Not America’s Mayor

Posted on September 7, 2026 by 34orion

On September 11, 2001, Rudy Giuliani was not America’s Mayor.

He was my mayor.

My city had just been attacked. Thousands of people were missing. Lower Manhattan was burning. Two buildings that had defined the New York skyline for most of my life were simply gone.

Nobody knew what was coming next.

And there was Rudy.

He was walking the streets. He was talking to reporters. He was answering questions when there really were no answers to give.

Most importantly, he seemed to understand what New Yorkers needed from our mayor that day.

He did not sugarcoat what had happened.

“The number of casualties will be more than any of us can bear ultimately.”

It was a brutal sentence. But it was an honest one.

And then he gave us something else.

“We’re going to rebuild…. The City of New York will be whole again.”

That mattered.

In those first terrible hours, when the entire world seemed to have tilted off its axis, Rudy Giuliani made us feel heard. He made us feel seen. He gave voice to our grief and, somehow, managed to reassure us that New York would survive.

He was our mayor.

America was watching, too.

Soon the rest of the country adopted him. The press called him “America’s Mayor.” He was universally praised, admired and, for a time, almost canonized. There was even talk of suspending New York’s term-limit rules so he could remain in office.

I understood it.

I felt it.

But twenty-five years later, I also understand something else.

The person we saw that day was an overproduced reality star. Not the real man.  

There were things about Rudy Giuliani we either did not know, did not understand or, in the fog of grief surrounding 9/11, simply were not prepared to examine.

And some of them should have mattered enormously.

Start with the decision to locate New York City’s Emergency Operations Center in 7 World Trade Center.

Think about that.

Eight years earlier, terrorists had detonated a bomb beneath the North Tower hoping to bring it down. Six people were killed and more than 1,000 injured.

The World Trade Center was not some theoretical target.

It had already been attacked.

Yet Giuliani’s administration placed the city’s emergency command center right there.

Apparently, once was not sufficient warning.

Worse, the city did not have a fully established backup command center ready to take over if the World Trade Center complex was attacked again.

As one 9/11 commissioner later asked:

“Why put it in one of the most likely places where people are going to come back and hit us again and where it could be knocked out and not help us save lives?”

Good question.

Then there were the radios.

The 1993 bombing had exposed serious problems with FDNY radio communications inside skyscrapers. In 1994, Giuliani’s first year as mayor, another report warned about those deficiencies.

Seven years passed.

Replacement radios did not reach firefighters until the spring of 2001. They were purchased through a noncompetitive procurement process, were inadequately tested in the configuration firefighters received and failed so badly that the FDNY withdrew them from service.

So on September 11, firefighters entered the World Trade Center carrying the old radios.

Communications failed.

Evacuation orders did not reach everyone.

Three hundred forty-three members of the FDNY died that day, leaving roughly 250 widows and more than 600 children without their fathers.

It would be unfair to claim that Giuliani personally caused those deaths. It is not unfair to ask why a problem his administration had known about for years remained unresolved when those firefighters needed reliable communications most.

But that was not a question many of us were asking on September 11.

I certainly wasn’t.

That day Rudy was my mayor.

And my mayor was standing in the street telling me that my city would survive.

Maybe that is why what came later feels so jarring.

Maya Angelou famously said, “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.”

Perhaps Rudy had already shown us.

We just weren’t ready to see it.

Time has a way of clearing away the smoke.

And over the decades, another Rudy Giuliani emerged—or perhaps the same Rudy became easier to recognize.

There was Bernard Kerik, Giuliani’s longtime associate whom he enthusiastically recommended to become Secretary of Homeland Security before Kerik’s nomination collapsed amid ethics and financial scandals.

Apparently, vetting was optional.

There were the city security expenses associated with Giuliani’s travel while he was conducting an extramarital affair, expenses initially billed through obscure municipal agencies.

Nothing says romance quite like creative municipal accounting.

Then came Donald Trump.

As Trump’s lawyer, Giuliani helped conduct the pressure campaign seeking Ukrainian investigations of Joe and Hunter Biden that contributed to Trump’s first impeachment.

After the 2020 presidential election, he became one of the loudest promoters of the false claim that widespread fraud had stolen the election from Trump.

Two Georgia election workers, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, paid an extraordinary price for those lies. Giuliani falsely accused them of election fraud. A federal jury eventually awarded them $148 million.

Defamation, it turns out, can be expensive.

Giuliani subsequently filed for bankruptcy. The case was later dismissed amid criticism of his failure to provide required financial information.

In 2024, New York disbarred him for repeatedly and intentionally making false statements about the 2020 election.

Quite an ending for a man who built his national reputation prosecuting other people for dishonesty.

He was indicted in Georgia’s election-interference case, although those charges were ultimately dismissed without a finding of guilt.

He was indicted in Arizona over the alternate-elector effort, although that case was dismissed in 2026 without prejudice.

A former employee, Noelle Dunphy, has accused him of sexual assault, harassment and wage theft—allegations Giuliani denies and which have not been adjudicated.

Still wondering about America’s Mayor?

Consider what the New York Appellate Division said when it disbarred him.

The judges found that Giuliani’s “16 acts of falsehoods … were deliberate and constituted a transparent pattern of conduct intended and designed to deceive.”

They said he “told numerous lies in the numerous forums all designed to create distrust of the elective system of our country.”

They concluded that he had “baselessly attacked and undermined the integrity of this country’s electoral process.”

And they said he had “actively contributed to the national strife that has followed the 2020 presidential election, for which he is entirely unrepentant.”

Those words are difficult to reconcile with the man many of us thought we saw walking through lower Manhattan on September 11.

But maybe that is the point.

Al-Qaeda’s purpose on 9/11 was not simply to murder Americans. It wanted to provoke the United States, destabilize us and deepen the divisions within our society.

On that horrible day, Rudy Giuliani seemed to represent the opposite.

To me, he was the mayor telling frightened New Yorkers that we were still a city.

That we would bury our dead.

That we would rebuild.

That we would endure.

For a while, America looked at what we saw and gave him a title: America’s Mayor.

On September 11, 2026, Rudy Giuliani is the abject lesson in all that we have not learned from that day.

Twenty-five years ago, we watched him stand amid the wreckage and tell us that New York would survive. We believed him. More than that, we believed in him.

For a moment, he seemed to represent the best of us: resolve without bravado, grief without surrender, leadership when leadership mattered.

Time has revealed something very different.

The man who once seemed to embody our determination to come together would spend much of the next quarter-century helping pull us apart—spreading lies, attacking our institutions and feeding the distrust that now infects so much of American life.

Perhaps that is one of the lessons we should have learned from September 11.

Before we decide to give someone such a vainglorious title we should ask a few more questions and see what lies beyond the media hype and beneath the bronzer.

We should not confuse performance with character.

In our grief and horror we mistook the man we needed that day for the man he actually was.

Twenty-five years later, the smoke has long since cleared.

Perhaps next time we will let it clear before we start casting statues…or building triumphant arches.

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9/11 Plus 25

Posted on September 5, 2026 by 34orion

That morning, twenty-five years ago, began like so many others for me. I rose early, completed my morning ablutions, walked the dog, and was in a cab heading to my office at The Sporting News before 7 a.m.

You could not help but notice it was an extraordinarily beautiful day. The heat and humidity of summer had given way to clear blue skies and crisp, fall-like weather. The kind of day my mother would describe as “positively Swiss.” It was so beautiful that morning I hesitated before entering my building, wanting to savor it before putting my nose to the grindstone.

At 8:15, I was convinced the most exceptional thing that would happen that day was that my assistant had actually arrived early and kindly brought me my second cup of coffee. I thought it was going to be a good day—even when I heard an airplane flying low and fast over our heads. I casually remarked to her that the FAA didn’t take kindly to aircraft flying so low over the city.

That plane turned out to be the first, lined up with the neighboring Empire State Building and flying down Fifth Avenue at five hundred miles per hour. We learned the truth when someone came running into my office, shouting that the Towers were on fire. We ran to the southern windows of our 27th-floor office. From there, we watched in horror as the moments that changed us forever unfolded.

We saw the second plane hit, erupting in a burst of orange flame. We watched the first tower crumble, pancake, and collapse. And then the second. We had no way of knowing—or comprehending—what had just happened:

  • 246 people who had boarded their flights minutes before were killed when their planes were turned into missiles.
  • 2,606 people working at their desks lost their lives in clouds of flame and dust.
  • 343 firefighters ran into the Towers and never emerged.
  • 60 police officers disappeared into the buildings, never to be seen again.
  • 8 paramedics went to save lives and lost theirs instead.

I had no way of knowing that my childhood friend and neighbor, Todd Rancke—the first boy I met when I moved to Summit—was among the victims.

After making sure my staff had a plan to get home and had my address in case they couldn’t, I began my trek home. I remember seeing dust-covered people, heads down, no doubt in shock, mechanically moving uptown.

On Madison Avenue, cars were lined up bumper to bumper, yet there were no horns, no impatience—just the tramp of feet as pedestrians made their way home.

Crossing the park, I saw groups of people huddled around boomboxes, listening to grim news broadcasts. Overhead, unbelievably, fighter jets patrolled the skies. Warplanes. Over my city. At the Imagine mosaic, someone had already laid flowers. I thought of Lennon’s lyrics:

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace…

Never had those words felt so far away.

I withdrew money from an ATM, knowing cash could come in handy in a disaster. I shopped at an empty Fairway, worried that food supplies might run out. Then I went home, turned on CNN, and waited for the displaced and dispossessed to arrive. They came. They went. Together, we watched endless loops of the Towers crumbling.

I remember the frustration of trying to reach my parents. The collapse of the Towers had destroyed a major AT&T switching station, and cell lines were jammed. Only my BlackBerry worked. Hours later, when I finally got through, I will never forget the relief of being able to tell them I loved them.

The next morning, I rose early and went for a long run. I was training for the Chicago Marathon, just weeks away. Running south along the West Side Greenway, I could see smoke rising from the pile and a nearly mile-long line of ambulances waiting to help those who would never need help again. I felt I had to do something.

After finishing my run, I went to the American Red Cross headquarters near my home and waited sixteen hours to give blood that we hoped would be needed. When I emerged, the wind had shifted. The smell from Ground Zero now engulfed the city. It was unlike anything I had ever encountered—the smell of death, fire, and concrete dust. I wondered if this was the smell of hell.

That night, I didn’t lie awake thinking about lessons. I was simply grateful that most of those I loved were safe. But in the twenty-five years since, I have thought a lot about that day and what it taught me.

Some lessons were immediate:

  • Be grateful for everything. Every day is precious. Savor it.
  • Open your heart wider. Love more. Accept others for their gifts.
  • Prepare for the worst, hope for the best. And if the worst comes, still look for the best in people—even if they haven’t earned that trust.
  • My family—my wife, sister, brother, brother-in-law, nieces, and nephews—are my most precious gifts. I do what I can every day to make sure they know they are cherished.

But the most important lessons of that day seem to have faded. This is especially true in these MAGA days.

Over the next few days, leading up to the 25th anniversary of that awful day, I am going to publish a few articles about what we didn’t know then, what we should have learned, what we have forgotten, and how our current government has made us weaker and more susceptible to attack.

But for now, let me say this.

September 11 should have taught us that we are all in this together.

That we need to look out for our family, friends, and neighbors. And that means being woke when woke simply means treating people as they wish to be treated. Pronouns, sexual orientation, religion—these are personal matters that do not affect you, and no one should feel “less than” for being who they are.

When someone is homeless or mentally ill—or both—they should not be arrested or vilified. We have an obligation to help them up. Capitalism is as broken as communism if it creates a permanent underclass that cannot afford housing or food because wages have not kept pace with costs.

Everyone deserves to be treated with kindness and humanity. Even if they didn’t arrive in this country with the right paperwork.

If that day taught us anything, it is this: we do not get to choose the moments that define us, but we do get to choose how we show up for each other. Honor the dead by choosing well.

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Trump Canal

Posted on August 30, 2026 by 34orion

Let’s begin with the first problem, which is that Donald Trump appears to have gotten the history exactly backward.

What a surprise!

Lake Ontario is not named after the Canadian province of Ontario.

Ontario is named after Lake Ontario.

This is the sort of fact that can be discovered in roughly the amount of time it takes to type “Lake Ontario” into Google, assuming no one on the presidential staff was otherwise occupied renaming airports, battleships, writing laudatory Truth Social posts, or the next big lie.

The name Ontario was attached to the lake centuries before the Province of Ontario existed. It comes from an Indigenous word generally understood to mean something along the lines of “great lake,” “beautiful lake” or “sparkling water.” Ontario did not become a province until Canadian Confederation in 1867.

So Trump is essentially punishing Ontario by renaming the thing Ontario was named after.

That is not statesmanship. It is the geopolitical equivalent of getting mad at George Washington and demanding we rename the man because you don’t like Washington, D.C.

But the absurdity really blossoms with the proposed replacement: Lake America.

America.

The name America comes from Amerigo Vespucci, an itinerant Italian explorer who sailed around parts of the New World and never saw Lake Ontario, never saw Lake Erie, never saw Lake Michigan and, for all practical purposes, had about as much connection to the Great Lakes as Marco Polo had to the Garden State Parkway.

A German cartographer put Vespucci’s name on a map in 1507, and through one of history’s stranger branding exercises, half the Western Hemisphere eventually inherited it.

So the grand patriotic gesture here is to remove an ancient Indigenous name from a lake and replace it with the name of an Italian traveler who never came within hundreds of miles of the place.

You almost have to admire the efficiency. It manages to be historically ignorant, geographically nonsensical and culturally tone-deaf all at the same time.

And then there is the small nuisance called Canada.

Lake Ontario is an international body of water. Fifty one percent of it belongs to Canada, a sovereign country that is under no particular obligation to participate in whatever cartographic improv exercise is taking place in Washington.

The United States can call it Lake America. Canada can continue calling it Lake Ontario. Most of the planet will presumably continue calling it Lake Ontario because that is what it has been called for centuries and because adults generally do not rename major geographical features every time somebody gets cranky.

This is what makes the whole exercise so perfectly Trumpian.

Presidents have enormous powers. They can negotiate treaties. They can confront wars. They can reduce deficits. They can build infrastructure. They can reform immigration. They can try to make government work better.

Or they can sit around renaming lakes.

If the guy in the oval office really has developed a passion for improving the nomenclature of upstate New York, though, I have a suggestion.

A little farther west sits Love Canal, the infamous toxic waste site near Niagara Falls where more than 20,000 tons of hazardous chemicals were buried, eventually poisoning the surrounding neighborhood and turning the name into a national synonym for environmental catastrophe, government failure and industrial irresponsibility.

Now there is a place begging for a rebrand.

Forget Lake America.

Rename Love Canal.

Trump Canal.

It has history. It has toxicity. It has lawsuits. It has people desperately trying to get away from it.

And unlike Lake Ontario, the name would finally make a certain amount of sense.

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Dolly Would

Posted on August 29, 2026 by 34orion

There was a time in my life when I was on an airplane every week.

Invariably, someone — often my mother — would say, don’t you hate the razzle-dazzle of travel? The hustle, the bustle, airport security, the inevitable delays, and bad airline food. My response to them — often my mother — was no. I loved it.

To be fair, I was traveling so much at the time that I had reached Supreme status on American Airlines, and most of the time I was sitting in the front of the airplane, where the seats were bigger, the nuts warm, and the ice cream sundaes delicious. But that was not the reason I loved traveling so much. Well, it was one of the reasons. Warm nuts and sundaes are very nice.

And I do have insatiable wanderlust. If I have not been somewhere, I want to go there. If I have been there, discovering new things is pretty exciting too. So there is that.

But my response to people who questioned my travel schedule — often my mother — was none of those things. It was that I loved the time to myself to think. Well, not necessarily just think, but to do other things the busy, noisy world did not often provide time for, such as reading a newspaper or a real book. Mind you, this was at a time when getting Wi-Fi on an airplane was either impossible or very expensive. And getting on an airplane meant being cut off from the rest of the world for hours at a time. Add a pair of noise-reduction earphones… bliss.

I was thinking about this earlier this week when I embarked on a two-leg, 21-hour journey to our home in Rio from Chatham. Do I have to repeat myself? Don’t sympathize. I like this. And, as I have done approximately a gillion times since Elaine and I became Elaine and I, it is as routine as driving to Montclair to visit my much, much younger sister. It just takes a little more time, and the cookies are better at Marissa’s.

So I’m sitting in the American Airlines lounge at MIA — perhaps the most apt airport code in aviation — and thinking about Dolly Parton.

Really, it’s hard not to this week.

Everyone, from every political and social tribe, seems eager to claim her as one of their own. And why not? You never had to look very hard to see a woman entirely comfortable in her own skin, who regarded her success less as an entitlement than as a blessing — one she felt obliged to share with people who had not been given the same gifts God had given her.

Her kindness, decency, wit, and generosity were self-evident. Who wouldn’t want to attach themselves, even briefly, to something like that? And who wouldn’t mourn when a light that bright finally went out?

I won’t lie. I spent an ungodly amount of time doomscrolling Dolly. That is what happens when you have time to kill and free Wi-Fi. I can’t tell you how many times I heard the lyrics to “I Will Always Love You.”

Which triggered a memory for me: the first time I ever heard of Dolly Parton. It was my senior year in high school, and I, like almost every teenage boy I knew, had a gigantic crush on Linda Ronstadt. She had released her album Prisoner in Disguise. It was a seminal album for Linda and included covers of Tracks of My Tears by Smokey Robinson, Love Is a Rose by Neil Young, Roll Um Easy by Lowell George, and Hey Mister, That’s Me Up on the Jukebox by James Taylor. Back then, when vinyl ruled and the quality of your turntable was a status symbol, albums had liner notes (God, I miss them), where you could find out not only who wrote the songs but who did the handclapping. Ronstadt did all of that, but she added a twist. The entire interior spread of the album featured handwritten lyrics from the songwriters she covered, including one from Dolly for “I Will Always Love You.”

Ronstadt’s version of that song remains my favorite. Nothing against Whitney’s or Dolly’s, but at that age, Ronstadt’s clear, powerful, and almost unnervingly pure voice resonated with that boy and made him pray for a day when he would know a love that deep.

Of course, once I was down the rabbit hole, I figured we were in this far — might as well go all in. I won’t tell you how long this diversion went on, except to say I was glad I was in the far reaches of the club and people could not see the “Tracks of My Tears.” (And, not for nothing, if you have not heard the Coldstream Guards version of 9 to 5, you have not gone nearly far enough.)

What finally made me pause was when I got to Dolly’s, Linda’s, and Emmylou Harris’s version of Neil Young’s “After the Gold Rush.” Neil’s version is good. Theirs is better. Don’t believe me? Listen for yourself: Harris, Parton, Ronstadt on Late Show, March 24, 1999 (full, stereo) — YouTube.

The song, written in 1970, is amazingly prophetic about the world to come. It envisions a world so corrupted and destroyed by man that people need to leave the planet of their origins to find a better world.

Well, I dreamed I saw the knights in armor coming
Sayin’ something about a queen
There were peasants singin’ and drummers drumming
And the archer split the tree
There was a fanfare blowin’ to the sun
That was floating on the breeze
Look at mother nature on the run in the nineteen seventies
Look at mother nature on the run in the nineteen seventies

I was lyin’ in a burned-out basement
With a full moon in my eyes
I was hopin’ for replacement
When the sun burst through the sky
There was a band playin’ in my head
And I felt like getting high
I was thinkin’ about what a friend had said
I was hopin’ it was a lie
Thinkin’ about what a friend had said
I was hopin’ it was a lie

Well, I dreamed I saw the silver spaceships lying
In the yellow haze of the sun
There were children crying and colors flying
All around the chosen ones
All in a dream, all in a dream
The loading had begun
Flyin’ mother nature’s silver seed
To a new home in the sun
Flyin’ mother nature’s silver seed
To a new home

Of course, this made me think of Agent Orange (were you taking bets on how long it would take me to get there?) and the destruction he does to our democracy, our environment, and our everyday lives. Especially the last two lines:

Flying mother nature’s silver seed.

To a new home.

Is that what I am doing? Getting on a silver bird to fly to my new home in Brazil?

The truth is, that remains to be seen. What I am pretty sure of is that I can’t take another two years of unfettered, disastrous Don. It would steal too much of my soul and give him too much power over me.

Which, of course, made me think, “What would Dolly do?” I knew the answer, even though she was famously nonpolitical. She said, “I work hard at being happy.”

Those are words to live by over the next 90 days. Happiness is not a passive condition. You have to work for it — vote for it, fight for it, and refuse to let the loudest and meanest among us define the country we love.

Dolly made a life out of pairing kindness with backbone. We could use a little of both right now. Because if we don’t do the work to put this country back on track, Neil Young’s silver seed may begin to sound less like poetry and more like a travel plan.

Posted in Humor / satire, opinion, personal essay, Politics and Society, Trump Opposition | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Willie and Joe

Posted on August 23, 2026 by 34orion

Many years ago, when my marginally older brother and I were old enough to read but not quite old enough to cook breakfast ourselves, we had only one screen in the house. (Don’t be outraged. Civilization somehow survived.) It was a 16-inch black-and-white Philco that my parents had put on a cart with casters so it could be wheeled from the living room to the dining room, or wherever we decided to watch Chet and David or My Mother the Car.

David and I were early risers. Like 5:30-in-the-morning early risers. We had been given strict instructions by our parents not to wake them, under penalty of a tongue-lashing. Our go-to activity at that hour was to wheel the television into the living room and watch early-morning programming. We had two choices: CBS’s Sunrise Semester, a series of lectures from NYU on topics such as art history, philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, the history of African civilization, and communication studies exploring media’s societal impact; or NBC’s Modern Farmer, where I remember being taught how to grow strawberries and the effects of a 5-10-15 nutrient ratio.

As captivating as these shows appear in retrospect, shockingly, they didn’t hold two young boys’ attention. Apparently, lectures on astronomy and proper strawberry fertilization had limits. Often, that put us on a path toward behavior that seemed completely logical to us but was not viewed quite the same way by our parents. For example, I remember one occasion when David thought it was a great idea to make a Boston Cream Pie for my mother (don’t ask). Unfortunately, his reading skills were not quite up to the task at hand, so he simply added the ingredients to a bowl, placed them in an unlit oven, and waited for the magic to happen.

Needless to say, Mom was not thrilled with our efforts or the FEMA-certified disaster zone we had managed to create in the kitchen. We were banned from the kitchen without her present and told that if “we didn’t like what was on television, we should find a book to read.” This was parenting before anyone thought to call it a content strategy.

Of course, our books were not good enough for us. We had read them all, and being young boys richly endowed with the mischief gene, we tore into our parents’ bookshelf. Not that there was much there to read, but we managed to find a few books to amuse us. Chief among them was Bill Mauldin’s “Up Front.”

If you’ve never heard of Bill Mauldin, he was a cartoonist for Stars and Stripes during the Second World War. Through two average GIs, Joe and Willie, Mauldin told the story of the war from the foot soldier’s perspective—a point of view that was not always appreciated by the upper echelons, who generally preferred their criticism filtered through several layers of rank and a freshly polished briefing table.

But we didn’t know any of that then. Despite the fact that World War II was closer to us then than 9/11 is to us now, we were just kids. They were cartoons. We thought some were funny.

Like this one.

Or this one.

It wasn’t until I was older and became a student of the Second World War that I really began to understand the subversive nature of Mauldin’s cartoons. He didn’t glorify war. He didn’t celebrate our generals. His cartoons celebrated the real hero of every war: the foot soldier. The guy in the trenches, doing his best to survive so he could go home to his family. The GI whose only defense against SNAFUs and FUBARs was to find a little humor in the absurd reality in which he found himself.

Often, that put him at direct odds with those in command. Patton particularly hated this cartoon, which is usually a reliable sign that the cartoonist had found the nerve.

In fact, Mauldin made a point of making fun of officers whenever he could, as in these cartoons. Rank, he understood, was not a vaccine against absurdity.

So why did Stars and Stripes publish the cartoons despite the very vocal complaints of famous and notoriously outspoken four-star generals? Apparently, there was once a theory that a military newspaper should occasionally be allowed to tell the truth to the military.

Part of the answer lies in the official mission of the paper.

“Stars and Stripes exists to give U.S. service members, DoD civilians, and their families independent, reliable news—separate from the military’s own public affairs and chain of command. Key elements of its mission:

  • Deliver news from an American troops’ perspective, especially covering communities and events relevant to military life overseas and at home.
  • Operate with editorial independence—while it’s authorized and partly funded by the Department of Defense, U.S. law protects it from being used as a mouthpiece for military or government messaging. It’s meant to report accurately, even when the news is unflattering to the military.
  • Serve as a “hometown paper” for a mobile, often overseas population, covering both world and military news and everyday features (sports, entertainment, personal stories).”

But that is only part of the story. Mission statements are lovely things; what matters is whether anyone is willing to live by them when the brass starts calling.

Joe and Willie were important because they made soldiers who were ankle-deep in mud, risking their lives every day and often suffering from the institutional blindness of command, feel seen and heard.

Being seen and heard matters because it means you are not being ignored. It means others understand what you are going through. And it strengthens unit cohesion because it makes plain that we are all in this together.

It surprises no one who has been paying attention that Commander Bone Spurs and Captain Cable News have little respect for the First Amendment. They seem to think the only important words are the ones they utter, preferably into a microphone and with no follow-up questions.

Which is why they replaced the senior editors of Stars and Stripes on Friday after those editors refused to give in to demands that they publish only articles coming directly from the military public affairs department and venerating the Field Marshal of Mar-a-Lago. Apparently, “independent newspaper” now means “press release with better typography.”

The fact that they appear unaware of the consequences of their actions is not exactly a shock either. (Iran, tariffs, mass deportations, Canada.) Foresight has not exactly been the house specialty.

When the men and women standing watch for the rest of us stop feeling seen or heard, morale doesn’t collapse with a dramatic bugle call. It leaks out slowly—one ignored complaint, one pointless directive, one senior leader insisting everything is “fine” because the PowerPoint says so. Nothing reassures a tired platoon quite like a green box on somebody else’s slide deck.

Unit cohesion depends on trust: trust that the person next to you has your back, trust that your commander knows what is actually happening, and trust that somebody above the rank of major occasionally listens to people who wear body armor instead of briefing-room badges. When that trust disappears, troops stop speaking up. Problems get buried. Good people leave. Cynicism moves into the barracks and starts collecting housing allowance—and unlike most recruits, it never seems to get transferred.

You can order people to formation. You can order them onto a ship, into a cockpit, or across a desert. What you cannot order is loyalty, confidence, or belief in leadership. Those have to be earned, which is inconvenient because earning things takes longer than issuing a memo.

And when service members begin to think their leaders are more interested in political theater, press releases, and pleasing whoever occupies the next office up than in hearing from the people actually doing the job, the military develops a dangerous problem: everyone still salutes, but fewer people believe. The ceremony remains immaculate; the confidence underneath it does not.

That is how cohesion starts to crack—not because troops suddenly stop caring about the mission, but because they begin wondering whether the people running it care about them.

We should all care about them. And what the current administration is doing to systematically destroy a military that guards our gates.

Which made me wonder what Mauldin and his muses, Joe and Willie, might think about the current situation. I suspect they would recognize the scenery immediately. So I asked my friend Chatty to help me create some Mauldin-inspired comics about this week’s actions.

For example, how the Navy in an effort to soothe the ego of a man who did all he could not serve, removing a name of Congressional Medal of Honor winner, with his own

Or scaling back needed joint military exercises with South Korea because we are stretched so thin we no longer have the capability to conduct exercises.

And maybe that is the point Mauldin would make today.

The uniforms change, the weapons get smarter, and the PowerPoints become infinitely more colorful, but the people carrying the load remain remarkably familiar. Joe and Willie understood that soldiers can endure lousy food, bad weather, absurd orders, and officers with an inflated sense of their own genius. What they cannot endure forever is being treated as scenery.

A military is strongest when the people in it believe their voices matter—not because every complaint should win the day, but because somebody is actually listening. Stars and Stripes was built to provide that voice. Turning it into another public-relations shop may make the brass more comfortable. It will not make the troops stronger. And somewhere, I suspect, Joe and Willie are sitting in the mud, looking at each other, and wondering how the hell we managed to forget something they figured out eighty years ago.

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The Powerball Presidency

Posted on August 16, 2026 by 34orion

I had a rough week last week.

I was not the winner of the $1 billion dollar Powerball lottery.

All the fantasies I had about being able to fly to Brazil on a private jet sipping champagne with Rosie at my feet, gone. I would not be able to buy niece Cate the horse stable she richly deserved. Nor immortalize my parents in a foundation that supports immigrant education. Or live on a ship that took me to whatever destination whimsy told me I should go to. Create a micro loan nonprofit that benefited single working mothers in the US to help them start businesses. Lend meaningful support to political candidates whose vision for this country whose intent was to lift people up not create a permanent underclass.

I could go on. But you get the idea. All the fantasies you have after you buy your lottery ticket and before the drawing reveals the winning number.

On the morning after heartbreak, I was on the Stairmaster at the gym contemplating the tragedy that had just befallen me. If you are unfamiliar with this apparatus, it was clearly designed out of some Munchian nightmare where you are condemned to walk up an endless flight of stairs.  It is torture. The only way I found to make even the least bit tolerable is to use one of the features of this machine called the monument challenge.  It allows you to challenge yourself by climbing to the top of various skyscrapers around the world. That morning my goal was to climb the 117 flights to the top of the Empire State building.  

The only way to survive this torture is to let your body do what your body needs to do and send you brain into a different direction. I get some of my best thinking done while climbing these virtual buildings.

On this morning, I was doing a little self-comforting. Not winning the lottery was certainly a disappointment but I am doing okay. My wife is smart, beautiful and funny.  I live in a nice town. I have an apartment that is more than is more comfortable. I live on two continents and have a dog who likes to sleep on my toes when I write. I don’t worry about where the next meal is coming from as demonstrated by the fact that I am on this nightmare machine trying to keep the pounds from multiplying.

It occurred to me that I have been very fortunate in life. I grew up at a time where the American dream was still alive. A country that believed that everyone who worked hard would be successful. Who on the heals of the great depression had created programs to make sure every kid had the opportunity for a good education, could go to college and get a degree without committing financial seppuku. If you were poor we would make sure you had enough food on your table until you could take care of yourself and where a medical emergency didn’t result in you having to live in your car or on the streets.

We were a generous people who took care of those less fortunate that us because the Great Depression taught us that “other than a grace of god go I.”

Somewhere about the 20th floor I happened to look up at one of the monitors that fronted the Stairmasters and saw the Combover Cesar. I will be honest. I looked away. Looking at him is hard enough generally but when I am on the edge of exhaustion he is too much.

But sadly, he invaded my thoughts.

It made me think about how the Duke of Deflection had perverted the American Dreams. Instead of helping people up he has done all he could to keep people down. Some examples:

  • More people will go hungry because he reduced SNAP funding by $187 Billion at at time of burgeoning unemployment and uncontrolled inflation.
  • 10s of millions of people can no longer afford health care because reduced ACA subsidies and draconian cuts to Medicare have.
  • Education grants designed to help teachers in low income areas have been eliminated creating a scarcity of teachers in areas where education should be their primary escape route.
  • College education has become unaffordable even to the middle class especially and programs to help them like AmeriCorps grants and the elimination of the SAVE program designed to ease the burden of student loans.

Meanwhile, he has helped the rich get richer. To name just a couple

  • The 2017 Trump tax cuts — many of whose individual and business provisions were extended or made permanent in 2025 — lowered taxes on corporations and business owners. Apparently, when a billionaire keeps more of his money it is called ‘growth.’ When a single mother gets help buying groceries it is called ‘dependency.’
  • The estate-tax exemption was dramatically increased, allowing very wealthy families to pass tens of millions of dollars to their heirs before the federal estate tax even enters the conversation. Nothing says rugged individualism quite like being born on third base with an accountant standing nearby to explain that you hit a triple.
  • Investment income continues to enjoy advantages that wages do not, including preferential long-term capital-gains rates and the stepped-up basis at death. The tax code apparently believes money works much harder sitting in a portfolio than a nurse does working a double shift.

And the carried-interest preference still allows many investment managers to have compensation taxed as capital gains rather than ordinary income if the statutory requirements are met. Because if there is one group America has historically failed to protect, it is private-equity managers.

The American Dream, Trump Edition

By the time I reached the upper floors of my imaginary Empire State Building, it occurred to me that Trump has not really abandoned the American Dream. He has simply revised it. In his version, the dream is not that every American should have a fair chance to become prosperous.

It is that Donald Trump should have a fair chance to become even more prosperous while serving as president.

The numbers are difficult to dismiss as mere political rhetoric. Trump’s latest financial disclosures show enormous income from crypto, licensing, golf clubs and other businesses.

Reuters has estimated that the Trump family has made billions from crypto ventures since he returned to the White House, including hundreds of millions from the $TRUMP meme coin. At one point, the top holders of that coin were even rewarded with a private dinner with the President of the United States. In the old days, rich people bought a table at a fundraiser. Progress means now you can buy a meme coin and perhaps get the President with dessert.

Then there is World Liberty Financial, the Trump-family crypto venture, foreign-backed investments and licensing deals bearing the family name. None of this proves that every presidential decision was made to enrich the Trump family, and the White House denies conflicts of interest.

That may be the clearest definition of Trump’s American Dream. Cut the ladder for the people below you. Build an escalator for the people above you. And make damn sure the escalator stops at the gift shop, where everything has your name on it.

I reached the 117th floor exhausted, sweaty and still not a billionaire. But I did come away with one comforting thought: apparently, I had misunderstood the lottery. The Powerball drawing was not the game I needed to win. I should have run for president.

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The Ted Lasso Way

Posted on August 9, 2026 by 34orion

August 2020 was a particularly dark time in my life.

The world I thought I knew had completely disappeared. Like the rest of the world, I had been in lockdown for the past five months. The fear of catching COVID was central to almost every part of my life.

The simple things were no longer simple. You couldn’t just head to the store for groceries. You ordered ahead, or masked up, swallowed your anxiety, and braved the aisles of what, in the world before, had been one of the most benign places in your life. Seeing people on the street still generated a wave, but from a thoughtful distance. Seeing friends and family required appointments, planning, and a safe environment.

My isolation was a little different than most. When the pandemic lockdown hit on March 13, 2020, I was in Brazil celebrating a birthday with my wife. A two-week trip turned into four months of being marooned in a country where people were dying by the thousands and being buried in mass graves.

When I finally found a flight home, I faced one of the hardest decisions of my life. Stay in Brazil with the woman I loved, knowing that if I got sick I would be in a country where I didn’t speak the language and could find myself frightened, hospitalized, and alone. Or leave her behind and return home to Rosie, to a health-care system I knew, and to a country that—at least at that moment—seemed to be coping somewhat better.

I left.

But not without a lot of tears, a promise from my wife that she would soon join me, and a load of guilt that did not abate until she finally arrived in the United States.

And then my best friend of nearly forty years died during COVID. His son, unable to cope with the isolation of the pandemic, his father’s death, and his own demons, died shortly thereafter.

I am, by choice, an optimist. Yes. I am the person who looks at a glass half full of water and says, “It’s full. Just not all with water.” But by August 2020, it was getting harder every day to remain positive and upbeat—to retain the capacity to imagine the end of this thing.

Then came Ted Lasso.

It was a very unlikely story: an American football coach hired to lead a British football team. How was that going to resonate with audiences? Turns out, excuse the phrase, it was just what the doctor ordered.

Because Ted Lasso was never really a story about football, no matter which way you spell it. It was a story about a coach who preached positivity, decency, and belief—in yourself and in your teammates.

Ted’s optimism isn’t based on believing bad things won’t happen. Bad things happen constantly. His optimism is the refusal to allow what has happened to dictate what happens next.

“Be a goldfish”: forget your disappointments as quickly as you can. “Be curious, not judgmental”: remember that we all wallow in our own stew and that a little grace for people who see the world differently goes a long way. And my favorite: “I believe in hope. I believe in believe.” A reminder that without hope we are lost, and belief is one pathway back.

The message resonated, and Ted Lasso became a beacon of hope and positivity in a world where both were in very short supply.

I have been thinking about that a lot this week.

How could I not? After a three-year hiatus, Ted Lasso has returned to Apple TV, and the airwaves, streams, podcasts, and social media have been full of Jason Sudeikis and his castmates promoting the new season.

It is also the sixth anniversary of Elaine joining me in the United States. Words are inadequate to describe the joy, relief, and love I felt when I saw her emerge from customs. It was, and will forever be, one of the best moments of my life.

And then there was the attempted political lynching of Anthony Fauci by Rand Paul and his Senate committee.

The same Rand Paul who spent much of the pandemic fighting mask mandates and arguing that herd immunity was taking hold even as tens of thousands of Americans were dying each month, hundreds of thousands more were getting sick, hospitals were overflowing, and refrigerated trailers were being used as temporary morgues. The same Rand Paul who pressed federal health officials to give greater consideration to unproven early COVID treatments, including ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine—neither of which proved to be the cure their most enthusiastic advocates hoped for.

Fauci, meanwhile, was already one of the most prominent infectious-disease scientists in the world decades before 2020. He led NIAID for 38 years, from 1984 to 2022, overseeing research on HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, influenza, Ebola, Zika, and eventually COVID-19. He helped shape the federal response to HIV/AIDS as it went from an almost invariably fatal disease to a manageable chronic illness. He advised seven presidents and received both the National Medal of Science and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. And during the pandemic, he was willing to contradict the president publicly when the president wandered into medical fantasyland—whether musing about disinfectant or promoting treatments before the evidence was there.

In other words, he was one of the people who gave us reason to believe that science would eventually get us out of the mess.

Why did Rand Paul decide to pillory Fauci? Some of it seems personal. Paul has a long history of hitting back hard at people who insult or challenge him. Ask John McCain, Chris Christie, Markwayne Mullin—or Fauci himself, who famously told Paul, “You do not know what you are talking about.”

But mostly, this looked like political theater: a chance for Republicans to score points and energize their base before the midterms. They wanted Fauci as a symbol. When he invoked the Fifth Amendment rather than answer questions in a hearing chaired by a senator who had spent years calling for his prosecution, the committee moved to hold him in contempt and send the matter to the Justice Department.

So why did all of this remind me of Ted Lasso?

When Ted Lasso first entered the zeitgeist, we were in a very dark place as a country. We were desperate for someone—or something—to latch on to. Something that could give us hope. Something that could help us believe there was a better way ahead.

The Fauci hearing reinforced something I already knew: our country is in another dark place, one where political ideology too often outweighs common sense and fact, and where greed, selfishness, ego, and grievance get celebrated more loudly than kindness, selflessness, and understanding.

That August, Elaine walked out of customs and Ted Lasso walked onto my television. One was the person I loved coming home. The other was a fictional football coach reminding me why hope matters. I needed both.

Six years later, Congress is once again serving grievance with a side of theater. Ted is back too. Good timing.

Because optimism isn’t pretending the ugliness isn’t there. It is refusing to let the ugliness have the last word.

Sam Obisanya’s father put it better: “Don’t fight back. Fight forward.”

And that may be the lesson we need most right now. Hope is not passive. Belief is not surrender. If we want a different country, we have to fight for it — in our communities, in our conversations, and at the ballot box. And if we want to change the direction of this country, we need to fight forward and win the midterms.

So be curious. Be decent. Remember what matters. Fight forward.

And when Washington becomes impossible to watch, be a goldfish.

But not until after you vote.

Posted in covid, Humor / satire, opinion, personal essay, Politics and Society, Trump cuts, Trump Opposition | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

What We Do In The Shadows: The White House Edition

Posted on August 2, 2026 by 34orion

The other day I was driving through Staten Island.

For most of us in New Jersey all we have ever experienced of Staten Island is the highway between Goethals Bridge in New Jersey to the Verrazano Bridget that connects us to Brooklyn and beyond. We have no desire to stop and explore. There is no there for us. I mean they had Fresh Kills Garbage dump but not a destination most want to visit and its closed now.  And the cast of the Jersey Shore demonstrate to those of us who love the shore why we called Staten Islanders bennies and generally avoid them at all costs.

Please don’t get me wrong. I am sure there are very nice people from Staten Island. Colin Jost and Pete Davidson are funny and are from there. But then again Antonin Scalia grew up there which is yet another reason never to stop there because no one I know wants his cooties.

Anyway, I was musing about this while stuck in the permeant traffic jam that is route 278. I was not listening to the radio because I didn’t want to hear the news (who does these days)  music seemed to noisy for a traffic jam  I guess I could have listened to a podcast but my go tos were either in summer hiatus or Rosie and I had already listened to them while on twice daily inspection of the neighborhood.  

Did I mention that I was hot. The air conditioner in my car is on the fritz and only working at about 50% capacity. And I couldn’t open the window unless I wanted to suck down exhaust and listen to people arguing in the car in the next lane.

So I was little bit miserable. A lot bored, when I spied an old Victoiran house on top of a nearby hill. It reminded me of one few things from Staten Island that seemed worthwhile. The television show “What We Do in The Shadows.”

Never seen it? It is the story of four centuries-old vampires  who have mastered immortality but remain utterly defeated by Staten Island parking, local politics, and household chores. Imagine The Office if the employees were undead narcissist.

There is Nandor, the Relentless wjp once conquered kingdoms, yet can’t figure out email, American customs, or why nobody respects his authority anymore.

Laszlo a centuries old libertine who approaches every problem with absolutely misguided certainty accompanied by ridiculous statements said with Shakespearean conviction.

Guillermo their mortal servant who longs to be a vampire but spends all of his time p vampire messes, buying groceries, and disposing of bodies. His loyalty is rewarded with…more chores.

The vampire that hit closest to home was Craig Robinson, the energy vampire. Rather than drinking blood, he feeds by trapping people in soul-crushing conversations about municipal zoning, printer maintenance, or PowerPoint updates. Every office has one—you just never realized he was supernatural.

That is until they introduced Evie Russell, the emotional vampire. So clever. Who in the course of their life has not run into an emotional vampire.  Someone you have friended, dated, or made a significant other who before you knew it had sucked the emotional life out of you leaving you a husk of your former self and having to re-build your emotional infrastructure from scratch and wondering how you got here.

Thinking about it, Evie had a particularly insidious way of draining  people by making them feel sorry for her with a constant stream of tragic, self-pitying stories.

Gosh, that sounds familiar.

Who else produces a constant stream of self-absorbed, self-pitying and self-centered complaints about how badly the press, the courts, his political opponents, foreign governments, former allies, late-night comedians and practically everyone except the fellow in his bathroom mirror treat him?

You know the person I mean.

The Mar-a-Lago Martyr.

The Orange Evie.

The Whiner-in-Chief.

The only man capable of occupying the most powerful office in the world while sounding like someone has once again given him the wrong table at the country club.

His speeches and social-media posts have become an endless recital of grievances. The press is dishonest. The judges are corrupt. Prosecutors are deranged. Elections are rigged. Allies are ungrateful. Foreign countries are treating us unfairly. Television hosts are untalented. Celebrities who dislike him are washed up. Even Canada, according to a recent lamentation from the Presidential Pity Palace, has treated the United States “very unfairly for decades.”

One might reasonably ask whether there is anyone on Earth who has treated this poor billionaire, television celebrity, golf-course proprietor and twice-elected president properly.

Apparently not.

At the recent White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the Tangerine Tragedian began pleasantly enough before returning to his emotional feeding ground: complaints about reporters and insults directed at the people who displease him. It was less a comedy routine than Thanksgiving dinner with a wealthy uncle who has cornered you near the liquor cabinet and wants to explain, again, why everybody is jealous of him.

Then there is Truth Social, his electronic fainting couch.

During one six-hour stretch in July, the Sultan of Sulk reportedly posted 43 times. A few weeks earlier, he unleashed more than 100 posts in another digital eruption. Apparently, governing the United States leaves considerable downtime between breakfast and the first tee.

The individual complaints are almost beside the point. Like Evie Russell’s stories, they accumulate. One grievance follows another until we are no longer discussing policy, budgets, wars or the future of the country. We are discussing him: who insulted him, who betrayed him, who failed to praise him sufficiently and which unpleasant fact must be transformed into another story of his persecution.

That is how the emotional vampire feeds.

Evie drains her victims by forcing them to feel sorry for her. The Mango Martyr does something even more ambitious. He drains an entire country by demanding that every event be experienced through his emotions.

If he is angry, we must all be angry.

If he feels humiliated, the nation must seek revenge.

If a reporter criticizes him, the press becomes an enemy.

If a judge rules against him, the justice system is corrupt.

If an ally disagrees, the ally becomes a traitor.

If reality itself refuses to cooperate, reality must be fired and replaced by someone more loyal.

And it works.

Every morning, millions of Americans awaken to discover what has offended the Apricot Aggrievance since they went to bed. Television panels analyze his latest tantrum. Members of Congress rush to defend it. Administration officials translate it into something resembling policy. The rest of us argue about it over breakfast, mutter about it during the day and carry it to bed with us at night.

He posts. We react.

He complains. We explain.

He wallows. We slowly become exhausted.

Like all emotional vampires, he does not merely consume attention. He consumes joy. He turns holidays into political rallies, tragedies into opportunities for self-praise and national celebrations into another airing of personal grievances. Even moments that should belong to the country somehow end up revolving around the Great Pumpkin’s hurt feelings.

By the time he is finished, we are too tired to discuss the cost of groceries, the national debt, housing, health care or whether the republic is being quietly dismantled while everyone debates the latest Truth Social eruption.

Perhaps that is the real danger of being governed by an emotional vampire. It is not simply that he is exhausting. It is that exhaustion becomes a political strategy.

A drained country is easier to frighten.

An angry country is easier to divide.

And a country that spends every waking hour tending to one man’s limitless emotional needs has precious little energy left to tend to its own.

Traffic finally began to move. The Victorian house disappeared behind me, and the air conditioner coughed out another lukewarm breath.

For a moment, I wondered whether the vampires of Staten Island might actually be preferable.

Nandor may be incompetent. Laszlo may be depraved. Colin Robinson may bore you into unconsciousness. Evie Russell may leave you emotionally hollowed out.

But at least they are fictional.

And none of them has the nuclear codes.

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The Cheeto Dust Cup

Posted on July 20, 2026 by 34orion

I told you Cheeto dust was the anti-fairy dust. I did not expect FIFA to run the field trial.

The final was supposed to be a futbol match. Somewhere along the line it turned into a corporate entertainment convention with a soccer match trapped in the middle, and I’m fairly sure I know what got sprinkled on the itinerary.

Start with the lines.

Getting into the stadium required the kind of security theater usually reserved for a nuclear facility, except the ticket scanners kept jamming and nobody in a yellow vest could tell you why, so eighty thousand people baked outside MetLife for the privilege of paying more than a monthly mortgage to watch a game most of them couldn’t actually see because they were still in line for the first half.

That’s Cheeto dust working exactly as designed: apply it to crowd management and you don’t get a smoother experience, you get a bottleneck with a metal detector and heat stroke.

Then came the pregame ceremony, ninety minutes of it, because somebody decided the World Cup needed the pacing of a Super Bowl halftime show stretched across an entire evening. Tom Cruise stood alone on the pitch in his all-black promo-tour outfit and told eighty thousand soccer fans that football is a language spoken without words, which is a fine sentiment for a movie trailer and a strange one to deliver, out loud, with words, for several minutes, while a man tries to sell you his fall release. I don’t doubt he meant it. I just don’t know what it had to do with Spain and Argentina.

The politics were the part that actually stung.

Clever organizers handed out red cards so the crowd could hold them up in protest of a phone call the sitting president made to get a suspended player back on the field, which is either the most on-brand thing I’ve ever heard or performance art nobody asked for. Security confiscated a chunk of them before kickoff, which is its own small miracle of irony: silencing a protest about interference with an actual act of interference in a country that is supposed to guarantee speech with a President that claims his free speech rights are violated on an hourly basis.

And then he walked out onto the pitch anyway to hand over the trophy, got booed twice on camera, and lingered on stage well past the point anyone wanted him there, because leaving gracefully has never once been in the formula.

That’s the tell with Cheeto dust — it is hard to get rid of and stays on far longer than anyone wants.

Ticket prices, meanwhile, had drifted somewhere past reasonable and landed in “you’d need a Manhattan penthouse and a guy named Chip” territory, which meant the people actually filling those seats were less “die-hard fans who’ve followed this team for decades” and more “whoever’s publicist got the good suite.” Somewhere in the nosebleeds there were probably real supporters. I hope they enjoyed the view of Tom Cruise’s ceremony.

And the game. My God, the game. After all that buildup, Argentina — the defending champions, with Messi playing what may be his last World Cup match — could not manage a single shot on goal in ninety minutes of actual football. Not one. Spain, playing with the calm precision of a team that had clearly practiced this exact scenario, still somehow looked like they’d learned the offside rule that morning, stringing together technically flawless sequences that led nowhere in particular until, eventually, they found the one they needed. One goal. A whole tournament, a nine-figure production budget, a Louis Vuitton trunk for the trophy, and the soccer itself was the least memorable part of the night.

So here’s the diagnosis: apply fairy dust to a World Cup and you get a tournament. Apply Cheeto dust and you get a red carpet event that occasionally pauses for a match, security lines that could radicalize a monk, a movie star’s earnest monologue standing in for a kickoff whistle, and a president who can’t resist being the story even when the story was supposed to be about two nations who’ve waited a combined near-century for this exact final.

So here is the diagnosis: fairy dust turns a football match into something magical. Cheeto dust turns it into a branded content opportunity with armed security, dynamic pricing and a celebrity explaining the meaning of football to people who crossed continents to watch it.

It gives you ticket prices calculated by private-equity consultants, security lines designed by the DMV, a halftime show nobody requested and a president wandering onto the field like a wedding guest who heard there might be cameras near the cake.

And after all the speeches, fireworks, confiscated protest cards, luxury trunks and corporate hosannas, the actual football arrived almost as an administrative afterthought. Ninety minutes, no Argentine shot on goal and just enough excitement to remind everyone what the evening might have been had FIFA remembered it was staging a match rather than launching a streaming service.

Somewhere, my father is shaking his head and asking the obvious question: why didn’t somebody just fix it?

The answer, sadly, is that nobody involved thought it was broken. The lines were full, the suites were sold, the sponsors were photographed and the most powerful man in the stadium successfully made himself part of a story that had absolutely nothing to do with him.

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Cheeto Dust

Posted on July 19, 2026 by 34orion

I am sitting in Ice Cream Square.

It is a bucolic little park in the heart of our neighborhood, at the edge of a jungle and in the shadow of Pedra da Gávea, a monolithic rock that rises almost 3,000 feet above our neighborhood. It has a small playground for children and a few pieces of rudimentary exercise equipment for those so inclined — the kind that always seems to have exactly one determined retiree working the pull-up bar no matter the hour.

My wife dubbed it Ice Cream Square because a couple of years back the HOA placed a WizMart — a self-serve mini-mart in a repurposed shipping container — adjacent to the park, where we’ve been known to grab an ice cream bar to sustain us while walking on particularly hot days.

Today, I am walking alone. Walking and exercise help me find balance when the world seems to be coming at me faster than produce in Fruit Ninja. And it has been that sort of week. Not only had it been one of those weeks at my company where challenges seemed to pop up faster than mushrooms after a rainstorm, but earlier today we had to say goodbye to our cat, Romeow. Despite the fact that he tried to murder me every morning by weaving in front of me on my way down the stairs to feed him, he was a great lap companion and a wonderful listener to my monologues on any subject. He had opinions about all of it, mostly conveyed through the volume of his meowing and the insistence with which he head-butted whatever body part was nearest, but opinions nonetheless.

Making the decision to euthanize your pet, no matter how right it is, is fraught with guilt, what-ifs, and the unanswerable question of what he would ask of you if he could speak. Returning home to an empty house, where you look for him in all those old familiar places, only compounds the sadness. You catch yourself listening for the specific thump of him jumping down from the windowsill, and there’s a full second before you remember why you’re not going to hear it.

Did I mention I really needed this walk?

Normally, when I walk, I listen to an audiobook. Partially because it relieves boredom. Partially because it makes me feel like I’m accomplishing something. But mostly because it blocks out the intrusive thoughts that the walk was designed to free me from. Today, though, I decided that the whole purpose of this walk was to help me slay the demons that sometimes lie in my thoughts. No narrator, no plot, just me and whatever my brain decided to serve up.

Today my walk was full of thoughts of my dad, as they often are when I’m walking my way through life’s challenges. On my walk today, I found myself reminiscing about the advice he would give us when we ran into problems he felt deserved more attention. He would ask, “Do you think these problems would go away if you just sprinkled a little fairy dust on them?” He’d usually say it with one eyebrow raised, in the tone of a man who had heard every excuse in the book and found all of them equally unconvincing.

I have no idea where he got that expression. Probably some Viennese nursery rhyme from his childhood, translated into English. Or perhaps it was something his father had said to him. But I knew what he meant. He was trying to teach us that problems don’t solve themselves. There are no magic solutions. You’re responsible for solving them, so get on it. If it’s broke, figure out how to fix it. If your first solution doesn’t work, figure out why and come up with a new plan. And if that doesn’t work, repeat.

Hoping something will change just because you want it to is delusional.

But over time, I gave his fairy dust expression a different interpretation. Instead of thinking of it as a magic solution to my problems, I began to think of it as my work product. What “fairy dust” can I bring to the problem that will actually solve it? Not a wish. A deliverable.

And that is what I tried to do on my walk: apply fairy dust to the challenges my fledgling little businesses are facing. How to resolve some management problems with people who were trying to do the right thing but were spending too much time in the weeds and not enough time looking at the horizon. Where to find the next big revenue hit, and how best to cope with the clients we have who keep challenging us to do better. How to console my wife, who — in addition to dealing with the death of her companion of the last thirteen years — was suffering from guilt over euthanizing her beloved pet.

Sitting here on the small patio directly adjacent to WizMart, with the warm winter sun on my face and the sounds of the Brazilian forest — bem-te-vis singing their eponymous song, tamarins chirping and whistling as they do their tightrope act on the power lines, plus a few mysterious ones I can’t identify — I’m satisfied with my application of fairy dust. I haven’t solved all the challenges, but I know I’ve taken some steps, mental as they may be, to push the ball down the field. For example, I know no amount of fairy dust will ever fill the void in my heart for my pal Romeow, but I’ve come to terms with the fact that we did our best for him, and that wherever he is, he’s at peace.

My reward for such good work is not ice cream. It’s winter here (gasp, it’s in the sixties), so I’m enjoying a bag of Cheetos Requeijão — a flavor of Cheetos sold only in Brazil, of which I am particularly fond — and a can of Guarana Zero.

Life is good. Idyllic location, fairy dust applied. Om mani padme hum. I’m convinced that if I listen hard enough, I’ll hear the rich, resonant hum of a Zen bowl.

Then I made the mistake of looking down at my fingers and seeing they’re caked in Cheeto dust sludge — the kind that, I know from experience, gets so embedded into your skin and nails that it takes a power washer to remove. Which, of course, makes me think of the Grand Cheeto himself.

Talk about a buzzkill.

But it spurred a thought: if fairy dust is what you apply when you need to solve a problem, what does Cheeto dust do when you apply it to one?

Cheeto dust has to be the anti-fairy dust. Apply it to a problem and, instead of getting a solution, you get more problems and bigger issues. It doesn’t require decades of hard-won judgment. It doesn’t require you to sit with a problem long enough to actually understand it. It just requires a couch, a bag, and an unshakeable belief in your own genius — and the confidence to declare victory on the way out the door, before anyone checks the math.

For example:

  • Think tariffs are going to create fair trade? Apply a little Cheeto dust, and next thing you know, not only do you have unnecessary trade wars, but consumer prices are jacked up — and instead of friendly partners, you’ve got pissed-off neighbors.
  • Want to make Washington, DC special for the country’s 250th anniversary? Apply a little Cheeto dust, and instead of turning the reflecting pool patriotic blue, you end up with an algae pond that costs millions to fix.
  • Go to a Knicks game to see “your” team play for the title for the first time in generations. Apply a little Cheeto dust, and “your” team loses its one shot at the championship.
  • Decide immigrants are ruining this country? Apply a little Cheeto dust, and suddenly you’ve hired thousands of people who couldn’t get hired at McDonald’s, who murder innocent people and turn cities and towns into terror zones for citizens.
  • Have a brilliant solution to the Iran nuclear issue? Apply a little Cheeto dust, and the next thing you know we’re spending billions a day on a war we can never win, creating a worldwide inflationary spiral, weakening our national defense, and turning allies into frenemies.
  • Worried about the deficit? Apply a little Cheeto dust, and watch a tax cut for the people who least need one somehow get rebranded as fiscal discipline.

I could go on but you get the point.

So here’s my Fairy Dust solution for Cheeto dust. Since fairy dust takes decades of hard-won experience to work, and Cheeto dust just needs a couch, a bag, and an unshakeable belief in your own genius, this isn’t a policy problem. It’s a hygiene problem. What we need isn’t policy. It’s a pressure washer, aimed squarely at Cheeto’s grip on Congress, until the orange finally rinses off — and we get our Guarana-and-quiet-winter-afternoon back.

I’ll drink to that. Guarana Zero, obviously. It’s still winter.

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