Thanks, Wisconsin, for holding the line

I think I speak for all Americans when I say that it’s good to have some rules and to know, after last week’s primaries, that if, in your adult life, you posted online that Thanksgiving is a celebration of colonialism and should be canceled, you’re not going to win the Democratic nomination for governor, at least not in Wisconsin. These are weird times with the president being off-loaded in a food container, and so many rules and standards have fallen in the past decade, that it’s reassuring to know that Thanksgiving is above reproach and, I assume, Christmas and Memorial Day and a few others.

The Democrat defended her comments, just as a Democrat would, by saying they came during periods of personal growth in her spiritual journey to become the individual she is now, and she only lost by 1%, but still she lost. And she doesn’t deny it.

I assume other standards still stand. Public nudity in broad daylight, for example. Years ago, if a Chief Executive, after a snort of bourbon and branch water, had walked naked across the Rose Garden in a moment of personal growth, the New York Times would not, in deference to the ideals of the young, have published the picture without airbrushing away the privates, but these days if DJT did it just to show that he could get away with it, we’d all have to look and what would it do to the bond market?

But Thanksgiving is still sacred, at least in Wisconsin. I’m from Minnesota, a major producer of turkeys, and this is no small matter.

What’s unsettling to me, an old Democrat, is that it’s Democrats who are trying to maintain standards. I became a Democrat in high school to rebel against my Republican uncles so I could be a writer instead of a carpenter or an engineer or, God forbid, go into business. I went to college and majored in English, which nobody in the family had ever done, and I read Thoreau, who said, “If one advances in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” Which was not what the uncles said. They advised responsibility, common sense, and respect for rules and customs. Eisenhower, in other words. I admired the Kennedys who were glamorous sailors and promised adventure. And now the tables are turned and Republicans are the pirates running riot in the capital and we Democrats are perpetually alarmed and upset, harrumphing, tsk-tsking, shaking our heads, Puritans looking on at the orgy.

Now our Chief is advancing in the direction of his dreams on a daily basis, no messing around with Congress, building a ballroom bigger than the White House, planning a giant arch, putting his name on things, and offering an advance look at his Truth Social posts for a hundred grand. He is a powerful transcendentalist and is setting a powerful example for Republican kids. The improvisational war in the Middle East, the amateur approach to measles, the denial of election results and of the Reflecting Pool screwup. It’s fascinating to watch your parents maintain that the sun rises in the west.

Republican senators are parents and grandparents. They can vote the party line but in the privacy of their own homes they are obliged to teach the young to continue to drive on the right side of the road except on one-way streets, to bathe daily and brush your teeth and floss, to disagree respectfully and not address those who differ as “scumballs.”

The Chief has dominated our lives for a decade by playing on the fact that the news media, given the choice between a UFC cage match and climate change, will choose the cage match. Climate change doesn’t have the visuals. If the cage match is done in the nude, all the better. How about gorillas vs. humans? Back in the 19^th century, public hangings drew enormous crowds. If strangulation became boring, there was always decapitation.

The government could stifle the heresy of climate change as the Church held the line against heliocentrism for centuries, but still the Earth continued to revolve around the sun, and today we teach our children to admire Galileo and Copernicus. The truth will out. Colonizers founded Thanksgiving but we took it over and made it our own. Advance in the direction of your dreams but when you come to a wall, look for a door and if there isn’t one, turn on a light.

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