Winslow Homer’s “Summer Night” (1890), oil on canvas. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Each summer, I dream of spending part of it by the sea as I did as a child. Never happens. Maybe summer disappoints, because we expect too much of it.
Winter, it is generally agreed, is the harshest season. But summer may be the cruelest. It offers its promises with soft, welcoming arms only to snatch them away.
Read MoreCartoonist Lalo Alcarez’s poignant statement about the Trump Administration’s treatment of children at the southern border sadly rings as true today as it did last Christmas. Copyright Lalo Alcarez.
Still trending this Christmas – caged Baby Jesus. You’ll remember last Christmas’ cartoon by Mexican-American cartoonist Lalo Alcarez of a wide-eyed Baby Jesus in swaddling clothes further constrained by a cage secured by a lock with an American flag on it. The theme, echoing children and families confined indefinitely at the southern border by the Trump Administration, continues with coast-to-coast Nativity displays of Jesus, Mary and Joseph either in separate cages or Baby Jesus set off alone.
Read MoreIn 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? …
Read MoreI had a slight meltdown in the supermarket Saturday. The plastic bottle recycling machine wasn’t working. (It rarely is.) But that’s not why I was upset. I took the bottles to the Courtesy Desk where I encountered a photograph on the front page of the Daily News that I had seen in a smaller version on the front page of The New York Times. Perhaps you’ve seen it. The picture, by Getty photographer John Moore, shows a 2-year-old Honduran child crying at the border as her mother, attempting to cross illegally, is searched.
I’m not a particularly maternal woman. And, of all the arts I’ve covered, photography is hardly my favorite. I hate the way people act around photos, always posing even when they’re being “natural.” But the power of photography to move instantly is undeniable. Something about that photo shook me to my core and, as I held it up in outrage to the young woman at the Courtesy Desk, I found myself choking up. …
Read MoreYou have to hand it to President Donald J. Trump. He really knows how to commemorate an occasion with a bang. On the anniversary of the Haitian earthquake and Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, Trumpet decided to let the world know that people are not to be judged by what King called “the content of their character” but by what one witty Washington Post poster called “their country of origin.”
Trump apparently told Senators Lindsey Graham and Richard Durbin – who thought they were at the White House to negotiate the bipartisan immigration “bill of love” that “Apprentice” Trump spoke of Tuesday when he was trying to disprove the lunatic persona portrayed in Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury” – that we don’t need people from Haiti, El Salvador and “s---hole” countries in Africa. No, what we need is immigrants from places like Norway. ...
Read More
Last year, I attended OutWrite, the annual LGBT book festival at The DC Center in Washington D.C., with the second (and original) chapter of my then soon-to-be published novel, “The Penalty for Holding.”
This year, I went back with the first chapter of the now published book (Less Than Three Press) and once again enjoyed myself immensely.
Part of the fun...
Read More
