This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2017, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

You know what I want in a president? I want someone who is so busy running the country that he or she doesn't have time to tweet about movie stars talking trash.

Apparently — and I say this because I read only the headline before moving on to something I cared about — Meryl Streep said something about Donald Trump at the Golden Globes (which I didn't watch) and he felt the need to respond by calling her a "ho."

OK, I don't know what he said about her. All I know is that it wasn't flattering. The point (at least for me) is that he bothered to respond at all.

For a guy who's about to become one of the most powerful people on the planet, President-elect Donald Trump seems to have a huge amount of time for Twitter rants about people whose votes and opinions no longer matter about him becoming president.

For the record, I don't Twitter. I barely answer my email or my phone. My head doesn't work fast enough to do all that and still make deadline at the paper.

But neither do I have the ability to order up a surprise bombing of Iran. If I did, you can bet that I'd be worried about something more than what Hollywood thought of me. I would need to pay attention to things that actually matter.

A few friends and even the newspaper have encouraged me to get involved in Twitter, the magical world of passing notes to each other in class.

"It's great. You can tell all your followers what you're doing, thinking and even where you are."

Yeah, and I can get called a &%@$* by thousands of people whom I not only don't know but hope I never do.

Maybe my aversion to Twitter stems from being raised in an age where commentary on behaving like a moron was confined to the people in the room you were actually in at the moment.

People on the other side of town, or even the other side of the planet, weren't privy to it the instant it happened. And unless maybe you killed somebody important, they never heard about it at all.

Email, Twitter, texts, LinkedIn, Google, Yik Yak, Pinterest, Facebook — where do people find the time for all of that and still get their chores done?

I have all the letters my wife and I wrote to each other during the year before we got married. Back then, the normal communication tool was a pencil. A retractable ballpoint pen if you were looking for really high tech.

When I was in South America, it took a handwritten letter nearly two weeks to reach me. When a former friend wrote and denounced my decision to go on a mission, it was a month before he got my reply. By then he was dead from a drug overdose. It was six weeks before I found out about it.

Yes, it's nice to have immediacy in our correspondence today, but it's also one of the biggest time-sucks in the history of the human race.

This isn't about whether Trump is qualified to be president. I've already stated my position on that. It's about how he spends his time.

If I could, I'd use the latest social media tool — Crap Head, I think it is — to send Trump a message. "The country has lots of problems. None of them are Meryl Streep. Get to work."

Robert Kirby can be reached at rkirby@sltrib.com or facebook.com/stillnotpatbagley.