"I want to keep wearing a mask after this is over. I can just go and do my thing, and I don’t have to interact with people. It’s liberating."

Said the 16-year-old son of the author of this WaPo column, "Here are the people who love wearing masks."

The author, Petula Dvorak, collects some other pro-mask statements:

“I love wearing a mask. I want to do this forever. It has helped my social anxiety so much.”...

“Wearing a mask is really letting me be ugly in peace. I love it here.”...

“I like not catching colds, not wearing makeup and not being noticed... So even vaccinated and with herd immunity, I’m still going to be hiding behind it.”...

“Wearing a mask means people can’t see my facial tics, and I love that... I’ve always chewed on my tongue ever since I was a kid... I also have a lot of facial acne that masks hide. Acne so bad that random people I meet on the day-to-day feel the need to comment on it and give me advice, as if I haven’t been to tons of dermatologists. I feel much less self-conscious out in public when I’m wearing a mask”...

“[My tardive dyskinesia] manifests as constant contortions of my mouth and tongue twirling... I was mortified to go out in public.”

From the comments over there:

"Time’s up, baby boomers. It’s Gen X’s turn now."

That's the headline for a column by Petulia Dvorak (in WaPo). It's kind of a great headline, but (as Dvorak does at one point admit), Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders are not baby boomers.

You might think it's time for the baby boomers to shuffle off stage and let the next generations take charge, but Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders are from an even earlier generation, an they're acting like it's not the baby boomers turn yet.

President Trump was 70 when he was inaugurated, the oldest man to take on the job of president in U.S. history. (Ronald Reagan was 69.)

And now we’re fixing to talk about Sen. Bernie Sanders at 77 and Biden at 76 in the driver’s seat of a divided and complicated nation? They are even older than the baby boomer generation, which started in 1946.

All three white men leading the polls are too old to even renew their driver’s licenses in California without retaking the test.

Who's the other white man??

Anyway, it's so Gen X to think that competition must back down and let you have what you want. Sorry, but even if there's some ethic of generational equity worth invoking, the Boomers haven't had our full share of Presidents yet, and we're still blocked by the older generation. As long as they're still participating, you can't disqualify us yet.

And as for your driver’s license analogy: Presidential candidates do take a test. They have to work like mad and travel and speak and submit to tough interviews and debates for over a year right in front of our eyes. And there's only one license to hand out. We'll see who gets it.

The entrepreneurial wisdom of Stormy Daniels. (No wonder she was a good match for Donald Trump.)

I'm reading "Interest in Stormy Daniels is surging on Pornhub" (WaPo):

... And while it’s not clear that [Stormy Daniels will] prevail in that legal fight [to get out from under her non-disclosure agreement], it is clear that her appearance in the news has been good for her marketability. Searches for Daniels’s name are skyrocketing.... And each subsequent time Daniels has made headlines for her alleged affair with Trump — when she appeared on the Jimmy Kimmel Show... searches for her name have spiked again....

“I have two choices,” Daniels told Rolling Stone of the Trump scandal. “Sit at home and feel sorry for myself, or make lemonade out of lemons.”

Led Zeppelin said it best:



The top-rated comment at WaPo uses a device I'm seeing in the comedy subgenre of mocking Trump*:

I don't see what all the hullabazoo is over some sleazy, oversized, fake-tanned, fake-blonde trashy prostitute who crawled out of the sewer just to spew forth a bunch of garbage in hopes of being more famous.

Why would anyone care?

About Trump, I mean?

And then, also in WaPo, there's a Petula Dvorak essay touting Stormy Daniels alongside "the female pioneers of the porn industry":

You hear “porn,” and you may think predatory guys with cameras in warehouses... But ever since Edison and his kinetoscope, there have been women... who have emerged as entrepreneurs in an industry made for men and run by men....

“This industry is filled with strong, smart, very business-savvy women,” [said Lynn Comella, associate professor of gender and sexuality studies at University of Nevada Las Vegas]. “They are calling the shots as directors and CEOs,” and they “are willing to stand up for themselves.”

Given the female power players who survive and thrive in such a cutthroat field, she said, “I’m not surprised to see it’s an adult performer” taking on Trump.

_______________________________


* Trump used it on himself at the Gridiron dinner on March 4th:

I won't rule out direct talks with Kim Jong-Un. I just won't. As far as the risk of dealing with a madman is concerned, that's his problem, not mine.

Of course, now the direct talks are on. And look! Now, it seems that Kim Jong-Un is cracking jokes about himself. Keep thinking, keep talking, keep joking — maybe there's enough lemonade for everyone.

"Hillary Clinton is a 68-year-old woman. And plenty of people hate her for it."

A tendentious headline over at The Washington Post, but it's clickbait I clicked, and I'm strongly clickbait resistant. The column is by Petula Dvorak, who says:

The older, wise woman has rarely had a starring role in the American story.... Plenty has been said about the way American women feel invisible once they reach 60, or 50, or — gack — even 40 today...

Most women in this age bracket remember the day they realized they had become invisible — that moment when the salesman pushing a big-ticket product looked right past them.... when the clerk who was so chatty with the guy in front of them ignores them, when the intern treats them like a nonentity rather than an experienced superior....

The tiny minority of respected, older women... have persisted and struggled and fought to earn positions of power that are usually an inevitable evolution for men of their skill and experience. They get talked over in meetings, interrupted and passed over for promotions, while usually being criticized for their ambition....

I've excerpted the part of the column that makes a lot of sense to me. I'm not buying into the more specific things that charge Clinton-haters with misogyny. In fact, I think it's tremendously important that we resist merging the struggle for women's equality with the political fortune of this one individual, Hillary Clinton.

We need to be able to criticize, mock, savage, and even hate the President of the United States. If doing that to Hillary Clinton is considered misogyny, then the woman is not qualified to be President.

And, ironically, Donald Trump is superbly qualified: Has there ever been a candidate for President who is more qualified on the criterion of criticizability?

"The unfiltered misogyny of Elliot Rodger is extreme, but it’s an indicator of the hatred that remains a stubborn part of our society’s fabric."

"No, #NotAllMen are like Elliot Rodger. But #YesAllWomen reveal the little pieces of him we encounter every single day."

Petula Dvorak weaves an awful lot of themes together. You can tell she knows they don't really fit neatly, but she can't resist doing it anyway. Rodger was a crazy murderer, but somehow his words are an indicator of what we are.

A madman murdered, but — look! — it spawned hashtag activity on Twitter. I can't believe this dead murderer is the lens through which we ought to look at ourselves.

You know, people are reading his 137-page manifesto, taking it seriously as an object of study. We didn't do that with the Unabomber's 35,000-word manifesto...

One of the most widespread manifestations of the craziness of our world is leftism, so a discussion of the psychology of leftism can serve as an introduction to the discussion of the problems of modern society in general....

When we speak of leftists in this article we have in mind mainly socialists, collectivists, “politically correct” types, feminists, gay and disability activists, animal rights activists and the like. But not everyone who is associated with one of these movements is a leftist. What we are trying to get at in discussing leftism is not so much movement or an ideology as a psychological type, or rather a collection of related types....

The two psychological tendencies that underlie modern leftism we call “feelings of inferiority” and “oversocialization.” Feelings of inferiority are characteristic of modern leftism as a whole, while oversocialization is characteristic only of a certain segment of modern leftism; but this segment is highly influential....

Oh, hell. If that came out today, we would be taking it seriously.

"Lots of people are opposed to the kind of late-term abortion that preceded the death of a woman in Maryland last week...."

"But everyone should be opposed to the blatantly illegal violation of her privacy and the exploitation of her death by protesters using it to make their point."

Writes Petula Dvorak in the WaPo.

I don't understand the "blatantly illegal" part. Dvorak is only guessing that someone in the clinic leaked the information, so shouldn't "blatantly" be something like "possibly"? Dvorak's opinion goes beyond the question of whether any law was broken. She portrays what happened to the woman as something intensely private that ought to have been mourned within her circle of family and friends and never disclosed to the rest of us, who have various opinions about a matter of important public concern related to this death.

To shift the topic slightly: Remember the immediate aftermath of the Benghazi attacks, when we kept hearing — from Hillary Clinton and others — that the primary concern is for the families of the men who died.

I think we need to be a little skeptical when we hear the argument this is private, this is for the families.

What belongs securely in the private realm and what should come out into the public light? Consider the old slogan: The personal is political.

When we hear the statement this is private, we need to test its truth with the opposite proposition: This belongs in the public debate. And consider whether we are looking at something that can be divided up into private and public. We can be respectful to the family, we can avoid using the woman's name and photographs and and so forth, and extract the part of the story that properly belongs in the public debate. Those who demand absolute privacy may have complex motives. They may say: What I care about is the very personal suffering of the victim's family and friends. Why would they give voice to less admirable motivations?

"Not wearing hoodies or not wearing skirts isn’t going to change anything."

Key sentence in a column by Petula Dvorak titled "Blog post about sexual assault in D.C. unleashes torrent of women’s stories."

"The U-Va. president drama: Is it the Queen Bee scenario?"

Asks WaPo columnist Petula Dvorak:

The woman doing the firing is a sharp-profiled, sharp-suited corporate leader who has busted chops in the male-dominated world of construction — “The Devil Wears Prada” and a hard hat. Her name, Helen E. Dragas, even sounds Hollywood...

The woman who was fired — and whose reinstatement students and faculty are rallying behind — is U-Va.’s first female president, Teresa Sullivan. She is a beloved, bespectacled professor and respected scholar in a softer discipline — sociology — and was admired for her quiet advocacy of women and open-door policy toward students. She zips around campus in her Smart car and teaches a sociology class....

It is difficult to understand exactly why Dragas called for Sullivan’s resignation....

That’s why the Queen Bee scenario seems to make so much sense here....