RUTHFULLY YOURS

I am no stranger to protesting, having marched so often in the sixties and seventies that I sometimes felt as if I were chanting “Hey, hey, LBJ” in my sleep. But I have come to think over the years that too much demonstrating can get to be a bad habit, like smoking.

Now I’m not talking here about the Gloria Steinems and Michael Moores, for whom protest is so much a way of life they couldn’t exist without it. Or the Madonnas who, like other entertainment stalwarts, have business reasons for constantly reminding us they are still have their “edge” even as they age, liberally dropping the f-bomb and speculating about bombing the White House in the process.

I’m talking about the rest of us, especially, this weekend, a fair percentage of the women of America who descended on our nation’s capital and elsewhere in impressive numbers.

Excuse me if I don’t get it. What exactly was motivating them?

Oh, right, Donald Trump, that vulgar misogynist who bragged about pu**y grabbing (asterisks to dissociate myself from Madonna, even though I’m aging too). I’m going to skip over the obvious – these same women almost all ignored Bill Clinton actually doing (not just mouthing off about) similar activities in the Oval Office, not to mention on numerous other occasions, some of which we know about and some of which we may not. Further, these women didn’t have much to say — no demonstrations, no marches, maybe a few hashtags — when radical Islamists of various stripes regularly kidnapped large numbers of women (Nigerians, Yazidis, Kurds, etc., etc.) from their homes and took them as sex slaves, often beheading them after they finished raping them. Nor did they even pipe up when honor killings were going on in their own backyard.

I could go on. But those are just, shall we say, a few of the minor inconsistencies mixed with, perhaps, a soupçon of cognitive dissonance. Something more must be motivating these hundreds of thousands of women.

Oh, yes, reproductive rights. Break out your clothes hangers. The Donald is going to bring back the era of backroom abortions

Rubbish.

The idea that Trump, given his life and background, is a social conservative is almost silly. His primary issues were — need I reiterate what must be drilled in all our brains — bringing back jobs, lowering personal and corporate taxes, cutting excessive business and environmental regulations, ending illegal immigration, repealing and replacing Obamacare, rebuilding the military, extreme vetting of immigrants from countries where terrorism is prevalent, an America-first foreign policy (no nation building) and revived infrastructure.

On the campaign trail, the social issues were almost completely ignored. I listened to at least twenty of his speeches (probably a lot more) and can’t recall his mentioning same-sex marriage even once. (He was known to be favorable to it years before Obama and Hillary “evolved” on the issue.)

As for abortion, Donald has evolved toward being pro-life to some extent, but so have, apparently, a majority of Americans. They have shown this by their actions. According to a recent report from the Guttmacher Institute, the abortion rate in America has decreased precipitously from 29.3 per 1000 women in 1980 to 14.6 in 2014. Whether this steep decline was caused by the advent of advanced sonograms making the emergent human being more visible and palpable in the womb or because of more accessible birth control (probably both), these facts-on-the-ground are far more important than any legislation or judicial ruling. Abortion is gradually disappearing as fewer and fewer want it. It’s hard to imagine Trump expending any political capital to speed up this process, assuming he wanted to and if it were even possible, both of which are highly unlikely.

So back to square one. What was the purpose of Saturday’s demonstrations? None, I think, meaning nothing substantive in the provable sense. They were propaganda. Basically the protests were media and social media ginned-up events intended to continue opposition to the myth, not the reality, of a Trump administration for political purposes. (Some were even claiming he was about to put people in concentration camps.)

The success of the demonstrations in terms of size attests to the power of mutually reinforced paranoia. This paranoia is of course magnified by the extraordinarily fractured nature of our society with almost everyone living inside their own echo chamber with fears building upon themselves, much in the manner of the Salem Witch Trials.

This makes demonstrations to a great degree pointless because the demonstrators make little attempt to reach out beyond the converted and convince their opponents of the rightness of their cause. If fact, they rarely even try. Instead, they parade their “rightness,” their superiority, to impress themselves, as did the myriad women in the pink pudenda beanies Saturday. They are mostly showing off.

Ironically, these women’s marches are strangely behind the times in today’s America and therefore largely irrelevant, though the participants may not realize or acknowledge it. More women have been going to college than men for several years and are just now surpassing them in law school as well. Hillary Clinton may have lost the election but women are well on track to win the war. Within a very few years, historically we may be living in a matriarchy of sorts. Instead of freaking out over an election, these women should relax and enjoy their coming power. It’s manifested all over the Trump administration already in the persons of Kellyanne Conway (she could run for president herself — and win) and Ivanka Trump (so could she).

Imagine Ivanka allowing her father to backpedal on abortion rights. Not happening.

Which leads me to a final point — people who demonstrate all the time should consider they risk morphing into a collective version of the boy who cried wolf. When there’s something really worth protesting, no one believes them anymore.

Roger L. Simon is an award-winning novelist, Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and co-founder of PJ Media. His latest book is I Know Best: How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic, If It Hasn’t Already. Follow him on Twitter @rogerlsimon

JOINT BASE ANDREWS, Md. — Former President Obama declared to staffers and members of the military that “yes we did, yes we can” after taking his last helicopter ride around the Capitol and before departing for California.

President Trump and first lady Melania Trump walked the Obamas down the Capitol steps after the inauguration, as is customary, and waved as the now-former first couple took off in the Marine helicopter.

It took a spin around the Washington Monument before heading to Andrews, where Obama quipped that he and Michelle have “really been milking this goodbye thing.”

“Some folks didn’t think we could pull it off. There were those who felt that the institutions of power and privilege in this country were too deeply entrenched,” he said. “And yet, all of you came together in small towns and big cities, a whole bunch of you really young, and you decided to believe. And you knocked on doors and you made phone calls, and you talked to your parents who didn’t know how to pronounce Barack Obama.”

“And you got to know each other. And you went into communities that maybe you’d never even thought about visiting. And met people that on the surface seemed completely different than you — who didn’t look like you or talk like you or watch the same TV programs as you. And yet once you started talking to them, it turned out that you had something in common.”

Obama said his change movement was “infused with a sense of hope,” and his staff and supporters “proved the power of hope.”

“And all the amazing things that happened over these last 10 years are really just a testament to you in the same way that when we talk about our amazing military and our men and women in uniform, the military’s not a thing, it’s a group of committed patriots willing to sacrifice everything on our behalf. It works only because of the people in it,” the former president said.

“As cool as the hardware is, and we’ve got cool hardware, as cool as the machines as weapons and satellites are, ultimately it comes down to remarkable people, some of them a lot closer to Malia’s age than mine or Michelle’s. Well, the same thing’s true for our democracy. Our democracy’s not the buildings, it’s not the monuments, it’s you being willing to work to make things better and being willing to listen to each other and argue with each other and come together and knock on doors and make phone calls and treat people with respect.”

We last saw these women – liberal, largely white, and middle- or upper-middle-class – sobbing their eyes out in the early morning hours of November 9. Now here they are again in the streets of D.C., channeling Lena Dunham – not posing for the camera while squatting on a toilet bowl eating cake, but close, giving everybody the finger while chanting obscene, filthy slogans and screaming about how powerful they are and how they’re not going away.

Well, they’re not that powerful, because otherwise they would have carried the election for Hillary. And they certainly aren’t tough – not tough like the many male police officers who make it safe for them to run this way, and that in the streets of our nation’s capital, in order to pretend they are. Not tough like the really tough women either running or helping to run American farms and ranches and an endless variety of other endeavors across this land. Not tough like my immigrant grandmother, who, if she were alive today, would likely be arrested for washing their mouths out with Kirkman’s soap. Not tough like my tough wife, my tough daughter, and my tough granddaughter, who keep kicking my can down the road. Not tough as Mother Teresa was tough or Margaret Thatcher or Joan of Arc was tough, or, God bless her soul, Edith Cavell.

And certainly not tough like “Mad Dog” Mattis, who might just save their sorry butts from some pretty bad hombres even less impressed with them than we should be.

Richard F. Miniter is the author of The Things I Want Most, Random House, BDD. See it here. He lives and writes in the colonial-era hamlet of Stone Ridge, New York; blogs here; and can also be reached at miniterhome@gmail.