11 thoughts about The Rockettes performing at the Trump inauguration.

1. I have trouble picturing The Rockettes performing at any presidential inauguration. How could lined-up, leggy females be kicking for a new President? How is that the proper tone for the occasion?

2. But I know The Rockettes have performed for an inauguration in the past. I hadn't noticed, so maybe it was off to the side somewhere and hardly mattered.

3. Or maybe there weren't enough bloggers back in 2001. There were no tweeters. Perhaps it should have been mocked and trashed, but new media had not yet lined up with our legs synchronized and ready to kick.

4. My trouble picturing The Rockettes at an inauguration is remedied by finding video of The Rockettes kicking at an inauguration:

5. Oh, good lord, they were prancing around at the feet of the statue of Abraham Lincoln. The symbolism! The tweets that could have been made if we had Twitter then! I'd like to see Abe get up off that chair — animated by horror of ladies in scanty panties & military garb — and do some kicking of his own.

6. If something shouldn't be done at all, is there more reason to say it shouldn't be done for Donald Trump or less? Think carefully! Your instinctive first reaction is probably wrong.

7. Shouldn't those who loathe Donald Trump be the most enthusiastic about the impending performance of The Rockettes? It's such wonderful raw material: The inauguration is crass and in bad taste, like everything else Trump touches. The "dancing" is all about maximizing staring into women's crotches, so apt for the man who made us focus on pussy-grabbing. The Trump administration is messaging us that it intends to reduce women to sex objects. They had to get as many kicking legs out there as possible to symbolize how Trump plans to treat vulnerable Americans. Etc. etc.

8. Marie Claire is leaking quotes from Rockettes from a private meeting with management: "I think that the Rockettes have always been apolitical, and now by performing at this particular inauguration, it's making us political," "We were #1 trending on Twitter and it's just really hard to see, especially our faces being likened to Nazis. Is this not something we could have foreseen? I think it's been really hard for all of us. Especially around Christmas, and the schedule's so hard, and we're all so tired." Management argued that it was "ironic" for those who hate Trump's hate to be hating on Trump, and one Rockette said, "it just sounds like you're asking us to be tolerant of intolerance."

9. Are The Rockettes apolitical*? Art is or can be political, depending on how you define political. But The Rockettes are a long-running, highly commercial act. No existing artist is expressing anything meaningful through the continued repetition of this dancing that was dated and spent half a century ago. From "A Catcher in the Rye," which came out in 1951:

10. Yes, the dumb guy in the audience, impressed by the precision, readers have been laughing at him for as long as I've been alive. But the show still pulls in money, and it still gives long-legged young ladies a dancing job. Management instructed the dancers in branding: "This is a great national event... It's a huge moment in the country's history... The fact that we get to participate in it... we are an American brand, and I think it's very appropriate that the Rockettes dance in the inaugural and 4th of July and our country's great historical moments." That's the brand: Old-fashioned, uncritical Americana.

11. Like it or loathe it, that's your audience. And it's kind of Trump's audience too. If you are a conscientious objector to that, go ahead and anguish over the dissonance in your life. It's a good time to think about how we want to live. How much branding and commerce do you want imposed on you? How much principle can a scantily clad, rigidly choreographed woman maintain? What are people expected to do to keep their jobs? When do you see your job as significantly creative and expressive of your individual mind? How much do we join together to get economically valuable things done — in a chorus line, in a country — and when do we break away from the group and insist on our personal autonomy? And what will happen to us after we do?

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* Joe Biden was a member of The Rockettes in 1968, or so it says on his résumé.

Summer reading.

A slide show — open without a subscription — of many old New Yorker covers on the theme of summer reading.

1. Why is summer reading considered different from other reading? I remember when the idea was you finally had a lot of leisure time, so you'd read something big and long, like Doris in "Goodbye, Columbus":

2. Maybe it has to do with suntanning, that eminently passive outdoor activity. You're specifically not swimming, and you need something to do with your mind. Frankly, swimming can be boring — if you're doing lanes and racking up calories burned — and I would want a nice waterproof iPod with an audiobook.

3. I tend to walk on land as my main summer exercise, so I get by with my iPhone, and I like an audiobook of something long and historical. History goes with walking, because it's a progression in time and place, and I'm finally getting to the end of the fourth volume of Robert Caro's biography of LBJ and overlapping it with a history of ancient Rome. I still associate the path alongside Lake Mendota — after the summer of 2014 — with "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich."

4. The best of the New Yorker covers is, I think, “Summer Adventures,” by Joost Swarte, from 2015. Do you agree? But I'm also fond of the very simple Sempé, just a woman lying on the face of the earth, looking into the clouds, which highlights the aspect of reading that is the part where you're not reading but thinking about what you have read (or is she just failing to read or forgetting what she's read?).

5. I like the 2007 cover “Big City Thrills,” by Adrian Tomine, even though it relies on a stereotype of New York tourists — boring, dumpy people with belly bags and frumpy shorts — because you can tell — though you can't see any words — the book the alienated girl is reading is "Franny & Zooey." The sightseeing bus is passing Radio City Music Hall, but it's "Catcher in the Rye," not "Franny & Zooey," where the main character goes to (and hates) Radio City. ("The Rockettes were kicking their heads off....")

5. I like that a little white dog — not the same breed — appears on the oldest cover (1937) and the 2014 cover.

6. The 2007 and the 2009 cover present an aesthetic issue I've been thinking about. When art depicts buildings (and other objects), you are — to some extent — displeased when things appear structurally unsound or gravity defying. In real life, any structure that's standing has taken proper account of reality, but you might nevertheless find it aesthetically displeasing if it looks unstable or liable to fall. That same standard carries over to works of art. This is only a general rule, and sometimes the defiance of gravity is delightful. I'm on the line as to what I think of the man climbing a stairway of books in the 2007 cover. Seems anti-book, no? The 2009 cover has a hammock attached to nothing and palm trees set in tiny flowerpots. That could annoy me, but I interpret it to mean that the woman is reading an escapist fantasy of some kind, an interpretation reinforced by the line of foliage at the bottom, which evokes the bottom edge of the well-known Rousseau painting "The Dream" (which may also explain the unnatural position of the figure).

7. When did summer reading change from big projects like "War and Peace" to escapist fare (or whatever it is now)? I googled "What kind of reading is summer reading?" and what I got was a lot of stuff about the importance of keeping children reading over the summer so they don't lose whatever ground they've gained over the school year. Why don't adults worry that they'll forget how to read if they don't keep forcing themselves through printed verbiage?

8. And yet you've come this far.

9. Good for you!

10. Lists should be 10 — don't you think? — for stability and an aesthetically pleasing sense of structure....

The news in plagiarism.

1. Buzzfeed apologizes for 41 incidents of plagiarism found in a review of 500 posts written by Benny Johnson. Johnson, we're told, was a "creative force," but he was apparently not creative enough to reword his source material sufficiently to keep his job at Buzzfeed, which seemed to be to collect material from elsewhere and to present it in listicles like "7 Miracle Babies To Warm Your Heart Today."

2. The NYT surprised some people by muckraking plagiarism from 7 years ago by a Democrat, John Walsh, a U.S. Senator from Montana who's running this fall to keep the seat he got by appointment. The Times has what WaPo's Fact Checker calls a "nifty graphic" showing how much Walsh ripped off in his final paper for his master's degree from the United States Army War College.  Is the NYT choosing its investigative targets in a nonpartisan way or is this an effort to preempt an attack by his GOP challenger? When Walsh got his appointment to the seat Max Baucus had suddenly vacated, the NYT called it "a move Democrats hope will improve their chances of retaining the seat in what is expected to be a fiercely fought election this November." Baucus had been central in the Obamacare legislative process, and Walsh was an unknown but he had military credentials... that don't look so good anymore. (The WaPo Fact Checker (Glenn Kessler) examines Walsh's lame excuse — unfamiliarity with citation form — and gives it 4 Pinocchios.)

3. The media is so hot to see young females excel in science that it pushed a little girl so far into the limelight that her game of presenting a study of lionfish as her own original research caught the attention of the scientist who actually did the study and he spoke up. The girl's dad — one D. Albrey Arrington — was a courtesy co-author on that published study. And now a father's support of his daughter's science ambition doesn't look as NPR-ready as it did when NPR murmured admiringly over the little girl. Listen to the audio at that link. I had to turn it off a few seconds after the girl began speaking, because of the insufferable tone of her scoffing at the dumb scientists who were looking in the wrong places: "So I was like, 'Well, hey guys, what about the river?''" Ugh.

4. The New Yorker had a nice long piece on Joe Biden — "The Biden Agenda/Reckoning with Ukraine and Iraq, and keeping an eye on 2016" by Evan Osnos — and amidst all the admiration, it had to dredge up the old plagiarism stories. When he was a law student, Biden "was caught lifting five pages of a law-review paper but told administrators it was ignorance, not malice. ('I hadn’t been to class enough to know how to do citations.')" I wonder if Senator Walsh got the idea for his lame excuse from Biden. Having gotten caught committing plagiarism in law school, Biden should have taken care never ever to plagiarize again, but Biden is not the careful type. In 1987, while running for President (and simultaneously chairing the Senate committee that wrecked Robert Bork's Supreme Court nomination), Biden lapsed from quoting the British politician Neil Kinnock to speaking as if Kinnock's childhood had been his own, "talking of 'my ancestors who worked in the coal mines of northeast Pennsylvania and would come up after twelve hours.' There were no coal-mining ancestors.... He was getting a reputation as a pompous blowhard, and Congressional staffers circulated a spoof résumé with Biden’s picture and accomplishments, including 'inventor of polyurethane and the weedeater' and 'Member, Rockettes (1968).'"