NEW YORK CITY—Goodbye, snowcapped peaks; hello, swampy brown East River. So long, fresh alpine air; greetings, choking diesel fumes. Adios, cows and cuckoo clocks; welcome, filthy island packed to the gills with angry, mean, squat Trump haters who live in decrepit buildings they share with rats. Yes, back to the city that never sleeps, and whose residents are perennially offended.
This is the bad news, the good being that the word “Brexit” means nothing over here, nada, as our Hispanic cousins crawling all over the place say. Instead of the B-word we have the S one, as in the college admissions scheme that turned into a scandal. More than fifty people were busted last week for paying lotsa moola to get underqualified students fraudulently accepted into some of the country’s top universities. Lots of hedge funders and Hollywood wives, so what’s so surprising about that? And why is it news now? George W. Bush was a C student in high school and would never have gotten into Yale but for…well, we all need a bit of help from Papa once in a while. JFK Jr. was so thick, even Brown U—Brown was on the take more than any other school back then—hesitated but finally took him. The worst was Jared Kushner, whose old man, a convicted felon, paid $2.5 million for his son to be accepted to Harvard. It sounds cynical, and it is. But then who said that life was fair? If it were, Michael Jackson, the most flagrant pedophile ever, would have been jailed very early on, but being black—although he later turned white—kept him out of the pokey and into little boys’ pants.
Ship of Fools: How a S...
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The reason this college scandal hardly registers is because it’s nothing compared with schools that operate as corrupt big-money fronts for pro basketball and football. Student athletes in those two major pro sports are 90 percent black, and many graduate without the ability to read or write but are called college grads. When they fail to make the big time, a life in crime is preordained. Now, that’s what I call a scandal. The only cry in the wilderness is that of a great sportswriter for the N.Y. Post called Phil Mushnick, who has been writing about this for years—but who’s listening? There’s moola to be made.
Never mind. There’s always #MeToo. And a revival of Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate, a wonderful musical comedy based on The Taming of the Shrew that surely rankles girls’ sensitivities nowadays. There’s wife-slapping and demands for womanly submission and the great line of “If her behavior is heinous, kick her right on her Coriolanus.” My, my, naughty William and Cole, how could they write such stuff? I went to the play and noticed that Kate kicked Petruchio much harder than in the 1953 movie, thanks to today’s sensibilities. As a wit wrote, Kick Me, Kate would have been closer to the point.
