Category Archives: Manners

A Note to Gillette

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In re you new ad—The last time I shaved was the morning of our wedding day.

When Mrs. Hoge and I first met, I had just returned from active duty as an Army Reservist, so my chin whiskers were gone, but my mustache was intact. By the time we met again I had regrown my beard, and it remained intact throughout our courtship. However, she suggested that I shave off everything except my mustache for the wedding.

Our wedding was scheduled for the Saturday after Thanksgiving in the small Indiana town where her grandparents lived. I drove her up from Nashville on the weekend before and went back to Tennessee on Sunday to go to work on Monday. I shaved my beard on Monday. On Wednesday, I drove up to Indiana. Connie greeted me at the door with a big hug and kiss. After a prolonged hug, she stepped back with a quizzical look on her face. After a few seconds, she spoke, and the first words out of her mouth were, “Grow it back after the wedding.”

Something Positive About President Trump

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Karol Markowicz has a an item in the NY Post titled How the Trump presidency made me a better American. She writes,

After the election, I was as dazed and confused as anyone in the political-media bubble. To understand what happened, I devoured reporting about Trump voters and sought to understand them.

I wasn’t some liberal, mind you. I had worked for years in Republican politics. Yet I hadn’t known any Trump primary voters. I didn’t know his fans, his base.

Reading their concerns was eye-opening. They weren’t stupid, and they weren’t hateful. Mainstream politicians had ignored them for so long that they took a wild chance on the reality-TV star from Queens.

So another New York newspaper writer didn’t know anyone in flyover country who voted for the wrong candidate. The big difference between Ms. Markowicz in 2016 and Pauline Kael in 1972 is that Ms. Markowicz has tried to learn about those other people. Learning about their concerns and watching how Donald Trump has responded to his constituency has changed her point of view on politics.

To wit, Trump has made me less partisan. I’ve disagreed with plenty of policies of Republican presidents in the past, but I still always felt the need to defend GOP administrations; they were on “my team.”

The beauty, and the curse, of the Trump administration is that the man at the top is on his own team. I can see clearly the good and the bad that his office produces, and there is no need to sugarcoat any of it. Tax cut, good. Tariffs, bad. I can praise the first, criticize the second and stay true to my own beliefs.

His presidency also helped me refine which issues truly matter to me and which only appeared to matter because “my party” happened to be pushing them.

Read the whole thing, all the way to the last paragraph—

There must be a way to move beyond Trump and our culture’s ugliness, which transcends one presidency. Americans can resolve to be better people, instead of racing to the bottom. We won’t always have Trump to blame for our bad behavior. It might be best to start improving it now.

Yeah. It might.