Impromptus

Simone triumphant, &c.

By
America’s Simone Biles in the floor exercise at the Paris Olympics on July 30, 2024 (Hannah McKay/Reuters)
On a comeback kid; the Secret Service; race and Election 2024; so-called workers’ parties; William Calley; and more

Everyone likes a comeback, and Simone Biles is a smashing comeback kid. At this writing, she has won nine Olympic medals, six of them gold. She has earned more medals than any other U.S. gymnast. She is one of the greatest Olympians of all time. In Paris, she is not yet through.

She had a problem at the previous Olympics, in Tokyo: a case of the “twisties.” This means she was experiencing disorientation, which is dangerous for a gymnast. You can hurt yourself badly. She withdrew from most of the competition.

(To read a piece about Biles, published earlier this week, go here.)

Lots of people came down on Biles for her problem in Tokyo. As the sportswriter Molly Knight put it, “A lot of dudes who can’t even touch their toes are suddenly gymnastics experts today.”


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Mark Robinson, the lieutenant governor of North Carolina, who is now the GOP nominee for governor, delighted a crowd by saying, “I ain’t no weak little gymnast that quits when the going gets tough.”

Charlie Kirk, the young Republican leader, called Biles a “selfish sociopath” and a “shame to the country.” He said, “We are raising a generation of weak people like Simone Biles.”

A generation of people like Simone Biles would be a huge boon to the country. My Lord, think of it.

I go way back with gymnasts. (Bear with me a moment.) In 1972, when Olga Korbut shone, I was eight. In 1976, every boy in the world, probably, fell in love with Nadia Comăneci, with her perfect tens. (Three years later, there would be a movie, 10, starring Bo Derek. That’s another story . . .)

• I have a hobbyhorse — one among many — and it goes something like this: “We need to recover a proper sense of manliness.” This week, a Fox News personality said, “When a man votes for a woman, he actually transitions into a woman.”

Let me recommend a column by my old colleague David French (which is a natural for me): “Hulk Hogan Is Not the Only Way to Be a Man.”

• I was impressed by the acting director of the Secret Service, Ronald Rowe Jr. “What I saw made me ashamed,” he said. He was talking about the assassination attempt on Donald Trump — the particulars of it. Rowe continued, “As a career law-enforcement officer and a 25-year Secret Service veteran, I cannot defend why that roof was not better secured.”

Sometimes people are ashamed unnecessarily; sometimes shame is the right feeling. Anyway, I was impressed by the man’s statement.

• If I were running for president this year — the Harris and Trump campaigns can rest easy, I’m not — one of my mottos would be: “Stop the madness.”

• Race is the American morass, and this week we are deep into it. Said Trump of Kamala Harris, “I didn’t know she was black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn black and now she wants to be known as black. So, I don’t know: Is she Indian or is she black?”

Harris’s father is from Jamaica; her late mother was from India. They met and married in California. That is a very American story. If I had my way (which is kind of a laugh), Harris would lean into that “identity”: “American.”

(Plus, she married a Jewish guy from Brooklyn. Again, very American.)

More from Trump:

David Frum had an interesting observation, colorfully illustrated:

I think of Groucho Marx, dealing with the officials at the country club: “My daughter’s only half Jewish. Can she go in the pool up to her knees?” “My son is only half Jewish. Can he play nine holes?”

• Have a look at this:

That would be Senator Mark Kelly, of Arizona (combat pilot, astronaut, etc.).

I am a very, very old-fashioned conservative — a dinosaur, staggering and howling. People like to say they belong to a “workers’ party” — whether they are Democrats or Republicans. Listen to Kevin McCarthy, when he was the GOP leader in the House: “The uniqueness of this party today is, we’re the workers’ party.”

Yeah, yeah.

You know what I think a “workers’ party” would do? Foster economic growth, for all citizens, workers and employers alike.

And you know what else? Lots of employers work their tails off, day and night.

• Conservatives of my vintage were hot against Balkanization. That’s a phrase we often used: “the Balkanization of America.” Endless tribes, endless “identities,” pitted against one another: white against black; rich against poor; old against young; immigrant against native-born — all of that.

“White Dudes for Harris”? That was kind of funny, as a concept, and as a phrase. But still. For years, J. D. Vance has been pitting people with children against people without. (I wrote about this in a column last week, here.)

One of the best things Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. ever did in his long, productive career was write a book called “The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society.” That came out in 1991. In 2020, I re-read the book and wrote about it, here.

Disuniting is a ticket to national doom.

• Trump has said, “She’s totally against the Jewish people.” (He was talking about Harris. He might consult her husband on that.) He has said, “This administration is destroying Israel.” He has said, “Chuck Schumer has become a Palestinian. Yes. Can you believe it? He has become a proud member of Hamas.”

Are there people who, in fact, believe these claims, and others like them? Yes, millions do. I know many of them personally.

• For Reason magazine, Brian Riedl has written a thorough and impressive piece called “Why Did Americans Stop Caring About the National Debt?” This is a boring issue, debt, that will be all too unboring when the bill comes due.

You may remember Mitch Daniels’s name for the national debt: “the new red menace.”

• The opening of a story from the Associated Press:

A video that uses an artificial intelligence voice-cloning tool to mimic the voice of Vice President Kamala Harris saying things she did not say is raising concerns about the power of AI to mislead with Election Day about three months away.

The video gained attention after tech billionaire Elon Musk shared it on his social media platform X on Friday without explicitly noting it was originally released as parody.

AI will grow ever more sophisticated, ever more mischievous — diabolical, even. It will harm all parties and causes. What to do about it? Um, hang on, I have to file my nails . . .

• I was amazed, and moved, to read about Chen Si:

A suicide prevention volunteer who has stopped 469 people from jumping off a bridge in China over the past 21 years has been dubbed the “Angel of Nanjing”.

Chen Si, 56, patrols the Yangtze River Bridge in Nanjing, the capital city of Jiangsu province in eastern China.

Chen engages in conversations with people lingering or wandering aimlessly on the bridge, to prevent them from jumping.

He has also pulled people back from the edge and assisted in rescuing those who have already jumped into the river.

What a life’s calling.

• Watching the Olympics, I think of a phrase from the American past: “the thrill of victory, and the agony of defeat.” Such drama. I sometimes think there is more drama in sports than is 100 percent good for you.

• I saw this and thought: “Put it on a Wheaties box.”

• “William L. Calley Jr., Convicted in My Lai Massacre, Is Dead at 80.” The obit’s subheading is: “Hundreds of Vietnamese civilians died at the hands of American soldiers, but Lieutenant Calley was the only one found guilty.” The debate over Calley has always been about things other than Calley, or beyond Calley: the nature of war; “American exceptionalism”; accountability. There are worlds within this one case.

• Another obit: “Jill Schary Robinson, Who Wrote of Her Hollywood Upbringing, Dies at 88.” I thought this was pretty great:

One year a private, and restricted, girls’ school declined to admit Jill and her sister Joy, though they had aced the entrance exam. There was a quota for Jewish students, they were told; nothing personal.

But when the local papers announced that their father had become head of production at RKO, the head of the school called Mrs. Schary saying there had been a terrible mistake. She replied, tartly, that she, too, had made a terrible mistake and was no longer interested in the school.

• A little language? As I mentioned, I’m a dinosaur. I realize that people use “masterful” and “masterly” interchangeably — but, eons ago, there was a distinction (a distinction I learned early on). To be “masterful” is to lord it over someone. To be “masterly” is to show skill, learning, and the rest.

I thought of this when I received a missive from The New York Review of Books, talking about “three masterful poems by Marina Tsvetaeva.” The dinosaur in me would say “masterly.” In fact, I used that word the other day, to describe a column by Matt Labash (here).

• “Do you really have to wait to go swimming after eating?” Huh? The article says,

Did your parents warn you against jumping in the pool right after eating? They were misguided.

In most cases, there’s no need to wait at least 30 minutes after eating to go for a swim, doctors say.

Oh, for heaven’s sake. Be careful when you upset a person’s lifelong understandings . . .

Thanks for joining me today, Impromptus-ites and other -ites. Happy August.

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