It
seems that I was mistaken. I had always reckoned that the first
question recorded in the Bible was Adam's asking Eve, “Is that a
McIntosh or a Delicious?”
Thank goodness for Google for setting me
straight (and thank goodness for the internet, because before its
existence, I suppose I would have only been able to find the
correct answer by renting a hotel room and scanning the Gideon).
It
also turns out that the famous question “Am I my brother's keeper?”
wasn't even the first one on its line of text (Gen. IV, 9), being the
response to the Lord's own question: “Where is Abel thy brother?”*
***
The
two presidential candidates whom I most enthusiastically supported in
the past were:
The
Biblical Cain's favorite candidate, I believe, would have been Herman
Clabbercutt, the fictitious politician created by “TV-comic,
newspaper columnist, humorist-writer,” as the Saturday Review styled him, Roger Price in his 1952
satirical look at politics, I'm for
Me First.
Raising the serious charge that neither the Republican nor the Democratic parties have "cut him in on the take," he calls in his book for the formation of a "Me First Party," a grass-roots movement of greed which (he hopes) will sweep the country.**
Just
short of four decades later, Washington
Post
columnist Jonathan Yardley asserted:
If you take a clinical look at the evolution of these United States over the past couple of decades, it is self-evident that the Me First Political Party won all the elections and that its papers and memorabilia soon will go to the National Archives.***
***
The
other week McKay Coppins of The
Atlantic visited
CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference).**** He reported that
the place to take “the temperature” of the conservative movement
was not in the main auditorium listening to speeches but “The Hub,”
Exhibit
Hall D on the ground floor of the Gaylord National Resort and
Convention Center, where CPAC was being held.
It
was there that young conservatives waded past “booths set up by
right-wing think tanks, media outfits, pressure groups, and
publishers—shopping for future careers.”
And
it was careerism trumping (pun unintended) principles as scads of
“blue-blazered and high-heeled” conservative wannabes began to
bend and bow to the hot wind of Trumpism. Coppins
notes
that
[n]one of the young CPAC-goers I talked to told me definitively that they were undertaking a wholesale career recalibration in response to Trump’s rise. Instead, most seemed like they were hanging back, cautiously assessing the landscape, trying to stay flexible.
However, it took an attendee who wished to remain anonymous who--off the record--said he “noticed
that some of his amateur blogger friends have begun to adopt a more
Trumpian posture lately in hopes of making it big.”
Principles be damned!
The
“Me First Party,” the political movement of greed, is alive and
blue-blazered well.
***
**Saturday
Review, August 4, 1956.
http://www.unz.org/Pub/SaturdayRev-1956aug04-00020
***April
11, 1994.
Quite
coincidentally, in this 1994 column about collecting autographs and
baseball cards, Yardley wrote:
I'll admit that I'd pay a pretty penny for a Babe Ruth or (better yet) a Honus Wagner or (best of all) a Christy Mathewson, but the market in baseball memorabilia has gotten so out of hand that these are now the tastes of a Rockefeller or (God forbid) a Trump.
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