A view from the top of a peak in the Catoctin Mountains in Maryland: Glynn Wilson

The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

CATOCTIN MOUNTAINS, Md. – Who does not want peace and quiet?

Apparently kids, bots and Trump supporters. Maybe New Yorkers.

Sitting outside for hours on a mountaintop this week, the quiet only broken by birds and frogs singing in the trees and an occasional whoop across the way by a kid having fun camping, I knew I would not have it in me to watch any of the Republican National Convention.

So what’s wrong with me?

What’s wrong with the world.

The national conventions of both parties used to be the biggest political events and parties every four years. Any political news reporter or news junkie would not be caught dead anywhere else.

But the point of fact is, I’ve always been a different kind of reporter/writer. Hey, I like parties as much as the next guy or girl. In my youth I may have liked them more than most, in some cases too much. You know what I mean.

The last political conventions I remember watching with enthusiasm were Obama’s in 2008 and to some extent 2012. They were well orchestrated Hollywood affairs.

The only convention I got to cover in my career was the Democratic Party’s convention in Atlanta in 1988. Ted Kennedy duking it out with Michael Dukakis. The Cheetah III. Cocaine. Those were the days, my friend, as the song goes.

Besides, these days you can get a glimpse of what went down seeing clips on social media and reading news stories online about it. I just can’t take talking heads on TeeVee or the radio anymore. Sorry.

I did enjoy some of Maureen Dowd’s column, although I think she bent over a little backward’s in quoting Trump, maybe because of the outpouring of sympathy over the assassination attempt. And there’s just a little too much “Almighty God” in it for me.

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I laughed out loud at Hulk Hogan ripping off his shirt, still kissing Trump’s ring after all these years. They go way back, back to the day when Trump must have had his crossroads moment, meeting the Devil in person and signing over his soul. It’s easy to imagine what the Prince of Darkness must have whispered, a secret to communicating with the masses he perfected with Steve Bannon’s help in 2016.

“The day I realized it can be smart to be shallow was, for me, a deep experience,” Trump was quoted as saying back then. I had figured this out and wrote about it in the spring of 2018.

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But to distract myself during the proceedings, I went back and revisited the world of hobbits, elves, dwarves and cave trolls. I’m talking, of course, about “The Hobbit” and the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, still magically available online with Max. It comes via my AT$T iPhone account, which of course was just hacked.

About the time Trump was finishing his so-called speech, I was watching Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee there on the precipice of Mount Doom, with Gollum still following them trying to steal back the ring of power. The quest was to make it to the top to drop the ring into the volcanic fire and destroy the evil ring, thereby saving the world, or Middle Earth at least. This was to usher in a period of at least 400 years of peace and prosperity for men and women, and hobbits. The elves were leaving anyway. There weren’t many dwarves left.

So what do the hobbits talk about there on that fiery mountain?

Peace and quiet in the Shire, the sound of water, trying to remember a nice meal of summer vegetables, and the taste of a half pint of fine ale.

That’s what I’m talking about. A place out of the maelstrom of human conflict and chaos.

Can’t we all just get along?

Maybe if there were more peace and quiet in the world, we wouldn’t be fighting with each other all the time.

But of course that would take a long period of peace and prosperity, which just seems out of our reach these days.

How long has it been?

So long ago no one can remember.

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