It’s Thursday morning and I’ve just returned from my weekly 8 AM protest. I live on the presidential motorcade route, one of the busiest streets in Washington. Once a week, we neighbors go out to decry the current regime, and supportive drivers honk as they’re tooling down Connecticut Avenue.
This protest energizes with good humor, community, and outreach to drivers. There are lots of these around the country, even if we don’t hear about them in our news feeds. (I’m not alone in believing that the resistance is underreported.)
Another thing I’m doing for nourishment is hosting monthly writing sessions under the aegis of the Inner Loop’s Write Now program. Please join me this Saturday (10AM-12PM) at 1377 R Street NW. We’ll have a painterly prompt, snacks, and a quiet space to write. You don’t have to be a writer to write!
Here’s the link, just scroll to the October 11 session.
I’m just finishing up Zachary D. Carter’s biography of the totemic twentieth century economist and public intellectual, John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946).
Keynes was a member of the Bloomsbury Group. He was their patron and iconoclast, famous and controversial. He kept an open mind and changed his views to adapt to what he observed on the world stage.
During the Great Depression, FDR begin to enact Keynes’s most famous theories: that government should spend to promote the good of all members of society to enjoy a country’s prosperity, that human beings should live well and partake in culture and gardens and literature and the arts. That economic policy was not to enrich the rich and punish the poor, but to benefit everyone’s quality of life.
What a contrast to today! Our government is shut down because the Republican party wants to take health care away from tens of millions of people. Members of the national guard are patrolling my weekly farmers’ market (what?? protecting cabbages and turnips?). The occupant of the White House and his goons aim to turn the military on peaceful Americans. They imprison and deport our neighbors who are family members, taxpayers, and pillars of our communities; decimate our esteemed public health establishment, endanger the lives of millions by lying about the efficacy of vaccines; and bulldoze environmental protections.
Among the mountains of collateral damage, our beloved National Symphony Orchestra is experiencing plummeting subscriptions and ticket sales because Darth Vader saw fit to bully his way into leadership at the Kennedy Center. The National Symphony is a national treasure and we should treat it as such.
And finally, on a lighter note, when the going gets tough, I get cooking. Here’s my version of Ottolenghi’s vegetable paella:
Let’s gear up for the No Kings protests on October 18.
Love, Martha
P.S. ICYMI, here’s last week’s newsletter/Substack, “Mourning and Music.”
P.P.S. It would be helpful if you could post a review of DUET FOR ONE on Amazon or Goodreads. Thank you.
Click here for the complete playlist for DUET FOR ONE on Spotify.