Spectator Life

‘Life,’ Carl Sandburg says, ‘is like an onion. You peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.’ Carl, being a poet, was the sensitive type. You’d better believe that when Chuck Norris peels an onion, the only crying comes from the onion. But Chuck’s iron-jawed impassivity isn’t a trait I personally seek to emulate (though one is naturally curious about the type; did you know that when Chuck goes to a feminist rally, he leaves with a freshly ironed shirt and a sandwich?) I freely admit that both life and onions have occasionally brought me to tears. Especially onions. Julia Child thought it hard to imagine a civilization without them, but as a seven-year-old I vigorously disagreed.

Fifteen years ago, I dusted off my Nantucket Basket, which I’d carried every summer since 1964. To my horror its woven straw was unraveling. The desert climate of Scottsdale, Arizona, where we moved in 2002, had not been kind. When I was a young woman, and received a Nantucket Basket as a gift, I knew it was to be used from Memorial Day until Labor Day. The Baskets have evolved over the last 170 years, from nesting baskets selling for $1.50, to closed baskets used as purses by islanders. Nantucket men wove them in their spare time while serving onboard the South Shoal lightship, off Nantucket. Straw purses are now back for summer. Not that they have ever gone out of style. Many top designers have come out with baskets, including Chanel, Prada and even Hermès.

Shhh...quiet. Can you hear that? Listen closely. That’s the sound of backpedaling. Beautiful, isn’t it? The left’s panic is conspicuous as their woke figureheads try to reverse course on the lockdowns. The real unraveling began on Thursday morning when the New York Times ran a piece headlined ‘President of Key Teachers’ Union Shares Plea: “Schools Must Be Open” in Fall’. This ‘plea’ came from Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. It likely came as quite a surprise for parents across America. After all, they had been pleading with the AFT’s head honcho to open schools for over a year now. But Weingarten was too busy flying all over the United States on Boutique Air flights to worry about valid concerns from desperate families.

Thank heavens the Champions League final is being played in Portugal, now Turkey’s off the menu (sorry). It will certainly be a damn sight easier to get to than Wembley: have you tried to go round the North Circular these days? And at least the capital will not have to accommodate what is ominously described as ‘the Uefa family’, all 2,000 of them. Pity no one told them about family planning. And where would you prefer to go out for a post-match bite: Porto or Wembley Way? Anyway, then we will see quite how far Chelsea have got inside Manchester City’s head, with two very efficient victories in the League and the FA Cup in the past month. And the pressure on City with all that stuff about this being the owner’s dream will be seriously intense come the final.

One of the great successes of modern feminism is the public awareness campaigns to recognize sexual harassment in the workplace. Universities have encouraged whistleblowing and anonymous complaints procedures so that women can safely report such targeting. But when women in academia are subject to vile slurs such as ‘TERF’, all bets are off; it is considered reasonable to publicly hound and humiliate those women. Interestingly, the vicious, censorious mob tend not to target the handful of male academics who speak out against the sort of extreme transgender ideology that results in the removal of women’s hard-won sex-based rights. Holly Lawford-Smith is associate professor in Political Philosophy at the University of Melbourne (UM), Australia.

In the center of Bath a giant obelisk sits in the middle of a little park called Queen’s Square. Standing in the park on a cool but sunny February morning, I realize that despite passing it on countless occasions in the 22 years I lived in the city — from playing bowls on the grass as a child to sheltering behind it to smoke cigarettes as a teenager — I have no idea what it is doing there. A black metal sign informs me that it was erected in 1738 by the Bathonian dandy Beau Nash in honor of Frederick, Prince of Wales. I wonder what Frederick thought about being presented with an obelisk. The sky is darkening. In the 10 minutes I have been sitting there, waiting for a friend with parking troubles, the place has been almost empty. Bath is a tourist town — or at least it was.

My jar of vegan flaczki has been eyeing me for the last four months. It sits in my fridge, large, round and imposing, filled with a lumpy gray mixture. Flaczki is tripe soup, a traditional Polish concoction of broth, herbs, spices, vegetables and guts. Poles adore the stuff. It is warming and hearty. An unimpressed friend once described it as ‘elastic-band stew’. My vegan flaczki contains mushrooms instead of tripe. I bought it for a lark. My Polish friends thought it funny that a modern, progressive twist was being put on a firmly traditional dish. I am a vegetarian, but every time I think about eating my vegan flaczki, I think again. Traditional Polish food is warm, rich and meaty. Roulada, for example, is a meat roll stuffed with, among other things, more meat.

Once upon a time, a CRT was a Cathode Ray Tube, that bulky thing that ran old televisions. Those tubes have been replaced by sleek new liquid crystal displays, but the initialism lives again as the hottest thing in totalitarian ideology: Critical Race Theory. CRT is still an idiot box, however. It tells you what it wants and shuts out everything else. But instead of showing you I Love Lucy and Gunsmoke (or Miami Vice and Knight Rider) it shows you that America is a racist monstrosity that inculcates white supremacy at every turn. Don’t try to change the channel, CRT is at every frequency. Sit back and obey. Efforts to enforce the CRT regime just got a signal boost. On April 18, the Department of Education posted its 'Proposed Priorities' for American history and civic education.

When racist graffiti appeared on the walls of a dormitory at Albion College in Michigan, the college heads and student body were outraged. The graffiti, which included racial slurs, anti-Semitic remarks and multiple references to the Ku Klux Klan, prompted college officials to put forward a $1,000 bounty for anyone with information as to the perpetrator. Albion College President Mathew Johnson warned that ‘if they are Albion College students, they will also immediately be subject to the student conduct process — including the potential for suspension or expulsion’. Criminal charges would follow. More than 450 Albion College students and staff members marched across town to boycott the injustices they believed were happening on campus.

It was night when I arrived in Seville. A taxi took me through a maze of winding backstreets then came to an abrupt halt at the head of a pedestrian-only lane. ‘You’ll have to walk from here,’ said the driver. Uncertainly I dragged my suitcase down one dark alley after another, then suddenly came out onto a plaza lined with orange trees. Soaring above me, spotlit against the black sky, was the cathedral steeple. It was a breathtaking sight with its delicately latticed walls of golden stone, so tall I had to tip my head back to see the spire at the top. The cathedral stretched beside it, filling an entire block. Four hundred years have passed since Seville was the greatest and most glamorous city on earth, as glittering and alluring as New York City is today.

I don’t remember my grandmother, Anna Olson Nelson (Nelsie to her grandchildren), ever measuring out anything for her divine Swedish bread. The recipes must have been kept under the thick, blonde braid that she piled expertly on top of her head. What I do recall, as if it were yesterday, is helping Nelsie bake fläta and limpa every other Sunday in her small kitchen. The heavenly smells of cardamom and fennel wafted throughout her apartment while she tried to improve my Swedish. My mother, Mimi, often spoke Swedish to me and my sister, Chris, when we were babies and my father was with the Office of War Information as a correspondent in China, Burma and India during World War Two. Nelsie was our ‘Swedish nanny’.

How better to lift a torch against late-winter gloom than by conjuring an evening from a time when our country was still a confident going concern, when its culture and ideas bestrode the free world? What with our plague-driven mania for virtual living, it’s hard to get anyone to come to dinner these days. And since she died in 1969, our virtual guest of honor won’t be coming either. But from an era full of entertainment giants, we pick one, the star of stars: Miss Judy Garland. If only in our minds, we invite Judy to cocktails and dinner and then, just maybe if we get lucky, to linger late into the evening around the piano and sing a few of the old songs. This is not a formal affair, just two couples on a Friday evening after work.

What will Easter 2021 be like? Nothing like 2020, if I have my way. This year, I dream, Easter will be preceded by a Holy Week as solemn as if COVID had never been. Purple-veiled statues will stand solemnly about the church overlooking the Holy Thursday foot washing, a jug of water the only cleansing agent in sight, while a large choir sings the Ubi caritas. The Mass will be jammed with people, as it is every normal year, lovely, unknown people who spontaneously show up, unregistered and untraceable, squeezing in wherever there’s space. Afterwards an altar boy swinging a golden censer will lead the procession through volutes of blue smoke to an altar of repose, swathed in white silk.

Wheaton College will be removing and replacing a plaque honoring a group of alumni who were murdered by an indigenous tribe during a missionary trip to Ecuador. Why? Because it uses the word 'savage', the school's president announced in an email Wednesday. 'Recently, students, faculty, and staff have expressed concern about language on the plaque that is now recognized as offensive,' president Philip Ryken said in the email. 'Specifically, the word "savage" is regarded as pejorative and has been used historically to dehumanize and mistreat indigenous peoples around the world.

For a thousand years, Western universities were the champions and guardians of reason. Now, they know better. Such is the lesson from the sorry tale of Georgetown University Law Center professor Sandra Sellers, whose career abruptly ceased to exist Thursday for the crime of being able to observe patterns. Of course, Sellers’s remarks aren’t a shocking revelation. They’re common sense. Georgetown proudly maintains an 'Office of Affirmative Action Programs'. What is affirmative action, if not a pledge to admit less-qualified students for identity reasons, even if it means watching them struggle in class? Any poor soul who has hit the rock bottom of applying to law school knows that 'Under-Represented Minority' (URM) status is a boon for law school applications.

You’ll find them all over the boroughs of New York City. Multiple-dwelling buildings, usually large apartment blocks, slapped with a faux-Tudor façade defined by fake gables hiding a flat roof. They aren’t particularly attractive buildings. Even 100 years after most were built, they come off as self-conscious, a bit tacky, imparting to the viewer a dreaded feeling of secret working-class shame — a befuddling reproduction of a reproduction. They say New Yorkers never look up. But even during short journeys through Queens or parts of Brooklyn, New Yorkers are bound to have noticed examples, even if they don’t give it much thought.