Suzanne Fields

Susan Collins stands tall in the muck of an angry mob

The latest lowest of the low in the public conversation was struck last week by the American Civil Liberties Union, for its television commercial of spliced together video clips of Bill Clinton and Bill Cosby denying their sexual transgressions, and linking them to Brett Kavanaugh, Matt Lauer, Harvey Weinstein and Charlie Rose.

October 10, 2018

Kavanaugh in the crucible

Brett Kavanaugh could play the lead in a new version of "The Crucible," Arthur Miller's celebrated play about an innocent man tested by the mob. The playwright was a man of the left, but his play reflects what can happen to a reputation anywhere when the dishonest unleashes poison.

October 3, 2018

The disappearing ‘man’s man blues’

My father was not very tall. But no man ever stood taller in my eyes than this particular Big Daddy. He was warm and playful, a man of character and the model for the men I would admire as I grew up. Daddy wasn't formally educated, having dropped out of school in the sixth grade after his mother and father, Jewish immigrants from Pinsk, told him he had to wear his older sister's hand-me-down shoes because they didn't have the money to buy him a pair of his own. He took a certain pride later in having graduated from the "school of hard knocks."

September 26, 2018

Brett Kavanaugh does not deserve to be ruined by accusation without evidence

Brett Kavanaugh is now a moving target, a wounded stag emerging from a thick forest of hearings, interviews and the moral speculations of strangers. This man, nominated to be a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, who only a few days ago enjoyed the respect of everyone, is caught now in the crossfire of changing attitudes about sex. Aggressive political manipulators smear him with unsubstantiated accusation that damages not only him but, as well, long-held traditions of justice and fair play.

September 19, 2018

Miss America meets #MeToo

No bathing suits, but not bad. Miss America endures to play another year, this year with a winner from New York singing a lyrical aria from Puccini's "La Boheme." She tells with witty authenticity how she survived life in the Big Apple with true grit, moving five times from sublet to sublet as rents climbed up, up and away.

September 12, 2018

The not so innocent ‘damsel in distress’

The American male is caught in the maelstrom of cultural change. Once the heroic images of World War II faded from bright colors into the darker tones of sepia, "the greatest generation" began a slow fade into history. Barely 500,000 of the 16 million men who fought in World War II are now alive. What has followed the greatest are several "not so great generations" (including my own).

September 5, 2018

Ours is a culture still in search of a mythmaker to make sense of it all

We don't live in an age of heroes. Hateful animosities, vicious polarities, and unrelieved political partisanship are highlighted in both social and mainstream media. The passing of John McCain's unflappable integrity during his last ordeal united us for the moment in a chorus of praise and gratitude.

August 29, 2018

Melania’s compared to Eva Braun for speaking up for bullied children of the cyberworld

Melania Trump walked into a conference the other day to summon attention to her "first lady's project," using her own bully pulpit to curb cyber-bullying of children. Who wouldn't report with respectful appreciation what the woman was saying, about a major problem confronting our children today? She found out who, after receiving an onslaught of online bullying for daring to separate herself from her husband's political attack style.

August 22, 2018

Fear and loathing of Jordan Peterson

Ah, men! This is the ultimate exclamation of women, frustrated, puzzled and baffled by the other half of the human race, forever a riddle wrapped in ambiguity, ambivalence, anticipation — and admiration and affection. The exclamation has never been static. That frustration and bafflement is once more examined and re-examined, stretched and shrunk, applauded and animated with vigor and vitriol.

August 15, 2018

Women rise to defy the sleaze-slingers

Only yesterday the Democrats in the U.S. Senate were giddy with the idea that Brett Kavanaugh had united the women of America, who would pressure their senators to do him in. But the campaign to confirm Judge Kavanaugh for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court is beginning to look like Ladies Day at the baseball park.

August 8, 2018

Lost in the deep blue Sea of Fakery

Fake news, alas, is authentic enough. Just because the label was popularized by Donald Trump doesn't mean it isn't sometimes real. It's a label covering a multitude of sins.

August 1, 2018

Tribal loyalties have become the ‘factions’ that George Washington warned against

The human animal seems hardwired for tribalism, and the ties that bind are shaped by our compelling need to group together, obeying calls for loyalties and exclusions. Some groupings contribute not only to the gratifications of bonding, whether in family, clubs, choirs or loyalty to sports teams, but provide the glue that holds a community together.

July 25, 2018

#UsToo strikes back, demanding equal justice

They're hiring lawyers, in that all-American way of proving they're serious, and they're organizing what they proudly call "the men's movement." If it's derivative, they should call it #UsToo. It's a further poisoning of the well whence both men and women drink.

July 18, 2018

Kavanaugh nomination marks the end of only the beginning

One of my colleagues in the writing trade often reminds me that the ancient folk wisdom, "nothing succeeds like success," is misleading. Success is fragile, "and it's more accurate to say that nothing recedes like success."

July 11, 2018

Men behaving badly are on the run, but we’re still debating what women want

Gotcha! Gotcha! Gotcha! That's all you hear in the echo chamber surrounding Harvey Weinstein.

July 4, 2018

Defining deviancy down

Robert De Niro, the actor, aimed the "F-bomb" at Donald Trump in remarks to a large audience at the Tony Awards. Following an appreciative applause he repeated it and got a standing ovation. Samantha Bee, the television comedian, used the even more vulgar "c-word" to describe the president's daughter, Ivanka Trump.

June 27, 2018

Sally Hemings today would be an icon of the #MeToo movement

If Sally Hemings were still with us, she would be the poster child of the #MeToo movement. Such speculation is the stuff of revisionist presidential history, and a new exhibit at Monticello humanizes, for better or worse, the portrait of Thomas Jefferson the slaveowner.

June 20, 2018

Donald Trump’s ‘raw manliness’ wins the day, but theatrics now defer to reality

Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un introduced a new kind of reality show when they met at Singapore. It wasn't a matter of who would be fired, or voted off the island. The stakes were nuclear, or to be precise, "the complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula." This was the powerful aphrodisiac that lured the president to Singapore.

June 13, 2018

Bill Clinton and #MonicaToo

Bill Clinton is back, and as Yogi Berra might say, it's deja vu all over again. Well, not quite.

June 6, 2018

Rising anti-Semitism in Europe sounds a warning to a new generation

The American response to the history of the Holocaust is changing. So, too, the response of the Germans. "History teaches, but has no pupils," Antonio Gramsci, a Marxist philosopher, once said. But he was wrong.

May 30, 2018