Are there any grown-ups left in America?
It is possible that we have become unserious people.
And not in a good way. In fact, the person who made the most sense and struck me as the most grown up during the past week was the man who took off his pants at a school board meeting in Dripping Springs, Texas.
His name was James Akers, and he stood before the board and said he did not like being told what to do by the government or higher-ups. He said his place of work required him to wear a shirt and tie, which he stripped off. He said he broke the speed limit, drove through stop signs and parked in a handicapped zone on his way to appearing before the board.
Then he pulled down his pants. He was wearing a swimsuit, although it was not Dripping Wet.
Some of the reporting on Akers seemed to miss his meaning. He was not protesting mask mandates but instead was attempting to illustrate the folly of not following everyday rules.
There was no James Akers in Cheshire Wednesday night, when a small group of anti-masking carbon life forms interrupted an information session with their semi-intelligible bellowing.
Gov. Ned Lamont and other state officials had to beat a hasty retreat to their cars, not because they feared violence but because the members of the Great Cheshire Smattering wanted to get closer and closer, lowing like cattle, with no masks and — dollars to doughnuts — no vaccination for anything, including hoof and mouth disease.
On their Facebook page, they declared this a victory. One woman wrote that she had heard about maskwearing children getting warts on their noses.
Ma’am, some of those children are pretty definitely witches. I mean, that’s just science.
We screwed up the climate while having fun and making money. The human race may not last to the end of this century, but don’t bring that up because we’re watching WWE Summer Slam (which 2 million people sought out on pay per view despite its outcome having been predetermined by focus groups.)
We screwed up Afghanistan. Sure, go ahead and blame Biden. This is his Bay of Pigs. But don’t ignore the larger truth. You’d need, as one political analyst said, an electron microscope to find a congressional
We screwed up civil order when a segment of those screaming brats arrived at the U.S. Capitol to stage what looked like a Why Methamphetamine and Paintball Don’t Mix pageant
race in the last 20 years in which Afghanistan policy was a major factor. We have become people who start wars and immediately stop paying attention to them.
Wars are too serious. Geopolitics is too hard. Unless you count Mansoor vs. Jinder Mahal at WWE Raw, in which case, yes, that was definitely illegal stomping after the superkick.
We screwed up democracy when large unserious swathes of the electorate treated the final vote like a Dairy Queen that was out of their favorite flavor. No Raspberry Fudge Bliss? I don’t accept that! Waaaaaaaah! We screwed up democracy even worse when one of the two political parties treated those bawling kids like they had a legitimate point.
We screwed up civil order when a segment of those screaming brats arrived at the U.S. Capitol to stage what looked like a Why Methamphetamine and Paintball Don’t Mix pageant. Overgrown kids in costumes trying to kill and maim cops and lawmakers. The Republican leaders of the House and Senate, after a few hours of blustering, pronounced themselves disinclined to ground anybody.
We even screwed up pet ownership. Andrew Cuomo left his dog, Captain, at the governor’s residence in Albany while he decamped to his sister’s home in Westchester County. He asked if the staffers would take care of Captain. You can’t do that. Especially to the only creature on Earth still willing to accept your caresses.
There are starting to be (admittedly spotty) reports of unserious owners who adopted pandemic pets now trying to return them, now that walking Sarge or Petunia simply interferes with meeting the gang for laughs at Happy Hour.
You know who takes care of his pets? Panta Petrovic, who has been living in a cave in Serbia for almost 20 years. He sleeps on a pile of hay and has no plumbing. I mean, it’s a cave. On the side of a steep mountain.
He has goats and chickens and 30-odd dogs and cats and Mara, his one true love, a wild boar whom he pulled out of the tangled brush as a piglet and who now outweighs him by several hundred pounds. And people preen about their rescue dogs.
“I love her and she listens to me,” he told Agence France-Presse. “There is no money that can buy such a thing.”
He had to build a shack because Serbian wolves were coming for his fourlegged friends.
You know what Petrovic did the other day?
He got the COVID vaccine. He even wants the third booster shot. He said the virus “does not pick. It will come here, to my cave, too.”
What does it say about the depletion of adult behavior that the two best roles models of the week are a Serbian hermit and a guy who addressed the local school board in his swim trunks?
I just hope Mara is serious about that relationship.
Colin McEnroe’s column appears every Sunday, his newsletter comes out every Thursday and you can hear his radio show every weekday on WNPR 90.5. Email him at colin@ctpublic.org. Sign up for his newsletter at http://bit.ly/colinmcenroe.