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Harry Styles, seen performing in Rio de Janeiro last year, was heckled by Beyoncé fans at “The Grammy Awards.” *Photograph by* *Leticia Morales.*

Heckling diminishes us all

February 9, 2023

Heckling is as old as performing, but our digital cult and culture of narcissism, which has made everyone an instant celebrity, has given it a trending obnoxiousness. President Joe Biden was heckled by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and the other MAGA Republicans at the State of the Union address. Harry Styles was heckled by Beyoncé fans at “The Grammy Awards.” Novak Djokovic was heckled by a drunken “Where’s Waldo?” quartet at the Australian Open. And Sydney Warner, wife of San Francisco 49ers linebacker Fred Warner, was among the Niners contingent heckled at the Eagles-49ers National Football Conference championship game.

A kindergarten in the village of Javolik, Serbia, built by the Novak Djokovic Foundation. Djokovic is active in social justice issues that might surprise the far right, which has adopted him in its anti-Covid vax mandate crusade. Photograph by
Ванилица.

Of Novak and no-vax

February 4, 2023

Among those exulting in Novak Djokovic’s Australian Open triumph Sunday, Jan. 29, were members of the far right, who had adopted the world’s No. 1 male tennis player as the poster boy for their anti-Covid vaccine mandate crusade after the debacle last year in which he was deported from Australia for coming to the tournament unvaccinated, a moment that covered neither Australia nor Djokovic in glory.

The cover of Prince Harry’s new best-selling book, “Spare” (Random House). *Jacket design by Christopher Brand. Front cover photograph by Ramona Rosales.*

Prince Harry's 'Spare' view of himself

January 31, 2023

Having written about Prince Harry’s “Spare” (Random House, 407 pages, $36) elsewhere – and written about him many times for a variety of publications — I wasn’t going to weigh in on this blog about the book. I thought it might be passé. But what I’ve learned is that with politically divisive figures — and make no mistake, the prince and his wife, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, are politically divisive figures — there is no such thing as passé. Witness this New York Times opinion piece, which plays right into the hands of everyone who defines liberals as “woke.”

I’m not going to reargue the article, except to say that while some members of the British press and posters have made scurrilous, racist remarks, the Sussexes must also be held accountable for their lack of professionalism in leaving the monarchy and the contradictory narrative they have since put forth. A similar contradictory quality dominates “Spare,” which purports to be an authentic account of Prince Harry’s life in his own words but is certainly not written in his own voice.

John Singleton Copley’s “John Quincy Adams” (1796(), oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The son of Founding Father John Adams, second president of the United States, John Quincy Adams would become the nation’s sixth president, serving, like his father, only one term. An esteemed diplomat and secretary of state, he had a long third act as a member of the House of Representatives, opposing slavery and proving that there’s life beyond being at the top of the power game.

Our failure to respond to 'the literature of rejection'

January 29, 2023

What do the Black cops who murdered Tyre Nichols have in common with the mass shooters in California — and indeed all the cops who murder and the mass killers?

They are all men with a disproportionate sense of entitlement and grievance and thus rage at some kind of rejection. They are part of what I call “the literature of rejection,” one with everyone from assassins like John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald to dictators like Adolf Hitler to terrorists like Osama bin Laden to mass murderers like Timothy McVeigh. And they share a great deal as well with such fictional antiheroes as Achilles in Homer’s “The Iliad,” Iago in Shakespeare’s “Othello,” Lucifer in John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” and Heathcliff in Emily Brontë’a “Wuthering Heights.”

What they all have in common is that they are men with an overweening, overwhelming pride that seeks the destruction of everything, and everyone, in its wake.

In 1976, President Gerald R. Ford presented the Congressional Medal of Honor to Rear Admiral James B. Stockdale for his leadership as a prisoner during the Vietnam War. Stockdale, whom I interviewed when he was a vice presidential candidate on Ross Perot’s 1992 independent ticket, said that the writings of Epictetus helped him get through his ordeal. U.S. Navy photograph by Dave Wilson.

A guide to living through the chaos

January 14, 2023

I no sooner arrived in Washington, D.C., for Christmas than the sister I was traveling with came down with Covid and the sister we were visiting developed a non-Covid virus. Other family members became sick as well. (Miracle of miracles, I never got Covid.) On my return, I had a sinus attack that has left me tired, which is why this New Year’s post is so tardy. Apologies, dear readers.

As I sat alone at breakfast in the hotel, shuttling between drop-offs for the Covid sister in the room next to mine and visits to the non-Covid sister, I had an opportunity to read a book that has had a profound effect on my life and that I believe can help you navigate the world as well.

Lost opportunity: Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, chats with children during a visit to ActionAid in South Africa in 2019. Judging from photographs like this, you’d have to conclude that she and Prince Harry could’ve been king and queen of the Coomonwealth. It wasn’t enough. Photograph courtesy eNCA.

Lost horizon: Netflix’s ‘Harry and Meghan’

December 16, 2022

In the trailer for “Harry and Meghan,” the new six-part Netflix series that dropped like an H bomb Thursday, Dec. 8, with the final three installments on Dec. 15, Prince Harry observes, “It’s really hard to look back on it now and go, “What on earth happened?”

Boy, ain’t that the truth.

Whose art is it anyway?

December 5, 2022

What is it about Colorado?

First, there was the baker who didn’t want to make wedding cakes for gay couples. He told the U.S. Supreme Court that it violated his artistic and religious freedoms.

Now we have Lorie Smith, a Colorado website designer, who’s making pretty much the same argument before the court.