A Modest Proposal to Survive the 487 Days Till the Election. (But Who’s Counting?) - The New York Times

“The nature of social media and the expectation that you would share your emotions the minute you have those emotions has caused all the rules of personal respect to be violated,” he told me. “Today there is no respect and there are no rules.”

So let’s cease the tweeting and throw away the remote. What precisely will we miss?

The Progress Iowa Corn Feed on July 14? We can live without it. The Dickinson County Summer Sizzler in Northern Iowa? I have written about national politics for more than a third of a century and can say with certainty that this vital event at the Expo building in Spirit Lake can be skipped without penalty. How about Londonderry Old Home Days from August 14 to 19 near Derry, N.H.? Ignore it, even though this is the 120th time this event is being held and local singers are scheduled to put on quite a show at the town common bandstand.

I’ve been to scores of these kinds of things, and truly, no candidate says anything meaningful at them — not about health care, not about national security, the stuff of debates — except maybe to ask for an extra helping of pie. So I have real credibility when I say that there is no peril in skipping the Sept. 21 Polk County, Iowa, Democrats’Steak Fry, where candidates will trek to the Des Moines Water Works Park and demean themselves by cooking steaks on a giant barbecue and giving cornpone speeches.

Some 27 years ago, a young Bill Clinton — the high priest of the hokey, wearing a washed-out plaid shirt that he wouldn’t be caught dead in today — told the Steak Fry crowd that he was “happier than a hog in slop” and that George H.W. Bush, his 1992 rival but his great friend in their post-presidential years, “squeals like a pig under a gate.” Mr. Clinton now has a near-vegan diet and is not likely to be tending the grill or even employing pork images.

We could all use a change in our news consumption as thoroughgoing as the 42nd president’s diet. Let’s tune in again after the Steak Fry. As Swift said in his Modest Proposal, I offer this advice with “no other motive than the public good of my country.”

Swift took refuge in satire because real life was too arduous to bear. I’m just going to take a vacation.

David M. Shribman, a former Times political writer, was the executive editor of The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for 16 years.

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