August Kleinzahler

Be glad Mitt Romney didn’t visit Auschwitz. That could have really been ugly. You know people like Mittens, as his former constituents in Massachusetts used to refer to him, without affection, also Mitt the Shit. You may even be related to someone like Mitt, perhaps by marriage: the sort of counter-intuitive person who, as if by some sinister gravitational pull, will inevitably step in it every time he opens his mouth. You may find something endearing about him, you may even love him in your own fashion, but you try, as best you can, not to go out in public with him if it’s at all possible. You certainly wouldn’t take him with you to Europe or the Middle East.

The cover story in this coming Sunday’s New York Times Magazine is entitled ‘Prep School Predators: The Horace Mann School’s Secret History of Sexual Abuse’. Amos Kamil, who left the school in 1982, names several teachers, including the headmaster, as pervs. I was at Horace Mann 15 years earlier than Kamil – class of ’67, near the bottom of the fifth quintile and a great disappointment all round – and knew a couple of them: one was waving his baton as a young music instructor and the other, a large boy, a few years older than I, Stan Kops, later became a teacher at the school. Poor Stan wound up killing himself. I believe he swam butterfly on the varsity swimming team.

It would have been a grey September day in Melbourne 25 years ago, lunchtime, that I was sitting in a car outside the ABC’s Broadcast House, listening to Christopher Logue being interviewed by Terry Lane, a former Church of Christ minister, who was laying into Logue with an unholy fury. The onslaught culminated in Lane declaiming: ‘Did you, or did you not, Mr Logue, claim the Queen of England is the Anti-Christ?’ There was a long pause, after which Logue remarked: ‘Well, I don’t remember exactly, but it does sound like something I might have said.’

Chris Christie is very fat. That wasn’t the problem, as he contemplated running for president on the Republican ticket: 75 per cent of Americans are overweight, if not quite that overweight. Governor Christie is also Roman Catholic, and that is a problem, a very considerable problem, as regards his electability nationally. You can be certain his religious affiliation was in the mix as he sat down with his people this week and made his decision not to declare himself as a candidate.

Barack Obama suffered a split lip nine or so months ago playing basketball, severe enough to require 12 stitches. Obama likes basketball and has played it competitively since he was a schoolboy in Hawaii. One of his enduring grievances is directed at his high-school basketball coach who didn’t make him a starter on the varsity team, a decision Obama regarded as unfair and, perhaps, related to a certain animus on the part of the coach.