The presidential eye of the storm

August 29, 2017

Does 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. ...

The statues of limitations

August 23, 2017

I 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? ...

Eclipsed: Trump and Afghanistan

August 22, 2017

It’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. ...

The resistance strikes back

August 19, 2017

“What a week” as “Washington Week” anchor Robert Costa would say. Last Saturday, we saw the worst of America, with neo-Nazis leading to the death of three people at a keep-the-Confederate-statues rally, so-called, in Charlottesville.

But since then the country has rallied around the counter-protest. Democrats and Republicans alike have denounced President Donald J. Trump’s there-was-bad-on-many-sides response to the Charlottesville tragedy. Business CEOs have exited his advisory council and one – James Murdoch, CEO of 21st Century Fox and son of archconservative Rupert – has pledged $1 million to the Anti-Defamation League and has urged his fellow 1-Percenters to do likewise. ...

Trump’s clouded rearview mirror

August 17, 2017

President Donald J. Trump is a huge fan of the past, largely because he doesn’t understand it.

He fails to differentiate between the historical past – which is always with us to enlighten, inspire and, at times, to warn (those who do not remember the past are doomed, etc.) – and the social past of deathless grievances, like Trump’s feud with Rosie O’Donnell, which is deader than Jacob Marley.

We live with the past, not in it, and study its narrative, which is history itself. The study of history provides you with context and context drives perception. The greater, the wider the context, the deeper the perception. ...

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? ...

Charlottesville and the ‘bigotry’ against hate

August 13, 2017

The racial clashes that led to the death of three people, including two state troopers, in Charlottesville, Va. may seem complex but they’re actually sickeningly, frighteningly clear.

The white supremacists, protesting the planned removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, were loaded for bear with torches, Confederate and Nazi flags and shields, evoking the Ku Klux Klan, a terrifying image from my childhood. They were met by counter-protestors, who carried the day – until a car plowed into them, killing a 32-year-old woman and injuring 19. In all, 35 were injured. (The troopers were killed when their surveilling helicopter crashed.)

President Donald J. Trump initially took to his favorite medium, Twitter, to condemn the violence, then expanded on the theme at a veterans’ event at his Bedminster, N.J. golf club, denouncing “hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides.” ...