By Patrick F. Cannon
I’ve been doing this blog since the Fall of 2015 and haven’t missed a single week. In case you’re interested, that’s 435 weeks in a row. I keep doing it despite realizing that my opinions don’t seem to have gained much traction.
For example, I have several times expressed my distaste of tattoos. Yet, everything I see tells me that they’re more popular than ever. I should have known I was losing ground when they started being called “body art.” Since I have yet to see a tattoo that enhances a person’s appearance – quite the opposite, in fact – I can only take satisfaction in knowing that as they age, the tattooed ladies and gentlemen will regret their decisions as their skin inevitably turns into wrinkled paper, and the now bright colors fade into indistinct blurs.
Speaking of art, I’m afraid the definition thereof now includes anything that someone claims it to be. For example, if I were to blow my nose whilst strolling jaunty jolly along a sidewalk and toss the tissue away; and were someone to yell at me, I could claim it was my artistic comment on our throwaway society. Who could object in this world where giant metal balloon animals sell for tens of millions? Alas, my making fun of it has only caused prices to rise! And I get no thanks!
My espousal of classical music and the Great American Songbook (Berlin, Porter, Gershwin, etc.) has fallen on deaf ears – literally deaf from listening to over-amplified guitar riffs. Whatever happened to the singer whose talent didn’t need dancers and light shows to distract an audience? When did the lyrics become irrelevant? Where is it written that you must write your own songs, even if they’re mediocre? Another of my lost causes.
So, apparently, is Donald Trump. Recent polls have shown him ahead in the president’s race, despite the fact that he’s a lying, cheating, bigoted, and dishonest sociopath (and that’s just scratching the surface). I’m certainly glad I’m not on his bad side. Those who have annoyed him have had their lives threatened by the crazies who respond to his tirades as if coming from the Almighty. And speaking of the Almighty, there are even some religious folks who literally believe Donald has been sent by God to clean out the temple (Washington).
His baleful influence has resulted in a Congress that has passed fewer laws than any since the Great Depression. The House of Representatives has become a bad joke. Several Republican members have resigned in disgust, making the party’s hold on power even more tenuous. Their tireless efforts to prove that “Crooked Joe” has enriched himself in the public trough have come to naught. And blaming poor Joe for all the rest of our ills – and there are many – gives him way too much credit!
As a natural conservative, I find this year’s apparent choice (I hold out hope it might change) highly depressing. I frankly don’t want to vote for either Trump or Biden. I console myself that I’m not legally required to make a choice. I can either just vote “down ballot” (if I can find candidates worthy of a vote), or perhaps write in someone like Mitch Daniels or John Kasich, who are, in my definition anyway, actual Republicans.
Copyright 2024, Patrick F. Cannon
cannonnadedotcom 
And who might be these actual Republicans, of whom you speak?
The heirs of Ike, Nixon, Ford, and Bush Sr. and Jr. are an endangered species. A few shy Reaganites hang around but even the Gipper is but a bygone memory. Nikki Haley attempted CPR on the elephant’s carcass, but her main fans turned out to be Democrats.
Nor are there many actual Democrats left. Classical Liberalism lives mainly in textbooks. Harvard socialist Obama steered the party toward New Age Marxism and the principles that go with it: Alinsky political tactics, class conflict, elitist bureaucratic government and denial of American exceptionalism. He got a Nobel prize for it.
Phantom Joe, the Ghost Who Walks, is a cranky half-wit and his kindly, avuncular image is fiction. He is a nasty, corrupt, stupid character who made millions for himself and his family through influence peddling to adversaries. He remains at large because of a compromised Justice Department, FBI and CIA, and a complicit media paid to lie. But Joe doesn’t lead the country. He is only the public face of his “advisors” Obama, Pelosi, Schumer and Sanders, who pull the strings.
Trump would today be but one more tastelessly attired Florida duffer, were it not for the radical policies of Democrats and the hapless ineptitude of Republicans. It may not be apparent in places like Boston, Berkeley and Oak Park but people are fed up with progressives who foster rising crime, rampant drug addiction, gender confusion among children, unlimited illegal immigration, inflationary economic policies and support of foreign terrorist groups. Ordinary Americans get the full brunt and don’t like it. Trump may be a shameless opportunist but it has been Democrats who have given him the opportunities, first by backing his candidates in open primaries (figuring they’d be easier to beat) and now, to thwart his re-election, by unleashing against him waves of blatantly contrived criminal charges adjudicated by openly hostile judges.
As for the media, the public has lost trust in it. NBC tries to present itself as a democratic forum for political debate by righteously firing the former Republican committee chairperson they had just hired. Slimy operatives like ABC’s George Stephanopoulos lies to his audience by stating Trump was convicted of rape in the E. Jean Carroll case. The harpies on The View and other network shows are no better. But enough said about these hucksters.
I don’t know what to say about tattoos (a young nurse at the local medical facility is covered with them including a diabolic “Born to Raise Hell” banner on her upper arm), popular music (maybe a mating call?), and art (what may have started as a joke became orthodoxy).
Theodore Dalrymple in “Vulgarity as Virtue,” in City Journal, however, does, writing on the decline of Edinburgh, Scotland:
“This vulgarity is not a mere absence of refinement, such as has always existed among a section of any public, nor is it a satirical commentary on the over-refinement of a self-appointed cultural elite. On the contrary, it is a conscious, positive ideology: vulgarity as political virtue. It partakes of a false syllogism:
The common people are vulgar.
I am vulgar.
Therefore, I have empathy with, and sympathy for, the common people—the highest form of political virtue.”
Commenting on the spectacle of a fat, skimpily dressed, tattooed woman with seaweed green hair, he continues:
“Yet absence of dignity must not be the mere unconscious absence of care; it must be chosen, selected, and have unique features, with a tendency to innovation and extremity, or else it fails to serve the permanently wounded ego.”
So bring on sleazy Bidens, Donald L’Orange, venal Democrats and craven Republicans, body artists, Jasper Johns and Thottwat! They dance in Dante’s Inferno.
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Can there really be no virtuous pols left?
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