The Golden Legacy Of The Late Cathy Cummings Of OKC

In recent days, the national media has been reporting on an ongoing occurrence in the Oklahoma City area in which restaurateur Sean Cummings has been paying off school lunch debts of underprivileged students at local schools from funds that have been donated to honor his late wife Cathy, who passed away several months ago at the young  age of 62. Cathy Cummings also operated a restaurant, “Vito’s Italian Ristorante” that was attached to Sean’s Irish pub on May Avenue in Oklahoma’s capital city. In addition to being successful restaurateurs, Sean and Cathy Cumming’s were also committed political activists who ran for political office on the Democratic ticket and where fixtures at that party’s gatherings  where they advocated for humane and inclusive politics that sought to bring people together in a time of rancorous division.  In addition to those students relieved of debt for lunches, her legacy also includes a younger generation of   Democratic Party candidates who may have been inspired by her style of leadership who  are seeking elective office in the Oklahoma City area and  are offering  less divisive approaches to public policy issues that are designed to bring people together rather than to foster division. On recent Saturdays a group of young people have departed the law office of   Senator Michael Brooks Jimenez  armed with leaflets that tell of a young attorney affiliated with that firm, Sam Wargin Grimaldo, who is currently a candidate for the Oklahoma State Senate District 46 post, and the policies that he advocates and would pursue as a member of that legislative body. They include a proposal  that would allow all residents of the state of the statutory age to obtain driver’s licenses, and as his campaign literature points out, many other states across the nation have already done so, and that car insurance rates have dropped precipitously for those  jurisdictions as a result.
 During the height of the Cold War an intelligence officer in England who was tasked with routinely reviewing Soviet propaganda productions for the purpose of possibly unearthing clues to Russian spying, saw fit to stop and rerun a scene from a  grainy Soviet newsreel  that   had featured a   celebration of the anniversary of the  fall of Berlin in 1945. The  ceremony had  included Russian military and diplomatic officers from throughout Europe, and the alert British intelligence officer had noticed that a Russian ambassador had saluted a diplomatic official  who held  the more minor post of an attache to a European state, and she deduced from that the attache, despite his minor posting, was in fact a Soviet KGB officer who outranked ambassadors in the Soviet hierarchy, and the discovery of his actual identity led to the unmasking  of  a high  level British intelligence officer who was in fact a Russian agent. And a somewhat similar discovery was made by a woman in Enid, Oklahoma, Connie Schmidt Vickers, who was watching a news report  of the infamous gathering in Charlottesville, Virginia in which torch bearing right-wingers had defiantly chanted “blood and soil” and realized that one of the participants had recently been elected to the Enid city council, and she and several of her colleagues had  immediately begun a recall effort that eventually resulted in his recall by the citizens of his district. And hopefully leaders such as Grimaldo and Vickers will in turn inspire another generation of leaders of a humane and tolerant approach to the issues that confront us as a society.

The Late Soviet Leader Leonid Brezhnev’s Fondness For Cufflinks

 “Berlin is the American testicle and I’m going to squeeze it,” a belligerent Nikita Khrushchev bellowed at his American counterpart President  John F Kennedy at a Cold War summit conference  convened on June 4^th, 1961 in Vienna, Austria, and it was reported that the president’s American interpreter   diplomatically translated the phrase as “ Berlin is the America big toe and I’m going to squeeze it.” Kennedy was initially  surprised at the Russian’s belligerence and later said to him “ Your attitude is what is  mine is mine and what’s yours is well, we’ll negotiate.” The Soviet premier was clad in ill fitting plain off white suit during that encounter, and was similarly attired when he later made a state visit to the US, with his family and Hearst columnist Dorothy Kilgallen would offend Soviet sensibilities and feelings when she wrote that Khrushchev’s wife Nina was dressed ‘Like a Russian peasant woman.”  Khrushchev’ predecessor, Joseph Stalin, only wore a worker’s tunic  in his  official appearances or a military uniform during the Second World War, and his Chinese counterparts,  Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong  and Premier Zhou Enlai also wore such  drab tunics in their official appearances as does the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un today. But in his recorded recollection of his summit conference with Khrushchev’s successor Leonid Brezhnev former President Richard Nixon recalled that while he faced  Brezhnev who was clad in a tailored dark suit, he suddenly realized that  he was wearing gold cufflinks, which was somewhat surprising for a leader who claimed to be the leader of the international Communist movement  that was ostensibly committed to leading the world’s worker to victory over the capitalists. And it was reported that the British authorities thought that the Soviet Union was undergoing significant change  when Brezhnev’s eventual successor as leader Mikhail Gorbachev, did not ask to be brought to the site of Karl Marx’s grave in High Gate  Cemetery in London, where previous Soviet had made reverential pilgrimages,  but instead asked that he and his wife Raisa be permitted to visit the upscale Harrod’s Store in the  British capital instead, and Gorbachev would later have suits made for him by famed English tailor Alexander Mc Queen who also made clothes for Prince Charles. And an individual who often appears in court in the Oklahoma City area  recently asked  the staffers at the Pinpoint  Fine  Wear Men’s Store  at Fifty Penn Place in Oklahoma City if they thought that he should wear  cufflinks in his office or for his court appearances and jury trials. One staffer,  an older man named Dwight, who was wearing a pinstriped suit with gold cuff links, replied that he thought that they were always appropriate. But a younger salesman, who was addressed as “Angel” despite the fact that he was not a winged seraph did not think that cuff links were in order for the well dressed man of today. The owner of the establishment, Chris Khrais, said that he continues to sell cufflinks to men of all ages who wish to present an image of success and sophistication. In the classic novel “The Great Gatsby” a shady character who is a business associate of Jay Gatsby, Meyer Wolfsheim, and is said to have been the individual who fixed the World Series games of 1919, was described by author F. Scott Fitzgerald as wearing cufflinks that appear to have been made out of human molars. While it is not known if the current Russian leader Vladimir Putin, wears cuff links it would seem that similar style of them would be appropriate for him and his murderous regime.                                                                                                                         
                                                                                                                                          
                                                                                                                                     

Death Of Alexei Navalny

It has been said that while a dictator’s power ends when he dies, a political martyr’s begins when he dies, and the proof of that assertion may be confirmed in Russia, where people have faced arrest and harassment by the government of Vladimir Putin by attending memorial services for Alexei Navalny, the Russian lawyer and activist who was imprisoned by Putin and died  in a penal colony in Russia  on February 16^th, 2014 at the age of 47. The dissident leader, who had publicly  described Putin’s ruling United Party as “a party of crooks and thieves,” and had documented the massive corruption that it’s officials had engaged in.  He was  subject to several trumped up charges as a result of his political activity  and received suspended sentences on them  In 2020, he was hospitalized  after being poisoned by a Novichok nerve agent, and was evacuated to Berlin for treatment as a result. It was thought that Navalny was going to remain there or some other Western nation, and that Putin was thinking that he would. But courageously he returned to Russia after his recovery and renewed his political activity that resulted in another trial that was condemned by Amnesty International as fraudulent and was eventually confined to a prison in the Arctic Circle where he died.  His 69 year old mother has reportedly been denied access to his body by the Russian government. “The Mandela of Russia” was how Navalny was on occasion described in the Western media, and he on occasion spoke of his admiration for the South African leader who emerged from 27 years of imprisonment to lead his nation to a new era of freedom, and journalists and diplomats who had dealt with him said  he displayed the charisma and courage that Mandela  exuded.  It was thought by some of them  that Navalny would  eventually play a similar role in Russia after he was released from prison and Putin, who is now 71 years of age, had departed from the scene. While Navalny’s death has resulted in condemnation from leaders around the world, and the Trump Administration has indicated that it will  impose additional sanctions on Putin and his associates, former President Donald Trump, who’s ties to Russia have been made evident since he first ran for office, was notably silent about it, but has recently seen fit to state in a forum sponsored by the friendly Fox News network, that he is the “Navalny of the US” due to the legal actions that have been filed against him in  courts  in New York and Georgia and Florida. Several weeks ago, Trump had told an audience in South  Carolina that if member nations  of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization did  not pay their share of costs for maintaining the entity that he would encourage  Russia to attack them,  which was surely music to  Putin’s ears as he steps up his military campaign against Ukraine while the US Congress dithers on whether or not to provide additional assistance to that embattled state. He  may  be already  casting covetous glances at neighboring Poland, which is a member of NATO.  In the somewhat bizarre monologue that Putin  delivered recently  to  Tucker Carlson the Russian leader  said that Hitler’s invasion of Poland that started the Second World War  was justified. Article Five of the NATO  Treaty, which the US is a signatory to, requires any member who is attacked receive the immediate support of fellow members. Would that obligation be honored if Donald Trump is returned to the White House or would his commitment to “ America First” cause him to negate it?