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. ...

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? ...

Updike’s complaint: Gay fiction – and what belongs to us

January 31, 2016

Aaron Hamburger, the short story writer and novelist, begins his laudatory review of Garth Greenwell’s “rich, important” debut novel “What Belongs To You” in the Jan. 31 edition of The New York Times Book Review by indulging in a remembrance of a review past.

He recalls John Updike’s 1999 New Yorker piece on Alan Hollinghurst’s novel “The Spell,” in which Updike – who wrote many sexy novels – complained that Hollinghurst’s “relentlessly gay” fiction bored him because “nothing is at stake but self-gratification.” “What Belongs To You,” Hamburger writes, provides the “ringing” retort to Updike’s complaint.

I suspect that Updike may have been not only bored, though, but frightened and even repulsed. For gay fiction, like gay sex, presupposes the male as love object. And that might’ve been an uncomfortable exploration for the alpha male who wrote the “Rabbit” series and “The Witches of Eastwick.” ...

Summer reading – tennis’ (and humanity’s) ‘Terrible Splendor’

August 14, 2015

Tennis is a game of doubles. In the Hitchcock thriller “Strangers on a Train,” the tennis star must confront and overcome his murderous doppelgänger. In Woody Allen’s “Match Point,” the tennis pro is his murderous doppelgänger.

In Nijinsky’s ballet “Jeux,” the male tennis player is involved with two women.

Marshall Jon Fisher’s juicy 2009 book “A Terrible Splendor” (Three Rivers Press) offers a very different pas de trios. ...

Clarence Thomas and the mind as its own place

June 27, 2015

As the Supremes were busy upholding gay marriage barely (5-4, still a win is a win) the dissenters among them went into overdrive with talk of the Aztecs, hippies and California not being part of the American West.

But leave it to Justice Clarence “Uncle” Thomas – a man who once dismissed a racial discrimination suit by noting that most of the players in the NBA are black – to come up with a point that really misses the point. ...

The Supremes’ greatest hits – gay marriage, affordable health care

June 26, 2015

We live in interesting times. Yesterday the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act, 6-3. Chief John Roberts, you’re my new hero. This is actually the second time you’ve saved Obamacare, so I’m playing Britney Spears “Oops!...I Did It Again” just for you.

But then… you lose points for voting against gay marriage (5-4 in favor though, yeah!) and then there was that whole Aztec reference – a slippery slope, don’t you think? The Aztecs believed in ripping out the beating hearts of the conquered and the sacrificed and donning their eviscerated skins. I wouldn’t go there. ...