By Jove! Trump as disrupter in chief

February 4, 2017

God created the world in seven days, the Bible tells us.

It took President Donald Trump only 14 to destroy it.

“Destroy” may be too strong a word. “Disturb,” “disrupt” are better choices. In one of the greatest games men play, politics, he is the lord of misrule, tweeting and executive-ordering us into a new world that may or may not be brave; terrifying the already traumatized “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” and insulting world leaders – with the exception of boy crush Vladimir “Rootin’ Tootin’” Putin – in equal stead.

Australians, refugees, refugees in Australia – is there anyone who has not been blasted by Trumpet? ...

Kasich goes his own way

July 18, 2016

Once upon a time, Gov. Krispy Kreme was my CPB – Chief Pretend Boyfriend. I imagined myself under the boardwalk down by the sea-ee-eeee yeah, on a blanket with my baby, swooning in passion as the waves crashed upon our bodies to the beat of The Boss blaring from my Hello Kitty boom box. We were like Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster in “From Here to Eternity” – if Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster were two beached whales, that is.

But what with Bridgegate and the capitulation to The Donald, it’s become harder to sustain the fantasy of being with my tubby little Luv Guv. So I banished Gov. Krispy Kreme from my heart, and instead promoted my WPB (Weekend Pretend Boyfriend), Rafael Nadal, to CPB status. ...

Tom Brady’s shadow in the sun

May 8, 2015

Paging Gisele.

Because Ms. Bündchen – a tiger wife if there ever was one – is all that stands between hubby Tom Brady and his squishy balls on the one hand and ignominy on the other.

As even the horses that ran the recent Kentucky Derby now know, a report issued by the Manhattan law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison on behalf of the NFL has concluded that Brady was probably aware that two lower-level employees of the New England Patriots were deflating balls.

Probably? Here are excerpts of text messages between Jim McNally, the longtime locker-room attendant responsible for the air pressure in Brady’s balls, so to speak, and John Jastremski, an equipment assistant who seems to have served as a go-between...

‘Toast’ing Gov. Christie – and the male sex

February 27, 2015

Well, it’s official: My Chief Pretend Boyfriend, Gov. Krispy Kreme, er, Chris Christie has been proclaimed “toast” by The New York Times’ puckish Gail Collins. And by “toast” I don’t believe she means the kind spread with delicious Bonne Maman damson plum preserves.

No, I think she means the kind whose burnt offerings can never make it palatable. And all because he said he fixed New Jersey’s pension system and apparently didn’t. You know, it’s one thing to fail grandly, epically, sexily, like Coriolanus. But to fail in a manner that requires a boring Excel spreadsheet – ah, the cruel irony. I’m willing to bet that my little CPB is not even very good at math – another thing we have in common along with our love of the Jersey Shore, Springsteen and ice cream cones. While I contemplate whether or not it’s time to end my pretend relationship and promote WPB (Weekend Pretend Boyfriend) Rafael Nadal to CPB status, thereby elevating PB in training, Colin Kaepernick, to WPB, I want to note that there’s a new book that would make hay of the rise and sort of fall of my luv guv.

“Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy” by Dr. Melvin Konner (W.W. Norton & Co., $26.95, 404 pages) suggests that blustery males like Christie are basically, well, troglodytes who will have no place in the new evolutionary world order of consensus-building that dovetails with women’s strengths.

Konner does a good job of rounding up the usual cultural and historical suspects to paint a depressing portrait of man’s inhumanity to woman. Reading the litany of abuses made me at once angry and self-congratulatory: As an unmarried woman, I may not have what my married sisters have, but at least I have myself.

Where Konner is particularly on-the-money is in his discussion of the one thing that colors the male-female dynamic: Men rape; women do not. Men’s atavistic, animalistic propensity to violence, to sexual violence, makes it difficult for women to trust – and build relationships with – them. But he also implies that the male violence may be selected out in the evolutionary scheme of things.

I think Konner is more optimistic than I am. For one, it’s hard to imagine male brutality going out of style. Witness the popularity of war, terrorism and the NFL – all of which are promulgated b men, young and old, who seem to have a lot of rage and too much time on my hands.

But the members of my sex aren’t completely innocent in all this. Some of us have long since swallowed the male Kool-Aid. We find men charming, funny, entertaining, beautiful even. We’re happy to let them do the heavy lifting – as long as we can direct that lifting, even obliquely. We are ambivalent toward power, because we understand that its price is the many interests we have, including our children. We even support the male power dynamic. Among the posters who are welcoming back Adrian Peterson – the Minnesota Vikings star who’s been reinstated by the NFL after being suspended for taking a switch to his 4-year-old – were women who said there are different paths to discipline, that we shouldn’t judge, blah, blah, blah. ...

Chris Christie’s Cowboy love

January 11, 2015

The reemergence of the Dallas Cowboys – who play the Green Bay Packers today for the right to move on to the NFC Championship game next weekend – created some unforeseen levity once viewers spied Gov. Chris Christie hugging Cowboys’ owner Jerry Jones after the team’s victory over the Detroit Lions.

“Spied” might be the wrong word. Gov. Krispy Kreme was sporting an orange sweater for the occasion, and let’s just say that orange isn’t always the new black. Indeed, though Christie described himself as a high school athlete at the time of Bridge-gate – to distinguish himself, I guess, from those “loser” henchmen who took the fall for the George Washington traffic scandal – his moment with Jones resembled nothing so much as the chubby kid trying to hang with the cool jocks. Altogether now singsong “Awk-ward.”

Christie – who has taken a lot of heat for his Cowboys’ allegiance – has been characteristically unbowed, leading the puckish New York Times columnist Gail Collins to remark that it’s “certainly the tough-talking, self-assured Chris Christie that all of us have come to know and, um, know.”

The real problem here is not that a New Jersey governor likes a Dallas team – that would hardly matter in a national election – but that the Cowboys own a company that was recently awarded a contract at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, overseen by Christie and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. ...

Is Peyton the Michelle Kwan of football?

February 6, 2014

Forget Richard III. This is the winter of my discontent, and it isn’t just the unrelenting cold, snow and ice in the Northeast. (It’s like “Dr. Zhivago” without Omar Sharif.)

No, it’s partly because my guys – Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic, Colin Kaepernick, Gov. Chris Christie and now Peyton Manning – have all fallen short this season. (Thank God Tim Tebow has found his calling as a T. Mobile pitchman and ESPN analyst, or this winter would be a total bust.)

Let’s leave off Gov. Krispy Kreme, shall we? Remember how in math you always had to pick out the one thing that didn’t belong to the set. Well, he doesn’t belong to the set. His is a different kind of performance to be judged by other criteria. What I want to talk about today in the aftermath of that dud of a Super Bowl and with the Olympics beginning Thursday, Feb. 6 with the new team ice figure skating event is why some people – brilliantly talented everyday achievers – fall flat in big moments. Read more

Is Christie Coriolanus?

February 1, 2014

Recently, a trio of screen stars has taken to the London stage to portray three of Shakepeare’s greatest characters – David Tennant (“Dr. Who”), Richard II; Jude Law, Henry V; and Tom Hiddleston (“Thor”), Coriolanus. Together they offer a kind of round robin of Shakespearean performance. On PBS, Tennant was a febrile Hamlet, a role that was played with lucent rationality on Broadway by Law, whose Henry V follows hard upon Hiddleston’s charismatic interpretation in PBS’ “The Hollow Crown.”

The three also offer lessons in leadership undone at a time in our history when the systemic failure of Alexandrian leadership – leadership from the front – continues to haunt us. What, for example, would the Bard make of New Jersey Gov. Chris Chrisite? Would he cast him as his blustery Roman general Coriolanus, a man whose skills are undermined – no, doomed – by his own arrogance and blindness to the will of the people? Read more