I'm single again and though it was my idea I am not at all sure how I feel about it. I am proud that I kept an intense, long-distance relationship going between Los Angeles and Milan for a year and a half and then from Manhattan to Milan for another nine months. I am also proud that Cris and I are still fantastic friends and I hope will always be. Ava, my daughter, has been asking if we sill see her this summer (she is especially keen to see Cris's maid, Rupa, who lived with us and cooked the kids desserts twice a day). I told Ava that I wasn't sure yet, that Cris is very busy. I have been on a few dates here in New York and so far have done an excellent job at the espionage required in keeping my kids in the dark about my love life.

Even though I only saw Cristina about a week every six weeks it wasn't all bad at all. Having a virtual girlfriend most of the time freed me to father and write and teach. When she came into town I put everything else on hold and vacationed a bit. I don't know how I would handle a girlfriend who actually lived on the same continent. I haven't had one like that in four years.

I've been divorced five years. Wow. I always thought of myself as one of those guys who was recently divorced. I guess I can't claim that anymore. I'll have to wear a different hat.

Posted by Trey Ellis at 11:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

It was so cowardly of both of you not to scream, yell and push back with every fiber of your souls against the Cheney-orchestrated, trumped up run up to war. It is almost as cowardly now to claim that you knew all along that it was a bad idea and that you had wished that the administration had found another way of insuring that Saddam was defanged.

Tens of thousands of lives have been lost, hundreds of billions of dollars spent making us less safe, more hated and the region even more destabilized.

And you write a book to clear your name?

Watching the excellent Bill Moyers report on the lack of opposition to the trail of lies that lead us to war I was again struck by the number of people who knew better but stayed silent. Or, much worse, knew better but parroted the administration’s lies. When Colin Powell spoke before the U.N. and accused Saddam of harboring al-Zarqawi in northern Iraq I remember screaming at the television, “Liar! Northern Iraq is Kurdish controlled and in our no-fly zone. There are already more U.S. Special Forces there on the ground than Iraqi troops.” And yet General Powell has the balls to leak to Bob Woodward that he lobbied to avoid this madness.

Tenet and Powell should worry more about the lives that they helped ruin than their precious reputations. They should march over to Walter Reed and empty bedpans for now legless soldiers, read Tom Clancy novels to now sightless marines. If they were Japanese they would have long ago fallen on their swords.

I do not want that for them, or for anyone. However if these two men truly want to restore honor to their reputations they need to dedicate the rest of their days to atoning for the pointless misery that they helped unleash on our country, on Iraq and the world.

Posted by Trey Ellis at 12:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

None of the three Democratic frontrunners went far enough yesterday in denouncing Giuliani’s offensive and ludicrous statement that America would suffer “more losses” under a future Democratic regime than under a Republican one. The response should not be, “Oh, that was a low blow,” or “You’re not playing cricket, old sport.” The response needs to be, “ Mr. Giuliani, if you actually believe something so stupid and so wrong you, sir, are unfit to serve.”

“All thinking Americans, Republican and Democrat, understand as historical fact that the failed policies of this administration have sabotaged our own military, dangerously reduced its readiness, thus endangering the lives of every American on the planet. All thinking Americans, Republican and Democrat, understand as historical fact that this voluntary war in Iraq distracted us from the necessary one in Afghanistan. All thinking Americans, Republican and Democrat, understand as historical fact that this Administration’s shortsighted and boneheaded policies have bred thousands more suicidal anti-American zealots than existed before September 11th.”

These facts are the basis for any reasonable discussion on the next necessary steps to rebuilding our decimated military and effectively combating global terrorism. If any candidate cannot embrace this sober and difficult reality than they have no business asking Americans to trust us with the safety of our lives.

Instead, that candidate needs to go back to the Land of Make Believe where Bush, Cheney and the neocons dwell -- and let the grown ups roll up their sleeves and start cleaning up their mess.

Posted by Trey Ellis at 12:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The need for most Americans to own a firearm passed around a century ago. However in 2007 we Americans are all still held hostage to the rabid whims of the National Rifle Association.

Sandy Froman, pistol-packing president of the NRA, smiles at me from above my desk every day this month. She’s the April pin-up for my Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute “Great American Conservative Women” 2007 calendar. Besides seeing this as a public-relations nightmare, I wonder how she feels knowing that her organization is directly responsible for this country’s insanely lax gun laws which have led to the senseless misery of thousands.

Listen, I respect hunters. Bow hunters, especially, but hunters in general spend hours out in nature and have the courage to actually kill what they eat. I can also understand the allure of firing a weapon. I’ve played paintball a few times and loved it. And I once sprayed an Uzi at a gun range in Vegas and it was a blast.

Handguns, however, are so easy to conceal and as almost extensions of our index fingers they allow the owner to almost magically point and zap away the problem immediately at hand. It is their very ease and efficiency makes them such a danger to every single person within their radius – including their owner.

We have needed sane gun laws for decades. Each of us is less safe because of the NRA and if the rest of us and our leaders don’t stand up to them now we never will. The NRA leadership are a lunatic fringe that even their (overwhelmingly Republican-voting) membership have little in common with. They are like the Bushies who overran the Republican party and turned it into a base of operations for extreme-right-wing nutjobs.

The NRA rabidly lobbies against even the most minimal laws that would enhance gun safety: serious, vigorous background checks on a nationwide database, mandatory safety lessons for every single person who purchases such a ridiculously easy way to take a life, the banning of assault rifles.

If you’re not hunting Al Qaeda you shouldn’t be hunting with an assault rifle.

The fact is, according to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, a gun kept in the home is 22 times more likely to be used for a criminal assault, homicide, unintentional shooting or suicide than it is to kill or injure in self-defense.

Pin-up woman Froman, I’d like to tell you about my own personal history with a handgun. It is actually one that I never laid eyes on. When I was sixteen my mother didn’t tell anyone that she had bought one, then one night drove off and parked in Yale’s Payne Whitney gym parking lot. The police cleaned the blood out of our Audi and delivered it back to us a week or so later. When the police returned the gun to my father he immediately went back to the gun store where my mom had bought it, handed the manager back the gun and told him that his wife had used it to shoot herself in the heart.

Posted by Trey Ellis at 12:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Did I really have to just see Paula Zahn interviewing the author of “Nappily Ever After” about the degree of offensiveness of the word “nappy”? Did I really need Ms. Zahn’s Upper East Side lockjaw pronunciation of the word “ho’” forever seared into the deepest recesses of my brain? Isn’t there a war going on out there someplace? Isn’t there a medium-slow-motion genocide of Africans happening somewhere that starts with a D?

I haven’t written earlier because I was praying that the news sharks would have long since had their fill feasting on this story. It was the story of my life and a very boring one so I had absolutely no desire to revisit it. I imagine Obama feels the same way. Those that chastise him for not jumping out early and hard on this incident don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. Folks like Sharpton and other African-Americans who rarely left their all-black enclaves can be outraged and shocked. For those of us blacks who grew up in white neighborhoods condemning Imus is like condemning a wife beater, a child molester. We don’t stop to consider the motivation, the level of gravity, the anything. He’s just another of the countless racist pricks we’ve met in our lives and may he rot in hell. Move on. Next. We’ve got real work to do.

As a kid growing up in all-white neighborhoods in the Northeast in the 1970s I know a little something about name-calling. I will never forget when I was in middle school frantically sprinting through the backyards of Italian East Haven, Connecticut, with a half-dozen beefy Italian stallion high schoolers chasing me and shouting, “Go back to the Congo!” I wanted to stop and correct them, informing them that I in fact hailed from nearby Hamden, Connecticut, but they didn’t seem in the mood for a geography lesson.

The last time I was called “nigger” I was a junior at boarding school (we were called “Uppers” there and it’s the same school the Bush boys attended). I was crossing the street after having just aced a Latin exam when a public school bus drove by and a tiny little boy, he couldn’t have been more than ten, yelled that to me out his window.

He ruined my day and a few days after. I was sixteen and that’s the last time I allowed the knuckle-dragging ignorance of somebody else to so alter my mood.

Posted by Trey Ellis at 09:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The release date for Father of the Year has been pushed back from June. We didn’t get all the quotes we were looking for yet. I’m actually glad because I want them to be able to give it a real push. Still, it throws my summer plans a real monkey wrench.

Perhaps the weirdness comes in that it's a memoir. When I finished the first draft in January I was writing about final events that happened in December. I think part of me feels that I can't move on emotionally until the book is actually out in the stores. Maybe I can't move on emotionally anyway. The book ends with my maturation from a guy who chases after every pretty face that passes by to a guy that chooses his kids over catting. Though that is still true I still find myself drawn to flirt with women solely on the basis of their beauty. The reincarnation of Madame Curie might be right next to me but all I'll ask her is if she knows the name of that actress in the corner with the shiny high heels.

Posted by Trey Ellis at 09:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)