Well, it’s finally here – 2024, the year of the bitch!
Rest assured, sisters, this has nothing to do with any gender-based slur, rather a recognition of the prevalent national pastime of whining.
I say national because on trips to Sicily, Scotland and Ireland in recent years, the whine level barely surpassed a whisper.
Our era of complaint and victimhood inarguably amped up when Donald Trump glided down the escalator and announced his candidacy for U.S. President on June 16, 2015.
Bloomsday, no less! Perhaps, Mr. Trump is a secret James Joyce admirer. Now there’s something for conspiracy theorists to sink their teeth into. One can only imagine the man from Queens and Mr. Putin exchanging Molly Bloom quotes, or breaking into a few sober bars of Finnegans Wake during late night calls.
The White House.
In no way am I accusing Mr. Trump of inventing the national whine. The No-Nothings beat him to it by a solid century and a half. But it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the most influential president since Franklin Roosevelt legitimized the art of complaint.
Even my Uzbekistani barber, a once cheerful man, has grown dour and can launch into a persecution-laced rant that could leave me hairless if I didn’t keep a close eye on the mirror.
Does Mr. Trump not realize the damage he’s doing to the national mood? What’s his problem anyway? he was born with a platinum spoon in his mouth, got free digs in the White House for four years, and now lives down in sunny Mar-a-Lago with his beautiful wife. Yet he never stops whining.
Why doesn’t Melania order him to swear off social media, go to the pub a couple of nights a week, and lighten up my barber’s mood? Just the thought of four more years is enough to send me to Uzbekistan.
When I broached this matter to my Black 47 co-founder, Chris Byrne, he advised with Brooklyn logic, “Just don’t listen to him.”
Whatever happened to the American ideal of the tall, silent stranger blowing into town on a palomino, and sorting things out? I never heard a single whine out of Gary Cooper, Clint Eastwood, or The Duke, all paragons of silent fortitude.
But that means no more television. And what am I going to do when Slow Horses returns in the fall?
There are a lot of downsides to President Biden, but give the man his due - he’s eminently ignorable. Come to think of it, neither of these guys takes a drop of the hard. Barack Obama could drink both of them under the table. Now that’s a scary thought.
But forgive me, I’m straying into politics, and it’s a long way to November. No, I want to deal with the whine, and why it seems to be everywhere. I know, the Mets, the Jets, the Giants, the Yankees and Manchester United all suck, but there’s so much else to be grateful for.
Whatever happened to the American ideal of the tall, silent stranger blowing into town on a palomino, and sorting things out? I never heard a single whine out of Gary Cooper, Clint Eastwood, or The Duke, all paragons of silent fortitude.
Where did we go wrong? I mean, both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times agree that the country is thriving economically. In many ways we’ve never had it so good.
Wages are up, unemployment is down, new immigrants are lining up to do the jobs we want no part of. We even pulled together and came through a pandemic that could have floored us.
Financial markets are booming, 401(Ks) have rebounded, the big companies are raking in profits as per usual. You can listen to Taylor Swift on Spotify without paying her a dime, and though the outside world is in crisis, we merely supply weapons to the antagonists now. We’re not sacrificing our young as in previous generations.
And yet we bitch on. Maybe it’s time to smell the roses; they were still blooming in Manhattan on Christmas Day, the product of climate change, no doubt, but even that eventual cataclysm can be prevented should we pitch in one more time and do something about it.
But that would take listening to each other, and we don’t have time for that. We’re too busy whining while being pushed around the chessboard, the willing pawns of self-serving politicians.
In the meantime, who’d like to open a couple of good Irish pubs within strolling distance of Mar-a-Lago and the White House? Rumor has it that certain politicians may soon be in need of a pick-me-up.
