On Father’s Day 2019, I performed an act my own late father might’ve considered sacrilegious. I attended a Dodgers game in Chavez Ravine.
To mitigate my baseball transgression I cheered for the visitors not the home nine.
Father was a Brooklyn Dodgers man through and through. The Los Angeles Dodgers could never have engaged his rooting interest. Continue reading Keeping True
Were Time magazine founding publisher Henry Luce still alive, the man who’d coined the 20th century “the American Century” would today declare any extension of it dead.
Our epoch of true world influence stretched from the Jazz Age until Bolshevism collapsed under capitalist superiority. Although our Levant fiasco significantly diminished the nation’s prestige while emboldening adversaries, much of the global community still accepted the United States as the planet’s cock of the walk.
After wrong-footing throughout 2017, the only standing America retains is being musclebound and brainless. Continue reading Magnificent Arrogance
Nice to have the steel-toed shoe on the other foot. All the better with which to kick.
The Schadenfreude to be enjoyed drops directly from the 2016 election results.
Given a clear choice between vast experience and absolute unpreparedness, between a first-rate temperament for governing or petulance and impatience intolerable in well-run enterprises, between a superior intellect brimming with curiosity and a small mind formed and locked early, less than half of American voters chose disaster. Unfortunately, our no longer great nation remains beholden to the last vestige of slavery.
The Electoral College.
Undeserving though awarded our presidency nonetheless, Donald Trump personifies the least of the United States. In his bloated, billowy, and bloviating presence he is the antithesis of “American exceptionalism.”
He is quite common and surpasses crass. Continue reading Fair Play
Miss crushing deadlines as I do, there is one benefit being a newspaper racket casualty. No need to fake objectivity. I can now voice opinions without caring who’s offended.
I didn’t grovel before and I’ll damn well clean clocks now.
During March, too many journalists have jumped on the Libyan War bandwagon. Somehow the United States’ North African involvement constitutes our third conflict with a Muslim country.
Has it come to that? Dropping ordnance and enforcing internationally recognized sanctions against a rogue nation count as war? It’s an intervention. Libyans themselves are doing the real fighting and killing. American press misinterpretation crosses between lax writing and lazy thinking.
Since President Obama’s installation, there’s been way too much brain-dead, knee-jerk, pack-following. Compare Libya and Kosovo, and see Barack Obama as a darker, cooler Bill Clinton and the word “war” never enters circulation.
Unsurprisingly, I support this administration. Adults are in charge and they’re behaving in a conscientious manner. Americans haven’t enjoyed such high-level contemplation since the Eisenhower and Kennedy Administrations. Continue reading Funhouse Mirrors