Somewhere in the Midwest, where if you’re anti-Trump you must speak in lowered tones, I had my hair cut — well, so to speak, inasmuch as there isn’t much left — and was at one point during my monologue — for I can’t hear without my hearing aids, and thus feel I must hold forth when in the chair — asked if I read.
“Yes,” I said.
“Ah,” the barber said, “my polling’s holding up! You didn’t vote for Trump, then?”
“For public enemy number-one. . ??”
As my daughter and I walked out of the barbershop, she said by way of explanation, “Dad, he’s been conducting an anecdotal poll, and he’s found that none of his customers who’ve said they read voted for Trump.”
Perhaps I was counted twice, for the barber, who’d looked at the crossword she and I had been filling out while waiting, followed us out onto the sidewalk, waving it. “And you do the Times crossword too!”
I probably should have said, “Well, it’s only Tuesday, for goodness sakes,” but took the compliment affably, in silence, feigning modesty.
As for Trump, she remains wary, despite all the reasons why he ought to be given the hook, having strutted and fretted more than his allotted hour upon the stage.
To release his tax returns will do their client irreparable harm, his lawyers say. Indeed.
They say he’s stalling on the tax front to wait out the statute of limitations. Well then, pick a year, any year.
As for the impeachment inquiry, not that all that much inquiring
need be done given the self-evident, elf-incriminatory truths that abound, let it ride. Let us at least attempt to end, as the Constitution has it, in speaking of King George, this “history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having, in direct object, the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these States.” (Note: repeated injuries in the present case would include but not be limited to leaving the Paris Agreement on climate change, pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal, and appointing to head federal agencies people whose views are antithetical to these agencies’ missions.)
You could even go so far as to say that — as China claims in the case of the Rockets owner’s support of the Hong Kong protesters — that our national sovereignty and social stability, especially those comments that have given aid and comfort to white supremacists, are being so undermined by our president that the gravity of his offenses in that regard warrants incarceration. But this is America, not yet an autocracy in which free speech is considered a crime.
We can speak our minds here, proud that our revolutions every four years are peaceful, or at least, as I said above, mumble.