It’s hard to imagine that participating in sectarian slaughters fraught with possibilities that we’ll be played for suckers perhaps by all the combatants will lead to any good, and yet it seems we have no choice given the likelihood of a greater evil emerging insofar as Americans are concerned from a jihadist triumph.

The recent beheadings by ISIS of two American journalists and a British aid worker have fueled revanchist fire — all the more reason to be grateful that we have a president with a cool head, one who, as was the tragic case a decade ago, when the Pandora’s box  was opened, is not likely to go off half-cocked.

Tom Lehrer, I gather, does not like to be invoked, but these days I find the lyrics of a song of his that masterfully catalogued the world’s sectarian, political, and racial hatreds, which ended with “and I don’t like anybody very much,” dancing in my head.

And with the above in mind, I’d like to recall the late Denis Craine, who had much to teach, and who died, at 56, of Lou Gehrig’s disease in March 2003, the same month, if I’m not mistaken, that we invaded Iraq.

What follows are some excerpts from his obituary and an interview with him, both of which I wrote:

“ ‘. . . In the end, though pride and judgments get in the way, love is all that endures,’ wrote Mr. Craine. He thanked his five children for having taught him to be sensitive, to be inquisitive, to be courageous, to live in the present, and to let the spirit move him.”

“. . . Five years ago, to promote inclusiveness in the East End’s schools, and to combat racism and bias crimes, Mr. Craine began to hold a Race Against Racism, also known as the W.E. Race, on Columbus Day, in an effort ‘to rediscover America.’ ”

“. . . He recalled also that Dylan, then 5, had inspired him to jettison his self-pity [stemming from two operations he underwent in his mid-30s to remove a cancerous tumor] when he said, ‘You might die? Well, let’s play!’ That says it all. It has really been grace we’ve been talking about. When you have your faith and come to terms with what you’re dealing with, no matter how critical the crisis, it doesn’t become bigger than spiritual peace. That’s what grace is.”

Love is what endures. We cannot let hate win.

Back when summer was new, The Star sent out its interns to gather up all the free magazines they could find and put a brief rundown of them on our website. The interns came back with 13 glossies. Thirteen! A few, like Hamptons magazine, have been around a long time, but most are relatively new here and some are pop-ups (to use the term now popular for the sudden appearance of a shop or restaurant).

Fortunately for us here at The Star, these glossies pretty much compete with each other, and not with us. They lure advertisers from the corporate worlds of fashion and interior decorating, and, of course, they follow celebrities. They all allege to know everyone and everything that is happening. Real estate is also prime fodder. 

Ocean Home, which I hadn’t even heard of before the interns found it, offered what it said were the top 10 “most exclusive estates on the market.” (The word “exclusive” always draws my attention, by the way. What does that really mean, anyway? Most expensive? Most likely to be encircled by a moat?) The Real Deal, an oversize Manhattan magazine that concentrates on luxury apartments that are for sale, added a “Hot in the Hamptons” feature for July. There is Hamptons Cottages & Gardens, and Pulse, and Joan Jedell’s Hamptons Sheet, which have been around awhile.

I was a little amused when I belatedly cottoned on to the fact that there are two Beach magazines on the market. The Modern Luxury chain’s Beach magazine was inaugurated in 2012 and took a bead on Niche Media’s Hamptons. The other Beach is Avenue magazine’s Avenue on the Beach, which started up last summer. Although one has a much smaller format than the other, each has the word “Beach” on the cover in extra-large type. Could a little litigation be going on between them?

The interns also brought in a copy of Du Jour, which divides its content between the city and the East End. Its publisher is Jason Binn, who had launched but is no longer with Hamptons. More recently, I picked up a copy of Gotham, which is another Niche Media publication, and was pleasantly surprised that there was nothing in it about the East End, except for an advertisement for the James Beard Foundation’s Chefs and Champagne party this weekend. 

But the prize of the summer was picked up and brought home by my husband. It’s called Hamptons Dog, and it is about nothing but. Among the cover lines were: “Boating Safety for Canines,” “Flying Dogs: Learn Frisbee!” and “Summer Skin and Fur Care.” Its editor and publisher is Lisa Hartman, a dog trainer and crackerjack photographer of dogs. The issue featured a Paw List (names of dogs), an article on how to go paddleboarding with your four-legged friend, and quite a few photos of dogs cavorting handsomely on local beaches (although they showed happy golden retrievers or yellow Labs, not happy little blond children, these reminded me of the beachy family portraits you often see marketed locally).

I find Hamptons Dog quite brilliant in its special-interest focus. It certainly stands out among the other periodicals trying to make a buck with party pictures and wannabe society chit-chat. And who among us hasn’t complained that the Hamptons are going to the dogs?

Brock, or Brick, or something like that, I think he said his name was, but it was difficult to pay attention the other day because I was on the beach chasing friends’ children in a runaway kayak as they drifted down the bay in the direction of Promised Land. He seemed a nice enough guy, probably in his late 20s or early 30s. He introduced me to his companion, a woman about his age, and said he was renting the house next door.

Things on the beach have seemed different in the past couple of summers. New and unfamiliar people walk past our place. Last year, the house next door was rented in August to some youngish tenants who were low-key until the end of the season, when they threw a jungle-themed pool party complete with thickset bouncers and a catered spread.

They were nice enough, though my wife was itching to call the police one night when they turned the music up way too loud. Heading off her grab for the phone, I pulled on a pair of paint-covered jeans and the muck boots I use to tend the chickens and headed over for a chat. They agreed to turn the thumping disco down and invited me for a shot of spiced rum. I declined and went home to get back in bed.

As we learned later from the neighbor who owned the house, the jungle party had left the house a shambles. Rooms that were supposed to remain off-limits had been the scene of apparent debauchery and so on. She vowed to better vet her tenants next time. We said we would help keep an eye on things.

So far, the guy whose name I didn’t quite get and his friends have hardly been a nuisance next door. We hear them occasionally carrying on around the pool. It seems that they gather for dinner and an early drink, then go out on the town after we have gotten our kids into bed. They have had one party, and the catering gear hung around on the beach for a few days, but so far, that has been about it.

More interesting, really, was the extended family that rented a place a couple of houses to the west for a weekend at the end of June. Out walking the dogs one evening, I stopped to try to chat with a guy wearing a camouflage trucker’s hat who was baiting a line for a small child.

He had little to say, which surprised me; most of the time, people on the beach here like to get acquainted. A little while later, as I walked back the other way, the rest of the family had emerged, two more men in camouflage hats, a couple of women, and a few more children. They acknowledged my hello with a nod and a wan smile, but did not engage. I have not seen them in the weeks since, but I wonder who they were each time I go by.

Many may not take me for the type of gal who enjoys camping. After all, I was raised in Manhattan. Growing up, the closest I ever got to camping was visiting my cousins at Hither Hills during their extended stays there, but I always left long before dusk. Fast forward all these years later and I look forward to going to sleep under the stars, sitting by a campfire, and, yes, even as a decade-long vegetarian, waking up to the smell of bacon cooking at the neighboring campsite.

All of that faced several interruptions, including leaks and police activity, a few weekends ago.

First, the hot water heater in our camper broke. (Did you think this city girl slept in a tent?) It was already after dark on a nonelectric site at Indian Island in Riverhead, so we roughed it the first night. In the morning, we tinkered with pipes and valves, which promptly blew the faucet off the kitchenette sink. Then we realized the fridge and freezer, which can operate off propane, weren’t getting as cold as they should, a rather big problem for my MorningStar Farms veggie bacon strips.

My fiancé was ready to admit defeat, but a friend in East Hampton, far more experienced in the world of camping, had a number for a repairman who exclusively fixes campers. We called Bill, who came right over, fixed the sink and the fridge, and diagnosed the leak. Weekend saved.

As soon as one problem is fixed though, another rears its ugly head.

As we enjoyed a peaceful evening, we heard yelling. We peeked our heads around the camper, and diagonally across the way found a man screaming at two Suffolk County Park Police officers. Our next-door neighbors, a large group of 20-somethings, suddenly came out from their campsite to fill us in — they had been watching most of the incident through the blinds. Allegedly, the man had two shotguns in the trunk of his car, which the cops had confiscated. It’s illegal to bring any firearms to a county park.

The man appeared intoxicated, also a no-no in a county park. He was filming the exchange with his cellphone camera — after all, the Eric Garner incident was just days old. The back-and-forth went on for quite some time with him screaming about his rights and the officers trying to keep him at bay. It was like a block party with campers from every site gathering around to watch. More cops and a sergeant arrived.

The man grew less steady on his feet as time went on, doing the two-step and carrying on. When he urinated right in front of the officers, it seemed they had had enough. I think it took six officers to arrest him as he struggled with them. My neighbor captured the whole thing on his cellphone. There were no chokeholds, though.

Everyone was relieved the man was in custody, and just as we were all ready to go back to our s’mores, the reason the officers had held off arresting him so long became apparent: a 3-year-old child asleep in a large tailgating chair and no other adults in sight. Another hour went by before a Riverhead volunteer ambulance came to fetch the child, I assume under some kind of protocol because the child seemed fine, scared and alone, but all right.

Officers remained at the campsite well after I turned in for the night. The Suffolk Times reported later that police found a loaded shotgun in the man’s tent, though the article made no mention of those other guns. Court documents said the child could have easily gotten to the gun.

You just never know what’s lurking around the corner. The whole incident got me thinking that maybe I should have stuck to Manhattan, where at least I had double-bolted doors, albeit no real view of the stars.

Taylor K. Vescey is The Star’s digital products editor.

Fifty-four years ago this month — almost to the day, actually — The Star ran a review of a new musical that was running at the John Drew Theater of Guild Hall. The play was “The Fantasticks,” and I wrote the review, one of its first. Today, The Star is to publish another review I wrote of a new musical. This time it is “My Life Is a Musical” at the Bay Street Theater. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose? 

All these years, I have been dining out, so to speak, on what I’ve described as my own misbegotten moxie in panning a theatrical masterpiece that went on to run continuously for 42 years and 17,162 performances. The problem with my handy-dandy dinner-party anecdote is that I didn’t really pan it.

“The Fantasticks” had already opened at the Sullivan Street Theater in Manhattan, in May of 1960, when it came to Guild Hall in August. Although I remembered think­ing it was too corny to make it for very long in the Big City, and I even called some of the lyrics “sophomoric” in the song “Try to Remember” — “without a hurt the heart is hollow” — the review was generally positive. Looking back, I am excusing myself for the word “sophomoric”; I was a recent college graduate. 

Knowing that memory, at least mine, plays tricks, I went to The Star’s archives this week to take a look. It turns out that, in addition to sophomoric, I called the musical “an ingenious kind of vaudeville for the modern stage.” I praised Jerry Orbach, the original narrator and villain, as “the best member of the cast” and said Tom Jones, who wrote the book and lyrics and also took the role of the Old Actor, was “excellent.” The review concluded that “like vaudeville, it is light entertainment that is soon forgotten but, for the moment, entirely captivating.” 

When “The Fantasticks”closed in 2002, its passing was widely reported. It had been viewed as a musical incarnation of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” and more than one generation of theatergoers had been enchanted by it. It has been produced in 67 countries and on innumerable high school and college campuses.

When it was revived on Broadway in 2006, Ben Brantley of The New York Times noted with approval that it had “no artificial amplification or special effects” in an era of over-the-top productions. But he also said it began with “whimsy preserved in formaldehyde” and had some “spun-sugar poetry.” Even if I had been clever enough to choose those words, back as a slightly pretentious recent college graduate in 1960, I wouldn’t have had the nerve. 

But you know what? Today, sitting at the computer writing this, I can’t get “Try to Remember” and “Soon It’s Gonna Rain” out of my head. I have no idea whether what I’ve written about Bay Street Theater’s new show, “My Life Is a Musical,” is on target, but I certainly wish it will “follow, follow, follow” the success of “The Fantasticks.”

We already suspected what the public perception of us was, but now we have something akin to hard proof: In a “readers choice” survey by Condé Nast Traveler, “the Hamptons” was rated as the eighth most unfriendly city in the United States among a list of 10. Newark, N.J., at number one, was the worst, and Miami just made the list, at number 10. Imagine! “The Hamptons” was only two slots friendlier than Detroit and — if that doesn’t make your hair stand on end — four slots better than Atlantic City. 

I, myself, don’t really believe those Condé Nast Traveler readers really knew what they were talking about when they filled out the survey. I think the votes were based on a vague cultural perception.

Sure, in East Hampton, and everywhere else on the South Fork, we have plenty of issues, but kindness isn’t tops among them; residents, visitors, and civic organizations continually attest to lots of generosity and caring. Who would deny that we have an unusually strong sense of community here? The letters to the editor of The Star are often filled with thank-you notes to individuals and volunteers who stepped out of their way to help others. 

I went to the magazine’s website in hopes of finding out just who participated in the survey, but didn’t have much luck. I ended up taking it (well, some of it) instead. Readers were asked to name cities they had been to and then evaluate them on a scale from poor to excellent — for not just friendliness and unfriendliness, but arts and culture, scenery and sights, restaurants and food, accommodations, shopping, and value. Among the friendliest cities, a disproportionate number of high scorers turned out to be in the South: Charleston, S.C. (which I’ve been meaning to visit since a former Star reporter moved there), was deemed the friendliest, followed by Savannah, Ga.; New Orleans was at the mid-mark, despite its problems, and Asheville, N.C., was number 10.

Perhaps those who marked “the Hamptons” as an unfriendly city had visited on a chaotic weekend in the summer, and run into someone in a shop who was tired and cranky. That certainly, ahem, happens. But, really, there’s a lot to quibble with in this survey ranking. First of all, even if we allow the Hamptons to be considered a single geographic entity, they (it?) are hardly a city. Hamptonization may have blurred some of the distinctions between the South Fork’s villages and hamlets, but their basic characters have not disappeared. In East Hampton, at least, people “from away” have been part of the equation for well more than a century; we’re not exclusionary. 

In his 1979 book, “The South Fork: The Land and the People of Eastern Long Island,” the late Everett T. Rattray said that although this place was “native now to a relative handful, it could be native to thousands more if they would undertake the necessary naturalization exercises, which include some long looks beneath the surface of things.” I can’t help but wonder what he would say about the conclusions of Traveler’s survey. Its voters probably didn’t engage in any naturalization exercises. 

Ah, well, perhaps it’s best that they didn’t. Our unfriendly rating may be good news, in the end, for this overcrowded peninsula. Given what things are like each July and August, we don’t really need any further announcements or broadcasts to the effect that our streets are filled with celebrities, that our restaurant kitchens are staffed by world-class chefs, that our visual arts heritage is second to none, that our farm and ocean produce is near-miraculous, and that our beaches are still incredibly beautiful. Grouchy survey-takers? You are welcome to stay home. 

Sunday night I was out in my boat on Gardiner’s Bay as the moon appeared over the Hither Hills highlands. It was a still evening, no wind to speak of, and only a little ripple under the hull as I passed the bluffs at the old Bell Estate, where the Clintons are staying for a couple of weeks.

Nights like this always puzzle me. So calm, so beautiful, and yet so few vessels on the water. There were no signs of the former president and former secretary of state or their security team, either. A single blue-hulled cabin cruiser lay at anchor off the Accabonac Harbor channel buoy. Another, smaller boat made its way northwest, and in the distance, a sloop was tucked up off Gardiner’s Island for the night.

It had been a long day, beginning for me with a fuel line problem that cut the outboard engine in the middle of the Three Mile Harbor breakwaters. On an incoming tide, I let the boat drift back onto a clam flat where I climbed overboard and worked it back to the dock, half walking, half swimming, with a line attached to the bow.

Back at the slip, talking through the boat’s problems with Palmer Smith, who keeps a runabout next to mine, the repair suddenly became obvious. I had the part I needed, and before too long I was on my way again.

My plan had been to run the boat up on the beach near our house as the tide switched around midday. Only a bit behind schedule, I managed to do so by lunch. That afternoon, as the hull sat dry on the sand, I took care of what needed to be done and waited for the bay to come in again. It did, while I was not watching, the way people say a pot won’t boil when it is being watched.

I had gone up to the house for something or other, and when I returned the boat had swung on its anchor line and was floating, swimming distance from the shore, in the light southwest wind. We were under way shortly thereafter.

Recently, I read of someone who was described as “a great herder of cats.” Leif Hope, a great ballplayer, by the way, who moves like a cat on the mound and bats like a lion, is one of those — an artistic manager of swing-for-the-fences egos in the service of the greater good.

The betterment of life in this town has been the prize on which Leif’s eyes have been cast for the almost 50 years now that the Artists-Writers Softball Game has been played as a benefit, for such organizations as the Eleanor Whitmore Early Childhood Center, which began here as Head Start, the Retreat, which offers a haven to victims of domestic abuse, Phoenix House, which helps to free people from addiction, and East End Hospice, which enables the terminally ill to remain in their houses.

Leif is a doer of good leavened with a sly sense of humor, however, a sense of fun that has served him, and The Game’s receipts, well over the years, during which the myth he’s spun of solipsistic, closeted Writers intent on annually bludgeoning the insouciant, life-loving Artists has been undone by the cold fact that Artists, while perhaps less obsessive than Writers, like to win too. And indeed they have as many times as the Writers have in the past 25 years.

Leif’s aim has always been to put on a good show, and thus he ought to be forgiven, I think, for playing fast and loose with his players’ bona fides. John Leo, once the Writers’ manager, said he guessed that in his opposing manager’s eyes anyone who was not a writer was an artist.

In rebuttal, Leif has said the Writers were the first to transgress, insisting in the 1970s that two lawyer ringers from California were eligible to play for them because they “wrote legal briefs.” But I think that riposte came after Leif played two auto body guys, Andy Malone and John Johnson, who in their work repainted cars.

A lover of women, Leif has not hesitated to enlist them in tweaking the Writers’ egos, often subbing in for a few innings all-female lineups recruited from the East Hampton Town women’s slow-pitch softball league.

In the famous “Battery Show” of 1977, he introduced a lights-out pro pitcher, Kathy Neal, and her catcher, C.B. Tomasiewicz, whom he and Tom Twomey had flown over from Connecticut, as “two folk singers from Omaha.”

It soon became evident they weren’t. Bowing to authorial pique, Leif played them in the outfield from the second until the ninth inning, at which point, with runners on first and third, and with the Writers about to tie the game up, he called them back in to pitch and catch.

A popup, a strikeout, and a popup, and that was it. The Artists won 13-7. “Some guys didn’t talk to me for five years after that,” said Leif, who, when it comes to The Game, puts it all on the line, always has, and always will.

My one regret is that he, a great ballplayer, as I’ve said, hasn’t played more in all these Games for which he’s been the impresario. But there’s more than one way, I suppose, to skin a cat.

Let’s play it again, Leif, play it again.

There is no shortage of lettuce in my house. Or cucumbers or zucchini or string beans. And come fall, the larders will be laden with mounds of potatoes and squash.

No one is more committed to the farm-to-table ideology than my mother, which is why, on any given evening, my family can be found eating homemade, homegrown organic basil pesto, with a side of sauteed zucchini and lemon balm. Eternally present at the table is a salad that consists entirely of vegetables that can be found either in our backyard or at my mother’s plot at EECO Farm.

My mother tends her garden lovingly, putting as much effort into it as she does her two daughters. She works less now than she did when I was growing up, but a large portion of her free time is devoted to coaxing tomato plants up stakes and eradicating scourges of potato bugs — she picks them off by hand; no pesticides are used on her plants.

She explained to me recently that this year she’d grudgingly made the switch from seedlings to already sprouted plants. She had seen the other farmers at EECO Farm unabashedly plant quarter-grown tomato plants purchased from Agway last season, and eventually decided that this was the easier way to go. My mother has a green thumb, but baby tomatoes need round-the-clock care. She does lament, though, that the plants will not have been raised organically for their whole lives.

She showed what can only be called mother-like devotion to her plants a month ago, after she was injured and ordered, not only by the doctors, but by my father, myself, my sister, and her boss, to stay in bed for a few days. Needless to say, she could not be kept away from her garden for long, not trusting the weatherman’s assessment that it would rain soon, nor was she satisfied with a fridge that was slowing growing empty. These days we don’t buy any vegetables from the grocery store, and as a family of vegetarians, we’ve come to depend on Mom’s garden.

Despite headaches and bruises, she has not shirked her responsibilities to the garden, nor has she asked for my help. My parents never hired a baby sitter when my sister and I were younger; they didn’t trust anyone else with their children, and I doubt I would be trusted in the garden. Besides, it has become a point of pride for her that the food on our table is made or grown by her hands alone. She is constantly encouraging me to pack a salad for lunch or slipping a bag of snap peas into my bag for work. I may finally be in my 20s, but when I hurt my hand recently and was unable to wield a knife, my mom made me lunch.

Truth be told, the two organic gardens that she tends are merely an extension of her cooking empire. She is a skilled chef, though she is hard pressed to admit it, and excels at whipping something up out of thin air. We eat dinner late, around 9 p.m., and many a time I have walked into the kitchen at 8:45 to find my mother sipping a cup of tea, a mystery novel in hand. Like magic, though, by 9 p.m., she creates some fantastic concoction, perhaps an Indian dahl with naan bread on the side, or a pasta dish that has been passed down in her family for generations. She is also an A-plus pastry chef and, not to rub it in, makes the best pie crust I’ve ever tasted.

In recent weeks, she has hauled out her old pasta machine, a relic from a past life in California, a time that my father has deemed “before baby.” She has taken to making fettuccini and spaghetti from scratch, declaring that it’s easier to make it herself than drive all the way from Springs into East Hampton Village to buy pasta. Two nights ago she used her pasta machine to make buckwheat Soba noodles. My father and I thought that the results — a stir fry of noodles, shrimp, and vegetables — were exemplary, but my mother did not agree, claiming that the noodles came out too thick and that she would have to try again.

Lucia Akard is an editorial intern at The Star. She will be a senior at Skidmore College in the fall.

The Hamptons, as it were, have been described as a mighty unfriendly “city” in a recent Condé Nast poll, though I’d beg to differ. On the contrary, rather than brutish, I find people here, if not beatific, quite giving.

So much so that I think every now and then — when I’m not in traffic — that we’re an island of sanity in an insane world.

But there I go again, arrogating to this place an exceptionalism that could well be overstated. Were we in a war zone — and there are many now in the world to choose from — I’d undoubtedly be singing a different tune, dirge rather.

Hobbes said life in the raw was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, a description that even today may be true in many places, though I, an optimist by nature (against all odds), cannot help but demur.

It’s all how you look at it, and from what vantage point. Our vantage point here is rather serene, most of the year, and I sense a feeling of community (that the Condé Nast poll-takers apparently did not) that is sustaining and abiding. What more can you hope for in life than that?

There being no crying need to be brutish here, we can, to some degree at any rate, be friendly, living our lives as we please yet helping one another when there is a need. I’ve seen this happen time and again on the South Fork. If it’s anything America has to teach the world, it may well be this — that life need not be the way Hobbes described, that it can be bountiful, pleasant, endlessly engaging, and long-lived (my dentist said recently that like the Stoics he tried to treat each day as his last, and that he wanted to live forever).

There’s more to power than force and domination. There is, indeed, power in numbers, in numbers of well-meaning people who have worked to free themselves from the tyranny of their emotions, to the extent, at any rate, that they can, having achieved a certain degree of equilibrium, or equanimity, if you will, devote themselves at times to the greater good of a community rather than solely to self-aggrandizing (and often self-destructive) pursuits.

While an antipathy toward tyranny has informed America’s past, as I heard someone say on the radio this morning, by the same token it has a heritage of charity and fairness as well. I would guess in that connection that if a poll were taken, this “city” might be in the forefront when it comes to charitable work. But, again, that is just my surmise (which, of course, is unimpeachable).

Looking at the bigger picture, taking in life’s beauty and joys as well as its ghastly enormities (natural and man-made) ought, I think, to persuade us that there is more to be gained from amity than from hate. Granted, it’s easier to think that way when you’re not coming under fire, but, in the end, if humankind is to survive, if not thrive, it must free itself from the chains of pride it has forged.