A Cry from the Far Middle

by P. J. O'Rourke

  As I was walking down the street one day

  A man came up to me and asked me what the time was on my watch

  And I said

  Does anybody really know what time it is?

  Does anybody really care?

  If so I can’t imagine why

  We’ve all got time enough to cry

  Cry, “Enough already with the Internet of Things!”

  Plus there’s this to consider . . . Two ordinary old married men are playing golf.

  First Golfer: Take a look at this golf ball. Doesn’t matter how bad you hook or slice. It’s got a flashing red light and a beeper and a GPS chip and a Bluetooth tracking locator and a camera that sends you a selfie of its location.

  Second Golfer: Wow! Where did you get that golf ball?

  First Golfer: I found it.

  Lessons in Fake News from Two Old Masters of the Form

  On February 17, 2017, I noted down one of Donald Trump’s Twitter messages. This is not something I usually do. The words that come from this president don’t tend to be informative. Not for nothing do “ignorant” and “ignore” have the same Latin root. And the meaning of the phrase in Psalm 8 “Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings” is not that the infantile have anything substantive to say. The meaning is that even squalling brats can recognize what’s clearly evident. In the case of Psalm 8 this is the glory of God. In the case of our squalling brat president evidence doesn’t exist. It’s fake news. Or, as Trump would put it, “FAKE NEWS.”

  So, as I was saying, I copied this particular tweet into my “Trump Miscellany” notebook:

  “The FAKE NEWS media (failing nytimes, NBCNews, CBS, CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!”

  This was nothing Trump hadn’t said before while he was campaigning. And it wasn’t anything he wouldn’t say again—and again—during his presidency. But that particular tweet, just a month after he was inaugurated, seemed gnomic, apothegmatic, and—not to tease the man for his near illiteracy—pithy.

  What was also interesting was that Trump might have gotten it right about the oppositional relationship between the news and the citizenry.

  One of the great newsmen of all time, H. L. Mencken, agreed. In Heathen Days, the third volume of his auto­biography, published in 1943, Mencken says, “The plain people . . . are always, in fact, against newspapers.” And to make a further, prescient case for the yet unborn Trump, Mencken went on to say, “and they are always in favor of what reformers call political corruption. They believe that it keeps money in circulation, and makes for a spacious and stimulating communal life.”

  Certainly the past four years have been stimulating, and news coverage of Trump and his administration has been spacious, to say the least, and plenty of money has been kept in circulation.

  As for “FAKE NEWS,” it has been with us for quite a while. Mencken has a gleeful passage in his autobiography’s second volume, Newspaper Days, published in 1941, about reporting for the Baltimore Herald during a slow news week in 1903:

  A wild man was reported loose in the woods over Baltimore’s northern city line, with every dog barking for miles around, and all women and children locked up. I got special delight out of the wild man, for I had invented him myself.

  Another lesson from Mencken is that we should be wary about “feuds” between politicians and the media. In Heathen Days Mencken recounts how, during the 1910s, the newspaper where he was a reporter and where he would remain for the rest of his working reporter days, the Baltimore Sun, was engaged in a huge political quarrel with Baltimore’s mayor J. Harry Preston. Never mind that both Preston and the Sun’s editor were die-hard Democrats.

  According to Mencken, if Preston “proposed to enlarge the town dog-pound” the Sun would denounce it “as an assault upon the solvency of Baltimore, the comity of nations, and the Ten Commandments.” And if the Sun editorialized in favor of clean alleys “Preston went about the ward clubs warning his heelers that the proposal was only the opening wedge for anarchy, atheism, and cannibalism.”

  Mencken confesses, “My own share in this campaign of defamation was large and assiduous.” And then he says, “I was fond of [Preston], thought he was doing well as mayor, and often met him amicably at beer-parties.”

  Mark Twain was also an old newsman. He instructs us to be equally wary of feuds between media outlets themselves. In an 1869 piece for the Buffalo Express, “Journalism in Tennessee,” Twain wrote, with perhaps slight exaggeration, about witnessing a confrontation between the editor in chief of the Morning Glory and Johnson County War-Whoop and a Colonel Bascom, proprietor of a rival paper, the Thunderbolt and Battle-Cry of Freedom.

  “Both pistols rang out their fierce clamor at the same instant. The chief lost a lock of hair, and the Colonel’s bullet ended its career in the fleshy part of my thigh. The Colonel’s left shoulder was clipped a little. They fired again. Both missed their men this time, but I got my share, a shot in the arm. At the third fire both gentlemen were wounded slightly, and I had a knuckle chipped . . . They then talked about the elections and the crops a while, and I fell to tying up my wounds.

  Maybe we should go ask Tucker Carlson and Lawrence O’Donnell how the crops—and the elections—are doing. You first.

  Woke to the Sound of Laughter

  Puritanism is back—and you’re welcome to it. I applaud the New Piety and want to tell twenty-first-century thought leaders that your current fashion for sanctimoniousness, earnest solemnity, and taking everything very seriously indeed is just what’s needed.

  Humor depends upon irking the dour, the censorious, and the po-faced. Now there’s a fresh abundance of calamity howlers, bluenoses, and vinegar pusses to provoke.

  This is a great relief. For most of the previous century lemon-sucking prudes were scarce and sadly out of style. Life was mirth-deprived.

  World War I was followed by a licentious riot of amoral libertinism with the collapse of ethical norms, societal conventions, plain good manners, and religious convictions.

  Nothing was sacrosanct. This turned laughter into hard work, like going to see Waiting for Godot and waiting for the punch lines. Or skating over the thin ice on a river of despair in the novels of Evelyn Waugh. Or fearfully suspecting, with Dr. Strangelove, Catch-22, and Slaughterhouse-Five, that levity might be a symptom of mental illness.

  Lacking icons, the iconoclastic joker is just a crazed person trying to break things in a safe space—his padded cell. Without taboos Tabu is a perfume, available in better stores since 1932. Shortly after Tabu was introduced Cole Porter sang

  In olden days, a glimpse of stocking

  Was looked on as something shocking.

  But now, God knows,

  Anything goes.

  And everything went. The years from 1918 to 2016 weren’t funny. First came manic-depressive economies, then the rise of totalitarian ideologies, another world war, Mutually Assured Destruction, the antinomian violence of the 1960s, dissolution of the nuclear family, evisceration of the middle class, and people over forty wearing bicycle shorts.

  Goodbye to all that (except, alas, the bicycle shorts). You stiff-necked pettifoggers have reemerged from the loosey-goosey fog bank of pre-postmodernism. Thank you. The long drought in prudery is over. Japes at Tartuffian cant can begin anew.

  Jesters witnessed, with happy surprise, the rebirth of priggish shock and prissy moral indignation when a licentious riot of amoral libertinism was elected president of the United States in 2016.

  (Actually, Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992. But the New Piety had yet to be proclaimed. Imagine how much more fun the Monica Lewinsky imbroglio would have been with #MeToo. Unfortunately for the sanctimoniously pious and earnestly solemn, the Clintons arrived too soon—Gadarene swine with nobody to chase them into the sea.)

  But nowadays you, the woke, have perfected your pietism. You
know just which conscious thoughts to decry and just what unconscious thoughts to condemn, and you even know the precise words that mustn’t be used to describe any of those thoughts. For example, you disapprove of the noun “mankind.” You grapple with English as if the language were a professional wrestling villain attempting to pin “womynkind” to the mat.

  (Rematch to be announced. “Womyn” is considered transexclusionary by gender activists.)

  To be woke is to maintain a state of mind where you are constantly and acutely alert to social injustice and permanently on the lookout for more social injustice to be alert to. Or what I would call a good reason to take a nap.

  Which one would think would be perfectly acceptable since being woke doesn’t seem to entail actually doing anything. But thankfully for the merry-andrew, if you’re woke you must stay “conscious” in order to continually “communicate” how “vigilant” you are about “toxic masculinity,” how “mindful” you’re becoming about “cultural appropriation,” and how “committed” you are to “no platform” people who disagree with you by, for instance, putting your vocabulary in quotation marks.

  Thus each of you becomes a “social justice warrior” armed, like Samson, with the jaw of an ass.

  Being woke is a parody of being born again—­instead of you accepting Jesus, people like Jesus (Cisgender normative, famously well-connected father) have to accept you.

  And, as to religion, it’s about time we had a new one. Religion has been the mainstay of lampoon at least since Voltaire. But the old established creeds are no fit targets for jocularity—doddering congregations, frayed theologies, and sorry impoverishment from being sued for less than comical behavior. A fresh theology to poke fun at is required.

  I don’t understand your creed, but I enjoy it. Diver­sity is a wonderful new shibboleth—you must both pronounce it correctly and not pronounce it at all. Differences between religions, races, ethnicities, cultures, and various genders (after a million years with just two, dozens more have been discovered) can never be ­acknowledged. Then they must be celebrated.

  And tolerance is a wonderful new sin. It’s a modern moral lapse to practice toleration when glorification is what contemporary mores demand. Witness the shamed Colorado confectioner who, on the occasion of a gay wedding, failed the “If I knew you were coming I would have baked a cake” test.

  Of course the New Piety requires up-to-date saints. Gladly there’s no shortage. Martyrdom has become inclusive. Hurt feelings count. So does Joe Biden smelling your hair. Saintly relics are close at hand. You have a mental reliquary filled with splinters from the true cross of your personal victimhood.

  And worship has never been easier. All you have to do by way of praise and adoration is think well of yourself. It’s another new sin not to. Self-esteem is a human right. You are a good person. You are an excellent person. Look at your tattoos—you’re a signed masterpiece.

  But what happens if one of you wants to be more than merely holier-than-thou? All they has to do—using the plural pronoun as singular to show how grammar needs a theological correction—is recycle something. Preferably something indicating “awareness” and “engagement” such as an empty container of organic, gluten-­free, non-GMO, locally sourced, fair-traded drain cleaner. Being holier-than-globally-everybody is a sustainable alternative for the progressively minded faithful.

  And Charles Dudley Warner’s quip “Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it”? That is so early-Trump-campaign. Everybody you know is devoutly stopping climate change. The way you did when you made obeisance over the bins marked “glass,” “paper,” “polypropylene plastic,” “polystyrene plastic,” and “biodegradables”—worshiping the garbage can.

  Meanwhile everybody I know is having a much more amusing life.

  Why Kids R Commies

  And Never Mind How the Free Market Bankrupted that Backwards R Big Box Store that Once Held a Greedy Monopoly on Selling Toys

  America’s young people have veered to the left. Opinion pollsters tell us so. According to a November 2019 Gallup Poll, “Since 2010 young adults’ positive ratings of socialism have hovered near 50%.” A March 2019 Axios poll concurs, saying that 49 percent of millennials would “Prefer living in a socialist country.” And The Hill puts it more strongly, citing an October 2019 YouGov Internet survey in a story headed, “7 in 10 Millennials Say They’d Vote for a Socialist.”

  Traditional liberalism still exists. In a March 2018 Pew Research Center study of Americans age 22–37, 57 percent called themselves “mostly” or “consistently” liberal.

  But “mostly” or “consistently” liberal may not be enough for young voters. This was evident in the 2018 congressional elections. Ten-term incumbent congressmen Michael Capuano (D. Mass.) and Joe Crowley (D. NY) were as mostly consistently liberal as they come. And they were kicked to the curb in Democratic primaries by leftists Ayanna Pressley and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

  What’s the matter with kids today? Nothing new. A large portion of the brats, the squirts, the fuzz-faced, the moon claves, the sap-green, and the wet behind the ears have always been “Punks for Progressives.”

  As soon as children discover that the world isn’t nice, they want to make it nicer. And wouldn’t a world where everybody shares everything be nice? Aw . . . Kids are so tender-hearted.

  But kids are broke—so they want to make the world nicer with your money. And kids don’t have much control over things—so they want to make the world nicer through your effort. And kids are very busy being young—so it’s your time that has to be spent making the world nicer.

  For them. The greedy little bastards. Kids were thinking these exact same sweet-young-thing thoughts back in the 1960s, during my salad days (tossed green sensimilla buds). Young people probably have been thinking these same thoughts since the concept of being a “young person” was invented.

  That would have been in the nineteenth century—during America’s first “Progressive Era”—when mechanization liberated kids from onerous farm chores and child labor laws let them escape from child labor.

  This gave young people the leisure to sit around noticing that the world isn’t nice and daydreaming about how it could be made nicer with the time, effort, and money of grow-ups.

  I’m all for sending them back to the factories or, at least, the barn. If I hear any socialist noise from my kids I’m going to make them get up at 4 a.m. to milk the cows. And this will be an extra-onerous farm chore because we don’t have any cows, and they’ll have to search for miles all over the countryside to find some.

  They’ve got it coming. Young people are not only penniless and powerless, they’re also ignorant as hell. They think of wealth as something that’s limited, like the number of Hostess Ding Dongs on the 7-Eleven shelf. They think rich people got to the 7-Eleven first and gobbled all the Ding Dongs, leaving poor people to lick the plastic wrappers.

  Young people don’t know that more Ding Dongs can be produced. They don’t know how or why more Ding Dong production is possible. And they certainly don’t know how to get the cream filling inside.

  (Leaving aside the wild indignation of young people about the very existence of synthetic industrial and undoubtedly poisonous food such as Ding Dongs. They eat them anyway. Watch them shop at the 7-Eleven when they think nobody’s looking. But I digress.)

  Young people believe that the way to obtain more wealth is to take it away from rich people. You can’t do it. Well, you can do it. But you can only do it once.

  You can take the Ding Dongs from the Hostess factory for free, but once you’ve eaten them you can’t go back to the Hostess factory and take more Ding Dongs for free. The Hostess factory is out of business. (Which may protect our health, reduce environmental pollution, and preserve various species of animals such as the high fructose corn weevil, which, for all I know, is endangered. Although, considering that Pew
Research claims even more millennials [69 percent] favor cannabis legalization than favor socialism, somebody’s going to be sorry when they get the munchies. But I digress again.)

  Young people are so ignorant about wealth that they think wealth is limited to what arrives at the 7-Eleven with the Hostess deliveryman. The reason they think this is because young people are still in school or have been recently.

  School, while not without its benefits, carries the risk of over-exposure to intellectuals. And intellectuals, when it comes to understanding economic realities, are Ding Dongs.

  The nineteenth century spawning of idle, dreamy, feckless young people arrived just in time for the Marxist intellectual fad. And Marxist thinking among intellectuals is a fashion trend that has never gone away.

  Intellectuals like Marxism because Marx makes economics simple—the rich get their money from the poor. (How the rich manage this, since the poor by definition don’t have any money, is beyond me. But never mind.)

  Real economics are more complicated than anything that intellectuals can make sense of.* Also, living in an ivory tower teaches few economic lessons—even fewer now that intellectuals have banned the ivory trade.

  Marxism puts inarticulate notions of a sharing-caring nicer world into vivid propaganda slogans. Slogans such as: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”** Which may be the most ridiculous political-economic idea that anybody has ever had.

  My need is for Beluga caviar, a case of Chateau Haut-Brion 1961, a duplex on 5th Avenue overlooking Central Park, a bespoke suit from Gieves & Hawkes in Savile Row, a matched pair of Purdey 12-bore sidelock shotguns, and a 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO that recently sold at Sotheby’s Monterey auction for $48.4 million.