Harvard Yard in 2005: Fewer students will be attending Harvard University in person this fall, because of the coronavirus, leading to a crisis for those who rely on the school for more than just academic learning.

What price school?

July 12, 2020

In Agatha Christie’s much-admired, oft-filmed “Murder on the Orient Express,” her irresistible Belgian detective, the great Hercule Poirot, finds his “little gray cells” stymied by a case in which everyone is a suspect. Everyone has it in for the loathsome victim, a child murderer on the order of the Lindbergh baby kidnapper, the inspiration for Christie’s villain.

I think it fair to say that we have reached the “Murder on the Orient Express” portion of the people versus the Trump Administration, and the denouement is at hand. Each day brings some fresh outrage against a group that won’t be voting for him. (Roger Stone-pardon critics and New Yorkers, anyone?) Recently, the wheel turned to educators and parents whom the president and his education secretary, Betsy DeVos, are trying to bully into getting kids back into the classroom this fall as the virus still rages and no clear plan is in sight.

The Trumpian return to classicism

February 10, 2020

Far be it from me to agree with President Donald J. Trump on anything, but as the saying goes, even a broken clock is right twice a day.

Trump’s decision to MABGA — Make American Buildings Great Again — finds him decreeing in a new executive order that federal buildings in Washington, D.C. should be classical in style, rather than Modern.

The liberal media, Modernists and the art world are not taking this well — understandably. Everyone gets nervous when the federal government starts telling folks what to do, especially conservatives. And Modernism isn’t less a standard of beauty than classicism, Marion Smith, chairwoman of the National Civic Art Society, which is leading the anti-Modernist charge, notwithstanding. As the great composer-pianist Duke Ellington — who wrote jazz standards and classical works alike — observed, there are only two types of music, good and bad. So it is with all the arts.

But the Trump order is in keeping with a growing backlash against Modernism n art and design.

Still no room at the inn -- for Baby Jesus or immigrants

December 23, 2019

Still trending this Christmas – caged Baby Jesus. You’ll remember last Christmas’ cartoon by Mexican-American cartoonist Lalo Alcarez of a wide-eyed Baby Jesus in swaddling clothes further constrained by a cage secured by a lock with an American flag on it. The theme, echoing children and families confined indefinitely at the southern border by the Trump Administration, continues with coast-to-coast Nativity displays of Jesus, Mary and Joseph either in separate cages or Baby Jesus set off alone.

Windows onto children at the border

August 1, 2018

I wanted to call your attention to two excellent pieces of journalism regarding the undocumented immigrant children caught in the current nightmare at the southern border….

True sons and daughters: Immigrants in Trump’s America

July 9, 2018

Conrad Richter’s 1953 novel “The Light in the Forest” tells the story of John Butler, who is kidnapped by the Lenni Lenape Indians in 18th-century Ohio when he is 4. His Lenape father, Cuyloga, loves him, raises him and renames him True Son – a name that resonates with irony and poignance as the story progresses and True Son confronts nature and nurture amid the realization that when you come from two worlds, you often wind up belonging to neither. Thus marooned, True Son asks, “Who is my father?”

It’s a question that some 2,000 undocumented children may be asking in the future. The Trump Administration has said it will need more time to reunite them with their parents. But already parents of 19 of the 101 detained children who are under the age of 5 have been deported. The parents of 19 others have been released and seemingly vanished – all of this according to The New York Times. …

Trump’s bizarre lookism

April 27, 2018

Dr. Ronny Jackson’s decision to withdraw his nomination as Veterans Affairs secretary raises a number of issues – about drinking on the job, playing fast and loose with prescriptions and contemplating job opportunities to which you are not suited. But not the least of the rippling effects is the role of lookism in the Trump Administration, which says something important about power.

President Donald J. Trumpet holds Jackson in esteem, because he looks the part of a rear admiral and Navy doc, is blandly attractive and flattered the president’s physique in his report on his health. Indeed, the president said he would like to be Jackson, referring to his looks. This coincided with the state visit of French President Emmanuel Macron, during which Trumpet reached over and picked a piece of “dandruff” off his suit jacket. I have never seen another American president invade a foreign leader’s personal space in this manner, and you have to ask yourself, Why? …