The rules of engagement: Trump rejoins the world America never left

April 10, 2017

President Donald J. Trump’s decision to respond to the chemical weapons attack in Syria with a bombardment of 59 Tomahawk missiles was the most presidential thing he has done so far. He’s not the first president to use an air strike as a form of gesture politics and, sadly, he won’t be the last.

But it had to be done. It’s what a President Hillary Clinton would’ve done. It’s what President Barack Obama should’ve done. What does it accomplish? Maybe nothing. But you cannot let chemical weapons go unnoticed. This year marks the centennial of the United States’ entry into World War I, the Great War, in which millions were gassed. The response was “Never again.” And yet it has happened, again and again. ...

Whose art is it anyway?

April 3, 2017

The painting shows a young black man in a coffin, his face a blur of color in the manner of Abstract Expressionist art – and violent death.

The departed, then, is not just someone who has succumbed to the ills that the flesh is heir to. Emmett Till was just 14 years old when he was lynched by two white men for flirting with the wife of one of them. “Open Casket, “ on view at the Whitney Biennial, is Dana Schutz’s 2016 painting of a mutilated Till in the open casket his mother, Mamie Till Bradley, insisted on. The work has drawn protests and condemnation from black artists and writers, who question the right of a white woman to appropriate a searing moment in black history. ...

The bridge of life and death

March 24, 2017

Reading about the dead and the wounded in the terrorist attack on London’s Westminster Bridge – from 10 nations and all walks of life – put me in mind once more of Thornton Wilder’s beloved novel “The Bridge of San Luis Rey.”

It tells the story of five people in 18th-century Peru who die while crossing a footbridge that collapses. A witness who was about to cross, a Franciscan monk named Brother Juniper, is assigned to investigate the tragedy. ...

The few and the proud

March 8, 2017

There is such an abysmal spectrum of disrespect and insensitivity these days – from Housing Secretary Ben Carson ignorantly calling slaves “immigrants” to the vicious attacks on Jewish cemeteries – that it’s hard to know what to write about first. Certainly, there’s no shortage of blog material screaming for fresh outrage. But today’s ire must be reserved for Marines United sharing nude photos of women and lewd, derogatory comments on Facebook.

As someone who writes homoerotic novels, I appreciate a nude – especially a male nude – as much as the next person. And I have little interest in what consenting adults do in private. ...

‘Come back, Little Sheba’: The myth of lost opportunity in Trump’s America

February 27, 2017

The horrific violence visited on Srinivas Kuchibhotla and Alok Madasani – two Indian immigrant engineers whose death and assault respectively are now being investigated as a hate crime – places the American workforce and immigration, particularly the notion of the immigrant as demonized other, at the intersection of crisis in the America of President Donald J. Trump.

To recap, the two engineers – who worked for Garmin, a GPS navigation and communications device company – were enjoying a workday-ending whiskey at Austins Bar and Grill in Olathe, Kan., as was their wont, when Adam W. Purinton began hurling ethnic slurs at them. After patrons complained, he was thrown out but returned in a rage and shot the two, killing Kuchibhotla and wounding Madasani and Ian Grillot, who intervened. Purinton, formerly with the U.S. Navy and Federal Aviation Administration, fled to Missouri but has since been extradited to Kansas, charged with premeditated first-degree murder and two counts of attempted premeditated first-degree murder as the FBI investigates the crimes as a violation of the victims’ civil rights. (Ya think?) ...

Trump, rape and the demonization of ‘the other’

February 24, 2017

In the Another-Country-Heard-From Department, Sweden was upset by President Donald J. Trump’s remarks at a campaign rally that implied the country had suffered an attack recently related to a refugee/immigration problem. (Gee, Australia, Mexico, Sweden – three countries down and only 193 left to go.)

"We've got to keep our country safe," he said. "You look at what's happening in Germany. You look at what's happening last night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe this? Sweden.”

Despite the president’s problems with tenses, he was actually referring to a Fox News report Feb. 17 on an Ami Horowitz documentary that links refugees in Sweden to an increase in violent crimes – a correlation that has been debunked. ...

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? ...