Tomorrow morning I’m heading down to Miami Beach for Seatrade (the cruise industry’s largest annual gathering) and Wednesday morning we’re leaving for five days in the Keys, so this morning I’m putting a few days’ worth of posts in one.
Watching the splashdown of Artemis II on Friday, I thought of the evening in Perpignan, in 1975, when, walking with some French people, I was asked if I felt proud when I looked at the moon. The question caught me by surprise. I didn’t respond, though I should have, that Neil Armstrong had called it a “giant leap for mankind” – not a giant leap for America. Yet, watching the TV on Friday, I did feel some national pride, probably because Trump incites the opposite feeling.
Saturday we went to GableStage for its production of A Prayer for the French Republic. Gaul again. But the play is as much about global antisemitism as it is about the French version. It is an excellent if unnecessarily long play (at three and a half hours), yet because it’s in English, and the actors are all American, speaking with American accents, it was hard to think of the characters as French. Perhaps that’s the point.
And yesterday, showing some friends around Miami (a two-Miami weekend), we heard that in Hungary, Viktor Orban had lost to Peter Magyar (Peter Hungary). And like that, the pariah of the EU (except in the eyes of American conservatives) became its darling.
I'll be back here in a week.
