Green Room Dialogues Toward Cultural Relevance

But there are questions about Foster, now, that any reasonable person-- much less any reasonable employer-- should want to have answered.-- The Ringer, in a voluble chorus against a franchise over-valuing marketing skills against trauma we never used to discuss.

Ross Douthat’s appearance on Rose was the first that I became aware of him as a vivacious, enthusiastic analyst with an optimistic outlook. The link I selected for my viewers to stream is arbitrary as opposed to the actual segment with its few sentences I recall, the show where Ross deconstructs Harvard as a pulsating progressive mass with a model libertarian overlay. It was not so much what Ross said during the interview, as much as his engagement with his answer. It caught my attention, and that was it. It was not enough for me to rush to Amazon to purchase his book, or resubscribe to The New York Times. I am more interested in The Wall Street Journal at present, but that his tweet about Michel Houelleberg's byline, his underwhelming column about the ruling elite of yesteryear, his brazen assertion on Twitter about membership within that elite not being all that privileged as it’s cracked up to be, led me to do some background research on his biography. Ross Douthat and Niall Ferguson, in combination, with a little Sullivan in the mix, as you gasp that my virulence against homosexual identity momentarily makes allowances for this argument, represents a reasonable approximation of a writer’s life I thought I could sustain. All of them have scheduled appearances on television, and this is something I’ve no idea how to do, nor have the work product to make the effort feasible. Is this an agent’s responsibility? A publicist’s? Arcane details within the supposition that knowledge acquisition on camera doesn’t lend itself easily to mnemonic retention. I have been on television, purely for gawker purposes, but never as an analyst with access, to serve as a conduit, or to engage as an equal. Krauthammer, although he is no longer around to ask, presumably needed assistance in his daily living activities and was still able to manage. I no longer know now if the biggest joke is that which I have played on myself. Still, one receives the sense that Houelleberg is disingenuous in his appreciation of our Trump transformation. The president has thoroughly exhausted me and everyone else, and under Douthat’s playful assertion that we’re living a libertarian West Wing in realtime these days, I rather interjected that it is unfair that I can barely keep myself afloat within the labyrinth of a punitive public housing system while he almost had his career handed to him on a silver platter. This is not the “fusion” I envisioned in being able to go toe to toe with someone like Kathleen Parker. This is why I created this account in the first place, to reach across the divide, whether to a conventional moderate such as Parker, or Ross as her slightly more contrarian alter ego. The opposition to his Wasp nostalgia on social media was misguided, although that opposition to his prominence is the only battlefield Ross engages for his salary, but that doesn’t mean he defined his parameters all too clearly: JFK certainly emulated what being part and parcel of American royalty entails. His Catholicism was virtually an afterthought, and Truman, as the heir to Roosevelt’s deified mantle, didn’t ascend upwards in national politics with a silver spoon in his mouth, and the historical lens through which we view LBJ isn’t necessarily urbane, polished. Johnson was a local color Texan who played the ends against the means, cementing the Medicare disaster we live with today.