Another Week: Number 161

This was one of those grim weeks where you mostly stay indoors and wonder why people live here. Temperatures were often in the single digits, below zero — or “down below zero,” as WISN 12’s Molly Bernard prefers to say (maybe it’s a Kansas City thing). There were frequent dustings of new snow, requiring frequent shoveling to prevent ice. There were 20 and 30 mph winds. People were wincing.

The Chicago Bears played their  NFC Divisional Playoff game on Sunday night at frozen Soldier Field. Like many of their games this season, it was a nail-biter until the very end. The Los Angeles Rams won 20-17 in overtime, and both amateur and professional analysts began burrowing down “what-if” rabbit holes.

I was grateful for a highly entertaining season. Now it’s over. Goodbye to my TV football friends, like Mina Kimes and Kyle Brandt, until next August. I don’t care about the Super Bowl or the NFL Draft. I did tune in to the College Football Playoff National Championship — but then tuned right out again when they showed Donald Trump in the skybox during the National Anthem. Gross.

Monday was Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Looking at MLK’s Wikipedia bio, I learned that he was born Michael King Jr. — and that his father, pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church, visited Germany in 1934 on church business and was inspired by that nation’s Martin Luther sites to rename himself and his son. How come I never knew this?

I walked zero miles this week.

Trump pandemonium mushrooms into second year

On Sunday, PBS reported that Donald J. Trump, the leader of the free world, sent an insane message to the Prime Minister of Norway to say that, because Norway didn’t give him the Nobel Peace Prize, he must now have “Complete and Total Control of Greenland.” Then he began publishing private texts from European leaders perplexed by his threat to impose new tariffs on “Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, The United Kingdom, The Netherlands, and Finland” for opposing his conquest of Greenland.

Responding on Tuesday after the holiday, the stock markets plummeted.

On Wednesday, to celebrate one year since re-taking office, Trump occupied the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room for an hour and 20 minutes to babble and yammer and dementedly praise himself. Then he flew to Switzerland, had trouble walking in a straight line, and unveiled a plan to turn Gaza into yet another Trump club.

At Davos, following a cogent and loudly-applauded breakup declaration by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, Trump delivered yet another embarrassing and belligerent screed — before admitting that his Greenland threats were pure horseshit. Afterward, he claimed to have “formed the framework of a future deal” on Greenland with Secretary General of NATO Mark Rutte, who obviously does not speak for either Greenland or Denmark.

On Thursday, Trump claimed the details of the “deal” would emerge in … wait for it … “two weeks.”

My own shorthand for Trump’s constant, deranged distractions is “pork chop” — as in the piece of meat the burglar throws and the guard dogs chase, instead of doing their job.

MS NOW’s Lawrence O’Donnell had been warning the press corps from the beginning that the whole Greenland ultimatum was just a big, juicy pork chop. O’Donnell was absolutely right.

BBC Outlook: Patrick Bringley, ‘The stillness was a gift’

I have long had the impression of some unseen being handing me books to read and turning my attention to audio and video. Lately, that sense has been intensifying.

Early Thursday morning, I woke up to an installment of the BBC’s Outlook, called “The stillness was a gift.”

It was a conversation with Patrick Bringley, a man who accompanied his brother through cancer and death — and then processed his grief in the quiet and beauty of the Metropolitan Museum of Art by working as a guard there.

This interview, by Mobeen Azhar, was one of those where certain points jumped out and spoke directly to me.

I plan to read Bringley’s 2023 book — All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me — in the very near future.

Bob Geldof: ‘My Life in Five Songs,’ with Brendan O’Connor

Saturday morning, I caught another stunning radio segment from the British Isles. I was listening to RTÉ Radio 1, Ireland’s excellent main station, during Brendan O’Connor‘s show when Bob Geldof joined the program to recount “My Life in Five Songs,” a regular feature.

The song samples were fine, and Geldof told of the generous, enduring friendship David Bowie extended to him when he was a complete stranger. But the most poignant moments came when he was asked about coping with grief. Geldof lost his mother at age 8, then his ex-wife in 1997, and one of their daughters in 2014.

All I know is that I hadn’t — sterile old me — I hadn’t quite understood how much I loved, how much I’d been loved, and as the poet Larkin says, all that remains of us will be love. That’s true. But it takes this 74-year-old geezer how long, and what experience did I need to go through, to understand that it is the central, foundational, spinal thing of life — is love.

Your jackbooted thugs are here

In April 1995, National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre sent out a fundraising letter that described federal agents as “armed terrorists dressed in Ninja black … jack-booted thugs armed to the teeth who break down doors, open fire with automatic weapons and kill law-abiding citizens.” At the time, the description was outrageous enough to make former president George H. W. Bush quit the NRA.

And now, here we are.

On Sunday, according to the Associated Press, “Federal immigration agents forced open a door and detained a U.S. citizen in his Minnesota home at gunpoint without a warrant, then led him out onto the streets in his underwear in subfreezing conditions.”

On Tuesday, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) removed a 5-year-old schoolboy in bunny ears and his father from Minneapolis.

On Friday, tens of thousands of peaceful residents engaged in “ICE Out of Minnesota: Day of Truth and Freedom” — a general strike and a protest march through downtown Minneapolis in subzero temperatures. The scene on my TV was profoundly moving.

Then on Saturday morning, as I sat in my living room working, breaking news interrupted once again: Video shot from across the street showed federal agents tackling and then executing a man who turned out to be Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse at a VA hospital.

Before long, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller was denouncing Pretti as a “would-be assassin” who “tried to murder federal law enforcement,” and a “domestic terrorist.”

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem declared, “This looks like a situation where an individual arrived at the scene to inflict maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement.”

Doublethink.

In case America didn’t get the message 17 days earlier, the 37-year-old veteran’s nurse was snuffed out just like the 37-year-old mom shot in the head before him: Cower, or you are next.

This is America now — in between the ads for gym memberships and the gigantic flag covering the field.