One Day in the Life of Ann

Liberals can ruin anything.

I’ve been trying to distract myself from the end of the world, as Trump blows up not only Iran but the Republican Party with a pointless war that has spiked oil prices, depleted our munitions, closed the Strait of Hormuz, jettisoned America’s moral standing, distracted the president from immigration, and, so far, cost us $30 billion in direct military spending, with $200 billion more requested.

So I’ve been spending my time on murder mysteries.

Reading David Baldacci’s action-thriller “To Die For,” I was willing to suspend disbelief and accept his portrayal of the CIA and FBI as all-powerful, super-stealth agencies, full of swashbuckling killers (men and women!) as opposed to what they actually are, which is incompetent paper-pushers with cushy bureaucratic jobs who didn’t see 9/11 coming. (Refusing to engage in “racial profiling,” FBI officials blew off Phoenix agent Kenneth Williams’ July 10, 2001, memo warning about the “inordinate number” of Muslim men linked to Osama bin Laden enrolled in U.S. flight schools.)

But then I got to the part where the real enemy is revealed — the hidden malevolent force that is about to take down THE ENTIRE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. Guess what that terrifying organization is …

… a reconstituted KKK! Actual quote from the book: “[They want] a population that looks the same, prays the same, speaks the same, and where white men dominate everything. Just like the KKK.”

This book came out in 2024. Yes, apparently, Baldacci was in a semi-vegetative state during the previous four years of convulsive violence from antifa and their leftist comrades — cities aflame, businesses destroyed, police stations razed to the ground, neighborhoods commandeered by fascist thugs, an explosion in the murder rate beyond anything ever seen in U.S. history. And all this violence was committed with the warm cooperation of a half-dozen local governments.

So this was just the time to release a panicky tome about the (nonexistent) KKK and their scary memes. (A hundred electroshock-therapy sessions couldn’t cure hack writers of their irrational fear of white domestic terrorists.)

Next on the escapist trail, I watched an episode of “Law & Order.” Sticking to formula, the writers took a hideous, real-life crime committed by a non-white person and made the perp a super-WASPy white man. The “ripped from the headlines” show I saw was strikingly similar to a Muslim’s mass shooting in Canada 10 years earlier.

In 1989, Gamil Gharbi, son of a French Canadian mother and an Algerian immigrant father, who hated women (no, really?), methodically murdered 14 female engineering students at École Polytechnique, a top technical school in Montreal. Gharbi barged into an engineering classroom and ordered all the men out, then shot the women, explaining he was “fighting feminism.”

The misogynist Muslim continued on his way, entering another classroom, again threw the men out, and shot or knifed the women to death. During his 20-minute rampage, Gharbi killed 14 women and injured 10. (It appears that not one of the ejected men, listening as the ladies were shot, attempted to intervene, not exactly smashing the stereotype of French Canadians as useless sissies.)

In the “Law & Order” version of this real-life Muslim murder spree, a group of 17 female pre-med students in Central Park are gunned down by a creepy guy, aiming only for women, while muttering “Damn bitches.” Description of the suspect from one of the TV witnesses: “He was white.” And just so no one missed the point, he was played by a blond, blue-eyed, all-American actor.

Hoping for a less annoying distraction, I tried one of my favorite shows, “Murder, She Wrote” — or as a cruel ex-boyfriend called it, “Underpants She Soiled.” (The lead character is a cheerful dowager who solves an apparently unending series of homicides in her small New England town.)

But even this aggressively apolitical program worked in a gratuitous shot at Republicans. It wouldn’t be worth mentioning, except for the near-perfect Opposites Day nature of the remark.

In the show, the owner of a Fifth Avenue salon says of her star hairstylist, “One of our nine Republican candidates for president pays him $600 plus airfare to fly to Washington every two weeks.”

Because, you know, Republicans are such rich, elitist snobs.

That episode aired in 1995, which happens to be just two years after President Bill Clinton made international news for stopping traffic at Los Angeles International Airport so that he could treat himself to a $300 haircut ($670 today) from “Cristophe of Beverly Hills” aboard Air Force One. The story became, as one Washington Post columnist put it, “The Most Famous Haircut Since Samson’s.” The Post alone ran more than 50 stories on it.

No one at “Murder, She Wrote” — not the writers, editors, Standards and Practices executives, cameramen, not even the actors — could have missed the story about Clinton’s tarmac trim. But the dialogue sounded good to them.

It didn’t stop with Clinton.

In 2007, Sen. John Edwards’ Federal Election Commission filings revealed that he’d billed his presidential campaign for two $400 haircuts from a Beverly Hills stylist, $250 for hair styling and makeup from a swank salon in Dubuque, Iowa, and $225 in services from the Pink Sapphire in Manchester, New Hampshire, which, NBC News reported, “is described on its website as ‘a unique boutique for the mind, body and face’ that caters mostly to women.”

Famously, Hillary Clinton got a $600 haircut in 2015 from the posh John Barrett Salon, requiring half of Bergdorf Goodman to be put on lockdown.

According to Google AI, every haircut scandal has involved a Democrat. These include Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s $300 haircut in 2019 and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s spending more than $30,000 from his 2024 campaign coffers for hair and makeup.

Back to the dissolution of the world, Google also reveals that in 2016 Benjamin Netanyahu got a haircut in New York City for a whopping $1,600. Perhaps patriotic hairstylists could put an end to the slaughter by threatening to withhold services from the well-coifed prime minister.

If our storytellers ever try their hand at reimagining the Iran War, at least they’re unlikely to confuse which party bears responsibility for this catastrophe.