Category Politics/Culture

“I will build a great wall—and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me—and I’ll build them very inexpensively. I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will make Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words.”

Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, where have you been, my darling young one?
 I’ve stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains
I’ve walked and I’ve crawled on six crooked highways
 I’ve stepped in the middle of seven sad forests

“It’s really cold outside, they are calling it a major freeze, weeks ahead of normal. Man, we could use a big fat dose of global warming!”

I’ve been out in front of a dozen dead oceans
I’ve been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard
And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, and it’s a hard
And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall

“Black guys counting my money! I hate it...

So the unthinkable happened. A shallow, venal, vindictive, mendacious, unprincipled demagogue has won the presidency of the United States, and many of us are disheartened and crushed and fearful and angry and just aching to emote.

So we do, and it is good and necessary. We howl to the heavens to release our outrage and frustration. Our sadness for those most vulnerable to the fiscal machinations that lie ahead—the poor, the elderly and infirm, and even the untold numbers of ‘Regular Joe” working class types who will see tax cuts for corporations and wealthy individuals but likely precious little flowing into anything that will benefit them.

(This will be but one of Trump’s betrayals of the working class voters who made him president...

A thought experiment: What if the current presidential election pitted Tim Kaine against Mike Pence? What would be the tone of argument, attack and vituperation between two, by most all accounts, decent middle-aged men who exhibit next to no bombast and would appear to harbor precious few skeletons, legal or otherwise, in their respective closets? Might the entire campaign have been conducted with at least a modicum of respect and focus on the issues of the day rather than the character flaws of the combatants, er, candidates?

What if Kaine and Pence weren’t relegated mostly to defending the figures at the top of their tickets while savagely attacking the other’s, but instead would have been free to wax presidential about their plans for the country?

Or would it have been only a matter of time, in this riven age, before these two decent men were reduced and dragged through the same foul vitriol that h...

Many years ago, I wrote an essay called “Locker Room Memories” that got picked up by a couple of small publications and anthologized in a book of essays by and about men. The essay wasn’t very good, in the way such things can be for a writer when coming across a piece from long ago. But the subject matter remains worthy and newly relevant today.

In it, I wrote about the experience of picking up a basketball again for some purely recreational play a decade or so after my playing career ended with my last college game. Rather than write about playing, though, I focused instead on the experience of walking into the locker room beforehand, with all that it represents in the life of an athlete.

Now, Donald Trump has gotten me thinking about locker rooms again. And this is what I want to tell him:

Man, you don’t know squat about locker rooms.

***

Trump, as surely everyone anywhere near the orbit of thi...

So we are at the end of these Olympic Games. Mammoth undertaking, nearly the entire world enthralled to some degree or other with these contests reflecting intense passion, competitive fire, and, for the most part, a sense of universal brother-and-sisterhood, human solidarity writ large across nations and cultures and even religions of the world, oh my…

All of it reflecting years of effort and training and dreaming for a select few fortunate enough to make it to this pinnacle of the sporting world.

(Yes, I know it also reflects rampant commercialization, politicization, fraud and influence peddling etc.; I’ll get back to you the very moment I find a large human endeavor that is free of those…)

In the midst of it all, a quartet of lunkhead male swimmers, who I’m sure are fine sons and friends and teammates with many scores of good people who can vouch for their essential good character, get too much ...