The Washington Post accepted my letter for publication in this Saturday’s “Free for All” section, inspired by my Rush review! They seem to have had fun with it, finding an external link for the quote and expanding “stable genius” to “very stable genius” in the third paragraph while otherwise leaving a quite long letter for that section almost unedited except for two words which were altered (“as in” became “found in” and there was one other word I don’t remember), actually slightly expanding it:

Speaking this week about the Russo-Ukrainian war, President Donald Trump offered yet another variation [nypost.com] on his statement “If I were the president [in 2022], it would have never happened.”

Here he uses an ungrammatical construction, expressing a past contrary-to-fact condition with the past subjunctive, which would be correct for a present contrafactual: “If I were president [but am not], this war would not start.” A past contrafactual, however, requires placing the action of the subordinate (if) clause before that of the main (then) clause, to wit, the pluperfect: “If I had been president, this war would not have happened.”

The very stable genius tries to signal erudition but exposes insecurity and superficiality, committing the same kind of pretentious overcorrection found in “explain grammar to Mike Johnson and I,” aping the “educated” form without understanding the underlying grammar. Better, then, simply to say “was” and cast it in a construction both natural to and correct in informal English.

It has to be exclusive to the Post but I’m sure they won’t nerf it if I post it ahead of time on a 1997-style music message board with a dozen regular posters. It’s my 40th birthday, the governor sent out a $200 surplus-rebate check based on hours already worked even though I’m unemployed right now, I’ve got a half-ounce of Gold Label on its way over here as we speak with the money, and after feeling disspiritingly slow and stupid through months of depression earlier this summer, the newspaper is making me feel like a (not-so-stable) genius right now, and I’m living it up in the satin pajamas and fleece robe I got for my birthday. Life is good. I’ve never been big on youth and never really had one to miss (I went straight from hanging out with teenagers to hanging out with 40-year-olds) so I feel fine about the big four-O.