My Impromptus column today has an unusual heading: “The end of boys and girls, &c.” The Interlochen Arts Camp in Michigan — a wonderful place — is doing away with boys and girls in this sense: No longer will the camp have such designations as “Junior Boys” and “Junior Girls,” “High School Boys” and “High School Girls.” Instead, it will have “Junior Pines” and “High School Pines,” “Junior Lakeside” and “High School Lakeside,” etc. This is because the terms “boys” and “girls” cannot reflect “the full diversity” of campers’ “gender identities,” says Interlochen.
As I say in my column, I am not so much opposed as bewildered. Do you ever feel that the world has passed you by? My critics call me a “dinosaur.” Increasingly, I’m afraid they are right.
(It usually goes like this: My critics on the left call me a “dinosaur” because I’m a conservative, not a progressive. My critics on the right call me a “dinosaur” because I’m a conservative, not a nationalist or populist.)
I also discuss Bernie Sanders and his defense of the Castros’ Cuba — literacy and all that. Strangely enough, my first blogpost ever — April 2001 — was on this very subject. I was ticked at something the new secretary of state, Colin Powell, had said in congressional testimony. Jonah Goldberg and others had been doing blogposts for quite a while. But I believe that was my debut.
Further subjects in Impromptus? Well, the wife of Enver Hoxha — Stalinist dictator of Albania — has died. She was 99. Once, she called herself “a hard-line Communist,” which I thought was rather charming. (I wrote about her, and other Hoxhas, in a book, Children of Monsters.) In 2008, she said, “I continue to have confidence in the Communist ideal that will never die.”
To say it again, Nexhmije Hoxha has died at 99. She enjoyed a much longer life than the Hoxha regime’s dissidents and political prisoners.
Let me mention, too, my latest Q&A podcast, which is with Jan-Albert Hootsen, one of my favorite people. I sat down with him in Mexico City. He is a Dutch journalist who has worked in Mexico for a long time. He is the representative in that country of the Committee to Protect Journalists. He has a particularly important job: Mexico, you recall, is the murder capital of the world for journalists. (I did a piece on this subject in 2018.) Jan-Albert has grave responsibilities, but he is also a delight, as you will hear in that podcast.
One piece of mail, before I go. In an Impromptus earlier this month, I had occasion to mention “Hook ’em.” That’s what the University of Texas Longhorns say. I also mentioned “Gig ’em,” which is what Texas A&Mers say. And “Sic ’em,” which is what the Baylor Bears say. A reader now informs me that the Florida Gators say “Chomp ’em.”
Fair enough.