The lotus represents karma in that it holds its seeds as it flowers. Photograph by Nevit Dilmen.
Violence is never the answer, but it is often the question. The attempt on former President Donald J. Trump’s life is nothing to celebrate as the taking of a life in anything but self-defense is morally and legally wrong.
But after almost 10 years of vitriol on the campaign trail and in office, he has come to his encounter with karma.
Read MorePresident Joe Biden on his 81st birthday, Nov. 20, 2023. Courtesy the president’s Instagram account.
If President Joe Biden’s debate performance had been a Broadway play, it would’ve closed the night it opened. At times stiff and unresponsive, he stood there as if his spirit were encased in wood, like some mythological creature whom the gods would destroy before loving, while former President Donald J. Trump hammered home false narrative after false narrative. Good grief.
Read MoreCarolyn Bessette-Kennedy at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner April 26, 1999, less than three months before she, her husband, John F. Kennedy Jr., and her sister, Lauren Bessette, were killed in a plane crash. Photograph by John Mathew Smith & www.celebrity-photos.com.
May 19 marked the 30th death anniversary of Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Kennedy Onassis — editor, style icon and former first lady of the United States (1961-63). Those of us who cover and mark such figures and occasions have already noted that in two months, almost to the day, we will commemorate the 25th death anniversary of the son she loved so much and the daughter-in-law she never knew.
On July 16, 1999 — as the evening, the century and the millennium began to draw to a close — publisher John F. Kennedy Jr. lost control of the plane he was piloting, killing himself; his wife, former Calvin Klein company publicist Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy; and her sister, Morgan Stanley executive Lauren Bessette.
In the quarter-century since, there has been an almost radical reappraisal of Bessette-Kennedy — by a generation of influencers who’ve adapted her classic, minimalist, monochromatic aesthetic; and by authors sympathetic to a lovely, empathetic woman ensnared by the image she helped to create.
Read MoreThe Manhattan Criminal Courthouse where the hush-money election interference trial took place. Photograph by Ajay Suresh.
What’s the old saying about a person representing himself having a fool for a client? Now that the “trial of the century” is over, former President Donald J. Trump has been convicted on 34 counts related to election interference and the postmortem is in full swing, about the only thing that hasn’t been discussed is how Trump’s narcissistic approach to life — deny, deny deny; attack, attack, attack — cost him any chance of a hung jury or even victory.
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Read MoreJulius Kronberg’s “Hypatia” (1889), oil on canvas. The particularly brutal murder of this fifth-century Alexandrian philosopher and mathematician shocked even the Roman Empire. It’s recounted in Islam Issa’s new book “Alexandria: The City That Changed the World” (Pegasus Books, $35, 476 pages).
When I was thinking about what my next blog post should be, there was no lack of ideas. Should it be about the student protests, which, however sincere, lack historical perspective, or dog-, goat- and horse-shooting Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota or the Republicans’ “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” at former President Donald J. Trump’s trial in New York or the continuing wars in Ukraine and Gaza? Or how about Speaker-vacating Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene going after Rep. Jasmine Crockett’s eyelashes verbally, which led to Crockett’s sly rebuke “about somebody’s bleach-blonde, bad-built, butch body”?
Then I had an unsettling personal experience that made me realize that what all these events and people have in common is further proof that despite the upward arc of civilization, we live in cruel world.
Read MoreScales of justice: In “The Egyptian Book of the Dead” (1275 B.C., papyrus), the heart of the deceased is weighed against the feather of truth. Woe to any heart that does not balance with the feather. Courtesy British Museum.
In the civil fraud case brought by the state of New York — as opposed to the criminal fraud case that began Monday, April 22, in Lower Manhattan — former President Donald J. Trump complained that he was denied a trial by jury, even though his lawyers failed to ask for a jury trial.
Now Trump has his jury — seven men and five women of various races, ethnicities and professional backgrounds — and he, of course, is still not happy. It’s understandable. He’s forced to sit quietly — well perhaps not so quietly outside the courtroom and on Truth Social — listening to people say unpleasant things about him when he could be out on the campaign trail saying unpleasant things about others. (It’s the saying of unpleasant things in violation of his latest gag order that could net Trump fines or worse.) Life is not fair, he thinks. But then, how fare is it to jurors and the hush-money trial jurors in particular?
Read MoreMug shot from O.J. Simpson’s arrest for the murder of ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. Time magazine would be criticized for darkening the photograph when it ran on the cover, underscoring a trial that proved to be less about domestic violence and more about race in the United States.
When I think of O.J. Simpson, who died Wednesday, April 10 of prostate cancer at age 76 in Las Vegas, I think of the short story '“Appointment in Samarra,” often retold in novels. The protagonist encounters the figure of Death, and to elude the dreaded specter, runs off to Samarra, only to find Death waiting there at the place where they were destined to meet. You cannot escape fate — or the consequences of your actions, no matter what else you do in life. Such is the Hindu and Buddhist principle of karma.
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