Trump’s Normal Abnormalcy
The 45th President and the press, part a million.
Wrestling with an issue that we’ve spent a lot of time on over the last nine years, Salon columnist Lucian K. Truscott IV argues, “The problem with reporting on Donald Trump is the press never took him seriously.” He contrasts the way political beat reporting worked for decades:
You didn’t have to cover American politics very long to realize that politicians lied, prevaricated and said things that were demonstrably untrue all the time. It didn’t take much longer to learn that you weren’t there to report their lies. You were there to report what politicians said. You were, in effect, a stenographer. Lies, if they were remarked upon at all, were the domain of pundits.
As a political reporter, you could point to gaffes, however. Remember gaffes? A good part of the job of a political journalist was to endure hours and days and weeks and months of tedium on the campaign trail waiting for that ever-hoped-for moment when the candidate would make a gaffe and you were there to witness it and write about it. A candidate would sometimes say what we now call “the quiet part out loud,” expressing his real view that cutting taxes actually did affect the deficit, rather than give his talking point that tax cuts would raise revenues instead of adding to the deficit. A candidate might misspeak, or, as Edmund Muskie was said to have done in New Hampshire while running in the 1972 Democratic primary, break down in tears right there in front of the press, and everyone would run to the phones to call in this groundbreaking political moment that was certain to bury his candidacy, which it did.
If you were lucky after days and weeks and months on the road, you might be there when a candidate makes a mistake, saying he was in Des Moines when he was actually in Detroit. If a candidate told a lie out loud, it wouldn’t be called that, of course, because the press didn’t accuse politicians of lying back then. It would be called a “distortion” or even a “falsehood,” but never a lie. The way you couched the statement that wasn’t true would indicate the seriousness of its falsity. If a politician claimed that he had never been unfaithful to his wife, you would repeat that, but then maybe indicate that he had been seen “in the company of” another woman once or twice, hinting at his unfaithfulness. Incredibly, it once took a photograph of presidential candidate Gary Hart with Donna Rice, a young campaign worker, sitting on his lap, to disprove Hart’s denial that he was a “womanizer.” But just as incredibly, he wasn’t called a liar for claiming faithfulness that wasn’t there.
And then, Trump entered the picture, and things changed.
Those were the “before” days. It boggles the mind that we have been in the “now” days for more than nine years, since the twice-divorced platinum playboy descended the golden escalator in Trump Tower in 2015 and, unburdened by the more than two dozen women who had accused him of sexual harassment and sexual assault, greeted the political press who had gathered, they thought, to report that Donald Trump had announced his candidacy for president.
He did much, much more than that, beginning with his lies about immigrants: “They are bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime and they’re rapists.” Who was this buffoon? was the reaction of the national media. No one had ever announced a political campaign like this.
As with so many things, the old rules weren’t designed for someone so outrageously outside the normal and our institutions were slow to catch up. Or never did.
A few months later, I wrote this for the Village Voice about Trump: “What we are watching every day is ‘pageant Trump,’ and it’s why the national political press has been so confused. Covering him is like covering the Victoria’s Secret fashion show: It’s supposed to be hot and sexy and fun and irresistible, but it turns out to be just a bunch of pneumatic posing – all feathers and sequins and nylon and cheap lace from China, as sexless as one of Trump’s silent wives. Donald Trump is the Wonderbra of American politics. He pushes everything Up and Out and In Your Face. But you know what’s left when the Wonderbra comes off, don’t you? Donald Trump sure as hell does.”
I wrote that in January of 2016. The national media certainly didn’t know what to make of Trump, and neither did I, because at the same time, I saw him as a buffoon, the rest of the press saw him, and treated him like a uniquely “American” figure in politics, with his fake hair and his fake tan and his supermodel wife and his exaggerations and outrageous statements nobody in American politics had ever made before.
See if how I described it way back then sounds familiar: “Trump says something outrageous, and his fans parrot him with outrage of their own. Then he escalates the outrage. He says John McCain is a pansy, and the pundits are shocked, but then it’s okay. Then he wants to register Muslims, and the pundits haul out their pocket Constitutions and wave them around, and then that’s okay. He promises to bring back waterboarding, and the pundits loose the dread words, George W. Bush, at him like poison arrows — and waterboarding goes back down the memory hole. He wants to ban all immigration by Muslims, and a couple of Ivy League law professors write op-eds saying it might not be all that illegal, and once again the pundits put down their pens.”
He recounts for the next several paragraphs how Trump continued to spin wild lies—and utter nonsense—to this day with the mainstream press rarely calling them out as such. Jumping ahead to the present:
The New York Times this week finally published a front-page story calling attention to Trump’s age and pointing out how frequently Trump “has seemed confused, forgetful, incoherent or disconnected from reality lately,” complete with actual unhinged quotes from his rallies and a linguistic statistical analysis of Trump’s speech patterns and most frequently used exaggerations and lies. But it’s the next sentence in the Times story that, for me at least, says it all: Speaking of Trump’s erratic speech on the campaign trail, the Times said, “In fact, it happens so often these days that it no longer even generates much attention.”
Nine long years in, the man who began his first campaign for president as a buffoon has become a caricature of a buffoon, but we, including the political press, are all so used to it by now that the New York Times calling attention to Trump’s obvious unfitness for office became a story covered by the rest of the political press. Why? Because the Times and much of the rest of the national media played such a large role in normalizing behavior that once would have been disqualifying on the day it occurred.
While Truscott was calling out this phenomenon from almost the beginning, he doesn’t let himself off the hook:
The orange-haired buffoon who first ran for president in 2015 showed us over the years who he was, and still much of the press let him slide, perhaps because his entire political party not only let these outrages slide, they celebrated him for them. A discussion of how 70 million Americans could have followed Donald Trump’s long descent through one disqualifying act after another — he’s been criminally convicted of multiple crimes by a jury of his peers, remember? — is one for another day. In 2016, I called him a “toy fascist.” He was the real thing, not a toy. I mistook a buffoon for a monster, and I will be eternally sorry for that.
While I fully agree with Truscott on his major premise—that the press has treated Trump differently in some ways than it would a “normal” candidate, with the ironic impact of normalizing him—I remain skeptical of his conclusion: that it much mattered. The fact of the matter is that the New York Times, Washington Post, and other prestige outlets did, in fact, assign beat reporters to all three Trump campaigns and to the Trump White House. Said reporters dutifully reported pretty much everything Trump said. They were, in fact, stenographers. All of the gaffes and “saying the quiet part out loud” were covered. Many of them on the front page.
And, lord knows, the pundits pundited. They routinely called him a liar and unfit for the presidency. This, incidentally, included pundits who had traditionally been associated with the Republican Party and the conservative movement.
Over time, it became difficult to distinguish the reporters from the pundits. While she’s caught a lot of grief from the left, I never once read a report from Maggie Haberman and had the slightest doubt that she held Trump in utter contempt. Which is very much not the way things were done before Trump.
The notion that the things Trump said and did that made him manifestly unfit for office were somehow kept secret by the press is just nonsense. Everyone reading this blog were exposed to each and every one of the outrages.
Those who decided that Trump was fit for office—or, at least, preferable to Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris—did so using motivated reasoning, not blissful ignorance. Most were simply dyed-in-the-wool Republicans who were going to vote for their party’s nominee regardless. Some wanted to poke a finger in the eye of The Establishment. Some were just happy that someone was Saying The Things That Needed to Be Said or hated the same people they did. But none of them did so without knowing at least the broad outlines of who he was.
Consumers of right wing media were endlessly told that Trump was an uber successful businessman who would bring his golden touch to government. They were not told he was a carnival barker, but they were told how corrupt Hillary Clinton was. And in 2016 and 2020 Trump was not subjected to the kind of media pack attack that pushed Joe Biden out this summer, or the obsessive coverage of Clinton’s emails. Yes, the voters ultimately decide who will get their support, but they are at the mercy of the political reporters and pundits who frame the coverage of politicians. The media’s perception of Gary Hart as a womanizer and Howard Dean as a shouting lunatic did them both in. Unfortunately, the political media found Trump entertaining instead of corrupt and unfit, and 9 years later, they STILL dismiss his ongoing efforts to undermine faith in elections and instead focus on the horse race.
I think where the press might have failed is not being more direct in how much of Trump’s conduct has been actually damaging. News articles dutifully report his transgressions, but we only see the “this means he’s violating the law” in opinion pieces, which are easily dismissed as being partisan.
For example, today in the New York Times we see: Trump Holds Up Transition Process, Skirting Ethics and Fund-Raising Rules
“Skirting” and “Rules” are both softer ways of saying Trump is violating the law, AGAIN.
From the article:
These are REQUIREMENTS. BY LAW. He’s breaking the law. Again.
That should read, “I mistook a monster for a buffoon.” At any rate, a monster can be a buffoon, too, and monstrously buffoonish while he’s at it.
Ultimately, I am coming to think you are right James. I agree that the press didn’t do the US any favors. And I am not sure that it matters given the deeply populist aspect of his base, the structures of our political systems, and the shift in our media infrastructure.
Ultimately the national newspaper-first press is an elite institution. So they don’t speak to the majority of non-college-educated voters (and, in particular, White non-college-educated voters).
The loss of real local media (especially newspapers) and the rise of the conservative media ecosystem means that the way a lot of America encounters elite news media is as punching bags and “the enemy.”
I dont think the way they covered him would have mattered that much. Trump voters dont read the NYT that much or if they do its just to confirm how awful liberals are. What I do think hurt was the sheer volume of coverage he received. It certainly seemed like he got a lot more than anyone else. A lot of that showcased how awful he is but GOP voters liked that so it was more like free advertising than reporting.
Steve
I’ve complained about this in the past here. I’ll just say that Trump couldn’t have done it alone. He had tons of help from Republicans, the rightwing media, Russia despite his huge flaws. It was also a system that had been rotting for decades. Expecting the press to be able to counter all of that is actually asking a lot.
I don’t think the press failure has been in its coverage of Trump. Trump is who Trump is and though he is getting worse, it’s been a change in magnitude, not in kind.
The press failure has been in its coverage of this “motivated reasoning” by Trump’s enablers and supporters. Whether Trump is a buffoon or a monster, those who have chosen to get into bed with him have been told they are still decent people of integrity. Putting party over country is “just politics” and not destabilizing to national unity. Sticking it to the Establishment doesn’t have any deleterious effect on social norms. “Things That Need to Be Said” don’t actually need to be said when they are demonstrably untrue. Racism and xenophobia are reasonable perspectives in the face of “economic uncertainty.”
Trump’s damage to our country has been as a catalyst. Trump’s nuclear grade shamelessness has killed shame for everyone else, especially his sycophants. Trump made it okay to be racist, corrupt, mendacious, and hateful, because he is all those things, everybody knows he is all those things, yet he rose to the Presidency of the United States of America.
And the press has no incentive to call 46-47% of the population out on bad behavior. So, the press abdicates it’s Fourth Estate role as the watchdog for a well-functioning democracy.
Well, reporters are suppose to report. Columnist and pundits are suppose to “discuss” what is reported. But when the reporters started giving their two-cents, what they reported turned out to be “out of context”. Now when anti-Trumper actually listens or reads the transcript of what Trump said at Charlottesville, they not only learn the truth but see how the “reporters” lied by shaping what they “reported”. And this makes people feel cheated/deceived. A feeling it is hard for the bad actor to overcome and restore trust.
I suppose we could wonder of the situation if they’d just reported what Trump said factually with context and then maybe reported a documented alternative instead of going for the clickbait stories. But then they wanted to get paid which the man who put tabloid journalism on the map knows how to exploit.
@Scott F.: In a “well functioning democracy,” even the racist, corrupt, mendacious, and hateful have the right to try to sway opinion to their view. Democracy doesn’t guarantee the government will be colorblind, honest, truthful, or loving.
What a naval-gazing self-indictment by Truscott.
So, before Trump, dishonesty by politicians didn’t matter. Reporters were on the prowl for a “gaffe” or screwup that could be used to get a story that would label the person who made the gaffe unfit for office or otherwise be politically problematic for them. Howard Dean’s yell comes to mind as a poster child for this.
Then Trump comes in, and he is completely shameless and a walking gaffe machine. The prowling for gaffes doesn’t work on him and hasn’t largely worked on him, except that Trump’s behavior has netted him a very low ceiling in terms of support. Bizarrely, Truscott (and he’s not alone) believes that the reason Trump is not labeled unfit by the vast majority of the body politic is due to getting some kind of a pass from the media. As James points out, this is not remotely true.
Truscott seems to be one reporter of many who still suffers from the delusion that the media can control and shape narratives like it used to do, and he’s disappointed that the power he used to wield hasn’t worked on Trump.
Even more strident reporting about Trump that diverges even further from the traditional “stenographer” role would have little effect – and even be counterproductive – because Trump supporters and others don’t listen to people like Truscott. The more reporters move away from the stenographer role to open anti-Trump advocacy, the less people will listen to what they have to say, except for those who already agree with them.
The real problem here—if it is one—is the death of the information and narrative gate-keeping thanks to the internet. This is Truscott’s real lament. The result is the balkanization of the media as media companies are forced by economic reality to chase discrete market segments. While the right-wing media ecosystem was the vanguard for this move, it is hardly alone at this point.
@just nutha:
I disagree. Revered Founding Father Thomas Jefferson wrote that a well-informed electorate is a prerequisite to democracy.
There are matters of opinion and there are matters of fact. And yes, the racist, corrupt, mendacious, and hateful have every right to their own opinions and they’re free to try to influence as they might. But, those opinions don’t become facts without evidence simply by virtue of being repeated often by people with a megaphone.
So, we are seeing every day now how US democracy is absolutely not well-functioning in this political moment, in part because the media landscape is shattered and bespoke, while any arbiter of truth – be they credentialed journalists, or scientists, or technical experts – has their credibility challenged by people who have utterly failed to sway people with their opinions alone and who have chosen instead to make up facts to help with the swaying. JD Vance has said this very thing explicitly, his statement has been factually reported, and yet he’s still going to be invited on TV to be interviewed respectfully, while claiming he is being censored when he’s fact checked live.
This is a failure. We know why it’s happening – press norms, media incentives, news source silos, etc. – but it’s a failure nonetheless. The “well-informed” prerequisite is not being met and we see quite clearly that Jefferson was right.
Like it or not, the “press” in its present form is all we have as arbiters of truth. And our democracy can’t work in a post-truth world. If we can’t all agree that the earth is round, that the sky is blue, that climate change is happening, that Haitians aren’t racially predisposed to steal other people’s pets and eat them, that tiki-torch marchers chanting “we won’t be replaced” aren’t very fine people no matter the context, or that someone can’t be racist, corrupt, mendacious, or hateful, while maintaining their standing as a decent, reasonable person, then well-functioning democracy is out of our reach.
The Bulwark has several newsletters, J V Last this morning treats several topics beginning with normalizing Trump:
“Bulwark”
There are url’s in the reference piece that are not shown as links in the blockquote.
@steve: maybe around mid-2021, an MSM journalist, whose name escapes me now, posted on Twitter something like, “Come on, admit it. You miss Donald Trump, too. Everything’s so boring now.” He was shocked at the pushback he got from ordinary Twitter users telling him that they absolutely did not miss Trump, and preferred a world of boring politics to the chaos, anger, and fear sown under Trump.
Truscott’s article describes the boredom that political reporters typically endure, so I can imagine that the “excitement” of Trump is a welcome respite for them. But to ordinary people, this isn’t a game or some form of entertainment. This is our lives, our families, our futures being deeply harmed by this man. And it’s shameful that the press so rarely reports on the actual impact of his actions on ordinary people. To add to Jen’s comment, they may report his words or actions, but they don’t tell us their significance. For example, why does it matter that a presidential transition is held up? What will the actual impact of deporting millions of people be?
@Andy:
Trump’s secret sauce is that he loves attention, any sort of attention. He does outrageous stuff that used to be disqualifying when other pols did it, he laps it up, revels in criticism, people getting outraged by his behavior, he loves it.
It’s like in WWE wrestling, you can be a “face” (hero) or “heel” (villain), as long as you get plenty of “heat” (attention) either is fine.
People get overwhelmed by him being constantly in the news, in our faces, and it gets normalized, as J V Last says in the Bulwark.
ETA: The way to get attention is to say stuff that is outlandish, which, attention whore, he does, constantly. So because people eventually resort to tuning it out, tuning it out = normalized.
So what’s nice about Project 2025 is it’s extreme enough to get plenty of attention. Same for “mass deportation now!”
I’m with Kamala, “Turn the Page!” Enough already!
@charontwo:
JV Last goes on to write what “we” can do about the human tendency to normalize, however little it might seem to matter.
While I agree with JVL that normalization can’t be stopped, I believe we can do more than just slow an inexorable drift to maximal abnormality. We can set direction toward new norms – norms that honor shared values, common ground, and honest information. We are just going to need to be as relentless in that pursuit as those who would abuse our natural tendencies to adapt or re-anchor. No matter how tired we get.
@steve:
That’s all you need. Most voters don’t take in all that much news beyond sports, weather and a few headlines, regardless of party affiliation.
@Scott F.: Dr. Joyner made the assertion that the argument you share with Truscott is in persuasive. I concur–appeals to Jefferson notwithstanding. The press was probably less activist than it could (should?? meh… I dunno) have been and certainly less than you wanted it to be, but “the problem” is not as much that the press “sided” with racism, corruption, mendacity, and hatred as that 47% of the population did. That’s not on the press, that’s on the 47%. Democracy functions to see that said 47% get heard. The Founders functioned to guarantee that said 47% mattered more. That’s, also, not on the press.
@charontwo:
Even worse. Just like in WWE, some characters are more popular as heels than as faces. Trump succeeds because he’s a heel not in spite of it. The system is profoundly dysfunctional and has been for a long time. The Bulwark people are only just catching up.
@MarkedMan: Yes, exactly–which is why it’s a problem that the NYT uses squish words in their headlines, like “skirt” and “rules” rather than “Trump violates ethics law again.” “Skirting rules” conveys a level of concern roughly equal to not using recycling bins properly, and that’s what the average person will take away from that headline.
@Scott F.:
I don’t know whether to put this statement in the “easier said than done” category or the “that boat has already sailed” one. Things such as the 3/5 compromise put the lie to shared values and common ground going back to The Founders. Our nation was founded on moral compromises and going along to get along. Norms that honor the virtues your proposal seems seem pretty remote given the cohorts such concurrence will need to embrace.
Or are you thinking that your can create a nation that will encourage large-scale self-deportation? If so, you might want to side with the MAGAts and subsequently emigrate.
So apparently there is a documentary on the Jan 6 insurrection that will get a very limited theater release then go to streaming:
“64 Days”
“Link”
snip
snip
snip
@charontwo:
Yep, for Trump, the worst thing is being ignored. Being talked about, even negatively, feeds him. Ignoring him is not going to happen while he’s a Presidential candidate, but even when he wasn’t, so many people (especially in the pundit/media class) could not help themselves.
And the reality is that Trump, especially his outrages, is great for media organizations. The viewership and dollars speak for themselves on this score.
@Andy:
I doubt this will be Harris’ next campaign ad.
If Trump would have been able to overturn the 2020 election, the media would have normalized that, and they would be horse-racing a totally bogus 2024 election, with Trump’s ‘reasonable’ defenders blaming his opponents for having created the situation. What Truscott might be trying to say is that the media has normalized how precarious things are right now if you think that being normal about normal things like accepting loss is important.
@Matt Bernius:
I see what you and James mean on an acute level, narrowly focused on Trump’s base. But Trump could not win with just his base. Vis a vis the broader electorate, the media’s laziness and general mediocrity has been a gift to Trump. To wit:
So, yes, the editorial focus of the elite press does matter a lot and does have widespread influence on the general zeitgeist. The legacy media could make decisions that would result in “lies” or “old” or “felon” or “Russia” or “rape” the word Gallup poll respondents most associate with Trump. Just like journalists once attached “emails” to Hillary and “old” to Biden.
An American need not be a subscriber to the New York Times to have its slant seep into his psyche.
And this is why I applaud Kamala Harris for observing what happened to Hillary and Biden and thus declining to play the game the way the corporate media insists she should. In the Trump era, pundits have not been judicious brokers. Democrats should have recognized this long ago instead of falling for the “liberal media” bait-and-switch.
@just nutha:
We are writing past each other. Let me come in again.
First, I’m concurring with Dr. Joyner. I agree when he writes that reporters dutifully reported what Trump said and did. They didn’t hide who he was. And I agree with Dr. Joyner that there was ample punditry that routinely called Trump a liar and unfit for the presidency.
Also, I concur with @Andy that Truscott’s piece is navel-gazing self-indictment. I really don’t care about the points Truscott is making about himself and the press, because the central premise is if we’d only known Trump was a monster and not a buffoon sooner, things might have happened differently. But, the first point – we’ve known for a long time what Trump is – makes Truscott’s “if we’d only” premise unsupportable.
I’m not calling for a more activist press. I am challenging passivity in the face of what Andy calls the death of the information and narrative gate-keeping thanks to the internet. YES, the problem is the 47% who are siding with racism, corruption, mendacity, and hatred. Our difference of opinion seems to be that I don’t believe that all or most of those 47% came to believe what they do organically. They weren’t born hateful or xenophobic. They were taught these things. And often taught by people who were serving themselves. And pointing this out IS, at least in part, on the press.
Finally, I am not suggesting expelling or encouraging self-deportation of those people who disagree with me. We can have a well-functioning democracy with differences of opinion, even profound ones. (See Liz Cheney)
There are objective truths and demonstrable lies. There is common understanding broadly of what is Good and Bad. People can be taught the difference. If people can learn to be hateful, they can also learn that being hateful is shameful in a civilized society. (Back in their day, the KKK wore hoods, so they could show their faces at church and around town. I want to make the hateful to feel they need to put their hoods back on.)
@charontwo:
Just once I would like someone to point out that this country has +330 million people living in it. That only roughly 71% of the adult population is eligible to vote. Out of those that actually do register to vote only about 37% or so have bothered to vote consistently the last few elections. So you’re talking about a fragment of a fragment of the country who are voting. That is NOT half the country by any reasonable metric. Last I saw around 12% of the USA thinks the world is flat. Should we take them seriously? Every two bit brutal hitler wannabe dictator including Hitler himself had millions and millions of followers. Does that automatically make their actions ordinary?
Has there ever been a time when the media covered a right wing movement seriously?
I think you would have to go back to David Duke or Pat Buchanan, and even then it was mostly “these clowns are going to be an embarrassment for the respectable Republicans” rather than “why do these white supremacists have so much support, and what would happen if their policies were implemented?”
Iran-Contra, the Clinton conspiracy theories, the Brooks Brothers riot, the Tea Party, QAnon, Palin and Trump— all treated like an amusing bit of color.
The crazy parts of the right wing got a boost of respectability from Fox and talk radio, and it has fundamentally changed the nature of the political conversation in this country.
Of course, if you go back further, you will get to the Yellow Journalism era, where news stories were often just made up.
I wonder if the semi-functioning journalism between Yellow Journalism and the Reagan years was more of a weird aberration than the norm. And even during that period, the media was memory-holing the support for Nazis among the wealthy and privileged before WW2. And then McCarthyism.
Did the media really only function for a few months around Watergate?
@Matt: several folks on Threads pointed out that this interaction (on 60 Minutes) is more evidence that Harris has learned how to handle the media. The question set her up to say something memorable like “basket of deplorables” about Trump supporters to drive a negative news cycle, and she didn’t fall for the trap. Instead, she said something like, “I’m just glad that so many people understand that these comments by Trump are wrong.”
@Matt:
I would call the actions “not unusual.” I do not see a vast distinction “ordinary” vs. “not unusual.” Authoritarian followers account for roughly 30% of populations everywhere, and not all Republicans are in that category, some just habitually vote R without giving it much thought. And saying “half the country” instead of “half the voters” is, to me, just sloppy language and not such a big deal.
Hitler was named chancellor subsequent to the NSDAP receiving roughly 1/3 of the votes, I forget the exact pct. but IIRC it was a plurality. The Communists and other leftist parties also got a lot of votes, so I don’t draw much in the way of significance from the NSDAP vote share, as they were not the only extremist votes.
There is a lot of craziness on right wing media and a lot of people are falling for it, people watching Newsmax or reading 4Chan or whatever get gradually seduced into nuttiness.
I see that somebody still hasn’t watched the actual video of what Trump said in Charlottesville, which is exactly as the press reported it and in context, too. The best one can claim is that Trump was mistaken about who was at the rallies, but that’s being overly generous for a known racist.
@Scott F.:
Yes. That may well be the impasse. I will accept that people are taught those negative qualities, but I also assert that those qualities are, according to the theology to which I subscribe, the default inclinations of humanity. If they weren’t, it wouldn’t be so time consuming to teach children to not yield to those inclinations.
You are welcome to reject my beliefs. I frequently hope I’m wrong, but 72 years of observation leave me disabused of the notion that I am. Lily Tomlin is right–the problem with being cynical is that it’s hard to keep up.