July has brought another rich harvest of American folly, fatuity, and foolery. The Connecticut Democratic Party, under pressure from the state’s NAACP, has dropped Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson from their traditional Jefferson-Jackson-Bailey annual fund-raising dinner. The party chairmammal, Nick Balletto, says he wasn’t aiming to pioneer a trend “that’s going to affect the rest of the country” but he hopes all the Democratic state parties will follow suit “when they see it’s the right thing to do.” We await word whether Maine’s Democrats share that sentiment.

I pointed out in a recent column that the Democrats’ long-standing custom of honoring Presidents Jackson and Jefferson as the de facto founders of their party was a little awkward since Thomas Jefferson owned 600 slaves and Andrew Jackson 150. Balletto and the other state party leaders have now caught up with me and recognize that these party heroes “had some issues.”

Balletto acknowledged that, in addition to doing the right thing, it was expedient to erase the pair. He pointed out that the Democrats had to realize that “blacks and Native Americans are a major constituency of the Democratic Party” and “when something offends someone, it’s beyond being politically correct. It just causes a need for change.”

So Connecticut’s Democrats will celebrate an annual Bailey Dinner until the NAACP researchers notice that John Moran Bailey, who dominated Connecticut Democratic politics from 1946 to 1975, was a white man. Think about it; Bailey presided over 29 party dinners celebrating those two slaver-owners and Indian-molesters. He knew nothing about those “issues” his successor suddenly discovered?

On July 21 President Barack Obama sat down for a final palaver with Jon Stewart. Our president, sitting in the Comedy Show, accused the media of a weakness for “shiny objects.” Barack took Jon seriously. Jon took Barack seriously. We live in strange times.

This the month the US team won the International Math Olympiad for the first time since 1994, but U.S. head coach Prof. Po-Shen Loh was disappointed. It thinks it’s “terrible” because there were only two participants, out of a team of 27, whom he described as “girls”. He gave no indication that he regretted the dearth of white boys or any superfluity of Asian-Americans. Diversitarian criteria remain elusive for those not in the know.

On another front, the UK’s PinkNews.com asks us. “Did this Seinfeld joke about trans people overstep a line?” Jerry imagined a transexual airline where “You get on one sex and get off the other one.” YES! is the only possible answer to the PinkNews question. Seinfeld stepped way, way over the line. “Trans people” take top billing in the Victims Parade right now and deserve nothing but pity, respect, reverence, support, and kind words.

Word reaches me that NYC’s first-ever Disability Pride Parade is scheduled to take place in a location where the closest subway stations lack elevators. This affects me personally, and affects me very deeply. I had planned to head on down to celebrate the growing pride I feel about my stiffening knee joints, but that dream is dead. Too late to change venues, the city’s insensitivity had done irreversible damage.

On July 10 the Washington Post’s fashion editor, Robin Givhan prophesied: “The End of Gender Is Near.” She explained: “Menswear designers are on a mission to eradicate it. Some are going full bore, wielding lace shirts and floppy, grandma blouses like cultural grenades. Others are taking a stealth approach, quietly chiseling away the boundaries between masculinity and femininity through non-traditional retail, models and silhouettes.”

“The over-arching message,” Robin tells us: “Gender is a mood, a metaphor, an anachronism.” Readers anxious to get a handle on the Givhan’s stupendous revelation should know that the Pulitzer Committee gave her a prize because “she had transform[ed] fashion criticism into cultural criticism.”

You will understand 97 percent of American cultural criticism if you grasp this essential fact: It’s the concentrated essence of three-times distilled banana syrup reduced to a putrid blob of gelatinous cognitive decay. If you aspire to a career as a cultural critic in the modern American university remember three cardinal rules. Idiocy equals boldness; Gibberish equals profundity; Scandal equals sophistication.

I foresee the end of gender when Caitlyn Jenner’s pregnancy is confirmed by birth of a human baby. Until then, cool it. . The Romans never intended a literal meaning for Vestis virum facit (“Clothes make the man”)

Professor John Frary of Farmington, Maine is a former US Congress candidate and retired history professor, a Board Member of Maine Taxpayers United and publisher of www.fraryhomecompanion.com and can be reached at: [email protected]