It's Sunday afternoon in New York City and I am at the St. Regis Hotel for tea and sandwiches with my wife, Lauren.  A woman is playing the harp.  When I look up and see paintings near the ceiling I feel that I am in the Sistine Chapel.  I was there in 1970 with Lauren, whom I married in 1972.  America was capacious then, affording the upper-middle class luxuries that should be cherished rather than scorned.

We spent three months in Europe at five dollars each per day.  That was before we tried to imitate the Continent and our dollar was devalued.  That was before the glorious possibilities of socialism turned our country into a welfare state.

"Do you know that Obama wants to turn America from a democracy into a collectivist state?" I ask my wife.

"How?" 

"Well, he's violating the fundamental principle of democracy that the majority rules.  He's turning America into an aristocracy of the unaccomplished.  He uses minority status as a badge of honor.  It's ironic that America is the great escape from aristocracy, and yet Obama and his liberal followers have turned it into the royalty of the complainers and the misfits."

The waiter brings us our tea and sandwiches.  We don't even have to order.  We are regulars.

"Yesterday" by the Beatles floats from the harp through the room.

We click our tea cups to "Yesterday."  Lauren loves the Beatles.  I guess I do, too.  We saw Paul McCartney at St. Ambrose restaurant a few months ago.  He's a legend.  In my teens I got high to him.  Now I just wonder where it's all gone.  "I believe in yesterday."

How did Obama make us disrespect our traditions?  His zeitgeist is ambient throughout society.  Gay marriage has become an open-minded proposition rather than a perversion.  We are afraid to judge lest we be judged.  But if we don't judge, there will be no cognitive categories to define reality.  We will be walking blindly with a cane through a landscape of failure and disarray.

And Christmas during Obama's reign?  Forget it.  We can celebrate only atheism.  That is the religion of the middle class.  Come to think of it, that is the religion of fascism and Nazism.

In naïve progressivism, everything forward is better than what's behind.  It is progressive to let stupid kids into Harvard because their grandparents were slaves.  This doesn't help their grandparents.  It just ruins the mediocre kids by giving them delusions of accomplishment and confidence based on the suffering of ancestors.  In fire departments around the country, they make entrance exams easier for the blacks and Hispanics.  Great.

The maître d' comes over.  He is our friend.  He gives us two free glasses of champagne.  Everything is elegant and classy.  We are insulated from the outer world and from the changes in values that the progressives ride through our society on bullying steeds.  How long will this oasis of elegance last?

It's Sunday -- the one day I don't go to Gleason's Gym to box.  I like the give-and-take of boxing.  You pay for what you take, unlike misfits on food stamps and excuse-makers on welfare.  I want to be hurt.  I want to know that you are there.  I want contact rather than palaver and liberal drivel.  I want to be a man, not a woman adjusting to her own female liberation.

And yet when Obama comes to the St. Regis, I hear he brings three chefs of his own.  He is the knight of mediocrity, the lance of minority enhancement, the leader of an army of bureaucrats, and yet he lives like the king of the royal court.  He is the only nouveau riche leader to bling it up in the White House and spend 1.4 billion dollars a year on personal expenses.  He promotes the fair share, and yet he takes everyone else's share.

They used to call someone who stole your money and spent it a thief.  Now they say about a man who steals your earnings -- the dude Obam-ed you.