Amateur Hour

Do you remember Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour? Remember  it was sponsored by Geritol, the cure for “iron-poor tired blood?” America has become a nation of ambulance chasers, professional pundits who turn up on Fox as well as CNN, with their pre-rehearsed sanctimony and long faces they take right to the bank. The vote recount is now going on in Arizona. Cyber Ninjas one of the companies hired is apparently owned by a "stop the steal" advocate, but you can easily find pre-packaged ideologies on the left. The attitude of smug self-congratulatory indignation fuels the mentality of the lynch mob. You might not agree with Brad Raffensberger, the Republican secretary of state who upheld the Georgia vote and who's  now arguing for initiatives which will adversely affect minority voters, but his very mode of discourse takes the higher ground—a position which has lost its charisma in the current environment. Ditto  Liz Cheney whose conservative positions might be anathema to liberals, but who has stood up to the Retrumplicans with dignity and great courage under fire. The geri of Geritol refers to geriatric and perhaps what America needs is a form of political Geritol which will bring back the youthful and idealistic belief in the principles of enlightened discourse in which opposing sides really listen to each other. Right now gerrymandering is going to be countered by a dose of the same. The two parties are like the angry divorced couple fighting over the children. How would King Solomon have handled the fighting over this baby?

Read "MAGA and the Coronavirus" by Francis Levy, The

East Hampton Star