RUTHFULLY YOURS

Playwright Tennessee Williams said that he found “no refuge but writing” and couldn’t resist gilding even his paintings with words. On one self-portrait, the author scrawled “very flattering”; on another, he signed the canvas on the white undershirt he is wearing.

The pictures—one is from 1939, the other isn’t dated—capture Williams’s face and his bare shoulders, in a simple representational style, against a vivid blue background. They are part of a wide-ranging exhibition on the writer of plays such as “The Glass Menagerie” and “A Streetcar Named Desire,” opening Feb. 2 at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York. Williams started painting as a young man and made it a lifelong hobby. The exhibit also includes an undated oil portrait by Williams of Pancho Rodriguez, his lover at the time he was working on “Streetcar.”

The poems of Hart Crane entranced Williams, but in 1936, a performance of Henrik Ibsen’s dark drama, “Ghosts,” literally propelled the would-be-poet from his seat and into pacing back and forth. The drama “took the top of his brain off,” said Carolyn Vega, an associate curator in the department of literary and historical manuscripts at the Morgan, who organized the exhibition.

The Morgan exhibit focuses on six plays Williams created between 1939 and 1957, from the threshold of fame to the height of his powers. He left behind a prodigious trail of journals, letters, poems, short stories, one-acts and full-length plays. The exhibit also includes first editions, posters, programs and photographs from his plays—including a 1947 image of a then-little-known Marlon Brando and his co-stars on the first day of rehearsals for “A Streetcar Named Desire,” which made Brando’s name. CONTINUE AT SITE

“I’ve had a lot of bad ideas in my life,” former U.N. ambassador Samantha Power tells Politico. “Though none as immortalized as that one.”

Wow. It’s a major concession. And what might “that one” be?

Not standing idly by in the White House while Iranians protested a fixed election in 2009, then advocating a nuclear agreement that bankrolled the theocratic regime’s expansionism and militarism and corruption. Not serving as U.S. representative to an international body that took no effectual action to stop the Syrian civil war, in which more than 400,000 people have been killed, civilians gassed, and millions of refugees gone to Jordan, Turkey, and Europe. Not flacking for a president who, out of fear of reprisal, waited until a month after the 2016 election to punish Russia for interfering in American democracy, who spent years trying to coax Vladimir Putin onto the “off ramp” from the illegal annexation of Crimea, did nothing more than scold Russia after learning it had violated the INF treaty, reduced America’s nuclear deterrent at the very moment our adversaries were building up their armaments, denied Ukrainians lethal defensive aid against Russia-backed separatists, and routinely put up obstacles to domestic extraction industries that undercut Russia’s share of the energy market. She’s not talking about any of that.

What Samantha Power regrets is allowing documentarians to record the election-night party she threw, in the words of Susan Glasser, “for all 37 female ambassadors to the U.N. as well as feminist icon Gloria Steinem and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to celebrate what they all expected to be Hillary Clinton’s inevitable victory.”

The cameras “immortalized” Power and company’s colossal self-regard and misjudgment, thus making the film, “The Final Year,” a fitting send-off for the Obama crew. But back to that party: “As a host, I was kind of hoping it wouldn’t be quite the blowout it was anticipated to be, because I wanted to make sure that people had a chance to interact with Gloria Steinem,” Power tells Glasser. You can see where she’s coming from. Imagine how awkward it would have been for Power if the election were called for Hillary before guests finished the tomato-soup shooters and the delegate from Timor-Leste told Steinem how cool it was to hear her sampled in the video for Jennifer Lopez’s “Ain’t Your Mama.” How would Power’s guests have spent the rest of the evening? Gossiping about Hillary’s pick for secretary of state while dealing hands of “Cards Against Humanity” as “Fight Song” played on a loop? That would have been a letdown. “I wanted to milk the soft power dividend of this moment,” Power goes on, in one of the weirdest and somewhat terrifying mixed metaphors I have ever encountered.

So we’re in for another bit of high-stakes shutdown theatre, as evil moustache-twirling Republicans (it’s always Republicans, even when it’s Democrats) strap the lovely damsel of Big Government to the tracks just as the Friday midnight express is rounding the bend. At his press conference today, however, Mick Mulvaney, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, said that this time round they’d be working to minimize the impact of the shutdown – whereas, last time round, for political reasons, the White House set out to maximize it. Mr Mulvaney called this “weaponizing the shutdown” – which the Obama Administration certainly did, up to the point of seizing and detaining blameless foreigners – which is, oddly, what they now accuse Trump of doing. This 2013 piece is anthologized in my book The [Un]documented Mark Steyn, personally autographed copies of which are exclusively available at the SteynOnline bookstore:

If a government shuts down in the forest and nobody hears it, that’s the sound of liberty dying. The so-called shutdown is, as noted last week, mostly baloney: Eighty-three percent of the supposedly defunded government is carrying on as usual, impervious to whatever restraints the people’s representatives might wish to impose, and the 800,000 soi-disant “non-essential” workers have been assured that, as soon as the government is once again lawfully funded, they will be paid in full for all the days they’ve had at home.

But the one place where a full-scale shutdown is being enforced is in America’s alleged “National Park Service,” a term of art that covers everything from canyons and glaciers to war memorials and historic taverns. The NPS has spent the last two weeks behaving as the paramilitary wing of the DNC, expending more resources in trying to close down open-air, unfenced areas than it would normally do in keeping them open. It began with the war memorials on the National Mall — that’s to say, stone monuments on pieces of grass under blue sky. It’s the equivalent of my New Hampshire town government shutting down and deciding therefore to ring the Civil War statue on the village common with yellow police tape and barricades.

Still, the NPS could at least argue that these monuments were within their jurisdiction — although they shouldn’t be. Not content with that, the NPS shock troops then moved on to insisting that privately run sites such as the Claude Moore Colonial Farm and privately owned sites such as Mount Vernon were also required to shut. When the Pisgah Inn on the Blue Ridge Parkway declined to comply with the government’s order to close (an entirely illegal order, by the way), the “shut down” Park Service sent armed agents and vehicles to blockade the hotel’s driveway.

Even then, the problem with a lot of America’s scenic wonders is that, although they sit on National Park Service land, they’re visible from some distance. So, in South Dakota, having closed Mount Rushmore the NPS storm troopers additionally attempted to close the view of Mount Rushmore — that’s to say a stretch of the highway, where the shoulder widens and you can pull over and admire the stony visages of America’s presidents. Maybe it’s time to blow up Washington, Jefferson & Co. and replace them with a giant, granite sign rising into the heavens bearing the chiseled inscription “DON’T EVEN THINK OF PARKING DOWN THERE.”