With Mr. Denton on Doomsday

On more than one occasion, I have witnessed a passing car sporting the vanity license plate: DOOMSDAY. Ordinarily, it would have gone by unnoticed—just one among many vehicles traveling up and down the street where I live. But this automobile’s driver craved attention with his ear-splitting display of four-wheel barbarism. A ridiculously loud and revving engine with popping gunshot sounds doesn’t exactly complement one’s morning coffee and is no more pleasing at lunch or dinnertime. It’s off-putting morning, noon, and night, which, I suppose, is the point.

Doomsday it is. At least that’s the way it feels around here with the countless speed racers violating multiple New York City ordinances as they make their daily rounds. Then there are all those noisy electric scooters and their various epigones—many of them illegal and often operated by illegals—whizzing past stop signs and through red lights. Further adding to Doomsday is the $4.4 billion retail crime spree underway in the Big Apple. Every damn thing is locked up in stores because the thieves know they won’t ever be. There is this palpable sense of chaos and lawlessness run amok, which I’ve never experienced before—at this omnipresent level anyway. Local politicians appear uninterested in the problems or unwilling to address them in any meaningful way.

I have an idea. In the Batman TV series, starring the indomitable Adam West, I recall an episode where the Joker captured Batman and Robin in a large fish net. Why don’t the big retailers that are being robbed blind place big nets by their entrances and exits and snare the shoplifters on their way out? Then lift them up in the air and encourage the non-criminal patrons to taunt them and, if available, toss rotten fruit at them. When all is said and done, ship the offenders en masse to an undisclosed wilderness location equipped, of course, with survival kits donated by Wal-Mart, Target, and Home Depot. Sounds like a plan, no?

Moving on to our national dignity crisis—self-respect sacrificed on the altar of ridiculousness and obeisance to unworthy people. As a youth, I had a poster on my bedroom wall with this Native American proverb: “To give dignity to man is above all else.” Sadly, a vastly different kind of tribal mentality has descended on much of the populace, particularly those who are addicted to social media and can’t get enough of bloviating talking heads, sky-is-falling commentators, and loony conspiracists. The ones, too, who also vote in primaries and supply us with the worst general-election candidates imaginable.

In fact, their names are legion—men and women who have cast dignity away to kiss Trump’s keister come hell or high water. Exhibit A: Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham, and Mike Lee. And on Side B: the minions who have been telling us that old Joe Biden was sharp as a tack—better than ever in fact—when are eyes, ears, and common sense told us otherwise. The best president since FDR—come on, man! It’s retirement village time, they now say. It takes a village, I guess.

Several months ago, the Los Angeles Times published an opinion column entitled, “Age Matters. Which Is Why Biden’s Age is his Superpower.” Around the same time, the New York Times ran the piece, “For Joe Biden, What Seems Like Age Might Instead Be Style.” You can’t make this stuff up. Did these authors actually believe what they were saying? If they did, they ought to find another line of work. Self-respect takes yet another back seat in 2024.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump repeatedly proves that he is meshuggeneh. His tweets, or whatever they are now called, are creepy crazy and certifiably looney tunes. I have little doubt the man, too, is suffering from cognitive decline, but it is hard to decipher in an individual who is bona fide fruit loops. Permit me now to turn my attention elsewhere—to an alternative to the two, manifestly unfit for the presidency, geriatrics. A third-party candidate. This option has had a worm devour part of his brain and—heaving a sigh of relief here—sampled barbecued goat and not barbecued dog cooked on a spit in Patagonia. “So many skeletons in my closet,” the man says. Now, I will concede, that’s quite an honest admission, but hardly refreshingly so.

In closing, there’s an old Kamalan proverb worth mentioning: “It’s time for us to do what we have been doing. And that time is every day.” Yes, then, I will just sit back and recall the better and saner days when Michael Dukakis was the Democratic presidential nominee and selected Senator Lloyd Bentsen as his running mate—two reasonable adults from a more reasonable and dignified time. I remember voting for them with pride at having done my civic duty. I wish that time were every day, but it’s not. See all of the above.