Spiritual Quote of the Day (St. John Paul II, on ‘Emigration in Search of Work’)

“[T]he person working away from his native land, whether as a permanent emigrant or as a seasonal worker, should not be placed at a disadvantage in comparison with the other workers in that society in the matter of working rights. Emigration in search of work must in no way become an opportunity for financial or social exploitation. As regards the work relationship, the same criteria should be applied to immigrant workers as to all other workers in the society concerned. The value of work should be measured by the same standard and not according to the difference in nationality, religion or race. For even greater reason the situation of constraint in which the emigrant may find himself should not be exploited. All these circumstances should categorically give way, after special qualifications have of course been taken into consideration, to the fundamental value of work, which is bound up with the dignity of the human person. Once more the fundamental principle must be repeated: the hierarchy of values and the profound meaning of work itself require that capital should be at the service of labor and not labor at the service of capital.”—Polish-born pope St. John Paul II (1920-2005), in the encyclical Laborem Exercens (“On Human Work”), issued Sept. 14, 1981

This Day in Journalism History (Raines Begins Trying ‘Times’ Running the Gray Lady)

Sept. 5, 2001—Howell Raines took over as executive editor of The New York Times with superabundant self-confidence. In two stormy years atop the “paper of record,” he exuded a grating self-righteousness. Several years later, following revelations of widespread fabrication and fraud by reporter Jayson Blair on his watch, he reviewed his fall from the newspaper where he had worked for 25 years with self-pity.

Less than a week after assuming control, Raines threw the paper’s overwhelming resources into the biggest story that he and other journalists had ever covered: the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

At first, it seemed to vindicate his philosophy of “flooding the zone,” or devoting saturation coverage to a major news event, day after day. In his first year at the helm, The Times won Pulitzer Prizes, including the first given to its metro desk since the 1950s.

But more than he or his acolytes realized, all that celebration and self-congratulation were not entirely warranted.

First, the staff responsible for producing the prize-winning stories (including its ongoing special section, “A Nation Challenged”) had been largely picked and guided by predecessor Joseph Lelyveld.

Second, as noted in Eric Boehlert’s Salon post-mortem on the scandal that ended Howell’s reign, top editors’ direction of the DC bureau’s news coverage “represented an unprecedented attempt to micromanage the newspaper and infuriated editors and reporters, many of whom began to flee to other papers and other jobs.”

Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., the publisher of the newspaper who had selected Raines for the top editorial post, should have taken more seriously a December 2022 Newsweek article warning of newsroom rumblings about this direction. 

He must have sensed that, for all his friend’s talent (a Pulitzer Prize winner himself, for a 1992 Times Magazine essay about his family’s maid, Grady Hutchinson, in the segregated South of his childhood) and experience (bureau chief stints in Atlanta, London, and Washington), Raines needed to relax his management style.

According to Ken Auletta’s June 2002 New Yorker profile, “The Howell Doctrine,” Sulzberger not only cautioned Raines that he could not employ the star system he had used as Washington bureau chief, but confided in associates "that he would have blocked Raines’ promotion [to executive editor] if Sulzberger was not convinced that he had changed.”

But you might as well ask a leopard to change its spots. It wasn’t enough that Raines thought he had a mandate from Sulzberger to make the paper “smarter, livelier, and more appealing to the geographically diverse and demanding national audience on which its future depends,” as he put it in a May 2004 Atlantic Monthly account of his tenure. 

He also saw a conflict between “the senior editors who endorsed these improvements and traditionalists on the newsroom floor and among mid-level managers.” The latter, he claimed, “wanted the paper to stay the way it was.”

The members of the latter faction went unnamed. There is every reason to think that the claim was fatuous, a grope in the dark by a former journalism giant too blind to understand how his own failings led to his departure from the job he craved and the paper he loved.

In his first day on the job, Raines thought he was sending a symbolic signal to staff by putting on his desk a copy of the Charles Gaines 1972 novel Stay Hungry, the application of which seemed obvious to him in a competitive news environment.

But he missed the other signals that the newsroom picked up about his imperious manner in fielding questions at breakfasts and lunches, including an expression that even friends thought made him look like “an angry hawk.”

Terms other than “flooding the zone” might better describe the coverage that Raines soon assigned to some topics, with the most polite being “crusade.” “Obsession” would fit even better. “Hobbyhorse” might have worked especially well in some instances:

* The verdict was most mixed on the Roman Catholic Church abuse scandal. No doubt, an institution to which one in five Americans belonged at the time needed to be scrutinized, and there was no doubt that exposing the misdeeds of individual priests and the coverup by the hierarchy prevented countless future crimes. But the number of collective column inches, the lack of oversight on individual stories, and the secular viewpoint of the paper’s staff and readership raised real questions about objectivity and even anti-Catholic bias. (For instance, assuming that TV showrunner David Kelley was “raised Catholic,” it headlined a review of one of his scripts about the abuse scandal, “A Catholic Writer Brings His Anger to 'The Practice'”—and needed to run a correction when it turned out that Kelley was, in fact, raised Protestant.) Moreover, Raines’ motives for propelling the coverage were hardly pure; Martin Baron, executive editor of The Boston Globe, later told Roy Harris for a 2008 article for Poynter that he heard his counterpart at the Times was “annoyed that we were onto the biggest story of the year and seemingly headed to a Pulitzer,” and determined that his paper would cover it at the national level and consign the Globe to local stories about the scandal.

*The Bush administration claim that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction was certainly covered in depth, but without the skepticism it deserved. A 2004 “Editor’s Note,” after an internal investigation, concluded that Judith Miller’s stories on this justification for the war buildup that “information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged” by senior management at the time—an assessment that Raines predictably took issue with.

* Campaigning incessantly for the Augusta National Golf Course to open to women was hardly the most consequential story in Raines’ tenure, but it was certainly the one that provoked the most ridicule. The revelation of spiked columns by two writers who disagreed with the position only made matters worse.

But the Blair fiasco represented a fundamental challenge to the Times’ credibility that could not be ignored.

What Raines’ friends and defenders downplayed, in noting that other journalists were not forced out of their positions or faced such dire damage to their reputations for their misdeeds, were the sheet multiplicity and breadth of Blair’s transgressions, including fake quotes; locations supposedly visited even as he sat in his Brooklyn apartment; details invented from photographs and other news reports; and passages plagiarized from other reporters.

An exhaustive, nearly 7,500-word post-mortem that, to his credit, Raines authorized, concluded that at least 36 of Blair’s final 73 stories filed before his resignation were tainted by fraud. 

Worse, high-level figures such as Washington editor Jill Abramson and metro editor Jonathan Landman had been raising red flags, with Landman even warning, in a blunt April 2002 memo, “We have to stop Jayson from writing for the Times. Right now.”

Five works elapsed after Blair's firing before Sulzberger took further action. When Raines could not contain the mushrooming scandal or the newsroom muttering that had now become a cacophony, he and managing editor Gerald Boyd were forced to resign.

The disappointment must have been enormous when Raines finally grasped that he would function as an agent of change at the Gray Lady in a far different fashion than he expected.

Largely because of the Blair scandal, the Times instituted the ombudsman position (or, as they called it, a “public editor”), an independent watchdog who investigated reader complaints of inaccuracy and unfairness. 

Six journalists performed that function for the next 14 years, until the paper decided that the rise of social media helped maintain accountability. (I still think that was a mistake.)

In Andy Robinson’s July 2017 retrospective on the position in the Columbia Journalism Review, Margaret Sullivan, the penultimate Times public editor, noted the scandal epitomized “so many issues that were and still are happening in newsrooms: the effort to diversify the staff, people who find mentors, the pressure that reporters are under, the intense pressure that they’re under at places like The New York Times, the things that can go wrong, the way that in the new age you could simply be talking to your editor on your cell phone, and they wouldn’t know where you were.”

Quote of the Day (Simone de Beauvoir, on ‘Authentic Love’)

“Authentic love must be founded on reciprocal recognition of two freedoms; each lover would then experience himself as himself and as the other: neither would abdicate his transcendence, they would not mutilate themselves; together they would both reveal values and ends in the world.”— French existentialist philosopher, social theorist, novelist, and feminist activist Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), The Second Sex (1949)

Quote of the Day (P. G. Wodehouse, on a Desperate Young Man)

“A young man with dark circles under his eyes was propping himself up against a penny-in-the-slot machine. An undertaker, passing at that moment, would have looked at this young man sharply, scenting business. So would a buzzard.” — English humorist P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975), The Luck of the Bodkins (1935)

This Day in Literary History (Alison Lurie, Smart, Tart Pulitzer Winner, Born)

Sept. 3, 1926—Alison Lurie, who used her longtime career in academe as material for critically acclaimed fiction, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1984 novel Foreign Affairs, was born in Chicago.

I first encountered the work of Lurie in the mid-Seventies, with her biting academic satire The War Between the Tates. Though she had written four prior novels, this was the first to attract widespread attention—enough for it to land on the bestseller lists and to be adapted into a 1977 TV movie starring Elizabeth Ashley, Richard Crenna, and Annette O'Toole.

For anyone wanting to know what how the nation’s campuses were roiled in the late Sixties by the Vietnam War, women’s lib, and the sexual revolution, this insider’s take, with its cool irony, remains an excellent place to start.

Many neophyte authors follow the mantra “write about what you know,” but I was unaware until I started researching this post just how closely Ms. Lurie followed that.

Several of her novels (including The War Between the Tates) feature characters from Corinth University, a school that shares a classical association and upstate New York setting with the institution where Ms. Lurie taught for decades, Cornell University.

Her female protagonists (the same age, within a few years, of Ms. Lurie) are often involved with children’s literature—her academic specialty. She couldn’t help but regard with tart disdain how these books were viewed by her colleagues, as in this passage from Foreign Affairs:

“For the truth is that children’s literature is a poor relation in her department –indeed, in most English departments: a stepdaughter grudgingly tolerated because, as in the old tales, her words are glittering jewels of a sort that attract large if not equally brilliant masses of undergraduates. Within the departmental family she sits in the chimney-corner, while her idle, ugly siblings dine at the chairman’s table –though, to judge by enrollment figures, many of them must spout toads and lizards.”

With all of that said, readers should be careful not to construe her fiction as directly autobiographical. Maintaining the kind of ironic distance she was able to keep towards her characters would have been difficult, if not impossible, if they derived entirely from her experiences and emotions.

For instance, like Erica Tate in The War Between the Tates, Lurie suffered through the collapse of her marriage to another academic. But, while the marital conflict in the novel was brought to a boil by an extramarital affair, Lurie’s marriage deteriorated as her first husband underwent a conversion to Roman Catholicism—a spiritual orientation that, as the child of religious skeptics, she had little or no use for.

Over the years, I have wondered why Ms. Lurie was unable to sustain her mid-career popularity. Some of it may relate to the fact that creators of so-called “literary fiction” don’t work in genres where they can become “brand authors.”

But I suspect most of the problem instead rests with her frequent recourse to the academic environment she knew so thoroughly—a setting outside the experience of many common readers in the U.S. Throughout most of her career, her popularity was higher in the U.K., where writers such as A.S. Byatt, Kingsley Amis, David Lodge, and Iris Murdoch have enjoyed success with “campus novels.”

Readers who do try Ms. Lurie will find a fiction writer able to put her literary influences to use in contemporary contexts:

*Her consistently wry narrative voice (you can practically see her narrators raise their eyebrows) is reminiscent of Jane Austen.

*With his “international novels” (featuring encounters between innocent Americans and more jaded British), interest in artists, and midlife fascination with the supernatural, Henry James provided Lurie with another template.

*And her intense study of children’s literature led Lurie to plumb the complex personalities and frequent fears of the very young.

Above all, Lurie exemplifies the tendency of so many writers—no matter their time or nation—to write from a personal wound. With Lurie, that wound began even before childhood, in birth. As she wrote in a 1982 essay for The New York Times Book Review:

“I was a skinny, plain, off-looking little girl, deaf in one badly damaged ear from a birth injury, and with a resulting atrophy of the facial muscles that pulled my mouth sideways whenever I opened it to speak and turned my smile into a sort of sneer. I was clever, or, as one of my teachers put it, ‘too clever for her own good,’ but not especially charming or affectionate or helpful. I couldn't seem to learn to ride a bike or sing in tune, and I was always the last person chosen for any team.”

The precocious but lonely child took refuge in books, especially, at that young age, fairy tales. To her joy, she discovered her own personal superpower: “With a pencil and paper I could revise the world.”

It made the difference in her life, which ended six years ago in a hospice in Ithaca, NY.

Lurie would be delighted to know that admirers of her fiction are celebrating the centenary of her birth on both sides of the Atlantic this month. In New York City, the 92^nd Street Y will host “Alison Lurie at 100” on Tuesday, September 15, featuring authors Bruce Handy, Joanna Rakoff, and Micah Perks in conversation with Cody Upton.

And in London, the British Library hosts “An American in London: A Celebration of Alison Lurie” on September 29, with speakers including Amanda Craig, Elly Griffiths, and Dame Margaret Drabble.

Quote of the Day (Sir Ben Okri, on Museums As ‘A Tremendous Force for Public Good’)

“The best way to spend £20 is a visit to a good museum, most of which are still free in Britain. Long may this continue. It is a tremendous force for public good. I recommend that you donate half of your £20 to the museum after such a visit, to help them with their work. A pot of tea and some biscuits are all you need to restore yourself before heading back out into the mild hallucination of the outside world.” — Nigerian-born British poet and novelist Sir Ben Okri, "The Aesthete: Ben Okri,” The Financial Times, Aug. 1, 2026 (“How To Spend It” supplement)

Unlike Britain, most U.S. museums charge admission fees. But Sir Ben’s point remains well taken: museums are a “tremendous force for public good” in terms of what they can teach visitors. Let’s keep it that way.

Quote of the Day (Studs Terkel, on the ‘Assault Upon Our Intelligence’)

“I’ve always felt… that there’s a deep decency in the American people and a native intelligence — providing they have the facts, providing they have the information. The September 11 assault was horrendous. But there’s another assault that’s taking place. It’s an assault upon our intelligence. It’s an assault upon our sense of decency as well as upon our faiths too, I believe. We are the most powerful nation in the world, but we’re not the only nation in the world. We are not the only people in the world. We are an important people, the wealthiest, the most powerful and, to a great extent, generous. But we are part of the world.” —Pulitzer Prize-winning American oral historian, actor, and broadcaster Studs Terkel (1912-2008) interviewed for PBS “Religion and Ethics Newsweekly,” Dec. 19, 2003

In the two decades since Terkel’s remarks, I would have to say that the “assault upon our intelligence” has grown more relentless, and, in important ways, has even breached longtime defenses.

Quote of the Day (William H. Whyte, on ‘The Great Enemy of Communication’)

“The great enemy of communication…is the illusion of it. We have talked enough; but we have not listened. And by not listening we have failed to concede the immense complexity of our society—and thus the great gaps between ourselves and those with whom we seek understanding.”— American urbanist, journalist, and people-watcher William H. Whyte (1917-1999), “Is Anybody Listening?”, Fortune, September 1950

TV Quote of the Day (‘Desperate Housewives,’ In Which Gaby Assesses Her Husband’s Life Change)

Gaby Solis [played by Eva Longoria] to her suddenly socially conscious husband: “Carlos, you help the poor and downtrodden... a group with a very flexible schedule.”— Desperate Housewives, Season 8, Episode 23, “Finishing the Hat,” original air date May 13, 2012, teleplay by Marc Cherry, Jason Ganzel, and Brian Tanen, directed by David Grossman

This Day in Military History (Afghanistan War Ends in Chaotic U.S. Withdrawal)

Aug. 30, 2021—Less than two weeks removed from the anticipated complete withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, Taliban forces forced that timetable to be radically revised.

Army Major General Chris Donahue represented not just just the last U.S. service member to leave at the end of a chaotic two-week period, but also the failure of America’s two-decade effort at nation-building in the country that harbored the 9/11 terrorists.

More than a few officials bore responsibility for this ignominious end to America’s longest war, but the one left holding the bag was President Joe Biden. Coming eight months into his administration, the images of civilians clinging to a military transport plane and a suicide bombing that killed 13 U.S. service members demoralized TV viewers who had never seen or had forgotten similar scenes of disarray in Saigon in April 1975.

Biden’s approval rating fell from 49 percent at the start of August 2021 to 43 percent a month later, according to Gallup polling, and never really recovered after that.

Periodically, American foreign-policy or military failures lead to the question, “Who lost it?”, as occurred in China and Vietnam. The Biden administration was certainly responsible for setting up a symbolic but arbitrary withdrawal date (the anniversary of 9/11) that left inadequate time for planning an orderly transfer to complete Afghan military self-reliance.

But multiple mistakes, as early as America’s initial airstrikes in October 2001, ensured that this would be a waste of American blood and treasure, including:

*Failing to catch Osama bin-Laden quickly: In an August 2021 Wall Street Journal analysis, Eliot Cohen thought that several brigades of light infantry were needed to finish off al Qaeda. Instead, bin-Laden eluded capture and remain the symbol (if not operational leader) of the terrorist network until he was killed a decade later in a raid into Pakistan.

*The Iraq War diverted needed men and equipment from Afghanistan. Five years ago, Jonah Blank, a former policy adviser to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, observed in an article for The Atlantic, “the original sin of the war in Afghanistan was going to war in Iraq.” Bush advisers sought to convince the American public that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was a destabilizing force in the region, but he did not have weapons of mass destruction, as they claimed. The result of the change in focus was detrimental to the U.S. long-range campaign in Afghanistan, according to Blank: “Too light a troop presence in Afghanistan meant that security was never truly established; too little money actually delivered meant that the fledgling government was never able to prove its credibility to its own people; too little focus from U.S. policy makers meant that a highly centralized governing structure, imposed on a never-before-centralized nation, could not be prevented from degenerating into nepotism, ineffectiveness, and rampant corruption. Failure to provide enough troops, money, and focus on the front end resulted in exponentially more troops, money, and focus down the line."

*Misguided drone use. Some military experts thought that, after instituting a troop surge following his inauguration in 2009, Barack Obama’s announced mass drawdown five years later occurred when Afghan security forces were still inadequately trained. But his authorization of more drone attacks was arguably worse, leading to civilian casualties that turned much of the population (along with then-Afghan President Hamid Karzai) against the continuing American presence.

*Corruption in the Afghan government: As early as August 2012, in a statement to the House Armed Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, Vanda Felbab-Brown of the Brookings Institutions warned, “Afghans have become disconnected and alienated from the national government and the country’s other power arrangements,” resenting “the abuse of power, impunity, and lack of justice that have become entrenched over the past decade.”

*Lies and concealment among American political and military leaders about progress in the war: In December 2019, the Washington Post revealed that American officials, fearing the consequences of what might ensue once Americans left Afghanistan, misled the public by spinning casualty counts and other data. Behind the scenes, it was another story, with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, for instance, throwing up his hands in a September 2003 memo: “I have no visibility into who the bad guys are.”

*Donald Trump left a skeletal American force in the country just as Biden was to be inaugurated. The administration announcement that only 2,500 troops would remainat that point came despite the lack of an agreement between Taliban and Afghan government negotiators—and a warning by NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg warns that too rapid a drawdown could expose the Afghan regime to collapse.

The public’s overwhelming feeling of futility at the Taliban’s resumption of control was palpable. But a few other aspects of the conflict got lost along the way:

*American concern about oil at least partly accounted for bin Laden’s murderous rage. George H.W. Bush ordered American troops placed in Saudi Arabia to counter a potential threat after Iraq invaded Kuwait. Those forces remained in the kingdom even after the successful conclusion of Operation Desert Storm to enforce no-fly zones protecting the Kurds. Bin Laden cited that presence as a primary reason for waging jihad against the U.S.

*Questions remain about the full extent of Saudi involvement with 9/11. Though the administration of George W. Bush never specifically claimed that Saddam Hussein collaborated with bin Laden on 9/11, officials mentioned the dictator and terrorist so often together that many Americans jumped to that conclusion. They were far more pointed in claiming there was no high-level Saudi government support for the attack. But most of the 9/11 hijackers (as well as bin Laden himself) came from the country. A lawsuit by 9/11 victim families turned up a growing body of circumstantial evidence that the Saudi government was being disingenuous about these connections.

*The overarching War on Terror distracted from countering the growing Chinese threat in Asia. The phrase “War on Terror” itself provided the Chinese regime with vocabulary to justify cracking down on the Muslim Uyghur minority in Xinjiang. Moreover, military and intelligence resources that the Bush administration could have devoted to monitoring Chinese saber-rattling in the Far East were devoted instead to Afghanistan and Iraq.

(The image accompanying this post, of U.S. Army Soldiers assigned to the 10th Mountain Division standing security at Hamid Karzai International Airport, Kabul, Afghanistan, was taken on Aug. 15, 2021, by Sgt. Isaiah Campbell.)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Thomas Merton, on Love and Worthiness)

“Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody’s business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy.” —American Trappist monk, theologian, memoirist and poet Thomas Merton (1915-1968), “The Power and Meaning of Love,” in Disputed Questions (1960)

Quote of the Day (Mila Kunis, on Advice That Has Stuck With Her)

“Don't make permanent decisions on temporary feelings. Also, it's OK to change your mind. That's the biggest thing I wish I could go back and change about my youth. It’s all right to say, ‘You know what, I don’t like this anymore. I’m going to move on.’”— Ukrainian-American actress and model Mila Kunis, now 43, on advice given that she's found useful, quoted by Ava Mason, “My Monday Morning: Mila Kunis,” WSJ. Magazine, December 2025-January 2026

The image accompanying this post of Mila Kunis, speaking at the 2012 San Diego Comic-Con International in San Diego, CA, was taken on July 12, 2012, by Gage Skidmore of Peoria, AZ.

Quote of the Day (Margaret Atwood, With a Bad Guess About American Culture in the Past Decade)

“What sorts of novels, poems, films, television series, video games, paintings, music, or graphic novels will adequately reflect America’s next decade? We don’t have any idea yet. We can’t: Nothing is predictable except unpredictability. It’s probably fair to say, however, that Donald Trump’s interest in the arts, gauged on a scale from one to 100, is somewhere between zero and negative 10—lower than any president in the last 50 years. Some of those presidents didn’t give a hoot about the arts, but at least they found it politic to pretend. Trump won’t. In fact, he may not even notice they’re there.”—Canadian novelist, poet, and essayist Margaret Atwood, “Creative Reconstruction,” The Nation, Feb. 6/13, 2017

Margaret Atwood developed a reputation as a master dystopian novelist with The Handmaid’s Tale, but I’m afraid that her soothsaying capabilities have failed in at least one respect. Had she substituted “appreciation” for “interest” in the above paragraph, I would have had no quarrel with her prediction.

Yet it turns out that Donald Trump is very much interested in American art and culture. It all goes back to what conservative Republican and former speechwriter Peggy Noonan called in her recent Wall Street Journal column “The Art of the Self-Deal.”

In other words, whatever or whoever trumpets his name, money, and allies, meets with his approval. But whoever interferes with any of these, he will go beyond the already vast powers of his office to crush them.

Count among the latter Army Chief of Staff Randy George, fired without explanation earlier this year by Trump’s Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth. Perhaps not so coincidentally, George had refused to kill a probe into an unauthorized Apache helicopter flyover near the Nashville estate of Kid Rock, according to this Hollywood Reporter account from earlier this week.

In implementing plans by his Orwellian titled Department of Government Efficiency to terminate funding for more than 1,400 National Endowment for the Humanities grants totaling more than $100 million, Trump hoped to demoralize key portions of academe.

But the algorithms that triggered many of the cuts were so ridiculous that a federal judge ordered the grants’ reinstatement in May—and even Brian T. Allen, writing for the venerable conservative magazine National Review, was forced to concede, “Entrusting the cancellation of grants to twentysomething tech nerds was a big mistake.”

Moreover, the Kennedy Center controversy continues. Trump couldn’t stop with replacing former trustees with ones of his choosing, all of whom bent over backwards to rename that much-loved Washington performing arts center in his honor. More recently, he has threatened, if it’s not allowed to proceed with plans for a renovation that might not even be needed, to simply knock the whole building down.

Even before becoming President, Trump wanted his name on all his business ventures, as part of his branding effort. It’s a different matter when he’s talking about buildings that, properly speaking, belong to the people of the United States and not him and that traditionally honor retired or, better yet, dead American figures.

Nevertheless, he has no compunction about plastering his name and/or image not just on the Kennedy Center but, among other initiatives, on the Interior Department’s “America the Beautiful” pass, the State Department’s Institute for Peace, or limited-edition U.S. passports.

When late-night comics predictably mocked the President (as they should, and as they have done with other incumbents of both parties), Paramount yielded to FCC pressure over its planned merger with Skydance Media to cancel Stephen Colbert’s longtime perch on CBS—and Jimmy Kimmel only narrowly avoided a similar fate at ABC.

Anytime something happens, Trump always wants to make it about him. Poor Dolly Parton couldn’t pass away without the President claiming to conservative commentator Glenn Beck, on scant evidence, that the country-music icon “really liked me, I will tell you!” (If she did, she kept it very well hidden—rejecting the Presidential Medal of Freedom from both Trump and Biden, so as not to alienate either Republican or Democratic fans.)

I guess we should probably qualify Ms. Atwood’s statement above in another sense. When she is referring to “the arts,” it is true that Trump could care less about, say, literature, classical music, or the visual arts. But he may be our most show-business President in the same sense that Lincoln was our quintessential war President.

His second term continues the pattern from his first in commanding the nation’s attention 24/7. That is not a compliment: no society can be counted as well when its citizens cannot carve out for themselves a private realm where the mind is not dominated by images from the state.

Unfortunately, this second term has abundantly proved that Atwood was overly optimistic that Trump wouldn’t notice the presence of arts programs.

But she was absolutely correct in believing that “Nothing is predictable except unpredictability”—at least when it comes to a wildly capricious President intent as much on self-aggrandizement as on retribution towards opponents.

Joke of the Day (Tina Fey, on a New Form of Plastic Surgery)

“There's a new procedure I'm doing a lot where they freeze your fat off you, then make it into a whipped dessert, and you eat it again.” — American actress and screenwriter Tina Fey, quoted by Dan Snierson, “Tina and Amy Boss Us Around (And You Love It!)”, Entertainment Weekly, Dec. 20, 2013

Song Lyric of the Day (Dolly Parton, on Her ‘Coat of Many Colors’)

“My coat of many colors that my mama made for me,
Made only from rags, but I wore it so proudly.
Now I know we had no money, but I was rich as I could be.
In my coat of many colors my mama made for me.”—Grammy-winning country-music singer-songwriter Dolly Parton (1946-2026), title tune from her Coat of Many Colors LP (1971)
 
There’s a reason why Dolly Parton was remembered not just with respect for her talent, but even with love for her personality: she was so transparently down to earth. She never forgot where she came from: Locust Ridge, TN, in a tiny log cabin with her parents and 11 siblings, but without electricity or running water.
 
There will certainly be those who say that she achieved success through hard work. No argument from me there. But I think it’s also fair to say that, despite what some cynics say, you don’t have to step on other people’s toes to get ahead in life. Her career proved that, too, in abundance.

(The image accompanying this post, of Dolly Parton accepting the Liseberg Applause Award 2010, was created on Nov. 16, 2010, by Curtis Hilbun.)

Quote of the Day (Teresa Carpenter, on ‘Crime As Entertainment’ in the Eighties)

“It would be no exaggeration to call the ’80s the decade of Crime as Entertainment. An epoch where fascination with ‘reality’ permeated every nook and crevice of television. The first and most visible manifestation of the phenomenon was the unprecedented number of miniseries and movies-of-the-week based loosely upon true tales of mayhem. In 1981, there was Murder in Texas recreating the demise of Texas heiress and equestrian, Joan Hill. The following year brought The Executioner’s Song based upon Norman Mailer’s Pulitzer Prize–winning account of the felonious life and ultimate electrocution of Gary Gilmore. Nineteen-eighty-four was a bloody year, giving us both The Burning Bed and Fatal Vision, followed close upon by the following year’s extravaganza, The Atlanta Child Murders. Nineteen-eighty-seven produced not one, but two, network miniseries on the rather minor case of Frances Schreuder, a demented Mormon heiress who induced her son to kill her father. And, of course, in the closing months of the decade were offerings fresh off the newsstands: The Preppie Murder and Howard Beach: Making the Case for Murder.”— Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Teresa Carpenter, “1980-1989: Crime as Entertainment,” The Village Voice, Jan. 2, 1990

Forty years ago today, the crime referred to in the above paragraph, “The Preppy Murder,” occurred in Central Park. In the attempt to create “entertainment” out of a story, the media’s use of “preppy” represented a misnomer. 

That would not be the only distortion involving the case. To the shame of the American legal system, the next one perpetuated sexism that violated female victims all over again.

It has infuriated me that, though account after account eventually got around to the exact background of the accused, Robert Chambers, the words “preppy killer” and “privilege” appeared to leach out these subtleties. 

His mother was an Irish-born private nurse who struggled to scrape together enough to pay (with the help of scholarships) his way into several private schools, including York Preparatory School. Though trying to pass in the circles of wealth, Robert possessed neither the affluence nor the self-assurance that came with the term “preppy.”

Thank God the press didn’t have an equivalent term to latch onto in the early 1900s, when Chester Gillette, a poor relation of an industrialist, took his pregnant girlfriend on a lake in upstate New York, clubbed her while out alone on their boat, and left her to drown. 

In fact, Gillette briefly attended a prep school in his youth, but in all the subsequent accounts of the case—the breathless newspaper reports as well as, in fictional form, Theodore Dreiser’s novel An American Tragedy and the Montgomery Clift film A Place in the Sun—that aspect of his life was not emphasized, unlike the Chambers case. (I examined that earlier crime in this blog post from 18 years ago.)

What did come up was the moral vacuity that led the social-climbing Griffith to that point. 

It is that same soul emptiness, it seems to me, that lies unaddressed, after acres of newsprint and hours of news footage, in the story of how Chambers ended the life of Jennifer Levin, the 18-year-old with whom he left the Upper East Side bar Dorian’s a little after 4 in the morning. Less than two hours later, she was found dead in Central Park, strangled.

It would, then, have been fine to call the person who took her life “The Central Park Strangler,” as some news outlets did, because that's exactly the act that occurred. 

But editors needed a way to convey the morbid fascination with a tall, well-dressed, handsome youth. “Preppy” did the trick.

Then Chambers—first in accounts to the police quickly picking apart his story, then through his attorney Jack Litman—began with a contortion act of his own. While engaged in intercourse with him in the park, she had “hurt” him, he claimed, and an “accident” occurred when he tried to disengage.

The shamelessness of the statement was breathtaking: not only was her capacity to “hurt” him limited because she was nearly a foot shorter and 100 pounds lighter than Chambers, but the scratch marks on his face indicated that she had engaged in a desperate struggle against him—and now, being dead, the victim had no way to dispute his story.

Litman employed the same defense he used nearly a decade before in staving off a murder conviction for client Richard Herrin for killing ex-girlfriend Bonnie Garland—i.e., insinuate that the victim, in her relationship with the defendant, was responsible for her own death.

The judge in the Central Park case dismissed Litman’s motion to introduce Levin’s diary as evidence at the trial. But the lawyer had already characterized it to the press as a record of her encounters with other young men.  Moreover, for a New York Magazine cover story about the case, he made sure to contrast Chambers’ past as an altar boy with Levin's dating history.

Litman sowed enough doubts about Levin’s character to induce a jury deadlock for more than a week on the second-degree murder charge against Chambers. Rather than put the Levin family through the trauma of another trial, prosecutor Linda Fairstein agreed to Litman’s proposal that Chambers plead guilty to first-degree manslaughter.

Then, with the trial over, a video emerged that depicted the former altar boy in a rather different light: out on bail, at a party surrounded by women, twisting the head off a doll before pronouncing, in a high-pitched voice, “I think I killed her.”

It was too late to affect jury deliberations, though it certainly may have led some members of the public to rethink their fascination and even support for the clean-cut young man. It certainly would have lent credence to the charge that he displayed depraved indifference to human life.

Even after serving the full 15 years of his sentence, Chambers was not done with the law. Arrested again in 2004, this time for drugs, he served 100 days in Riker’s Island, then was arrested a third time in 1907, for drugs again. He did not leave Sullivan Maximum Security Correctional Facility in upstate New York until three years ago.

Ironically, he spent more time as an involuntary guest of the state for his substance abuse problems than he did for taking Levin’s life.

After seeing her daughter traduced by the defense and the media, Ellen Levin became a victim’s-rights advocate, lobbying for “rape-shield” legislation that limited defenses’ attempts to discuss a victim’s prior sexual history.

Unfortunately, today, even after the MeToo movement—and perhaps as backlash to that social phenomenon—defense lawyers still resort to smearing victims, justifying it, as Litman did 40 years ago, as part of their responsibility to represent clients, no matter how unpopular those defendants or those tactics might be.

In that sense, the “crime as entertainment” that Carpenter noted 36 years ago remains a staple of the court system—only this time the drama is a legal horror show. And the public fascination with good-looking defendants continued with Luigi Mangione in the first months after his arrest for murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

I experienced the same sense of deja vu when I read the title of a YouTube video from Australia about the latter case: "What would drive a young, privileged white man to kill?"

This Day in Art History (Death of Thomas Moran, Painter of Dramatic Western Landscapes)

Aug. 25, 1926— Thomas Moran, a British emigrant whose many sweeping landscapes led him to become known as “the dean of American painting,” died at age 89 at his home in Santa Barbara, CA.

His most significant art resulted from his participation in Ferdinand V. Hayden's 1871 Geological Survey Expedition to the Yellowstone region in the West. When he returned east, Congress bought for inclusion in the Capitol Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone (pictured) and The Chasm of the Colorado, for the then-princely sum of $10,000 each.

The sensation that these sparked created a groundswell of support for creating, within a year, Yellowstone National Park—the cornerstone of the parks system that a Ken Burns documentary called “America’s Best Idea.”

Displacement motivated the Moran family’s migrations in his childhood, an involuntary movement that he would later convert to a more positive—and lucrative—wanderlust. 

His parents, who were handloom weavers, had left Dublin, Ireland for Bolton, Lancashire, England to improve their economic prospects. But mechanization put them out of work and compelled them to move to Kensington, just outside Philadelphia, PA.

While working as an apprentice at a local wood engraving firm, Moran took up painting and drawing, until he became adept at watercolors and illustrations. Influenced by British landscape painter J.M.W. Turner, Moran was uninterested in “realism,” but instead aimed for “idealization.” “The mere restatement of an external scene is never a work of art, is never a picture,” he explained.

Despite his strenuous attempts to build his practice and reputation, Moran was not a logical addition to the 1871 Geological Survey Expedition, in the eyes of others or even necessarily himself. First, the very idea of having an artist dedicated solely to recording impressions of a new territory hadn’t even occurred to the normally visionary Thomas Jefferson when he authorized the Lewis and Clark Expedition nearly seven decades before.

But the rumors of wonders in the Yellowstone region—along with entrepreneurs like Jay Cooke who hoped advertisements would stir travel to this virtually unknown American interior—sparked the need for a visual record of what was encountered. 

A railroad manager and friend of Moran’s urged Hayden to hire him for this purpose, with the added inducement that the artist would pay his own way and simply hoped for a cavalry escort for protection.

It does not appear that Hayden and his associates were informed that Moran was frail and had never trekked through anything approximating the physical environment where he would go now. But he quickly impressed his counterpart in photography on the expedition, William Henry Jackson, with his “fine courage…[N]one was more untiring on the trail, or less mindful of unaccustomed food or hard bed under a little shelter tent, than he was.”

For most of the 1870s, to be closer to New York publishers who published his work in their magazines, Moran and his wife Mary (another artist) lived in Newark, NJ. In the early 1880s they relocated to East Hampton, NY, the beginning of that town’s status as an art mecca. (Today, their studio is a National Historic Landmark overseen by the East Hampton Historical Society.)

Public taste can be fickle, and Moran had to adapt to buyers no longer interested in the Far West scenes that had once caused sensations. With obvious resignation about the changing art market, Moran told a reporter, "I prefer to paint western scenes, but the Eastern people don't appreciate the grand scenery of the Rockies. They are not familiar with mountain effects and it is much easier to sell a picture of a Long Island swamp than the grandest picture of Colorado."

Even after his beloved wife died in 1900, Moran continued to travel, in the company of his daughter Ruth or his old friend and expeditionary companion Jackson. He revisited the places that initially fascinated him while adding Venice as a subject of some of his most popular paintings.

It would take seven decades before the National Gallery of Art mounted the first major retrospective of Moran’s work, coinciding with the 125^th anniversary celebration of the creation of Yellowstone National Park. 

Museumgoers were able to behold on that occasion 97 paintings and watercolors and 17 photographs—including, most importantly, Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, Chasm of the Colorado, and Mountain of the Holy Cross (1875), which Moran and his admirers were previously unable to convince Congress to keep together as one whole.

(For an informed analysis of Moran’s technique, I urge you to read landscape painter Stapleton Kearns’s April 2011 blog post.)

Quote of the Day (John Cheever, on a Mid-Century Duchess in Rome)

“If you should happen to be the son of a coal miner or were brought up (as I was) in a small town in Massachusetts, the company of a ranking duchess might excite some of those vulgar sentiments that have no place in fiction, but she was beautiful, after all, and beauty has nothing to do with rank. She was slender, but not thin. And rather tall. Her hair was ash blond, and her fine, clear brow belonged against that grandiose and shabby backdrop of limestone and marble, the Roman palace where she lived. It was hers, and, stepping from the shadows of her palace to walk along the river to early Mass, she never quite seemed to leave the grainy light. One would have been surprised but not alarmed to see her join the company of the stone saints and angels on the roof of Sant' Andrea della Valle. This was not the guidebook city but the Rome of today…Donna Carla lived, like you and me, with one foot in the past.” —Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist and short-story writer John Cheever (1912-1982), "The Duchess,” originally published in The New Yorker, Dec. 13, 1958, reprinted in Some People, Places, and Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel (1958)

Quote of the Day (Frances Trollope, Loathing a Most American Summer Fruit)

“The huge fruit [watermelon] is cut into half a dozen sections, of about a foot long, and then, dripping as it is with water, applied to the mouth, from either side of which pour copious streams of the fluid, while, ever and anon, a mouthful of the hard black seeds are shot out in all directions, to the great annoyance of all within reach.”—English novelist and travel writer Frances Trollope (1779-1863), Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832)

To her infinite horror, Mrs. Trollope first came across this fruit (one I love, BTW) while visiting Cincinnati in 1830. I’m afraid that her bad opinion wouldn’t be improved by the image accompanying this post: Juliette Lewis in the 1993 film, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape.

This Day in Theater History (Novelist Balzac Scores Stage Hit at Last, Posthumously)

Aug. 23, 1851—Honoré de Balzac might have been dead for a year and five days, but he achieved the stage triumph he’d been craving for nearly three decades at the Gymnase Theatre in Paris with the comedy Mercadet.

I am far more familiar with the novels and short stories that comprise La Comédie humaine, a wide-ranging, interwoven panorama of French life in the first half of the 19^th century, than with Balzac’s plays.

Astonishingly, he did not confine his energies to the more than 90 novels and dozens of tales for which he is best known, but also turned out six major plays, along with a verse drama from his early 20s, Cromwell, that should probably best be termed “apprentice fiction.”

(Oh, I almost forgot: in his 20s, to keep the financial wolves at bay, he churned out essays and journalistic pieces, many under pseudonyms, and at the time of his death he also left 46 works unfinished. And I thought Hemingway was bad!)

What audiences saw 175 years ago in Mercadet wasn’t Balzac’s first crack at this material. It had first emerged from his busy pen as Le Faiseur (“The Speculator”). It must have been something of a mess, because it fell to Adolphe d’Ennery to act as what we might call a “script doctor” today.

You might call d’Ennery Balzac’s counterpart for the stage, as he was sole or co-author of more than 280 plays—except with this difference: he knew how to keep and even boost the totals he made from his work. 

He certainly had a good idea of how to fix Le Faiseur, whittling it down from five to three acts, retitling it, and making it easily the biggest theater success of Balzac’s career (though even in this instance, it was only a moderate success).

Let’s give Balzac some credit instead of ridiculing him for his lack of stage success in his lifetime. First, he took great pleasure in adding drama to his fiction.

In a February 1934 French Review article with the intriguing title “Balzac Precursor of Eugene O’Neill,” the French and Italian literature scholar Hermann H. Thornton observed, “Only the most literal-minded compiler of literary manuals could fail to see in him a dramatic author of the first rank,” pointing to his tendency to demarcate scenes, to read his own work aloud, and to speak “with excellent diction.”

Moreover, he hasn’t been the only novelist who’s had trouble in turning from fiction to the footlights.

Though John O’Hara wrote the “book” portion of the classic Rodgers & Hart musical Pal Joey, that show lopped in its initial 1940 run—and his other unproduced dramas (collected in the 1961 collection, Five Plays) have, to my knowledge, been barely remembered, never mind staged, since the pugnacious author wrote them.

Charles Dickens’ attempt at amateur theatricals led not to major London stage success but to a clandestine love affair with a teenaged actress (as I explained in this post from 18 years ago).

And I can’t neglect to mention Henry James—whose Guy Domville was such a crushing fiasco that it ended after a half-dozen attempts his desperate hope for a London stage hit, as I related in this post.

Stage flops were not the only thing that James and Balzac (worshipped as “the father of us all” by the American expatriate) had in common: they were both obsessed by what James called “the money passion.” 

It seems that, though D'Ennery streamlined the novelist’s script, he didn’t strip away its devastating satire of post-revolutionary French bankers and mountebanks who will let nothing stand in the way of profits—including a roguish, inveterate speculator of a father who is out as much for his own creature comforts as for his daughter’s dowry.