Kevin D. Williamson writes for The Dispatch about the spectacle of setting up a UFC match on the White House lawn.
It does not matter whether you live in a trailer park or a brick ranch house or something more grand and getting grander, it is all the same: Tornado bait is tornado bait. When the Trump administration announced that it was staging a UFC fight on the South Lawn of the White House, I knew what I was seeing. It is as familiar to me as the taste of canned Ranch Style Beans on cornbread or the smell of cigarette smoke soaking into Dacron-upholstered office furniture and slick tallowy well-yellowed linoleum in the grim waiting rooms outside those weepy Al-Anon meetings my mother dragged me to for a while because she couldn’t afford a babysitter. I know my people. My people know what they like. And they will have what they like even if it harelips the pope—especially if it harelips the pope.
My son is graduating from middle school next week.1 He tells me about the kids who get in trouble at school for bullying other kids and using racial epithets. Those kids are loud and proud supporters of the president and they emulate his style. Like our president, they are pugilists and punching people, or the verbal equivalent, is what they love. Perhaps that’s why the UFC thing is so fitting for the White House lawn. This is a far cry from the Easter Egg Rolls I used to attend as a child there.
It’s shameful that these are the examples we have of leadership for our children. This is what we traded for when we decided character no longer mattered. Now kids who imitate the leaders of our country have behavioral problems.
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He gets his first full summer vacation since starting his school career due to switching from the year-round calendar to traditional for high school. ↩︎
