Homemade Cartoons for February 2022

In case you’ve been living under a rock and cut off from the world– Whoa! Wait a second. I’ll start over.

In case you haven’t heard, Sarah Palin made news over the weekend for dining out at multiple New York restaurants after testing positive and not isolating for having COVID-19. She’s since sounded repentant…“I strongly encourage everyone to use common sense to avoid spreading this and every other virus out there.”

But of course there’s more to this. and prior to her own infection she had proclaimed… “It’ll be over my dead body that I’ll have to get a shot. I will not do it. I won’t do it, and they better not touch my kids, either.”

And there’s little doubt in my mind that she’ll ever get vaccinated now which is weirdly honorable in this upside down time in American history. Some, like the governors of Texas and Florida, have done everything within and perhaps beyond their power to help insure that others won’t have to be vaccinated or masked and prevented from spreading the virus to those around them if and when they do become infected. But of course they themselves are fully vaccinated and in the case of Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who got COVID, he was immediately treated with the monoclonal antibody drug Regeneron that is in short supply.

I’ve never met Sarah Palin but in the summer of 2008 after she was picked by John McCain to be his Republican vice presidential running mate I was sent to Alaska and interviewed some of the people who had. Upon landing we learned that Palin’s 17-year-old daughter Bristol was pregnant and unmarried. Including that development in our story, took time away from what was supposed to be a profile of her mother but there’s a moment in the piece where Barack Obama, the Democratic candidate makes it clear that the Palin family news would not become a campaign issue for him.

How times have changed. How sadly times have changed.
Here’s a link to my story from Alaska…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNxi6TEflP8&ab_channel=PeterImber

And I’m not letting Sarah Palin off the hook for eating out with COVID and getting caught. So here’s a song with apologies to the Gershwin brothers and DuBose Heyward…

Oh, I got plenty of chutzpah

And chutzpah’s plenty for me

I got no shots, got no masks

Got no empathy

The folks there eatin’ the penne

Left their masks at the door

No one’s threatenin’ to swab ’em

While they’re sittin’ there eatin’ more

I’m sure…

I’ll get no jab of vaccine

Fill up my chablis

You can jump up and down and scream

That’s Ok with me

Cause if somebody dies

I’ll just shout it’s all lies

You wait and see

Oh, I got plenty of chutzpah

And chutzpahs plenty for me

I got my gall, got my throng

Got the Bering Sea the whole day long

No use disdaining

Got my gall, got my throng

Got my throng

“I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’ was composed in 1934 for Porgy and Bess. The song has been described as, “The cheerful acceptance of poverty as freedom from worldly cares.” I guess I haven’t met enough poor people yet to have encountered one who I could have imagined singing this number with a smile on his or her face.

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I’m looking out my window this morning and in Maine overnight we acquired more of something that wasn’t made in China– an additional few inches of snow. That’s not news but it is ironic since the Chinese are hosting the Winter Olympics which begin today and for the first time in the history of the winter games not a single snowflake will have been supplied by mother nature.

Yes, 100% of the snow where competitions will be held in the next two weeks near Beijing has been man-made and it has taken 49 million gallons of water, 130 fan-operated generators and 290 snow making cannons that have been turned on non-stop since last December. It’s quite a technological feat and I’ll just say that it’s got to rank as possibly the greatest snow job of all time.

Ok, I’ll also say that there’s ample evidence that man’s ability to change his climate, is going to run headlong into our climate continuing to change on its own and sooner than we’d like to believe– Changing to the point where skiing on fresh powder in Park City or hitting a golf ball off lush grass in Palm Springs might be something our children will only be able to tell their grandchildren stories about.

It’s predicted that by mid-century nine of the locations around the world that have hosted past Winter Olympics will not be reliably cold enough to do so again and a short time after that virtually none of the places where the games have been held previously will be able to do that if global warming remains on its current trajectory,

I wasn’t much interested in math as a student but I wasn’t bad at it either. The difference between arithmetic and exponential growth is a concept that I grasp but wonder if the world does. Global warming isn’t like increasing a kid’s allowance by a dollar a year. If it were a kid’s allowance, it would eventually bankrupt you by the time he or she finished college.

But the reason for environmentalists having such dire outlooks about the planet is that they understand the definition of exponential.

Here’s a quote I found…

“A lack of appreciation for what exponential increase really means leads society to be disastrously sluggish in acting on crucial issues. I am utterly convinced that most of the great environmental struggles will be either won or lost in the next decade. And by the next century it will be too late.” 

Thomas Lovejoy, an ecologist and conservation biologist who coined the term “biological diversity” spoke these words in 1989 and was referring to the decade of the 1990s. Lovejoy died this past Christmas Day.

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Some of television’s famous artifacts are in the Smithsonian– The Lone Ranger’s mask, Dick Clark’s lectern, Archie and Edith Bunker’s chairs –but one item that appears to be lost forever is the “applause-o-meter” that was used to pick the winner on Queen for a Day.

The program ran from 1956 until 1964 and should have been called Desperate Housewives. Looking back now, I’d nominate it for being arguably the creepiest thing ever on American TV. The women contestants were often in dire straits; in need of something as basic as the next month’s rent or as crucial as life changing medical care for a child. While describing their adversities, they often broke down sobbing as they competed with one another to seek the most sympathy.

The show’s climax had the camera trained on each contestant’s face as host Jack Bailey summarized their plights. Then came the aforementioned applause-o-meter. After Bailey reprised each story the meter’s needle was shown bending on the screen as an audience of 1,000 in the Moulin Rouge nightclub in Los Angeles applauded and determined which heart wrenching tale merited the help requested. The most frenzied clapping usually could be identified without ever having to look at the applause-o-meter.

Pomp was added to circumstance when the winner was robed, crowned, handed a bundle of roses, seated on a throne and for good measure Sir Edward Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance was played in the background during her coronation.

I wasn’t old enough to appreciate how surreal it was that a Queen for a Day– whose husband might have just died in an accident leaving her with young children and nearly destitute –while being granted her most fervent wish, was simultaneously awarded a lot of other stuff from the show’s sponsors. Things like new flatware and a dishwasher plus a set of Samsonite luggage and a trip to see the hottest act in Las Vegas. She may not have been made whole, let alone authentically royal, but hopefully, the new Queen was at least given enough coin of the realm to play the slots.

America doesn’t have hereditary royalty that extends back a thousand years but there are those who say we have flirted with the idea– the Kennedys, the Bushs, the Clintons. Hey, we’ve had a John, a William and two Georges who’ve been our recent presidents and of course our previous one was the man who would be king. We don’t say they’re royal families but we do call them dynasties as well as other names.

And America has on occasion anointed our own. The golfer Arnold Palmer was “The King”, Aretha Franklin “The Queen of Soul.” But like the commercials for an investment firm where actor John Houseman would proclaim “They earned it.”

Many of us here follow the British monarchy closely as if it were a soap opera. There’s Charles, the future king in perpetual waiting and Andrew, the pitiful prince in permanent purgatory. The Harry and Meghan show is on hiatus but William and Kate are a hit and have been renewed for the next half century. If they all didn’t exist, Hollywood would have to make them up, complete with petty slights and coldblooded back stabbings. Hollywood’s good at that sort of thing especially off screen.

I know this is a long way round to get to Queen Elizabeth II and the fact that over the weekend marked 70 years since she ascended to her throne without a new sewing machine or an all expenses paid vacation in Hawaii. Her 70th anniversary is certainly a reminder of the miles she’s toured and the remarkable number of royal twists of the wrist she’s endured in the service of her queendom.

I’ve done the math and Elizabeth has now been Queen of England for over 25,570 days. She’s the longest reigning British monarch ever and if she lives until May 28, 2024, she’ll become the longest living monarch of any sovereign state in history surpassing Louis XIV of France.

The Queen has even outlived royally named ocean liners– the Queen Mary and both the QE1 and QE2. All three were built, operated and retired in her lifetime. And just as the sun still never sets on all 14 British territories at once, it also doesn’t ever totally obscure Elizabeth’s image which presently appears on the coins or banknotes of 35 different countries.

But there’s a feat of Queen Elizabeth’s that amazes me more than her physical longevity. From the start of her reign in 1952 it wasn’t until 2018– 65 years –that she gave her first media interview. That may be the record for the longest time someone whose life is on continual public display has kept their mouth shut. 

For her to have remained above any fray and England’s beloved Queen for 70 years that turned out to be a wise and necessary decision.To have been chosen as television’s Queen for a Day in America it would have been clearly impossible.

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In 1957 the Jewish New Year– Rosh Hashanah — occured on October 5th. One day earlier a metal sphere the size of a basketball was launched into orbit around the earth by the Soviet Union. I was 10 years old and I remember this event from 67 years ago because of something I overheard a friend of my father say to him at services in our synagogue…

“Along with everything on earth should the rabbi bless Sputnik?”

The friend was joking but the Russian achievement was a shock to America. Now, the Soviets not only dominated a group of European nations and had “satellites” on the ground but one of theirs was also flying above us in outer space. Suddenly, science classes became a top priority for schools across the United States. Within a year President Eisenhower created NASA so we could catch up.

I don’t actually remember ever watching from beginning to end a single episode of a TV show called Watch Mr. Wizard but millions of kids did. Don Herbert was the creator and host of the weekly program which ran from 1951 until 1965. Child actors would participate in conducting science experiments with Herbert that looked complicated but could usually be performed at home without blowing up the house.

Herbert’s Watch Mr. Wizard shows undoubtedly led many young Baby Boomers to get interested in the sciences and technology and pursue careers in those fields. He is today considered an unsung hero.

“Herbert’s techniques and performances helped create the United States’ first generation of homegrown rocket scientists just in time to respond to Sputnik. He sent us to the moon. He changed the world.”  — Bill Nye, The Science Guy

Well, I’m feeling a little bit like a Mr. Wizard these days. No, I’ve never been accused of being a rocket scientist but if Don Herbert was dispensing scientific knowledge, my role recently has been somewhere between that of museum curator and history teacher.

A highlight of my week is when our two grandsons visit us after school. One is nine and the other about to turn six. He and I actually have birthdays on the same day– St. Patrick’s Day.

For a month now when the boys arrive the younger one heads straight for my desk and retrieves an old and very basic pocket calculator. 

“Ask me a question,” he says and we do addition and subtraction problems and keep moving forward with mastering the functions of this tool which is only a few years younger than that first Sputnik.

And it turns out that without having realized it before, my office is full of things that to a six year old might seem like a visit to Jurassic Park where I’m the tour guide. I have some old film cameras and a few transistor radios. Harvey was thrilled to learn how to use a battery tester and put in new ones when we discovered some of the batteries needed replacement. Finding random stations on the radio was like playing a new “audio” game.

I explained that the cameras require film which needs to be developed and printed and that I didn’t have any and if I did, the resulting photographs would be anything but instantaneous. I’m not sure he grasped that. When I was Harvey’s age my grandfather told me about a horse and cart delivering ice to his house when he was young and I still have trouble imagining what life was like for him.

My Webster’s Dictionary and Roget’s Thesaurus, which I’ve carried more or less around the world with me since high school, were also a revelation. I’m guessing that’s because they look old and worn and what people get out these days when they need to know a word is not a book. A folding wooden yardstick or even a New York City subway token can be objects of discussion and fascination at least for a few minutes to someone who has never seen either before.

It’s both amazing and somewhat sad to me that all of the stuff I’ve mentioned with the exception of the yardstick and the subway token is now accessible quite readily in a smartphone. No more typewriters, phonographs, slide rules or even clocks fill college dorm rooms anymore. The things I’ve kept may be obsolete, but I’m wondering if in the future, anybody will want or even remember any of them?

At times I’ve thought about selling this stuff that I have but never use on eBay but I haven’t. Now, I think I know why. The cameras and radios, the old dictionary and thesaurus are a link with my family history and my own. The original Arnold Palmer designed golf putter that I bought for my father as a present for $5 in 1962 sells for about $1,000 dollars today if it’s in decent condition but it’s not going anywhere despite golf technology having passed it by decades ago.

I guess I do have a museum of sorts of “ancient” artifacts and may be imparting knowledge no longer useful to my grandson but maybe there’s something simple and practical that I can teach him that requires no batteries and no megabytes and will stand the test of time. Yes, I think I’ve got it…

“Hey, Harvey. Today, I’m going to show you how to get crumbs off of a tablecloth using a dinner knife.”

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“The Russian threat to invade Ukraine should concern every person on Earth. If it again becomes normative for powerful countries to wolf down their weaker neighbours, it would affect the way people all over the world feel and behave.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

“Tragically, the Western leaders and diplomats who are right now trying to stave off a Russian invasion of Ukraine still think they live in a world where rules matter, where diplomatic protocol is useful, where polite speech is valued. All of them think that when they go to Russia, they are talking to people whose minds can be changed by argument or debate. They think the Russian elite cares about things like its “reputation.” It does not.”

— Anne Applebaum

“Americans are going to look at Ukraine and say: ‘That doesn’t look like a country I’m willing to die for,’ and rightfully so. So where does it end?”

— Andrew Lohsen

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“It’s not enough to succeed, others must fail.”I don’t remember the last time I watched the Olympics– summer or winter –and I guess I’m not the only one. Television viewership for the current games from China is only half of what it was for the last Winter Olympics held in South Korea four years ago. NBC is on track to be broadcasting the least watched Olympics– summer or winter –in history.

Although last Sunday’s Super Bowl ratings increased by 6% from 2021, the overall audience numbers for broadcast television have been dropping like a rock for years. Of course there’s a lot more to choose from through your television screen these days.

Forty years ago the average home got about a dozen channels. Now, it’s hundreds and that’s not counting the streaming services like Netflix and Hulu and how much they have altered our viewing habits. And how many of us watch a lot of programs live anymore? Even sports broadcasts I record so I can skip the commercials.

The time is long gone since the CBS Evening News had 30 million people tune in every night and its anchorman Walter Cronkite was considered the “Most trusted man in America”?– In my opinion one was connected to the other –But that’s not what I want to dwell on at the moment.

No, let me ask a question for those of you either viewing all, some or none of the Olympics from China. Name me any of the athletes competing from any country?

Ok, I can name only two– The U.S. skier Mikaela Shiffrin and the Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva. Next question– Does that make me a sadist?

Shiffrin was predicted to win multiple medals in women’s skiing but so far has been a DNF (Did Not Finish) in three events and placed ninth in another. Her comment after falling yesterday, “”Right now, I just feel like a joke.”

Kamila Valieva’s implosion was under a different microscope and I mean that literally. Not only was she favored to win the gold in women’s figure skating but even if she had, her achievement would have been tainted forever. It was Winston Churchhill who said that Russia was a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, but I think his observation can be expanded to include the International Olympic Committee or whoever permitted Valieva to compete.

In a process only the historically and notoriously corrupt IOC can unravel for me Valieva, who tested positive for a banned substance before the games, was allowed to skate anyway. One reason given was that she was only 15 and therefore denying her the opportunity would be damaging to her mental health. That explanation and any others for how and why this happened needs to include a contortionist for me to have even a faint chance of comprehending it.

Now, the fact that Valieva had a disastrous performance, falling twice and failing to medal, begs the question of whether or not a 15 year old’s psyche was more impacted by her having skated than if she had not. I won’t dwell further on the unfortunate circumstances. No, it’s the coverage of these athletes’ failures that is at once regrettable but also inevitable.

The quote at the top of this page— “It’s not enough to succeed, others must fail.” —I believed until now must have originated in Hollywood or Wall Street but according to the website the Quote Investigator may have been uttered first by no less than W. Somerset Maugham, Iris Murdoch, Gore Vidal, David Merrick, Larry Ellison and a few others including Genghis Khan. I guess a quote attributed to this many people kinda bolsters its validity.

I cannot fathom taking pleasure in Mikaela Shiffrin’s misfortunes, but I know from my career in the television news business that a story about the unexpected is more interesting, even more riveting than the opposite and especially when it’s major misfortune right there for all the world to see.

If Shiffrin had won all her races, no doubt she would have been celebrated as an American Olympic hero. Some have criticized NBC’s lengthy focus on her washouts and visible anguish. I didn’t see the broadcast and so it’s not fair for me to judge if the coverage was over the top but I do know from the still photographs I’ve seen of her sitting on the slopes with her head in her hands that, while viewers may or may not have been feeling Shiffrin’s pain, NBC’s Olympics production team was thinking, “This is great television!”

The same of course can be said about Kamila Valieva and apparently, the cameras showing every second of her calamitous routine and her tears and despair afterward. Said one of the NBC commentators– “The people around her should have kept her away from this, shielded her from this, kept her from competing here.”

No, they didn’t and I doubt very much they would if they had it to do all over again. When it comes to the Olympics Shakespeare was wrong. All the world isn’t a stage, it’s an audience and when you fall off that stage that the world is watching, you are truly alone.

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Menahem Golan was born in 1929 in Tiberias on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee. It can also be conjectured that he was born a half century too late.

In 1981 when I was a film student at UCLA I made a documentary about Golan, who two years earlier purchased an American movie studio with his cousin and had arrived in Los Angeles from Israel to run it. If Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront bemoaned that he “could have been a contender,” I contend that if Menahem Golan had come to Hollywood in its early days, he might have been a Louis B. Mayer or a Samuel Goldwyn– a Hollywood mogul like some of the other Jewish immigrants who became them. 

The studio Golan bought was Cannon Films and had been started by two twenty year-olds in the mid 1960s. Cannon made low budget movies that were correspondingly low grossers at the box office. But in 1970 Cannon had a hit starring Peter Boyle as a bigoted working class Joe– the movie’s title was Joe –who goes on a murderous rampage to rid the world of hippie drug dealers. Despite the violence Joe got favorable reviews.

By the end of the 70s the money that Joe had brought in for the studio ran out and Golan and his cousin Yoram Globus, who were making films in Israel, seized the opportunity to buy it. Quickly, the two of them became known in Hollywood as the Go-Go Boys for Cannon’s prolific output of movies mostly from scripts no major studio would touch and also for their business “discussions” which I had heard sometimes got overheated. “They throw chairs!” was what I was told.

I was a lot more excited than apprehensive when my request to be allowed to spend a week with a camera in the Cannon offices on Hollywood Boulevard was granted with the proviso that I wouldn’t be allowed to record or even be present when Golan and Globus “discussed” business. That didn’t turn out to be a problem. I had plenty of access and there was hardly a dull moment. I never did hear the sound of furniture being tossed against the walls.

Menahem was the creative side with his own aspirations to one day direct a serious film that both critics and movie audiences would admire. He had one in mind and told me he planned to make a screen version of Issac Bashiva Singer’s The Magician of Lublin. He eventually did and the New York Times reviewer wrote …

“The director evidently expended so much attention to laying on ersatz atmosphere that he didn’t have time to explain to the cast what the story was about.”

Yoram was the business end and I got to see enough of the two cousins’ interactions to realize that they were more like brothers to the point where Menahem told me on camera that they signed each other’s names on checks.

Golan liked my documentary and offered me a job. My goal at UCLA had been to become a feature film editor and I could have left film school and started at the bottom at Cannon and still wonder what might have happened if I had. But I have no regrets.

My documentary (I’ve placed a link to it at the bottom of this post.) was well received at UCLA and never seen anywhere else. As the format for videotape and then digital media changed, I made updated copies of Menahem Golan in Hollywood so that I could still be able to view it on whatever device made that possible and that turned out to be fortuitous.

Jo and I moved to Maine from California in 2010 and I was at my local golf course a year later when I got a phone call from Israel. Producers there were making a documentary about Golan, who by then had returned home and had found out from UCLA– which keeps records of such things –that I had made mine 30 years earlier. During the conversation it was clear to me that I had material from a time in Menahem’s career that they didn’t and I agreed to send them a copy and did so but inserted my name in large letters on the screen of every frame.

Three years went by and I hadn’t heard a word and had all but forgotten about the initial phone call when I got another and just happened to be on the golf course again.

The voice on the other end of the call said…

Producer: “We’re just wrapping up the editing of our documentary about Menahem Golan which will be shown at the Cannes Film Festival and want to offer you $200 to be able to use some of your footage.”

Me: “How much footage do you want to use?”

Producer: “Nine minutes.”

Me: Choking sound

I didn’t know how long their documentary was going to be but I was sure it wasn’t Gone with the Wind which runs three and a half hours. My own doc was under 40 minutes. Nine minutes, most likely, was a substantial chunk of what they had put together. They wanted to have rights to use almost a quarter of my work for less than I could even buy a new driver to put in my golf bag. I told them to call back with a more realistic offer but at the same time I was so insulted I realized later I had learned something invaluable.

I remembered how much purchasing archival film material cost from my own having purchased it during my career as a producer at ABC News and got even more annoyed. In fact I got so mad I didn’t care if I sold any of my documentary at all. I decided I would charge $5,000 for each minute that I’d provide, which actually wasn’t an exorbitant amount.

On the next phone call– this time I wasn’t at the golf course –I detected choking on the other end of the line when I made my $5,000 a minute proposal. Over the course of more phone calls I was called unreasonable, crazy and even ungrateful…

“Menahem Golan gave you your start.”

More time passed and I have to believe it included some serious recutting in an edit room in Tel Aviv. In the end the amount of footage I sold was less than nine minutes. It was, however, enough to cash the check and buy a new Pruis.

When it comes to bargaining I had never been and still am not what I think is a good haggler. But from this experience I learned a secret of good negotiators. I hadn’t budged because I honestly didn’t care if I won or not. The best negotiators may care about the outcome but can act convincingly as if they don’t and are ready to walk away. That’s how you play hardball. I don’t know who said this first about sincerity but I guess it’s true that if you can fake that, you’ve got it made.

Oh, and shortly after receiving my first check I got another. A producer in Australia was making his own documentary about Golan and Globus and Cannon Films. He got in touch with me, too and I offered him the same deal. It turned out to be a small one. He only bought enough footage for me and Jo to buy new blinds for every window in our house.

Menahem Golan in Hollywood

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“For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”

If you want to know the who, the why and the when of this quote it will be revealed at the bottom of the post. Let me just add that if a year from now these words might be uttered again in a similar context, the world will have done well.We Baby Boomers are a legacy of the planet’s last world war. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine hopefully, will not result in a new one after which a baby boom might not even be possible, but then I never thought when I was 16 years-old that an American president could be assasinated.
I never imagined that when I was 54 two skyscrapers in Manhattan could be pierced by hijacked planes and brought down by Islamist terrorists.
I never believed that when I was 69 the internet and social media would be used by conspiracy theorists, hate mongers and our enemies to help elect a deficient and delusional man as our chief executive. And I never conceived that four years later our nation’s Capitol would be assaulted by our own citizens at his urging.
The development of the atom bomb ended World War II and remarkably, the most devasting weapon ever developed by humanity has not been used anywhere on the globe since. 

Not surprisingly, nuclear weapons and the threat of “mutually assured destruction”– the acronym is MAD –have also been the greatest deterrent to another world war.

Despite diplomatic efforts to eliminate or at least reduce these arsenals, Russia is still believed to have roughly 1500 nuclear warheads mounted and ready on bombers and missles and the United States nearly the same number.

Yesterday, Vladimir Putin made what sounded like a threat that if any country interferes militarily with his current attack on Ukraine, the danger of a nuclear option may become a clear and present one.

“To anyone who would consider interfering from the outside– if you do, you will face consequences greater than any you have faced in history.”

–Vladimir Putin

Until only recently many both outside and within Ukraine thought Russia was bluffing about invading. Of course they have now been proven wrong. Are we naive to think that Putin is bluffing about using nukes or that he has no desire to conquer the former Russian satellites in Eastern Europe that are now members of NATO?

In my lifetime the United States has chosen its wars poorly– Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. I believe these were all civil wars and we chose a side. Our mistake was, among others, in thinking we could build democracies in places where they hadn’t existed before. And that our way of life would be attractive and inspiring enough that, notwithstanding the corrupt leaders we backed, in time we would guide those countries to create something better for themselves.

We were convinced our aims were laudable and justified but our aim was poor.

These misadventures have been more damaging to our nation’s psyche than its pride. The criticism that we “squandered our blood and treasure” is a terribly inadequate description of what transpired.

What we’ve lost over the last half century are many thousands of young lives and their potential. What we’ve wasted are trillions of dollars that could have supported public education, money that could have provided more expansive health care, money that could have been targeted for training for those left behind as American jobs were lost overseas and technology made others obsolete. And imagine the headstart we might have had for combating climate change then, now and in the future.

I believe many in the country have now lost their resolve and desire as individuals to sacrifice for others or even act in their own best interests. The pandemic’s unnecessary toll has made that sadly apparent. Such a divided national mentality that now exists will undoubtedly influence how we as a waning “superpower” choose to conduct our foreign policy. Even if we make better decisions in the future, the fallout from Donald Trump’s presidency has diminished our country’s standing in the eyes of our allies and left them unsure of our reliability.

Putin’s likely usurpation of Ukraine will be a tragedy that the rest of the world will watch happen with its hands more or less folded behind its backs. The current administration has already stated our reasons: Ukraine is not a member of NATO so we have no obligation to intervene with our military, sanctions imposed on Russia must be given the time to work and now there is also another reason that President Biden dare not speak. Putin has played the nuclear blackmail card.

What makes Ukraine’s fate so significant however, is that unlike the situations America went to war over in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, Ukraine was striving on its own to be a democracy. The organization Freedom House does annual surveys of 210 countries in the world measuring how much freedom their citizens have. They assess people’s access to all types of rights from the right to run for office and vote to civil rights from freedom of expression to equality before the law.

Here are some current rankings out of a possible top score of 100 for a country where freedoms reign:

Sweden 100

United States 83

Ukraine 61

Russia 19

The number for Ukraine of course was before yesterday’s invasion. It would be miraculous if by next year it hasn’t plummeted. The question is whether the war begun by Russia will be long and bloody or short and decisive? If you hear somebody tell you that they know which, they don’t.

Oh, and the quote at the top? It was from a commencement address given by President John F. Kennedy in 1963 eight months after the resolution of America’s most ominous nuclear showdown to date with Russia that we now call the Cuban Missile Crisis. Russia pulled its nukes out of Cuba and the United States in turn removed its own from Turkey but only after reaching the brink of catastrophe. Leaders on both sides were shaken and shortly afterward began talks on nuclear arms control.

I’ve posted a link to a recording of the portion of President Kennedy’s speech where the quote occurs. It might make you feel hopeful about what’s possible even in a dark hour or it may leave you despondent about what is happening in Ukraine and what the outcome might be.

For me Kennedy’s eloquence is as striking as his message. 

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