Suzanne Fields

FIELDS: It’s the kids, stupid

Not so long ago, many youngsters wanted to grow up to be teachers, and parents were pleased to encourage them. Not any longer. Teachers have become the Rodney Dangerfields of postmodern America.

September 12, 2012

FIELDS: Time to work, not whine

Asea change has washed over America since Freud asked the question that forever perplexes everybody: "What do women want?" The question remains forever elusive, because women are never of one mind. To the consternation of marketers, political and otherwise, women don't all think alike.

September 5, 2012

FIELDS: Paul Ryan closing the generation gap

How will the voters of Generation X mark their presidential ballots? If the baby boomers never trusted anyone over 30, the Gen X'ers are said never to trust themselves. They've been stereotyped as slackers, cynics and whiners. They also have been described as confident, pragmatic and engaged.

August 29, 2012

FIELDS: Back to school brainwashing

It's the time of the year when children's smiles begin to look a little pinched. You can feel it when you walk through any school-supplies store. While the colored pencils and lunchboxes on display evoke memories of "the good times," they also spark memories of all that filler work, the spelling and grammar exercises, multiplication tables and the dates of the Revolutionary War.

August 22, 2012

FIELDS: Ryan Medicare commercial silliness

We remember Granny. She's the helpless old lady in a wheelchair whom Rep. Paul Ryan, or somebody who was supposed to look like him, pushed over the cliff. That's the way an Obama campaign commercial attempted to demonstrate the heartlessness of the mean ol' Republicans.

August 15, 2012

FIELDS: Men making out badly in culture war

Sex is always interesting, but mix it with politics in a presidential campaign and it becomes downright sensational. First Amendment guarantees of free speech get lost in the protest when homosexual couples meet to make out at Chick-fil-A.

August 8, 2012

FIELDS: Press sees conflictin Israel’s culture

Ethnic jokes are always dangerous. Gen. James Jones, as President Obama's national security adviser, famously regaled a friendly Jewish audience with a variation of a joke about the Hamas militant in Jerusalem who went into the shop of a Jewish merchant and asked to buy food.

August 1, 2012

FIELDS: Looking for meaning in a massacre

The memorable massacres of history have been the stuff of ruthless despots. They're about power and intolerance -- getting rid of anyone who could cause trouble. Atilla the Hun needed an army to massacre his enemy. Josef Stalin was a wholesale killer who measured his dead in the millions.

July 25, 2012

FIELDS: Short-circuiting the new third rail

Race has become the third rail of American politics. Touch it and you die. It’s the rail on which some of our angriest Democrats want to ride Mitt Romney and the Republicans out of town.

July 18, 2012

FIELDS: Rebalancing power in the age of Obama

These past few days have given us a lot of fireworks, between the Supreme Court decision upholding Obamacare's mandate and the celebration of Independence Day. With the fireworks came a serious look at the Founding Fathers - and what they had to say about governance. The pundits rent the air with commentary.

July 11, 2012

FIELDS: Fantasy for a summer’s night

Any parent can tell you that finding a decent summer movie for the kids is a hard day's work. Blood-sucking vampires abound in the twilight zone, children fight to their death in violent hunger scripts, but it's not easy to find fantasy as magically alluring as a fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm.

July 4, 2012

FIELDS: The fall from having it all

I am woman, hear me whine. With apologies to Helen Reddy, whose "roar" was heard 'round the world from the top of the Billboard Hot 100 in 1972.

June 27, 2012

FIELDS: The gathering digital storm

The e-book generation lucks out. Winston Churchill is going digital and global. More than 40 volumes of his prose are being downloaded so that they can be read throughout the world. The man who said "history will be kind to me for I intend to write it," won't have to depend on the kindness of readers.

June 20, 2012

FIELDS: Between mystique and failure

When Chelsea Clinton stood in for her mother at a recent gala at the Kennedy Center in the District, she addressed her mother's hopes that women could build a better world.

June 13, 2012

FIELDS: Honoring Ike

"Moving forward" is suddenly everybody's cliche in a city that thrives on political cliches, but there's another Washington that looks to the past - or at least a commemoration of the past - and how we pay homage to the men who shaped the nation's destiny.

June 6, 2012

FIELDS: Romney’s religion shapes the man, not his message

A tiny incident in the life of a candidate can sometimes tell us more about him than a dozen speeches or television commercials. When Mitt Romney paused to rub his wife's aching feet after a tough and tiring day of campaigning in Michigan last fall, we got just a glimmer, but a bright one, of insight into the man who would be president.

May 30, 2012

FIELDS: Hillary for spare tire

Hillary Clinton has gone through more reincarnations than Shirley MacLaine, who insists that when she was a Moorish girl in the ninth century she had an affair with Charlemagne. Hillary has no such exotic tales in her past - Bubba is exotic enough - but she has gone through a number of roles for women who no longer stay home and bake cookies.

May 23, 2012

FIELDS: Romney prescription for faith with works

The Founding Fathers would be pleased. President Obama, endorsing same-sex marriage, celebrates his becoming fully evolved by citing the golden rule, Christ's admonition to "you know, treat others the way you want to be treated." (Jesus said it better.) Mitt Romney tells an audience of 35,000 at Liberty University's commencement that central to America's global leadership is "our Judeo-Christian tradition."

May 16, 2012

FIELDS: Economy as a moral issue

Rick Santorum endorses Mitt Romney, the man he once described as the "worst Republican in the country to put up against Barack Obama." The presumptive nominee impressed the former senator from Pennsylvania with his "deep understanding" of the connection between social and economic issues.

May 10, 2012

FIELDS: Engulfed by a rising tide of mediocrity

When my father arrived in America at the age of 3, he spoke two languages. Neither was English. He was a grade-school dropout after his mother made him wear his elder sister's shoes because he had none of his own. He said he was a graduate of the "school of hard knocks."

May 2, 2012