One of the hallmarks of the Donald Trump campaign, and to a lesser extent the Republican Party, is a call for the end of political correctness. I’ve always felt a little sorry for that term, doomed to the grammatical tragedy of becoming a sarcastic pejorative before it ever had a chance to be a straightforward noun. That said, with a few highly regrettable exceptions, I’ve never had much trouble differentiating the loud, profane, obnoxious, ribald and borderline pornographic from language that hurts, demeans, dehumanizes or demonstrates power over someone else. Be polite, just like your mom told you, and you shouldn’t have to worry about anything.

What would a Frank Sinatra White House look like?

You do know a vote for The Orange Lord is a vote for old-school values, right? When men ran in packs and she-rats pretended to run for their lives, especially when those male rats carried names like Sammy, Dino, Peter and Frankie Baby.

Because if Donald Trump isn't a one-man rat-pack, I don't know who is.

Let us ponder this phenomenon, one that is fast disappearing from our culture as the buffalo were in the late 1870s on the American Great Plains.

Buffalo. Rats. White men. See where I'm going with this? I don't. I'm flying blind. But I'm feeling it. And that instinct got me from the Mediterranean French coast to its north, Verdun, in a day on a motorcycle without the use of a map and I don't speak French, except you know, when I'm loving. But I know when I'm on to something, dear reader. So, onward, monks.

The American male as we know him is a living thing of the past, put out to pasture by, oh, a lack of a fence on our southern border? Nah. More like every movement needs its villain. Thus it was decreed: thanks for setting up this good thang but you're politically expendable. Sorr-ee!

Video footage from the police cruiser where Black Lives Matter protester Tynan Krakoff was taken into custody is raising questions about Columbus police tactics and why he was targeted for arrest. Krakoff is a lead organizer in the Columbus chapter of Showing Up for Racial Justice, a national organization of white people who fight against racial injustice.

I write this column with a heavy heart.

Two fields of endeavor that I care deeply about are disintegrating before my eyes.

In politics, the two candidates for president are deeply flawed and profoundly unpopular.

In journalism, once-evenhanded media institutions and individual reporters have lost their way and become propagandists.

Sadly, I fear that after the election, things will become worse and the warring political camps will start posturing for the next election.

The public has been badly served by all this and now holds both politicians and journalists in disrepute with little possibility of regaining the public trust. The chances of either of them changing their ways and beginning to serve the public without fear or favor -- once the hallmark of a good politician and a good journalist -- are slim.

How did we get to this sad state of affairs?

On the Republican side, Donald Trump, a venom-spewing bully used his superior knowledge of manipulating the media to intimidate his primary opponents and swat them down like flies.

What happens when you want to turn a popular work of literature into cinema but it’s not long enough to serve your purposes?

In the case of Tolkien’s The Hobbit, director Peter Jackson simply padded the story out so much that he was able to stretch the novel into not one, not two, but three super-sized films.

Director Mark Osborne (Kung Fu Panda) has taken a different approach with Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s classic children’s book, The Little Prince. The beloved tale is so simple and concise that there wasn’t enough content to stretch into even one feature-length film. Osborne’s solution: Embed the original story into another story set in contemporary times.

First appearing in French in 1943, The Little Prince is the illustrated tale of an aviator who crash-lands in the desert with only eight days’ worth of water. He’s feverishly working to fix his plane when he meets a young boy who claims to be a visitor from another planet—or, actually, an asteroid. The boy has left his tiny home after a tiff with his true love: a beautiful, but vain, rose.