Red and Blue It is the week of the anniversary of our military victory in Iraq and I am thinking about the strong strain of Puritanism in our collective lineage. It goes a long way to understanding our national intolerance It runs from the thundering moralists in New England like Cotton Mather to the fire-and-brimstone, […]

Everyday Perils God bless Nicholas Kristoff. He helped me put it all in perspective this morning. I didn’t know what to say this morning before I read his column in The Times. As I predicted, the death toll has continued to rise in the Madrid bombing and questions remain as to who perpetrated the outrage. […]

Madrile�os We are all Madrile�os this morning, or so says the op-ed page of the Times. It is beginning to sound hollow. Trite, even. I do not really feel Spanish this morning. I just feel a low anger and mounting frustration. So this time it is a clockwork operation of ten bombs, three trains, 200 […]

I Hate Thursday I furrowed my brow, wondering how this magnificent temple of my mind is crumbling under the weight of the years. Something else happened on September 11th. I knew it, had run across it, was struck by it and could not remember. I lay flat on my back, looking up. I hate Thursdays. […]

Cherry Blossoms   The National Weather Service has issued its most urgent agricultural pronouncement of the year. The spokesman for the Service cleared her throat and predicted that the Cherry Blossoms will be in full bloom in the last week of the month.   “Pay no attention to the frost warning for tonight. Rebirth is […]

Wild Geese When I was younger and not much brighter than I am now I used to read a vaguely pornographic magazine called “Soldier of Fortune.” It was the 70’s. War was raging in Rhodesia, and the magazine ran personal ads in the back purporting to recruit for irregular organizations like Grey’s Rangers and the […]

Mighty Wind Seven rockets roared into the Green Zone in Baghdad last night like a mighty wind. They hit the famous Al Rasheed hotel. You remember the place. It is where Bernard Shaw reported with awe the first night of the air war in 1991 and where Peter Arnette stayed in the first Gulf War. […]

March Showers Could it only be four years this day since three white New York police officers were convicted of a cover-up in a police station attack on Haitian immigrant Abner Louima? Abner received a nice settlement from the cituy of New York, and he returned to his home island where he did charity works […]

Born Again So now it is 183 dead in the attacks yesterday. I want to swat at the numbers like flies. There is a story in the Times- and I should not have to point out that it is the New York, rather than the Washington version- about the body-washers of Iraq, and the tremendous […]

Down and Dirty The news this morning is cautionary and brisk. Spring Training for Big League Baseball kicked off in Florida and the Southwest, and the photos were taken for bubble-gum cards. There is a furor over Human Growth Hormone use by some of the stars. I don’t believe a word of it. Just because […]