Category: Current Events

Bad news for all my former colleagues in the news media. A recent Gallup Poll asked Americans whether they approve of how the U.S. leaders and institutions are handling the coronavirus pandemic. Donald Trump, who the press corp has roughed up regularly during the crisis, had a 60 per cent approval rating. I am drawing from secondary sources here, so, at this writing, I don’t know how Vice President Mike Pence, the CDC and Congress rated — but, according to what sources I do have accessed, they all scored higher than — the news media. More people disapproved than approved of its coverage, 55 per cent to 44 percent.

Now — I don’t like the way Trump interacts with reporters who ask questions he doesn’t like or his blanket denunciation of reporters. However, some of those questions — and he sniffs them out easily — are subtly or overtly of the “gotcha” variety.  And Trump’s base and, apparently, many others, feel he should be getting far more credit for his efforts, and far less criticism. But, this is a Democracy, thank God. I know Trump’s current dust-up with governors is being perceived as the case of a man who doesn’t understand the Constitution. I know and very much like Harvard professor Larry Tribe. But I recall, going all the way back to Reagan, that Larry will be reliably on the liberal side of Constitutional interpretation. Not sure where I fall down on the issues of the governors. I haven’t heard Larry on the matter. The folks at MSNBC like to go to him. I’m sure he’s out there, likely fulminating. God bless America!

And, speaking of that — that’s the problem, you might say, with a Democracy in which many people don’t trust what should be their reliable source of unbiased information — the Fourth Estate. Especially in a crisis such as this. The media is preoccupied, it seems, with partisan, divisive squabbles.  Trump hates them and they often waste their time hating him back.

But I’ll say this. Whenever Mike Pence steps to the microphone, I’m finally hearing that Consoler-in-Chief I welcomed during the Obama, Bush or Clinton-era crises. Trump is not good at that. Mike is. He reminds us, we’re all in this together.

A Las Vegas firm has compiled some unusual proposition wagers during this time of pandemic-related stress and tedium when bookmakers and gamblers, like the rest of us,  are in need of deep and consistent diversion and maybe a way to keep making money.  A proposition wager pertains to the occurrence or non-occurrence of certain events in a sporting event, irrespective of who wins or how many points are scored. For instance, the number of strikeouts a pitcher will throw or how many touchdowns will be scored by a non-offensive player.

In this case, the odds-makers are calling for bets on how often President Donald Trump speaks certain words and phrases during his nightly coronavirus briefing.  (I mean no criticism of the President’s pandemic policies –not here, not now, anyway — when, as a college English major and former high school orator, I point out that our Commander-in- chief employs a fourth-grade vocabulary when speaking in public. Of course, I’m not the only one to notice this. Frankly, I don’t know how this Yale graduate ever passed the verbal SATs. But one might say, he’s a man of few words — endlessly repeated.

According, that Vegas firm has determined that “we’re doing a great job” has an over/under of 2.5; “best” is 5.5; “more tests than any other country” is 9.5 and the omnibus “fantastic, incredible, amazing, tremendous” gets a whopping 24.5.

Okay, they’re plainly having a little sport, quite literally, with the Chief Executive and, as we know, ridicule hardly musses the golden coif of DT, who gives ridicule in equal measure as he receives it. And,  heck, as he insistently brags, the ratings for those  afternoon virus briefings has spiked. For most people, it’s for whatever new information can be gleaned from them — in between all those repeated words and phrases. But now we know that gamblers may be hanging on every word — or phrase.

 

My former colleague Chris Luke, who is Chinese-American, has taken me to task for that part of a Facebook post in which I seem to link China and, by extension, all Asian peoples to  the Covid-19 pandemic, presumably finding most offensive the reference to  ” a filthy street market in Wuhan” and bats being  butchered for food. She says Asian people, including apparently her relatives, are being “racially profiled” as a consequence of  the pervasive linking of the outbreak specifically to China, either to a marketplace, or a lab, or wherever in that country. Continue reading “COVID 19 ADDENDUM”

No one writing anywhere on the web can fail to say a dozen or so words about where we find ourselves, in the midst of a worldwide pandemic. This is to note it — and note that, when I can get my small head around it, I’ll want to say more, if only to myself — and to whatever lonely soul chances upon this lonely blog. Continue reading “THE INFECTED MOMENT”

That — Jersey Street – is what became of Yawkey Way after the posthumous mugging of the late, once-beloved Tom Yawkey over questions of his racial attitudes. I won’t open that big can of snakes again — but, yes, as winter grips Beantown and that short, shadowy byway astride Fenway Park awaits the crowds of opening  day and the Sox begin their ritual preps in Fort Myers – I’d have to say, as a Boston native and unalterable fan of all Boston teams, that the loss of Mookie Betts is, well, too, too bad. Who can deny it? But that’s pro sports now. We root for laundry, as Jerry Seinfeld so aptly said. Continue reading “NO JOY ON JERSEY STREET”

Something reasonable to think about — albeit also a little emotion-charged — on the subject of tolerance and bipartisanship in this fraught election season – a post by Princeton Professor and scholar Robert P. George, always a voice of reason and principle: He’s aiming it at conservative Democrats. Continue reading “THE LIFE WE SAVE MAY BE THE U.S.A.”

I just wrote of the tragedy — wrote at length — and made passing referenced to the circa 2003-2005 rape accusation. I needed to remind myself that Kobe read a statement in court essentially acknowledging that the sex with the 19-year old who accused him of rape “may not have been consensual.”  As Tara Sullivan in the Globe is saying, finally, the star who could have been a great advocate against the rape culture missed that chance. Mindful, he was never convicted in a court of law and there was a civil settlement, which does not amount to a guilty conviction — and these sexual encounters, with the famous or non-famous can be complex he-said-she-said matters….nonetheless, it shouldn’t take a #MeToo movement to remind us that no means no. And that victim is still out there, a 34-year-old woman. What must be her thoughts?

And so, there. We are all sinners. The tragedy abides, as does all the good KB did, this father of four daughters, one of whom entered eternity with him.

I believe I was somewhere in Florida’s interior when it happened — when Kobe Bryant, his daughter and several other souls were suddenly lost in a violent flash in the fog three thousand miles away on a north-of-LA hillside. I had probably just recently exited I-275, then exited I-10 and found my way to state road 301 west on my way back to what is currently home: Largo in the Tampa Bay area. And I know that for much of the drive I’d been thinking about my son and his new wife. I was just coming from their wedding in Mount Pleasant, SC, a seaside suburb of Charleston. And I was thinking about life’s frailty, its shooting star evanescence. ( Driving on any American highway at any hour of the day will induce such thoughts.) I’d been praying for God to keep the newlyweds safe — to keep us all safe, every soul. But life is both fragile and — though we should not dwell on it — full of dangers.  And the truth is that I had not, in the years prior to his wedding, bonded with my son as any father should — and should not now fail to do. The swell of emotion I was feeling during that wedding ceremony, tinged in equal measure with joy and remorse, was great. Every moment without love is a tragedy. Life is short. Love — well, it’s eternal. Cliche? Yeah. Sorry. Continue reading “A FLASH IN THE FOG”

Observing the shame that has fallen on the Houston Astros and knowing that the Red Sox might soon be forced to submit to the same chastisement, I feel compelled to ask — what does it say about our society that seemingly upright public figures could so overtly and deliberately cheat on such a grand stage as a major league baseball championship? Perhaps I’m naive to ask the question — but I have to say I am shocked and fear it may say a great deal about our anxious morality and its precipitous state of decline. Perhaps I’m learning that, the bigger the stage, the higher the stakes, the larger and bolder the sin.

Rockets are scary and those wheels of fortune do grind slowly, but exceedingly fine.

I confess I watch Wheel of Fortune and recorded last night’s “episode”. (It  truly IS an “episode” and “adventure” for the souls who wait weeks, if not months, to try their puzzle-solving skills on national television after being duly vetted, interviewed and tested for sportsmanship so unflagging that they smile and applaud fellow contestants even after losing thousands of dollars and a trip to an exotic venue at the capricious click and bump of a stupid wheel).

But my recording of last night’s episode was abruptly pre-empted at the outset by a special network bulletin and I was soon looking at the face of CBS’s Nora O’Donnell — appearing to my eyes equal parts alarmed and indignant  — urgently informing us that Iranian rockets were raining down on a U.S. base in Iraq, ominously launched not by Iran’s terrorist surrogates but by — and from within —  Iran itself. Continue reading “WHEELS (AND ROCKETS) OF FORTUNE”