Elise Stefanik was once a nice person

Republicans shutting eyes to outrages

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I get up about 4 to do some writing and have some time to myself.

Bella starts getting up about 4:30, wandering out of the bedroom, which is downstairs now, and into the library, where she shuffles items around on top of the coffee table and a shelf under it.

I can hear her from my office upstairs, and after a few minutes I go down and put my hand on her shoulder.

“Do you want to go back to bed?” I say.

“Yeah,” she says.

I lead her back through the house.

“What do I do?” she says.

“Crawl up onto bed and put your head down on the pillow,” I say.

She does it, and I cover her with the sheet and three or four blankets, pulling each one up to her neck. I rub her back.

“Get some sleep,” I say, and go back to the office, until I hear her again, a couple of minutes or 20 or 40 minutes later.

I noticed a few days ago she had unearthed an old letter to me from Elise Stefanik while she was rooting through papers in a basket on the shelf under the coffee table.

The letter was from December of 2018, and it praised a series of columns I’d been writing and podcasts I’d been doing with Bella. The series was called the Alzheimer’s Chronicles (you can find it on the Post-Star website), and it detailed our experiences with the disease since Bella was diagnosed with it in February of 2017.

The letter is gracious.

“I wish you all the best, and if my office can ever be of assistance to you, please do not hesitate to contact me. My door is always open.” — That’s how it ends.

(“Always” in this case meant a year or two, at which point, because of other things I wrote, her door was slammed shut.)

I’d forgotten about the letter.

“Since taking office, I have been proud to work closely with both local and national organizations such as the Alzheimer’s Association, attending their meetings, events and programs in an effort to help end Alzheimer’s,” it says.

She has different goals these days.

“We are working with President @realDonaldTrump to finally DEFUND Far Left and totally biased @NPR — long overdue! We will not allow hard earned U.S. taxpayer dollars to prop up these Far Left failed entities,” says one of her recent posts on X.

“Fueled by the radical groupthink Far Left faculty, inept University leadership, donations by foreign adversaries and pro-Hamas terrorists, Harvard has fully embraced and tolerated the raging antisemitism threatening the lives and physical safety of Jewish students on campus,” another one says.

Her writing has gone from sincere and straightforward to abusive and overheated and inaccurate.

Some of the students protesting Israel’s treatment of Palestinians are Jewish, at Harvard and elsewhere. They are neither for Hamas nor against Israel; they oppose the wholesale killing of innocent civilians by bombs, starvation and disease. They empathize with millions of Gazans who have been driven from their homes and forced to watch as their family members suffer and die.

Seven years ago, Elise Stefanik empathized with me and Bella near the beginning of our long Alzheimer’s journey, but I wonder, watching her on TV and reading what she writes, whether she is capable of that now.

She has gone from thoughtful to thoughtless, from kind to malevolent. With a glitter in her eye and her mouth locked in a grin, she seems to take pleasure in being mean.

If her transformation is genuine, I feel bad for the loss of the person she was. If she’s feigning heartlessness to win Trump’s favor, she has sold her soul, and that’s worse.

Some very wrong thinking

I was furious Tuesday morning when, during a discussion on WAMC’s Roundtable about the illegal incarceration of Kilmar Abrego Garcia in El Salvador, Mark Grimm, a Republican Albany County legislator, called this shameful, unconstitutional act of the U.S. government “a distraction.”

Grimm was one of three panelists on the show Tuesday, which is hosted by Joe Donahue.

“We’re overlooking the problem that Trump has fixed — an open border. … Through executive action, he has reduced crossings at the southern border by 95 percent … So let’s acknowledge this pretty remarkable success … If this man is there for no good reason, they should bring him back. But I think the broader issue is immigration. People were clamoring to get the border fixed, and Trump fixed it … This is a distraction, I think, from the overall picture,” said Grimm.

First, the border crackdown that began under President Biden and has continued under Trump and has greatly reduced illegal border crossings has no connection to the case of Abrego Garcia, who has been living and working in the United States for 14 years.

More importantly, it’s obscene to argue a person’s life has so little value it can be dismissed as a distraction from what is really important: better numbers at the border.

Abrego Garcia works in construction. He is married to a U.S. citizen, and they are raising three children. His wife is pregnant.

His chances of surviving the hell he has been plunged into seem to have gotten better in recent days, because of all the attention being paid to his case. Still, he is in grave danger, and if he dies or is otherwise harmed, the fault will lie with those like Grimm who continue to support a lawless presidential administration.

“Non-citizens don’t have the same rights as citizens … they just don’t,” Grimm said Tuesday on WAMC.

But, as another panelist pointed out, non-citizens do have a constitutionally guaranteed right to due process of law, which Abrego Garcia was denied.

Beyond the details of the case is the appalling, dismissive attitude of people like Grimm, who acted as if this man’s life was barely worth talking about.

What is the source of their nonchalance?

Is it that Abrego Garcia originally came to the U.S. illegally? Does that mean he has no rights at all, can be seized off the street and sent to a notoriously violent prison in a foreign country where he could well be tortured and killed?

Is it that, in the mind of Mark Grimm and others who think like him, non-citizen equals non-human?

LARAC show

Work from two longtime local artists, Joan Reid and Kris Gregson Moss, is being shown in the latest exhibit at LARAC’s Lapham Gallery in City Park in Glens Falls. It’s a great show and is up until May 14. The gallery is closed on Sundays but open every other day 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. and on Thursdays from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

This stunning piece from Kris Gregson Moss is part of the current show at LARAC’s Lapham Gallery in City Park.

The Trial

I finished “The Trial” by Franz Kafka and loved it. So entertaining, imaginative and, yes, funny. Kafka’s protagonist, Joseph K., slides into a surreal world of mysterious legal proceedings on charges against him that are never revealed. He has long discussions with a lawyer and other characters about his case, in which everything is vague but ominous, no one ever says what the trial is about but everyone has something to say on the proper strategy for dealing with the unknown charges. You wouldn’t think a whole book could be written about this, but that’s where the humor comes in. Joseph K. is a tightrope walker on a wire no one can see. The more he and the others discuss the nature of the wire — its tension, its history, how it responded to other high-wire acrobats — the more amusing the whole thing becomes. Just walk away! I kept saying to myself as I read. Just jump! Does “the trial” refer to the handling of the undiscovered charges against Joseph K. or to his efforts to deal with what appears to be his deteriorating mental state? No fundamental questions are decisively answered, all remains in a no-man’s-land of uncertainty and ambivalence. It sounds like hell, but it bears a striking resemblance to life.

Franz Kafka