In the saddle?

Reader question:

Please explain “in the saddle” in this comment on politicians: Get all you can while you are in the saddle. They all do it, don’t they?

My comments:

Get all you want while you’re in control, in other words.

While you’re in the saddle refers to the period of time you are in a leadership position, when you can make decisions.

So, as the above commentator suggests, make decisions that benefits yourself.

Get all you can while you can.

Grab with both hands, in other words.

And why not?

Or, as our commentator asks, rhetorically: Don’t they all do it?

Well, this sounds like a comment from someone who has a cynical point of view on politicians. I know of politicians who are not like that. But, I admit, they’re few and far between.

I want to posit that there are exceptions, as there are exceptions to everything. Not all politicians are corrupt, right?

But I don’t want to argue with the above commentator who will certainly counter with: Exceptions prove the rule.

Well, either way, I’m not here to argue.

Instead, I’d like to focus on the phrase “in the saddle”, which, of course, refers to the saddle on horseback.

The saddle on horseback is a seat on which a horse rider sits while riding the animal. This seat, or saddle, is curved upward in front as well as the rear – so designed that the rider can, in fact, sit tight.

After the horse rider climbs up and sits in the saddle, he’s in control, commandeering the horse. While he’s in the saddle, he can direct the horse to stroll or to gallop, i.e. to walk slowly or to run fast.

Hence, figuratively speaking, he who’s in the saddle is in control and in charge of a situation.

“In the saddle” is similar to “in the driver’s seat”, the latter referring to the seat on which a driver of an automobile sits.

Needless to say, “in the saddle” were more popular before the advent of automobiles, while horses and horse-driven carriages carried the day.

Today, “in the driver’s seat” is often used.

Still, “in the saddle” is a valid expression to learn.

All right, without further ado, here are media examples of people who are “in the saddle”, both literally and figuratively:

1. Tory Lawrence, who has died aged 86, lived a life of two distinct halves. The first centred on the equestrian world in which she grew up, and encompassed marriage to the jockey and racing commentator John Lawrence (later Lord Oaksey), motherhood and years looking after horses. The second, which began when she took up painting in her forties, led to a full-time career as an artist and nearly four decades as the companion of the painter and sculptor Maggi Hambling.

The thread linking these two halves was a deep immersion in the local landscape and an instinctive affinity with the animals that populated it. She painted the chalk hills and pastures of the Berkshire Downs over which she had once galloped, and later the wide fields and big, leaden skies of Suffolk, with the assurance of someone who knew this terrain inside out, fully attuned to its varying rhythms and alert to every shift in mood brought about by the changing weather.

Her paintings of horses, pigs and sheep often aspired to portraiture, unsentimental depictions of creatures whose individuality she readily appreciated. It was her wholehearted engagement with her subject matter that gave her work much of its conviction.

Victoria Mary Dennistoun was born in Chelsea on April 2 1938, the eldest of three children of Major John Dennistoun and his wife Nancy, née Court. Her father, always known as “Ginger”, was an eccentric, quick-tempered racehorse trainer, based at Letcombe Regis in the Vale of the White Horse, and she was in the saddle practically from birth. She claimed to have learnt to ride at the age of two and by her early teens was the star of local gymkhanas. A natural horsewoman, she gained a reputation as a fearless point-to-point rider and competed with success as a professional showjumper.

- Tory Lawrence, gifted painter who left racing commentator Lord Oaksey for Maggi Hambling, Telegraph.co.uk, November 14, 2024.

2. The Miami Heat enter the 2025 NBA play-in tournament as the 10th seed in the Eastern Conference. They will have to win against the ninth-seeded Chicago Bulls later before trying to take down the eighth-seeded Atlanta Hawks to book their tickets to the postseason.

Miami have the opportunity this year to become the first 10th seed to qualify for the playoffs. Given their history in the tournament, including an improbable NBA Finals run in 2023, Tyler Herro spoke confidently about the challenge that awaits his team.

“Hell yeah, we’re excited for this challenge,” Herro said via Zachary Weinberger of ClutchPoints. “We dropped those 10 games, and it kind of, our path became more clear. You know, as that happened, but we still are in the saddle. We haven’t let go of the rope, and we’re excited for this challenge.”

“It just ultimate clarity, you’re not looking at the standings no more,” teammate Bam Adebayo added. “You’re not trying to see if they lose, if we win. You got to win two road games to punch our ticket.”

- Miami Heat: Tyler Herro Reveals He’s Excited on the “Opportunity” to Enter the Play-In Tournament as the 10th Seed, HardwoodHeroics.com, April 16, 2025.

3. Tom Wolfe published “Radical Chic” in 1970, telling how musician Leonard Bernstein gave a fundraiser for the Black Panthers at his penthouse in Manhattan. He basically belittled Lenny for being a patsy. The assembled guests are either confused or hopelessly square.

This work also contains an early mention of anti-Zionism as left wing dogma – the far left wing, that is, as represented by the Panthers themselves.

Wolfe attributed the Panthers’ hatred of Israel to several different factors. First, America backed Israel while the Soviets backed Egypt; so if you believed in socialism, like the Panthers, you fell in line. Second, the Panthers deemed Arabs to be of color, while they called Israelis white (an argument based less on skin tone than political expediency). And third, the Panthers did not pretend otherwise: they were profoundly anti-semitic.

They wanted Jews out of Harlem, they wanted to banish Jews from the civil rights movement, in which they had been historically prominent, and as Wolfe notes in passing, they wanted Jews to die, fantasizing openly about killing them on the streets. Such sentiments were hard for Lenny’s friends to ignore. Wolfe remained sanguine, though. “In the most Literate circles of the New Left, well, the Panthers’ pronouncements on foreign affairs couldn’t be taken too seriously.”

Six years later, novelist Saul Bellow felt otherwise. Writing about visiting Israel in 1976, he commented that “the Arabs enjoy a significant advantage in the sympathies of the left,” which fact he attributed to the legacy of Viet Nam and the growing influence of Marxism in academia. He suggested to an Israeli friend that his country “had better give some thought to the media intelligentsia in the United States,” but his friend demurred. He had bigger fish to fry.

That was fifty years ago. Israel had just barely escaped destruction in the Yom Kippur War, a United Nations assembly packed with newly freed colonies and soaked in Arab propaganda had already voted that Zionism was racism, and future rock-thrower Edward Said was already teaching at Columbia. His work came to epitomize the jaundiced scholarship of post-colonial studies which in turn came to infuse nearly every aspect of the liberal arts, eventually inspiring the DEI movement.

The Panthers’ view of foreign affairs didn’t simply survive. It ended up dominating an entire sector of American culture: our colleges. And through our colleges, it came to dominate Lenny’s own circle: the sensitive, the ones who care, the ones who really want people to get along. The poison at its core grew silently for decades.

One generation after another, the young prove deeply conservative at heart. They want more than anything to stay young. They want the purity of their childhood to last into their adult years. They want to stop growth and change in an existential way. They have no truck with moral compromise. They don’t need to. They don’t have bills to pay.

This strain of romantic puritanism first entered politics in that awful time, the 1960’s, when the horrors of Viet Nam were being presented daily on TV. Students protested to stop it. I used to envy that generation, that had so much important work to do: stopping evil, basically. That must have felt satisfying.

Yet whether that war was misguided or not, there was nothing especially evil about the people who fought it and nothing especially good about the people who wanted to stop them. Protestors carried the day in both academia and journalism, though; many were drawn to those fields, so open to idealists and so resistant to practicality; and they never stopped believing in their own moral superiority.

Donald Trump’s presidency offers so many newsworthy events that it’s hard for your columnist to keep up (“things are in the saddle and ride mankind,” Emerson observed in the 1840’s). No sooner do I consider writing about Trump’s begging for a jet plane from one of our dodgier allies, than he banishes vaccines for kids, he invades California with troops, he marches the army down Pennsylvania Avenue for his birthday. For all his failures, he has succeeded in two main things: making it difficult to track his mistakes because he makes so many of them, and making it boring to hear about them, because the criticism all sounds the same.

One challenge becomes sorting through the smashed pieces he leaves behind and finding the through-line that existed before him and will stay in place after him. Perhaps those points are worth shining light on. Especially to illuminate the dead in Boulder, Colorado, and Washington, D.C.

- Not So Chic Anymore, by Michael Davidow, InDepthNH.org, June 12, 2025.

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About the author:

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.

（作者：张欣）