While at college, every student was required to take a 10-hour art history class called The Arts in either their junior or senior year. It was divided into 5 hours per semester, in which you attended lectures and subsections weekly.

The Arts was a class that students took with a great deal of trepidation. I don’t recall why I decided to take it in my junior year. Apparently, it was one of those moments when I carpe diem. At the end of the year, Louie Palmer, the professor, called me to his office and asked me to be his first teaching assistant during my senior year.

During my senior year, there I was in front of my fellow classmates, as an undergraduate, teaching them about art history in several subsections each week. Also, during both semesters, I wrote and graded the midterms and finals. That opportunity had a profound positive effect on my Weltanschauung.

My favorite painting was William Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire. There are four paintings on the wall in my bedroom. Three were done by Than Tun Oo, who is a great painter in Myanmar and a good friend of mine. The other is The Fighting Temeraire. It is considered the greatest British painting of all time.

The original painting of The Fighting Temeraire is at the National Gallery in London. I, too, looked at The Fighting Temeraire like Q and James Bond did in the movie Skyfall. Listen to the exchange between Q and Bond.

Q’s question to Bond is a metaphor for the way things change over time to newer ideas and concepts. Bond didn’t grasp Q’s metaphor.

Q asked Bond what he thought. Bond’s comment about “A bloody big ship” missed Q’s point. He sees a parallel between the old HMS Fighting Temeraire and the aging Bond.

The intellectual and educational benefits to me of having taken The Art, being a student assistant, and teaching art history at the college in the past quarter-century are enormous. Of all the art history classes in college, graduate, and post-graduate school, that single class is remembered like no other one. The Arts is like Mrs. Davis, my English teacher in high school, who required us to memorize 100 lines of poetry or prose each semester. A day doesn’t go by without me thinking about artistic expressions, either written words or paintings.

This article is about Q’s understanding of things aging and our need to move on. For example, one issue facing our TACO president is his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. Epstein committed suicide, which means that the files will replace interviewing him. Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in prison for planning and sexually abusing minors with Epstein.

However, Deputy Attorney General Blanche, who represented Trump in his hush money trial along with two federal criminal cases, interviewed Maxwell for nine hours, which was spread over two days. During the interview, around 100 names were mentioned regarding friends of Epstein and Maxwell. After the interview, Maxwell was moved to a minimum security prison. Trump’s criteria for a pardon for Maxwell are based on how it will affect him.

Prior to the Maxwell interview, Attorney General Bondi said that Epstein's files and the client list were “sitting on my desk.” Well, the worm has turned.

Trump maintains that Epstein was one of his best friends, and at other times, Epstein wasn’t. When our TACO president and Epstein parted ways, it wasn’t over sex trafficking. Trump was irked that Epstein was trying to buy the same mansion in Florida that he wanted to buy.

More disturbing, several weeks ago, Trump bemoaned that Prince Andrew lost all royal titles due to his sexual conduct with young teenage girls. That was an example of projection. Trump might lose his royal titles after the Epstein files are released.

Beyond the obvious issues around the Epstein files, they reflect where we are as a nation. Trump and his MAGA minions are denying that the files exist. However, if they do, what’s the big issue regarding the files?

Trump was found guilty in the hush money trial. Nonetheless, Trump asserts that he is innocent. From his perspective, women aren’t really equal to men, at least Christian Nationalists. Therefore, he was innocent of sexually abusing dozens of women over the years. Women aren’t valuable as people; the value of women is in their being sex objects, not that they have rights.

As with racism, sexism goes back to the early evolution of humans. Both -isms are based on birth. In America, if you are born a white male, you can lord it over non-whites and women.

Even though the North won the Civil War, it lost the battle against racism. Here again, one’s race was determined by birth. Whites, especially white males, are superior to all others. Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) addresses the issue of racism, which the white nationalists wish to ensure that white males control America. It is the basis of both the Great Replacement Theory and the Critical Race Theory, which wants to go back to a time when all Americans were white and men ruled the roost.

Despite what white males want to return to, the facts are that women aren’t less capable than men. Women’s brains fully develop several years before men complete the process. Therefore, from K through secondary education, women outperform men. Women make up 70% of the valedictorians in high schools. They do equally well as college and university valedictorians. They also make up 58% of the student body in all higher education schools.

Additionally, women in America and throughout the world outlive men on average by 5.8 years. They can also do one thing that men have never been able to do—create and bear children.

White males in America need to realize that “the times they are a-changin’.”

One final note. Even more fascinating, Bryan Sykes, who was a human genetics professor at Oxford, theorized in Adam's Curse: A Future Without Men that the declining sperm count of men and the atrophy of the male Y chromosome could mean that men will become extinct around 125,000 years from now.

These two films reflect upon a time in the past, even though some still live in the past: The Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind.