"What stops us from looking at ourselves and seeing ourselves is that we’re kind of ugly, if we really, if we look really hard."

"We’re not who we think we are. We’re not, uh we’re not as wonderful as we think we are."

Said Bill Murray, back in 2014, in an interview with Howard Stern, quoted in a new NYT article — by David Segal —  titled "Confessor. Feminist. Adult. What the Hell Happened to Howard Stern?/Scattered among the gleefully vulgar mainstays are now intimate exchanges that have made Mr. Stern one of the most deft interviewers in the business."

That's one of the articles I read on my iPhone this morning before getting out of bed. I've had it in the back of my mind as something I might blog, and I thought of it just now as I was having a conversation with Meade about Bill and Hillary Clinton. The theory under discussion was that Bill and Hillary are not really of our generation but our parents' generation, even though they are only about half a decade older than us. What puts them in that earlier generation is that they don't believe in telling it straight and revealing their true selves. They think things need to be kept hidden and that what you say publicly needs to be a cover story. They never believed the 1960s credo Tell it like it is.

Why not tell it like it is? Let it all hang out — that's another 60s saying. I thought of what Bill Murray said: "What stops us from looking at ourselves and seeing ourselves is that we’re kind of ugly...." Not everyone thinks like that. "We’re not, uh we’re not as wonderful as we think we are." Not everyone thinks like that, but it is a way of thinking. You could also believe that everybody's beautiful. (Here's the song that plays in my head when writing that sentence.) You could take a flier on the belief that whatever you are is what you should be and it's perfectly good. What else are you going to do? You're you, and you're never going to be anyone else. Another 60s expression: Do your own thing. 

Did that make you think of Donald Trump? It seems that all roads lead to Donald Trump these days. And wouldn't you expect an article in the NYT about the greatness of Howard Stern as an interviewer would have something important about the Howard Stern interviews with Donald Trump, something as profound as the place where Howard took Bill Murray? Your NYT-mistrusting mind might be yelling at the computer screen: Not if it's anything that makes Donald Trump look good. Bill Murray was highlighted as the celebrity Stern opened up. If he opened up Trump in a similar way, we don't learn about from the NYT. Trump appears in the article, but only like this:

Mr. Stern...  is the same guy who, for years, traded misogynistic quips with anyone who was game, including, Donald J. Trump. In a 2005 phone interview, the two rated the looks of the cast of “Desperate Housewives.”

“Would you go out with Marcia Cross,” Mr. Trump asked, “or would you turn gay, Howard?”

“She’s got a good body,” he answered. “Just put a bag over her head.”

It's like one of those video  from the Democratic National Convention — those little videos displaying Trump saying something like "A woman who is very flat-chested is very hard to be a 10" so you can sit there staring and hating....