Quote of the Day (Russell Baker, on Summer’s Power ‘To Make Us Suffer and Like It’)

“What must the fish make of it as they pass the American coast with its banks packed with sunning carnivores? There they lie in the millions—their flesh broiling, their hides oiled, their hair stiff with salt, their blankets stained with mustard, their skins bitten by insects, the grit of sand between teeth and toes, their great masked eyes staring blankly into Proust, electric guitars throbbing into their earplugs, and the boredom as thick as crocodiles on the Zambesi. Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American reporter, humorist, and memoirist Russell Baker (1925-2019), “Observer: The Strangest Shores,” The New York Times, June 27, 1965

Quote of the Day (Lynne Truss, on Our ‘Screen-Bound Lives’ and Social Skills)

“Many aspects of our screen-bound lives are bad for our social skills simply because we get accustomed to controlling the information that comes in, managing our relationships electronically, deleting stuff that doesn't interest us. We edit the world; we select from menus; we pick and choose; our social 'group' focuses on us and disintegrates without us. This makes it rather confusing for us when we step outdoors and discover that other people's behaviour can't be deleted with a simple one-stroke command or dragged to the trash icon.” —English journalist, novelist, and radio broadcaster and dramatist Lynne Truss, Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door (2005)

The image accompanying this post, of Lynne Truss at an event for Melville House Press in Brooklyn, was taken on Feb. 13, 2015, by Terry Ballard from Merrick, NY.

Joke of the Day (Emo Phillips, on Him and Technology)

“A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.”—American stand-up comic and actor Emo Phillips in “Quotes on Technology,” Reader’s Digest, June 2009

Maybe true back in 2009. But if the edge lords of today’s tech world have anything to say in the matter (and they will, they will), you can bet that they’ll be crowing about the athletic ability of their latest AI-driven projects before long—even promoting a Computer Olympics.

(The image accompanying this post, of Emo Phillips opening for Weird Al Yankovic at the Apollo Theater, was taken on Mar. 22, 2018, by slgckgc.)

This Day in New York History (Roy Cohn, McCarthy and Trump Whisperer, Dies)

Aug. 2, 1986—While pressed by multiple misconduct charges leading to disbarment, Roy Cohn—a shadowy courtroom presence behind public figures ranging from Sen. Joseph McCarthy to future President Donald Trump—died of complications from AIDS, a disease he denied having.

When I was an undergraduate nearly 50 years ago, I was talking with fellow staffers on my college newspaper about the McCarthy Era, venting my loathing for the senator’s chief counsel. Suddenly, a freshman reporter yelled, “Don’t talk about my Uncle Roy that way!”

To say that I was stunned by this unexpected response would be an understatement. But I was equally amused by the retort of another reporter in the room: “I wouldn’t go boasting about it, Richard.”

Cohn had graduated from the same school where we were matriculating, Columbia University. For all his brilliance (he graduated from the law school at age 20), he remained, a quarter-century after his meteoric rise to fame and notoriety during the Red Scare, a deeply loathed figure on campus.

He was reviled in New York at large and Washington, too, for what many judged his abrasive, ethically edgy representation of clients. But his Rolodex still bulged with prominent people from all walks of life and even both political parties. (Despite closeness to far-right Republicans, he retained the ties to local Democrats developed by his father, a judge and member of the party.)

Clients hoped to benefit not just from his undoubted knowledge of the law, but influence. Ironically, in his last couple of years, even as he falsely claimed he was afflicted with liver cancer, Cohn was calling in chits in the ideologically sympatico Reagan Administration to secure the experimental AIDS medication AZT, then only in the clinical trial stage.

Nearly a decade after his death, Cohn was depicted, in all his splenetic hypocrisy, in Tony Kushner’s epic drama of life during the AIDS years, Angels in America. 

And more than three decades after his passing, he was recalled as the evil mentor of young real estate tycoon-on-the-make Trump, in the documentaries Where’s My Roy Cohn? and Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story Of Roy Cohn, as well as the feature film The Apprentice.

Ivy Meeropol, the director of Bully. Coward. Victim, has special reason to abominate Cohn. As an assistant prosecutor, he was not only instrumental in winning espionage convictions against her grandparents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, but also in communicating in secret with Judge Irving Kaufman about the need to sentence both to death.

(Today, after the release of declassified Soviet archives and USA government intercepts, the historical consensus is that though Julius was guilty of running a spy ring, the evidence against Ethel was far thinner—contradicting Cohn’s ludicrous contention years later to journalist Sidney Zion that she was “the mastermind of this conspiracy.")

Though Cohn facilitated the Rosenbergs’ destruction, it is equally true that he helped engineer the self-immolation of his boss after that trial, McCarthy, during the lawyer’s 18 months as chief counsel for the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

His insane threat to “wreck the Army" if it did not give friend and fellow aide G. David Schine favored treatment in boot camp—and his demand that McCarthy back him up—resulted in the televised hearings that exposed the senator unmistakably as a bullying, reckless threat to the Constitution.

Resigning from his post after the Army-McCarthy hearings, Cohn retreated to New York, where he spent more than two decades building up a profitable practice at his law firm, Saxe, Bacon & Bolan.

By the time that journalist Ken Auletta caught up with him for a December 1978 Esquire article, he was riding high—scoffing at four trials from which he had escaped unscathed, even crowing that his notoriety, rather than being a stigma, furnished him with more publicity and clients.

He had some reason to feel that he’d survived the worst blows thrown at him. By this time, his clients had numbered Francis Cardinal Spellman (who had employed his services in a school prayer case), Barbara Walters (whom he briefly dated), Studio 54 co-owners Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, Aristotle Onassis, Rupert Murdoch, Bianca Jagger, and rumored Mafia chieftains Carmine Galante and “Fat Tony” Salerno.

Nevertheless, Cohn’s ambition and ruthlessness were so relentless as to spark speculation that they were rooted in fear, including of antisemitism. 

Robert Sherrill’s August 2009 review in The Nation of two books pointed to Cohn’s concerns that the public would associate Jews with Marxism, and the lawyer did stun friends with enough slurs directed at co-religionists that it was commonly believed that he was a self-hating Jew.

That behavior was certainly bewildering. But I think Sherrill does not give adequate attention to what was surely Cohn’s more gnawing unease: exposure as a gay man.

As early as the Army-McCarthy hearings, when he and Schien were closely, even inextricably, linked in the public eye, he squirmed as the lawyer representing the military, Joseph Welch, when asked by the senator what a “pixie” meant, responded, “A pixie is a close relation to a fairy. Have I enlightened you?”

As Cohn reveled in his celebrity, whispers about his sexual orientation turned into open conjecture. Auletta, for instance, bluntly asked during an interview if he was gay, and it was difficult to miss the insinuations—starting with the quiet adjectives and adverbs before exploding in the final sentence—in this passage:

“He looks like a killer. Except for the body and the deportment. He's only five feet eight inches tall, 144 pounds. The suit he is wearing this day is dark blue, slightly tucked at the waist, with a faint stripe. A modest paisley tie fades into a nondescript striped shirt. His mannerisms—the licking of the lips, the waving wrists—are effete.”

Six weeks before his death, surely too sick from AIDS to fight with his long accustomed vigor and ruthlessness, he was finally disbarred on several charges, including:

*tricking a dying, elderly multimillionaire client into signing a will naming Cohn as co-executor;

*failing to repay a client $100,000 he’d borrowed for two decades, until the disbarment proceedings started; and

*submitting a false statement on an application to the DC bar.

No summary of the influence of Cohn on life in the second half of the 20^th century—or the first quarter of this one—would be complete without a discussion of his relationship with President Trump, which began in the mid-1970s.

Dennis Rohatyn’s October 2019 post on the Culture Catch Web site criticized Where’s My Roy Cohn? for offering an overly simplified explanation of Cohn’s impact on Trump, leaving the President's overbearing father Fred out of the picture. Fair enough.

But with that said, it’s all too easy to see how Trump absorbed the lessons of his consigliere:

*Never admit wrongdoing, or even a mistake.

*Attack, attack, attack the prosecution.

*The more preposterous a countercharge, the better. (He called the Jewish lawyers from the Nixon Justice Department suing the Trump Organization for refusing to rent to blacks “Gestapo agents,” just as Trump later would weaponize the Justice Department to pursue counter-investigations against officials involved in previous cases against him.)

It’s fair to say that Cohn helped Trump gain his coveted foothold in the Manhattan real estate market with advice on converting the Commodore Hotel into the Hyatt Hotel. 

Then he protected him from the consequences of his playboy lifestyle not only by writing his prenup agreement with Ivana, but also by directing the young Czech emigrant to a lawyer of his own choosing who would review the pact.

For all his tirades about desiring loyalty from aides, Trump displayed little of it as Cohn fought in vain against disbarment and AIDS. The disappearing act did not go unnoticed by the lawyer, who is said to have remarked (in the bowdlerized version) that Trump had ice in his veins.

It is rare that one individual can be seen as a malevolent force in three different eras. But the life of Cohn resoundingly confirms the truth of Shakespeare’s line from Julius Caesar: “The evil that men do lives after them.”

(The image accompanying this post, of Cohn conferring with Sen. McCarthy over questioning of witness William Taylor, was taken on Aug. 23, 1953. It appeared in the Los Angeles Times and is now part of the collection at https://digital.library.ucla.edu/catalog/ark:/21198/zz0002shqk/)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (George Herbert, on Prayer, ‘The Church’s Banquet’)

“Prayer the church’s banquet, angel’s age,
God’s breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth.”—English “metaphysical poet” and Anglican minister George Herbert (1593-1633), “Prayer,” in The Complete Poetry, edited by John Drury (2015)

Photo of the Day: Saint Anthony Chapel, Pittsburgh PA

I took the image accompanying this post three weeks ago, on a short visit to Pittsburgh.

While touring the Troy Hill neighborhood on the city’s North Side, a close relative and I had hoped to see the venerable shrine. Unfortunately it was closed when we came around noon on a Friday, and we had to move on. But as I stood outside, even its exterior filled me with an aesthetic and spiritual sense of wonder.

The two-steepled Saint Anthony Chapel is laid out in a cruciform shape (i.e., in the form of a cross), with a pointed Romanesque arch at its center.

You’d never know that this modest house of worship, built to minister to a predominantly German immigrant population towards the end of the 19^th century, contains what is believed to be the greatest collection of relics outside the Vatican.

Although the relic dealing directly with St. Anthony of Padua here is a molar (the only part of the saint outside his hometown in Italy), more than 5,000 relics of other saints are contained inside, arranged in altars and side cases constructed of hand-carved solid walnut. Saints represented include the first martyr, Stephen; Frances of Rome, Philip Neri, Macharius and Stephana.

The dynamic force in collecting all of this was the shrine’s founder, the Belgian-born Father Suitbert G. Mollinger. He was able to secure so many relics because he traveled so widely and used his family’s great wealth for the acquisitions.

After Fr. Mollinger died in 1892, the chapel passed into the hands of the Archdiocese of Pittsburgh, which considered closing it when it couldn’t afford repairs because of hard financial times for the area in the late 1970s. Luckily the crisis was averted and the shrine remains for pilgrims offering prayers.

Quote of the Day (Michel de Montaigne, on Discussing Yourself)

“By publishing and indicting my imperfections I may teach someone to fear them. The parts that I most esteem in myself derive more honor from self-accusation than from self-commendation. That is why I so often return to self-accusation and linger over it. Yet, when all is said and done, you never talk about yourself without loss. Self-accusations are always believed, self-praise never is.” —French essayist Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), Essays, Book 3, Chapter 8, “The Art of Discussion,” translated by New Zealand-born philosopher and historian Jonathan Bennett (1930–2024)