The Orlando shooter, mad men and the literature of rejection

June 14, 2016

When tragedy occurs, it’s always best to think before acting or speaking. (Right, Donald Trump?)

And yet, you knew what the profile of Omar Mateen would turn out to be, and I’m not talking about his religious and ethnic profile. He was a man. He was a young man. He had anger management issues. He demonized others – particularly women. And despite all the conspiracy theories, he appears to have acted alone.

In other words, he was a loner and a loser. Sound familiar? Plug in the names of the Charleston/Newtown/Columbine/Boston shooters/bombers, throw in Lee Harvey Oswald, Timothy McVeigh and John Wilkes Booth, now add Osama bin Laden and Adolf Hitler and it’s always the same narrative – someone with a disproportionate rage at rejection who focuses it on some group or groups in a lethal way. Whether they act alone or in groups or even as the heads of nations, they have an aggrandized sense of themselves that they see as aggrieved. They are so profoundly disturbed that they must explode else they’ll implode. ...

Education – the antidote to terrorism

June 13, 2016

Once again, there is nothing to say and too much to.

A lone gunman, a massacre among people going about their everyday lives and the usual hand-ringing and finger-pointing.

Although I must say Donald Trump deserves our heartiest “congratulations” for putting a new spin on opportunism – or should that be a new low.

“Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism,” he tweeted. “I don’t want congrats, I want toughness & vigilance. We must be smart!”

And just how is he “right”? In a PBS town hall recently, President Barack Obama responded to an edgy question about refugees by observing that the real terrorist threat to the United States is not from refugees – who are vetted extensively – but from “tourists” and American citizens who are radicalized, like Omar Mateen, who murdered 50 people and injured 53 in an Orlando nightclub – the worst mass shooting in U.S. history. ...

Homer in New Rochelle: More adventures in publishing

March 31, 2016

Recently, Ken Valenti – a colleague from our days at the Gannett newspapers – graciously asked me if I would read at a gathering of his group For the Love of Words at R Patisserie Café & Tea Boutique in New Rochelle, N.Y., a most collegial coffeehouse. Naturally, I said yes. What writer doesn’t love the sound of her own words, her own voice?

As usual, I practiced my go-to selection from “Water Music,” the first novel in my series “The Games Men Play,” in which tennis player Alí Iskandar becomes involved in an international incident that draws him into the circle of his soon-to-be lover, tennis star Alex Vyranos. (Given the R-rated nature of the novel, there are not many easily available go-to sections.)

But something happened as I prepared to leave for the reading: I turned on the TV to learn of the Brussels bombing. ...

Of deflated balls, exposed appendages and concealed identities

March 6, 2016

It’s been a great week for news – sporting and otherwise – of the games men play.

First, it’s ba-aaack – Deflategate that is. You will recall that last September, federal court Judge Richard M. Berman ruled that the NFL had overstepped its bounds in its arbitration of Tom Brady’s four-game suspension for allegedly masterminding the deflation of footballs in the New England Patriots’ 2015 A.F.C. Championship win over the Indianapolis Colts.

Now a three-judge panel for the United States Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, has said, Not so fast. Taking a view similar to my own from the start of this delicious story, the panel seems less interested in the NFL’s triple role as judge, enforcer of punishments and arbitrator of appeals – a strange trifecta that would automatically make the league vulnerable to the charge of overstepping by the Players’ Union – than it is in the cover-up that always trips you up. To wit: What of Brady’s destroyed cell phone that might’ve contained incriminating information about his altered balls? ...

The NFL’s perception problem

February 6, 2016

On this Super Bowl weekend, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell told Robin Roberts of “Good Morning America” that people around the world will be watching Super Bowl 50 Sunday, implying that the game is the center of the universe.

People may be watching the Super Bowl around the globe, but that doesn’t make it a global sport the way soccer or tennis is. Few people in Indonesia beyond some ex-pats care about the NFL – a subject I address in my forthcoming novel “The Penalty for Holding.” But there seems to be a disconnect between public and internal perceptions of the game.

For Goodell the game is one he’d be happy having a son play; arrests are down 40 percent among NFL players, with the players more upstanding than non-players in their demographic group; and, as for concussions, he actually said there’s a risk in sitting on the couch. Really.

Meanwhile, Johnny Manziel – aka Johnny Football, the soon-to-be-former Cleveland Browns quarterback – has imploded. It’s the usual – trouble with drugs, alcohol and women. ...

On nature and human nature: American Pharoah and San Bernardino

December 3, 2015

Is it right to talk about Sports Illustrated’s controversial nomination of American Pharoah for Sportsman of the Year at a time when there are so many lost souls and unanswered questions amid the mass shooting of a facility for the disabled in San Bernardino, Calif.?

I think it’s relevant. We are divided from nature, of which we are apart, in part because we are divided in our own human nature.

There are two types of people who misunderstand nature. The first doesn’t care about it and ranges from those who toss the ice cream pop wrapper out the car window onto the highway to those who abuse animals. ...