From “Somehow, Trump Is a Tough Act to Follow,” a Gail Colins-Bret Stephens chat (2.21.22) (“The Conversation”):

Gail Collins: “On the domestic front, for all my paranoia about Covid, I’ve been remembering when I was a kid and everybody was terrified of polio. First-graders hearing stories from their parents about all the children who died or were disabled for life. Then the terrible, terrible time when AIDS seemed to be a potential death sentence for so many in the gay community. And when it comes to many less dire illnesses, science also found new cures, or at least effective ways to control them.”

Bret Stephens: “Very true. But here’s what’s depressing: When the Salk vaccine came out, nearly everyone celebrated and got vaccinated, and polio all but disappeared from the developed world. When scientists developed antiretrovirals to manage H.I.V., people living with the virus embraced the new medication as the lifesaver it is. Yet here we are with a vaccine that can save you from dying or going to the hospital with Covid, and tens of millions of people refuse to help themselves by taking it. Which goes to prove that no pandemic is deadlier than stupidity.”

Here’s a portion of a hand-written “aerogramme” that I wrote to my parents on 5.3.76. I was living with girlfriend Sophie Black (now a renowned poet and Columbia University prof) in a small studio at 9 rue Gregoire du Tours. I was only three and a half years old at the time.

…if a semblance of All In The Family could return as a present-tense social-issues Hulu series, except Archie could be…well, a bit like myself…sensible liberal older guy, perhaps an editor & founder of an online publication or web business of some kind, grappling with the pressures of HR woke terror in the workplace, clashing with Millennial or Zoomer daughter and BIPOC son-in-law who are living with him while they save for a house…basically Hollywood Elsewhere meets Norman Lear…except Archie Wells wouldn’t be as smug or under-educated as Carroll O’Connor was…it could write itself.

While living in the bucolic bedroom community of Westfield, New Jersey, my father led a “Citizens for Kennedy” campaign — basically an appeal to independents and Republicans who had doubts about Richard Milhous Nixon‘s sweaty upper lip.

As it turned out Nixon won Union County (to which Westfield belonged) but JFK won New Jersey, albeit by a nosehair — 49.96% (1,385,415 votes) vs. 49.16% (1,363,324).

I kept the original bumper sticker and eventually duplicated it (peel-off sticker surface and all) at Kinko’s on Westwood Blvd. It was on the rear bumper of my black Nissan 240SX (which I bought in ’93) for many years, and it’s now pasted on the left side of the rumblehog.

I’ve said time and again that my current mode of liberalism is JFK-styled — i.e., sensible left moderate. If the former Massachusetts senator had the heaven-bequeathed ability to survey the cultural-political state of the USA in 2022, he’d be fuming over what the wokesters have done to the Democratic party brand.

The general image quality is obviously far superior in the 1.75:1 Criterion Bluray image, but consider the additional amount of shiny floor, not to mention the reflections within same, at the bottom of the 1.37:1 MPI Home Video image. I own Criterion’s A Hard Day’s Night Bluray, but chopping off the tops and bottoms of perfectly good visual content (otherwise known as “cleavering”) is a terrible practice among home-video distributors.

Who would dispute that boomers have been the worst generation ever? The greediest, most wasteful, most indulged, most sociopathic. They’ve made life economically arduous for Millennials, and almost futile if you look at things from an environmental perspective.

Eight years ago I read P.J. O’Rourke‘s “The Baby Boom: How it Got That Way and It Wasn’t My Fault and I’ll Never Do it Again.” That same year Reason‘s Nick Gillespie did a video interview with the libertarian O’Rourke during Freedom Fest 2014, and one of O’Rourke’s topics was about how today’s culture is much gentler for kids, or certainly less rough-and-tumble.

“Just this whole process of going through the baby boom’s history, I began to realize what a nicer society — kinder, more decent society — that we live in today than the society when I was a kid. I don’t think my ten-year-old boy has ever been in a fist fight. I mean there might be a little scuffling but I don’t think he’s has ever had that kind of violent confrontation that was simply part of the package when I was a kid.”

In my twelve years of primary education I got into one (1) schoolyard fist fight. It happened in seventh grade on a sunny spring day (or was it early fall?), on the edge of a baseball diamond. The other kid started it, but I fucking finished it.

It was over in less than a minute. Okay, 90 seconds. I took a few blows, but I kept punching and punching and actually knocked the guy down. The downside is that my hands were pretty swollen from all the hitting, and I think I may have gone to the family doctor to get my hands or wrists taped up.

I once came upon a pair of eight- or nine-year-olds beating up Jett. It was near the end of a school day, during some kind of outdoor recess. He was crying and crouching against a concrete wall, and his two attackers were standing over him. I stopped it, of course, and went over to the teachers who were presiding and explained what had happened. They in turn told the mothers of the two attackers, and subsequently those mothers really read the riot act to their boys.

HE to God #1: “Cosmic design, unity and connectivity are obvious to anyone with half a brain, but as a beyond-intelligent entity do you and your only begotten son feel just a teeny bit responsible for the massive amounts of stupidity, ignorance and arrogance that are directly attributable to religious devotion? Which is partly responsible for destroying the earth as we speak? Are you good with all that?”

Roughly 25 years ago I was hosting a Woodland Hills screening series called Hot Shot Movies, and one of the films I booked for the fall of ’97 was Taylor Hackford‘s The Devil’s Advocate. It’s no one’s idea of a great film. It has, however, a great Al Pacino speech at the very end — the Devil himself (i.e., “John Milton”) explaining what a pious asshole and sadistic mind-fucker God the Father is.

I don’t know who wrote Pacino’s rant, but the film is based on Andrew Neiderman‘s same-titled 1990 novel; the screenplay was co-authored by Jonathan Lemkin and Tony Gilroy.

Milton: “Let me give you a little inside information about God. God likes to watch. He’s a prankster. Think about it. He gives man instincts. He gives you this extraordinary gift, and then what does he do? I swear…for his own amusement…his own private cosmic gag reel, he sets the rules in opposition. It’s the goof of all time, [and] he’s laughin’ his sick fuckin’ ass off! He’s a tight-ass, he’s a sadist, he’s an absentee landlord.”

HE to God #2: “Do you agree or disagree with Gilroy‘s assertion that you’re an absentee landlord? When I was a kid I thought you were that deep, slowed-down voice in Cecil B. Demille‘s The Ten Commandments; now you’re nothing more than a component in one of the ugliest political-religious movements in U.S. history.”