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
Driving through northern Iowa last week, the flattest farmland in America, I thought of my Uncle Jim and the old Keillor farm I loved as a kid, the big barn and haymow, The cows he milked by hand twice a day, the horses Prince and Ned who pulled the hayrack, a magical place for a boy. My dad, who grew up on that farm, hated it because he saw it as perpetual poverty. He was eager to make a break and start over. He was not nostalgic. I am but I was only a visitor.
It was dramatic to drive for hundreds of miles and see no barns or silos, no windmill or grove around a farmhouse, the Grant Wood landscape of rural America, and see what corporate industrial agriculture looks like. It looks like Siberia. A place you send people as punishment.
Read MoreOn the road last week, doing one-nighters, living the motel life, which is a good life, though it does raise questions in a man’s mind, such as, “When did America decide to wrap paper cups in plastic? And why?” I’m an old man and I remember when your motel room came with two coffee cups, ceramic, unwrapped, next to the coffeemaker, or a stack of paper cups. Maybe two glasses in the bathroom. Was there a wave of motel cup poisoning back in the Nineties that led to this plastic protectivity? And if so, why do they not put plastic covers on the motel scrambled-egg breakfast?
The plastic film I peel off a paper cup for coffee turns my mind in a direction I don’t want, and instead of thinking about my beloved wife and lighthearted daughter and what I might do this evening to amuse the audience coming to see an old man with a microphone, I think about microplastic pollution, a planet that absorbs 40 million tons of it every year, plastic in the trees, water, the ice in the Antarctic, in my brain, pollution created by powerful corporate interests — men in tailored suits who own three homes have persuaded my motels to plastic-wrap cups and they don’t care about science, only profitability.
Read MoreI went walking around Central Park Sunday, 843 acres of paradise in the middle of the metropolitan grid; that always makes a person feel good because it contradicts all you read about AI, alienation, angst, atrophy of the arts, urban disaffection and antagonisms — you walk among flocks of different individuals being themselves and also enjoying flocks of dissimilars in passing, a parade of heterogenuflecting homogenuineness, joggers each jogging to their own drumbeat, dogs towing their people, papas pushing babies in strollers, little princesses, cool kids on scooters, elders freed from their four walls, everybody talking, phrases flying past — I don’t see why — I told her, Don’t — it’s nice the blue jay is pretty because it’s a mean bird and the shriek — and for me, a writer from a family of separatist evangelicals who brought me up to avoid the worldly, it is a Carnival of Humanity, it is a feast, everybody is cheerful, how could they be otherwise?
A few minutes before, I was on the phone with a friend having a dour conversation about all the usual things people my age bemoan and beweep, and now I was in a timeless scene of happiness that E.B. White would’ve enjoyed, A.J. Liebling, W.B. Yeats, J.F. Powers, J.D. Salinger, or H.D. My Grandma Dora would’ve felt at home here, her grandfather David Powell who went West in the silver rush of 1859, his wife, Martha Ann, whose father was an English seaman who jumped ship in Baltimore and avoided being hanged and took up farming in Pennsylvania.
Read MoreI’m at the age when you learn more about medicine than you had intended to, such as a T.I.A. or “transient ischemic attack” or what I call “temporary idiotic agitation,” which recently happened to me, the sudden inability of even a published author to speak a simple declarative sentence, which is embarrassing, like suddenly wetting your pants.
Of course much of what you learn about medicine is good, such as noninvasive surgery: a doctor can rearrange body parts leaving such a tiny scar that your swimwear modeling career will hardly be interrupted. Injuries that once would’ve landed you in a rocking chair by the fireplace to peruse National Geographics in your twilight years — now physical therapists put you through your paces to make you nimble, supple, and adroit. And the best news: a study at Harvard shows there is no connection between a healthy lifestyle and longevity.
Read MoreGetting old is an adventure and what, I ask you, is life without adventure? And an adventure that is planned such as a canoe trip or the ascent of Mount Kilimanjaro is nothing compared to one that happens to you suddenly such as what happened to me Sunday at Bethel, New York.
I was on tour with Sam the road manager and the pianist Rich Dworsky and we’d done six terrific shows — even I, the naysayer, thought they were good — and were headed to do the seventh and last at a nearby venue on the site of the 1969 Woodstock Festival, which according to some accounts was an iconic week in the saga of my generation and according to some people I knew who were there was a miserable few days of loud music, rain, bad drugs, and chaos, a crowd of almost a half million that had been planned for a crowd of fifty thousand. Janis Joplin sang and Jimi Hendrix and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and I’d written a parody of CSNY’s “Teach Your Children” for it.
Read MoreMy new career as a stand-up is more fun than the old one in broadcasting for the simple reason that the audience is right there in front of me and it’s very clear when I connect and when I don’t.
Comedy is intimate. You poke them right, they laugh, it isn’t a conceptual problem. AI can create what sounds like jokes but they’re not funny. AI is going to take over banking and politics long before it takes over comedy.
Read MoreIt’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.
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