A modest request from an older citizen

The Column: 02.27.25

Please tell me that our current Occupant is not going to take over the Metropolitan Opera and the Lincoln Memorial and the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown and that the Met will continue to do opera and not celebrity tribute shows and Lincoln’s statue will not be given a movable jaw to speak posts from Truth Social and Cooperstown will not switch to enshrining owners of ball clubs.

Let him have the Kennedy Center and turn it into a country pop dinner theater with a motel and casino but please let the Smithsonian continue keeping history and not be purged of history the Occupant doesn’t care for.

Please tell me he does not have the power to rename the Pacific the Terrific Ocean, nor the power to change the rules of baseball to include blocking and tackling. If the National Park Service puts oil derricks in Yellowstone and Yosemite and the Statue of Liberty is made movable and is programmed to shimmy and twirl a baton, that’s okay; I seldom go to New York Harbor or whatever he decides he’d rather call it.

I am among the secular leftist minority who did not vote for him, but 49% of the American people did and God has anointed him to make the country great and we misfits have to get with the program, so if he wishes to eliminate the word “diversity” from the language and also its synonyms — variety, variable, complex, plural, divergent — or words that sound like it — university, adversity, courtesy, artistry, Traverse City — I have to accept this. Take it slow, Mr. Current, one thing at a time. Gulf of America is fine but let us get used to it and leave the names of the 50 states as they are for now. If Indiana should become Melania next week or New Hampshire become Trumpshire, it has an unsettling effect and a person starts to wonder, “Will east still be east tomorrow or will it be south and will I ask Siri to direct me to my office downtown and I’ll wind up at a recycling center in a distant suburb?”

The Occupant likes to capitalize letters as a way of emphasizing the importance of words he likes, such as Mandate and Greatest, which leads me to believe he may have changes in mind for English grammar as a way of making it American since the British can no longer be considered reliable allies in the America First movement so why should they own our language, the language we’ve made “hot”?

I’m sure he’d like to eliminate the past tense and make everything present and give the presidency the sole power to speak in the future tense. The past tense only leads to pissy arguments about factuality that get us nowhere. Now is what matters, not then. Then is gone, wake up to today.

And what is the use of “that” and “which” and “their” and “they’re” and “there”? Let the Department of Grammatical Efficiency purge it — big waste of time and it just gives them elitists a chance to make there corrections their and make us feel inferior. Which is absurd. That is that, from now on. Dump all apostrophes.

Pronouns. Big problem. The answer is to simplify. No more plural pronouns and eliminate pronoun/noun disagreement, one more place where elitist copyeditors, most of them transexuals, like to stick there No. 2 pencil in and correct you. No more of them and those and ours and let’s have singular pronouns from now on and I say, “Let it be him. If God is male, that should be good enough for you.”

I (who am a He) am prepared to go along with all of this and if he wants to make Tennessee Tiffany I say, “God bless him,” and a few baseball owners in Cooperstown is okay too and if the Met wishes to revise “Aida” so Aida and Radames do not die in the tomb, it is a launching pad from which they climb into a rocket and fly to Mars to sing “Y.M.C.A.” and play golf and live forever, okay by me, but a movable talking Lincoln, let’s wait on that, okay? He looks good, sitting, hands on the arms of his chair, silent, thinking things over.

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