Merry, well, you know

December 23, 2017

We hear a lot at this time of year about putting the Christ back in Christmas – or, more recently, putting the Christmas back in Christmas. Indeed, one of President Donald J. Trump’s campaign promises was that we would say “Merry Christmas” again – as if we ever stopped.

This used to be a religious campaign against the commercialization of the season. With the, um, advent of Trump, it has become less about the materialism of the season – it’s hard to believe that he and his administration object to anything that makes money – and more about reclaiming a Christian identity that, they think, has been co-opted by multiculturalism and political correctness. It is factionalism versus globalism and, inevitably, us versus them, whoever they are.

And you have to wonder: Why? ...

A world grown cold

May 27, 2017

The Manchester bombing is just the latest example of man’s inhumanity to man. But it’s hardly the only one.

There’s the caning of two men in Indonesia for no other reason than they engaged in gay sex.

Then there’s the Trump budget, the anti-Robin Hood, taking from the poor to give to the rich. ...

Where have you gone, Jackie Robinson?

April 10, 2016

I saw Jackie Robinson in person once. It was at Yankee Stadium on Old Timers’ Day, and Iike a lot of other wiry kids, I craned my neck to take in as many legends on the field as possible. I thought then that Robinson looked old and sickly for his age. (And indeed he would die of a heart attack, complicated by diabetes, at age 53.) The other thing I remember thinking was that he was a big man, larger than life – which he certainly was.

I was reminded of Robinson – the man who had that special combination of physical and spiritual grace to break baseball’s color barrier in 1947 – because Ken Burns’ miniseries about him is set to debut Monday and Tuesday, April 11 and 12, and because Jay Caspian Kang has written a column for The New York Times Magazine’s April 10 edition in which he suggests that racism is killing baseball. ...