Declarations And Graduations
Declaring against declarations, plus, when your children leave childhood
Editor’s Note: Have a question that’s burning inside of you? You might want to see a urologist about that. But after you get a handle on your health travails, ask Matt about whatever else is ailing you at askmattlabash@gmail.com.
Dear Matt,
What do you think about a public declaration both condemning Donald J. Trump and affirming democratic ideals? Think something in the vein of The Barmen Declaration, only ecumenical. Something like this would need some heavy lifting from popular people like Russell D. Moore, Timothy Snyder, Anne Applebaum, Cornel West, etc.
How would one encourage this kind of group and activity? It would be a serious thing to consider doing.
A Concerned Citizen
Well, I’m 100 percent down with small “d” democratic ideals, and am also down with three of the four people you mention. But color me a little skeptical about Cornel West. I’m told by those who know him that he’s a perfectly nice guy – and I don’t always even disagree with him. I like a man who’s not afraid to buck his own side, as West often does. But I generally don’t trust people who have been wearing the same suit/costume since the Reagan administration. Neither do I trust professors who put out rap albums loaded with academese and pseudo-profundity, as West once did. Imagine thinking it a good idea to toss this word-salad on vinyl: Time gets interwoven to refrig and / or oven with variance coming after centuries of scientific observation/ Heliocentric puts specific comprehension to circular flow with mass bind of mind velocity. (After my head stopped hurting, I felt a duty to my brothers and sisters in the respectable hip-hop community to trash it in the pages of my old magazine, The Weekly Standard —once widely considered to be the hip-hop Bible.)
So no, I don’t want The Professor anywhere near my updated Barmen Declaration, or at least not on the drafting committee. But truth be told, neither am I all that into Declarations. Sure, I like The Declaration of Independence. (That was a keeper.) Though these days, they’re like the ineffectual equivalent of a U.N. resolution or a sternly-worded letter-of-concern from Chuck Schumer to the Stable Genius. It has about as much potency as the dreaded “open letter” — most often a sure sign that someone had too much pinot noir while watching the news, and now has a snootful of righteous indignation they just have to lay down in black-and-white. Don’t get me wrong, I can relate. I do a version of the same for a living.
But as I once wrote of open letters: “They are show-offy, self-important, and tend to operate under the often errant assumption that the famous person they are addressed to actually reads.”
I went on to write an open letter to open-letter writers:
Dear Open-Letter Writers,
Please close your letters. A personalized email would be a lot more effective.
Thanks in advance,
ML
Nobody listened. Probably because they didn’t read it. Why would they? It was an open letter.
I don’t mean to pee in anyone’s protest Wheaties. Protest is generally good, and beats the hell out of passive acquiescence. When public “servants” — and I use that term loosely here to include self-dealing meme-coin kings who hold public bribery dinners for themselves — continuously lie or engage in blatantly corrupt behavior, it can be exhausting: constantly feeling the need to call attention to a truth so obvious that half the country would rather nurse their mass dissociative disorder than reckon with the destructive choices they’ve wrought. But just because the truth is tiring doesn’t mean it’s not still worth telling.
Yet the group-grope grandiose gesture leaves me a little cold. As it tends to smack of performative obviousness. Or put more bluntly, it usually has a “no-shit” quality to it: people who already spend a fair amount of time publicly decrying something, peacocking their collective disapproval to impress each other, rather than effectively prosecuting (metaphorically) the wrongdoer(s) in question.
And the dirty, uncomfortable truth is that until real checks are slapped back on this administration — now that a toadying Republican-majority Congress, Trump’s Justice Department full of lackeys, and a Supreme Court that last year issued a stay-out-of-jail-forever card have made it damn near impossible to hold the President to account — not much is likely to change.
While it’s worth re-articulating the principles Trump’s perpetually violating, he can likely only be slowed down rather than stopped. And his progress should be impeded, as several judges, vigilant lawyers, and (some) adversarial media keep attempting to do. But in all likelihood, nothing will markedly improve until the electorate squares accounts, hopefully helping Congress regain their autonomy, when they might finally trade in Mike Johnson’s kneepads for something resembling an actual spine. But I’m afraid some crisply-worded manifesto from a coalition of libs, moderates, and Never Trumpers would mainly be an exercise in intellectual onanism. A “circular flow with mass band of mind velocity,” as Professor West might put it.
It would be much more effective if Trump’s own people turned on him. Which could possibly happen in bigger numbers than expected after a few more months of market volatility, retirement-fund hemorrhaging, and the price of everything going up instead of down. Trump, having promised the opposite before making a futile declaration of his own: a declaration of war on the world economy. Maybe some of them will come to regard Trumpism, with all its blatant dishonesty and corruption, as the cancer on the body politic that so many of the rest of us do.
Mind you, cancer isn’t an automatic death sentence. We all know people who have had it, and beat it. Depending on the kind of cancer one has, there are lots of ways to treat it. But the best hedge against it is not to contract it in the first place. And when you smoke three packs a day for many years, you shouldn’t be surprised when you do.
Dear Matt,
My son just graduated from high school last week. I’m happy and proud, but I just can’t shake the blues. Any advice?
Sarah J.
I’d give you some if I had it figured out, and wasn’t suffering from the same myself. For my youngest son just graduated from college. Three-and-a-half years ago in this space, I wrote the following:
Late this summer, when my last brood left, I was already feeling the full weight of middle-aged maudlin-hood. My youngest son, Dean, had just graduated high school, and was shoving off to college. The bluebirds weren’t the only ones whose nest had been emptied. It seemed like about five minutes ago that my wife and I, her pregnant with Dean and feeling every lick of the discomfort that entails, were driving past some outdoor bar, with carefree 22-year-olds in heat drinking and laughing and carrying on like they had no obligations in this world. Alana, who is not prone to using foul language, unlike some people in our family, said to all of them and none in particular, “Enjoy it while it lasts, motherfuckers.”
After we actually dropped Dean off at college, on the silent ride home, we drove past the yard of one of our neighbors, where a military father and his two young sons frequently play catch, like I used to do with mine. “Enjoy it while it lasts, motherfuckers,” I said, wistfully. Between those two “mf’ers,” our kids became adults, or something close to them. While time crept up behind us, and hit us with a tire iron.
The tire iron made its return the other day. Like any blues singer worth his salt, I always figure the best way to deal with pain is not to avoid it, but to plow right through — to let it shape your own song. So after we returned from the commencement ceremony, I went for a drive, alone, to the little church school where it all started for Dino a little less than two decades ago.
Down the hall from his Pre-K classroom was a stained glass window. As a four-year-old, he was positively enamored with it. Whenever we’d visit his school for programs or parent-teacher meetings, he’d take us down the hallway, stand in front of it, and say, “Look, stained glass.” Though back then, he inserted some air in his consonant clusters, pronouncing it “guhhh-lass.” Ever since, whenever my wife and I drive by a church, one of us will say, “Hey look, stained guhhh-lass.” Not so much a joke-word, as a magic time-machine.
When I got to the church-school, it was after-hours. It was all locked up, but then, it always was even when my kids went there — to ward off school shooters and perverts, I guess. With plenty of cars in the front lot, however, I decided to try my luck anyway. It appeared there was some pickleball tournament in the gym — pickleball being a tool of the devil to crowd our once perfectly good tennis courts with trendy white people who’d rather play overgrown ping pong. As I neared the door, a kindly old codger saw me, ambled up, and opened it before I could knock.
He asked if he could help me. I told him, “I know this is a weird question, but would you mind if I went upstairs and took a picture of the stained glass window?”
“Sure,” he said, putting up no resistance. He even offered to escort me. As I walked upstairs, I tried to explain so he wouldn’t think me some kind of weirdo. “It’s a long story, but my kids graduated from here.”
“How long ago?” he asked. “About 20 years,” I said, now feeling like one of those weirdos they try to keep locked out. As we arrived in the corridor with the stained glass, he reached to hit the overhead switch, but as the window was still catching the day’s last light, I asked him to leave it off.
I departed with my photo, and as I descended the stairs in silence, the old man asked, “Memories?” “Yep,” I said, barely able to talk, worried I might start squirting like I did that time a friend asked me to join a pickleball league.
I made it outside without leakage and in one piece, though I was nearly blown down the stairs by the whoosh of time. It was okay, though. There was some bright side. I would never again be asked to help with homework I didn’t even understand the first time around. I could now start climbing college-loan mountain, without worrying about its summit growing any higher. And though we’re both considerably older now, my son is still my son. We still laugh. We still fish. We still swap tunes. And he’s really come a long way on those consonant clusters. His childhood might be over, but we aren’t.
Bonus Book Plug: Jake Tapper’s been a friend of mine for nearly 30 years — long before his CNN days — since back when he was a smartass, leather-jacket-wearing print jockey at Salon, who ran reporting circles around his competition. We first bumped into each other covering the chaotic goat rodeo known as the Reform Party Convention, in which Donald Trump was exploring a run for the presidency, which nobody took seriously. (Ooops.) Even when I was savaging Tapper behind his back to prospective sources (it’s a cutthroat business), the one thing I always said about him is “there goes an honest man.” If you so much as burped out an observation over drinks in his presence, and Tapper wanted to borrow a tiny shred of your thinking, he’d scrupulously credit you. (Even if I do most of my burping on background.)
In any case, Jake is still one of the most honest men in the business— as evidenced by hard partisans on both sides being perpetually pissed at him for one imaginary infraction or another. And there’s plenty more pissing and moaning now that he’s out, along with his coauthor — ace Axios reporter Alex Thompson — with Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. Which is about, well……the subtitle nicely covers it.
Some Bidenites — all three of the remaining ones — are miffed at Tapper and Thompson for telling the truth. And right-wingers do what they always do in The Age of Perpetual Media Bias Accusations: they complain a lot about the lamestream’s original reporting, whining they didn’t tell the truth sooner about Biden’s deteriorating mental acuity (which was not only apparent to anyone with eyes and ears, but in Tapper’s and Thompson’s case, is demonstrable BS). Meanwhile, the whine-arati simultaneously dine out on their shoe-leather reporting and scoops, of which there are plenty. Yet Tapper, still being an honest man, has admitted on his own network that while he covered Biden’s cognitive decline before Biden tapped out, “I think some of the criticism is fair, to be honest. Of me, certainly. I’m not going to speak for anybody else, but knowing then what I know now, I look back at my coverage during the Biden years — and I did cover some of these issues, but not enough. I look back on it with humility.” (Would that wingers were similarly reflective over their failure to note the cognitive decline of a President who thinks it’s a swell idea to invade Greenland and annex Canada. No screws loose, there!)
Most publicists would say a book tour is no time for honest admissions, but that’s Jake. Which is yet another reason you should read Original Sin.
Bonus Track: While driving around, moodily contemplating your own mortality and lost youth as your kids graduate, you need an appropriate soundtrack. And this really did the trick for me the other day. Bruce Hornsby’s live version of “Soon Enough,” off his 2016 album, Rehab Reunion. I highly recommend the pretty instrumental that precedes it as well. (“Song F”). But since it’s a ten-minute video in its entirety, we’ll start it at the aforementioned song.