I once found myself driving, smoking a cigar, taking notes, and talking on the phone at the same time. I only became completely aware of this when I had to shift, and realized something had to give.
One of my favorite footnotes in the hypochondria book [The Hypochondriac’s Guide to Life. And Death.] was about the death of one of the King Charleses. He was essentially bled and vomited to death by his doctors. They also drilled holes in his head.
Many put him in the second tier, below the big three and surrounded by Truman and Eisenhower. Kennedy moved our soul. Changed our thinking about service and governance. And won big in the greatest nuclear crisis of the Cold War.
On Twitter, people like me regularly get called “sore losers” by Trumpeters. It just makes me roll my eyes. This is not about winning and losing. We all lost, even them, they just don’t know it yet.
So, when this kind of thing happens to other people, we need to put them in a different category from us. We don’t want to resemble them, and the fact that we might is too terrifying to deal with. So, they have to be monsters.
I don’t think there is prejudice against atheists the same way there is prejudice against fat people. I don’t think people hate or contemn atheists; I think people feel sorry for atheists.
Reporters are not merely recording devices that take down what people say and repeat it in print; we are expected to use our knowledge and experience both for triage – deciding what’s important to cover and what isn’t – and for contextualizing, analyzing and such.
I think Trump wants to be dictator. I don’t think the courts will allow him to be, and I think that after months of revolting sycophancy, neither will Congress. He will sink to such a popularity trough that even those spineless, craven gophers will cave.
Allowing a non-lawyer to be on the Supreme Court strikes me as a very American thing, in a good way. Another is that the speaker of the house doesn’t have to be a member of congress.
But this does me no good because, being intelligent and sophisticated human beings, they are all contemptuous of Trump. They hate him. They find him…vulgar.
You know, I am not a particular Kennedy apologist or an awed fan – I was 12 when he was murdered – but I have discussed Kennedy with historians. For his incredibly short tenure, he was a very important president.
The intelligent Trump supporter will be someone who is so cynical about politics that he wants the world blown up, and doesn’t care if the person doing the blowing up is an obnoxious, infantile vulgarian. I don’t know where to find these people. Do you?
My preference would have been a school that was totally diverse – half and half, or close. I wouldn’t have hesitated at all if they would have been in the racial minority. But to be the only white kids: I don’t think that would have been fair to them.