Nixon and Trump

Yesterday was our hottest day yet -- about 90º F or 32º C. It was too hot to do much. I know many of you in North America are experiencing temperatures hotter than that, but here in England most people (including us) don't have air conditioning. So when it's 90º F, we're feeling it all day. It's draining. My only escape is taking a shower, which I happily did last evening once things began to cool off.

I kept reading "All the President's Men," which I am still enjoying a lot. The parallels between Nixon's time and now are so stark. Like the current president of the USA, Nixon was considered a somewhat coarse individual, and he was full of resentment against a power structure he felt had long mistreated him. He and his administration spent a lot of time sowing seeds of doubt about the media. They depicted reporters as representatives of a coastal elite who didn't understand "real Americans." It's exactly the messaging we hear from Trump now.

And despite all the evidence about the dirty tricks being employed by the Nixon White House against its adversaries, voters overwhelmingly re-elected Nixon in 1972. Again, parallels with Trump and our last election -- Nixon ran against a weak Democratic candidate and voters went with what they knew. Somehow it makes me feel better about Trump's re-election. We've done this before and survived, though admittedly not without a huge governmental crisis.

Anyway, I read about Watergate until I couldn't anymore, and then in the evening I watched the movie version again. It was very interesting to see how the movie condensed all of the detail in the book into a coherent script that was by and large very accurate. As far as I can tell, the only scene in the movie that's not in the book is the one in which Woodward and Bernstein knock on the door of a woman who supposedly works at the Committee to Reelect the President, and she welcomes them in (unlike all the other people they've approached), only for them to find that she doesn't work at CRP at all but at the Garfinkel's department store. I don't know whether the script writers made that up, or it really happened and "Woodstein" left it out of the book.

Oh, and Deep Throat's famous advice to "follow the money" is never uttered in the book, either. Not in those words, anyway.

I made a tomato sandwich for lunch with an heirloom tomato I bought at our local produce market. It was good but not as good as I thought it might be. I love a tomato sandwich in summer but tomatoes in England are just not like tomatoes in Florida. Dave would say it doesn't get hot enough here (except yesterday!), and maybe he's right.

Through all of this, I was hearing the sounds of packing tape being ripped upstairs, as the Russians prepare for their move. It filled my heart with joy.

(Re. the graffiti above: Funny, because I have the exact opposite reaction.)

Although it's cooler this morning, I'm seeing that we're not going to have any rain for the next few weeks, which includes our week away in Pevensey Bay. I feel like we're going to have to figure out some way to get the plants watered during that time. If only we had reasonable neighbors I could ask!