Les jeux sont fait à Biarritz

Americans, especially, always perk up

when their President ventures into a

gathering he's not competent to attend,

because they know the ejaculations of

a brittle ego will flow warm and wrath-

ful in much staining of their honor.

All of life in his trajectory's a spin

of the wheel in his delirium's casino.

What Prime Minister will he shove this

time, what autocrat start petting, what

female head of state extend a pawful of

Hershey kisses? How swollen, tirades

trip the loosened lips bombastic, en-

listing legions of late night to wax a 

bit sarcastic. All to boost his ratings.

It may be a goon show, but it's America.

Martin Conte

"We as a nation simply cannot" [fill in the blank]

We were enchanted, weren't we,
to see that wonderful scaffold
for demagogic perfidy deployed
in an online column by a CNN
"Business" contributor, on the
wisdom of American trade "pol-
icy" at this moment of inter-
national sinking in soufflées.

Surely we recall a fratboy's
exculpatory mantra, whenever
his least excusable of binges
tugs at the heartstrings so
infallibly enmeshed in flag,
family, and fanny: the exi-
gencies of fellows, faith,
and fornication working fat-
uously to mask his choices. 

Recall these farces as we may,
it never hurts to pass around
their latest re-enactment, to
set the stage for Laurel and
Hardy on Saturday morning TV.
The Manichaeans play so well
in monochrome, don't they. We
love how their catastrophes
simply cannot be averted.

Danish borders we have known

Who knew that the present era,

such as it is, might come to be

defined by that Kierkegaardrail

against expansive idiocy, that

Danish aperçu-to-go with coffee,

the absurd. A pity, that from a

Queens so awash in Danish pastry,

a politician should have emerged

to stalk the earth with ignorance

as phosphorescent as his hair, on-

ly to gain his comeuppance from a

female prime minister who thought

better of her territorial integ-

rity than to cede it, McConnell-

ishly, to his silly bluster. It

wasn't so much that his nation

had furnished no rejoinder, that

set the morning papers abuzz to

do the job of nailing it down, but

that when it finally did arrive,

it should have tripped so obvious-

ly and irrefutably from a culture

not known for power plays at all.

Ladies' Javelin aside, of course.

Christina Scherwin

Rued, the boat

You think Britain has it bad, to

be led by a PM of iridescent dis-

regard for the realities of Brex-

it? America has a similarly dyed

monstrosity, who can't stay afloat

without fibbing. But think of poor

Bogey, sparring with Claude Rains

on the patio at Rick's, having to

claim he migrated to Casablanca

for the waters, against Rains' re-

joinder that there aren't any. On-

ly in the movies, is it endearing

to confess, I was misinformed. Or

does that line survive so well, be-

cause it's lifted from childhood?

Khaki sempervirens

  I don't know why I think the green

  that is so congenital in khaki is,

  in any way, elusive. It may please

  me to be so, but it will be there.

  With which colors is one careless?

Lynn Bystrom

Gray Wolf

Getty Images©

Suppose it were Friday clxxviii: And one forgot to go to the bank

    That's not so bad.
    There's always the
    movie.

      



    
















Anthony Perkins
  and Janet Leigh
Shamley Productions
  at Universal Studios
Alfred Hitchcock
  producer-director
Psycho
1960

Šli and the family stone

The upper Adriatic is not the most

fertile setting for dreaming up a

tease for the American president,

but that's where the esteemed col-

umnist for The New York Times, by

way of the internet, found one at

an hour I will not mention. Still,

to read Gail Collins by the dawn's

early light would be such a tonic

for those who stay up in the dark

to cavort in her latest fantasy, I

feel others may follow one's lead.

Her latest foray into presidential

interaction is so promising in its

particulars, and flawless in expres-

sion, that I commend it without a

single excerpt to spoil a delicious

sequencing of inspired irritants. If

you are not too elderly to withstand

the occasional ribald allusion, the

whole tenor of the thing encourages

being read to the tides, high or low.

Gail Collins
How to torture Trump
  Who's less popular than
  Elton John?
The New York Times
August 14, 2019

Sunday nibbled sleeve xi: Frank Bruni and vituperation

Columnists seem to be writing much
more about their personal lives and
their families these days, than be-
fore. I mean, I know that like Frank
Bruni, Liebling liked to eat, but in
skewering a hypocrite I'd say their
difference is telling. In his col-
umn of this weekend, Bruni defends
the sovereignty of his sexuality
without failing to touch upon fear
for a remaining eye and love for his 
mother. I don't know about Liebling,
but I think hypocrisy fared no bet-
ter for his omission of these facts.

Their difference must be found in
triumphs Bruni has achieved, to ad-
dress hypocrisy with pitilessness.
He gives it the grammatically pre-
carious term, hate, but it's plain-
ly a failure of faith that he means.

Shakespeare avoided this confusion
with Caesar, and Liebling with Long.
His are insights of a double-edged 
kind. But who doesn't need to work
on the precariousness of the senses
when the passions are their author?

Frank Bruni
Hate is so much big-
  ger than Trump
The New York Times
August 10, 2019

Farrow & Ball
Picture Gallery Red
  and Mahogany No. 36
Dorset, England