Advocates for ideas and draws conclusions based on the interpretation of facts and data.
The blues I had for breakfast are someone else’s soundtrack.
“Not my problem” — the worst three words in the language. This is my unquiet mind blistered by summer sun, ruminating on civilization and its discontents. Friends are bemoaning air travel woes as if touring the world were the best thing they could do today.
People are still dying in Ukraine, kids. China is taking aim at Taiwan. Ask how things are going in Hong Kong. The Brits let them hang alone. But in old spoiled America, the pandemic days were so ... boring. Unmasked marauders, we’re back visiting the tourist meccas of the third world. The imperialism of the almighty dollar.
It’s a hard slog mentally with the weight of the state of the nation and the woes of the world. Here at home, a decade of progressive regressive lobbying led by the Warren-Sanders burden of gilt has led to the recent executive action on student debt. What about all those who never afforded college? Tough luck and top of the morning. Which geniuses think this will play in middle America? Right in time to undo midterm advantage from anti-anti-abortion blowback. Are they all dolts in the foggy bottom of the Capital? What’s the question?
Despite top secret documents that could compromise human intelligence, the party that Lincoln would never have recognized still whines about why the Mar-a-Lago basement wasn’t a fine place to let it all hang out. Not even Donald Trump’s own spooks wanted him to see those docs in the first place; folks I know who used to give White House morning briefings say he was fed a comic book version with his corn flakes.
The plots thicken. Manchurian candidates still parrot “election integrity” as if Dinesh D’Souza’s “2000 Mules” agitprop were other than expensive toilet paper. Hey Dinesh, I’ve spent a lifetime making so-called documentaries. You’re a trumped-up pornographer of smellovision. A rosebud never scented less sweet. Yet true believers swallow this as gospel.
Progressive skins are so thin they’re translucent, while conservatives study "Fahrenheit 451." Save us from the self-righteous of the species.
If I sound bitter — and if you’re not hearing it, get your ears checked — it’s my bad. All those years toiling in what passes for fact, trying to inoculate the culture with empathy for those in need and things needing change, and it seems I was just running between raindrops flattering myself I was making a difference. Vanity of vanities. As Bob Dylan has bemoaned, “I wish that I’d been a doctor, maybe I’d have saved some life that had been lost.” Feeling old, dreaming young.
Here we are, discontentedly bourgeoisie, grandparents or at least puppysitters to our kids’ dogs, rendered conservative in our comforts if not our politics. NIMBY-pambies. Who can blame us? The social safety net is Swiss-American cheese. Instead of two rounds of pandemic relief checks, Biden’s scant capital would have been better spent fixing the gaps in Medicare — bridge-work anyone? — and putting people to useful labor as Franklin Delano Roosevelt did. Lots of potholes out there, Joe — I should know, I just straightened my alignment. What about yours? Smooth biking on Rehoboth Beach? I am exhausted with these old white guys running the country. That we are still talking about the burgermeister running again in 2024 makes me want to go all Edvard Munch. While we’re at it, heaven forbid we say anything that bugs anyone else. Progressive skins are so thin they’re translucent, while conservatives study “Fahrenheit 451.” Save us from the self-righteous of the species.
Gazing east, I am deeply troubled by our post-Afghanistan diplomatic seesawing while the unfinished business of democracy at home is starting to resemble peeling wallpaper. Just because we have disorder in the house doesn’t mean that we need to succumb to nail-biting when it comes to promoting and preserving democracy abroad. After all, if those living in glass houses didn’t throw bricks, we wouldn’t be here in the first place. It’s not as if Black Americans and women voted back in the day, is it? Would a Harriet Tubman denomination be worth three-fifths of a $20 bill? Lest we forget, the Founding Fathers were slavers.
The pirates of the Eastern world Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping — the latter with the planet’s second-largest GDP, the former with the most nukes — are fond of saber rattling and, it’s true, one has pulled the trigger on Ukraine while the other has his sights set on Taiwan. That doesn’t mean we let them get away with it. Never let a bully beat you back. Israel has shown time and again it isn’t size that matters, but the will and the way. As the world’s greatest power, we still have the way. As for will, indeed several isolationist administrations have weakened it. Yet, as history has shown, no better time to look outwards. Democracy abroad may help bring it all back home.
Speaker Pelosi, an 82-year-old grandmother, wasn’t cowed. Get off the beach.
Dalton Delan can be followed on Twitter @UnspinRoom. He has won Emmy, Peabody and duPont-Columbia awards for his work as a television producer.
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