short page-turner.
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Published: Nov 12, 2021
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Weekend
“STUPID IS AS STUPID DOES”
The Russians are gearing up for an invasion of the Ukraine, and Tucker Carlson says we should side with Putin. A Virginia politician says it may not be sufficient to ban books, we should consider burning them. The owner of an $85 million house in Los Angeles has launched a service “to help other rich people buy, sell, staff and decorate their homes.” And Joe Manchin is still President.
I’m finishing a novel. But I couldn’t resist clicking on the Times feed and watching the testimony of Kyle Rittenhouse, the kid who shot three protestors in Kenosha last year. I told myself I’d watch with one eye. Good luck with that — I watched it, full screen, for hours.
Rittenhouse was well coached. Not that he needed much. He had a story and he was sticking to it: he fired in self-defense. Those guys were going to take his gun – which was, let’s not forget, strapped to his body — and shoot him. He fired to defend himself.
Impossible to watch without shouting at the screen. Dude, your mother drove her minor child across state lines with an assault weapon attached to his body and dropped him in the middle of a riot — what did she think was going to happen? Dude, did you believe for one second you’d be applying your maybe two days of EMT training to help overwhelmed police and EM Tunits to restore order? Dude, the curfew — it didn’t apply to you?
The loss of life, this trial, the support of lunatics whose own trigger fingers are itchy — it could have been so easily avoided. All 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse had to do was stay home. All his mother had to do… but she didn’t. And here’s why.
Cellphone video shows Rittenhouse walking past police in the moments after the shootings, his rifle slung over his shoulder and his hands in the air. Officers let him go, and he turned himself in to police in his hometown of Antioch the next day.
The Chicago Tribune reported that the police video shows Rittenhouse sobbing and hyperventilating. Investigators reminded him of his right to remain silent. Rittenhouse, who once participated in programs for aspiring officers, replied, “I know Miranda,” and said he wanted a lawyer.
Police left him in the interrogation room with his mother, Wendy Rittenhouse, who spent the next several hours scrolling through her phone. At one point she put her head in her hands and lamented about people posting derogatory remarks about both of them on Facebook.
His mother told him he needed to deactivate his social media accounts.
“’I have to get rid of social media?” he asked.
“Yep … ’Cause they’re going to harass you if they can find you anywhere,” she said.
Rittenhouse said he couldn’t give her access to some accounts because the passwords were stored in his phone, which police had taken. He later asked an officer if detectives could delete his accounts. The officer said he would look into it.
In the audible portions of the video, Rittenhouse didn’t ask about the men he shot. He also didn’t appear to understand the seriousness of the situation, asking an officer if he could go home and if he could get counseling to help him cope.
“I don’t want to be one of those people that lives with PTSD the rest of their life,” he said.
Last week, a judge ordered Rittenhouse to have no contact with known white supremacists after he was seen drinking in a bar in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, and posing for a photo with two men who made hand gestures used by white supremacists. Prosecutors also alleged men at the tavern serenaded Rittenhouse with the anthem of the Proud Boys, a neo-fascist group.
The legal drinking age in Wisconsin is 21 but Rittenhouse could legally drink alcohol because he was with his mother.
His mother has just accused Joe Biden of defaming her son. Not quite: The post, which includes a 50-second clip, refers to a question Fox News host Chris Wallace asked then-President Trump during a presidential debate about whether he was willing “to condemn white supremacists and militia groups” in the wake of unrest in Kenosha, Wisconsin and other American cities. The clip— to be clear, the Fox news clip — includes an image of Rittenhouse, 18, wielding a semi-automatic rifle.
“Stupid is as stupid does.”
“INSIDE MOVES” — THE SHORT NOVEL TO READ THIS WEEKEND
The characters in this snovel are crippled. Maybe they’re not so bright. But damn… they are fantastic.
Jerry is a cripple and Roary got shot in Vietnam and Max has no legs at all — as the book starts, they’re losers hanging out in Max’s bar. Attitude? Roary’s the narrator, and here’s how he introduces himself:
“I don’t want you to get the idea this book is about me, because it isn’t. It’s about Jerry, but I thought I’d better say something about myself so you know what kind of angle you’re getting. In a way, you’re getting a cripple angle, but then again I wasn’t born a cripple. There’s a big difference between a born cripple and somebody who gets crippled. The main difference seems to be how bitter they are. That isn’t always true, but take Jerry, he was born cripple and he’s the sweetest guy in the world. Me, I was born straight, played fullback in high school. Me, I’m bitter. I’m no sweetheart”.
To read more about the book and buy the Kindle from Amazon, click here.
HELLO, DARKNESS
Sunset comes so early now. But we have it easy compared to Tromsø, Norway, which sits 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle. From November to January, the sun doesn’t rise at all — and yet rates of seasonal depression are remarkably low. How do the citizens of Tromsø cope? They embrace it. The idea: they’re all in it together, so enjoy it. Their word for this attitude is koselig, a cousin to the Danish idea of hygge. They say: “There’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes.”
THE JULIA CHILD DOCUMENTARY
Unvarnished. Like her advice to women: “Feed your man, flatter your man, f— your man.” Opening this weekend in New York, maybe elsewhere. Here’s the trailer.
“WE CAN’T WAIT FOR UNIVERSITIES TO FIX THEMSELVES. SO WE’RE STARTING A NEW ONE”
Pano Kanelos is the president of the just-announced President of the University of Austin. He describes himself as “Former President of St. John’s College. Shakespeare scholar. Liberal Arts advocate. Old soul.” He’s gathered a faculty of writers who used to feel differently but now feel America is on the wrong path: Niall Ferguson, Bari Weiss, Heather Heying, Joe Lonsdale, Arthur Brooks, and others. (What, no Andrew Sullivan?) All this is posted by Bari Weiss, who you may recall as the op-ed writer at the Times who snarked her colleagues and quit in a huff.
SHERLOCK HOLMES RETURNS: “THE RETURN OF THE PHARAOH: FROM THE REMINISCENCES OF JOHN H. WATSON, M.D.”
1974 was a very good year for Nicholas Meyer. The Seven-Per-Cent Solution: Being a Reprint from the Reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D. was on the bestseller list for a year. He wrote the screenplay, went on to write and direct movies (“Time After Time” and “Star Trek,” among others) and write several Holmes sequels, most recently The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols: Adapted from the Journals of John H. Watson, M.D. In that book, set in 1905, Holmes is pushing 50, and sensing a gloomy retirement ahead.
Now it’s 1911, and in the just-published “The Return of the Pharaoh: From the Reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D.,” Holmes is still at it, this time in Egypt, investigating the disappearance of a prominent Egyptologist. Here’s the set-up: Watson’s wife has TB, so he takes her to Egypt to recover. (They must wear masks and maintain social distance — sound familiar?) Holmes is also there, incognito. Time has not dulled his skills, though it has made him more chatty. There are revelations I didn’t see coming — where did that hotel room go? — and more plot twists that I could follow. Alas, Holmes doesn’t answer the question that’s always nagged at me: The Pyramids are 481 feet high. When the Jews were fleeing Egypt, why didn’t they see them? [To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
A NEW POEM BY LOUISE GLÜCK
Day and night come
hand in hand like a boy and a girl
pausing only to eat wild berries out of a dish
painted with pictures of birds.
They climb the high ice-covered mountain,
then they fly away. But you and I
don’t do such things—
We climb the same mountain;
I say a prayer for the wind to lift us
but it does no good;
you hide your head so as not
to see the end—
Downward and downward and downward and downward
is where the wind is taking us;
I try to comfort you
but words are not the answer;
I sing to you as mother sang to me—
Your eyes are closed. We pass
the boy and girl we saw at the beginning;
now they are standing on a wooden bridge;
I can see their house behind them;
How fast you go they call to us,
but no, the wind is in our ears,
that is what we hear—
And then we are simply falling—
And the world goes by,
all the worlds, each more beautiful than the last;
I touch your cheek to protect you—
