"Point of personal privilege"

Many years ago, when Gaspar Stephens and I were teaching on the same faculty (of one of those Universities of Name of State at Name of Town), we had a colleague – in economics, if I’m remember correctly – that interrupted every faculty meeting at least once with a “point of order” to move the discussion from substance to procedure or a “point of personal privilege” to explain how things ought to, though they probably never could, be – I think. Because: He’d rise, “Point of personal privilege, Mr. Chairman!” and he’d launch off into a tangent that only the most tortured reasoning could relate to the business at hand. Experts, however, in tortured reasoning, Gaspar and I would discuss the point of privilege after the meeting, and we almost always made the connection; moreover, there was usually a principle involved, if only one that an economist would recognize.

I listened to as much of the-next-president-of-the-united-states Donald J. Trump’s speech last night as I could, then I scanned the transcript of the rest and went to bed. Donald J. Trump’s “dark speech,” as more than one pundit has characterized it. But I slept well.

     It’s not that I don’t also believe the world is going to hell in a handbasket. But I don’t expect – at least not immediately – a bloody apocalypse. I’m not sanguine enough to believe civilization will die so quickly and painlessly; we won’t get that kind of one-breath release. Instead, in the West at any rate, we’ll smother each other in cant. It won’t be rapid-fire guns in the hands of dark-skinned young aliens that will destroy our republic but hypocrisy and smuggery in the wheezing throats of old white men – like me!

I wish I could say that knowing that I am part of the problem would shut me up. It won’t. Like most old white men, I am – at the deepest level of my waning intellect* - convinced that I know best, for everyone.

On the other hand: Truth be known, I’d be surprised if any of us knows what is best for us, as a community, as a nation, as a Western alliance, as a planet – or individually. But that’s a truth we can’t believe; it makes sense, but it goes too much against our innards. Besides, as the truth, it might set us free. Even from cant.

     Nobody really wants that.

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* I am 68 years old, and I know I am not as smart as I was when I was 38 years old. Then I also know that we will be making a mistake to elect a president that is as old or older than I am.