There is an old saying in journalism: “Always write the same piece three times.” George F. Will has modified that bit to read “Write the same piece on the Moynihan Report seventy-three times.”
George’s latest reiteration of Daniel Patrick’s timeless wisdom on prosperity and family structure (which does hold up pretty well) can be found here, but I’m not going to let George’s latest rewrite go by without indulging myself in a sneer or two. If you had driven by a certain house on a certain day in the late eighties in Washington, DC, you might have observed a heap of men’s clothing lying on the front yard. If you had been so rude as to walk into that yard and examine that pile, you might have found a note attached to it, a note reading “Dear George, Since you don’t sleep here any more you shouldn’t keep your clothes here either.”
Yeah, it seems that our George, like so many successful men, had discovered that the perquisites of power include attractive young women who really, really want to get to know you better. In 1989, George divorced his wife of 22 years, who does seem to have been a bit of a drama queen, before retying the knot in 1993. Prior to 1989, Will’s columns often included references to “the little Willses,” his three sons by first wife Madeleine, but afterwards the boys slipped silently into the Memory Hole, rather like Madeleine herself. So the next time you read a column by George on the tangled pathology of absent fathers (and you will, soon), just remember that that only applies to poor black guys. For rich white guys, the rules are far, far different.
