When a dog wants to show submissiveness, he lays down on his back and shows you his belly. When a politician wants to show submissiveness, he gets on a plane, flies to Florida and meets with Donald Trump at his cheesy country club. As William Faulkner once said, the past isn’t dead. It isn’t even …
It was 35 years ago today, my last winter working in St. Louis. I was working mostly nights, getting home after midnight and then watching old movies for a couple of hours until I was ready to sleep. I would usually sleep till noon and then kill a couple of hours before leaving for work. …
When I heard the story of how Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski and apologized to a young reporter for remarks he made after the Blue Devils’ loss at Louisville last week, it took me back. Not so much to memories of Coach K. My path only crossed his twice in a decade and a half …
“It doesn’t matter what you believe as long as you’re sincere …” I’m pretty sure nothing that Charles Schulz wrote for his beloved comic strip “Peanuts” has been as vilified as this statement Linus Van Pelt made about his love for the Great Pumpkin. Of course it’s the fundamentalists who loathe it. They think Schulz …
Short takes from a journey through a disorganized mind: During my years as a newspaper columnist, I wound up with a lot of topics that were interesting but not interesting enough to fill an entire column. That’s where “short takes” came from. Lately there seem to be a lot of mildly interesting things, so I’m …
Can it possibly be true that nearly a third of the country believes Donald Trump had an election victory stolen from him? I can’t complain too much. I myself believed the results of the 2000 and 2016 elections were at least a little off, but in both cases, my candidates conceded in a timely fashion …
“You’re drunk, sir. Sleep it off.” Those were not the first words I heard Larry King say, but they may have been the ones that set him apart from other all-night radio talkers. I probably heard King for the first time in the late ’70s on WAVA radio in the Washington, D.C., area. He was …
Are we at the beginning of a new era or sliding farther down the slippery slope that will end small-d democratic government in the U.S.? Are we ready to dismiss Trumpism or do we just have a short interlude before it comes roaring back stronger than ever? I have a very close friend who refuses …
I only saw Hank Aaron play once in a game I attended in person. It was July 23, 1969, at Washington’s Robert F. Kennedy Stadium, and the National League beat the American League, 9-3, in that summer’s All-Star Game. Aaron was 35 that summer, and he wasn’t the home run king that day. He had …
I was 10 years old for most of 1960, and there is one memory that stands out from the presidential campaign that year. Millions of Americans were seriously concerned about the possibility of a Roman Catholic becoming president of the United States. My grandfather, who was a Lutheran, was among them. Sixty years later, it …
STIGMA OF CATHOLICISM MIGHT BE ENDING IN POLITICS Read More »
