We welcome our first guest columnist

 Ed. here. Walt is indisposed, so has, for the first time in the nearly 12-year history of WWW, invited a guest columnist to contribute a post. Our guest is David Frump, a self-described conservative and contributor to The Atlantic & Pacific magazine, which no longer has much use for his anti-Trump articles.

Thank you, Ed. Being asked to write a column in Walt Whiteman's World would be a daunting enough prospect at the best of times. But when one has to be not just a guest columnist, but the first, one is reduced to total speechlessness.

Staring at my face in the mirror this morning, I asked myself: what do you believe? Do you really have any opinions? Are you essentially conservative or, as some would have it, merely a cuckservative? Who are you?

Is this 1000 words yet? [No, it isn't. Keep going. Ed.]

Such profound questions have no easy answers. Yet answer must be found, if I am to fill up the remainder of the space allotted to me. And filled it must be, or there will be a good deal of white space on this web page. 

Was it not Anton Chekhov, that great prophet of our age, who foesaw a world in which men were grey shadows, who said "the act of writing is in essence a destructive act, turning what began as nothing into what ends as nothing."?

From Chekhov it is only a short stop to Czechoslovakia, which P.J. O'Rourke, in his epic All The Trouble in the World, held up as an example of the ecological disaster which comes in the wake of laissez-faire environmental policies of the sort espoused by Donald Trump, whose re-election last November virtually guarantees the further rape and pillage of America's grasslands, forests, lakes, rivers, wetlands and... [That's close enough to 1000. Your cheque is in the mail. Ed.]