Douglas Whaley

For Donald Trump to become the President of the United States in 2017 more than 50% of the people who vote in this November’s election must decide that he not only has the wisdom, experience, and gravitas to fill that exalted office, but that he’s also the best of the two likely candidates to be chosen president and, in effect, run the world for the following four years.  The chances of that are small.  Sure, a major number of people voted for him in the Republican primaries, and those people believe he has the right qualities, or that, even if he doesn’t, he’ll at least be better than the usual politicians who become president and don’t make their lives appreciably better, so what the hell!  Plus they hate Hillary Clinton. But even if Trump held the votes of all those people (and he won’t) they lack the numbers (even if they all vote, which they won’t) to win him the office.  Trump must also attract big numbers of new voters to his camp, and that is...

In the early evening of November 18, 1980, Ronald Crumply, once a policeman, went to Greenwich Village in New York City—very well armed.  When he got just outside the Ramrod Bar (popular with gays) he used his Uzi to start spraying bullets, killing two gay men (the Ramrod doorman, a church organist from Minnesota) and wounding six others, one of whom later died from his injuries.  Crumply claimed that gays were “agents of the devil . . . trying to steal my soul just by looking at me.”  He was subsequently judged insane and was still in a psychiatric facility as late as 2001, when I lost track of him.  Spookily, I’d been in that very bar a week before this happened, and was probably too much disturbed by the event.  When the shooting was discussed at a New York City public meeting a short time later, two orthodox Jews in the audience began loudly applauding the gunman before being silenced by the shocked people around them.  Crumply himsel...