In the August 8th Times Literary Supplement there is a piquant 1936 photograph by Alfred Eisenstadt of four ballet dancers in a window at The School of American Ballet. George Balanchine, cofounder with Lincoln Kirsten of the school, had a famous penchant for tall, lithe women dancers. One can’t tell from Eisenstadt’s photo how tall [...]
Read More...Are we becoming a land of belittlers and giggly sycophants?
I listened to John McCain, the man who promised us the high road, deriding Barack Obama’s innocuous admonition to pump more air into our car tires to get more mileage. McCain’s point was that Obama is silly, and there was giggly laughter from the audience. But [...]
The soldiers we see in Iraq, looking more and more like cyborgs with their night vision headgear, and the soldiers who won the great tank battles of Desert Storm because of their night vision capability, could not have carried out their missions were it not for a son of Iraq named Abu Ali Hasan al [...]
Read More...The New York Daily News, a tabloid newspaper, celebrated the birth of the nation Friday by devoting its first three pages to Yankee slugger Alex Rodriguez’s sputtering marriage, a breathtakingly perverse feat.
Among the matters the News invited us to consider was the
possibility that Madonna had interested A-Rod in the Qaballah, thereby somehow endangering his marriage. [...]
It was our own moral failure and not any accident of chance, that while preserving the appearance of the Republic we lost its reality.
—Marcus Tullius Cicero
FactCheck.org ferrets out and corrects the lies, distortions, half-truths, spin, exaggeration, misinterpretation and [...]
In a certain plot contrivance in television serials and films the conscientious subaltern makes a fool of his pretentious jerk of a supervisor. The gimmick is overused to a fare-thee-well in such productions as the three CSI shows. What intrigues me about it is that, as so often in television scripting, it seems to appeal [...]
Read More...The gray region between sexism and misogyny is a gloaming filled with turned around street signs and delusions. I ought to know because I’ve been wallowing in it. I wrote in this space that Senator Hillary Clinton was marching like the Energizer Bunny off a cliff. I faulted her for playing the race card. I [...]
Read More...Sexism, racism, agism, smoothies, bumblers, swift-boaters, dreamers—all flavors in the great American apple pie. As we learn to avoid trans fats so we learn, ever so slowly, to wean ourselves from misogyny, racism, agism and all those other nasties.
The late Democratic primary had plenty of misogyny and racism to go around. It arose among the [...]
It’s interesting how eager both the left and the right wings are to pull the trigger on Scott McClellan, the former White House spokesman, who has written a book confirming many of our worst suspicions about the Bush Administration.
If he knew his bosses were lying about Iraq and Valerie Plame, the CIA undercover agent whom [...]
We talk from time to time in our society about racial profiling, but where is Frank Gorshin now that we need him so much? Impersonators tell us more about our leaders and wannabes than all the pundits and reporters together.
Watch John McCain walking arthritically with his fists held rigidly in front of him like [...]