Columnist.
I was wondering when it would happen. For over 30 years, I have been anxiously awaiting the backlash. What backlash have I been awaiting, you ask? Why, the backlash to the most self-important, morally superior, narcissistic generation to cast a shadow across this republic in its history: the baby-boom generation. Had the generation just been designated "the babies" and left at that, America would have been on the right track. But as we are now about to discover, though the boomers are declining into senescence, they never really did grow up — or at least their headline-grabbing cohort never did.
The average American is understandably perplexed as to why Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and, of course, the runner up in last year's Democrat primaries, Sen. Bernie Saunders, are so lathered up over the Republicans' recent overtures to the Russians. They are calling for the impeachment of Attorney General Jeff Sessions. They want a special prosecutor to look into President Donald Trump's relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin. What has gotten into the Democrats? Why are they so bellicose toward Moscow?
As I find myself happily on the far side of middle age, I had assumed that I was now exempt from at least some of the cultural battles roaring through American society. How wrong I was. I recently found myself, despite my utter insouciance toward gender politics, suddenly hauled onto the battlefield, notwithstanding I am a full-bodied adult male somewhat advanced in years. Let me explain.
"Not since Lincoln has there been a president as fundamentally shaped — in his life, convictions and outlook on the world — by reading and writing as Barack Obama," said Michiko Kakutani, the literary critic of the famed New York Times. Did you know this? Frankly, I did not know President Obama was so wedded to books and the printed word as to be compared to President Abraham Lincoln, author of the Gettysburg Address and the magisterial second inaugural address and devotee of Shakespeare.
The so-called alt-right has apparently lost another battle. It is the racially preoccupied movement that champions the cause of white nationalism and populism. This time it was Yale University that beat it back.
For me the football season begins in mid-December (when everyone becomes serious) and ends at the Super Bowl (when everyone becomes deathly serious). This year it ended with the longest Super Bowl in history. Though I am the epitome of punctuality, I let the season go into the first overtime in Super Bowl history without turning off the television, so I could see whether President Donald Trump's prediction would be vindicated. He predicted that the New England Patriots would win by eight points. It won by six after being down 28 to 3 in the third quarter! Another two-point conversion and the president's prediction would have been right on the money.
Last week, President Donald Trump's recently appointed chief White House strategist, Steve Bannon, caused a stir among the press corps. He telephoned The New York Times and in what the Times reported as "blunt but calm tones" proclaimed, "The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while." Journalists reacted to his comments with "alarm and defiance."
Last Friday, as guests of the Trump family, my wife, Jeanne, and I braved inclement weather to attend President Donald Trump's inauguration. By now you know it was a typical Trumpian ceremony. It was peaceful, elegant, momentous and frightening. At least the protesters were frightened. What they were frightened about is a bit unclear, but many of them were certainly alarmed.
This is supposedly the week of multitudinous demonstrations in Washington, D.C. The hordes are getting more media attention than the hundreds of thousands of President-elect Donald Trump supporters who are also coming into town. Whether the demonstrations will be as multitudinous as anticipated by the media, I cannot say. Certainly, they are getting plenty of publicity already, though their actual numbers as of Tuesday night are disappointing.
President Barack Obama will leave office after eight years of strutting even while sitting down, preening even while standing up, swanking while playing 18 holes. Yet he remains the first president in American history to cast no shadow. President Jimmy Carter cast a pale and minuscule shadow. President Lyndon Johnson cast an obscene shadow. But Obama leaves absolutely no shadow, even in the moonlight.
Around Thanksgiving time, I noticed portents of this Christmas season being different. I noticed it when people unbidden would wish me happy Thanksgiving. There seemed to be a note of exultance in their greeting. Not everyone would say "happy Thanksgiving," but enough did that it got me to wondering. Was this Thanksgiving different, and if so, would this Christmas be any different?
Recently, a voice of the conservative media did what he is supposed to do, to wit, tell the rest of the story. The mainstream media only tells America part of the story. They tell us how they perceive the world and leave it at that. This is why so much of recent American journalism — and indeed, history — is so unsatisfactory to sentient observers. Journalism and history are told exclusively from the left's point of view, and those of us who do not share the left's point of view get the feeling that something is missing.
Over the weekend some pathetic wretch — obviously a casualty of the Nov. 8 election — writing under the pen name Paul Farhi filed a column in the Washington Post lamenting that after an extensive search of the newspapers of this great country, he could hardly find any pro-Trump columnists. Actually, he could not find any, not even among the alt-right, the Ku Klux Klan or the Neo-Nazis with whom the Post has become so familiar during this election year. Apparently the pro-Trumpers are nowhere to be found.
When I heard that Bob Dylan had received the Nobel Prize for literature, I was mildly surprised. He writes music — popular music. As did George Gershwin and Irving Berlin, both of whom almost certainly wrote better music. I have nothing against Dylan's music, except that it was written by a scruffy young man who has remained a scruffy young man all his life. At least that is an achievement. As the years accumulate around him, Dylan is still a scruffy young man, even when he recently bewildered the Nobel committee, whose members did not know what he was going to do about their award. Was he yucking it up with his pals while the committee awaited his decision?
What is it like in the Clinton household now that the last prototypical liberal presidential candidate has lost her run for the White House? Hillary the Inevitable? I attempted to correct that mediawide delusion months ago, as I did in 2008. Where is my Pulitzer?
History is not standing still. At least it is not stopping for America. It did not stop with the Clinton era, which is now finally over. America is moving along at a rapid pace. For the Clintonistas and their millennial acolytes, however, I guess America did stop. In fact, for them it froze, locked into an eternal 1968, forever reliving all the demonstrations and sit-ins, and the sobbing, heaving hubbub of yesteryear. Yet America goes on riding the currents of history, and those currents are moving rapidly.
On Friday, the BBC enlisted me to defend my support of Donald Trump for president. Though the ensuing television interview was conducted in English, I found it incomprehensible. I was speaking in my native tongue to two apparently intelligent English-speaking women, yet their responses to my clear, if amused, rejoinders amounted to gibberish.
Well, it is over! The most poisonous, slanderous, hate-filled American election of all time is now history, and the pity is that there is no historian living in this great Republic who is capable of doing it justice. At least, Donald Trump was entertaining and usually right. Moreover he has only been a practicing politician for a little over a year and a half. Hillary Clinton has been perpetrating politics for her entire adult life, and in the end we discover that she could not even properly maintain classified documents on her server.
Is it just me, or are there others out there in my audience who find it odd that Hillary Clinton, the inevitable presidential candidate of the Democratic Party, would continue to have at the highest level of her staff a woman married to a man who has repeatedly embarrassed himself, his wife and the Democratic Party? Anthony Weiner is a pervert. As to how perverted he might be we can only speculate, but we did see the picture of him sexually aroused in his underpants with his infant son lying next to him. Presumably, Weiner was sending that picture to one of his digital sweethearts.
As I have been saying, the sexual revolution of the 1960s is now over. We can thank Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton's gang of angry women (which Trump either knew or did not know years ago) for that. I think it is a contribution to the moral life of the republic, but I might be wrong. Arguably, the females of the species began the sexual revolution; and unarguably, they are now ending it. Frankly, I, for one, am relieved. There is nothing more frightening than an amorous — if that is the word — woman aroused and on the move.
