You’re reading the Today’s Opinions newsletter. Sign up to get it in your inbox.
In today’s edition:
Father’s Day lessons
Happy early Father’s Day to all the dads out there, including mine, who I hope knows I love him even more than he loves the U.S. Open.
Happy Father’s Day, too, to the “bonus dads” — what social worker Ke’Yonna Hall calls the men who have stepped into fatherlike roles in her sons’ lives. For single moms such as Hall, this holiday can be an uncomfortable reminder of raising kids alone. What it really is, she has realized in recent years, is a celebration of the fact that she is anything but alone.
There is Uncle Fred, with four kids of his own already, and potty trainer Uncle Theron, and Uncle Avery at the barbershop, and Uncle Christian and Uncle Bobby and Uncle Tonio and Uncle Cedric as well — not to mention Hall’s own father, PaPa.
Advertisem*nt
“This village” — indeed! — “supports me, too,” Hall writes. “I am able to show my sons that asking for help is not a weakness, but a strength.”
Like Hall, public affairs adviser Brad Todd devotes his Father’s Day tribute to a less traditional figure: Granddaddy.
Todd’s father is great, too, he hastens to clarify, and he’s still learning from him well into adulthood, but so many special lessons came from the generation before. Particularly tender is Todd’s memory of learning to bake at his grandfather’s elbow: “Stir it only till the dough follows the fork — no more” went the special touch for cornbread.
Todd leavens the confection with the freeing acknowledgment that Granddaddy, though saintly, was not perfect. He writes: “If we don’t see the foibles of our idols, we might miss their humanity.”
Flag Day indigestion
Before we get to Father’s Day, however, recall that today is a holiday, too! Forgot? Go figure. Flag Day often gets the short end of the staff — and increasingly so. Sometime between the June 14, 1777, adoption of the U.S. flag and today, it came to be uncomfortably synonymous with support for Donald Trump.
Advertisem*nt
Rick Reilly, who is “not easily flabbergasted,” writes that his “flabber got good and gasted” when he discovered this for himself. The Stars and Stripes that flap behind his beach bike garnered a “Go Trump!” the other day, followed shortly thereafter by a rather spicier verb from a passing MAGA opponent. Co-opting complete.
The association is ironic, Rick writes, given that “Trump doesn’t care about the flag any more than he cares about being a Republican. What he cares about is how he looks holding it.”
So Rick wants the country to co-opt our flag right back: “The more of us flying the flag from our porches and cars and, yeah, bikes, the less it seems as though Trump helped Betsy Ross sew it.”
Blessedly, we still have uncorrupted other accoutrements of patriotism: fireworks, bunting and, above all, the hot dog.
Advertisem*nt
Sports journalist Will Leitch was devastated by the news that a contract conflict will keep Joey Chestnut, the greatest-of-all-time competitive dog demolisher, from participating in this summer’s Coney Island contest. The man — “winning his first title at 23 and losing only one championship all the way into his 40s — is unparalleled in American sports, or any sport,” Leitch writes.
I wolfed down Leitch’s appreciation, which takes us back to the very start of the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest (first won in 1967 by a 400-pound truck driver), then to its remaking by the insurgent Takeru Kobayashi and ultimately to Chestnut’s record-setting reign.
Don’t cry too much into your beer, though, Will (or the pitcher of water you dunk your buns in): After publication of his column, Netflix swooped in to promise its own Labor Day faceoff between Chestnut and Kobayashi. Better come on an empty stomach!
From Fareed Zakaria’s column on how Europe keeps falling further behind the United States’ “powerhouse economy.” (And don’t think Britain is exempt; were it a state, its per capita income would rank solidly 51st.)
Advertisem*nt
The issue, Fareed diagnoses, is that “Europe remains a conglomeration of countries that pretend to have a unified” approach to the market, defense, etc. In reality, he writes, “entrepreneurs struggle to navigate 27 different markets with different regulations, authorities, standards and requirements.”
Fareed says that the solution to Europe’s problem “can be summarized in one line.” European politicians know this, too; it’s just a line few voters want to hear.
More politics
A unanimous Supreme Court on Thursday saved access to the abortion medication mifepristone, ruling that the antiabortion plaintiffs lacked standing.
“Breathe a sigh of relief,” Ruth Marcus writes. This latest opinion gives her the impression the court “wished the whole issue would go away” (... so it could “do the important work of dismantling the regulatory state”).
Advertisem*nt
After that breath, though, the pro-choice crowd must steel itself for the fight against the real threat to abortion meds: Donald Trump himself. Ruth explains how Trump as president could bypass the courts entirely to get rid of mifepristone.
Gene Robinson is watching another front in what he calls a war on women. The Southern Baptist Convention’s denunciation of in vitro fertilization this week shows how militantly the religious right will keep trying to assert its will, no matter what the majority believes.
Chaser: Dana Milbank noticed that Trump has spent a lot of time lately fantasizing about his own demise. Honestly, you have no idea how hard it is to be him these days.
Smartest, fastest
- Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu has an invite to deliver a speech before Congress. Josh Rogin says he might use it to interfere with U.S. politics (more than he already has) and damage the two countries’ relationship.
- Catherine Rampell writes that Republicans are running an excellent campaign against the President Biden of 2022. Unfortunately for them, a lot of the evidence behind their talking points has evaporated in the two years since!
- Brits are dominating American journalism — and British journalism, too, Erik Wemple reports.
It’s a goodbye. It’s a haiku. It’s … The Bye-Ku.
Dads hugged tight by arms
Widened for the whole village
Father’s Day record?
Plus! A rhyming Friday bye-ku (Fri-ku!) from reader Ray M.:
“I have done no wrong”
That at least was his lone song
It didn’t sing long
***
Have your own newsy haiku? Email it to me, along with any questions/comments/ambiguities. Have a great weekend!
