Hold the Fire, Hold the Fury People can’t stop talking about Donald Trump. Imagine how pleasant lunch would be if they did. By Joseph Epstein
https://www.wsj.com/articles/hold-the-fire-hold-the-fury-1515458158
I met a friend last week for a 90-minute lunch and, mirabile dictu, the name Donald Trump did not come up. I say that this was miraculous because it is rare to go more than an hour without Mr. Trump’s name cropping up in conversation, just about any conversation. In the lobby of my building, in our elevators, neighbors bring it up. The news—television, print, internet—is riddled with it. In front of the Whole Foods where I sometimes shop, a man in baroque sunglasses wearing a blue-and-white striped cape collects money he claims is for anti-Trump rallies.
Every Friday I meet for lunch with three or four friends from high-school days. Some while ago I instituted at these lunches what I called the No Trump Rule: “No” not in the sense of being against Mr. Trump’s politics but against talking about him at all, for doing so seems to get everyone worked up unduly. The rule, I have to report, has been broken more than the Ten Commandments. No one, apparently, can stop talking about our president.
The problem, for me, is that most of the talk isn’t highly intelligent. Instead it is vituperative, though cloaked in astonishment. Many sentences begin, “Can you believe . . .” Liberals wish to demonstrate their superior virtue by attacking Mr. Trump; conservatives wish to show their strong sense of reality in defending him. Neither are very convincing. Meanwhile the conversation, like flies in the soup, tends to spoil the lunch. CONTINUE AT SITE
Previous presidents have attracted mockery, disgust, hatred. At a brief meeting more than 50 years ago, Mort Sahl joked to me that a planned meeting between President Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson had to be canceled because the translator didn’t show up. I’ve known people who loathed Jimmy Carter, others who have long thought the Clintons irrevocably tainted by scandal. I was once at a dinner party of 12 where everyone at the table had something derisive to say about George W. Bush, until the woman seated at my right remarked that it seemed to her a sadness that the country couldn’t come up with more impressive people than the Clintons and the Bushes to lead the country. CONTINUE AT SITE
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