Patricia Mazzei’s recent New York TImes story on Florida Panhandlers doubly victimized by Hurricane Michael and the government shutdown ended with a quote that left many readers cold — and coldly infuriated. Crystal Minton, a federal prison secretary, is already challenged by being the single mother of 7-year-old twins and the caretaker for disabled parents. She’s facing a complicated work schedule in February but don’t cry for her, Argentina.
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The cherry blossom theory of the shutdown
The cherry blossom snow globe arrived last Thursday. Outside it’s the beginnings of what I hope will be a mild winter. But inside its magical sphere, two wands of blossoms flank a petal-strewn footbridge nestled on green earth in an eternal spring, for it can never be winter in the heart as long as there are cherry blossoms in the world or in the imagination.
I like to think of the cherry blossom snow globe as the object equivalent of the last plane out of Saigon. I had purchased it at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. Dec. 27 and had it mailed home as I was going to The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts that evening to see “Miss Saigon” and didn’t want to take a chance that it would break there or on the train back.
So I watched the woman at the register take my address and stamp it. I wondered when I might see it again. I figured that mailing the snow globe might be one of the last things the workers there would do and that I would be one of the last visitors before the full effects of the government shutdown could be felt. As it turned out, I was right and, when it did arrive, just five days after I came home, I opened it with both a delicious sense of anticipation and a certain ruefulness.
Read MoreAll our children: 'Miss Saigon' and the American paradox
“Miss Saigon” — which I saw over the Christmas break at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington D.C. — owes its narrative to Giacomo Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly,” which tells the story of a innocent geisha’s fatal love for an American naval lieutenant in 1904 Nagasaki. In updating the tale to the waning days of the Vietnam War (1975), “Saigon” improves on the story by making the American serviceman — here Marine Sgt. Chris Scott — and his eventual American wife, Ellen, much more sympathetic figures, trapped by circumstances of war rather than being blinded by white privilege.
Having said this, I must add that “Saigon” is no Puccini opera. It’s melodic enough without being memorable in the vein of other one-note Cameron Mackintosh musicals like “Les Miserables,” forcing the singers to belt when they might be better off lilting, particularly in the screeching upper register. Like “Butterfly,” however, “Miss Saigon” remains a potent metaphor for an America that, despite its best intentions is thoughtless, even callous, in its treatment of foreigners, particularly those of color.
Read MoreThe gang that couldn't shoot straight
In one of the interactive exhibits at Mount Vernon, George Washington’s home in Virginia, you’re asked to flip open the doors of his “cabinet,” each of which contains a portrait of its members — Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of War Henry Knox and Attorney General Edmund Randolph. As I opened the drawers, I couldn’t help but think of how one 19th century journalist crystallized America as “a nation created by geniuses to be run by idiots.”
Read MoreIn George (Washington) we trust
Standing in George Washington’s study at Mount Vernon, his Virginia estate, I was unexpectedly overcome by emotion. It was there that he would dress at 4:30 in the morning so as not to disturb wife Martha upstairs, perhaps getting down to the business of running his farm at a small desk with its fan chair. (You pedaled it and a fan moved back and forth overhead, the technology of the day.) In the corner stood a handsome, polished secretary.
Read MoreSaving face while losing themselves?
It was no minor metaphor when British Prime Minister Theresa May’s car door stuck as she strove to exit recently to meet German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who waited with characteristic stoicism on the red carpet for yet another go-round in May’s futile attempt to negotiate a better Brexit deal. Brexit has been the ultimate stuck car door for May and the British people, a frustrating rigmarole with no satisfactory conclusion in sight.
Read MoreQueen to pawn in a game of love and death
The new movie “Mary, Queen of Scots” — which I am reluctant to see for reasons that will become clear — belongs to what I like to call the Sylvia Plath school of storytelling. That is, if your telling the story of the suicidal poet, the husband will always be the villain. (That he had two wives who killed themselves in exactly the same way doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in him as a spouse. You know what they say. Once is a tragedy. Twice is an unsettling coincidence.)
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