It was my favorite British prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, who said that “there are no permanent friends or permanent enemies, only permanent interests.”
And that brings us to Donald Trump’s date with Mitt Romney at Jean-Georges, chaperoned by Reince Priebus.
Mittens is up for secretary of state, and the smart money says that Trumpet’s just toying with him as payback for Mittens calling him a fraud and a phony in a scathingly eloquent address during the campaign. ...
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So Novak Djokovic lost to Andy Murray in the ATP Barclays World Tour Finals – cementing Murray’s ascendance as the new No. 1-ranked player and my view that 2016 will go down as the worst year in recent memory for people I admire. Perhaps Nole never recovered from attaining the long-held dream of winning the French Open. Perhaps it was some personal crisis alluded to in the press at the time of Wimbledon. Perhaps it was a nagging injury. Whatever the reason(s), he had a brilliant first half and a terrible second half (terrible for him: Remember he won two Slams and was the runner-up at the US Open and the ATP World Tour Finals).
A good year but not a great one. And when you’re great, good looks mediocre. Last year he was unbeatable. This year, he proved he could be had. There are few greater falls than the tumble from No. 1 to No. 2.
No doubt he will go on. Champions, particularly tennis champions, are enormously resilient. They don’t dwell. ...
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What should be the response of the loyal opposition to President-elect Donald Trump?
In the wake of the election shocker, we’ve seen people veer between extremes – Colin Kaepenick on the one hand, the cast of “Hamilton” on the other – when the Buddhist middle way might prove more prudent.
Kaepenick didn’t bother to vote, because neither major candidate was to his liking. This was a problem for many people. But as the Lotto saying goes, “You gotta be in it to win it.” And a vote for no one is still a vote for someone – in the most passive of ways.
Kaepernick’s non-vote smacked of the illogical and the racist.
"I think it would be hypocritical of me to vote," Kaepernick said. "I'd said from the beginning I was against oppression, I was against a system of oppression. I'm not going to show support for that system. And, to me, the oppressor isn't going to allow you to vote your way out of your oppression."
Was the system oppressive, Colin, when it enacted the Civil Rights Act? How about when Barack Obama – who, like you, is biracial – became president? ...
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In his new book, “Shaken” (Waterbrook, 213 pages, $25), Tim Tebow considers the failure of his NFL career after his successful run with the Denver Broncos. He’s now trying to make it as a baseball player with the Arizona Fall League, where, once again, he’s been hailed for his good work ethic, leadership skills and clutch play but is still struggling to master the outfield. NFL legend and ESPN analyst Steve Young is among those pulling for him. But many who admire Tebow say he simply doesn’t have pro-quality aptitude.
He has, in other words, the temperament but not the talent. ...
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I’m the same age as Gwen Ifill – the woman who made TV history with Judy Woodruff on “The PBS NewsHour” as the first female co-anchors of a network news broadcast and who died of endometrial cancer Monday in Washington D.C. – so I’m old enough to remember earlier iterations, “The MacNeil/Lehrer Report” and “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour.” Both were anchored by two white men. And though Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer were fine journalists in the Walter Cronkite tradition, theirs were the faces I had seen since childhood.
People will tell you that affirmative action is needless and that you should only look for role models within your immediate circle, but I have to tell you that seeing two women of my vintage, including one of color, on my TV each evening, doing excellent journalism, was a comfort and a source of pride to me, a fellow journalist. I felt I could be enlightened by them without their well-groomed presences taking pride of place. It was their well-groomed minds that inspired. ...
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I’m still trying to wrap my mind – and, more difficultly, my heart – around the presidential election. You can talk about the failure of the Democrats to appeal to working-class voters; their reliance on the Barack Obama coalition (blacks, Latinos, women, millennials), which did not hold for the Dems – at least not in great enough numbers, and that includes you, Colin Kaepernick; a certitude, a smugness even, that wasn’t justified; the role of F.B.I. director James Comey in underscoring the tightening race in the last two weeks before the election; but at the end of the day, it was all about the zeitgeist.
Donald Trump was not merely the “change” candidate, again (Remember when Obama was the change candidate?); he was the regular-guy billionaire you could sit down and have a cheeseburger with, the one who understood America’s deeply ingrained nativist, isolationist, homogenous longings. This has always been – for all our forays into wars around the world – a determinedly inward-looking country. ...
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For me personally, I can say with Frank Sinatra, “It was a very good year.” I got to travel a great deal and I got a contract for my second novel, “The Penalty for Holding,” about a gay, biracial quarterback’s search for identity in the NFL. An excerpt from the book will be published in the Westchester Review, and an essay I wrote on love, sex and gender in the work of Colombian artist Federico Uribe will be part of a new monograph on him. For all this, I’m truly grateful.
I begin with an attitude of gratitude in this the month of Thanksgiving, because in other ways I’ve been disenchanted and disheartened as many of those I have loved have faltered. ...
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