And, truth be told, while I am temperamentally and intellectually a man of the old Christian-socialistic “left”, and think healthcare should be available to everyone, wealth should be fairly distributed, and society should be as charitably pluralistic as possible, I am not an American liberal or much of a bien pensant, and I am simply too damned old now to respond to the sight of preferred pronouns in parentheses after someone’s name with anything other than an arched brow of mystification. (“Why does he/she imagine,” I find myself wondering, “that I will ever be talking about him/her in the third person?”)

That’s DBH, who still has his fastball.