Edward Moran’s “Unveiling of the Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World” (1886), oil on canvas. The J. Clarence Davies Collection, Museum of the City of New York. Originally gifted to America by France as a symbol of the preservation of the Union,… — Edward Moran’s “Unveiling of the Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World” (1886), oil on canvas. The J. Clarence Davies Collection, Museum of the City of New York. Originally gifted to America by France as a symbol of the preservation of the Union, Lady Liberty has come to represent a light to the hopeful — and hopeless — immigrants of the world.

A world of immigrants

July 4, 2019

As America celebrates its 243rd birthday today, we are reminded that we are a nation of immigrants — and yet that nation and that notion are both under siege. Squalor at detention camps at the border. A Washington state judge subsequently ruling that asylum seekers can’t be kept in detention indefinitely — a Trumpian policy that has created the crisis. President Donald J. Trump — so good at the trappings of America’s birthday, with his tanks in Washington D.C. and his speech at the Lincoln Memorial — defiying the Supreme Court ruling that bars a citizenship question on the U.S. Census.

Where do we go from here?

October 7, 2018

So Brett Kavanaugh becomes a United States Supreme Court Justice and that’s too bad, because he lacks the temperament for it, as he himself demonstrated, and because other revelations – an inability to confront a drunken youth, questionable credit card charges and a good deal of misremembering – would seem to indicate an injudiciousness that would be lethal for a judge….

What makes a nation?

June 26, 2018

In his superb column titled “White Extinction Anxiety,” The New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow quotes archconservative Pat Buchanan as saying that the great issue of the day “is whether Europe has the will and the capacity, and America has the capacity to halt the invasion of the countries until they change the character – political, social, racial, ethnic – character of the country entirely.”

Let me fix it for you, Pat: Do Europe and America have the will and capacity to turn back the hordes of people of color beating on their doors? That’s really what he’s asking, though I would turn it around: Do we have the intelligence, talent, industry and character to be greater than ourselves and truly become a global society? …

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. ...