Category Archives: Opinion

Trump: Stumped

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By

Susan Kelly

Susan KellyI don’t usually write about politics, but the whole Trump phenomenon totally confounds me.

He’s said to appeal to “the base,” a group that regards all the other Republican candidates as progressive liberals. Seriously. Take a look at some of the online forums where “the base” gathers. I’m not going to list them. They’re easy to find. They’re composed of people who claim they refused to vote for Mitt Romney in 2012 because Romney’s a socialist.

Well, okay. Mitt’s a soft-shell Commie. I can dig it. But Trump, on the other hand, is supposed to be a real conservative. I’m not digging it.

Let’s look at his record.

Trump supports—100%, he says—Kelo, the Supreme Court decision that allowed a corporation to take over private property. This isn’t eminent domain; it’s theft. And it’s anathema to most conservatives. And to a lot of liberals, for that matter.

He has donated more money to Democratic politicians and their causes than he has to Republican politicians. And the Democrats better not forget it, either. If they do, he’ll remind them, plus issue marching orders. “Hillary Clinton, I said, ‘Be at my wedding,’ and she came to my wedding,” Trump stated on August 7, 2015. “She had no choice, because I gave to a foundation.”

Back in the day, he loved Hillary. He said so. Now he despises her.

In 2008, he thought Barack Obama was great. “I was his biggest cheerleader,” Trump claims. (Well, of course he was. According to Trump—who has recently acquired the lamentable habit of referring to himself in the third person—Trump and anything Trump-related is the biggest of whatever it may be.) In 2011, he offered to donate one million dollars to charity if someone would produce Obama’s real birth certificate. He said he sent a fleet of private eyes (the legendary Matt Jacob not amongst them, alas) to dig up the truth. In July of this year, Anderson Cooper raised the birth certificate issue. “I really don’t want to get into it,” Trump replied. Gee, I wonder why not?

He’s been all over the place on guns, abortion, and universal health care. His supporters say he’s “evolved.” They don’t cut the same slack for any other candidate who’s failed to toe the line without any deviation whatsoever, which is why, I assume, they decided that former candidate for the Republican nomination Scott Walker is a flaming liberal. Same for Marco Rubio. And Rick Perry. And Carly Fiorina. And John Kasich. The jury’s out on Ben Carson, because he once said something to the effect that he’d prefer not to see Uzis in the hands of homicidal lunatics.

At one point, Trump himself supported a ban on automatic weapons—but that was before he evolved, I guess.

So what’s Trump’s appeal to the people to whom he appeals?

Is it his braggadocio? “I’m really, really smart,” he’s said on numerous occasions, although probably not as often as he’s said “I’m really, really rich.” He’s told us that he’s “slept with the top women in the world,” though “the top women in the world,” whoever they are, seem to have unanimously declined to verify the claim. He’s informed us that his current wife Melania looks incredibly hot in a “very small thong.” (Amusing factoid: If Trump becomes president, his wife will be the second foreign-born first lady and the first to pose nude for a men’s magazine.)

The next time he tells us about whatever he has that’s the biggest, I hope it’s not what I’m afraid it will be.

Is it his general oafishness? He’s referred to various women—notably Rosie O’Donnell and Arianna Huffington–as slobs, dogs, and pigs. When Megyn Kelly of Fox asked him if he thought this practice might damage him with women voters, he responded by Tweeting that Kelly was a bimbo. Which would appear to prove Kelly’s point, but, hey…

Is it that he claims not to care what the press says about him? As he told Esquire magazine in 1991, “You know, it doesn’t really matter what [the media] write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.”

Or does it just come down to the fact that he said he’d build a 1575-mile-long wall along the southern border and make Mexico pay for it? If you believe that, you’ll believe anything.

Even about whatever’s biggest.

YET AGAIN

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22

By

Zachary Klein

zach

(Substituting for Susan Kelly)

Okay, we have another month mugged with another mass shooting, this time at Umpqua Community College in Oregon. How many times can we as a society feign shock or surprise? Since the 2012 tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, there have been 142 school shootings in the United States. That’s an average of almost one school shooting per week. To be fair, there is some disagreement about the specific number, but there is absolutely no argument about the FBI’s conclusion that there’s been a “sharp rise” in mass shootings since 2000 through 2013.13Yrs

Let’s be honest. The numbers just confirm what we already knew and the tired old gun control arguments once again have hit the fan.

On one side stand those who argue that “guns don’t kill, people do.” Many “anti-gun control” advocates add that the real issue is the mental health of the person(s) who pull the trigger. Problem is, our political representatives have been unwilling to adequately fund mental health programs. In fact, though most Americans believe mental and physical health are equally important, about one-third of those surveyed see mental health care as inaccessible, and 40 percent see cost as a barrier to treatment—according to a new survey released in September.

Worse, many states have been slashing funds. Between 2009 and 2012, states cut a total of $4.35 billion in public mental-health spending from their budgets. So, if those who truly believe it’s all about mental health really want to reduce the slaughter, put your fucking money where your mouth is. How about instead of signs and politicians screaming, “No New Taxes,” we increase our social service spending? I’m sure there is a Republican candidate for president who’ll support significant funding for mental health, right?

Because they sure won’t support any rational regulations regarding gun control. Again, to be fair and balanced, George Pataki not only supports it but, as governor of New York, also passed what was, according to the New York Times, the strictest gun control legislation in the country at that time.

All those who believe Governor Pataki has a legitimate chance at winning the Republican nomination, please raise your hand.

But there’s no reason to stop with Republicans. Before the Brady bill was finally signed into law in November 1993, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders voted against it. Moreover, in both 2003 and 2005, when he was in the House, Sanders voted in favor of a measure to prohibit lawsuits against firearm makers, though after last week’s shooting in Oregon, he did call for “sensible” gun control laws. (Whatever he meant by that.)

But in all honesty: “A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 34% of Likely U.S. Voters believe laws regarding the ownership of guns should be the responsibility of the federal government.” Says something about the nature of the American beast. Especially in the face of:Terror

We have little or no qualms about passing laws that have evolved into frontal assaults on the rest of our liberties in the name of the “War on Terror.” Is it my eyesight or is something is wrong with this picture?

And how about this picture? America has 4.4% of the world’s population, but almost 50% of the civilian-owned guns around the world.Guns

Of course the gun didn’t pull its own trigger in Oregon. The fucker that did, however, allegedly owned a large number of firearms. Now, I happen to believe in people’s right to bear arms, but I also believe in laws that are as least as reasonable as the ones that regulate car ownership:

  1. Point of sale background checks in real time for each and every purchase and those checks include sales at gun shows, mail orders, and the elimination of any “secondary” market that cannot or will not adhere to all these reforms. That is, individuals who sell guns to another person without that person’s compliance with licensing laws.
  2. A seven day wait for each and every purchase to receive a firearm for all purchasers regardless of a clean background check.
  3. Passing a gun safety test before the purchase of any firearm.
  4. Passing a marksmanship test before the purchase of any firearm.
  5. Passing a psychological exam before the purchase of any firearm.
  6. Serious prison time for “straws.”  (Those who are qualified to purchase guns and do so for another who may or not be qualified.)
  7. Strict regulation of firearm production. Production not to exceed legal licensees plus some small percentage above, along with lifting the prohibition of lawsuits against manufacturers who, in fact, overproduce.
  8. Mandatory liability insurance to cover all accidental and purposeful shooting incidents. No insurance, no permit. Period.

Ahhh, but here’s the rub. I’ll be dead and buried before any of the above come to pass—if ever. And by any, I’m talking about the increase needed in mental health funding and accessibility along with reasonable gun regulations. Our society is sliding into social psychosis and fast approaching the point of no return–but Americans just don’t seem to care.

Yes, there are some voices howling against the madness, but sadly, they are few and far between.

To mourn those who have fallen victim to our collective insanity and inaction, the following is a list of just the school shootings since the Sandy Hook massacre.

 

Great Inventions of Our Time

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By

Susan Kelly

Susan KellyActually, this column is going to be—mostly–about great unheralded, or at least underappreciated, inventions of our time. Do I need to talk about antibiotics, which have saved countless millions of lives? (Unfortunately, about 10% of the population of the planet is allergic to them.) Or Novocain and its successors, which have made trips to the dentist, if not a joyride, far less unpleasant? Or the Salk vaccine? The internal combustion engine? (Yes, it pollutes, but seriously—in the event that it’s necessary, do you want to be conveyed to the hospital via horse-drawn buggy?) Civil rights? Universal education? Computers? Telephones? Refrigeration, which has also saved countless millions of lives? Air conditioning? Vodka martinis? Mel Brooks’s movies?

No. I don’t need to talk about those things.

What I want to write about are those little things that make life so much easier, that we take for granted (our grandparents wouldn’t) and never acknowledge. The following list is not in any order of importance.

  1. Suitcases with wheels. Whatever genius invented rolling baggage deserves the Nobel Prize for so doing. I’m not sure which Nobel Prize. In my case, the Peace Prize, since it prevents me (and zillions of other people) from having meltdowns in airports as a result of having to carry all that stuff.
  2. Salad spinners. How did we prepare salads before these were invented? Well, we did, but it was considerably more work than necessary. I’m old enough to recall the time when you had to use a roll of paper towels to dry the lettuce you just washed. Or soggy-up a bunch of clean dish towels doing the same thing.
  3. Stamps that you don’t have to lick before you stick them on an envelope.
  4. Carpet-sweepers. These have been around a long time, but I really like them better than vacuum cleaners. They don’t jack up my electric bill and I don’t have to buy bags and change them.
  5. Rolled oat cereals. (These are commonly known as Ch—rios, but I don’t want to get into potential trademark violation. I wasn’t allowed by my editor to use the word Sty—f-am in a novel to denote a disposable coffee cup, so I’m careful about these things.) No, not for the fact that rolled oat cereals are apparently a heart-healthy breakfast food, but because they endlessly entertain babies. As soon as the kid’s able to maintain an upright position, buckle your infant into a high chair, sprinkle the pristine-clean high chair tray with you-know-whats, and the child will be absorbed for hours trying to pick up the things and insert them in his or her mouth while you occupy yourself with other matters. (Of course you don’t leave the kid unattended. I suppose I need to say that, just as blow-driers now come with instructions NOT to use them while one is taking a shower.) Babies seem to be able to pick up only one Ch—rio at a time, which is why I say they provide hours of entertainment for her or him. Full disclosure: I don’t actually like to eat this cereal, and never did.
  6. Plastic ice cube trays that you twist to release the contents. When I was a kid, ice cube trays were metal, with levers that you yanked back in order to relieve the cubes from their confinement. But you had to be Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime to do this successfully.

Here are some modern inventions I could do without:

  1. Reality television
  2. Ice tea or lemonade that purports to be kiwi-strawberry-flavored. This is not a beverage. It is what you pour into the anti-freeze compartment of your car.
  3. Boy bands
  4. Microwave pizza. This is not food. It is mattress stuffing compressed into a circular shape and topped with ketchup and a sprinkle of cheese product.
  5. Any carbon-based alleged life form calling itself Kim Kardashian

Neither of my lists is by any means comprehensive. In fact, as soon as I send this column to Zach, I’ll probably think of a dozen other unheralded but vital inventions that I love. And even more inventions that I hate. That being the case, I invite you to list your own loved and hated inventions. It’s still summer: This is the silly season, as they say in the news biz. So go for it.

I’ll be back later in September with some, ahem, more serious commentary. Promise.

But in the interim, tell us what you love. And hate.

THIS SPORTING LIFE

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By

Zachary Klein

zachThis was going to be a column that reviewed the Red Sox’s tumultuous season. But Boston’s—no, New England’s sports scene—is obsessed with something much more important than the Sox.

Deflategate. We’ve got a brand-spanking new word for letting air out of footballs during a game, aka, cheating by the New England Patriots before the first half of pro football’s AFC Championship. Given the constant drumbeat on sports talk radio, in daily newspaper articles, the evening news, Twitter, et al, it’s impossible to lead with any other story—even for your intrepid, gonzo columnist. Since last January this lunacy has become the Keeping up with the Kardashians of the sports world. And just like with the Kardashians, who really gives a shit?

I guess Tom Brady does. He has 1,882,352 reasons. (The amount of money he’ll lose if the four-game suspension sticks.) Robert Kraft, the team’s owner, not so much. Since he already agreed to the NFL’s discipline, I gotta wonder whether he’s conflicted about Brady’s federal case to overturn the Commish’s (who also served as arbiter for the initial appeal) ruling. Although fined $1,000,000 and docked two draft picks–a first-rounder in 2016 and a fourth-rounder in 2017–if Brady’s punishment holds, Kraft actually saves $882K. Ahh, but Tommy is a fine lad.

As for the merits of the punishment and the court case, Brady’s complete denial about knowing or caring about ball pressure just doesn’t pass the sniff test—especially given his testimony about the amount of time he actually spends getting game day footballs to “feel right.” But worse than a sniff test fail is the absurdity of the National Football League’s desire to ram it to the Pats over what amounts to an equipment violation. I’ve read the transcripts that have been made public and the NFL’s punishment processes are fucked up and horrifically unfair. (Truth is, when I worked as a trial and jury consultant I loved poring through transcripts. Yeah, I know. “Seriously deranged” would be my own diagnosis.) I don’t know who will win the case and I don’t care. All I know is how deflated I feel every time the subject comes up.

And while local sports talk radio hosts often cite their own deflategate fatigue, they lie. With 24/7 to fill, this sure helps.

Of course, once summer began, they could have used all that extra time to trash Hanley Ramirez even more. He was one of the “big name” players signed by former Red Sox General Manager, Ben Cherington, to a long-term contract before the season (4 yrs. @ $88M & a 2019 vesting option). I’ve been disappointed in Ramirez’s play this season too, but the degree of hate vomited by these commentators is frankly disgusting. They constantly call him a dog, a cancer, and they haven’t let up all season long.

The “anything for ratings” game encourages these jock-sniffer’s spewings and the cement-headed callers aren’t much better. I don’t know what it’s like in other cities, but in Boston, the two stations that carry local sports talk personalities have exactly one person of color as a regular host. Sadly when a town has a racial history like mine, you gotta wonder why they all rag on Ramirez and never our venerated quarterback. That Tommy surely is a fine lad.

Perhaps I’m making more out of this than I should, so do me a favor? Let me know whether your city’s sports talk hosts are as White as mine. And as targeted in their hate-mongering.

So How ’bout them Sawwks?

Well, it’s been one hell of a season. Hitters who made a career hitting haven’t hit. Pitchers haven’t been able to get anyone out and, about five times this season, fielders haven’t known the number of outs, including one player who generously threw the ball to the fans when there were only two away in the inning. Team management has been abysmal from the owners to the ex-general manager right down to the field skipper and pitching coach. Actually, what pitching coach? There’s been absolutely no sign that anyone knew anything about pitching. Plus, the team has done little to stabilize its young talent—a fine fix for the future. To top it off, the Red Sox manager, John Farrell, was diagnosed with Stage I Lymphoma during a routine hernia operation.

This entire season eventually reminded me of The Universal Baseball Association, Inc.,J. Henry Waugh, Prop., a 1968 novel by Robert Coover, whose protagonist, Henry Waugh, runs an intricate one-person fantasy season as a way to distract from his crummy life. Problem with Henry’s game is that it runs off the rails when his favorite player is killed by a bean-ball in accordance with the governing rules that Henry created.

Call me crazy, but the self-destructive decision making that produced one Red Sox Championship (i.e. lightening in a bottle) surrounded by three last place finishes sure looks like a train wreck to me.

Coover’s world is fiction but the Red Sox are real life (ha!). So in real life, then came Dombrowski.

Recently hired as President of Baseball Operations, Dave D. has a reasonable track record in his stewardships of the Montreal Expos, Florida Marlins, and Detroit Tigers. The prior Red Sox regime was loath to trade prospects, whatever the Red Sox record, but not so Dombrowski, if his history is predictive. The real question will be whether he can clearly identify the team’s needs and find players to solve those needs. Sit tight Red Sox Nation. Gonna be an interesting off-season.

But why am I writing about baseball? Deflategate is blaring from my radio speaker.

“It’s not even a lesson. It’s just what it is.” Damon holds the baseball up between them. “It is hard and white and alive in the sun.” ~ Robert Coover, The Universal Baseball Association

Don’t Like Me on Face Book; Don’t Follow Me on Twitter

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By

Susan Kelly

Susan Kelly       …And, for Gawd’s sake, don’t expect me to post any photos on Instagram.

Yeah, yeah, I know. I should get with the zeitgeist. But for whatever reason, I just can’t. At least in terms of social media.

It’s not that I’m a Luddite. I love technology. I love the Internet. I love being able to take my cup of morning coffee to the computer, sit down, and read any newspaper in the world that has a website. (I lived in Scotland for four years while in graduate school, so anything going on in the U.K. is interesting to me personally beyond the regular attention I pay to world affairs.) I love being able to go to the Mayo Clinic or Massachusetts General Hospital online for medical advice. I love IMDB for movie reviews, goofy as some of them are. I love the website that told me that one of my ancestors, whose name I never knew before the site posted it, was injured at the Battle of Gettysburg, mustered out the following September, and then re-enlisted in the Union Army the following December, presumably having recovered from his wounds. (Either he was a true Union man, or he thought being shot at by the boys in gray was better than facing another Vermont winter. But no matter.) I love email. I’ve participated in some lively political, literary, and cultural online forums. There are many more things I love about the process of instant worldwide communications. It’s made my life so much richer.

But I just can’t get into social media. All writers are supposed to have Facebook pages, or sites, or whatever you call them. Publishers insist on it. In fact, I have one. It’s there for the sole purpose of advertising my books. I don’t think it sells many books. When I glance at it, which may be once every six months, if Facebook is lucky, the “news feed”—whatever the hell that is—is filled with messages from total strangers posting photos of baby animals, places they’ve been to, birthday parties they threw for their two-year-old kids, some fabulous bargain they got at T.J. Maxx, a review of some restaurant I’ll never go to because the cuisine sounds appalling, and painfully (as opposed to painstakingly) detailed instructions on how they trained their kitty-cats to use the litterbox. I don’t know these people. They don’t know me, but they insist on sharing the intimate details of their lives with me. I live in dread that the next time—maybe sometime in 2018—that I check my FB page, I’ll be treated to a graphic description of someone’s menopause, supplemented with captioned photos of clots. Or a home video of a prostatectomy.

I have been assured that there is a way to control who sees your Facebook page, and who posts there, and who doesn’t. But the point is, as an author with a product to sell, I’m supposed to keep the page open to all comers. Perhaps there’s a way to limit the comers to people who want to talk about books. But if there is, at this stage in my life, I’m too bored and busy to find out what it is.

I have a Twitter account. I have posted exactly one message on it, which instructs people to visit my website (www.susankellywriter.com). As far as I know, I have no followers. I also have a LinkedIn account. When I started it, I got bombarded immediately by people advertising their self-published self-help books. There would be—and I am not kidding—at least 40 messages apiece from the same three or four people, none of whom, of course, were known to me. The same message. Over and over and over again. I resented the fact that they were using my account to advertise their products. That put me off looking at my LinkedIn account for at least a year or two.

As with Facebook, there’s probably a way to control LinkedIn and Twitter. But again, as with Facebook, I’m too bored by the whole prospect to do whatever work is involved to find it. And, mind you, this is coming from someone who has been asked by others to fix their computers when there was some sort of glitch, who’s test-driven academic software, and who has the kind of psychotic patience required to read through an 800-page trial transcript and take notes on it.

I used to blog on my website. But I got bored with that, too, because it seemed as if I was talking to myself, although I knew I wasn’t. And I am still very happy to respond to any questions or comments people post there. I ignore, of course, obvious raving lunatics; those who promise to tell me who the real Boston Strangler was if I meet them in a dark alley at midnight; and any person who asks me for a date that involves the deployment of squirt-can whipped cream and chainsaws.

Here’s the final irony about my Facebook site: People I actually know, personally, who’ve looked for it say they can’t find it.

So if you want to read me, follow me, like me–I’m here at Zach’s website, which seems to me more like a small magazine for a select readership, one to which I’m pleased to contribute.

And remember: No canned whipped cream, no chainsaws.