I thought what made America great was its product supply chain. The distribution system never lets up, the trucks keep rolling, and the shelves are always stocked. 

So why did I have to wait weeks to get a simple washing machine part, a little piece of metal with flanges and threaded plastic connectors, the source of a small but persistent leak puddling the floor, staining the baseboard, making a sponge of the carpet? After all, it’s not like it was coming by slow boat from South Korea.

Because of over-engineering, that’s why. Less is more, we were told by Mies van der Rohe, the architect who gave us the, uh, Barcelona chair. But not unlike the latest version of Microsoft Word, with its clutter and unnecessary extra steps and regular seizures, or your new car that shuts off at every stoplight, leaving you in the lurch, among other quiet thefts of your autonomy, my fancy front-loading washer looks good, with its spaceship array of lights, and sounds cute, with its singsong chirping that signals a completed cycle, and in theory I appreciate the reduced water use and increased efficiency, whatever that means, but does anyone really need a “Pre-Wash / Child Lock” setting or a “Fresh Care” button? 

Hot, warm, cold. Small or large load. That should about cover it.

The thing’s only four years old and this is the second repair to this one crucial juncture where water meets tube. No, for prolonged use and even abuse, you need an old top-loading job, with the rotating spike of an agitator like some medieval torture device and just as effective. 

That or a visit to the Sag Harbor Launderette. 

Putting aside the usual laundry list of complaints (pun unintentional, but I’ll leave it be), for us regular folks and year-rounders the Harbor is just not what it used to be. But in the face of gentrification, bad taste, whatever you want to call it, at least we still have this urban touch on the old main drag, with its long rows of stainless-steel shine — industrial-strength Dexter Laundry machines straight out of the Corn Belt. (You know, Iowa? Where they once made those reliable Maytags?)

The speed of laundry generation by a family of five is daunting, and the piles of clothes at home were taking on the permanence of burial mounds, so the Launderette was a godsend on a recent weekend, even with its corridor of a space filled like the 7 train after a Mets game.

I’d call it sobering, the contrast between the, shall we say, brusqueness of the summer crowds here and the courtesy among the other than rich in that rumbling, thrumming place redolent of fabric softener and sharp with static cling — a helpful tip about a dryer lacking heat here, a heads-up that another was open over there, and nowhere in evidence the petulant practice of removing someone else’s clothes and dumping them because they left them in the machine too long. It was like a Friedrich Engels fantasy in an Ayn Rand world.

Or maybe people just wanted clean socks. 

The appeal of the Launderette is the appeal of being alone in a crowded place. Like riding public transportation. Or lingering over a cup of coffee at a greasy spoon. Features of city life, to be sure, but here as the clothes tumbled and the patrons folded, the limited choices of what to do with myself was a relief — read a book (“The Early Work of Philip K. Dick, Volume One”), stare out the window, watch the Premier League on a flat-screen. 

And then the part arrived. It had been more than a month. I figure I’ve got a couple of years until it gives out again and I’m back at the Launderette. If not, there’s always that tune by Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders, on spin cycle in my head since high school: 

“There go the whites, mmm, getting whiter. / There go the colors, getting brighter. / There go the delicates, through the final rinse. / There goes my Saturday night, I go without a fight. / Watching the clothes go round, watching the clothes go round.”

Baylis Greene is an associate editor at The Star.

I am to turn 79 on Monday, by which time I expect to be lying on a beach in Zihuatanejo reading a good book, or, given my tendency to interrupt, making Mary look up from hers. 

That, my tendency to interrupt, may be the sole sticking point in our otherwise blissful coupling. Why I do it, I don’t know, though it may have something to do with being an only child for most of my youth, untempered by siblings shouting, “Will you shut up, Jackie, will you just shut up for once?” And so, uninterrupted, I continued interrupting.

In catechism — this was at the East End Lutheran school in Pittsburgh — I was constantly waving my hand when it was sixth-grade Bible passage recitation time. I was a fountain of dogma. Never mind that I hadn’t thought much about what I was saying.

And spelling. I was a whiz at it, and was dismissive when told the ability to spell was not a measure of intelligence. Of course it was. My mother helped me prepare for the Western Pennsylvania Spelling Bee, put on, as I recall, by The Pittsburgh Press. She sat on the same chaise longue that is in our bedroom today, I at the foot of it, and drilled me. I had no idea what most of the words meant, but it made no difference, I could spell them.

And, in the Western Pennsylvania Spelling Bee itself, I spelt with such aplomb that the reporter said the next day that if there had been a prize for the most lackadaisical contestant, I, who stumbled on “insidious,” spelling it with a “c,” and thus finished fifth, would have won it. . . . Lackadaisical. A five-syllable word. I didn’t know what it meant, but I liked it. 

From Bible passages and spelling bees I moved on in high school to Shakespearean soliloquies, a natural progression for one still more in love with sound than with sense. And, of course, soliloquies were essentially great interruptions, if you will, no matter that you had but a vague idea of what you were saying.  

I still, some 65 or so years on, have no more than a vague idea of what I’m saying. That’s called inspiration, isn’t it? And because of an arthritic shoulder, I no longer wave my hand much. But still there is this urge to interrupt, to blurt out, “Hold on, can I tell you one thing?”

The itch to propound passes I’ve found if you just hold on and sit tight (not all that hard to do when you have a margarita at hand), which I intend to do in Zihuatanejo. 

Once upon a time I was the only person who brought a dog to work, here at the Star office, but now we arrive to a daily menagerie — from the itty-bitty black and tan dachshund puppy and scraggly little terrier belonging to Isabel Carmichael to the 21/2-year-old rescue (a charming fellow with a soft, brown nose, named Marty) who was recently acquired by Paul Friese, to Archie, Jane Bimson’s bright-eyed Jack Russell, and Jack Graves’s adorable, purebred O’en, with his soft blond coat. 

The dog belonging to me and my husband is a lazy, plump, foxlike creature with a red coat and a stubborn nature. We call her Sweet Pea. I don’t know what we were thinking when we gave her that name. Dozens of other monikers were offered up by the younger members of the family, to be considered and discarded. Sweet Pea came to us from the Animal Rescue Fund of the Hamptons, where she was known as Victoria, which we all felt was too grand and ladylike for a quizzical canine who had washed up in the aftermath of one of the 2017 hurricanes. Sweet Pea definitely seemed sweet when we met her, and, like a pea, she is, yes, small. Still, I still almost laugh when I call her name: The only other Sweet Pea I can think of is Olive Oyl and Popeye’s baby, which seems such an incongruous reference.

My daughter found Sweet Pea at the ARF adoption center in late 2017; by the time my husband and I arrived to inspect her, later that day, they had bonded. To this day, Sweet Pea will run to her as fast as she can when she spies her entering a room, and will positively knock over bystanders in her rush to climb into her lap. Sweet Pea has not forgotten.

ARF told us Sweet Pea had been among the animals brought to the States following Hurricane Maria, which hit Puerto Rico in late September 2017; Sweet Pea was at ARF by mid-November. She was — and I have a hard time visualizing or believing this — a skinny little thing back then. Her paperwork says she was only 19.4 pounds when we met. Now she is nearly 26, and the veterinarian has instructed us to put her on a special diet. She may look like a fox when viewed from behind, but viewed from above, she is torpedo-shaped, a chunky little sausage.

That Sweet Pea was a warm-weather pet is evident by how much she detests snow, sleet, and rain. On a recent wicked, wet day, she ran to the car when we set out, but absolutely refused to climb back out again when the time came. For a small dog, she is mighty. I went into the house to fetch her a treat, as bribery, but even then she had to be seriously coaxed and dragged from the car, as I got soaked in the downpour. Forget trying to get her to walk in the snow.

At home, Sweet Pea likes to sleep and sleep and sleep — on the master bed. We don’t have the heart to kick her out of the bedroom or put her in a crate. In order for there to be room for us to sleep, we have to bribe her down to the foot of the bed with a goodie and put a heavy pillow as a sort of barrier behind her. We always start out the night with the hope that she will stay in place, but she inevitably finds a way to creep up during the night and ensconce herself between our shoulders and heads.

To be honest, even though she is a near-daily presence here at the office, she isn’t particularly welcome in certain circles of the building. She likes to sit guard at my desk, eyeing my colleagues with sleepy suspicion, and has been known to bare her teeth and snap at people for no discernible reason. She is probably 6 or 7 years old, and although she was possibly a street dog in Rincon, her daily lapdog habits lead me to believe she whiled away her days sitting on some doting person’s lap, watching people pass by the window and being fed bonbons. I like to think of her fault as being simply too devoted and loyal, but I’m not sure the rest of the staff would agree. As to whether she is genuinely sweet, well . . . the best thing I can honestly say about her behavior is that it is variable. Maybe we should have named her Crosspatch.         

We all know it’s been cold, and we all know how to procrastinate. What do I avoid doing? Paying bills, sorting through the junk drawer(s), going through old papers and magazines. You know the drill. 

But one has to do something when not doing the thing that needs to be done. 

Enter the time wasters. 

There are those little nuggets of time to be found while waiting for disks to burn, a return e-mail, or files to upload. Sitting at my computer with the big screen, while waiting for electronic things, I have been known to play a kind of scrabble against a computer. I tell myself that this is strengthening my brain and vocabulary, and, thus, I am actually not wasting time. Ah, but there are other things that engage me.

Much like the Jimmy Stewart character in “Rear Window” — both of us being photographers and both of us being indoors (he for a broken leg, me hiding out from the cold) — we have found entertainment in “the window.” He watched a murder; I am watching the peaceable kingdom. He watched his neighbors, I watch Africa from my computer window. 

Africam.com, is a website I found years ago when my family had just gotten back from a photo safari to East Africa and I could not get enough of anything Africa. The site features live feeds from remote cameras in the South African wild. I found myself staying late at the office to watch the watering holes in the African daytime. 

Enter the polar vortex and Africa once again seems a really great escape from the chill. I have abandoned the faux Scrabble game and begun to watch Africa, streaming live, in my house. 

The time difference messes up your creature watching big time. When it’s 2 p.m. here, it’s 9 p.m. in South Africa’s Kruger National Park. The watering holes are lit up, but not a creature is stirring. Anyone who watches animals knows you never know what’s going to happen. At Tembe Elephant Park, as I watch, two impalas are illuminated on the screen. Turning up the volume I hear the sounds of the South African watering hole. The animals are doing what I am doing, a continent and an ocean away — we are just hanging out.

I notice that their eyes glow at night, when the transmission looks black-and-white, little spots of glowing impala eyes. The remote camera sometimes zooms in for a close-up, zooms out and then gives a wide angle, and then scans the viewing area. The crickets and other things buzz, and the impalas never seem to blink. They must have spectacular wide-angle eyesight. Their eyes glow when seen from the front, the side, and even when facing away. Like goats, they sit down front legs first. When they get up, they get up fast.

As a kid I looked at animal books all the time and visited the dioramas at the Museum of Natural History and saw all the Disney movies. I figured I knew my animals, but when you visit a game park on real safari or “window” safari, you realize there are animals you have never heard of: topi, for example, and nyala. Nyala, which visit this watering hole, and are yellow-legged antelope with a long-haired strip down their spines and they have stripes. Their babies are really cute. I learned this yesterday. Educational time waster. 

I can identify the Egyptian geese by their call, and I can tell a young nyala (vertically striped) from a young impala, and I bet you didn’t know a waterbuck has a bull’s-eye on his/her backside.

I can’t control when the camera moves and scans, and it’s a bit frustrating when you hear a splash and wonder what happened and you can’t see it. There are five cameras to check on the Africam site. My favorite location is Tembe Elephant Park in Maputaland, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa (I found it on Google Earth). See, I’m also learning geography. This is not a time waster; this is interesting. 

In the past week I have seen a genet being startled by some elephants coming in for a drink. A bunch of impalas carefully avoided what appeared to be either a dead thing or a big bone by the edge of the watering hole. They each stopped, took a look, and gave it a wide swath as they passed by. I felt like I was watching an open casket funeral. Two days later they paid no attention to it at all. I watched a thunder and lightning storm and the animals didn’t care at all, but it was loud in my room and my cats did not enjoy it.

For the truly addicted, the site has an animal alert app for personal devices that lets you pick the animals you want to follow. And for the truly lazy, you can check in to see what was photographed and video-ed by the remote staff while you were otherwise engaged. One of the latest videos showed a small herd of elephants wallowing.

When does a time waster become a hobby? 

Last night I left the site on, with the sound low so the crickets and the crows and such wouldn’t bother me. This morning when I headed to check my email before getting ready for the day, there on my screen were two giraffes mock fighting! They swing their necks and kind of hip/shoulder bump each other — standing hip to shoulder, each facing a different direction — with the goal of moving the opponent sideways. This was going on right outside my “window.”

How cool is it that on my way to the shower I can observe animal behavior, learn a few things, and be totally transported before brushing my teeth. There is even a photo feature, so I can have my own “ safari” memories to share.

Some may say I’m wasting my time, but isn’t real life better than a video game?

While writing this, I have the site open to live feed for all of the watering holes. It’s now 4 our time, 11 in South Africa. The impala have yet to blink, as far as I can tell. There is a loud kind of splashing and I have been trying to reach the camera remote guy to scan the view at Tembe to see what’s making that wet noise, but to no avail. Maybe a goose landed and belly-flopped, but no. The sound gets louder. As I stop typing and go to full-screen mode, an elephant comes in from below the camera. First the head, then shoulders, then the rest of it showed up. The sound I was hearing was chewing and slurping. The impala got up, hind legs first, and got out of the way and the elephant went to a puddle, not the watering hole, and slurped like a kid with an ice cream soda. He slurped up the puddle with his trunk, swung it up and gave himself a drink — in perfect profile to the camera and to me. I took a picture.

I have not yet paid my bills but I did write this.

Durell Godfrey is a contributing photographer to The Star.

To get an idea about what team spirit means, all you have to do is go to the greater Boston area at Super Bowl time. I was there last week because my husband was a patient at the Lahey Hospital and Medical Center in Burlington, and everyone seemed to be wearing New England Patriots T-shirts emblazoned with the number 12 all weekend long. It was patriotism in two senses of the word. 

Although I was a twirler (you know, it’s something like a drum majorette) in a maroon-and-white outfit when I was in high school in Bayonne, N.J., marching onto and doing routines on football fields, I never paid much attention to the game; basketball was my sport. 

At the hospital during the Super Bowl, however, it was impossible not to recognize the spirit. Even I knew why the aides and nurses were wearing the red, white, and blue, and that 12 was the superstar Tom Brady’s number.

When I was first married and had become an East Hamptoner, we often went to Dartmouth football games, with or without children but always with great tailgate picnics. An outlier nevertheless, I once distinguished myself, if you can call it that, by jumping up and cheering loudly when a player ran down the whole field to make a touchdown. The trouble was he was on the opposing team. As far as I was concerned it felt good to cheer for a maneuver that was swift, graceful, and wily regardless of whose team he was on, and even if no one else on my side of the bleachers did. For me, it was simple appreciation; I didn’t care which team scored.

Such an attitude made me out of sync with my compatriots, but I was comfortable as an outlier, as much then as now. These days, for example, when I am among my husband’s large and talented family, I tend to stand with his brother-in-law, a man who is very much admired but whose background, like mine, is far afield.

Considering myself an outlier at The Star also has made it possible over the years for me to wear an editor’s hat. We decided it would be inappropriate for me to be a member of local organizations, even one noted for good works like the East Hampton Ladies Village Improvement Society. 

Suppose the society decided to do something outrageous, like, for example, tearing up the perimeter of Town Pond? I wanted to preserve the right to howl. Sure, L.V.I.S. members and the general public might well express opinions of disapproval, but at least no conflict of interest would be involved in what the editorial “we” had to say. I had a bully pulpit and think that was good enough.

Lots of books and other things arrive unannounced at The Star, as they do at newspapers and media outlets. Some are worthwhile. Some are not. Others lead into unexpected territory.

An item I found on a center table in the newsroom this week, a book by a James Carter of Enumclaw, Wash., managed to get my attention, if only for its memorable title, “Why Einstein Was an Ignorant Fool.”

To be sure, I have tried but have not been able to crack the wall between elemental physics and my own understanding to point out the error of the author’s ways. Nor do I want to single him out. However, “Einstein was wrong!” holds a high place among crank ideas in my estimation; one of my great-uncles, Morris Redman Spivack, was known to crackpots in his day.

According to WorldCat, six copies of Uncle Morris’s “G=Mmxc/r2; a New Road to Relativity,” are held in libraries in the United States. Morris was multitalented. He spent seven years in Iceland where he drew and collected 5,000 portraits. Among his greatest skills was getting his stuff into archives around the world. Family legend is that he thought Einstein was a nice enough person, though wrong.

I gave Mr. Carter’s book a shot. I really did, but he lost me when he argued that gravity actually went up, that is, away from the Earth’s core. I don’t think Uncle Morris ever went that far. 

Crackpots are attracted to the big ideas, like how the universe came to be. One of their marks is certainty that everyone else is wrong and that they alone, or at most the people who agree with them, have the answers. These proponents might be masters of word salad, but are generally ignorant about basic physics, math, and experimental methods.

I once worked with a guy who said he believed that mayonnaise would someday power space travel. Earlier in his life, he had been a cook in the United States Coast Guard, so it kind of made sense. Uncle Morris had his moments, though; his no-till agriculture, which he promoted decades ago, now has mainstream applications.

Anti-crankism, if it can be called that, has its own adherents. The web is as full of jabs at crackpot science and armchair theorists as it is of cures for the common cold or promises of bulletproof paint. I side with the anti-cranks. At least these are the people who get jet aircraft into the air and make modern medicine work.

David Brooks wrote the other day about his fear that America might soon become a kakistocracy, and, of course, I had to look the word up. Derived from ancient Greek, it means, our dog-eared Webster’s dictionary tells us, “government by the worst men.”

I had been thinking along the lines of caca, and cacastocracy, and hadn’t, as it turned out, been far off the mark, but for some reason, perhaps because I remain an optimist in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, I tend not to agree with the columnist’s dour outlook for the year 2019.

Trump, he seems to think, when it all comes down, will, like a wounded wild boar (my analogy), run roughshod over everyone, over the Constitution, the rule of law, common decency, all that.

Will there be sages the likes of Archibald Cox, Elliot Richardson, and Judge John Sirica (he could also have included in that number Sam Ervin, Howard Baker, and Peter Rodino) of Watergate fame to stand up to him, and, in so doing, reassert the equilibrium that our system of checks and balances intends?

Or will we be thrown — a likelihood in his view — to the wolves of party loyalty, ideological fervor, and general calumny?

And yet, and yet. . . . When the chips were down, a fellow East Hamptoner reminded me at a holiday party not long ago, Americans tended in critical moments to put their shoulders to the wheel and to do, in concert, the right thing.

We were talking about countering East Hampton Airport’s pollution (the airport itself being a Depression-era offspring of that can-do spirit), but his assertion can be applied to the amelioration of any number of ills, whether environmental or societal, that cry for attention.

I am an optimist and I believe him, not the dour David. People of good sense will stand up, sweet reason will win the day, that’s my New Year’s prediction.

I don’t remember when or why I picked up a small plastic bottle of anise seed at Mitad del Mundo on North Main Street. I was glad it was in a kitchen cabinet the other evening, when I decided to try my hand at making biscotti.

Jane Bimson, who works in The Star’s front office and who I like to talk with about all things cooking, chided me gently on Monday when I raved about how easy it was. “You’re 55, and you are just now finding out!” she said, as she made a note to bake some biscotti for herself very soon.

Jane is a master in the kitchen. Her sweet pickles brighten our Decembers every year, when she hands out a jar for each person at The Star. I am told Baylis Greene quietly consumes every last slice before the day is out. At birthdays, she always makes carrot cake muffins with cream cheese frosting, leaving them on the office kitchen table to honor the person whose lucky day it is. Because I can’t have dairy products, Jane places a single topping-free muffin on my desk before I get in.

We are an office filled with foodies. Russell Bennett’s wife, Fiona, is a test chef and often sends him in with the most remarkable of treats. Matt Charron’s eats are consistently healthy, and we often talk about that. Jennifer Landes knows all about the restaurants. Laura Donnelly (who does not come into the office often enough) and I could talk for hours about scallops and beach plums. My sister, Bess, who works downstairs on East magazine, is a whiz with desserts and has a massive stash of antique cookbooks.

Kathy Kovach, who used to work here, and Carissa Katz, the manag ing editor, worked in catering on the side for years. I spent several summers selling fish at Claws on Wheels in East Hampton, getting to know the regular customers and making up names for some of them, my favorite the “Pounda Flounda Guy.” Leigh Goodstein, a former reporter, manages the Clam Bar on Napeague. I could go on.

There is a thing, I think, about food and the news business, though I can’t quite put my finger on it. Years ago at a wedding, I met a woman who worked in human resources at The Times who told me they put internship résumés in two piles: those with food service experience and those without. They called in the food service people for interviews. I can see why.

Root canals need rebranding. I was thinking about this while sitting in a dentist’s chair earlier this week with all manner of devices in my maw, staring at the ceiling.

Going into the day’s excitement, I had told people around the office where I was going to be. To a person, at the words “root canal,” they shuddered or cringed in empathetic fear. 

Though I had undergone the procedure previously, about two years ago on a different molar, I remembered next to nothing, having been entirely whacked-out on laughing gas. At the time, I was worried and agreed when offered the hose end — self-regulated like a hookah. What did I know? I huffed and puffed and pretty soon I was high as a Georgia pie. (Those of you who know the reference will get what I mean.) 

All I can recall from root canal numero uno is that it seemed the same Tom Petty song was playing in the room as I took my first deep inhalation and an hour later, when someone charitably dialed the oxygen ratio back up, and I slowly climbed out of the very deep, black pit in which I had been for the preceding hour. I left my car in the dentist’s parking lot and walked, stumbled really, back to The Star. A week later, I still felt as if I had a hole in my head.

Lucid this time around, the root canal was hardly anything. A little Novocain here or there, maybe 45 minutes of drilling and poking around, and the job was done, hardly worthy of as scary a name as root — dah, dum, dum — canal.

Years ago, one of the New Yorker cartoonists drew a knee-slapper of a page poking fun at the restaurant industry’s effort to rename fish. I don’t remember much other than the concept and the “before” moniker of a made-up fish — the greasy-mouthed bleb. I know, sounds delicious right?

“Greasy-mouthed bleb” has for me become a kind of stand-in for renaming something unappealing to sound a little more appetizing. But though I have thought about this a long time (but actually not so hard), I haven’t come up with much, having learned from the technician exactly what the procedure involves. 

English is full of euphemisms. Panicked house-saving is called “dune restoration.” People don’t die anymore, they “pass.” But root canal? All I have come up with so far is “wallet whacker.”

And there, for the second week in a row, was another word I didn’t know in a Times column —  midichlorian. It was in Maureen Dowd’s piece about saucy dancing women come to take over the government.

It wasn’t in my Shorter Oxford English Dictionary at home, it wasn’t even in the online dictionary that Irene said would save me any more trips to our spine split, dog-eared Webster’s at the edge of Jamie’s desk.

But Mary found it, through Google, the modern equivalent of the Delphic oracle. It’s of “Star Wars” coinage and refers to cells within us that link us to The Force. She liked that idea. We are, then, all one, she said. It would be nice if we were all Obi-Wan too, but alas. Obama’s midichlorian count made Republicans tremble, Maureen Dowd said, until he disarmed them with his professorial side.

And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s midi­chlorian count has made them tremble too. Not only does she dance, but she thinks the top marginal income tax rate, now at 35 percent, ought to be doubled. Actually, it’s not such a radical idea. That rate was as high as 90 percent in the 1950s, when bottles of milk and clean diapers were delivered to the door, when one wage earner per household largely assured a pleasant life, and when personal incentive remained undampened as far as I know. Google says the top marginal rate even reached 94 percent during World War II.

Given the fact that we’ve been making war on the installment plan for the better part of the past 20 years, it doesn’t seem out of line that the obscenely wealthy who’ve been showered with tax cuts ought to write down the obscene national debt a bit, or at least fortify some bridges. They’re the ones who have been cutting a rug, and have been pulling it out from under the middle class, whose fiscal health is paramount if a democracy is to thrive. So, yes, let’s redress things somewhat. And along that line, I’d like to say that the administration’s assault on SALT (our state and local property tax deductions) is fundamentally a soak the middle class scheme — at least as it concerns many of the half-million Long Island homeowners who itemize — that ought not to stand.  

One wonders what foreigners who hold two-thirds of our national debt might do were they treated by the administration the way those living in New York and California have been. I know, I know, he’s trying.

Warren Buffet has said he owes his wealth, which he intends to give away, essentially to the accident of birth. Ben Franklin said that once one had enough for oneself and one’s family one ought to give the rest back to the country. Teddy Roosevelt in his Progressive Party platform of 1912 advocated for “a single national health service,” inveighed against the unbridled monied interests and unlimited campaign contributions, championed middle-class wage earners, was pro-immigrant, and asserted that “the test of true prosperity shall be the benefits conferred thereby on all the citizens, not confined to individuals or classes.”

“Dismaying,” I can imagine the midichlorian-deprived exclaim as they, like Tolkien’s Gollum, fondle their Rings and whisper, “My precious, my precious.”