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
I have been a very happy Democrat for the past week and I am not used to this. I’m used to reading about homelessness, hungry children, the pollution by plastics, the warming of the oceans, various daily examples of injustice and cruelty and suffering, but now, even though I am an old Episcopalian writer, I am in love, I’ve been Kamalized. The nation was sunk in depression over a contest between two old white men, one weird and maniacal, the other murmury, and we were praying for a fresh face to come onstage, but who? And then the news flash: Joe withdrew. Another flash: he endorsed Kamala Harris. And suddenly politics, which had been the same old sameness of similitude glaciating toward November 5, became a fascinating story. There was a good reason to read the paper. A smart articulate friendly woman who laughs and who smiles spontaneously and when Oval Orange came out and called her a lunatic and said she’d destroy the country, it made no sense, not even to his elderly biker fans with the white hair ropes coming out of their skulls. It only made O.O. weirder. It made me feel high. Harris vs. the Harasser starts to look like an unfair contest. She’s got a future, he’s only got a troubled past.
I am not used to feeling this way — my people expecting the worst. When happiness struck, they took this as a sign of imminent catastrophe. But Kamala looks to me like a sunny day after a year of trumpification and when she vows to eliminate child hunger in America, she is striking a chord that reverberates left and right. The right of every child to get a decent healthy start in life, no matter the iniquities or carelessness of the parents. Not even the man Senator Vance called “America’s Hitler” can argue with that. And the visual contrast between her and Herr Trump is stunning. A 16-month-old child can see the difference: Angelina Jolie vs. Thor the Avenger.
Read MoreI turn 82 in a few weeks in the midst of a long tour doing solo shows up Northeast, which is the best way to turn very old, to ride around and entertain beautiful strangers, all of them younger. I do not want to sit at a table of cranks and geezers, each eager to relate his or her own medical history, and then someone wheels in a bonfire of a birthday cake and we sing the old song in our ruined voices and eat melted wax with angel food and someone tells me all about an article they read about carcinoma. I don’t like cake. I’d prefer a pie, rhubarb, with a little tang to it, and two scoops of vanilla. We octogenarians get compliments that sound like eulogies, so go away, stick it in your ear. I’ve had a complicated life with more than my share of wrong turns and incompletes, but I’m in reasonable health, thanks to American medicine, and I have good friends, and I’m married to a smart and funny woman who makes my heart skip when she puts a hand on my shoulder. And I have work to do. God has a purpose for me, yet to be fulfilled, and maybe talking to you, dear reader, is it, so make the best of it. Too bad it’s via internet so you can’t use it afterward for cat litter.
I talk to Him now and then, bargaining about my death. I want to reach 97 as my mother did and be as alert as she and pass from the world in a few days, dozing, listening to gospel music, and He tells me, by way of my wife, that this is my problem, not His, that I need to walk a couple miles briskly every day and eat two meals and cut back on red meat.
Read MoreI have a feeling that the 2024 campaign is effectively over, thanks to a gunman shooting him in the ear and Mr. Trump having the presence of mind, as the Secret Service carried him to safety, to thrust his right fist in the air and shout, “Fight, fight.” The photograph of him doing it, streaks of blood on his face, the flag flying behind him — there is no way for Joe Biden to argue with that photograph. If I were Joe, I’d be thinking of a country to fly to on January 19, the day before treason charges are filed, perhaps Sweden.
Senator J.D. Vance promptly accused Democrats of responsibility, that Biden’s rhetoric “led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.” Others blamed the Deep State, Antifa, elitists, transgender persons, and a Republican congressman said, “Joe Biden sent the orders.” Democrats failed to put forward a theory of their own, given Vance’s line, that President Trump had attempted to “assassinate” himself by snipping his ear with a fingernail clipper, but they didn’t. Democrats are a bunch of clerks and clerics, no talent for fiction.
Read MoreI was in St. Paul last week, walking around, remembering my glory days there, the basement studio where I did a morning DJ show, my first house on Goodrich Avenue across the street from Scott Fitzgerald’s house where he lived with Zelda and wrote “Winter Dreams,” the Fitzgerald Theater downtown where I did a show for years. When I stuck my head in the door last Wednesday and walked down to the stage I remembered how incredibly lucky I had been in that town.
A few blocks away, is the train depot where my dad rode the westbound North Coast Limited twice a week, in the mail car, a .38 pistol on his hip. My mother, in her late teens, lived in St. Paul and earned pocket money going door to door selling peanut butter cookies in brown lunchbags. I grew up and had no interest in football so went in the opposite direction and tried to be a writer. I wanted to write like Kafka though I’d never been persecuted so it didn’t work but when my wife got pregnant I needed to earn a living and landed a job in radio by virtue of being the only applicant — it was the 6 a.m. shift — and obviously my audience wasn’t looking for existential dread, especially not in winter, they needed King Oliver and the Golden Gate Quartet and the Red Clay Ramblers. I come from serious people but I needed to learn to do comedy, so I did. A person can learn these things: brevity, word choice, timing, a wild streak. And cheerfulness is good.
Read MoreI felt the world turn Monday when my wife walked up to a tree, snapped a picture of it with her phone, googled the picture, and said, “It’s a Japanese maple.” Then she did the same to a Siberian pine. I’d never seen anyone do this before. I thought of all the Boy Scouts who earned merit badges by learning to identify trees and this gave them the self-confidence to go on to important careers in government and finance. I thought of people who majored in botany and impressed their friends at parties by saying, “That’s not an ordinary maple. It’s Japanese.” Now a fourth-grader can do it. Maybe even a second.
I don’t mind being married to someone smarter than I. I’ve come to depend on it. It means I don’t need to read about the heat wave or the elections in France and the U.K.; she handles all that for me.
Read MoreIn church Sunday we sang “All people who on earth do dwell” with the beautiful line about serving God with mirth, the only hymn that calls us to comedy, and it made me feel good after this dreadful past week in which mirth has been hard to find.
Suddenly I miss Jonathan Winters, the comic who worked in fragments — I wish he were here, he’d handle today’s news to perfection. Elderly dither was his specialty so he’d have done the Debate in 25 seconds: Biden’s breathless tremolo, the stricken eyes, the dazed solemnity, and Trump in nonsense Deutsch, the pump of a shotgun, baritone chortling, a sidelong snarl, the snap of a whip. Today’s comics are writers and they work in whole sentences and paragraphs but Winters was all phrases and feeling, lunacy, terror, smug confidence, profound stupidity. You can find an abundance of him on YouTube and while you’re there you can check out other varnished geniuses, the dignity of Buster Keaton in his triumphant defeats, the sweetness of Laurel & Hardy — once in a while when I feel gloomy, I google their three-minute dance in “Way Out West,” the fatso and the man-child doing an innocent buck-and-wing to the Avalon Boys singing “At the Ball, That’s All” on a busy street, oblivious to and ignored by the busy world around them.
Read MoreThe age of 81 has come under close scrutiny recently and, as an occupant, I should say a few words in its behalf. Most people are younger than 81, some much younger, and when they see me come onstage, they’re impressed that I’m upright and mobile. I walk to the microphone and speak entire sentences into it that apparently make sense. I don’t doubt that some maybe wonder, if I drop dead, will their ticket be refunded at the box office or will they need to go through a complicated procedure online. But what I say makes sense as do my various hand gestures — Magnanimity (Open Hands), Profundity (Index Finger), Thoughtfulness (Hands Pressed In A Steeple), Thumbs Up — and they relax and attend to what I have to say.
A man of 81 has quite a bit to say. It’s too late to try to be hip; back in my twenties I was hip and wrote bad poems about the fascination of unreality, the beauty of cloudiness and mystery and longing for meaning that I thought were beautiful. Now I know that honesty and compassion and kindness are beautiful and there’s no mystery about that.
Read MoreThe debate was a joke, a cruel joke. Trump was the drunk in the corner saloon, sailing on vodka martinis, and Biden was a serious man attempting to frame an argument in response to unreality and in so doing he searched for the right words, as any normal person would, and so the journalists said, “TRUMP SHOWS ENERGY, BIDEN APPEARS HESITANT,” and suddenly working reporters gauge the popular mood and see Trump winning the night. This is silliness. “I am the greatest,” is a boxer’s brag. It’s nothing a president would ever say, it is unhinged. Muhammad Ali said it but he had to actually get in the ring and hit a man and be hit by him, risk having his brains scrambled, he couldn’t just raise a half-billion from friends to make himself famous even among ferrets and armadillos.
Nobody actually admires Trump; half the people loathe him on sight as a New York loudmouth and phony who’s won the favor of Christians even though his ordinary speech is laced with obscenities. Preachers don’t talk in obscenities, not where I come from, but some of them did some fancy gymnastics and joined the cult. It’s fascinating but not admirable. Trump degrades everything he touches. That’s why there is no Trump University and there’s no Trump Library, they are contradictions. The Republicans sucking up to him now will go down in history as suck-ups, whether they think so or not. It will be a blot on the record. Their biographers will have to work their way around it, like a conviction for embezzlement or marriage to a cousin.
Read MoreMy bio in 100 words is as follows: My parents were in love with each other, had six kids, I was third, an invisible child. I had no interest in crashing into people so didn’t play football or hockey and avoided brain damage. I dabbled in poetry and when I was 14, I read A.J. Liebling and decided to be a writer. I went into radio, which requires no special skill, and took the sunrise shift, which turned me toward comedy, listeners don’t want grievous introspective reflections at 5 a.m. I told stories for forty years and still do. I married well on the third try.
There you have it: perseverance, not brilliance, is the key. I walk out on stage, the audience assumes it’s the janitor. I have no stage fright because my vision is so poor, I don’t notice them looking at me. They pity that old man on stage but I’m holding a microphone and that’s the advantage: when I hum, they hum with me and we all sing “My country, ’tis of thee” and they’re amazed by how good it sounds. The audience entertains itself.
Read MoreI spent my mornings last week at a little white house with a porch overlooking the Connecticut River, astonished by the early morning light, the devout silence except for the twittering of exhilarated birds, and the longer I sat there without opening my phone or laptop, I felt the prospects of the day getting better and better. This is the benefit of going to bed early. It causes concern among others — Is he sick? Was he offended? — but I rise at five and tiptoe downstairs and am dazed by wonder, which is a good thing for a man in the business of humoristicism. Comedy is about incongruity and dissonance and irony but morning light makes a person grateful for the natural world, for quiet and coffee and for the love and friendship of the slumberers upstairs.
It’s a revelation of delight, of our Creator’s delight in His creation, and though we’re brought up to be skeptical, wary of big hopes, prepared to deal with the injustices of life, still the dawn light argues with stoicism and you see the beauty of the ordinary. And then a distant leaf blower starts up, an angry drone like an air raid siren and we’re back in comedy. What was wrong with the old-fashioned hand-operated rake? Why does anyone need this monster that puts you in mind of the German Luftwaffe, the electric chair, the cruel dentistry of my youth?
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