Thanksgiving and the attitude of ingratitude

November 23, 2017

It’s the season in which we give thanks for our blessings as a nation and as individuals. But that’s not what prevails in certain quarters.

Here we must begin at the top. Usually, American presidents use the Thanksgiving holiday as an opportunity to express how grateful we all are. Instead, El Presidente Trumpet, issuing a decree from his cell phone at the Winter White House (Mar a Lago) in Florida, is using the holiday to complain about how ungrateful certain people are toward him. Namely LaVar Ball, father of LiAngelo Ball, the UCLA basketball player picked up for shoplifting in China. ...

Oh, say can you see the point of the Anthem protest?

October 8, 2017

A new development in the continuing saga that is the Trumping of some NFL players taking a knee during the National Anthem to protest police brutality against people of color: Vice President Mike Pence left the Indianapolis Colts-San Francisco 49ers game after several Niners – former teammates of protest initiator and onetime quarterback Colin Kaepernick – took a knee during the Anthem.

"I asked @VP Pence to leave stadium if any players kneeled, disrespecting our country. I am proud of him and @SecondLady Karen," Trump wrote on Twitter.

"I left today's Colts game because @POTUS and I will not dignify any event that disrespects our soldiers, our Flag, or our National Anthem," Pence wrote on Twitter.

But he and @POTUS must’ve known that there would be kneeling players, particularly on the Niners – who, along with the rest of California, are to the resistance of @POTUS what Boston was to the American Revolution. ...

The Kaepernick Knee keeps trumping the Donald

September 26, 2017

Nancy Pelosi, the House of Representatives Minority Leader and sometime new BFF (along with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer) of President Donald J. Trump told “Meet the Press” moderator Chuck Todd Sunday that she would like to see the president as more of a unifier.

Well, Nancy, you have gotten your wish. Seems like the NFL is united – against the president.

Of course, that’s not the way El Presidente saw it. Here’s what he tweeted after players took a knee during the National Anthem in protest ...

Charlottesville, North Korea and the tough guy

August 15, 2017

I was planning to riff on novelist Jennifer Weiner’s New York Times piece about the body disconnect and the phenomenon she calls “skinny women eating cheeseburgers in magazines” – and I will in a future post.

But events of the past few days make it impossible to put that on the front burner. How can we talk about our ambivalence toward the body when the body politic is being ripped asunder? ...