Food stores in Fairfax – Hogan Gidley, Trump’s press secretary – A cognitive test for Trump – An attempt to muzzle Robert Unanue – The decay of American liberalism – Hagia Sophia – Evening statistics
It was somewhat more moderate in temperature today, quite pleasant in the shadier areas; so I wandered about more freely in the area than on previous days, noticing developments here and there. Two large new supermarkets are scheduled to open soon within a couple of miles from where I live. It seems surprising to me that there is a demand for more stores of this kind when there are already well over half-a-dozen food stores in the Fairfax area: Safeway, Aldi, Walmart, H-Mart, Wegmans, Patel Brothers, Americana Grocery, Shopper Food Warehouse, Trader Joe’s – and that is just within the city itself or immediately outside of it; and the city is a bare six square miles in area.
A curious television interview occurred yesterday between Fox News’ Sandra Smith and Hogan Gidley, the new national press secretary for Donald Trump’s campaign. Smith had asked Gidley about the challenges running against Biden presented to the Trump campaign; and in particular she mentioned, as an example of Biden’s abilities, the manner in which Biden managed to reverse the trend against him during the Democratic primary in February and eventually transform it in his favor. Gidley replied with an odd tangential rant that referred to Biden’s remarks in 2017 about his stint as a lifeguard when he was a teenager and to his more recent response to the lockdown restrictions: “You’re going to hear interesting comments from Joe Biden about how children love his leg hair and how he used to coax children up onto the porch with ice cream during quarantines.” Smith hastily intervened, telling him that the intellectual level of his response was too trivial even for Fox News. She didn’t put it precisely in those terms, but she did manage eventually to steer him back to the topic at hand. It remains unclear whether Trump’s predilection for petty and irrelevant personal remarks is contagious or whether he simply surrounds himself with people whose tastes in such matters resemble his own.
Meanwhile Trump himself has claimed that physicians administered a cognitive test to him recently: “I took it at Walter Reed Medical Center in front of doctors and they were very surprised. They said, ‘That’s an unbelievable thing. Rarely does anyone do what you just did.’” I certainly have no quarrel with this assessment of his acing a cognitive test as “unbelievable.” I at any rate do not believe it. I suspect that many others have the same opinion.
Some of Trump’s opponents, however, manage to rival him in offensiveness. Recently Robert Unanue, the president of Goya Foods, said that the nation is “truly blessed at the same time to have a leader like President Trump.” Now while I may judge this opinion to be thoroughly misguided, he certainly has committed no crime in expressing it. But various Latino leaders, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and former presidential candidate Julian Castro, have publicized their outrage at these remarks and called for a national boycott of his company’s products. It appears that they have no difficulty with anyone expressing his views, provided that these are in complete accordance with everything they approve of.
What has become of the spirit of Voltaire, that led one of his biographers to summarize it in the phrase “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”? If voices such as Ocasio-Cortez’s and Castro’s represent the current state of liberalism in our nation and our century, I do not envy the generations who are to come after ours.
In a display of arrogance that should come as a surprise to no one, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman James Risch (R-Idaho) and ranking member Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) officially condemned Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s decision to turn Hagia Sophia from a museum into a mosque. I’m sorry, but that’s not their decision to make. Hagia Sophia, to be sure, has had a somewhat complicated history. It was originally built as a church in the Byzantine Empire during the 6th century. When the Ottomans conquered Constantinople in 1453, they converted it into a mosque. In 1934, the Cabinet under Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the man who modernized Turkey, decreed that it be made a museum. As such, it has been a major tourist attraction and has been widely used as a symbol for peaceful co-existence among religions. No doubt the recent decision must be very disappointing to outsiders. However, the fact remains that it is a Turkish edifice and its fate lies in the hands of the government of Turkey. We Americans have no more say in the matter than the Turks do about the function of the National Cathedral in Washington.
Of course, my attitude in the matter may be influenced by the accounts of some who were not overly impressed by it to begin with:
“I do not think much of the Mosque of St. Sophia. I suppose I lack appreciation. We will let it go at that. It is the rustiest old barn in heathendom. . . . St. Sophia is a colossal church, thirteen or fourteen hundred years old, and unsightly enough to be very, very much older. Its immense dome is said to be more wonderful than St. Peter’s, but its dirt is much more wonderful than its dome, though they never mention it.” (Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad)
Today’s statistics as of 8:00 PM – # of cases worldwide: 12,614,186; # of deaths worldwide: 561,980; # of cases U.S.: 3,292,270 # of deaths U.S.: 136,645. In recent days I have been anxiously scanning the figures in hopes of a deceleration, and I am always disappointed. Today there has been a worldwide case increase of over 230,000, of which the U.S. case increase accounts for more than 70,000. Nearly one in a hundred of the national population has contracted the virus by now. Our country accounts for over a third of the cases still active worldwide. India’s case increase is nearly 28,000, although that is less troubling than it may appear in proportion to its population, which is more than four times the size or ours. But South Africa has had a case increase of more than 12,000 and Argentina, Peru, Saudi Arabia, and Chile have each have more than 3,000 new cases, quite high in proportion to their populations.