I’ve been away for many months. Forgive me. The cascade of things-to-do, plus an incapacitating disgust toward social media and the stuff it vehicles, have kept me off the interwebs. But as always, when “somebody is wrong on the Internet,” I see the Bat-signal in the sky and jump for my cape and tights. Perhaps to regret my precipitousness later.

The stimulus: People harshing on J. D. Vance, the Theocratic Absolutist candidate for Vice President, because he wants to eliminate no-fault divorce (along with a lot of other essential things) though he is a twice-divorced man.

The accusation of hypocrisy lacks subtlety. There is not necessarily an inconsistency between his personal experience and his policy stance, if you stop to think about it from the right angle: Namely, that his prior divorces were quite possibly brought by his former wives. (I don’t know this as a fact, I am just surmising, because I don’t have a strong enough stomach to go digging for the legal paper trails.)

Thus what he is against is not divorce per se, but wives having the power to demand divorce from unendurable husbands. Of which he, in my reconstruction, may have been one. So now that “Gotcha!” would swerve into an “Aha!”

I have a funny tale to tell. A friend who was undergoing a divorce– as plaintiff, not as respondent– was faced with an extremely obnoxious opposing counsel who constantly ran up the bills by making frivolous accusations, demanding irrelevant depositions, not showing up for mediation meetings, and so on. My friend was sitting in his lawyer’s office one day when a call came in. Guess who? The obnoxious opposing lawyer’s wife, who was desperately seeking a capable lawyer to divorce his sorry ass and shake him over the money basket. My friend listened with delight and barely suppressed laughter as the wife described at length the horror of living with that jerk, slob, dimwit, creep (and other salty naval expressions), until his lawyer said, amicably and politely, that it wasn’t a case she could get herself involved in because of current litigation.

The thought of how deeply the jerk lawyer’s wife hated him buoyed up my friend during many hours of painful and unnecessary interrogation.

I can’t help seeing Vance and all his companions in misfortune in the same light. I hope their exes are living their best life, as folks say.