A Republican friend thrust his phone at me this morning so I could read about what an asshole Obama was as a teenager. They don't publish those kinds of "truths" in my newspapers, certainly don't discuss those kinds of things on my cable news shows. (I cut this particular Republican some slack, because he refers to me as "nice, for a flaming liberal," even though I am neither.)
The truth, my only truth, I suppose, is that I don't really care how much of an asshole Obama was when he was a teenager. If you're going to be an asshole, the teenage years are certainly a good time for it. Life is a series of trade-offs, I think. What we lose in skin elasticity we gain, theoretically, in the wisdom of age. Theoretically. And possibly some measure of generosity and a modicum of good judgment and even a small dose of sobriety -- within reason -- that just isn't all that cool when you're 17.
The year I turned 50, I began to reconnect with some old friends from high school. Facebook was being hijacked by folks my age, and the half-century milestone seemed to spur us on. I thought it was pretty cool, even though my kids did not. (They mocked me because one time -- seriously, ONE TIME! -- I mistakenly referred to it as "The Facebook.") Eventually, the kids moved on to more hip things like Snapchat and Instagram ("the Instagram"?) and let us have our old-fashioned cyber fun. Those were heady times, reconnecting with people who had been so much a part of my daily life so long ago, people I had not seen, sometimes not even thought about, for over 30 years. My friend list grew; for the first time in my life, I was impressed with my social life.
Fast forward nine years. We are knocking on the door of 60 now, and we are older than our parents were when we knew each other. Yikes. One of my old friends sent me a message the other day. I knew him when we were 17, but only to the extent we can know anybody when we are 17. I know him at 59, but only to the extent you can know a person from his pictures, or his posted thoughts, or the pictures of his family. Oddly, though, I think I know him better now, because, well, like I said, with the loss of skin elasticity comes at least a bit of wisdom. We have journeyed through lots of years together, my high school friends and I, even though we have been apart. My friend and I agreed it was a good thing there had not been security cameras in our high school newspaper office. Enough said. That was a long time ago.
My point is, and I've probably said this once or twice in the last week or so, that it's okay to be an asshole when you're 17. It's even okay, sometimes, to be an asshole when you're all grown up. As long as you own it and apologize for it. It is not okay, ever, to be, well, whatever the fifty-something year old Kavanaugh was at his Senate hearings, no matter what happened or didn't happen when he was a teenager. A grown man tossing questions back at his questioners, sneering at them, weeping openly as he reminisced about summer nights with Tobin and Squee and, to quote Matt Damon, Donkey Dong Doug. As if a place on the Supreme Court bench was his birthright, and damn all those Communist Hillary lovers trying to pull it out from under him.
Seriously? Almost every 17 year old I have ever known would have behaved better. He threatened us, all of us, that what goes around comes around. This, as of tomorrow, is our new swing vote.
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