When thoughts and prayers aren’t enough

February 17, 2018

Seventeen people were killed by a gunman in Florida and I feel – nothing.

No, that’s not exactly correct. I feel a certain righteous indignation. The Republican governor of Florida, Rick Scott, thinks FBI director Christopher Wray should resign, because the Bureau got a tip on gunman Nikolas Cruz and didn’t follow it up. Oh, please. The Broward County sheriff’s office got numerous complaints about this guy. Listen, it’s always the same story – young white guy with a disproportionate rage at the world. And it’s always the same result. And the same response. Thoughts and prayers. Nutjob. ...

Against bad manners

February 11, 2018

On Oct. 25, 1995 – one day after the United Nations turned 50 – then New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani threw Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat out of a concert at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall that ironically featured Ludwig van Beethoven’s great ode to humanity, his Symphony No. 9. The Clinton Administration then criticized Giuliani for an egregious breach of international diplomacy, but Giuliani said he could never forgive Arafat’s terrorist past, even though at that point he had been praised by both the Americans and the Israelis for his role in the Middle East peace talks.

It’s an age-old problem. We have our values. Do we cast them aside in social situations? We do not. But neither do we make a mockery of our values by punctuating them with rudeness.

Impolite behavior seeks to ridicule and humiliate others. But it is really only a reflection of those who advocate it.

I thought of this while watching the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in PyeongChang as Vice President Mike Pence avoided contact with Kim Jong-un’s sister, Kim Yo Jong, even though he was sitting right in front of her and the president of South Korea, Moon Jae-in, had shaken her hand. ...

The pit and the pendulum of sexual harassment

January 14, 2018

Every revolution has a counterrevolution. We push a pendulum away from us and it comes back to us with equal force. That’s just physics.

And, as it turns out, politics. A pair of Catherines – actress Deneuve and writer Millet – have joined with 100 Frenchwomen to sign a letter in Le Monde stating that #MeToo has gone too far. They want men to be treated fairly. They don’t want women to appear as wimps. And, most of all, they don’t want sexual freedom curtailed. The “freedom to bother” – as in a man bothering a woman – is “indispensable to sexual freedom.” ...

Alabama says, ‘No Moore’

December 13, 2017

Texas Congressman Blake Farenthold is alleged to have harassed his former communications director, Lauren Greene, in part by talking to her about a female lobbyist who had propositioned him for a threesome.

Have you seen Farenthold? It’s hard to believe any woman would proposition him at all, let alone for a threesome. But if she did, she wouldn’t have to look far for a third party. There’s enough of Farenthold to make two guys.

That might seem a low blow, but you know what, it’s a new day. And one of those signs of that new day is that Senate hopeful and mall exile Roy Moore lost to Doug Jones in Alabama’s special election Tuesday. ...

Is sexual harassment lookist?

December 7, 2017

In Larry David’s extremely awkward “Saturday Night Live” appearance a few weeks back, he worried that the recent rash of sexual predators was all Jewish – which is not true, but anyway, what I thought he was going to say was that they were all unattractive. (This was before Matt Lauer and Peter Martins, ballet master in chief of New York City Ballet, were added to the list of sexual harassers.) ...

No end in sight for sexual harassment

November 30, 2017

In his Sunday New York Times’ piece “The Unexamined Male Libido,” writer Stephen Marche offers this revelatory thought: “Men arrive at this moment of reckoning (about sexual harassment) woefully unprepared. Most are shocked by the reality of women’s lived experience.”

Translation: Men live with women. Men sleep with women. Men father women’s children. But they don’t know them. ...

The Don of denial

November 21, 2017

As heads roll in the sexual harassment version of Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities,” the accused-in-chief is taking a not so surprisingly compassionate approach to fellow accused: If they deny, you must comply.

Alabama Senate hopeful and mall exile Roy Moore says he didn’t do it, so, hey, vote for Roy Moore, President Donald J. Trumpet says. ...