Current Events – Page 11 – 19 Cent Notebook

COVID 19 ADDENDUM

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”

THE INFECTED MOMENT

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”

NO JOY ON JERSEY STREET

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”

THE LIFE WE SAVE MAY BE THE U.S.A.

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.”

NECESSARY KOBE B. ADDENDUM:

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.

A FLASH IN THE FOG

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”

CHEATERS

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.

WHEELS (AND ROCKETS) OF FORTUNE

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”

RUMINATIONS ON THE “CHRISTMAS SPRINT” AND OUR EXPENSIVE HELP

I’m casting a cold eye, down here in warm Florida, on two highlighted (essentially, therefore, “front page”) items in the on-line edition of a recent Globe.

Some families are being challenged by the new requirement that their au pairs must be paid minimum wage. Who hires these imported “nannies” but the reasonably well-to-do? Or, in fairness, parents both of whom work — but, again, usually fairly high-end parents. Tell me if you disagree. Therefore, does this signal the upper class’s secret discontent with one of the Democrat’s signature policy items, i.e., the endless push to keep hiking the minimum wage? Albeit, in this case, is was a federal requirement that merely forces families to pay au pairs the state’s current minimum wage. Nonetheless, is this, then, a story to file under irony-of-ironies, or the hoisting of many residents of Newton and Wellesley by their own mostly liberal Democrat petards??

Then the other item:
I was unaware — why, I don’t know except that as a reporteer I was never assigned to cover it, thank God — that in this new millennium, Boston now features a pre-Christmas “Speedo Run” in which scantily clad men and women charge down fashionable Newbury Street in defiance of seasonably cold temperatures wearing only very skimpy bikinis or, for the men, skimpy Speedo-manufactured variations of St. Nick’s red and white. It’s all for charity, of course. ( I’m constitutionally skeptical of any alleged Christmas event that could not be replicated in Bethlehem on Christmas Eve, charity or no charity. If that doesn’t “suit” one’s secular sensibilities, then a Santa Clause look-alike Run could, I bet, raise as much money.)

Then I read that this Run actually originated under boozy circumstances at the old Sevens bar on Charles Street. I know the Sevens, and know it to be an innocuous, mostly serene place of dart-throwing, bibulous roustabouts; the kind of dim, cozy watering hole where boredom, once the booze has “lost its kick” (as it did in Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Commeth), might give rise to a plot for various forms of public hijinks that, given some benevolent and charitable overtone, cold potentially meets with municipal approval.

So this, I guess, is a land-bound equivalent of a polar dip, but a little closer to a skinny dip. I guess the tide’s in on Newbury Street.

What nearly naked fools we mortals can be. But all for charity.

THE VERY IDEA….

The push to impeach Trump is political theater. I state the obvious. I recall the uproar among liberal celebrities and prominent academics when Clinton was impeached. I covered a Harvard rally to which, among other luminaries, Carly Simon made the long trip to Cambridge ( though she did not speak, or sing) As a sample of the pedigree of the protest arguments, the celebrated theatrical producer/ playwright Robert Brustein – speaking of theater — angrily suggested, in prepared remarks, that we remain under the sway of New England’s Puritanical ancestors when we insist on impeaching a political leader for his sexual conduct. Harvard professor and author Wendy Kaminer bluntly summed it all up in a Yiddish word — and to great applause — when she said, “The President is a putz, but that’s not impeachable.” Continue reading “THE VERY IDEA….”