From left, Champ Biden, seen with daddy Joe and baby brother Major, has taken a hit from Newsmax’s Greg Kelly, who said he looked uncared for. But we think the 12 year old, who posed for this group portrait on Feb. 9, looks good. Photograph by Adam … — From left, Champ Biden, seen with daddy Joe and baby brother Major, has taken a hit from Newsmax’s Greg Kelly, who said he looked uncared for. But we think the 12 year old, who posed for this group portrait on Feb. 9, looks good. Photograph by Adam Schultz/White House.

The political dog days of winter

February 25, 2021

February is, as everyone knows, the August of winter. Just as August is famed as “the dog days of summer,” February, too, has its dog days — literally.

There was the bizarre story about Newsmax host Greg Kelly intimating that the Bidens’ 12-year-old German Shepherd Champ was uncared for. (Hey, he’s 12. That’s like 84 in dog years. Maybe Kelly’s just jealous that Champ and kid brother Major are the stars of the delightful new children’s book “First Dogs.” More likely Kelly’s jealous that their daddy is president of the United States.)

Fear strikes out

October 25, 2018

The attempt to send crude pipe bombs to prominent Democrats and liberal-leaning CNN Wednesday was shocking but hardly surprising. It is the inevitable progression of an American society unhinged by divisiveness and incivility. And, predictably, the aftermath has not brought people together but set them squabbling about whether or not President Donald J. Trump can be blamed; who’s more uncivil, Democrats or Republicans; and the continuing whataboutism that relitigates past grievances.

Trump’s Manzanar

June 19, 2018

So, what are we now – Myanmar?

One of my sisters lives there, working for the U.S. State Department and spending all day every day on the Rohingya refugee crisis. These minority Muslims have been ethnically cleansed from the Buddhist country. More than 600,000 live in camps in neighboring Bangladesh.

I’m glad that America abroad is still standing up to human rights abuses, because America at home is busy creating them – setting up detention camps for the children of those trying to cross the southern border illegally for the sole purpose of deterring future crossings. …

Humayun Khan, Donald Trump and that ‘winning’ spirit

August 1, 2016

In the games men play, Donald Trump has consistently defined himself as a winner. It’s what suits him most to the presidency, he has said.

But what does it mean to be a winner? In the scriptural readings for Mass this past Sunday, both the Book of Ecclesiastes and Jesus warn against those who build up material wealth with either no concern for their spiritual development or the reality that someday what is yours now will belong to someone else.

Trump, of course, would not see himself in this admonition. He says he has sacrificed much, because he employs thousands upon thousands of people.

But can such a sacrifice be compared to that of Capt. Humayun Khan, the Muslim-American soldier who was killed on June 8, 2004 in the early days of the Iraq War protecting his unit from a suicide car bomber? ...

‘A world elsewhere,” continued: Ted Cruz and ‘Coriolanus’

July 24, 2016

Much has been made recently about Ted Cruz going Marc Antony – the Roman general, not the singer – on The Donald at the Republican National Convention in a speech in which he congratulated the Trumpster but declined to endorse him. This sent some political and literary experts alike scurrying to Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” in which Antony – a Caesar ally who is waylaid by the conspirators on the day of Caesar’s assassination – turns the tables on the assassins in his famous “Friends, Romans, Countrymen” eulogy.

“I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him,” he says, but praise him he does, however subtly, sealing the murderers’ fates.

The analogy here is to Cruz’s call to “vote your conscience,” thereby undermining Trump’s bid for party unity. ...

‘SHE’ and ‘the woman’s card’

May 2, 2016

With apologies to Dickens, this seems to be the best of times and the worst of times to be a woman.

At a moment when women dominate higher education and professional schools, they stand on the threshold of one of their own achieving for the first time the highest office in the United States and becoming the most powerful person on the face of the earth.

On the other hand, Hillary Clinton’s opponents seek either to demonize her and her sex, ridiculing her for playing “the woman’s card” (Donald Trump), or to throw chivalry into sharply false relief by confining women to the gilded cage of the pedestal (Ted Cruz) and the nostalgia of the kitchen (John Kasich).

And that’s the good news. Murder; rape; genital mutilation; sex slavery; child marriage; forced conscription into terrorists squads; a lack of access to education, employment, health care and reproductive rights; cyber death threats to and bullying of female sportswriters (a subtheme of my forthcoming novel, “The Penalty for Holding”) and, that old standby, unequal pay for more-than-equal work: The challenges and atrocities that women face are staggering.

All of which makes the incandescent “SHE: Deconstructing Female Identity” – at ArtsWestchester in White Plains, N.Y. through June 25 – a most timely exhibit indeed.

Organized by Kathleen Reckling, the brilliant gallery curator and an avowed feminist, “SHE” considers that identity and the woman’s card through what have traditionally been three power centers for women – their bodies/nature, the home/domesticity and fashion. ...

New York, New York

January 18, 2016

As a lifelong New Yorker, I love going to the city and I love leaving it.

My happiest journey was always riding the Madison Avenue bus up to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in spring with my Aunt Mary for work. I still love riding the bus there for work.

But I always exhale when the train hits the ’burbs. Something about seeing a greater ratio of greenery to concrete eases me.

New York is a tough, tough place. Come to it with a chip on your shoulder, someone once told me, and it will crush you. Approach it humbly and it will open like a flower. ...