I do not think a week has gone by this past year (hardly a day has gone by) that I haven’t been enlightened and uplifted by some amazingly creative, intelligent, and insightful pundit telling the world what he, and he alone, had been clever enough to spot about the recent strange election – Hillary did it.
Read MoreBack in the day, there was this national institution known as Time, a magazine which was of common occurrence in homes and waiting rooms across the land. Today, not so much, though it has managed, to its credit, to remain in continuous publication even as paper publishing, especially of magazines, has become fraught with peril. Back in 1927, when I was still pretty young, the magazine’s founder decided to recognize the Man of the Year, perhaps more as an excuse to put national hero Lucky Lindy on the cover yet again than from any thought that the public would be still interested in quibbling about the suitability of the selection each and every year.
Read MoreHey, you, woman! I’m a male writer! I don’t really know how to write women. Can you give me some hints? You see, I’m not sure I got the dialect right. I just don’t know how women talk. I don’t know their language. Give it a look, will you?
Read MoreDid you hear that Charlie Manson died the other night? If you did, it was no thanks to any news I saw the night that it happened or, for that matter, the night after it happened, and I watched a lot of news those nights, owing to my custom of switching to a news channel during the many commercials which festoon the evening’s football game. Pick your ideology—Fox News, CNN, or MSNBC, and you can even throw in C-SPAN, and…Nada, Zilch, Commandante Zero. He didn’t even make that cavalcade of trivia that scrolls along the bottom of the screen. Susan Collins, Al Franken, John McCain, Charlie Rose. Angela Merkel, Robert Mugabe, Vlad Putin, a merger between two cable outfits, even the death of fifties singer and latter-day ham actress Della Reese-- they were all there, but not the man who at one time was arguably the most recognized man in America. All of this news is very important and interesting (well, maybe except for the cable TV merger), but does it really have to shove an uber-important death out of our minds?
Read MoreWith the recent rash of revelations out of Hollywood, Alabama, and Minnesota pertaining to sexual misbehavior, we have a perfect opportunity to have a national dialogue, and actually make some changes. Of course, we have had many opportunities for that dialogue before (remember Anita Hill?) and we seem to be almost supernaturally able to forgive, forget, and return to business as usual. Then the next incident arises and we are shocked, shocked I tell you, that this is going on, and has been going on for so long. How is it we didn’t notice? How could these men be so predatory without someone knowing? (I’ll tell you a secret – people did know. Lots of people knew about Harvey Weinstein. Lots of people knew about Roy Moore. And since Al Franken was not alone when he misused his proximity to a sleeping woman, it is likely that people knew about that, too.)
Read MoreLogicians tell us that the “slippery slope”, an argument which posits that one seemingly reasonable concession on societal values, or most any argument, will lead to less reasonable and more destructive consequences, is a weak one. And it causes this writer considerable discomfort to admit that our President got something right; thus, this post begins life with two strikes against it.
Read MoreLast week my inner political junkie kicked in, and I decided to watch some late-night C-SPAN. What they offered me was watching a young lady with the same unusual surname as a well-known ABC financial reporter holding forth on the administration’s regulatory policies. I had just finished reading a magazine column by a man with the same unusual surname as an even better-known CNN anchorman. My apologies to all concerned if I jumped to an incorrect conclusion, but it occurred to me that these might be relatives, perhaps even children, of their entrenched media celebrity sires. That’s called nepotism, and it’s still nepotism even if you’re the finest political analyst of your generation.
Read MoreMany orthodox Jewish males open their day by thanking God for not making them a woman. I would like to add my voice to theirs; I would like to thank God for not making me a woman.
Read MoreSome decades since, when my workplace was trying to familiarize us with using computers at work, in a weak moment one of the head honchos requested that we surf the internet for a while each day to find out what useful treasures were available to us. Among many other things, I quickly discovered that this was a world which was powered by inscrutable acronyms. And so it came to pass that one day I innocently asked somebody what the deuce ‘FAQ’ stood for. I was misinformed.
Read MoreWhenever one happened by our neighborhood grocery store all summer, parked there in the outlying area that employees use was a pickup truck decorated with stickers of the Confederate battle flag and captioned with the friendly reminder that “If this offends you, you need a history lesson”. Now, I’m not sure that the stickers offended me, exactly—“annoyed” seems the more appropriate verb—since, having earned somewhere north of 125 college credit hours in history, I’m certain that said stickers were not directed at me, as I’m sure the owner of the truck would agree if he were informed of the fact.
Read MoreWell, Hillary’s book is out, and the critics are all over it…hating the book, hating Hillary, telling Hillary to go away already. This critique was not leveled at Bernie Sanders when he wrote his book after losing the primary. It was not leveled at Al Gore after winning the votes but losing the election (in fact, Al Gore has made two movies since the 2000 debacle). Michelle and Barack Obama have both signed large contracts for books. Bill Clinton wrote a book about his experience in the presidency. While these books were not loved by all (but by some, of course), there was no almost unanimous outcry that these major players on the political scene should just sit down and shut up. What’s the difference? The difference is Hillary.
Read MoreIf I had a nickel for every time I’ve watched or read some pundit or egghead tell me over the past two years that this time The Donald has gone too far and surely outraged the American people beyond their outmost limits, I’d be having two toppings on the pizza tonight and have enough left over to take the nephews for ice cream afterward. All this public outrage, of course, put him into the White House. And don’t let some spin doctor tell you that he’s become less popular whilst there—his favorability rating was 37% on election night, and, though it’s declined marginally at a couple of points, basically, there it still stands.
Read MoreI suppose I should have seen it coming; each decade of my life became a little less distinct. The fifties were, of course, suburban conformity, though I didn’t spend them in a suburb and my parents were not the most pliant conformists. The sixties quickly got filed under ‘peace and love’ with a dollop of political activism—though some spoilsport was always ready to point out that more than half of those sixties took place in the seventies. As for the seventies, things got a bit hazier, but they seemed to be sort of like the sixties except that nobody thought that stuff was so great any more, and some of the activism was elbowed out by political scandal. Then the eighties, the ‘Greed is Good” decade, and it seemed like the pigeonholed decade was back to stay.
Read MoreIn recent decades, Republicans have developed a strong distaste for higher education. They criticize it at every turn, complaining about the liberal bias of universities. And they do seem to have a point; study after study has pointed to a strong tendency for liberal arts programs to hire mostly liberal professors. This fact has generated barrels of ink on forests worth of paper, decrying the propagandizing of our youth, and the refusal to hire conservative thinkers. Many liberal pundits and journalists appear to agree with them, chastising their own for the terrible refusal to allow conservative thought to get a hearing. I would like to join my voice to the noisy throng.
Read MoreOne of the common memes going around the punditry today is that the Democrats lost the election because of identity politics. This is meant to say that, because the Democrats are the party connected with Civil Rights for people of color and Equal Rights for women, they are making big mistakes and ignoring a group of hard-working, honest, tax-paying people - in short, white men. The commentary has routinely suggested that the Democrats should abandon this stance and start listening to the people variously termed "working class", "flyover country", "gun-owning, church-going patriots", or, in rare moments of honesty, "white men".
Read MoreIf you've gone to the theatre lately, you may have noticed a phenomenon never before experienced in theatre history - every single play, every one without fail, is a true masterpiece of writing, directing, and acting. Except...no.
Read MoreEvery pundit out there is talking about the election. The why, the how, the wha' happen. Everyone has a reason, an explanation, a big finger to point, usually at liberals who are somehow more to blame than actual Trump voters. We've been condescending. We've forgotten Middle America. We have focused on the "special interest groups" and forgotten the hurt feelings of the white male, who is justifiably angry about being on the bottom of the heap. None of these actually work that well when you unpack the story.
Read MoreI've been made a fool of, and I'm pretty angry about it!
I was confident and happy until this. Now, I just want to crawl under a rock and never emerge.
Don't get me wrong. I'm glad I found out. I'm just feeling very humiliated. When somebody tells you at 2:00 PM that your pants are unzipped, you're glad you know, so you can take action. Still, you have to wonder how long they were like that, and how many people saw it. It's like that, but a thousand times worse.
Read MoreWhen I was first diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis, I carefully considered my options and decided to be an idiot. I talked it over with my late wife, pondered, meditated, prayed, and then settled on the stupidest possible course of action, short of bee sting therapy. (Yes, there are people who believe that allowing bees to sting you is an effective treatment for MS. - No, I'm not kidding.)
The actions I attempted to take might not have been foolish for somebody else. In fact, I know people for whom this plan works. It was dumb because it just isn't me.
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