Sound and fury, egomaniac-style

August 9, 2017

So one narcissist has decided to call another narcissist’s bluff.

Mess with the U.S., President Donald J. Trump told his North Korean counterpart Kim Jong-un from his Bedminster, N.J. bunker, er golf club, and the threats “will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen….”

Ooh, did Steve Bannon – Mr. Apocalypse, Senor Armageddon – write those words for Trumpet? I’m sure Kim is quaking in his little boots. Whatever happened to the words of another famous, at times high-handed Republican, President Theodore Roosevelt, who adopted the West African proverb “Walk softly and carry a big stick”? ...

Swinging for (and missing) the fences

January 29, 2017

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” Robert Frost writes in “Mending Wall” – one of two Frost poems, the other being “The Tuft of Flowers,” that addresses the nature of human relationships. “That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, and spills the upper boulders in the sun; and makes gaps even two can pass abreast.”

The poem ends with the neighbor telling the poet famously, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

Well, they certainly make resentful ones. This has been a week of walls, literal and metaphoric, courtesy of President Donald J. Trump. There is the actual, proposed wall between Mexico and the United States whose cost would be covered by a tariff on Mexican imports like avocados. (Oh, no, whither Cinco de Mayo?) To say that Mexico is not taking this well is the understatement of 10 lifetimes. El Presidente Enrique Peña Nieto – not exactly the most popular man south of the border – nonetheless got a boost at home after he cancelled his meeting with Trump, though the two have since spoken by phone. ...

The war that never ends, again

August 20, 2014

When I was younger, I called Vietnam – the conflict of my youth and my generation – “the war that never ends.”

Now Iraq is threatening to become that war as we are drawn back into its political and humanitarian crises. It was, of course, the wrong war, which President Barack Obama pointed out when he was a senator, the war for al-Qaeda being the province of Afghanistan. But we went anyway, little understanding the culture (echoes of Vietnam) or the lesson of Alexander the Great – that to conquer you must immerse yourself in a place and be prepared to risk being seduced, being conquered, by the place itself.

Alexander – the Greco-Macedonian conqueror of the Persian Empire – never left Iraq, dying in Babylon a month short of his 33rd birthday. We left, but in leaving, stayed.

Iraq figures into one of the four story arcs that make up my new novel, “Water Music,” about the tennis prodigy Alí Iskandar – a favorite character of my readers...