What I Fear From the Next Four Years

 As I look forward to the next four years with dread, I thought it would be useful to try to assess what I fear might actually happen.

Top of mind for me is immigration. His flagship campaign promise is to shut down the border and to deport all of the immigrants currently here. While it would be impossible to do that entirely, they will do their best to visibly scale up deportations. If they are effective in that, expect significant adverse impact to industries that rely heavily on immigrants, such as agriculture, construction, healthcare, and hospitality (restaurants and hotels). This is not a good recipe for reducing the cost of food and housing. Longer term, this will dampen entrepreneurship and invention, in both of which immigrants participate above their numbers. (Unlike crime, in which immigrants participate below their numbers, so one shouldn’t expect any drop there.) Despite what half the country has been lead to fear, immigration is the lifeblood of this nation, the vitality of our economy, and essential to our future prosperity. While it would be ideal to have more order in the immigration process than we have had, we shut it off to our detriment.

Another major fear is, ironically, inflation. Despite the fact that the con man persuaded half the country that he could magically bring prices down (a promise he’s already been backtracking from), so many of the other things he has talked about doing are inflationary. Cutting off immigration, as already noted, will raise prices on groceries and housing. He’s promised massive tariffs, which will be inflationary. (No, sadly, China doesn’t pay for the tariffs. We the consumers do.) He’s promised more tax cuts, which will inevitably increase the debt, which leads to more inflation. My real fear in this regard is that his failure to tame inflation will bring him into conflict with the Fed, who will want to raise interest rates (which is the right thing to do, but politicians always loath the short term tough medicine). For now, he’s saying he supports Fed chair Jay Powell, but watch for that to change. He will do his best to stack the Fed Board with people who will be “loyal” (i.e., not to the nation and to their fiduciary duty, but to him personally). On the bright side, it looks as though his party may end up being the ones who finally kill that ridiculous time bomb called the “debt ceiling”. But if he makes the Fed compliant to his short-term political interest, the way that Richard Nixon broke Arthur Burns, well, some of us are old enough to remember where that lead. (See 1970s rampant inflation.)

If he actually implements the large broad-scale tariffs that he has threatened to, that would have bad effects beyond driving prices of almost everything up. The United States has long enjoyed substantial economic benefit from our dollar being the world’s principal reserve currency and most widely used for world trade. That position allows us to enjoy extraordinarily low interest rates for our national debt. If we were to significantly reduce our participation in world trade, as seems to be the aim of his policy, we could erode the primacy of the dollar. Other world powers such as China would be happy to step into any breach we create, ultimately increasing the cost of our debt service.

That brings me to the promised tax cuts (by far the most likely promise to be kept). That doesn’t have any immediate obvious downside, but long term compounds the risk of the above concerns. The Republican mythology that tax cuts pay for themselves has been conclusively disproven time and again. This administration is likely to be the worst ever for the national debt (not that very many people actually care about that anymore). While I don’t believe (as some do) that deficits are always bad, I believe they need to be used only for investments in national capacity and productivity, not just in making the rich richer. Also, while our national credit limit is very high, it’s not infinite, and when we finally hit it, it will be like going over a cliff. If we increase our need to borrow at the same time as we’re reducing our ability to borrow cheaply (see tariffs above), that could be a self-multiplying economic disaster.

In foreign policy, I have fears too, but am very uncertain what to actually expect. In every regard, he says outrageous things with varying distance from what he actually does, and in foreign policy that distance may be the greatest. The bad things could be pretty bad, but I have a perverse optimism here that he might accidentally do some good things too. With Ukraine, he seems inclined to pressure both Putin and Ukraine to come to some kind of settlement to end their conflict. If he can actually do that (and he may be uniquely positioned to do so), whether that is good or bad all depends on the terms. If he pushes Ukraine to essentially capitulate and gives Putin everything he wants, that would only embolden Putin to expand his aims to include other former Soviet republics, and could indirectly embolden China with regard to Taiwan as well. On the other hand, if he can actually bring a settlement with some meaningful concessions from Putin, like Ukraine joining NATO, that could actually be good. My hope is that Trump’s ego would work against the total capitulation scenario because it would not make him look like the great dealmaker that he fancies himself. With the Middle East, as I write this, the first hostages are being released as part of a cease fire that was negotiated with the incoming president’s people participating alongside the current president’s people, and I will give his team credit for bringing Netanyahu to the table, something Biden’s team had been unable to do. I just worry what the long game is here. While this is a promising start, he has appointed people who are disposed to aid and abet the worst Israeli factions, so I don’t have much hope for a good and fair long term outcome for the Palestinians. And I don’t see any path to long term security for Israel that doesn’t involve an independent Palestine and something like a Marshall Plan for them that gives them something positive to live for. But I don’t believe the incoming administration shares that view, so my fear is ongoing misery in Gaza, ongoing annexation of the West Bank, and increasing global isolation of Israel.

At the Justice Dept, I share the fear of many that it will be weaponized to punish political enemies, as some (including the administration’s own nominee for FBI director) have advocated it should be. The policy for the FBI is somewhat incoherent, with some calls for dismantling the FBI wholesale while at the same time calling for it to be used to investigate political enemies. Either of those would be terrible for the nation. (Some would argue that the FBI and the Justice Dept have already been practicing “lawfare” against political enemies, but they miss the crucial distinction of prosecuting those where there is probable cause that actual crimes have been committed.)

At the Defense Dept, I fear a Defense Secretary who believes that “wokeness” is the most significant challenge facing the organization of our national defense will pursue that chimera to the detriment of the actual significant challenges. At best, we’ll see the Secretary be relatively isolated and ineffective while the military leadership does what is best for the country. At worst, we’ll see purges of the military leadership, bringing us closer to a banana republic.

At HHS, I fear a Secretary who has no grounding in science-based medicine, who will further undermine public confidence in actual medicine (vaccines in particular) and public health, who will lend credibility to all manner of snake oil, and who will leave us less well prepared for the next pandemic.

At the IRS, I fear (and expect) that the IRS budget will be further cut, particularly in the area of compliance, despite the fact that investment in compliance has been shown to have a significant positive return.

At the so-called “Dept of Government Efficiency”, one can look to past task forces chartered with cutting government waste, which have little history of success or impact. While the narrative of “outsiders” being more capable of “taming” government bureaucracy than “insiders”, the actual history of such task forces would suggest otherwise, with those few having much success drew more on “insider” expertise who knew how to make effective fixes with a scalpel rather than just inexpertly swinging a machete. This doesn’t bode well for DOGE, which is already failing to exemplify efficiency by starting with two leaders.

Across the government, I fear purges of dedicated civil servants who have faithfully served numerous administrations, in the name of “eliminating the deep state”. We already saw some of that in the first administration, and we should expect to see more. They will resurrect their plan called “Schedule F”, which is a tool for cutting deep into the civil service to fire people at will and replace them with political loyalists. This would be to steer us back toward the time when the whole civil service changed with each administration, and which initially prompted the creation of Civil Service protections in the first place. And I fear the significant erosion of the institutionalization of ethics and expertise in civil service. Neither ethics nor expertise are understood or properly valued by this administration, starting at the top with the first modern president who refuses financial disclosure and who is incapable of recognizing the most blatant conflicts of interest.

Four years from now, I fear we will not see the end of him, when he decides that his administration is just so great and beautiful that he needs to extend his term as president, Constitution be damned. I don’t rate this as highly probable, but neither do I dismiss it as practically impossible. Those who do dismiss that notion as absurd fail to appreciate just how close we came four years ago to being Venezuela.

Finally, I fear for our trans friends and family, who are the current scapegoat in fashion with the GOP. As those of us in the first couple of letters of the LGBTQ+ community learned in the 1990s, increased visibility comes with increased backlash. Last year, we elected the first trans member of Congress, and the GOP’s top legislative priority was to restrict where she could go to the bathroom in the Capitol. As Motormouth Maybelle said in Hairspray, "better brace yourselves for a whole lotta ugly comin' at you from a never-ending parade of stupid".

Of course who knows what will actually happen. It’s difficult to predict much. In his last administration he said a lot of outrageous things, but incompetence and guardrails kept much of it from actually happening. This time around, some of his cronies have tried to learn from their previous failures, and may be more effective. Then again, he has very thin margins in Congress, and we’re already seeing the dissension within his own ranks, as the OG nativist-populist monsters like Miller and Bannon clash with his new favorite billionaire bro buddies. All we know for sure is that we can expect chaos. As we in Los Angeles watched multiple wildfires burning out of control around us, the city filled with smoke and ash everywhere, I thought to myself, this is a preview of the next four years.

Remembering Beryl

When I was growing up in the 1960s in the northern San Fernando Valley, we lived on a newly developed suburban neighborhood street filled with young families like ours. One family in particular, who lived two doors down the street, became my parents’ closest friends. My brother and I played with their two kids about the same age, and the parents became “Auntie Beryl and Uncle Gary” to us. We were back and forth at each other’s houses almost like a second home. On Monday nights when Dad and Uncle Gary worked late, Mom and Auntie Beryl would take turns cooking dinner for both families. They swapped recipes clipped from Sunset Magazine and the LA Times. I remember one, burger trittini, being a favorite. On weekends, the grown-ups would sometimes go out together, or make a nice dinner in and play bridge and drink wine. Auntie Beryl had a musical voice, and I remember the sound of her laughter when the “grown-ups” were having a good time. I remember the minced meat pies that Beryl (who grew up in England) made at Christmastime, from her mother’s recipe. She was very musically talented, and not long after I started school, I also started taking piano lessons from her. She persuaded me to sing in the children’s choir at the Methodist Church that they attended, as a further musical education. She was a good teacher and a rigorous one, emphasizing the importance of theory and giving a great understanding of music history while teaching the technique of the keyboard. She was very involved in the Music Teacher’s Association of California, and all of her students took annual exams as well as performing regular recitals at the studio they had built into their home. The piano lessons were strict, but she also took time with me (and I suspect with all of her students) to show a personal interest in how we were doing, and sharing a little life advice. I have one memory of her telling me, “a handsome face and a fun time can attract you, but you also need to ask yourself is this person someone you’ll want to get up and have breakfast with every day.” The way she said it was as someone who was happy with the choices she had made, and wanting to share that – it was sweet. (It’s also one of those things I probably appreciate much more now than I did as a young teen.)

They eventually moved away, moving to the Oregon coast when Uncle Gary retired, but they and my parents always stayed in touch and visited one another. I’d sometimes enjoy getting to see them at my parents’ house when they were visiting. Not long after George and I married, we had a trip up to Portland, and they invited us to stay with them a few days in their beautiful home at Salishan overlooking Siletz Bay. Beryl and Gary (who told me I was old enough to just call them by their first names) showed us all around and we had a lovely visit, including going to their church where we heard Beryl sing a solo and in the choir. Toward the end of our visit, she caught me alone a moment and told me “I’ve been watching and listening and asking George questions, and I think you’ve found a very good husband. We’re very happy for you.” I was really touched, and it reminded me of the little life lessons that sometimes came with the piano lessons. In recent years they had moved to Washington to be closer to their daughter in Bremerton, and Alzheimer’s disease had started to take its toll. On New Year’s Day, Dad got the call from Gary that Beryl had passed. We’re sad for Gary to have lost his wife, for Diane and David who have lost their mother, and for the grandsons who have lost their grandmother. With a tear in my eye, I’m glad to have known her, she will always be a grace note in the score of my life.

FILM: My Old Ass

Our first Saturday movie night in a while. We weren’t sure what to expect from My Old Ass, a film about a free-spirited young girl, Elliott, who tries magic mushrooms on her 18th birthday, and ends up meeting her 39-year old future self. What would you want to tell your younger self? And what would a young you want to ask your older self? Elliott lives in a small Ontario town on a beautiful lake, but is determined not to be a third generation cranberry farmer, and is looking forward to going to college in Toronto. She’s in that poignant week at the end of her last childhood summer, about to leave her family and friends, with a heady mix of excitement looking forward and wistfulness about what she’s about to leave behind. There are some wonderfully funny moments and some wonderfully tender moments, and it is ultimately heartwarming and heartrending, and will leave you with a lot to think about. Maisy Stella is compellingly charming as Elliott, and Aubrey Plaza is funny but also wordlessly profound in moments. Very highly recommended.

Letter To Candy

When I was first getting to know George, I soon learned how close he was to his family, and how much he looked up to his older sisters. I heard earfuls about Candy and Linda’s homes and gardens, their cooking and crafts, all of the effort that makes a house into a home, taken to an art form with care and attention to detail. We used to laugh about which of you was more Martha Stewart than the other. When I first learned how Linda made hand-crafted caramel corn every Christmas, I thought she was the most Martha. But I think you forever took the lead the first time I had Thanksgiving at your house in Paradise, where the table was beautifully set and the decoration included acorns, collected from your yard, subtly dusted with gold sparkle. As I learned, in the process of collecting and gold-dusting those acorns, the caps got separated from the “corns”, and had to be put together again like a puzzle, having to find the right cap to go with each acorn, all to add a subtle touch of beauty beside the napkin rings and candlesticks.

You all (George very much included) inherited your passion for aesthetics from your mother. (Are any of us surprised that some of Katie’s last words in her increasingly aphasic twilight months were “Candy, that’s a cute outfit.”) But you took it to a whole new level. Just the way you would wrap each Christmas gift was a wonder, not only thoughtfully chosen paper and beautiful ribbon or string, but adorned with small lovely things from your home or garden, with old Christmas cards cut up and refashioned as tags. I came to appreciate that your devotion to such aesthetics went far deeper than a mere concern for appearances. It was an expression of utmost care for those of us lucky enough to enjoy your home and your hospitality. From my own experience cooking, I know how preparing a thoughtful meal is a way of expressing love. Your love language is much broader: delicious family meals (carefully catered to so many different allergies and preferences!), beautifully set tables, jars of jam from your fig or plum tree, exquisitely wrapped and thoughtfully chosen gifts, artfully arranged flowers – these were all your expressive way of making the world more beautiful and delicious for all of us.

You were also thoroughly down to earth. Much as you loved a cute pair of shoes, you were perfectly happy with no shoes at all, bare feet in the sand at Balboa Island, or just in your garden. You were proud to be a farmer’s daughter. I only knew your father after his stroke, and wished I’d known him before, because everyone always spoke so highly of him. I remember on one of our many weekends packing up the house in Lodi, you were telling me about your father — his service on so many community boards, how they valued his even temper and down-to-earth advice. In those stories you were telling, the resemblance struck me, and I said “you really are your father’s daughter.”  You just lit up, and said “oh, you don’t know how happy that makes me!” 

When your father passed, and I reflected on what I’d learned about his life, I observed that he was not just a farmer of grapes, but a farmer of community institutions — he helped grow a school, a hospital, and a church. In reflecting on your life, I think you’ve been not only a great gardener of fruits and flowers, but a gardener of family and friendships. You carefully tended the valued relationships with your extended family (as we can see by so many cousins here today). And when you planted a new home in Paradise, you set down deep roots there, nurturing new friendships and connections through the school, the hospital, and the church. I was always amazed at the exuberant abundance of Christmas cards you received, and you could tell me all about all of those people because you’d taken the time and care to keep up with them all. In raising your children, you instilled in them the value and practice of maintaining relationships, and they flourished, developing their own deep-rooted friendships, some going back to their school days. You watered your friendships with regular phone calls, cards, and visits, and you fertilized your family with rituals like Thanksgiving and Christmas, annual Balboa Island weeks, and Lodi visits. You showered your grandchildren with care, and it’s wonderful to see the joy it brings you to spend time with them. George and I are profoundly grateful that you rooted us so deeply in your family garden. 

There are so many things that will always make us think of you — a beautifully set table, a well-wrapped gift, homemade jam from backyard fruit. But for me, the epitome of you will be those gold-dusted acorns, humble and down-to-earth yet extraordinary and thoughtful. Like those gold-dusted acorns, you were ultimately ephemeral and gone too soon. Like those acorns, you are imprinted indelibly on our memories and in our hearts. 

FILM: Robot Dreams

The animated feature Robot Dreams is an unexpectedly beautiful story about companionship, relationships, and life’s unexpected turns. The story is told without any dialogue, just expressively drawn anthropomorphic animal (and robot) characters set in a gorgeously drawn New York City. The artistry of the drawing is just a parade of delight, and the story is completely engaging for the whole 1:40 run. The uncliché ending left me pondering what layers of metaphor and worthy life lessons lay beneath the charming and earnest story I enjoyed so much.

STAGE: A Strange Loop

A Strange Loop is, well, a strange loop indeed. This meta-musical is a play about a fat gay black writer trying to write a play about a fat gay black writer trying to write a play about … well, you get the idea. Before A Strange Loop, one could scarcely imagine how many internalized phobias, how much baggage a fat gay black theatre-geek wannabe writer might be carrying around. But now you don’t have to, because this play shows you all the baggage in explicit (sometimes painfully explicit) vivid detail, leavened by energetic music and clever funny lyrics. The protagonist, called Usher, lives in Queens and works as an usher for The Lion King on Broadway. The six other actors on stage are all shape-shifting meta-characters, acting out various scenarios from Usher’s colorful imagination. Some of these meta-characters are completely abstract (“Good morning, internalized self-loathing”). Other scenes illustrate imagined conversations with his family (in which his meta-father is called Mufasa and his meta-mother Sarabi, the names of Simba’s lion parents from The Lion King), showing us the disappointment of his father, his parents’ fears of HIV, and the prayers of his mother that Usher’s play will be some mix of gospel and a Tyler Perry show. (It’s quite a scene when that comes to life in his head.) This poor guy is certainly dealing with a lot of shit when even his fantasies end up disappointing and demeaning him. It’s a strange combination of heaviness with music and comedy that could only work in theatre. It is a loop in that Usher ends where he begins, wondering how his play will end, none of his issues really resolved, except that we’ve all watched him explore all his issues in his head, a communal theatrical therapy session. It was strange being made to laugh as this guy is baring his inner demons. In the end, it was provocatively entertaining, there were very talented performers on stage, and I was glad I saw it.

FILM: Ghostlight

 The beauty of Shakespeare’s works is that they are so much a part of our culture that they can be adapted and translated in all manner of creative ways. The film Ghostlight gives us a unique new spin on Romeo & Juliet, not so much as an adaptation of the play, but a story in which a community theatre production of the play helps a family work through deep emotional issues in unexpected ways. Shakespeare as therapy. The film unfolds the story deftly, at first just introducing us to Dan, a generally mild-mannered construction worker who shows a bolt of anger that seems to come out of nowhere. And then we meet his daughter Daisy, who has even more serious anger management issues and is about to get thrown out of high school. Wife and mother Sharon is just trying to hold the family together. Through a random encounter, Dan gets pulled into a local community theatre group who needs someone for a reading they’re doing. That encounter turns out to be just what he needed at that moment, and through his improbable continuing involvement with this bunch of theatre geeks, the story of what this family is really going through, and how they might get through it, unfolds. The main actors are not big names, but they are a real-life father, mother, and daughter, and their chemistry in the film is great. If you with patient ears (and eyes) attend, you will be moved.

FILM: Hit Man

Hit Man, while it doesn’t require quite the same level of seat belt as The Fall Guy, is also great summer fun. This is Richard Linklater (the “Before” trilogy, “School of Rock”, “Dazed and Confused”) taking on film noir romance-murder-mystery in New Orleans. Glen Powell stars as Gary Johnson, based on a real-life story of a mild-mannered college professor who moonlights for the police department as a fake hit man. Johnson turns out to be a master of disguise and acting, as he wears a wire to catch people attempting murder-by-hire. It’s fun to see this side-career evolve, but then things get really interesting when he ends up romantically involved with a woman who seeks out a hit man to take out her abusive husband. Lots of good classic noir twists (think Double Indemnity) with a good dose of steamy romance (think Body Heat), and add a pinch of philosophical reflection on whether people really can change.

FILM: The Fall Guy

The Fall Guy is an unabashed petition to the Academy to finally create an Oscar for stunt work. Director David Leitch is not only familiar with action thrillers, having helmed films in the John Wick, Fast & Furious, and Deadpool franchises, but he’s also a stuntman himself, having been a stunt double for Brad Pitt and Matt Damon. This film does double-duty as a rom-com with Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt (who wouldn’t cheer for them?) as well as an action thriller, all while highlighting the craft of stunt workers. This fun story follows Colt Seavers (Gosling), a veteran stunt man who flamed out years ago when a stunt went bad, and Jody Moreno (Blunt), a rising director working on an action-thriller-sci-fi-romance. The big name star of her new picture has suddenly gone AWOL in the middle of the shoot, and the producer recruits Seavers to find the star, while possibly rekindling their romance that also flamed out years ago. When Seavers’ quest to find the missing star suddenly turns into its own real-life action-thriller, with blockbuster stunts and some nice plot twists, the movie gets really good. As a romance, it’s a bit cheesy, but as an action thriller with a meta layer, it’s really good fun and you’ll be cheering in the suspenseful end of the film and the end of the film-within-the-film. And you’ll join the chorus clamoring for that new Oscar category for stunts.

STAGE: The Rhythm of Mourning

Last Thursday, we saw The Rhythm of Mourning by the Bethesda Rep company. On a bare stage with minimal props, a strong cast, with some subtle but effective lighting, costume, and choreography, tells a powerful story about loss and grief. At first we see a woman wordlessly express mixed feelings about the space she has just entered. She is soon followed by a handful of other characters who are talking about her like a kind of Greek chorus, except that Greek choruses spoke with a unified voice, and these characters are arguing with each other. Before long, it becomes clear (if you hadn’t already noticed from the cast of character names in the program – Anxiety, Shame, Hope, Innocence, Anger, Denial, etc) that what we are witnessing is the grieving woman’s internal struggle, her mental wrestling made manifest as a whole cast of emotions and stages of grief. It’s a powerful device deployed to great effect in this production, as the audience slowly learns who she lost, and how, what that person meant to her, and why this place she has entered is so fraught, all while we watch her movingly move her way toward an uncertain closure. We caught it at the Bethesda Rep’s home stage, but there will be a half-dozen more performances through June as part of the Hollywood Fringe Festival. Check it out!

OPERA: Turandot

On Saturday night, we had the pleasure of seeing the sumptuous production of Turandot at LA Opera. The magnificent cast is lead by house-shaking soprano Angela Meade, the honey-rich tenor Russell Thomas as Karaf, and vibrant soprano Guanqun Yu who moved us to tears as Liu. (We had enjoyed seeing both Russell Thomas and Guanqun Yu a few years ago here in Mozart's The Clemency of Titus.) And expanded chorus voiced the hopes and fears of the people of Peking sensationally (of course we're partial since we know so many choristers). The sets, designed by David Hockney, are fantastic. Opera is an extravagant art form, and this is one of the most extravagant of operas, filled with passion and passionately beautiful music. If you have a chance to see it, go!