Columns
From the New York Times, Time magazine, and the complete Chicago Tribune syndicated columns
From the New York Times, Time magazine, and the complete Chicago Tribune syndicated columns
It’s not easy keeping up with our Commander in Chief, who one day posts a picture of himself as a radiant Christ-like figure in Biblical robes healing the sick and another day attends a Universal Fight Club match in Miami at which martial arts fighters pound the snot out of each other, meanwhile conducting Operation Epic Fury, which has cost at least $300 billion so far and does not seem to be winding down. Seventy percent of Republicans approve of this, which suggests something like religious devotion, so the online deification of him is maybe the direction the party is taking. It’s a radical new phenomenon in our history, but there’ve been so many of them in his era that it’s hard to keep track.
The Founders never anticipated this, insanity as an accepted policy, the unashamed self-aggrandizement, the use of U.S. attorneys to go after political opponents. My dad departed the scene in time to avoid seeing it, he being an admirer of Dwight D. Eisenhower, and so far the policy of continual frequent and ferocious insult seems to be working fairly well. The Supreme Court has gone along with it for the most part and if it resisted and the C.i.C. issued an executive order dismissing four Justices, who would intervene? The Court has no army or navy, no Imperial Court Enforcers in paratrooper gear to carry out its will. If the C.i.C. got it in his head to send Special Forces into the Vatican to grab Pope Leo, it would cause an uproar for a day or two, but in our media age, storms fizzle out quickly. If the C.i.C. issues an executive order granting himself a lifetime appointment, which general is going to step forward and say, “Over my dead body” and what distant base will he be reassigned to? With 70% approval among Republicans, the Senate is not likely to take action. Newspapers are cutting back on journalism, and the influence of a Times or Post editorial is less than that of the average drum majorette.
Read MoreMy favorite aunt was my Aunt Eleanor, which I can say now that I am auntless. I had 17 of them, both Mother and Dad came from large families, and I don’t know what I’d have done without them, probably ridden freight trains and lived in hobo jungles and wound up in Leavenworth. Eleanor was a farm girl and loved animals, was a great gardener, could handle a gun, played sports, and was a nurse, so she lived life on a practical level. She was Dad’s favorite sibling and when he talked to her on the phone, he became a different person, told stories, was funny and uninhibited. And she was a beautiful letter writer.
Letter writing is a lost art but it’s been losing for a long time. Most people are hesitant to put themselves on paper. They say they’re too busy but really it’s a problem of reticence. Why embarrass yourself?
Read MoreI saw the F-word in the New York Times on Sunday, at least it was in my copy, and I don’t mean “fake,” and it was spelled out, all four letters, as posted online by the Commander in Chief in his early morning harangue against Iran, and though he considers the Times fake news, the White House hasn’t denied that he wrote it.
The Times didn’t use dashes to soften the shock for their younger readers but spelled out the word, I think, in order to convey the tone of the post, which the Times described as “blistering” but which most readers would describe as insane. If you got a note from your neighbor saying “you’ll be living in hell,” you’d call the cops and they’d come.
Read MoreIt’s a dark time in our country, with the price of gas up high and so the cost of sending B-52s to bomb another country is making Wall Street nervous, and anyone throwing a party in April has to wonder what the festivity level will be and will all that pricey champagne go undrunk as people stand around moaning about the bad news we get constantly because the phone is right there in our pocket. Everybody needs a good party now and then and I mean serious silliness, not just wry irony.
By “good party” I mean one where people get giddy on a glass of something and then the music starts and it’s loud enough to drown out all conversation and we hear a song from when we were 16 and suddenly we’re immature again and everyone dances with their hands in the air and sings Van Morrison’s great O O O my brown-eyed girl, do you remember when we used to sing, SHA LA LA LA LA LA LA DE DA LA LA DE DA. And even the guests who are in their 80s know the words because it’s from 1967 when they were twentyish. Old people are dancing wildly who didn’t think they could dance due to hip replacements and their neurologist recommended against it and pretty soon we’re singing — Help me if you can, I’m feeling down, and I do appreciate you being ’round. Help me get my feet back on the ground and minutes ago we were responsible citizens concerned about birthright citizenship and now we’re wild pagans at a fertility festival.
Read MoreAs I’ve said many times and I’ll say it again, life gets smaller as you get older and you delete things you don’t really care about such as folk dancing and canoeing and camping — camping is a refugee experience, I was a camp counselor for two summers, I lay on hard ground in a cloud of insects dealing with terrible constipation and every time I smell insect repellent or see an insulated vest, I thank the Lord, “Never again, thank you.” I gave up golf in my thirties, the sheer pointlessness of it. Some people tried to get me interested in bird-watching. Sweetheart, the birds know who they are and they don’t use our words for it, they have their own.
No, what a man needs is someone to love and something to do that he loves to do and if possible a daughter. I have my true love and last week I went around and did a show and I sang and told stories and did stand-up and I never mentioned ***** except to say, “I am 83 and an optimist and I believe that one day soon the wackos who are in charge will return to their stone huts in the swamp and we will be free to be who we are, a kind and curious and generous people who’ve done great things in science and invention and extending their benefits to all.” And people cheered.
Read MoreI’ve started a new career as a stand-up comic after fifty years in fiction and as anyone can see 2026 is the worst time to do comedy, maybe since the Middle Ages. We have a regime of wackos who are anti-science, anti-education and rather whimsical about raining deadly destruction on other people, and how do you satirize terminal stupidity? So I don’t. I go after Thoreau and his brand of individuals. “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” — horse hockey. I go out and do 90 minutes about the pleasure of being an elderly English-speaking American Episcopalian guy and people enjoy this. It’s about the pleasure of community.
Thoreau was the first in a long line of alienated loner cowboy poet heroes marching each to his own drummer, including plenty of felons and billionaires and sociopaths who drive cars with 95-decibel tailpipes and folks who get a kick out of blowing up things coming down to the current alienated loner Leader who had the power to pay the TSA workers but didn’t for five weeks while Americans waited in lines at airports for three and four hours. He has his own plane and doesn’t go through a metal detector. He ought to go through a soul detector.
Read MoreI am a Minnesotan, I speak the language, it’s my home so dear and its name is a beacon bright and clear. I attended the University of Minnesota and majored in English, which prepared me for a career in valet parking. I wanted to be a writer so I drank heavily and tried out all the illicit drugs offered to me but the good stuff went to the coasts, and the Midwest got hashish that was less potent than used coffee grounds. I never got high until I had two wisdom teeth extracted and was anesthetized.
I went into treatment for naivete and it helped. Minnesota is a national headquarters for the recovery industry, where you’ll find enormous camps for drunks where they listen to lectures and break into small groups to talk about their emotionally unavailable parents who failed to vindicate their personhood. There are programs for people in grief at the loss of a pet, people who want to stop being Scandinavian, people suffering from traumatic taciturnity. I suffer from a fear of leaving food on my plate and scraping it into the garbage and I’m sure there is a group for me.
Read MoreI took a cab over to the East Side to see my surgeon Thursday, always an interesting experience to chat with a man who took a sharp blade and made a hole in me and messed around with internal things. I was unconscious at the time and it was only my shoulder, he wasn’t inside my skull where language is stored and the neurology that enables you to walk and be mannerly and remember the jokes and also the Beatitudes, but still.
My primary doc chose him because his doctor friends told him that Sam is the best shoulder man in New York and my primary man is very well connected. You don’t want to be looking through the Yellow Pages or googling, you want to get the inside scoop, and doctors gossip about each other and know who’s who. You don’t recommend a surgeon just because he’s a golf partner. This is one difference between medicine and politics: competence is expected. If Sam had been like the guys masterminding the war on Iran, he would’ve replaced my shoulder with my right ankle.
Read MoreI don’t want to make a big fuss about this but when somebody does something for me, such as the guy who opened the door for me at Trader Joe’s, and I said, “Thank you,” I wish he hadn’t said, “No problem.” Back in the day, he would’ve said, “You’re welcome,” which sounds more elegant to me, or even “My pleasure,” which is downright friendly, whereas “No problem” sounds dismissive, a shrug. He was in his twenties, I’m old enough to be his grandpa, and of course I am capable of opening a door and I know it wasn’t a problem for him — my gratitude was for his good manners. I am grateful for his respect. I could’ve opened the door for him and extended my hand, to say, “After you, please” and he might’ve said, “Thank you.” It’s mannerly, a simple way of indicating that we each belong here, we have a right to respect, are not opponents engaged in a struggle for dominance. We are not raccoons. If we don’t maintain our good manners, we may soon slide to the level of filthy savages who crap in our pants and shove each other aside and say, “Outta my way, scumbag loser, or I’ll kick the daylights outta you.”
Well, now I have made a big fuss about it, so I may as well continue. I was a shy kid who shrank from playground bullies so my third-grade teacher let me stay in the library during recess and I became a reader. I enjoyed Mark Twain, Robert Benchley, James Thurber, but I mostly loved history.
Read MoreA day of false summer last week, 80 degrees in Manhattan, and I headed to my physical therapy appointment to improve my busted left shoulder. The PT establishment is in a deep storefront with workout machines and padded tables along the sides, which brings back miserable memories of high school phy-ed, the chin-up bar and rope climb, the padded mats on the gym floor and the waist-high barrier that we were supposed to take a running dive over and somersault forward. Gymnastics, for me, was public humiliation. I’ve avoided gyms ever since.
But this is a commercial enterprise, so it’s a welcoming place, no chin-ups or diving. The therapists are young and trim, in black workout clothes, friendly, professional, and the clientele is older, all shapes and sizes, fatties, skinnies, the lame and hobbling, wizened geezers, folks in discomfort, complainers. The therapists say, “We’re going to get you back to better than ever,” and the clients think, “Why did this have to happen to me?”
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