If there’s one thing I couldn't stand in all the Monday morning quarterbacking about Hurricane Irma, it’s those folks who said it was all a lot of “hype.”
What would it take to get their attention, I wonder? You have close to 40 people dead in the U.S. and Caribbean. You have millions without power – which means without air conditioning, fresh food, hot meals, transportation, communications and medical treatments. No school and no work. You have a wide, deep swath of destruction. And you have parts of the Caribbean that are decimated.
Plus, as with any hurricane, the aftermath is sometimes worse than the storm. What made Hurricane Katrina such a killer – apart from government mismanagement – was the flooding that followed. ...
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Read MoreScooch over, Harvey and join Sandy, Katrina, Andrew and (here insert your personal past hurricane nemesis) on the long couch.
As the Repubs learned yesterday, there’s no political storm quite like Hurricane Donald. (Here we cue a fabulously appropriate folk song that figures in my novel “Water Music” – “The Wind and Rain” – beautifully realized by the band Crooked Still.)
He blew through Washington D.C., cutting a three-month deal to raise the debt ceiling with Dems Nancy Pelosi and “Chuck Chop” Schumer, the Minority Leaders of their respective Congressional Houses, leaving the repudiated Repubs to wonder in the manner of hurricane survivors, “What the hell just happened?” ...
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Read MoreShe was born at the beginning of one summer and died toward the end of another. And like the season that framed her life – deceptively soft, blinding in its glare – hers was too short.
Thursday marks the 20th anniversary of the passing of Diana, Princess of Wales. Time is a funny thing. It heals, they say, all wounds, carrying us out on its merciless tide. But what it really is is another country. The world is a very different place now than the one Diana left. ...
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Read MoreDoes politics have a place in tragedy?
That depends on the tragedy. Politics was integral to Charlottesville. It has no place in Hurricane Harvey, still devastating southern Texas, particularly Houston, our nation’s fourth largest city. What’s needed there are prayers, money and assistance. There will be time for squabbles about climate change and government performance later.
What’s not needed is a presidential visit as the storm still rages. But then, you sense that President Donald J. Trump hates to be upstaged, even by Mother Nature. So he has to interject himself into the storm when he isn’t slipping something under the radar.
Like a presidential pardon. ...
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Read MoreThe qualifying rounds of the US Open are underway at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, Queens. The actual tournament – the last of the four Slams – begins with first-round play Monday, Aug. 28. In the meantime, enjoy the game’s stars in a lighter mood at Arthur Ashe Kids’ Day on Saturday, Aug. 26.
On the tournament’s infrastructure front, the big news is the temporary Louie (as in Louis Armstrong Stadium) while the United States Tennis Association readies the new Louie for its Big Apple Bow next year. On the personnel front, a number of big names will be missing this year. ...
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Read MoreI must confess to a certain smugness as the debate regarding the removal of Confederate statuary has taken on an aesthetic perspective. For years, I have endured the tacit, passive-aggressive notion from some newspaper colleagues and even bosses that my job as a cultural writer was not as important as those of the political and municipal writers and even the sports reporters. (Indeed, I lost that job partly because it was considered of lesser significance.)
But the arts – somewhat like religion and the family – are the refuge of the desperate and the inconsolable. Unfortunately for the arts, they are a refuge that their seekers often do not fully understand.
Some of my colleagues in my present job as an editor wonder about the artistic value that may be lost in the removal of the Confederate statues. No less an art lover than President Donald J. Trump bemoaned “the beauty that is being taken out of our cities, towns and parks.”
But are these works beautiful and, more to the point, are they art? ...
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Read MoreIt’s fitting that President Donald J. Trump should address the nation regarding our recommitment to the war in Afghanistan on a day when most of the continental United States saw a total solar eclipse.
Historians would say that Afghanistan has eclipsed all our other wars. Not for nothing is Afghanistan known as “the graveyard of empires.” Certainly, it’s the graveyard of modern empires. The British in the 19th century and early 20th centuries and the Soviets in the 1970s got bogged down in wars there but left without the victor’s laurel wreath. We Americans have been fighting there 17 years, our longest war. ...
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