A Long Plane Ride - Qatar - Washington DC

In January 2004 I traveled on Thai Air from New York to Bangkok without a refueling stop in Tokyo, Beining, or Taipei. Seventeen hours in an Airbus jet liner. The flight was half-full and I colonized a starboard bank of economy seats. Five meals coupled with pony bottles of Chardonnay only speaking to the stewards and stewardesses. I can't sleep on planes and watched movies and occasionally looked out the window into the eternal darkness of the Arctic winter.

I was very comfortable.

I have always loved long trans-global flights. As long as the plane doesn't crash, nothing bad can happen while in air. Peace and relative quiet as long as your seat is located before the engines.

Last week Trump traveled to visit Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the Arab Emirates. All American allies. He thanked the dictatorships for their support in the Eternal War. They reciprocated by signing defense and AI contracts for hundreds of billions of dollars. The Orange Messiah was treated as a valued friend and he marveled at the luxury architecture and wealth of the various royal palaces, calling them ,perfecto' and recognized that their wealth was on another scale of American billionaires. Power and wealth. Envy. He was the president of the most powerful nation on the planet and he was stuck with Air Force 1 and lived in the White House. It just didn't seem right to the Messiah of MAGA and the Qatari monarch offered his friend a $400 million 747 for his personal use on his homeward journey to the USA.

The Secret Service warned that the twelve year-old plane was unsafe for secure travel and that an upgrade on security features might cost a half- equipped with the proper security features of Air Force 1. The Donald was not dissuaded by that argument nor his aides informing Trump that accepting the gift was in violation of federal law.

47 had come said that he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and nothing would hapen to him. He was probably right about that. The 216 pounder has gotten away with a myriad of crimes and hasn't served a day in jail or prison, but he mijght have protested, "Bullshit. I know that. It's not for me. It's for America in thanks for our decades of friendship."

They arrived at the tarmac and departed on good old Air Force 1.

Donald was not happy. Like me I suspect that he can't sleep on planes and he spent the long flight venting out his social truth wrath on Bruce Springstein who attacked the MAGA leader on a European tour.

Trump fumed that the rocker that he needs to ‘KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT until he gets back into the country’.

Ever restless he said Taylor Swift was not hot anymore.

His staff had to hear it over and over and over again.

"Can't anymore roofie him?" Their eyes asked easch other like the last supporters of Hitler in the Bunker.

Thirteen hours of Hell. I am so gald I wasn't on that flight.

This weekend has been quiet, but the axs are out for the Supreme Court and the six members of the GOP who voted against his budget. Caveat cana or Beware of the Doge in Latin. No one is safe, until we are safe again.

A Dead Man's Triptych

Last week Christie of New York auction off a Francis Bacon triptych for a record $142 million to an unknown bidder. The rich and even more rich were ecstatic with the result, since the high-altitude sale reinforces all recent purchases of trophy art by dead painters. The Guardian wrote, "There can be no doubt the night belonged to Freud as well as Bacon. When he sat for Three Studies of Lucian Freud in 1969, this painter of harshly real faces and bodies in sparse London rooms was ever so slightly in Bacon's shadow. Now they orbit one another as the two great British artists of the 20th century, and probably will always be grouped in art history as blunt individualists who defied the supposed inevitable progress of the readymade to paint like modern reincarnations of Velázquez."

Everyone in the Art world awaits the next grand coup, as the ultra-wealthy spend money like it was going out of fashion, however the masses of the world was working too hard to rejoice in the triumph of capital over labor.

$142 million could pay the monthly wages of the tens of thousands of Nepalis constructing the 2022 World Cup stadiums in Qatar for several years. Most of them are exploited for nothing. Hundreds have died in miserable conditions verging on slavery.

All to scrimp and save dinaris for the Qatari Museum of Art, which purchased the Francis Bacon work.

Sheikha Mayassa bint Hamad al-Thani, the sister of Qatar's emir, is dedicating her family's fortune to establish her country as an international cultural power.

Here's another triptych.

The Nepali man is holding a photo of his dead friend.

That is the price of Art.

Dead people.

The days never belong to them in Qatar.

Poetry Police

My hillbilly girlfriend in the 70s was funny. She was even funnier drunk. Her limit was two drinks and then she transformed from an ingenue actress into a white trash beauty. I wasn't sure which I liked better. One night at CBGBs she launched into a tirade about the poetry police coming to arrest Patti Smith and William Burroughs. "Here come the poetry police." I had to pour her into a taxi for the ride home to our apartment on East 10th Street. Alice stopped drinking soon after that night, but I remembered the poetry police this week, when the Qatari government sentenced Muhammad ibn al-Dheeb al-Ajami to life imprisonment for insulting the ruler of that wealthy desert country. Al-Jazeera has made no comment about this draconian punishment in fear of losing their financial backing from the news agency's royal sponsor. This offense against the ruling family was supposedly directed at the crown prince. I couldn't find any copy of the poem TUNISIAN JASMINE online. The US has a big military base in Qatar. No one in our government has said a word in the defense of free speech. Muhammad ibn al-Dheeb al-Ajami has been held since November 2011. His trial was closed to the public. His lawyer said, "The judge made the whole trial secret. Muhammad was not allowed to defend himself, and I was not allowed to plead or defend in court. I told the judge that I need to defend my client in front of an open court, and he stopped me." Ajami was jailed in November 2011. Beware of the poetry police.