Curmudgeon

Curmudgeon is a book and a person; more properly a salty, cantankerous and frequently surly personality. Curmudgeon is an aging man who is anxious about the changes in the fabric of American society as the 21st Century dawns. He is more than uncomfortable with the changes he perceives in culture and behaviors among the Americans with whom he shares his neighborhood, community and country. In 16 chapters, he comments, criticizes, warns and generally finds fault with uses of language, manners, driving habits, fast food and what passes for fashion. He decries use of inessential consumer technologies that he believes have a corrupting influence on our minds. He calls the now ubiquitous iPhone a "butt-brain." If all politics are local, as Curmudgeon sees things, our politics is a fractured world dividing "us" from "them." We have lost the capacity for tolerance of differing viewpoints. We seem incapable of understanding differences or willing to make accommodation or find compromise. He sees no coming together in the near-term or distant future. An insight to the viewpoints expressed by Curmudgeon is his age and recent need for hip replacement surgeries. He sees a successful past in the 20th Century and a limited future, promising additional medical interventions. Mortality is staring him in the face. He lives in the existential "now." Curmudgeon embraces but is critical of the middle-class lifestyle; criticizing changes to religious practices that accommodate informality pushed by an addictive social media. Curmudgeon is deeply concerned about the rampant national infatuation with guns, resulting gun deaths and the growing opioid crisis afflicting his neighborhood and all of America. Curmudgeon has an alter-ego he calls "You" who argues with him throughout the book. "You" continually presents an opposing viewpoint and protests that Curmudgeon is fixated on the past. America, "You" argues, is a work in progress, capable of changing for the better, able to resolve any of the problems facing its heterogeneous evolving culture. Curmudgeon hits back with citations from a diverse literature on subjects he challenges with criticism. Hope cannot spring eternally from a dried-up intellectual aquifer. As Curmudgeon views the future at the prodding of "you," he ends with reflecting that his past seems brighter than "Your" future.