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New Year’s wisdom from RFK – and ‘the awful grace of God’

December 31, 2014

Spent a magical few days with my family – always too short of a good time – in suburban D.C. for Christmas and had the pleasure and privilege of visiting Arlington National Cemetery.

I hadn’t been there since I was a girl but as with anything that is ingrained, I found it washing over me, moving me as it did in the old days – the rows of crystalline marble headstones; the deep-veined names etched on them; the commanding views of the city that crown the serpentine climb to the Federal-style Arlington House, a.k.a. The Robert E. Lee Memorial, once the home of the gallant Confederate general and President George Washington’s descendants.

As I made the climb, I was struck by the grave markers, some containing a brief record of the departed’s military and civilian achievements, others containing nothing but a last name, the bearer’s deeds lost in time.

Along the way, I paused at the eternal flame that lights the graves of President John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, flanked by the graves of their first and last children, an unnamed baby daughter and son Patrick.

On the path to the left are the graves of JFK brothers Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., a World War II bomber pilot, and Sen. Edward Moore Kennedy, marked by simple white crosses – as is perhaps the most moving of the brothers’ graves, that of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.

His faces a low gray wall that contains some of the words he spoke extemporaneously in Indianapolis the night of April 4, 1968 amid his presidential bid after he learned the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated. Kennedy had been cautioned by police and aides against addressing those who had gathered, many of whom would be hearing about King’s death for the first time. But he decided to persevere, in one of the great, from-the-heart speeches – acknowledging the black crowd’s understandable anger toward King’s white assassin, James Earl Ray, and his own toward his brother John’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald.

That was vintage Bobby, and the reason you either loved or hated him but couldn’t sit on the sidelines and be dispassionate. He wasn’t afraid of raw emotions, afraid to say what everyone was thinking.

Nor did he deem it imprudent to quote Aeschylus to the throng. The ancient Greek poet-playwright of “The Oresteia” – recommended by his bookish sister-in-law, Jackie – became a favorite in the aftermath of JFK’s assassination. ...

An ‘Interview’ you can skip

December 26, 2014

On Christmas Day, some Americans did what they felt was their civic duty and went to see the controversial new film “The Interview,” which Sony decided to release in select independent theaters and online after being chastised by both liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans – led by President Barack Obama – for initially caving to North Korea and pulling the plug on the Seth Rogin-James Franco starrer, which makes copious fun of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un.

You’ll recall that Sony even had embarrassing emails hacked by cyber-terrorists, and North Korea, professing shock – shock, I tell you – that the U.S. would accuse it of such a crime, offered to conduct a joint investigation of the incident.

Which is a bit like O.J. Simpson saying he was going to search for ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman’s killer.

Uh-huh. Moving on, I was among those Americans who spent part of Christmas Day watching the movie with my family at home – thanks to the technical wizardry of my nephew James, take a bow – and may I say that it was two hours of my life that I will never have back.

It’s not that “The Interview” is a terrible movie. It’s just that it’s a terribly mediocre movie that belongs to a long line of turkeys about bumbling Americans mixed up in international intrigue. (“Ishtar,” anyone?) It’s also a road picture and a bro picture, which means there’s lots of 12-year-old-boy humor about urinating, defecating, anal sex, private parts, hot girls, gays, homophobia, drugs, vomiting, breaking wind, margaritas and Katy Perry. I think Kim Jong-un, American pop culture junkie, should screen it, because really he has nothing to worry about. It’s the Columbia J School that should be offended.

At its heart, “The Interview” is the story of the twisted, symbiotic relationship that exists between the celebrated and those who chase them, the so-called journalists. Franco, playing with type, is Dave Skylark, the airheaded host of a magazine show like “Entertainment Tonight” and “Access Hollywood.” It’s a measure of the filmmakers’ real fears that while Rogin and co-director Evan Goldberg apparently never worried enough about Kim Jong-un’s response to change his name or his country, they were quick to fictionalize Franco’s character and show so as not to offend the very programs they’d be using to hawk their pix.

A seat of our own

December 8, 2014

With all of the talk about race in the aftermath of two high-profiled cases – one in Ferguson, Mo.; one in New York City – in which grand juries declined to indict police whose actions resulted in the deaths of two black men, few have considered that this may be as much a problem of gender as it is of race.

Looking at the leaders and experts who sat with President Barack Obama recently during a discussion of the explosive events in Ferguson, you saw white faces and black faces. What you didn’t see – or at least what I didn’t see – were many female faces.

Why is that? Studies have shown that female cops are better at diffusing difficult situations without resorting to violence or even one-upmanship. I hate to reduce the world to hormones, but I do think testosterone and the “mine is bigger than yours” mentality it fosters play a crucial role in male police officers’ responses to male suspects. Sure, education, racism, poverty, media stereotypes – these are all factors. But at the end of the day, women are generally – emphasis on the word “generally” – better at dealing with volatile moments.

That doesn’t mean that every incident can be handled with kid gloves. Nor does it suggest that it’s always easy to discern the situation in which force is necessary or the one in which discretion is truly the better part of valor.

But it does point to the need for women to add their voices to the decision-making process, as Ali Torre observed when I talked to her recently about the Safe at Home Foundation that she and husband, former Yankee manager Joe Torre, founded to end domestic violence.

We need more women. We need more women in the NFL, not only to help the league sort out its domestic violence issues but also to tell young players like Colin Kaepernick, going through a bad stretch, that you don’t shove a cameraman out of the way because you’re having a lousy day at the office. That’s not going to improve your circumstances. Indeed, culling ill will is one way to cloud them.

Alexander the Great’s world (still)

November 29, 2014

My family, friends and colleagues often tease me about my fascination for Alexander the Great. I get it. Who cares about someone – a single-minded Greco-Macedonian conqueror, no less – who lived some 300 years before Jesus?

But you see, the fact that we call Jesus Christ “Jesus Christ:” – and not Joshua bar Joseph, his historical Hebrew name – is because of Alexander and the spread of Hellenistic culture. Before Alexander, culture flowed east to west. After his conquest of the Persian Empire (331 B.C.), it would tend west to east. And the resulting tension between the two has reverberated down through the ages, particularly in the Middle East, the heart of his empire.

Our soldiers have been following in his footfall since the start of the Iraq War in 2003, as I wrote then for the Gannett newspapers. We’re still living in Alexander’s world. We just don’t know it.

The once and future king

November 14, 2014

You would think that someone whose earthly life ended more than 2,000 years ago would be beyond controversy. But then look at Jesus. He’s still “a sign to be contradicted,” to quote the Gospels, almost two millennia after he was crucified.

So it is with Alexander the Great. Some 330 years before Jesus was born, this king of Macedon and hegemon of Greece conquered the Persian Empire, ushering in a Hellenistic age that would unite East and West. (The reason we call Jesus Christ “Jesus Christ” is because of the Alexandrian spread of the Greek language and culture.)

Such is the Alexander mystique – he never lost a battle but died at age 32 in Babylon, possibly of cerebral malaria – that he thrives in the imagination today as a metaphor for many things, including leadership from the front; the ultimate gay in the military (many consider him to have been the lover of his right-hand man, Hephaestion); and the tension between East and West.

That tension has escalated recently with Macedonian Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski’s decision to give waxworks of Alexander, his father, Philip II of Macedon and his mother, Olympias, pride of place in a new archaeological museum in the capital city of Skopje, which already has the world’s largest statue of Alexander in its central square.

A little background here...

Close, but no Cigar: The humanity of four-legged creatures (and the inhumanity of two-legged ones)

October 17, 2014

Am I the only one who is seriously disturbed by the rumblings that came out of the recent meetings between NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and his 32 bosses, uh, owners of the league’s teams?

Apparently, the league is considering the assignment of disciplinary actions to an outside committee, even though Goodell says his primary responsibility is to safeguard the integrity of the game. So wouldn’t the safeguarding of the game’s integrity require taking responsibility for disciplining miscreants? (An aside: This is a misuse of the word “integrity.” Goodell really means the game’s honesty. All integrity means is wholeness. The league could be wholly good or wholly bad. Either way it would still have integrity.)

English lessons aside, the real problem here is the absence of leadership. NBA commissioner Adam Silver had no trouble getting rid of former Los Angeles Clippers’ owner Donald Sterling after his racist remarks. So why should Goodell have trouble executing the new personal conduct policy the league is going to come up with? ...

Is soccer playing the gender card?

September 22, 2014

The NFL domestic abuse narrative took a twist Saturday as that other “football” game – soccer – got into the act.

Or didn’t. Hope Solo – goalie for the U.S. national women’s team – extended her shutout record to 73 even as she’s facing charges of punching her sister and 17-year-old nephew at a late-night, alcohol-fueled party, leaving them with head and face injuries. (Ironically, she was involved in an incident in which her husband, former football player Jerramy Stevens, allegedly assaulted her. A judge dismissed the case on the grounds of insufficient evidence.)

This as Roger Goodell...