Becoming My Father: The Seduction of the New York Times

As my father got older, he would sit in his leather chair with his feet up on an ottoman, in the most  sun lit room of his house and he would read the Sunday New York Times.  

He stayed indoors and read, which was fine with him. He took great joy in reading this  paper.

Mary Astor 

I vowed I would never descend to such a sedentary life, and I do start the day in my New Hampshire town with a walk, but I have to admit, the great pleasure is for my dog, who is wildly enthusiastic every time I reach for the collar and leash. I often find myself looking forward to getting back to open the Times.

This morning, the experience was akin to visual cocaine--there was so much to read about, so much exciting stuff.  

For starters, there was an article by Susan Chira, a "senior correspondent and editor on gender issues"  which brought to mind Jon Stewart's side kicks, like Samantha Bee and John Oliver, who were always introduced as senior correspondents of something--senior correspondent for White women's affairs, or senior correspondent for racial and nutritional issues.  

Ms. Astor had no gender issues

Ms. Chira informed me of the battle grounds being drawn for American feminists in the aftermath of Mr. Trump's victory:  
"There is despair, division...Hillary Clinton's loss was feminism's, too."
How had I missed that? 
"A man whose behavior toward women is a throw back to pre feminist days is now setting the tone for the country."
That bit was news to me.  We have someone who can set the tone now, for the country.  
After talking to women daily in Haverhill, Massachusetts, who seem to think the tone for Mr. Trump was set for him by their own live-in boyfriends, by the men they meet at bars or by their own husbands.

"More broadly, there is a fear that women's issues...reproductive rights, women's health, workplace advancement and the the fight against sexual harassment, among others--could be trampled or ignored."
Again, I hear no such things in Haverhill, where women get pregnant not because they can't get IUD's at Planned Parenthood and not because they cannot get oral contraceptives from a variety of clinics, but because they choose to get pregnant just as soon as they can get a job and find a boyfriend who agrees to help them pay for childcare.  
Marriage, career never enters into the discussion. For so many of the women I speak to, the plan is having the baby, living with parents or boyfriend's parents and work place advancement means hoping to move up from the cash register at Market Basket to a job stocking shelves and maybe to assistant manager.  
The good life means having a trailer at a camp in Maine for weekends. 
Sexual harassment at work, not so much. 

Ms. Chira notes the election fractured "gender solidarity" as white women voted (if you can believe exit poles) 53% for Mr. Trump, a much ballyhooed misogynist. 

My female friends in Haverhill don't talk much about gender solidarity or sisterhood. Their main focus seems to be their families, although these are not the traditional families I grew up recognizing.
And not a one of them has been able to define the word "misogynist" for me. But whatever it is, they don't think Trump is one. He's just like all the guys they grew up with. He's only interested in one thing from women, and that's okay with them, for a starting point. They can work on the guy later.

Now this is a feminist who has her own ideas

Ms. Chira also saw "the provocative possibility that many women believed that Mr. Trump would keep the country safe in part because of his paternalistic, alpha male persona--an that was an implicit rejection of feminism's attempts to redefine gender roles."

I'm not sure what gender roles Ms. Chira is talking about, but with so many of my Haverhill female friends as the main bread winners in their homes, supporting kids and an unemployed boyfriend, with many of these women working on assembly lines, as police officers, as construction workers, I wonder which women Ms. Chira is talking about. Maybe women who work in the office buildings of New York, but surely women in small town New England aren't bothered much by gender roles.

Maybe it takes a lunatic to talk to lunatics 

Next was an article by Bernard Avishai, who spoke of the way Jews in Tel Aviv and in New England looked at the issue of Israel building new settlements in areas the Palestinians claim.  Apparently, about 40% of Israeli Jews think Israel should be a state for Jews only, which ejects Arabs, Palestinians and ethnic cleansing, an Israeli apartheid is a Biblically sound idea. But the other 60% of Israeli Jews think an open society which welcomes all ethnic backgrounds and protest individual freedom is a good idea.  That is the prevailing opinion he finds among his friends who are Americans living in New England.

This made me think about my own attitudes toward Israel, which I haven't thought much about lately. In fact, the last time I thought much about Israel was when I read "Exodus" by Leon Uris at age 14, and then sporadically whenever there was a full blown war. In general, I recognize Israel is, or was, a democracy and so gets points for that, but I no longer assume, for reasons I cannot really place, that Israel is a priori in the right whenever a conflict with the Palestinians arises. 

I don't know enough about building new settlements, but I did hear David Brooks say on "The News Hour" that the settlements were not the big thing standing between the Palestinians and the Israelis, but there were things like Palestinian school books and curricula openly endorsing the destruction of Israel, the denial of the Holocaust and other things which annoy Israelis. 

Avishai mentions President Trump's selection for Ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, who believes Israel belongs to the Jews, as one state for the Jews and who says liberal American Jews who belong to a club called "J Street" and who disagree with him are worse than kapos." 
Kapos were the Jews in concentration camps who collaborated with their Nazi captors in organizing the extermination of other Jews.  
This is a sort of hysterical Jew who calls intermarriage between American Jewish boys and non Jewish (gentile) girls "the next Holocaust," because it will spell the elimination of the Jewish people through dilution of the gene pool, or something. Apparently among some Jews, there is the belief that the child is Jewish if the mother is Jewish.  Since you could never be sure who the father is, it was only the mother who counted. (Presumably, this rule arose before the days of gene sequencing.)
Mr. Friedman was Mr. Trump's bankruptcy lawyer, which means he helped Mr. Trump screw all those tradesmen who built his buildings and had to settle for less than half of what he promised to pay them, all legally. From such cloth are the righteous cut,nowadays. 
Anyway, Mr. Friedman emerges from the pages of the Times as a thoroughly unappetizing specimen, and I'll be sure to stay tuned. 

But Mr. Avishai's article was fun to read because it suggested American Jews are no longer Israel's lap dogs, if they ever were. 

But then there was the Book Review which had an unusually long and entertaining review by none other than Woody Allen,  of Edward Sorel's book about  Mary Astor and her "purple diary" in which she detailed her sexual escapades with a variety of Hollywood men, mostly married to other women.  
Over the past few years, I've been often disappointed by Woody Allen's movies, but this book review is enough to revive Mr. Allen in my eyes. It was quite sly of the New York Times to have him writing about a woman who as a 17 year old  embarked on a wild affair with John Barrymore "who was hugely older than she. " 
He does not say it and he does not have to say it, but of course, Woody Allen was widely vilified for his affairs with women who were much younger, who were too young for the tastes of many Americans.  What he is showing, but never outrightly saying is these things happen. 

Would have liked Mary Astor

Of course, Ma and Pa Kettle, straight out of the American Gothic, sitting on their front porches across the heartland do not approve of such things, and as Allen notes, "Free loving arrangement with his wife reads like Swahili to Mr. and Mrs. Front Porch, and the Porches were precisely who kept the nation's motion picture industry solvent. Many a Beverly Hills swimming pool was dependent on popcorn sold in the Bible Belt."

And so Woody Allen, speaking of Ms. Astor's predicament, was commenting on his own.

It is a delight to be living in the 21st Century, where I can download the Astor book to my Kindle and for now, I've stopped reading the Times and am swimming happily in the roiling waters of "Mary Astor's Purple Diary."