Trump's Press

Trump’s Negative Press?

Perhaps the NYTimes is not a typical example of the US press about reports about President Trump’s doings, but if not, it is still an important contribution to the media’s view of him. There are two things to note, both important. First, the Times articles, both reports and opinion pieces, are almost all of them negative, with some of the latter, quite vehemently so. I don’t recall ever seeing such strong—negative!—language used about someone of the stature of an American president.

   On the other side, however, there is very little reaction to this bad press and apparently no effort to combat it. I considered a number of reasons for this reticence. First, Trump doesn’t respond to it, because he doesn’t read or even peruse what the Times or, say, the Washington Post have to say about him. Those papers are not part of his homework.

   Second, his various underlings are surely aware of what I am pointing to and more. But they have no motive to bring this “bad news” to the attention of their boss. No motive, no action.

   A third possibility is that Trump is fully aware of the “bad” press he is getting. But it bothers him not at all. Rather, he accepts it as part of the persona he wants to present to the public.

   How this plays out with the American public remains to be seen. The likes of the NYTimes do not represent them. It probably won’t be known until the midterm elections, if then.   

Sex in the US: an Observation

   I call it an observation, because I could say a lot more (and don’t feel like it) and of course endless volumes have dealt with the subject—which I have not consulted. But start by opening this NYTimes article.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/18/arts/design/new-gallery-to-emphasize-female-artists-and-collections.html?emc=eta1&_r=0  The picture is of the owner of a New York art gallery. Now tell me, what is her leg doing there? Read the article again; maybe you can find a reason that I failed to find. And that leg is in the NYTimes, not in the Daily News!
   I mostly don’t read any paper other than the Times and certainly no German or French ones, so I wonder whether stories similar to those I read are to be found in the European press or whether what I note is actually an American phenomenon.

   I am talking about sex. Are European adolescents and young adults different from German or British ones? Not likely. Surely they share all the same drives. But I read endlessly of sex on US college and university campuses and not analogous ones about Heidelberg and Göttingen or Paris and Lyon. Are our mores so different from English or Scottish ones that they give rise to the much-discussed scenes on American campuses and not the equivalent where there are actually campuses, such as in Oxford or Edinburg? There are deep questions here; the role of the press is surely a partial answer.
   Take another example. The papers—for me, as I said, that’s the Times—are full of stories about complaints and law suits by women in various roles and professions that they have been sexually molested by co-workers or bosses—from having to put up with unwanted touches to being raped. A lawyer who takes only such cases could, it would seem, make a good living.

    I don’t read about such incidents in connection with European companies and organizations. Are European men less demanding of sexual relations of their female employees and coworkers or are those women more uncomplainingly compliant? I’m doubtful about both of these alternatives, though perhaps there are some differences in degree.

   It will certainly take more knowledge or interest to sort out all these interconnected issues, but one of them is surely the role of the American press. I don’t claim that these goings-on are prompted by the fact that they will be covered in the papers. They do, however, “teach” protagonists on how to behave and how not to behave.

   Perhaps most in important, the almost daily appearance of such accounts about sex in American society fosters the belief that such activities are a normal part of American life, to be regretted, to be sure. But that attempts to eliminate them have to be regarded as futile. If true, sad.

Perhaps I will later have more to say on this subject; perhaps not.

A Corny Intermezzo: an Old Jewish Mother Joke

   For his birthday, the Jewish Mother brings has son two ties. One is red in its dominant color, the other one is blue. The next morning the son comes down to breakfast wearing the new blue tie.

   Mother: "What’s the matter, you don’t like the other one?" 

In and Out

Warning: the blog post to follow talks about quite indelicate matters

      While I’ve been blessed with a pretty healthy life, when I did have problems, they mostly pertained to intake, with ulcers the main candidate, putting constraints on what I could eat and drink. My problems in old age are of the opposite kind: outtake, to use a polite word. There are two loci here: liquids come out in front and solids come out in the rear. I have problems with both and I don’t know how much they are a function of my advanced age. I leave research to a younger generation.

  The front I turn to first, which it also did temporally. A few years ago, my bladder went on strike and stopped functioning. Not good! The first remedial action was to have me insert you know where— with considerable frequency—a tube that would facilitate things to flow in a more or less normal fashion. It worked for a while, but not for all that long.

   The next move was more drastic, but it has been most successful—at least so far, he said cautiously. I hole was “drilled”—with appropriate local anesthesia—just above the pubic bone straight to the bladder, bypassing the long route via the penis. That has worked well so far and, I hope, will for the short number of years, if any, that may be left to me. The system requires me to strap a bag onto my leg that I need to empty about five times in a 24 hour period, requiring me to get up twice a night, on the average. I also need to visit the urologist every three weeks to check on things and renew all the equipment. The sole virtue of this malarkey is that it works.

   The problem in the rear that started only very recently affects my behavior much more seriously and remains unsolved. Its dual characteristics are seriously annoying and are ongoing. I have very frequent urges to defecate that cannot be controlled by my muscles. At this point the unhappy but  effective but sole solution is an adult diaper. The second symptom consists of frequent jabs of a sharp pain, resembling the stabbing of a knife. So far the recommendations of the proctologist I have consulted a couple of days ago have not solved either problem. I remain hopeful—do I have a choice?—but I am confined to the house for however long these symptoms last; they are both active as I now sit at my desk to type this blog post.

    

The Met and Me

   Reading about the change of leadership at New York’s Metropolitan Museum reminded me of my own brief encounter with the head of that institution. I had resigned from my Northwestern deanship—that’s another story—and had some thoughts of moving into the world of art museums. And then there was an ad in the Chronicle of Higher Education for persons interested to be vice president (the title as I recall it) for education of the Met. To say that the ad in that paper, not being for a job in an institution of higher education, was unusual is an understatement.
   But it offered a position in the world of art that very much fit with my post NU-dean ambitions. I thought that I was a relevant candidate, given that I had spent years building up two art departments, a standard “theoretical” one and an art practice group doing their thing.

  So I was asked to come to be interviewed by the Met’s big boss, Philippe de Montebello. A free trip to New York: I had nothing to lose. Our conversation took place late in the afternoon, just de Montebello plus a mostly silent lawyer side-kick and I. It became clear very soon that I was in the wrong place.

   The questions were about my ideas about educating elementary students visiting the museum, while my thoughts were about involving young adults. We did not hit it off: their one-time desire to recruit from a higher education population did not mean that they were interested in the expertise of that class. I got nowhere with my talk about internships and aids to publication. What were my ideas about sixth graders visiting the Met, for which I had a bumbling few responses.

   The interview ended in a friendly way and de Montebello soon afterwards appointed the education vice president at the Art Institute, ending the experiment to go outside their normal category of candidates.

   I have no idea about what the Met has done in the intervening years about its education mission. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since 1987 when our conversation took place.   

Comments on Times Articles

   I’m surprised how literate most of the comments are that are to be found in response to articles in the New York Times. Sometimes there are more than a thousand of them, occasionally even far more. Mind you I only read a small sample of them and have wondered how many readers go beyond taking in just a few. No doubt the practice would not exist if the Times could not rely on the fact that a portion of its readers desire to be heard.

   Yes, the comments are edited before they are published, a necessity when you think about it for a minute, but I don’t think that the editing converts dumb remarks into clever ones. And on the whole, what is published is, if not strictly speaking clever comments, mostly intelligent and relevant.

   I am encouraged by that entire phenomenon. No, I don’t think that these commentators are average Americans, although that is as much because I don’t know just what average Americans are like.  But they are representative of my fellow citizens, as much or, rather, more than those who make it into the marriage columns of your local paper.