Idaho’s state legislature wants to ask SCOTUS to overturn Obergefell, i.e. the same-sex marriage decision. They’re doing this in the form of a petition, which is unusual and unlikely to succeed, but I’m thinking this is the velociraptors testing the electric fence. They’ll be brushed back, and then try again. Or another state will get the idea. And I expect we’ll see the corrupt SCOTUS roll back this protection. Places like Michigan, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York will retain the right, but red-state shitholes like Alabama, Louisiana, even Indiana? I doubt it. And so a lesbian couple that travels from their home in Grand Rapids to, say, the bluegrass festival in Brown County, Indiana should take care not to get into a traffic accident, because they wouldn’t be each other’s next of kin if something bad happened.

This situation is why we have federalism, of course. It’s preposterous to think you can be married in one state and single in another, but that’s the way MAGAts want it, and I guess that’s how they’ll get it.

Also, the president casually suggested ethnically cleansing Gaza over the weekend. I hope the Arab Americans in Dearborn and Hamtramck who simply couldn’t vote for the party of Genocide Joe will enjoy this outcome. We’re also tariff-beefing with…checks notes…Colombia?

In other news at this hour, all the Great Lakes freighters are heading to their winter layup ports, about a week late. One had to be broken out of the ice in Lake Erie near Buffalo. It’s not exactly Shackleton’s Endurance, but good lord, we knew this weather was coming at least a week ahead of its arrival.

And that’s all I have energy for today.

There are two Catholic high schools in Fort Wayne. Bishop Dwenger, in the north end of town, is considered the academic powerhouse of the pair. Bishop Luers, on the south end? A football academy. In my time as a Hoosier, I remember the football academy being in the news when it was discovered that some of the players had something they called “The GTA Club,” with GTA standing for “grab that ass,” and we’re not talking about on the football field. In that more innocent time — it was before the Boston priest scandal — it was seen as a one-off, problematic but boys will be boys, etc.

My friend Nathan reports in an extended Xitter post that this is, it would seem, part of a pattern. In 2012, the athletic director was dismissed after he was found to be surreptitiously taking “inappropriate” photos and videos of students. In 2023, a teacher was arrested for having sex with students, and when it turned out he was having a competition with another teacher to see who could bang the most students, that guy was arrested, too. (One is in prison, the other is not.)

But it gets worse.

This week, a lawsuit was filed over, again, a scandal with sexual overtones. Overtones — what am I saying? It’s a sex scandal, but a particularly cruel one. The ledes of both stories don’t really explain fully what happened, so I’ll try:

Male students would go to porn sites and find clips where the female performer had similar hair, skin tone and body type as one of their classmates, then add her name to the clip and trade with or sell it to their friends and others, advertising it as being that student. This constitutes child pornography under state law.

The suit claims the school knew and — stop me if you’ve heard this one before — did nothing. The diocese did nothing. The principal, and dean of students/athletic director not only did nothing, they stonewalled the parents of the girls. Relevant quote:

According to the lawsuit, (the dean of students/AD) admitted to the parents that the school had been “dealing with” the pornographic videos for “some time.” He also admitted the videos had not been reported to the authorities, the suit said.

“During this confrontation at the school on September 25, (the principal) repeatedly proclaimed: ‘We don’t want to falsely accuse the boys!’” the lawsuit reads.

When I first read the story, I assumed the clips were so-called deepfakes, where AI is used to actually put a person’s face on another’s body. They don’t appear to be, but I’m sure that’s next, and I’m sure the next principal will stonewall those young women, too.

My trainer coaches at a local public high school, and says the parents of students at the Catholic football academy in these parts are fond of screaming obscenities at the officials.

I smell bullshit in this story, too:

The Trump administration has instructed federal health agencies to pause all external communications, such as health advisories, weekly scientific reports, updates to websites and social media posts, according to nearly a dozen current and former officials and other people familiar with the matter.

The instructions were delivered Tuesday to staff at agencies inside the Department of Health and Human Services, including the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health, one day after the new administration took office, according to the people with knowledge, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. Some of them acknowledged that they expected some review during a presidential transition but said they were confused by the pause’s scope and indeterminate length.

…Two others suggested the move is aimed at helping the newly installed Trump health officials understand the vast flow of information coming out of the agencies. The pause, according to one official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal agency conversations, “seemed more about letting them catch their breath and know what is going on with regard to” communications.

Catch their breath, my ass. The MMWR — Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, to you civilians, and one of the “paused” communications — is how doctors and researchers keep up with what’s killing and sickening Americans. Journalists rely on it, too. But I’m sure this is OK; it’s not like bird flu is going around or anything.

This, along with the deep freeze we’ve been stuck in all week, is not elevating my mood. At least Kate’s house hunt is a diversion. She got her pre-approval, and starts going through houses on Friday. So it begins.

Well, I kept some of my vow. I didn’t watch any of the inauguration ceremonies, but some of it got in around the edges. Melania’s hat. Ivanka’s hat. Both of their chins, Ivanka’s unquestionably new. The next Mrs. Bezos-elect’s neckline. Saved by God, golden age, Elon’s Nazi salute, blah blah blah. All those executive orders. I guess this is how we govern now? Send a bunch of idiot clowns to Congress, then get shit done via EO. The wingnuts will holler OBAMA DID THIS while ignoring that the reason Obama did so much via EO was because Mitch McConnell, et al, vowed to do absolutely nothing to work with him, i.e. their jobs, and were as good as their word. Now there’s a whole generation of young people who think this is governing. It is not. It’s stupid king-signaling, but this is the country we are now. Regrettably.

Vivek Ramaswamy is out at the new commission which is basically just an office and has no power other than to prompt more EOs. The human mosquito now intends to run for governor of my native state. I haven’t kept up on how the Democrats are doing in Ohio, but I have no doubt that Buckeyes will buy what he’s selling, whatever that is. I wonder if he sends his kids to the excellent public schools in the suburb where he lives now, the same one I grew up in. My guess is…no. But they’re still very young, so we’ll see.

A headline along the way spoke of Trump’s “showmanship.” I guess that’s what you’d call it, but I prefer to think of it as the greasiest pro-wrestling promoter baying to a crowd of toothless morons, desecrating the traditions and buildings of our allegedly cherished republic. In other words, I’m even less inclined to be nice to Trump voters, if I ever was.

Yes, I am glum today. How about you?

We went to Costco on Saturday, a very bad idea, although Costco was handling the crowd pretty well — all checkout lanes open, and as always, the ruckus was in the fresh-foods section, where people were lined up for Lunch at Costco, i.e. all the samples they were giving out.

To be sure, one of those people was me, although only in the less-busy stations. I ate a bite of plant-based pasta, some sort of savory pastry, chicken Alfredo and cherry cheesecake. Mea culpa.

That said, it was kinda festive, because everyone, and I mean everyone except the Derringers, was outfitted in festive Detroit Lions merch, and spirits were high. Go Lions! We’re Super Bowl-bound!

Alas, that didn’t work out. This is why I, generally speaking, don’t follow sports. Isn’t life full of enough disappointment? Isn’t the idea of facing the next four years misery enough? Do we have to layer our crushing moods like a party dip? I say leave that to others. In return, I promise I won’t bandwagon when your team is having a great year.

This was the Costco in Macomb County, i.e. Trump country, so it’s possible all the smiles and go-teams were also about Monday’s events, and I’m not talking about the King holiday. Perhaps it just wore Lions merch instead of MAGA hats. Entirely possible, but at this point I don’t care. I put down the NYT in despair today, unable to read anything more troubling than a short piece on Jamie Leigh Curtis. But it won’t last. I’m only practicing self-care, and only for a while.

This very interesting data tool shows that I’m among friends in my precinct — Harris by 28 — and the metro area in general is still blue enough for comfort. For now. Anyway, I ain’t giving up.

That said, if you’re feeling fragile at the moment, you probably don’t want to read this, but here’s a taste. It’s about Trump’s phone call with the Danish prime minister last week:

In private discussions, the adjective that was most frequently used to describe the Trump phone call was rough. The verb most frequently used was threaten. The reaction most frequently expressed was confusion. Trump made it clear to Frederiksen that he is serious about Greenland: He sees it, apparently, as a real-estate deal. But Greenland is not a beachfront property. The world’s largest island is an autonomous territory of Denmark, inhabited by people who are Danish citizens, vote in Danish elections, and have representatives in the Danish Parliament. Denmark also has politics, and a Danish prime minister cannot sell Greenland any more than an American president can sell Florida.

At the same time, Denmark is also a country whose global companies—among them Lego, the shipping giant Maersk, and Novo Nordisk, the maker of Ozempic—do billions of dollars worth of trade with the United States, and have major American investments too. They thought these were positive aspects of the Danish-American relationship. Denmark and the United States are also founding members of NATO, and Danish leaders would be forgiven for believing that this matters in Washington too. Instead, these links turn out to be a vulnerability. On Thursday afternoon Frederiksen emerged and, flanked by her foreign minister and her defense minister, made a statement. “It has been suggested from the American side,” she said, “that unfortunately a situation may arise where we work less together than we do today in the economic area.”

If you voted for this, then, well, you voted for this.

I will be practicing self-care all day Monday, i.e. not watching the new administration goose-stepping into the White House. If anything happens, I’ll hear about it later and there will be multiple camera angles. My house needs cleaning. That’s what I’ll be doing. How about you?

I’m leaving Twitter on Monday. Monday, the day all of Elon Musk’s evil plans click fully into place at noon? That seems to be a good idea. I’ve already deleted it from all my mobile devices. I can still access it through a web browser, but there’ll be another level of inconvenience that will discourage me from doing so (as though the content, which is truly like a sewer nowadays, doesn’t already).

But the other day I stumbled upon a tweet by a Detroit media personality who is currently grubbing the bottom of the barrel of his career, trying to rebrand as a conservative. And this individual made a point of excoriating our newbie senator, Elissa Slotkin, for her questioning of Pete Hegseth this week, on the subject of whether, as Secretary of Defense, he’d obey an order from Donald Trump to send in federal troops to quell domestic unrest, or anything else he feels like tamping down with jackboots.

She’s so dumb she doesn’t even know about 1967!, etc. Hard to imagine that a military veteran and CIA analyst, as Slotkin was in an earlier chapter in her life, wouldn’t know that indeed, the 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions, about 5,000 troops, were sent into Detroit during the civil unrest. I mean, I know that, and I’m not even a native.

But he leaves out the most important detail: That federal troops came to Detroit at the explicit and official request of the mayor and governor, after local police and National Guard troops were unable to quell the violence after (I believe) three nights of it. I talked to a friend who knows more about this than just about anyone, and he said it was quite a dramatic moment; President Johnson requested network television airtime at midnight to announce the action. Flanked by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and Attorney General Ramsey Clark, LBJ laid out the request and his decision to grant it. It’s on YouTube, and you can watch it. Said the president:

I am sure that the American people will realize that I take this action with the greatest regret and only because of the clear, the unmistakable, and the undisputed evidence that Governor Romney of Michigan and the local officials in Detroit have been unable to bring the situation under control. Law enforcement is a local matter. It is the responsibility of local officials and the governors of the respective states. The federal government should not intervene except in the most extraordinary circumstances.

Only someone trying to mislead you would ignore that Trump has said he wants to send troops into American cities on his own whim, not at the request of local officials. He has spoken of “the enemy within.” From the AP last fall:

As Trump’s campaign heads into its final stretch against Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris, he is promising forceful action against immigrants who do not have permanent legal status. Speaking in Colorado on Friday, the Republican described the city of Aurora as a “war zone” controlled by Venezuelan gangs, even though authorities say that was a single block of the Denver suburb, and the area is safe again.

“I will rescue Aurora and every town that has been invaded and conquered,” Trump said at the rally. “We will put these vicious and bloodthirsty criminals in jail or kick them out of our country.”

This is, of course, what Slotkin was trying to get Hegseth to talk about. What will he, and Trump, do when Fox News gins up another “crisis?” My friend said he thinks we’ll find out sooner rather than later. I’m afraid I agree. And he won’t do it with the greatest regret, as LBJ did. Get ready, Springfield.

Meanwhile, every MAGA idiot is rolling at the incoming president’s feet like puppies. This is in Indiana:

One of Indiana’s most influential elected officials wants to take the practice of trying to lure residents from neighboring states a step further by annexing entire counties.

Republican House Speaker Todd Huston’s bill to create an Indiana-Illinois Boundary Adjustment Commission to “embrace neighboring counties that want to join low-tax, low-cost Indiana” is one of the supermajority’s priority bills for the legislative session, meaning it has a good chance of passing.

“Annexing.” Such a benign word. You want to live in “low-tax, low-cost” Indiana? Fine. It’s still a free country. MOVE THERE. Of course, if you lose a hand in an industrial accident, you’ll collect about $4.17, because the insurance industry owns the legislature. If you need help in an emergency, make your way down to your township trustee’s office, get on your knees and beg. Chances are you’ll be sent away with a lecture about self-reliance. Maybe you’ll get a little cash, but prepare to come back in another month and do it again. That’s how Hoosiers do.

OK, then. The end of the week is coming into view, and mine’s been not-great. Let’s hope for a good weekend.

Before Jimmy Carter’s grave grows too much grass, I want to talk about his funeral a little more. It was, of course, interesting to see the seating of the first few rows, where the former presidents and other dignitaries were placed. There was a certain chatter, especially on the right-wing socials, about a shot of Obama smiling as Trump talked to him, which, depending on your degree of insanity, either means UNIPARTY or SEE THEY GET ALONG, SO PUT US BACK ON YOUR CHRISTMAS-CARD LIST. To me, it looked like polite cordiality, but that might be my own prejudice.

Melania looked utterly miserable. Karen Pence stared straight ahead and refused to look at Trump. Michelle Obama was said to have “a scheduling conflict” that could mean anything, but I’m choosing to think it meant no, I will not sit next to that racist piece of shit and you can’t make me. And I was struck by this photo:

The Quayles, Dan and Marilyn, of course. Now, we just watched “The Substance” this weekend, and I will never shame a woman for not going all-in on the insanity of cosmetic surgery, or even procedures. Part of me is glad she doesn’t give a shit about being anything other than properly presentable; I mean, she’s 75 now, and that’s a good thing, as anyone who’s checked out party pix from Mar-a-lago can attest. No one looks their best at a funeral, and it would be gross if anyone put in too much effort. It’s not about you. My only note, as we say in Hollywood, is that it’s time to rethink the hairstyle you’ve had since…at least 1984:

I haven’t thought about this woman in nearly that long. She will forever be fixed in my mind with the late ’80s, in Indiana, when she smiled sometimes but often had that who-farted look on her face. When I’m feeling empathetic, I think it must be terrible to be a smart woman who sailed through law school, and had the sort of steel-trap mind that drove her to choose induced labor for her first child, so that she could take the bar exam on schedule. (She was said to have sat on an inflatable donut.) She always seemed to be about 30 IQ points smarter than her husband, but she was imprisoned by her own politics, which called for her to be happy as a mommy and not ask for anything more. When I’m not feeling empathetic, I recall she was always kind of a bitch; I remember reading that she was distressed to learn the expensive D.C. private school she was enrolling her kids in also had the children of journalists in the student body, like our kids were common white trash who should have been happy in public schools.

It sounds like I’m saying I wish she was softer, but I’m not. I give her credit for her comment, when someone tried to imply her husband had screwed some woman he met at a golf tournament, something like: “Anyone who knows Dan Quayle knows he’d rather play golf than have sex.”

The world needs bitches, too, and this was before the modern political era, when an army of stylists would have descended upon her, dressed her in different clothes, cut and styled her hair and done their best to Stepford-ize her into something she wasn’t. People project whatever they want on you, anyway. Melania is a bitch, too, but there are millions of MAGA chuds who think she’s warm and elegant. Bottom line, Washington is a hard place to be anyone’s spouse, particularly at this level.

So yeah, we saw “The Substance.” An interesting movie overall, but very gory and, as so often is the case these days, about 15 minutes too long. Recommended for an inexpensive rental, but I’ll never watch it again. Demi Moore is naked for much of it, and Margaret Qualley ditto. Although one plays the used-up Older Woman and the other the super-hot Younger Woman, both look pretty ghastly rolling around in a white-tiled bathroom, but that is the point, I think. We rented “Conclave” on Saturday night, and it was way better than I expected.

The week ahead! Let’s enjoy it! We finally have some snow on the ground, so yay.

Maybe it was checking in and out of Jimmy Carter’s funeral Thursday, all that talk about decency and putting aside differences for the good of the country, the stuff that makes us proud to be Americans (if any of us still are), all washing like a tide over the head of the incoming president, and knowing all he’s thinking about is who he might want to fuck or fuck over next, or how much money he can shake out of X or Y, or some other shall we say less noble topic.

But once again I found myself thinking I can’t believe we’re going to do this again. I mean: Can’t. Believe.

Here’s a story from the New York Post this week:

Former and future first lady Melania Trump has inked an eye-popping $40 million deal with Amazon to license a documentary on her life — with cameos from her husband, Donald, and son, Barron.

The documentary, directed by “Rush Hour” auteur Brett Ratner, is set to be released later this year — with one source close to the agreement suggesting it could spawn multiple projects.

The hefty price tag was first reported by Puck News and covers the rights to projects involving Mrs. Trump over the next four years.

Page Six has learned that Disney was also in the running and bid $14 million, only to be swamped by the internet giant.

Forty million dollars. For a documentary about a vacant plastic-surgery addict, with “cameos” from her weird son and felon president. I wonder if she has to kick upstairs to the boss.

The next-closest bid was $14 million. That tells you something right there.

I was discussing this in a group text the other day, and someone said, “Remember when you could get put away for abusing a franking privilege?” Yes, I do. I bet all those guys bounced from office, or cut from the field, or publicly disgraced for things like throwing your Christmas cards into the outgoing mail, or saying yee-haw with a little too much enthusiasm, or otherwise stepping off the straight and narrow? Those guys are cursing that they weren’t born into this era of naked greed not only being OK, but celebrated. Go Melania! Not bad for a retired sex worker!

Today the editorial-page editor of The Detroit News, a conservative but generally one with enough sense to be a never-Trumper in 2016 and a despairing left-behind Republican ever since, wrote a column with this lead:

Time to focus, Mr. President-elect.

The stream-of-consciousness flow of ideas and promises that marked Donald Trump’s presidential campaign must now give way to deliberate, well-thought-out policymaking.

But Trump’s press conference Tuesday, his second since the election, suggests he hasn’t made the pivot from candidate to chief executive.

To quote Miranda Priestly: Did you fall down and hit your little head? Have you been asleep for eight years? Did you miss Infrastructure Week? “Deliberate, well-thought-out policymaking?” Making “the pivot from candidate to chief executive?” Are you insane? There’ll be none of the former and the latter will never happen. We’ve all seen this movie before. And now we’re going to see it again.

2024 was the last good year. And this is the first bad year.

Even the way apparently sane people discuss this stuff is crazy, all this talk of “annexing” Canada as the 51st state. Annex? Are you insane? “Buying” Greenland? I feel like I’m living in some weird alternate reality.

And California continues to burn.

OK, let’s enjoy the weekend and prepare for the rest of the first bad year.

Kind of a mixed grill today. Life gets back to normal this week and I have a buncha things on my plate. So here goes:

** I have a few friends who tally their year’s reading — book reading, anyway. I’ve decided I should do the same, and made a note in the final page of my 2025 planner: #1: “Long Island Compromise.” It’s Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s new one, following “Fleishman is in Trouble” from a couple years back, and it’s…fantastic. It, too, will probably be turned into a prestige-streaming series down the road, and it richly deserves to be. It’s funny, tragic, empathetic, smart, “sharply observant” (as the critics say) of the wealthy people in its pages. I loved every one. (And OK, I started it in 2024, but I’m counting it as a ’25 book, because I finished it Sunday.)

I also read “James” over the holidays, Percival Everett’s reimagining of the life of Huck Finn’s enslaved companion, Jim. That, too, was great. It’ll win a bunch of prizes this year, but I liked “Long Island Compromise” better. But it’s like preferring one flavor of ice cream over another. They’re both delicious.

** Most of you will be reading this on Monday, i.e. January 6, a day that will truly live in infamy for those with brains, eyes and memories. Note: This does not include million of idiots:

What began as a strained attempt to absolve Mr. Trump of responsibility for Jan. 6 gradually took hold, as his allies in Congress and the media played down the attack and redirected blame to left-wing plants, Democrats and even the government. Violent rioters — prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned — somehow became patriotic martyrs.

This inverted interpretation defied what the country had watched unfold, but it neatly fit the persecution narrative that binds Mr. Trump to many of his faithful. Once he committed to running again for president, he doubled down on flipping the script about the riot and its blowback, including a congressional inquiry and two criminal indictments against him, as part of an orchestrated victimization.

** I’m writing this before the Lions play the Vikings here in Detroit, the winner of which will clinch the NFC North and move into the postseason, or at least that’s what I thought I read this morning. You know me, no sports fan here, but the Lions are reversing their years-long losing ways, and it’s got the whole region on fire. The team is making the charismatic head coach, Dan Campbell, available for profiles and so on, most of which are kinda boilerplate, but oh well it’s football. The one fact I find amusing about the Campbell household is that he and his wife have three dogs, two of which are teacup Yorkies named Thelma and Louise, and have shared this photo with the masses, and OMG SO CUTE:

That is Louise, for the record. She sleeps in his armpit, the stories say. I’ll bet it’s warm there.

OK, 2025 is now fully in progress. Smash it however you like.

Happy New Year to everyone, but especially you, my loyal readers, who have kept me maintaining this blog for, good lord, going on …24 years this month? It’s been that long? Amazing. We’ve lived through the Blog Craze, remained steadfast through social media, and who knows, maybe we’ll be popular again before cancer or random gunfire or a drunk/distracted driver takes me out. Not to be morbid, but I read the news yesterday oh boy, and I don’t see a lot to smile about.

That said, I’m still smiling. My 2024 one-word resolution, which I can’t remember, isn’t dong me much good, so I’m not making one this year. I have goals, of course, one being: Work less. Or rather, work less for others, more for me. The Biden stock market, decent luck and a lifetime of reasonably careful money management have left us reasonably comfortable, so I’d like to throttle back the freelance writing and write more for myself. Here, and elsewhere. So that’s the big one.

The others? The usual. Declutter. Death clean. Unfuck that which is fucked. Not to get too personal about our finances, but we’re investigating whether we can afford to bestow a chunk of cash on Kate to help her buy a house. Nothing fancy, but something that will allow her to start building equity on her own. As an all-1099 penniless artist (but a happy one!), she’ll never be able to do it on her own income, I fear, and it’s time for her to join the Sisterhood of Worrying About the Roof. As a boomer who benefited from an economic system that has since disintegrated, I have strong feelings about hoarding generational wealth. (I’m against it.) She’s our sole heir; might as well let her have some benefits now.

Entry level for a house in Metro Detroit that you don’t have to evict the raccoons from first: Roughly $200K. This is insane. But it’s the way we live today, so.

We’re taking the tree down today. I’m also pleased to report that yesterday’s ham-and-bean soup not only fulfilled the traditions of New Year’s dining, but it also used up the last of the Christmas ham, AND the accompanying Caesar salad did the same. As a Midwesterner, nothing makes me happier than using up leftovers. (Unless it’s buttoning up the house for winter.)

So, speaking of social media: A while back I joined a Facebook group about a concept called radical unschooling, just out of personal curiosity. I don’t radically unschool anyone, and am in fact a big believer in public education, but I’m also aware of how often it fails children who don’t fall into the mainstream, and while there are a fair number of utter crackpots in this group, there are many whose children struggle with structure. For the unaware, “radical unschooling” takes homeschool a step further, into basically trusting children will be led into learning by following their own instincts and interests. (Yeah, I know.) Kids stay home with a parent and, in the idealized version, go for a walk in a park and ask questions about plants and birds and wind and so forth, which the parent answers or, more often, directs the child to library books or YouTube videos or other resources that can answer them. But it’s pretty clear the idealized version doesn’t always pertain. One post asking for advice from the group was from a mother who went to a homeschooling fair and was scolded by a reading expert because her daughter was 8 years old and still illiterate.

“I thought she’d just naturally pick it up, and now I feel really bad, because this woman told me I’d missed a window!” she mourned. Whew.

A lot, and I mean a lot of the posts, suggest that someone’s child is neurodivergent, at least a little. And one topic comes up time and again: “Sensitivity issues.” One mother writes that her child won’t allow her to brush their curly hair, and now it’s matted. A child acts out in public, violently. Her kids have no self-control. The answer to many of these concerns seem to always be: The child has sensitivity issues. So my question for the group is: Who diagnoses sensitivity issues? I get the feeling lots of these parents aren’t into western medicine, so I doubt much of it is coming from doctors. Are sensitivity issues the new “oh I’m gluten-intolerant,” or is this just an extension of how we understand kids who are on the spectrum?

On to current events. :::opens newspaper page, slams it shut::: Ai-yi-yi, 2025. Let’s get through it in one piece.

The last two years of the Carter presidency coincided with the first two years of my career in newspapers, and one of my early tasks was to help edit the vast amounts of wire copy that went into the Sunday women’s section at the Columbus Dispatch. Fashion, advice, all that stuff, but today I’m thinking about Betty Beale, who covered Washington society. Her columns about parties at the French embassy seemed a little out of touch with central Ohio readers, but like I said, we had a lot of space to fill.

Beale, like most of permanent Washington, despised the Carters, considered them cornpone country white trash and never missed a chance to sneer at them. To be sure, the Carters were a very different first couple than we’d seen in previous administrations, and certainly did things differently than the Nixons, Fords, Kennedys and even the Johnsons. Rosalynn, you might remember, recycled the gown for the presidential inaugural that she wore to her husband’s gubernatorial inaugural celebration some years before. This was before stylists had coined the term “vintage” and “shopping your closet,” and Beale echoed the opinions that the First Lady has some responsibility to wear and promote American designers, and their current collections, not the old stuff. Jimmy preferred to carry his own bags, and she didn’t like that much, either. How trifling! How low-class! Doesn’t he know the American president should not humble himself to manual labor? When they elected to walk the inaugural parade route, rather than ride in a limo, why you could hear the tut-tutting all the way to Ohio.

It went on and on like this, and not just from Beale. The Carters, who voters elected in large part because they were so different from official Washington, were expected to just figure these things out. The country was in a weird, stressed-out place, having just survived Vietnam and Watergate, and I can’t really blame them for not going whole-hog for creature comforts, not when inflation was out of control and the OPEC oil crisis was still delivering shock waves to the economy. They were Democrats, after all.

Anyway, nothing Rosalynn could do would make bitches like Betty happy, and it seemed she knew that, and didn’t try very hard to please her. After Carter’s 1980 loss and the imperial Reagans’ arrival, Betty wallowed like a pig in slop. The Return of Glamour, etc. Nancy Reagan, an average-pretty former actress with no charisma to speak of, was hailed as the second coming of Jackie Kennedy. Her bedazzled dresses hung on her skinny shoulders, but they made the editors of fashion magazines fairly orgasmic with glee, simultaneously praising her “birdlike” size-2 figure and her choice of styles that would “showcase” it — whatever that means.

I also thought a lot in the last day about the extended Carter family, which was also looked down upon by official Washington. There was Billy Carter, the president’s brother, a classic good ol’ boy and drunk. There was Ruth Carter Stapleton, his sister and an evangelist, who converted pornographer Larry Flynt (it didn’t take). There were his children, four sons and a daughter, the latter, Amy, being a little girl when the family moved into the White House. She was criticized, too, because official Washington didn’t think children belonged at adult events. (These people fell silent when the Trumps would parade a 12-year-old Barron Trump, in black tie no less, into the Mar-a-Lago New Year’s Eve party. That was the last time I felt sorry for the little monster; imagine sitting with your parents, in a tuxedo, at a party where most of the guests are about 90 years old and all the women have strange, ruined, plastic-surgery faces. No wonder he never spoke a word aloud.)

And there was Miss Lillian, Jimmy’s mother, who had even hard-core city folk calling her “Miz Lill-yun” about 10 minutes after meeting her. Basically, the whole clan was the Waltons, at least for a while. Then they were Ma and Pa Kettle and their hillbilly fambly.

Soon we’ll say our official farewell. I really, really, really hope you-know-who doesn’t show up. I hope he has that much decency. (Ha ha! I know he doesn’t, the cunt.)