Looking back over the past year, I’m amazed at whom I’ve become. I’ve changed.
Call me crazy, but I’ve begun to think of Marjorie Taylor Greene as inspirational. A year ago, that would have been as outrageous as expecting Pete Hegseth to name a woman four-star general. Or for Karoline Leavitt to tell the truth.
Foolishly, up until now I had M.T.G. pegged as a total Strangelovian nutjob.
It was not entirely my fault. She certainly provided plenty of reasons to think that, what with her full-throated and indecorous heckling of President Biden during a State of the Union address, her suggestion that Jewish space lasers caused the wildfires in California and that no plane actually flew into the twin towers on 9/11.
But that was then.
Unlike so many of us, she’s grown. She’s changed her mind.
Sure, she still holds far-right views on such issues as civil rights for trans people and access to COVID vaccines, but as she leaves the U.S. House to go home to Georgia, she has humbly admitted she was wrong about a lot of things. And not just incidentally, about Trump, the guy she seemingly worshiped at campaign stop after campaign stop for years.
“I was just so naïve…,” she told the New York Times.
Then again, aren’t we all?
So, I wondered, have I grown as much as M.T.G.?
I started tallying the things I’ve changed my mind about recently. And while I don’t feel transformed, I’m happy to report I’m not exactly static either.
Some things occurred spontaneously. Like ketchup. I woke up one day and no longer liked it. I can’t explain it, but it happened. I’m firmly in my post-ketchup period in life.
Other changes had been brewing for a while, and I finally admitted to myself that they had happened. In this category, we have lacrosse, the TV series “Severance” and the whole state of California.
My grandson, Cale, loves lacrosse and by all accounts is very good at it. Game after game I would cheer his feats and try to understand the rules, but it never made any sense to me. The players would whack each other with long sticks right in front of the refs and then a penalty would be called for something like pushing an opponent away when he was trying to whack the player with his stick. It was like an anti-anti-bullying exercise.
Finally, I just came to my senses and decided not to pretend to like this ridiculous form of brutal combat.
Same with “Severance.” I know it’s critically acclaimed and rakes in a ton of awards, but the plot is impenetrable, and the characters are creepy. Maybe it’s a parable about artificial intelligence or work-life balance, but the message is lost in the weirdness. I tried to get hip with it and failed. So, sue me.
My attitude about California is more complicated.
Growing up in stodgy working-class Wisconsin, I always thought of California as some kind of paradise of sunshine, beaches, artists and free-thinking people. Now I know better.
It’s a place where Mark Zuckerberg and his fellow oligarchs buy whole neighborhoods, install elaborate security networks, build things like entertainment palaces and private schools for their kids, and when nearby residents complain about the infernal construction noise, they give them earplugs.
I still love the farmers markets in California and the smell of jasmine, but that can’t compensate for the tyranny of the tech-bros and the vulgar billionaire class.
On the positive side, I’ve had a change of heart about Tom Cruise, kiwi fruit and e-bikes.
All these years, I’ve thought Cruise was a mediocre Scientologist who always played characters who were narcissists because the roles came naturally to him. Then I met a woman who was a child actor who performed opposite Cruise in “Born on the Fourth of July.” She said he was kind and generous with his time and always looked out for the young people on the set.
I admire that. Even so, I’m over the Top Gun genre. Enough already.
Kiwis, meanwhile, have found an elevated position in my refrigerator fruit drawer. No longer are they mere decorative items in the salad bowl, they now hold a vaunted position on the menu as premier sources of vitamins and fiber.
As for e-bikes, all it took was a weeklong bike trip in the Alps to make me realize there was more to cycling than busting your butt and sweating uphill. It was nice to pop that bike into sport mode and climb a mountain with ease so I could arrive at a lovely café feeling relaxed and ready for a fun evening.
I still don’t have any patience with the people who tear past pedestrians on the sidewalks downtown, but that’s not the bike’s fault. I get it.
Probably the biggest change I’ve experienced, though, is with my attitude toward M.T.G. and others like her.
Greene, Rand Paul, Chuck Grassley and many of our neighbors who gleefully, gloatingly celebrated Trump’s reelection in 2024 are speaking out against many of his actions and policies. They are showing some independence and willingness to question their earlier fealty to the cult of Trumpism. They can admit they were wrong.
I don’t have to agree with them to admire them. I hope their feats of independence amid the climate of rigid groupthink on both sides of the political spectrum become a more widespread and appreciated trend.
As the late businessman-philosopher Charlie Munger once said, “I regard it as perfectly normal to fail and make bad decisions. I think the tragedy in life is to be so timid that you don’t play hard enough so you have some reverses.”
So, as 2026 unfolds, here’s hoping for many courageous and magnificent M.T.G.-inspired reversals.
“If none of us is learning lessons here and we can’t evolve and mature with our lessons,” Greene told the Times, “then what kind of people are we?”
The answer is clear: the kind of people who deserve to be ruled by dictators and replaced by artificial intelligence.
Diane Carman is a Denver communications consultant.
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