Back in the day, like the Eighties day, and even later, I used to check out the National Review, either at the newsstand or the library, because I don’t remember ever being dedicated enough to buy a copy, just to keep up with what the enemy was thinking. There were a few writers whom I learned to skip, beginning with Russell “Snooze Man” Kirk” (I learned that way back in the Sixties!) and most emphatically including Jay “Cheap Shot” Nordlinger, who seemed to come more or less out of nowhere (I was too impatient with his shit to read enough to learn anything substantial about him), and who, whenever I looked past his byline, never failed to come up with a cheap shot or glib banality.
Well, I don’t know how old Jay is (I sort of got the impression that he was a young smart-ass), but these days he clearly seems to feel that he’s lived too long, a feeling that, if I were not such a goldurned optimist, I would be sharing. Like me, Jay feels that the election of Donald Trump is the worst thing that’s happened in his lifetime, but the difference is, Jay has to recognize Trump as his monster.1
In this long post, “The Right: United by Hate, Love, or Nothing?”, Jay struggles to understand how a political movement that he once believed to be founded on the rock of truth now seems to be so much quicksand, and quicksand sans bottom. In particular, Jay says that his friends, to the extent that he still has them, keep asking him why he doesn’t make fun of the bad guys the way he used to do in the good old days. You were so much fun, Jay! Such a terror! You showed them no mercy! And Jay says, I am still making fun of the bad guys! The trouble is, you’re the bad guys!
Afterwords
As World War II was pushing towards its climax, but before the use of the atomic bomb, a mortally ill H. G. Wells wrote a helpless “book”—really a pamphlet—Mind at the End of its Tether. Almost all his life, Wells had been the great prophet of the wonders, and terrors, of science. The combination of a second world war, even more terrible than the first, combined with the his own clearly approaching death, convinced Wells that humankind was a ghastly, if trivial, mistake that would soon erase itself from existence. So far, Trump seems to be less of a menace than either world war, though I guess that depends on whether he nukes North Korea or Mitch McConnell.2
- I don’t, but if there can be right-wing Trump, there can be a left-wing Trump as well. I didn’t learn much Latin in high school, but I did learn about “Marius and Sulla”, the plebian and patrician, respectively, generals who took turns conquering Rome rather than barbarians, and whose general contempt for “rules” set the stage for the ultimate collapse of the Roman Republic at the hands of Julius Caesar. ↩︎
- Blowing stuff up gave Trump *his best press evah!, so it isn’t surprising that he wants to do it again. ↩︎
