Yes, it’s come to this. Spending almost all of my time with my very confused dog when I’m not sifting through records, emails and bills, fielding kind calls from old friends, worrying myself sick and feeling guilty and lost, I’ve been looking for sources of hope and inspiration in history, culture and entertainment. (Teddy Roosevelt’s wife and mother died on the same night, in the same house.) When one gets down all the way to “Annie,” things are clearly getting desperate.

That clip above of Andrea McArdle at the Tonys is the start of a playlist that shows the actress singing her signature song 34 times from 1977 to 2022. If you skip to the last one, you’ll discover that she sounds remarkably the same. I once staged that song in a revue: on opening night, the dog playing Sandy, a Malamute- Airedale cross named “String,” barked twice at the end of the song, exactly on cue. She had never done it before, and never did it again, but boy, the audience went nuts.

1. Here’s something positive, sort of: The Great Stupid is clearly worse in great Britain than here so far. The Fitzwilliam Museum, owned by the University of Cambridge, decided that as part of its overhaul of its exhibitions to make them more “inclusive,” it needed to slap a sign by a classic British countryside painting noting that such artwork can stir feelings of “pride towards a homeland” but that “landscape paintings were also always entangled with national identity…The countryside was seen as a direct link to the past, and therefore a true reflection of the essence of a nation.” This, however, makes such art problematical: “The darker side of evoking this nationalist feeling is the implication that only those with a historical tie to the land have a right to belong.” In another part of the collection, visitors were told that portraits of wealthy and uniformed personages “became vital tools in reinforcing the social order of a white ruling class, leaving very little room for representations of people of color, the working classes or other marginalized people.” Such portraits, the museum insists, “were often entangled, in complex ways, with British imperialism and the institution of transatlantic slavery.”

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Eventually I’ll have to stop paying attention to these, I suppose. There are so many of them, they are intensifying and getting worse, and they represent such insulting gaslighting, dishonesty and “it isn’t what it is” propaganda that these does of brain poison wouldn’t be worth condemning if there weren’t so many gullible, easily manipulated citizens lacking critical thinking skills, adequate civic education, and yes, ethics alarms.

Last week I have sensed an uptick in the desperation from the Axis of Unethical Conduct (you know: “the resistance,” Democrats and the mainstream media) as its dream of using the politicized legal system to defeat Donald Trump seems to be fading on all fronts. I found Michael Tomasky’s typical screed in the New Republic refreshingly transparent on that score:
We Have to Beat Donald Trump. Clearly, the Broken Legal System Won’t. To people like Tomasky, the legal system is broken because the Left can’t just declare Trump an enemy of the state, lock him up or at least ban him from running without bothering with little details like evidence, non-partisan, independent prosecutors, and due process.

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