Karl Lagerfeld

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Oh, yes, I almost forgot. Everyone’s a hero nowadays. We want them and need them and there are so few natural ones around. Perhaps that’s why we have to keep inventing them. A one-time Olympic gold-medal winner in the decathlon, the toughest of all track-and-field events, changes sex forty years after his victory, and Vanity Fair sticks him on the cover. I’ve said this before, but if a Martian came down and read the N.Y. Times or watched the TV news, he would definitely think this planet is inhabited by transgender men and women, lesbians, bisexuals, bondage/dominance/submission types, and a few white beer-drinking truck drivers who spend their days and nights shooting black and Hispanic people.

Once upon a time there were barbers who cut men’s hair and hairdressers who took care of women. Sometime during the ’60s, a hairdresser by the name of Alexandre became a sine qua non among Parisian ladies of a certain class, and since then his profession has never looked back. Hairdressers became more sought after than rich old men, and now they’re more famous than their clients and some are multimillionaires.

Hype made Trump, and the Donald is still leading in the polls, a fact I cherish. So there are good things about hype, but except for Donald Trump I can’t think of any. But Trump hypes himself, he’s not hyped by an army of PR jerks. Actually Trump is the anti-hype—he tells it like it is and the proles love it. Up in Massachusetts, in a blue-collar 100 percent Democratic audience, he was cheered to the rafters. The N.Y. Times propagandist covering him was so shocked he never filed a story about it. But now I must stop and go over and organize my Christmas party. This year it’s uptown and more selective than usual. The Donald is invited but I doubt he’ll make it.