Susan on Medium

During the election and shortly after, I wrote pieces comparing Trump and Henry VIII. Now there’s a new dimension to add to the comparison — not about the two despots, but about the transformation of casual talk into dangerous “fact.”

I’ve been getting angrier and angrier over the media’s coverage of John McCain’s death, but not because of anything said about McCain.

In commemoration of Father’s Day, this is a piece I wrote shortly after my father died in 1994. It became the prologue and in many ways the touchstone for my book, The Male Body (1999), from which it is excerpted.

When Cynthia Nixon announced on twitter that the Sanders’ spin-off “Our Revolution” had endorsed her bid for governor of New York she made sure to hitch her campaign to Bernie Sanders himself. If you didn’t know Nixon had been a Hillary supporter in the primaries, you sure couldn’t tell from her newly minted identity as a “bold progressive” who accused her opponent Andrew Cuomo of not being a “Real Democrat.”

“Does James Comey want to run for president?”

The sentence was scribbled, with several exclamation points, question marks, and various punctuations indicating emotional distress, on the notes I’d taken while watching James Comey on the College of William and Mary “Town Hall” last week-end.

“I can’t stop thinking about this. It has shaken me to my core in a way that I couldn’t have predicted.”

​

It was October of 2016, and the election was yet to be decided. Michelle Obama, in a televised speech in Manchester, New Hampshire was once again “speaking truth to power.” The truth: “It is cruel. It’s frightening. And…it hurts.”