Bananas

One of those frustrating lockdown days. Worked from 7.30am to 6pm, then domestics. No time for a walk. No time for anything, although we did play cards after supper (I got soundly beaten). As we were playing I noticed this solitary "caged" banana and somehow it felt like an apt metaphor for these odd times we are living in. 

Just finished reading Ben Rhodes’ “The World As It Is”. He was one of Obama’s campaign team then his foreign policy speechwriter, and a member of the President’s inner circle - the sort of confidante that could be found drinking beer and watching football with his boss at 3am on Airforce One after having spent forty eight hours without sleep deciding whether or not to bomb Syria. He comes across as what Americans call “a regular guy” and his stories are relatively unembellished, his prose plain and his narrative dispassionate. As the book goes on he becomes increasingly tired and angry; I suspect the writing of this memoir caused him to relive rather than just remember those years. What really stuck out was the “Trump trajectory” of lies and manipulation that had started under Cheyney and gathered momentum throughout the Obama years as Breitbart and the likes simply lied and spread falsehoods about everything from the President’s birth certificate to the origins of the administration’s policy decisions.

At least I read it after Trump got dumped in 2020. Made the outcome of the 2016 election, as devastatingly described in the book, a bit easier to stomach.