Running for Your Life: The Rex Factor

It will come down to dogs.

It won’t be his womanizing, nor his collusion with the Russians, nor his belief in lies, tissues of lies, that there is no lie that he won’t marinate in his child-mind until it spews into public, elevated to the false altar of a sacred truth.

No, it will be his distaste for dogs that will be President Trump’s undoing.

If fixer Roy Cohn were alive, he would advise his one-time protégé to be seen with a dog, playing in the Rose Garden. A photo op with his new pet.

“For God’s sake, Donald,” Roy would bark. “F—ing Nixon had a dog. Checkers.”

It’s hard to imagine the name that Trump would choose to call his dog.

He couldn’t fathom one that would thoroughly reflect his magnificent glory – and, of course, not in the least upstage him.

If he had a sense of humor, how about Vladimir? Who is the pet of whom, right?

Sessions would be funny. So would Stormy. Mueller.

(Imagine Lou Dobbs if he were to get wind of a White House mutt called Mueller? Such a self-satisfied smirk you couldn’t get out of your head no matter how you tried.)

A boxer looks a lot like a sour-faced Trump. But I wouldn’t foist that on such a majestic breed.

The boxer, that is.

Dogs stand by you through thick and thin. You value loyalty, Donald? Get a dog.

Trump adopts a dog stranded by the calamity that was Hurricane Florence (and calls the bitch Flo), and he wins his Supreme Court nominee fight, tees up the GOP to win both the House and the Senate in the midterms.

That is, if Roy Cohn were alive. He’s dead. So is the likelihood that any of this is going to happen.

Rather, Trump’s son is trash-tweeting the woman who came forward to out the high court nominee for sexual assault during the latter’s high school years.

Better a dog, Donald, than attack dog Donald Jr.

Next: Running for Your Life: Pursuing Happiness

Running for Your Life: Émigré Eminence

W.G. Sebald (“Vertigo, The Emigrants”) makes much of bloodline rituals, of being rooted in place, yes, but also in bloodstream.

Yet not in the obscene way of a rigidly viewed superior, more the faith of doubt is teased out among those who share relations.

Take the fleeting memory of the Émigré Eminence, Great Uncle Ambros Adelwarth in “The Emigrants.”

There is a seed of Sebald here; something that presages for him a path out of the ordinary. Not a stranger, a person encountered in a book, but someone who shares a common lineage. One of them.

Sebald was one who had to read, think, reflect on what he knew, then dip all that into the vat of his capacious, serum-enriched mind of aggregate knowledge and experience, capture the byproduct – not just mental – but spiritual and physical, a charge of feeling, say, or a shiver of awareness, if not certainty.

Next: Running for Your Life: Bye-Bye Facebook

Running for Your Life: Tree Gait

My wife M likes to say that I’m built like a tree.

Not that I look like one (we are least able to judge our own looks; me, I’m thinking young Roman pine, skinny with a big head) but that my body is strong, as durable as a healthy tree.

I think about this when I run. How the body I have now is as much about being conscious of how I move rather than strictly what could be accounted for by nature, per se.

A gait, though, is your own.

When I was young, my friends and family said I walked like a farmer with exaggerated high and long steps, as if I were striding over furrowed plantings.

I didn’t live on a farm, but my father grew up on one.

He is justly proud of the life skills, the hard-knock lessons he learned, so I didn’t take the comments as an insult. Rather I thought it was part of my inheritance, an involuntary commitment, a place of pride.

Fifty years later, “Farmer Larry” is keeping pace in a different way. I’m slower now but no less controlled in my gait.

Farmer Larry is much closer to a tree than, say, a racing bike, a scooter, a skateboard. When I run I don’t, as the kids say, get too far out on top of my skis.

I recalibrate, feel the strike of heel to ground, share the impact from roots, to trunk, to crown.

Watch as the tree moves in the wind. The top waves, the trunk gives ever so, the roots are solid.

Or so it seems. You do the best you can with what you know. Trees know more, and to be compared to them is an honor I’m continually working to be worthy of.

Next: Running for Your Life: Emigrant Eminence

Running for Your Life: The Jock Resistance -- A Modest Proposal

An essay describes a “resistance” force of high-ranking aides busily trying to constrain, steer, manipulate, coddle or simply ignore the directives of a president who seems at times to be quite unhinged and barely in control of his own White House.

Call it the Jock Resistance.

Emboldened by the Quiet Resistance anonymous appeal for order in the White House comes this plea from a senior official at the Ninth Street YMCA in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

The poignantly argued position by the anonymous senior official is just the smoking gun needed to alert the citizens of New York to the inordinate time and energy lost to the efficient governance of our fair city by the current mayor, Bill de Blasio, who, the official advises us, spends more time working out at the Y than working on any crucial topic of municipal business.

The anonymous senior official of the Y points out that the mayor exchanges points of view with personal trainers and Park Slope co-op workers alike, all of whom are of like mind and correct opinions, while dodging calls for meetings with such important figures as the current head of the New York City Transit Authority, Andy Byford.

Subways now run as inefficiently as they have since the bad old days of the early ’80s. Maybe Byford should get himself to a treadmill.

What’s more, the mayor refuses to wholeheartedly endorse congestion pricing, or alter his own 12-mile treks from Gracie Mansion to the gym, while seeing himself as a policy leader in fighting climate change.

Surely, as the New York Times did with the White House mole, the newspaper will find it fit to print the anonymous appeal for order, as honestly portrayed by this senior official at the Park Slope Y.

The person in question is a liberal democrat bereft over the squandering of this opportunity for real change from the office of an avowed progressive to show the nation that a liberal path to political and social order is one that is characterized by compassion and brotherhood, bristling with promise that the 99 percent (Remember them?) need not always see their wee-lamb gains gobbled up by giant sheepholders, the kings and queens who will countenance no real threat to the consolidation of their insatiable appetites to acquire more and more wealth and influence, as if society is a simple parlor game of elites, conservatives and liberals.

In a just world, the Times will publish the anonymous letter from the Park Slope Y senior official about the mayor’s obsession with workouts while hope-and-change work goes undone.

Besides, Times, the decision to lead the “Quiet Resistance” has been boffo for paper sales – and advertising.

So bring it on. Citizens must learn of the “Jock Resistance.”

Next: Running for Your Life: Tree Gait

Running for Your Life: Apologize, Me?

“Never apologize, never back down, never admit you were wrong, use every means possible toward achieving your ends.”

- Lawyer Alan Dershowitz, on what the late master-fixer Roy Cohn taught Donald Trump

“That was the biggest f—kng mistake I’ve made. You never make those concessions. You never apologize. I didn’t do anything wrong in the first place. Why look weak?”

- Former White House aide Rob Porter on Trump’s reaction following his “reset” remarks in response to saying that both sides have a lot to answer for in the wake of the deadly white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Va., as reported in Bob Woodword’s “Fear”    

Next: Running for Your Life: Tree Gait