So the president made an appearance on Jay Leno the other night. Because he refuses to answer questions for the White House press corps, it was covered like news. Turns out he doesn’t know what events are involved in the Winter Olympics (give him a pass on that), and he also doesn’t know what American ports are on the Gulf of Mexico:

If we don’t deepen our ports all along the Gulf — places like Charleston, South Carolina, or Savannah, Georgia, or Jacksonville, Florida — if we don’t do that, those ships are going to go someplace else. And we’ll lose jobs. Businesses won’t locate here.

But just to show you how beaten down even the new media are about this kind of appalling ignorance, the story reported by Hotair was about how the Associated Press covered for him, inserting a forgiving parenthetical where nothing indicated it should be. This after four years of relentlessly tracking the Obamateurism of the Week. (Do take the time to read them. Eye opening and dismaying.)

[Something grim has just happened. The post was complete except for the insertion of links. I made one small change in link assignment and two-thirds of the post disappeared, even though I have scrupulously saved every change. Should I be paranoid? Well, at least I can ask for your help…]

My point was that the elite of educational credentials are actually proud of what they don’t know about the dross they see as the the rest of the nation — except when it embarrasses them personally. For example, writers for the New York Times haven’t even read the Bible, which is, you know, one of those educational checkboxes they’d like to get credit for, especially given their utter contempt for it.

Two other things most of the so-called elite don’t know anymore. History and geography. I’m old enough to remember that in the sixties, history was jettisoned in favor of Social Studies, where we learned about Pedro and Paula in Ecuador, and their fun with colorfully costumed gauchos. Nothing about the long march of time that brought us from Sumerians to the Cold War, even though we were taught to hide under our desks as the Cold War reached its zenith. (NB. Made up for this in prep school, thanks to one “Tank” Rankin. American and Modern European AP history. Two years of study, argument, and learning. Brutal.)

Geography. Fugeddabout it. What little I learned I got from my dad and his insistent fill in the states puzzle of the United States, dinnertime drilling on the state and national capitals, and the lovely detail of the National Geographic globe in the family library, referenced every time a nation showed up in the news. My dad could, given the name of a state, tell you exactly what other states bounded it. He could do almost as well with nations in the world he grew up in. Today, my wife and I, playing along with Cash Cab, hang our heads on many geographic questions. But we do know that Charleston and Savannah aren’t gulf ports. We screw up on questions about the Cascade Mountains and the course of the Colorado River.

I’m here to tell you that the most prestigious and expensive educations in the United States are no guarantee of knowing anything about the 50 states of the union, their history, and their way of life. The map above is instructive. The map is of the places Obama has lived during his time in America. West coast, Northeast, and one urban megalopolis in the middle. Most of the powers in the mainstream media are even more limited. They know everything from New England to the Middle Atlantic states. And they don’t give a damn about anywhere else, unless they have contracts in L.A.

Go ahead. Find your local Ivy know it all and quiz him or her about the states in the middle. They don’t know squat and they don’t care, either. Press them and they’ll be proud they know nothing of Indiana, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Alabama, Nebraska, Iowa, Ohio, and Texas. They’re just better than that. Like our president. It was clear from the start that his American experience consisted of a tiny fraction of the nation he purported to speak for. I made a suggestion early in his candidacy about how to correct his deficit.

Yeah, I know he’s criss-crossed the nation as a candidate and president on campaign planes and Air Force One. But I submit he’s a victim of a syndrome I described long ago with respect to New York taxicabs. You just don’t look outside. You get in, announce your destination, and emerge at the end of the ride with no real sense of distance travelled. To this day, I — who have taken many many cabrides in New York City — have absolutely no sense of New York geography. Air Force One is the ultimate taxicab.

Much the same is true of elite education regarding history. I recall that Obama pronounced his lack of interest in history courses as a young man (Help me find the links, please…) But if you have no sense of the continuum, the backbone of human history writ large, you have no sense of context. I’m quite sure Obama has a sense of the last 150 to 250 years, but his context is the propaganda of grievance and social injustice, not the grand sweep of human moral maturation. He’s got a community college associates degree in the greatest story on earth. Whether the diploma says Columbia or Harvard. Why he’s such a pitifully ignorant and small minded man.

Why I’ll close on another link. I trust you to get it without quotes or expatiating comments. The title says most of what needs to be said. The Front Man. The article text says the rest.

There’s a site that actually tracks the breasts of Fox News women. Okay. That’s fine. But get it right at least. They say that Andrea Tantaros, Kimberly Guilfoyle, and weather girl Maria Molina are all three natural “C” cups. Liberal bias writ large.

Kimberley Guilfoyle does look like a natural “C” cup. Very nice.

Maria Molina does look to be natural. She’s too shy not to be. But she’s no “C” cup. She’s a natural double D.

Andrea Tantaros, however, is definitely a double D and by no means natural.

Just trying to keep things honest.

People.

But as I said, breasts are nice things. Wondrous, beautiful things.

P.S. I asked Lake to show this Youtube, but apparently he’s a pure breast man. The meaning of this video is that legs are nice things too.

I just asked Lake, who knows more about how to install Youtubes here than I do, to insert a gorgeous video of The Hours:

It is gorgeous, but not as incandescently as this version, which I wrote about months ago.

The Hours.

Thing is, to me, it’s the greatest video I’ve ever seen. Why I’m violating my prime deerhound rule not to repeat Instapunk. I’m inviting you all to experience divinity. What I said before:

INSISTENCE REDUX. I had to comment on the inauguration. I’ve done so. But I want to end the day with something more important and lasting.

Commenters reacted with appreciation for the Philip Glass tour de force, The Hours. I listened to every piece recommended, and I thank everyone who recommended. They were all good, some extraordinary. Yet I found myself coming back to The Hours, which I remind you I found by accident, and in particular the video of its performance.

I keep watching it, and somehow the music, the performer, and the video have become one in my mind, a transcendent gestalt I may never be able to separate into component parts. Sorry. Not trying to be opaque. The music is genius. The pianist is inspired. And the video of this performance is greater than the music or the pianist. It’s a glimpse of perfection.

Why I’m redirecting your attention in the wake of yesterday’s buffoonish celebration of empty self. Watch THIS thing again. And especially all of you who think I don’t understand the unique strengths of womanhood at its best.

You have to watch it full screen in hi-def. That’s when you start to feel her hands. Not young hands. Weathered but not old either. They’ve washed dishes, changed diapers, maybe darned socks, felt for where it hurts with exquisite sensitivity, rushed quivering to the face at awful news, plied the pen to do the books and write the checks, and most likely tended a garden or picked a crop.

We can’t see her face. But we get to hear her heart. Everything has happened to her and nothing will ever make her stop.

We see her in profile. What is the piano? This grand Steinway is no phallic symbol. Its curves are female, its voice mightier than sex. The insistence is not prayer, not mother love, not carnal desire. It’s not even what we call vitality. It’s the ferocity of life as we’re supposed to live it, not in passive appreciation but in the hungry perseverant never ever subsiding passion which fills every hour with the life that IS what we mean when we speak of God.

So I keep looking at her hands. Where the music is coming from. Her frail bent back. Where the power is coming from. And Glass, presumably, is being channeled through her bun.

Regardless, none of this art will ever be brought to you by the collective action sponsored by the government.

All right, maybe I’m a little bit crazy right now. But if I weren’t, I’d be concerned that maybe I’m a little bit crazy in the aftermath of a catastrophic proof that the country as a whole has gone completely batshit crazy.

I’m not crazy anymore. Doesn’t matter what the country is doing. We will survive. The meaning of this music.

P.S. Can’t stop watching this video (the linked one, not the one shown). Keep finding new things. The keyboard mirror is fascinating, perhaps the key to understanding. Observe that the long shot of the pianist is dark and she is on the left. In the close up mirror shots, it’s the darkened mirror image that’s on the left, and the full color hands playing on the right. I’m reminded of Plato’s Cave, where all life is but a reflected shadow of a reality we cannot see. In this case it’s our pianist who’s the reflection, connecting with the divine reality behind the scenes. The hands on the right must be the hands of God. Works for me.

My wife liked a show called The Closer, which was about a ruthless detective who always got a confession and usually got justice as she personally conceived it, in defiance of political correctness, California liberalism, and the tyranny of bureaucratic mercy for the wicked.

That show has been replaced by a sequel called Major Crimes, which is indubitably kindler and gentler. And which has just committed a major crime of its own in direct contravention to its forebear.

The major crime I speak of is incitement to murder. A show that begins with the shooting of an unarmed Hispanic in a white man’s home, immediately references Trayvon Martin by name, and ends with an act of vigilante murder, as the father of the slain man shoots his son’s killer in the head.

This is an outrage on two levels. First because it exemplifies the worst of “ripped from the headlines” exploitation so long typical of Law & Order and all its depraved spawn. Which, in the current explosive racial environment, can’t help but be deemed an irresponsible drama grenade tossed by so-called entertainment into the tinder of contemporary events. If someone shoots George Zimmerman hereafter, how we will we not see this episode of a TV show invoked as a provocation and excuse? As it should be. The producers, the director, the editors, and the actors who said the lines are all culpable. We were told three, maybe four, times that anyone who shoots an intruder in a California home is not legally culpable for anything. This is almost certainly not true. According to California’s “castle doctrine,” the burden of proof in a home shooting is transferred to the prosecution, but that does not mean no murder prosecution is possible. In a case like the one dramatized, where there is a clear personal motive that can be demonstrated, the law offers resort, civilly even if the criminal prosecution wimps out. The show was a lie.

Second level. Isn’t Hollywood supposed to care about its own artistic integrity and legacy? Truth is, The Closer was kind of a breakthrough police drama. The protagonist, Deputy Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson, was about as far from being an admirable authority figure as you can get. Selfish, narcissistic, manipulative, emotionally dishonest, and absolutely without scruples in her pursuit of suspects, she was a triumph of charm and brains over character. That was the basis of the series. In fact, the last two years of the show detailed her flailing attempts to escape the consequences of what amounted to police vigilantism during her tenure in the LAPD.

The reason people watched was to experience the pull between her polarities. You loved her when her twisted genius could see the truth everyone else couldn’t. You hated her when she found every way possible to ignore the consequences of her own actions, even with her husband and parents. You wondered how anyone could put up with her for a moment. But then you remembered that she was lovely, beguiling, convincing, and smart as a whip, able to find an exit not only for her own latest screwup but those of the ones whose loyalty she required.

Then came Major Crimes. Brenda replaced by a kind of drab female Christ, endlessly patient and ultimately tolerant. Not lovely, not charismatic, not anything but perfect and brainy, even if she lacked Brenda’s lightning flashes into the heart of evil.

What’s the result? Amazingly, something much much worse than anything ever shown on The Closer. A real-life setup for real-life crime. Brenda was the argument for the rule of law, a loose cannon who needed reining in. Her successor is somehow the argument for feeling transcending law, which has been expressly translated in the new series into a preference for plea deals, selective prosecution, and understanding in place of moral judgment.

No, they never mentioned the words “stand your ground.” But they caved in dramatically to the cheapest finale any cop show can ever have. When the law has proven its impotence, the vigilante will have his day. And all that’s left to the perfect liberal is a certain measured clucking. Awwww.

The place where I’m invoking Raebert’s teeth. Those who have no strong moral convictions are bound to feel the surprise of gnashing teeth eventually. Not a promise. Just a reality of life.

Think you can outrun conscience? Little known secret — not even greyhounds are reliably faster than an angry deerhound. It’s just the way of things.

And I know that will bother you more than anything else… Teeth of the past bite harder, deeper, and more fatally.

I don’t even have a photograph of him anymore. The most important person in my life. My paternal grandfather. Boppa.

Getting ahead of myself here, as usual. Listening to Limbaugh today reminded me. He was observing some anniversary of his relationship with his grandfather, the lawyer patriarch from whom he gets his name. Yeah. Limbaugh is a numeral III, just like me.

In all the years, I’ve never talked about Boppa much. He was the original rflaird. He’s a writing challenge I’ve never been up to. Just telling the facts sounds like you’re repeating exaggerated family mythology. So you just don’t say anything instead.

When I met him, he was 64 going on dead. He’d had skin cancer on his back. They prescribed radiology treatment. A doctor left him under the beam too long. Way too long. It burned a hole in his back the size of a man’s fist. His backbone was exposed. A wound that could never heal. It had to be cleaned and dressed and bandaged every day for the rest of his life.

When he did finally die at age 82, his surgeon and chief medical attendant, a man most regarded as a shallow, materialistic jerk, broke down and cried. “You’ll never know,” he said, “how much pain that man was in every single moment of his life.” He was the one who had the job of picking decaying fragments of bone from Boppa’s continually open wound.

As a child, all I knew was that Boppa’s back was off limits. But he was still a great grandfather. He was the picture perfect grandfather of movies, children’s lit, and TV, endlessly patient, wise, funny, and, yes, handsome. His hair was Snow White — had been, mysteriously, since the age of 21 — and he had a close clipped mustache just as white.

He was also dapper. Despite his wound, he put on a suit and tie every day. He walked with a cane, not because he was feeble but because any fall would be a disaster. He made it a personal accent. Once he ran off a thug who was assaulting a woman by brandishing that cane on a sidewalk of Salem. Family said, “Boppa, how could you?” He said, “I just did what I could.”

Oh. The name. Two children. My dad and his sister. She had kids first. The eldest of hers couldn’t say grandpa. It came out Boppa. All six of his grandchildren called him Boppa from then on.

There was a twinkle in his eye. Thing is, he was pretty much of a superhero. There’s no other good explanation for how you can keep on living and thriving with the kind of injury he sustained. (No. He didn’t sue. He forgave the radiologist his error.)

Why I haven’t written much. The facts of his life come off too much like the backstory of a graphic novel. He was that extraordinary. He was the second youngest of six sons. His father wanted him to take over the family’s million dollar business of shoe manufacturing. Boppa said no. He was a chemist by trade and he launched one of the first sulphur dyeing businesses in the United States. He was pulling in $50,000 a week when WWI started and a German chemist in his employ burned the whole plant to the ground.

Declare bankruptcy and get on with it, right? No. Boppa repaid every creditor in full. It took him almost to his retirement from duPont to do that. Yes, he was a top chemist at duPont. He was a troubleshooter. You have a dangerous problem? We send in rflaird. A lead ethyl plant during WWII. Something went wrong. Boppa evacuated the plant immediately and went in alone to shut down the process.

In those days, lead ethyl poisoning was 100 percent fatal. Insanity followed by death. Boppa finished his job, drove home, and went insane. He was crouched in a closet, waving a gun, when his equally brilliant brother, a Philadelphia society doctor, arrived with his own unique concoction to cure his little brother after a high speed chase that got him from Philly to Salem in 45 minutes.

Improbable, eh? Why I haven’t written much about these dead titans. Except that I’ve been myself the beneficiary of the superhero doctor of the story.

You see, I got bitten in the face by a dog when I was eight. I scar malignantly. A registered nurse at the scene warned my mother that I would be scarred for life across my nose and cheek. So we trundled home and my mother pulled out the last bottle anywhere of my great uncle John’s salve called Arkase. She applied it every day and the nurse nearly dropped her teeth when she saw me a month later with no sign of a scar.

I know. Family stories aren’t supposed to be true. But what do you do when they are? The story of my grandfather’s back is absolutely true and it’s the most dire of them all. We spent a lot of time together because my sister had eye problems and went regularly to Camden and Philly with my mother and Grandma. That left Boppa and me alone together. We talked. He didn’t treat me like an idiot child. He approached me as if I were an intelligent person who didn’t know that much yet.

The end of stories like this is grim. I got sent off to prep school when I was thirteen. At Spring Break I came home, just as Boppa was going into the hospital. I saw him off, but my parents didn’t want me to visit him. They insisted, demanded, forbade me. I insisted, demanded, and won. But they had been right.

To this day I cannot clearly recollect what I saw in that hospital bed. Within the space of 24 hours, all the ravages of pain and suffering my Boppa had withstood for twenty years descended. What I saw was an ancient, barely living fossil, on his back.

I shouldn’t have gone to the hospital. That night, I was the one who heard the phone ring. I woke my dad, though he told me later I didn’t, that his dad had come to him first to say goodbye.

A comforting lie to a son? Well, maybe. But I had my own moment. I went to the third floor of Boppa’s house the day of the funeral — funerals have never done much for me — and I was looking down on the yard when I felt Boppa with me. (This is no writing trick. I teared up as I was writing that.) we had a brief communion. I promised him I would be a good boy. I failed to keep my promise, but I made it sincerely on that day.

Already gone on too long. Never told you about the role Boppa played in my more than excellent education. Or the example he set with his impalement on a wrought iron fence when he was five… Yes, he still had a scar.

But leave that for another day. What’s left? The portrait of Boppa’s mother above. She died when he was four. My dad painted the picture from a picture. All Boppa had was a dream of himself and his mother on a train. He could see her hand and that’s all he had left of her in his life.

They’re all gone now. My father, my mother, all my grandparents, all our dogs and cats. I wish they all wanted to greet me. But I fear I’ve gone too far. Also, I had a dream about Boppa when I was in my thirties. I was trying SO HARD to reach him, but he was already busy with a new life. “You don’t need me anymore,” he said. He was a doctor this time, and funny looking. Kindest thing any dead relative has ever done for me.

Know what? I don’t believe it. Boppa was just giving me a vote of confidence. Hardly anyone has ever done that.

He’s been giving us fits. Won’t eat except when he is offered people food. Won’t get up in the morning. Won’t go out unless he is led, yanked, pulled downstairs. But when he’s asleep, he looks so sweet.

Don’t you agree?

P.S. By the way, here’s a picture of his other front paw.