Hate to admit it, but when everyone swooned for John Travolta in Pulp Fiction I had a crush on Harvey Keitel. Riddle me that.

The memory came up when I listened to an interview by Terry Gross with the author Mattathias Schwartz covering his thoughtful and perceptive piece for the NYT on Mike Pompeo. The article is a must read, particularly in combination with his profile of Brennan from some months back.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/26/magazine/mike-pompeo-translates-trump.html

Keitel’s name surfaced in the context of his role as The Wolf in Pulp Fiction and parallels were drawn to our current Secretary of State. Fixers wherever we look, it seems, this week….seamlessly transitioning from fiction to reality, from the halls of congress to the hotels in Hanoi.

Here is the link to the interview.

https://www.npr.org/2019/02/28/698887851/journalist-explains-how-mike-pompeo-helps-translate-trump-to-the-world?utm_campaign=storyshare&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social

Full disclosure: I happen to know Matt, see him once every other year or so for an evening. He notes in the interview that he does not easily attribute “smarts” to people but acknowledges that Pompeo is smart. Same could be said for Matt and one should add the equally important “not boring.” The sheer diversity of topics he tackles and subjects he latches onto is mind boggling. No wonder that his work is snatched up by major news publications, from the New Yorker, the NYT, the Wall Street Journal, Bloombergs, the LRB to The Intercept, and winning prizes. His New Yorker story, “A Massacre in Jamaica,” on the Christopher Coke extradition, won the 2011 Livingston Award for international reporting.

I could not find a link to a free version of Pulp Fiction. Just as well, since the topic of The Rapture came up in the interview (das Jüngste Gericht). Apparently there have been public references in Pompeo’s speeches to this spectacle brought down from up high. His avoidance to be nailed down by Matt’s questions of how much his Christian beliefs about the end times influence his politics made me once again wonder where we have landed in 2019 in this country. Which gives me, of course, the opportunity to link to a movie of same name, seen by almost 1 000 000 people on YouTube alone (and produced by Fallen World Productions, no less!)

Maybe watching something like this offers a glimpse of the universe of those who govern us or those who want to be ruled by the current administration….

Then again, why waste our time.

Let’s watch this instead, still a trailer, but the full documentary had its premiere day before yesterday in DC by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and co-sponsored by Rep. Terri Sewell (D-AL) and Rep. John Sarbanes (D-MD); it can soon be ordered.

https://vimeo.com/291373548

Rigged: The Voter Suppression Playbook describes what happens if political operatives try to subvert the sacred American principle of “one person, one vote,” hatching and pursuing this plan for years with too few of us noticing. Rather than worry about the Rapture, maybe we should worry about the reality of the decline of democracy. If only to ensure that we’ll get rid of fixers in the next round. Here is a good suggestion for a start, written by another of these young brilliants, Jamelle Bouie. :https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/28/opinion/the-electoral-college.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

Photographs are of old Dutch church murals about the Rapture.

And here is Buxtehude’s Das Juengste Gericht