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
Church was fairly full Sunday, the second in Lent, and I stood in back before the organ prelude, enjoying a cup of coffee and a couple introduced themselves, Tom and Jean, visiting from Washington, D.C. Interesting people. He is newly retired from the Defense Department, responsible for maintenance of nuclear stockpiles, and they were visiting New York simply because they like the city. I didn’t introduce myself: I like the city because I’m anonymous here.
So we sat together in the third pew and I read the bulletin and the Gospel reading caught my eye, from Luke, the verse in which the Lord gathers His own like a hen gathers her brood under her wings, so I scribbled a limerick:
Read MoreI’ve gotten a rave report from Bayfield, Wisconsin, that relatives of a friend slaughtered a hog and put on a pork feast for neighbors and that fresh pork compared to store-bought is like gin compared to turpentine, but I dare not mention this in my own home because my love looks down on pork due to fairy tales she was read as a child. Those stories omitted the fact that pigs are omnivores and will devour a rat or lizard as readily as plants and flowers, and does the size of the prey place the Three Pigs on a higher moral plane than I with my bratwurst? Does a lizard not have feelings? Is a baby bunny not capable of loyalty?
I will say this for our Current Occupant, he has never come out against pork — he feasts on it and so does his man Musk — a herd is but a appetizer, billions of dollars’ worth of hog go down that gullet, he devours the tusks too, and the Man is the first Occupant in my lifetime who’s taken a swing at the Canadians, who due to their northernness consider themselves uppermost but who are trying to transport their chaos south — five political parties, two languages, an unsingable national anthem, round bacon — by way of a porous border.
Read MoreI became a cheerful person when I was in my twenties and got a job in radio. I’d been a mediocre student and was trying to be a poet but was averse to poverty so I needed a job and I landed the early morning shift because nobody else wanted to get up at 4 a.m. I come from somber fundamentalist stock, but I knew my job was to be lighthearted on cold dark Minnesota mornings, which is sort of like being a chaplain on Death Row, and I learned to impersonate lightheartedness and got good at it. And now I’ve been doing it for sixty years and actually love it.
I did a show at the Fox Theatre in Hutchinson, Kansas, last week that was one of the happiest of my long career, had a couple wonderful hours with a thousand Kansans, many of whom may have voted for this disaster of a president and his tycoon in the black cap and shades who’s running the government. But we didn’t talk about that. We sang “My country ’tis of thee” and The Battle Hymn of the Republic, including the verse about the circling camps and the dews and damps and dim and flaring lamps. We omitted political commentary entirely.
Read MoreAs we watch a white Christian patriarchy exert its influence in Washington, I think back to H.L. Mencken whom I admired back in eighth grade for his sharp tongue. I come from soft-spoken people who shunned mockery and I abandoned Mencken in my twenties when I became a romantic liberal but Project 2025 has made him relevant.
We’re living in Mencken’s world now. He said, “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron. The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”
Read MorePlease tell me that our current Occupant is not going to take over the Metropolitan Opera and the Lincoln Memorial and the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown and that the Met will continue to do opera and not celebrity tribute shows and Lincoln’s statue will not be given a movable jaw to speak posts from Truth Social and Cooperstown will not switch to enshrining owners of ball clubs.
Let him have the Kennedy Center and turn it into a country pop dinner theater with a motel and casino but please let the Smithsonian continue keeping history and not be purged of history the Occupant doesn’t care for.
Read MoreI seldom invite friends to come to church with me and, after Sunday’s morning service that was so deeply moving, I don’t know why. If you knew a great bakery, you’d tell people. If you read a great book, you wouldn’t keep it a secret. But off I truck to the West Side of Manhattan and in the big door past the greeters, drop my two cents in the offering plate, head altarward, stop at my pew, genuflect and bow, and take my seat.
The genuflection disturbs my fundamentalist ancestors. I can hear them mutter, “Oh please, not that again.” Genuflection they regard as Catholic, papist, alien to the pure faith, and my Anglican church they consider decaffeinated Catholicism, and though I love my ancestors, I tell them to shove off. I know my own heart. This is my home.
Read MoreI wound up my southern tour in Key West, stayed at an 1836 manse on Truman Street, awoke at 4 a.m. for the flight to Atlanta, then to New York. Stood out on the porch and heard a rooster crowing. The plane, a 737, took off at 7 a.m. The pilot locked the brakes tight, revved up the engine to full power, released the brakes, and we rocketed down the runway and got liftoff with about 90 feet of runway to spare. Exciting. I forgot my belt at TSA security in Key West and hiking through the vast Atlanta airport, trying to manage two bags while keeping my pants from falling down, I probably looked helpless because a young woman pushing a wheelchair stopped and asked if I was okay. I said, “Yes, but I lost my belt and my pants are falling down.”
She was delighted. “I’ve seen that type of thing before,” she said. She hung one bag on the back of the chair, I sat in the seat and held the briefcase, and she got me on the “plane train” to the T Concourse and a men’s store and I bought a belt, then back on the train to Concourse B to catch my flight to LaGuardia. This was my first time ever being pushed in an airport wheelchair; walking in airports is my main exercise. The woman’s name was Zsa Zsa and she was a delight, she called out “Hello, sweetheart” to other wheelchair pushers, she sang out “Chair coming through!” to clear a path onto and off of trains, she called me “Darling,” she said “How’s your day going?” to anyone who looked downcast and suddenly their day improved. She was joy on wheels, and it was illuminating to see how a joyful demeanor and radical courtesy can be a weapon to triumph over the passive aggressions and bad attitudes in public places — you simply couldn’t help but love the woman. She left you no other choice.
Read MoreI’ve just finished a ten-day solo tour down South as the World’s Oldest Stand-Up and it was a major adventure for an old guy with memory issues who keeps forgetting the word “cognitive” and other words of a similar sort, walking onstage every night to do ninety minutes or more freestyle in front of a big crowd, most of whom probably voted the wrong way last November, and make them laugh a lot.
A person forgets things at 82. One night I forgot the story about the Butt Grip Contest in Lake Wobegon and it’s not easy to find your way back to a logical point where you can have old Norwegian men drop their trousers and attempt to pick up a 50-cent piece with their bare cheeks. I got this story from Alan Simpson, a Republican senator from Wyoming who was a fan of the show, and it works beautifully and I hate to lose it.
Read MoreI never cared for Valentine’s Day as a kid, when we had to address a valentine to everyone in the classroom, Miss Moehlenbrock’s rule, so that every child would feel equally important — she was a true liberal, but the idea of universal fondness didn’t ring true for me, and clearly some valentines were more equal than others. Some valentines have integrity and the others are torn on dotted lines from a sheet of eight. I got a lot of those.
I was fond of Corinne and Christine because they were big readers and had been to New York City, which I had not. But the Valentine message –— “I love you, please be mine” –— wasn’t the right one. Possession wasn’t my aim.
Read MoreI sympathized with our President’s proposing that we run all the Palestinians out of Gaza and take ownership and turn it into a luxury resort. I’ve had crazy ideas myself but thank goodness I’ve kept them to myself. I do think a neurologist should be brought in — this sounds like global amnesia to me. Golf can be a dangerous game and you wonder if he might’ve taken a hit. The press doesn’t cover his rounds closely.
So of course everyone in the world denounced the idea, and poor Karoline Leavitt had to stand up in the White House press room and say he hadn’t meant what he said. And then, walking through a crowd of reporters shouting questions at him, the man himself did not stop to respond.
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