The Stylish Connoisseur

Pam and I bought furniture yesterday. We were about to buy the exact same furniture back in June when our AC unit stopped working. We decided that air conditioning, over the summer, in Short Pump, was a greater priority. We caught everything on sale and actually saved some money over what we would have paid last year.

I have always wanted a library in my house...and now I have one. We have a seldom used living room which has now been transformed into a beautiful, old money looking library, complete with two new chairs, gorgeous, richly detailed bookcases complete with one of those sliding ladders, and a wonderful writing desk. When it all gets delivered, I'll share pictures.

I was telling one of my nieces who has two little ones how it never really stops...these money-spending demands that life makes of us. Back when we had kids in the house, we couldn't have nice things. Turns out our mothers were right. First of all, with two kids we couldn't afford nice things, but even if we could have, what would have been the point? It would have taken all of two days before one of them would have thrown up all over that beautiful Persian rug. And I'm sorry, all of the overpriced Scottsguard treatments in the world would have been useless against one of my kids' Spaghettios-fueled projectile vomit performances!!

But now the kids are all grown. Their incessant demands for every spare dime of my capital have ended. So now, all that money I thought I would be banking is now flying out of my wallet even faster than it was back when they had crooked teeth. I have a new Downton Abbey-esk library!

About the time we were about to pay for it all I noticed for the first time the marketing slogan for the particular line of furniture we were buying. I have no idea why I never noticed it before because it
was in plain view on all of their signs and whatnot:

Van Buren...for the stylish connoisseur.

I almost called the whole thing off. What a horrible, elitist slogan. I am neither a connoisseur of fine furniture nor very stylish, for that matter....and Martin Van Buren was a terrible President! Oh well.

Of course now buyers' remorse has set in. From now on, The Tempest will be written at my stylish new writing desk, surrounded by richly carved bookcases and handsomely detailed chairs. Will the influence of such finery affect my writing? Will I find myself writing sentences filled with French words like...connoisseur? Good Lord, I hope not. If you, the reader, start detecting excessive high browery, too much reliance on flowery metaphors, and a preoccupation with inheritance taxes...feel free to complain!

Oh...and to help me replenish my newly depleted savings account, please click on one of these ads!!

The Debate

There was a debate last night. I watched it sparingly, in fits and starts. I would hang in for five or ten minutes then go back to reading. It's always this way for me with debates. They are hard to watch. They agitate me, rile me up in a counter-productive way. With everything else going on in my life right now, I don't need to be riled. At this point, I would settle for a couple three days without malfunctioning intestines...but that's another story that will never be told on this or any other blog!

A few observations about last night...

John Kasich's hands look like they are being controlled by a deranged puppeteer on uppers.

Marco Rubio seems to think that he will win if he speaks faster. It's as if he believes that he's being paid by the word. He says smart things, for the most part, even eloquent things...but he spits his sentences out like bullets from an AK47. Slow down buddy. Take a breath!

Ted Cruz annihilated Donald Trump on the issue of his eligibility to run for President. Come to think of it, Cruz did a lot of annihilating last night. I don't particularly care for the strident tone he often takes, but clearly this guy has the chops to be President. He has a lazer sharp mind, thinks fast on his feet. His biggest problem is he's the smartest guy in practically every room he enters...and he knows it, often an off-putting combination. 

Chris Christie is the tough love Dad of this group. It's hard to find fault with much of what he says, and he handles himself well in this format. But there isn't enough oxygen left in the room after Trump and Cruz enter. Not his time.

Jeb Bush. Poor, nervous, pleading, nerdy Jeb Bush, he of the record breaking money raising operation and the Presidential pedigree. He can't seem to get past the impression that he's a low energy, entitled, government technician who desperately wants to be liked by the cool kids, but somehow can't break through. The way he always tilts his head upward when he speaks seems so hopelessly patrician. He has all the charisma of a throw pillow. Thing is, he would probably make a decent President. Painful to watch him flounder.

Ben Carson looks like the last man on the Titantic. At one point he spoke right after a five minute explosion of words and energy from Marco Rubio and the contrast was devastating. Good man. Horrible candidate.

Donald Trump was Donald Trump. His facial expressions when not speaking are petulant and childish. His answers are largely fact-free screeds, sentences that the brightest English majors in the country couldn't diagram if their lives depended on it. But he has two things going for him with our disaffected population...he's a funny, entertaining dude and he's the only one on the stage that doesn't look over-coached. He simply opens his big mouth and says what he thinks, all of it...unvarnished, un-poll tested, the world according to Donald. For more and more people, instead of appearing ill-prepared and unserious, it feels authentic and honest. Debate prep? That's only for "losers" who need pollsters to tell them what they believe. Here's what he believes...straight from the gut. If you don't like it, vote for the other guy.

So technically, Cruz won the debate in every measurable way except one....what voters think, which is...another win for The Donald.

Something Has Ended

I wish I could figure out what is going on. Do you ever look around and ask yourself how we have arrived at this point in our history? Is it just me? Nothing makes sense anymore. It feels like I am witnessing the end of something...and the beginning of something else, dark and menacing.

I have friends who are buying guns, scrambling to get concealed carry permits. It's like they are expecting some awful thing to happen, or maybe they think it's the cool thing to do. 

One of the leading Presidential candidates of my country has his name plastered on casinos all over the country, his own line of cologne, and has never held an elective office. Another is an avowed Socialist, 74 years old, and looks like a cross between Statler and Waldorf of the Muppets. 

I can now fill up my 16 gallon gas tank for the same amount of money it would cost to buy an entire barrel of crude oil. I pay twice as much for a gallon of milk as I do for a gallon of gas. I wonder why some democratic senator hasn't launched an investigation into big oil to get to the bottom of these dramatic price declines...since they do so every single time prices rise.

Large swaths of our population want millions of illegal immigrants literally swept up and deported, and a ginormous, impenetrable wall built to keep them out on our 1900 mile southern border. Another large swath of our population wants to pretend that millions of new immigrants pose absolutely zero security risk in this age of terrorism and even to suggest that it might proves that you're a racist.

A country who is about to have 150 billion dollars transferred to their national checking account from the United States this very week has the stones to fire a missile within a nautical mile of one of our destroyers, and commandeer and humiliate the crew of two of our patrol boats, the Geneva Convention violating photos and videos released to the world days before the transfer is scheduled to take place. Can anyone imagine the Iranians trying this crap with Russian sailors? Our State Department practically breaks it's arm patting the Iranians on the back for being so gracious about the whole thing. Someone my age watches all of this and shakes his head in fascination at our diminished statue.

A group of militia ranchers have taken over a Federal building in Oregon and been there for over a week now because a couple of their buddies got sent to prison for starting fires on some federal land. After fourteen days...they are still there.

Something has ended, and something else has begun.

Lucy and the State of the Union

I have taken my first sip of coffee. I have turned on the gas fireplace and settled on the sofa. I begin to read the news from overnight. I hear Lucy jump off the bed upstairs, then the harried, frantic sound she makes bounding down the stairs. In a graceful flash she leaps up to within a foot of my face, presenting me with this...

If she could speak, what is it that she is asking me...for this is assuredly a questioning face. Those eyes can burn holes through you. She is unrelenting in her staring powers. 

1. "Why so glum Dad? How about we go outside and wrestle?"

2. "You feel bad, don't you? You should eat something...how about a sock?"

Instead, I tell her she's a very good girl, then I scratch her belly. Soon, she leaps down and disappears back upstairs, having completed her mission. It's the same thing every single morning. She is dependable, true as the North Star. She simply must check on me and gauge my welfare each morning. Maybe it worries her how serious I become when I read the news. She probably wonders why I do it. She doesn't understand responsibility, she doesn't even know what I do for a living. All she knows is that every morning I look into my iPad screen and turn glum. Lucy doesn't do glum. She's a dog and therefore...glum-free.

This morning I read the President's SOTU speech. Yeah, I know...I could have watched it on TV last night. But, I haven't watched one since Bill Clinton vowed that the "Era of big government is over!" Don't think I've ever recovered from that bold-faced lie. Besides, the optics of the SOTU are infuriating to me, the grandstanding, the phony stagecraft, the blank faces of the Vice-President and the Speaker to either side of the President, the props that Presidents increasingly now bring with them and set in the gallery to illustrate some point. All of it is nauseating in a very bi-partisan way. I much prefer Thomas Jefferson's decision to send the SOTU to Congress in writing, which every President after him did until Woodrow Wilson started all of this anti-republican pagentry.  So, I read the speech. I have no comment on the thing other than the observation that it sounded odd to me that this President would bemoan the lack of civility in our politics one minute and then a minute later suggest that his political opponents are controlled by "hidden forces." So, apparently, for this President civility is defined as agreeing with him. Thanks for clearing that up!

Anyway, this was his last SOTU, and it sounded like it. All of the angst that Americans are feeling is the result of things that happened before he took office, in his telling, and every good thing that has happened over the last seven year, both actual good things and things that perhaps only he thinks are good, are due to his brilliant mind and pure heart. Fair enough. If I were the President and I was giving my last SOTU speech, I would have pitched it the same way. 

Still, had it been up to Lucy, I wouldn't even have read it. I would have been outside wrestling in the mud with her!

Angry Old Man?

For the past couple of days I have been savoring a new book, a collection of Peggy Noonan columns called The Time of our Lives. She and I have had a weekly appointment for the past twenty years or so. She publishes her syndicated column in the Wall Street Journal, and I read it. I never miss one. Ever. Ours is not a sycophantic relationship. We sometimes disagree. But her writing is so glorious, so wise, I simply cannot stay mad at her for long. If you were to ask me who I wish I could write like, my answer would be...Peggy.

But this blog is not about Peggy Noonan, but something she wrote, that when placed beside Mr. Ricky Gervais' performance last night at the Golden Globes demands comment.

Writing about the death of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Noonan said this:

"She had manners, the kind that remind us that manners spring from a certain moral view--that you do tribute to the world and the people in it by being kind and showing respect, by sending the note and the flowers, by being loyal and cheering a friend. She was a living reminder in the age of Oprah that personal dignity is always, still, an option, a choice that is open to you. She was, really, the last aristocrat. Few people get to symbolize a world, but she did, and that world is receding, and we know it and mourn that, too."

Ricky Gervais is certainly not the first person in show business to trade in the put down. I grew up watching Don Rickles skewering Hollywood types on the Johnnie Carson show. But, Don Rickles was constrained by the times he lived in. If he descended into foul mouthed F-Bomb throwing, he would have been finished. Not so Mr. Gervais.

I will not here catalogue the carnage from last night. You can Google it yourself. And honestly, part of me always enjoys any opportunity I get to watch the Hollywood elite get cut down to size, so for that I suppose I should thank him. But, as I watched his act and thought of Peggy Noonan's words, I became overcome with sadness.

Watching him playing for laughs the suggestion that an old man might come out on stage and perform a sexual favor on him...or yucking it up about what he uses his Golden Globe statuette for back home-- it is on his bedside table, after all-- is to be reminded anew that I live in a very different country than Jackie Kennedy did. While personal dignity might still be an option for us in 2016, fewer and fewer of us are taking it.

I find myself longing for grace and a touch of class now and then. I see a publically drunk Cameron Diaz and long for Grace Kelly. I see Kim Kardashian and dream of Audrey Hepburn. Was she even real? 

I suppose that this post makes me sound like the old guy yelling at the neighborhood kids to "get off my lawn!!" Fair enough. Not everything in 2016 American entertainment is bad, just as not everything about an older America is worthy of nostalgia. But, there is a coarseness today, a creeping meanness, where rudeness is mistaken for charisma. We see it in Hollywood and on the campaign trail. If manners and civility have somehow become bourgeois, and if they have been replaced by the ugly and garish...well, we are the worse for it. Sorry, not every hip new trend is worthy of celebration. Gervais, and those like him should shame us. And they would if we could remember what shame was.

Conviction Without Courage Is Cowardice

Conviction without courage is cowardice.

These words came to me last night as I was sitting in a Starbucks in Occoquan, Va. waiting for the traffic on 95 to die down. I was reading the Washington Post and then the New York Times, then my cellphone news feed...you have to wait a very long time for the traffic to die down in Occoquan.

There were stories of good people doing nothing while innocent people were victimized. There were stories of decent people being railroaded by a tiny contingent of malcontents demanding their way or the highway, dressed up bullying. Other stories spoke of learned men and women who should know better, giving in to the shrill, unhinged demands of pampered children whose combined life experiences could be shoehorned into a thimble. Everywhere, it seemed, loud and angry people were demanding this and that while beleaguered adults looked on helplessly unable or unwilling to push back. 

Some will say that the problem in our day is that we have lost our moral compass, having rejected absolute truth, having no longer a North Star, we have been set adrift in a sea of moral ambiguity. To which I say...bull****. Sure, maybe a few cloistered academics have fallen for the everything is relative claptrap, but the average Joe knows evil when he sees it. The problem is not that we have no convictions, the problem is that we have lost our confidence in them. Without the moral courage that convictions demand, we have become moral cowards, passive bystanders watching a small pack of losers taking over the world.

Then I read a story about the Trump campaign. He has opened his mouth at a campaign event and some fresh absurdity has proceeded out of it. But it hits me at a Starbucks in Occoquan that Donald Trump has captured lightning in a bottle. His seemingly fearless attack on political correctness, his willingness to say whatever he thinks, consequences be damned, resonates with a people who have grown accustomed to standing on the sidelines passively taking whatever the elites have dished out. Trump has given voice to the morally timid, the bystanders of modern life. They hear him saying harsh things, even rude, dehumanizing things...and it pulses with something that has slipped away from them over the last fifty years...power.

But if conviction without courage is cowardice, what is courage without conviction? Donald Trump may indeed have courage, but to what end? What exactly are his convictions? It's terribly hard to tell at this point. How would the man govern? Would he be conservative? Fiscally prudent? To his supporters does it even matter? For me, nothing could possibly matter more. For, although it is a good thing for a man to have courage, if not enlisted in the service of moral conviction yields terrible results. 

Two famous motivational speakers, Jim Rohn and Zig Ziglar used to debate what was more important, education or motivation? Zig would say, "You've got to motivate people first, Jim. You can always educate then later!" Jim would reply, "No Zig, if you motivate an idiot, all you will have is a motivated idiot who will arrive at disaster quicker!"

While conviction without courage is cowardice...courage without conviction is chaos.

My Trip Into Hell

Today, I have three appointments north of Fredericksburg. That's right, I will be spending roughly six hours of my day in what everyone else in the Old Dominion refers to as Northern Virginia. For those of you not familiar with the idiosyncratic nature of Virginia rivalries, let me attempt to enlighten.

Virginia is a very proud State. We are quite proud of the preeminent role that our State played in the founding of this nation, we are the Mother of Presidents, after all. We are,oddly, even proud of the roll we played as the most powerful and influential State of the Confederacy, for what that's worth. Virginia is full of proud people...proud and aristocratic. There's a lot of old money here. We fancy ourselves as the most genteel of states, that embodiment of our most beloved son, Thomas Jefferson's agrarian ideal. But somehow along the way, something went terribly wrong. That something is Northern Virginia.

Sometime around the 1940's with the arrival of FDR and his New Deal, the power and reach of Washington began to mutate. To accommodate this growing monolith, suburbs began to explode in size and garishness. This army of technocrats, functionaries, hangers-on, and sundry bureaucrats had to live somewhere, and who in their right mind wants to live in DC? So, suburbs like Alexandria, Arlington, Burke, Lorton, Centreville and Reston were transformed from sleepy little hamlets to buzzing centers of activity inhabited by people most assuredly not form Virginia!! To accommodate their commute, construction began on a bee-hive of beltways, bridges, off ramps, loops and towering six lane highways that literally has never stopped. 

So, here's how things are going to go for me today. I will take the Short Pump ramp onto interstate 95 around 11:30. It will take me about 50 minutes or so to make it to Fredericksburg, a 53 mile drive. Then, just north of this, last truly Virginia city on 95, I will begin to notice a sea of red tail lights ahead. That means it has begun. The 46 mile drive from Fredericksburg to the Occoquan exit will take about an hour and a half. But that's the easy part of my trip. Once my last appointment is over, it will be around 5:30 in the afternoon. The roughly 100 mile drive back home will take anywhere from 3 hours to a day and half.

My brother has lived just over the border in Gaithersburg, Md. for the past twenty years or so and has had to fight this insanity on a daily basis. The fact that he has not killed one of his fellow commuters is a miracle. No wonder people who work in Washington are always in such an angry  mood! Maybe if our nation's capital was in Key West, there wouldn't be so much partisan hostility...and we Virginians could have the top third of our State back!