The President tweets that there would be no “Russian Witch Hunt” if Attorney General Jeff Sessions had not recused himself. I don’t follow that. Assume that Sessions had fully disclosed his contacts during the campaign with the Russians and had no conflicts that required his recusal from the investigation. Surely, however, Sessions still should feel an obligation for a Russian investigation. Evidence exists that Russians meddled in our election. That was an assault on our democracy, and any patriotic attorney general should feel an obligation to investigate such an attack in hopes of preventing or mitigating future attacks and to punish, if possible, anyone, including Americans, who were involved. Certainly if a missile were launched from a submarine that landed on American soil, we would investigate its source and seek to prevent similar future attacks and to punish all who were responsible. Any patriotic attorney general should have investigated Russian attempts to affect our election. Even without a Sessions’ recusal, we should still be having a Russian investigation.

Time and again the President has castigated football players who have “taken a knee” during the national anthem. He and others claim that this shows disrespect for the military. The players, however, were not making any statements about our armed forces. Instead they wanted to draw attention to those who had been killed without adequate cause by various police forces. The players’ actions did not disrupt or impede anything. The protests were not designed to get any special treatment for the protesters. Any protest, of course, bothers someone or it would not be a “protest,” but the football kneel-downs are as respectful and restrained as any I can remember.

Like some NFL players, the President also protests law enforcement. He does not take a knee during the national anthem. Instead, in tweets and statements, he indicates that the FBI and the Justice Department are filled with partisan, incompetent hacks who don’t have the best interests of the country at heart. In essence, he labels them unpatriotic. But unlike the NFL players, his is not a selfless protest. He seeks to personally benefit if he can undermine the credibility of law enforcement. How do “conservatives” lambaste the NFL players, but not castigate the President for much more harmful and disrespectful behavior towards law enforcement?

The President had invited the Super-Bowl-winning Philadelphia Eagles to the White House but most had indicated that they would not go. Like a high school girl, the President reacted; if you aren’t going to come, I won’t invite you, and the invitation was rescinded. Showing that he is capable of learning, he will not invite the NBA champs, the Golden State Warriors, at all. But I still want him to summon the Washington Capitals, the Stanley Cup champions. I hope that none go except for their remarkable Russian players, who, leaving their dental work out, give the President a bear hug. I want the picture

Respect for the national anthem should require learning the words to it.

“Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.” George Bernard Shaw.

           My season’s Playbills include productions that can’t really be characterized as plays, including a multi-disciplinary performance by Meredith Monk at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. I went to a couple magic shows—one that was in the form of a traditional magic show, but another one, In and Of Itself, that tried to be different. Derek DelGaudio did the requisite illusions, but something more was attempted—a show about identity. DelGaudio told stories and did tricks related to identity. He was not a new Spalding Gray but somehow it all worked resulting in an engaged and excited audience congregating outside the door when the performance ended proclaiming that they knew how he had done the quite amazing finale.

Jos Houben’s performance also was not a play in the classical sense of the term. The promos called him a mime and a clown. In the first part of the show, he was mime-like as he and Marcello Magni put on an absurdist farce with almost no words. But after the intermission, Houben became a lecturer as he presented The Art of Laughter. The title itself was too sweeping. Not all laughter was explored, but laughter from physical comedy was.

Houben, a Belgian native who studied at the Jacques Lecoq school in Paris (I did not know of that school before, but from its prominent mention in the Playbill bios, I gathered it was very important), explored nuances of physical humor. He told us that watching a person trip was not inherently funny. He walked and tripped and no laughter. He then said a trip followed by embarrassed glances to see who had seen it was funny. Trip, surreptitious looks, laughter. He then did variations of trips, saying in advance—and correctly–how the laughter would vary. On one level, this was amazing because it seemed to violate the fundamental law of comedy—don’t explain a joke. Houben, however, would tell us what he was going to do and tell us whether we would laugh or not. Even when we were told we were going to laugh, we still did. As the hour went on, I found it amazing for another reason. His exposition had come from a close study of the physical movements of people and their reactions to some quite common situations. From this he had distilled the funny from the nonfunny. All of us had seen what Houben had, but few of us had really seen them as he had. The Art of Laughter not only taught me something about laughter, it also taught me something about seeing.

What I have seen this season is only a fraction of the productions in New York this year. There are literally hundreds of plays most weeks, many more than the number of movies showing in the multiplexes around the country. I don’t pretend to understand the finances of either movies or plays, but many plays will be deemed successful in New York if they run for a month drawing audiences that fill their theaters. For Broadway, that may require thousands nightly, but for many productions that could mean three hundred or only seventy-five. The result is that plays can be quirky, daring, bizarre, or classical and still find enough audience members to be successful.  This makes the New York theater(re) scene a blessing to the likes of me.

Perhaps if I looked at my saved Playbills regularly, I might make more discoveries like I did recently on one of those few occasions when I pulled one out at random. I have little to no recollection of many of the plays I have seen, especially when they are from decades ago, but neither do I recall most of the books I have read a year or two ago, much less those from a generation back. This was an exception. Although the Playbill indicated attendance at a play in 1981, I did remember going to it. Who can forget seeing James Earl Jones as Othello? And then there was Christopher Plummer as Iago. I skimmed the cast, and to my surprise I had seen Kelsey Grammer as Casio. I had no idea who Grammer was in 1981, and his performance in Othello did not stay with me. But the Playbill indicated that I had indeed seen him, and, of course, since then I have tried to work into conversations that I saw “Frazier” in a Shakesperean play even before I had seen him in Cheers.

I look over a season’s Playbills before I move them to the top shelf of a bookcase. Looking over this year’s batch, I am struck by the diversity of what is offered in New York. I saw The Play That Goes Wrong, which came from London and has run on Broadway for a while. It was silly—no message—but it was laugh-out-loud funny. I saw a number of plays at the Roundabout Theatre Company, a preeminent theatrical institution, that ranged from dreadful to good to the quite interesting The Last Match, about fading and rising tennis stars.

I saw a couple plays at the Manhattan Theatre Club, another preeminent theatrical institution, including the provocative The Children, written by Lucy Kirkwood. An older woman shows up at a lonely British seaside cottage. She is not there as we might first think to renew an old love affair but because a nearby nuclear powerplant has had a disastrous meltdown. The three who meet there are physicists who generations ago helped build the plant. This is a play about righting mistakes, duty, and sacrifice. What is our obligation to fix our failures? What is our duty to future generations to leave a cleaner world?

I saw a couple plays at the The Public Theater—yes, in keeping with its populist roots, this preeminent theatrical institution spells it “theater” not the more pretentious “theatre.”  The plays I saw there rated B+s.

I had looked forward to seeing Junk because I had admired Ayad Akhtar’s Disgraced, which won the Pulitzer a few years back. This play about the junk bond crisis was good, but I felt somehow that it did not rise to a higher level. I so admire good reviewers who can articulate what sometimes I only feel. They can explain why a play is excellent or thrilling or not so good.

I felt a similar a similar disappointment in the play In Love with the Arrow Collar Man, which was at an Off-Off Broadway theater. (This is neither a pejorative nor a geographical term. An Off-Broadway house has from 100 to 499 seats, while an Off-Off-Broadway theater has fewer than 100.) The play was about Joe Leyendecker, the country’s foremost illustrator until Norman Rockwell, part of Leyendecker’s circle, nudged him from that pedestal; Frank Leyendecker, a gay artist like his brother; and Charles Beach, Joe’s model for the Arrow collar ads and his lover. The play portrayed interesting lives in complicated times, and it kept my attention, but there was something missing. I could say that the play lacked a necessary depth or did not have sufficient polish, but I don’t have the ability to articulate exactly what I mean by those clichés.

Some of the plays were plotless, or at least I can’t describe the plot. Ballyturk, at St. Ann’s Warehouse, (a preeminent institution that does not grapple with “theater” versus “theatre”) falls into that category. Two brothers seem locked in a hermetically sealed world, but there is much movement, fast speech, and what seems to be a periodic radio soap opera. I am not sure what it was about—perhaps the meaning or the meaninglessness of life. But I laughed and was amazed at many of the word images that kept flying by as well as the physical abilities of the two as well as the sultriness and voice of the third character when she appeared. I found it hard to describe, but it was assuredly out of the ordinary.

(Concluded on June 15)

Our President states that he can pardon himself. His lawyers state that he has the absolute authority over federal criminal investigations and can order them to cease. Because he has the authority to order the end of a criminal investigation, these people maintain that the President cannot obstruct justice even if he ends an investigation because of a “corrupt motive.” Commentators have concluded that these claims are the equivalent of the position that the President is above the law. This has caused me to ponder the Constitution, but it has also caused me to pick up the Bible and read again about David and Bathsheba.

Uriah, Bathsheba’s husband, was off at the wars when David saw her bathe, presumably sans clothing. David fell in love, or at least lust, and David and Bathsheba got it on. She became pregnant. David was worried that his transgression would be apparent and ordered Uriah back. David expected that Uriah would be horny after the isolated army life and would spend the nights with his wife. Then, it would look like the soldier had fathered his wife’s impending child. Uriah, a remarkably restrained man, however, refused to be with his wife while his comrades were still at the battles, and he was sent back to the war. This time, however, David gave an order to Uriah’s commander that Uriah be sent to a portion of the front where Uriah would be killed. The order was carried out, and Uriah died. David married Bathsheba, and they had a son.

In the story, it seems clear that even though he was king, David broke the governing law (God’s law) when he had sex with Bathsheba. But did he break the law when he ordered Uriah to the front? As king, David had the authority for this order, but he gave the command not in his kingly role as chief of the armed forces, but for the personal goal of having Uriah killed. He did it out of “corrupt motives.”

My favorite Bible states, “But the thing that David had done displeased the Lord.”  This might seem ambiguous as to what “the thing” was, but the Lord then sends Nathan to David, and Nathan makes clear that both the sex and the battle order were evil. “Why have you despised the word of the Lord, to do what is evil in his sight? You have smitten Uriah the Hittite with the sword, and have taken his wife to be your wife, and you have slain him with the sword of the Ammonites.” God’s messenger denounces David, even though he was king and could give battle orders, for killing Uriah. He slayed Bathsheba’s husband, even though David did not actually swing the sword, because of his evil motive in ordering Uriah into fatal danger.

The Lord then states the harsh punishments he will visit upon David. David repents, and the Lord forgives, or at least partially relents, and only (only!) punishes David by having his and Bathsheba’s child die seven days after birth. (This raises all sorts of questions about this God. The child was innocent, but He still had the baby die. This was hardly a pro-life stance. Bathsheba has sinned, but only in the adultery, not in the smiting of her husband, yet she suffered the same punishment that David suffered. But these are issues for another day.)

Does this biblical story hold any lessons for Trump? I am not talking about the adultery part. It seems clear that the President does not think of himself as “evil” because of his adultery, and apparently even his religious supporters do not truly think that it stigmatizes him. No, I am talking about the Uriah part of the narrative. David slew Uriah by giving an otherwise lawful order with an evil motive. Should I take that to mean that if the President gives an otherwise lawful order to end a criminal investigation for a corrupt motive, the President would then be obstructing justice? Or should I just conclude that the Bible no longer truly speaks to us?

While Jefferson and Monroe attended William and Mary College, which was intellectually staid, the guide said, Madison went to the College of New Jersey, now Princeton University. There he came under the tutelage of John Witherspoon. Witherspoon, a Presbyterian minister, born in Scotland and educated at the University of Edinburgh, became President of the College of New Jersey, a Presbyterian institution, in 1768, a year before Madison came there. Under Witherspoon’s guidance, the guide indicated, Madison became imbued with the ideas, ideals, and enthusiasms of the Scottish Enlightenment. (A recent letter in its alumni magazine pointed out Princeton’s iconic Nassau Hall was built because of donations by Scottish Presbyterians.)

Witherspoon would also have shown Madison that enlightenment thought should be expressed in political activity. Witherspoon was a delegate to the Second Continental Congress, signed the Declaration of Independence, signed the Articles of Confederation, and later supported the adoption of the Constitution.

Learning how the Scottish Enlightenment had affected Madison I thought of James Wilson. Wilson, whom I had learned about for an academic project, is largely forgotten now, but he was one of the most influential of our Founding Fathers, and he was the intellectual offspring of the Scottish Enlightenment. Wilson was born in Scotland in 1742 and attended three of the four Scottish universities, St. Andrews, Glasgow, and Edinburgh, where he studied Scottish Enlightenment thinkers. He came to Pennsylvania when he was twenty-four. He signed the Declaration of Independence and was one of the most influential people in the Constitutional Convention. Wilson was on the committee that produced the first draft of the Constitution. He was a leading legal theorist and wrote influential legal articles and books and was one of the original Justices of the Supreme Court. Through him, as with others, flowed Scottish Enlightenment thought into our founding documents.

Hearing how Madison was influenced by the Scottish Enlightenment and thinking again about Wilson’s role made me wonder more generally about the Scottish Enlightenment’s effects on the founding of our country. I have read one book about that Enlightenment, How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe’s Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It by Arthur Herman. It is quite good, but it is a general study, and I wondered if there was something more specific about how those Scottish thinkers affected our country’s foundations. Let me know if you are aware of a good study on that topic. The visit to the presidential homes certainly made me think that in important ways we owe at least partial thanks for our country to the Scots.

From the European perspective, the United States was a young country during its formation period. While that was true, I was struck during our visits to the Virginian presidential homes by the deep American roots of our early presidents. None was a recent arrival; each could be classified as having come from old stock. Washington’s great-grandfather came to Virginia from England in the 1650s. Jefferson’s ancestors also came from England during the seventeenth century. I am not sure about Madison’s grandfather, but Madison’s father was born in Virginia. Monroe’s great-grandfather emigrated from Scotland to Virginia at about the same time as Washington’s great-grandfather had. In addition, the second President also had long roots in America. John Adams’s great-grandfather moved to Massachusetts from England around 1640.

Of course, there were others of the Founding Fathers who had come to America more recently—Alexander Hamilton from the West Indies and Thomas Paine from England, for example. But our first presidents all had long and deep roots in America. Was this somehow important for the founding of our country? Did a person naturally feel themselves more of an American when their ancestors had been in the New World for three or four generations? Did it take decades and decades to question whether the British government was the best for a different land and an increasingly different society?  It was striking to me that in that young America all of our first Presidents had old American families. Have historians discussed this?

The Virginia dynasty had roots deep in the New World, but they were still influenced by European ideas. Much is made of Jefferson’s library, and it was not just for show. He read those volumes. And the books were not the eighteenth-century equivalent of Jack Reacher novels, but covered philosophy, botany, biology, agriculture, history, astronomy. I wondered how many modern American leaders have done the equivalent reading.

Jefferson was not alone. Washington and Monroe both had large libraries as did Madison. The guide at Montpelier indicated that Madison, recognizing that the United States needed a better form of government to replace the Articles of Confederation, studied all sorts of materials, from histories of Greece and Rome to modern philosophers, to be prepared to help fashion a new constitution.

John Locke is often cited, surely correctly, as an influence on Jefferson. Separation of powers is a central tenet of our Constitution, and Montesquieu is often credited with formulating that concept. But the European influence was more pervasive than that. The Virginia dynasty came of age in an enlightenment era that believed in human reason, rejected authority, and valued empirical knowledge. The Montpelier guide stressed how much Madison was influenced by the Scottish Enlightenment that was then flourishing.

(Continued on June 8)

“This is a book for the servantless cook who can be unconcerned on occasion with budgets, waistlines, timetables, children’s meals, or anything else which might interfere with the enjoyment of producing something wonderful to eat.” Simone Beck, Louisette Berthoile, Julia Child, Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

“Floating upward through a confusion of dreams and memory, curving like a trout through the rings of previous risings, I surface.” Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety.

“In the beginning, nearly fourteen billion years ago, all the space and all the matter and all the energy of the known universe was contained in a volume less than one-trillionth the size of the period that ends this sentence.” Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry.

“We went there for everything we needed.” J.R. Moehringer, The Tender Bar: A Memoir.

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude.

“Straddling the top of the world, one foot in China and the other in Nepal, I cleared the ice from my oxygen mask, hunched a shoulder against the wind, and stared absently down at the vastness of Tibet.” Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air.

“With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance comer far-reaching visions of the past.” George Eliot, Adam Bede.

“No matter how hard you try you will never be able to grasp just how tiny, how spatially unassuming, is a proton.” Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything.

“On the burnt-out end of a July day in Southwest Texas, in a crossroads community whose only economic importance had depended on its relationship to a roach paste factory the EPA had shut down twenty years before, a young man driving a car without window glass stopped by an abandoned blue-and-white filling station that had once sold Pure gas during the Depression and was now home to bats and clusters of tumbleweed.” James Lee Burke, Rain Gods: A Novel.

“History has not been kind to Jefferson Davis.” James M.  McPherson, Embattled Rebel: Jefferson Davis as Commander in Chief.

As much as I enjoyed the recent HBO documentary about the pro wrestler, Andre the Giant, I was disappointed at its leaving out the part of Andre’s life I find most intriguing—Samuel Beckett and Andre knew each other. Beckett owned a place in the French countryside near Andre’s home when Andre was growing up. Although we may never know much about this relationship, it is documented that Beckett did drive Andre to school. I first learned about this relationship from a two-character play Sam and Dede, Or My Dinner with Andre the Giant that I saw in a 50-seat theater a few years ago.

According to the play, Andre was too big for the school bus, and Beckett, paying off a debt to Andre’s father, offered to drive the boy to school in his truck. During the drives, the two mostly spoke about cricket, which both played.  While there are sources to support these facts, I am guessing that the most of the play was based on a playwright’s speculations. In the play, the two became friends, a friendship that lasted even after Andre had become a huge star and Beckett had become a worldwide literary figure. They have wide-ranging conversations about art and storytelling. Beckett is intrigued with professional wrestling, and Andre is intrigued with the lack of traditional storytelling in Beckett’s work.

Pro wrestling, unlike much of Beckett’s work, has stories, and it has writers. Beckett is interested in wrestling; wrestling has writers; Beckett is a writer. What if, I could not help wonder, Andre had gotten Becket to write for wrestling.  I don’t pretend to be a Beckett expert, but from what I have seen, he seemed concerned with the absurd, and surely so wrestling meets that standard. Perhaps he could have had Andre alone in the ring “calling out” someone he was “feuding” with. Beckett might have had a solo spotlight on Andre who says, “Big Show, if you want to take my title come out here.” Then for three minutes nothing but silence. Andre repeats his challenge. Another three silent minutes and another challenge. Another three minutes and Big Show appears at the arena’s entrance. He does not utter a word. Three minutes of silence. Big Show laughs. Three more silent minutes. The lights go out. When the lights return, neither wrestler is there. The giant television comes on. It says, “Waiting with Andre.” The TV goes off. And the audience wonders, What just happened? What did that mean?

In Beckett’s Endgame, two men in trash cans converse. In professional wrestling, men frequently bash each other with metal garbage cans. What could Beckett have done with wrestlers and those props? We will never know, of course, but I feel a bit cheated.

Little is known about the relationship between Beckett and Andre other than the fact that one existed. The possibilities are so intriguing; I wished that the documentary had probed it.

Keeping in touch with my low-culture side, I watched the recent HBO documentary about Andre the Giant. I took it with a grain of salt because it seems to have been done with the cooperation of the major wrestling organization, Vince McMahon’s WWE, and my gut tells me that it would be foolish to treat a wrestling promoter’s words as veracious. Still, I enjoyed it.

Andre Roussimoff, born in 1946 in Molien, France, a small farming village, started to grow excessively in his teenage years. And he continued to grow and then grow some more. Perhaps if his condition had then been diagnosed, it could have been treated. Only as an adult, however, was he diagnosed as having acromegaly, a disorder of excess growth hormone, often caused by a tumor in the pituitary gland. Andre just continued to grow.

Andre’s major fame comes from professional wrestling, although those who aren’t attracted to this spectacle may know him as the actor who portrayed the lovable giant Fezzik in the movie The Princess Bride. For a decade or two, he was probably the biggest worldwide star in professional wrestling, and the documentary does a reasonable job in describing that ascent as well as the ascent of pro wrestling itself from small, regional organizations to the dominant national WWE of today.

The film was filled with anecdotes about Andre—his strength, his gentleness, his attractiveness to women (although something was left out here), his legendary drinking, his graciousness, his jovialness, how much he liked to laugh, his good friendships. The documentary also provided glimpses of hardships and pain.

At the beginning of his career, because each pro wrestling operation was a regional attraction, Andre’s life was one of constant travel. He was on the road, the documentary said, for 300 nights a year. This much travel would be uncomfortable for anyone, but it is hard to imagine how difficult it must have been for him. The HBO production had a clip of Andre saying that he could never be sure that a hotel would have a bed big enough for him. You can’t trust wrestling statistics, but he was billed as 7 feet 4 inches tall and weighing 520 pounds. Those numbers were probably exaggerated, but he was huge as was clear in films when he stood next to others or held a normal-sized object in his hand. One of the interviewees pointed out that Andre took frequent fourteen-hour flights to Japan but that he could not fit into an airliner’s restroom. Curtains would have to be drawn in the back of the plane and he would urinate into a bucket that would then be emptied into the toilet by someone else. Would you ever get used to that? Another clip of Andre pointed out something I never thought about. He said that society now tries to make accommodations for the blind and disabled, but we have not tried to accommodate the giants among us.

There were many stories about his legendary drinking. On a routine night he would drink twenty-four bottles of beer or seven or eight bottles of wine. Some days and nights, he drank over 100 beers or three or four cases of wine. These stories were told in amazed, almost admiring tones, and it all seemed faintly humorous, but then one of his nonwrestling friends said that part of the reason he drank so much was his pain. His joints and back could not handle his growth, and as the years went on he had trouble even walking.

Andre lived knowing that his condition meant that he would die young. Nothing indicated that he lived regularly with morbid thoughts, but how could he not?

Perhaps all this was best summed up by a friend who said that every so often Andre, world-famous and rich, would simply say to him, “Sometimes I wish I would be you. I wish I could go to the corner store without being noticed.”

Andre died of heart failure alone in a Paris hotel room when he was 46.

(concluded onJune1)

James Madison was instrumental in the formation of our Constitution and Bill of Rights, but we are beholden to his wife, Dolley, for another one of his important constitutional contributions. Madison took notes during the Constitutional debates. He attended every session and noted every speech, he claimed, except the most inconsequential. Scholars have relied on Madison’s efforts to understand the flow of Constitutional proposals, counterproposals, and compromises. Madison’s notes have been invaluable for understanding our Constitution, but we should be grateful for Dolley for their publication.

Although Madison was meticulous in taking and keeping the notes, he merely stored them for most of his life. It was only after his Presidency, when he had retired to Montpelier, that he started to put them into publishable form. Dolley aided him in this, but after Madison died, Dolley finished the project.

It was Dolley who got them published. In doing so, she may have been thinking more about her widowed poverty than about future scholars, but she convinced Congress to buy Madison’s constitutional notes, and they were published in 1837, on the fiftieth anniversary of the constitutional debates.

Any law student knows that in that half century before Madison’s notes were published, the Supreme Court handed down major decisions about the Constitution that helped set the path of our country. Many constitutional scholars today urge that the only legitimate way to interpret the Constitution is to enforce what it originally meant. The late publication of Madison’s notes, however, highlights that the early Supreme Court Justices rendered their opinions without a basic source for understanding the original intentions of the framers of the Constitution. If you read those early decisions, you will realize that the Supreme Court was not interpreting the Constitution through an originalist lens. If you read Madison’s notes, you will not find the framers mandating that “originalism” was the proper to way view the Constitution. If you delve further, you will find that “originalism” is largely a late twentieth century invention by a few constitutional scholars and judges. “Originalism” is not supported by the original intentions of the framers and adopters of the Constitution.  Ironic.