As America celebrates its 243rd birthday today, we are reminded that we are a nation of immigrants — and yet that nation and that notion are both under siege. Squalor at detention camps at the border. A Washington state judge subsequently ruling that asylum seekers can’t be kept in detention indefinitely — a Trumpian policy that has created the crisis. President Donald J. Trump — so good at the trappings of America’s birthday, with his tanks in Washington D.C. and his speech at the Lincoln Memorial — defiying the Supreme Court ruling that bars a citizenship question on the U.S. Census.
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Stupid acts, laws in Alabama
Alabama has indicted a woman in the death of her fetus after she started a fight with another woman, who then shot her. The shooter was not indicted.
If this all sounds nuts, it’s actually perfectly logical in a place whose laws value guns more than life and the life of the unborn over that of the mother.
Read MoreGreek to us
“We’re not interested in Alexander I.”
That’s what one of my colleagues said to me about Alexander the Great (who was Alexander III, but no matter).
I thought about this as I returned to Greece recently on another “Legacy of Alexander the Great” tour, this time with The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Arrangements Abroad. I thought about this as we swept by plane from Thessaloniki — Greece’s second largest city, named for one of Alexander’s younger sisters — spitj to Athens, the capital, on a 12-day tour that included buscapades to many of the nation’s most important museums and archaeological sites.
Read MoreDonald Trump and the 'I' words
So we’ve finally heard from Robert Mueller about his investigation into Russkiegate and while we didn’t learn anything new, we did have the extraordinary experience of the special prosecutor emphasizing that while he couldn’t prove the Trump campaign was guilty of a crime, he still wasn’t exonerating the president from obstruction of justice.
Read More(Theresa) May Day
In Jenni Russell’s fine May 24 column for The New York Times, she compares soon-to-be former British Prime Minister Theresa May to the queen at the end of “Game of Thrones” — lost, abandoned, her realm destroyed. I gave up on the series after the first season, finding it misogynistic. Besides, who needs such popular fiction when we have history and current events themselves? After all, we must account God — or, for the atheistic crowd, life — as good a writer as George R.R. Martin, n’est-ce pas?
Read MoreMaximum insecurity
April is the cruelest month,” T.S. Eliot began his poem “The Waste Land.” But T.S. — we hesitate to be overly familiar and call him Tom — what about May?
Threats to and from Iran, the continuing abortion divide, tariff wars, the stock market bouncing around like a knuckleball again: The only thing that is certain these days is, of course, uncertainty, making us all uneasy.
In the past, culture — specifically, arts and entertainment and sports — has provided stability in a destabilized world. But the real world keeps intruding on these parallel worlds that are framed differently by time and space.
Read MoreAmerica's psychological virgin
With the passing of movie star Doris Day May 13 at her home in Carmel Valley, California, at age 97, much has been made of her goody two shoes image on film in the 1960s and the way it was pooh poohed in subsequent decades when attitudes toward women’s sexuality were expanding in the advent of feminism. (It was an image that Day, who had a number of troubled marriages, herself dismissed on “The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson,” and indeed she often played complex wives, most notably in Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Man Who Knew Too Much” and as the torch singer Ruth Etting in “Love Me or Leave Me.” )
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