OK, how do you deal with a historic week filled with incomprehensible and dramatic stuff?

Naturally, we went to the Chairman’s stack of old vinyl 33RPM LPs and grabbled one from the bottom of the stack. It happened to be one of Foreigner’s, a great group that came out of New York City in the mid-1970s. When all of us could still dance.

They managed to peddle some 70-million of those albums over the half century of performances and are still at it. So, well done for that feat and the success of the band’s adopted name, which was a joke. The singers and guitar players were from all over, so wherever they performed they were at least partially “foreign.”

And that is just one of the things that came out of New York City this week. You have heard some of it and like us are probably still puzzling about some elements in the drama. We try to save the metaphors for Monday, which has a working title about our County politics called “Missing Middle” which will be fun, but having used up all the ‘M” letters in the alphabet we are borrowing from, we are left with some of the other ones and “F” got the nod this morning after hearing that Dame Maggie Smith had passed yesterday.

She was a favorite around the battered white-topped table. Best known for her role as Professor Minerva McGonagall in the “Harry Potter” films, she was our favorite as the sharp-tongued Dowager Countess in the historical drama “Downton Abbey” that showed Great Britain’s change from power and privilege to something- well, something less dramatic. Like the “here” and “now” some woman will become famous in portraying some day with everyone shaking their heads at the foolishness of her times.

The one we are living.

Dame Smith was 89, reportedly in good spirits before the last curtain, and with a life of dramatic splendor lived well. Melissas brought a DvD copy of one of her old films to the meeting. “Miss Jean Brodie” then played in the background as we attempted to sum up the Big Foreign Policy Week that just swept over us. And the two foreign wars in progress, and the domestic one simmering with the idea that we might close our government at Midnight on Metaphor Monday.

That would affect Tuesday, which would give us a “Traumatic” start to the new Fiscal Year which will include the start of all sorts of wonders for Wednesday, but let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves, shall we?

Foreigner Maggie’s life is an appropriate way to sum it up. She had just transitioned from girl tom woman when the Germans rolled across Poland in 1939, and her young life included the roar of global war that ended the Empire of Britain and changed the face of the world in which she would perform for us in her wake.

The passage of Hurricane Helene gives us the premature metaphor, so we are having a day devoted to the roles in which she starred. We need a soundtrack, so Foreigner’s hits suit the mood- “Feels Like the First Time” is where we start, followed up with “Cold as Ice” and “Hot Blooded” to keep things rolling between our usual extremes.

Israel’s bombing of the Hezbollah HQ, and former President Donald Trump’s meeting with the president of Ukraine sum them up nicely.

DeMille looked down the table at our still-groggy faces. “We need to do an account of the astonishing performance by the little guy in the dark turtleneck and combat pants at the UN General Assembly. Zelenskyy should get a special mention this morning. He wrapped his role as beleaguered hero around Mr. Biden’s farewell address on Tuesday, in which the discarded President took credit for his accomplishments and the subsequent appearances by his Vice President who is apparently running against them.

Vic scowled. “Then the announcement that we are going to provide another three or four hundred billion dollars in hardware out of our own war reserves to the slow grinding ugly fight, maybe interrupted with dramatic long-range pin-prick rocket strikes on Mother Russia while he was meeting with the other candidate who claims maybe we ought to think about a different answer.”

“Perfect answer, so that we pay both ways. That cameo performance at Trump Tower was pretty cool- after beseeching Biden, The Z-man had to dangle with the Donald just in case there was some blowback for his campaign appearance in swing-state PA at the munitions plant.”

Rocket nodded. “Meanwhile, taking a quick moment in the limelight, the Israeli PM declared that he was not going to accept Iran’s proxy war on his people and had his jets kill the leader of Hezbollah in Beirut along with dozens of his subordinates over the last week. There is obviously a lot of trouble in that corner of the foreign affair.

There was a consensus in the pre-luncheon poll, which being on a Fall game day, featured an early start to standing around in the parking lot with some kind of band music blaring off the walls of the tower.

Copyright 2024 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com