Well, NFL owners and players had a “productive” meeting on social issues in Manhattan Tuesday – code for nothing but smoke and mirrors designed to placate two mutually exclusive viewpoints. There was, incredibly, no discussion of the National Anthem protests that have been designed to draw attention to the very social issues that were on the agenda. You can’t make this stuff up. ...
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On Tuesday, the NFL owners and representative players will meet to discuss the National Anthem protest that has been a driving issue this season – this as protest initiator and former San Francisco 49ers’ quarterback Colin Kaepernick filed a grievance against the NFL, saying the 32 owners colluded to keep him out of the league because of his activism.
A bit of background: “The Star-Spangled Banner” has been played before NFL games since at least 2009 at the behest of the U.S. Department of Defense, ostensibly to bolster recruiting. The NFL rulebook says that teams must be suited up and on the field before the Anthem begins, standing facing the flag, with their helmets in their left hands and their right hands over their hearts. In the third preseason game of 2016, a reporter noted Kaepernick sitting through the Anthem to protest police brutality against people of color.
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Is President Donald J. Trump racist?
It’s a question that has threaded his virulent response to the NFL players kneeling before the National Anthem to protest racism and his passive-aggressive approach to Puerto Rico’s suffering in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria.
I don’t think Trump is a racist. Indeed, I don’t like to think of any American president as one. But I do think that he is a joyless, mirthless person who takes no pleasure in other people and strikes a misanthropic tone. ...
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I had hoped to be writing more about tennis with the US Open underway. I had hoped to be resting from my labors on Labor Day.
But as Eleanor Roosevelt said of World War II, “This is no ordinary time.” With challenges and crisis on the home front and abroad, the time demands we go within to reach out, that we roll up our sleeves intellectually, physically and spiritually and use pleasure as it was always meant to be used – as a dessert rather than a meal.
Perhaps, however, it is still possible for me to write about tennis while also writing about character. Both are subjects of a new book by James Blake...
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I must confess to a certain smugness as the debate regarding the removal of Confederate statuary has taken on an aesthetic perspective. For years, I have endured the tacit, passive-aggressive notion from some newspaper colleagues and even bosses that my job as a cultural writer was not as important as those of the political and municipal writers and even the sports reporters. (Indeed, I lost that job partly because it was considered of lesser significance.)
But the arts – somewhat like religion and the family – are the refuge of the desperate and the inconsolable. Unfortunately for the arts, they are a refuge that their seekers often do not fully understand.
Some of my colleagues in my present job as an editor wonder about the artistic value that may be lost in the removal of the Confederate statues. No less an art lover than President Donald J. Trump bemoaned “the beauty that is being taken out of our cities, towns and parks.”
But are these works beautiful and, more to the point, are they art? ...
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“What a week” as “Washington Week” anchor Robert Costa would say. Last Saturday, we saw the worst of America, with neo-Nazis leading to the death of three people at a keep-the-Confederate-statues rally, so-called, in Charlottesville.
But since then the country has rallied around the counter-protest. Democrats and Republicans alike have denounced President Donald J. Trump’s there-was-bad-on-many-sides response to the Charlottesville tragedy. Business CEOs have exited his advisory council and one – James Murdoch, CEO of 21st Century Fox and son of archconservative Rupert – has pledged $1 million to the Anti-Defamation League and has urged his fellow 1-Percenters to do likewise. ...
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President Donald J. Trump is a huge fan of the past, largely because he doesn’t understand it.
He fails to differentiate between the historical past – which is always with us to enlighten, inspire and, at times, to warn (those who do not remember the past are doomed, etc.) – and the social past of deathless grievances, like Trump’s feud with Rosie O’Donnell, which is deader than Jacob Marley.
We live with the past, not in it, and study its narrative, which is history itself. The study of history provides you with context and context drives perception. The greater, the wider the context, the deeper the perception. ...
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