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 been a couple months since the New York City Council legalized jaywalking in town and nobody has noticed this because everybody was doing it anyway. New Yorkers have been jaywalking since before there were stoplights. No New Yorker would stand on the sidewalk, no traffic in sight, and wait for the Walk sign. Nobody, not even Baptists or accountants or people suffering from severe clinical anxiety. Only tourists from the Great Plains would stand and wait for the light to change and this is a clue to pickpockets to lift their wallets.
The main hazard to pedestrians in the city is bicyclists who jayride wildly, flying down the bike lanes, whizzing through red lights, bikes and scooters whipping silently through the winter dark, riders dressed in black, like vampires, riding the wrong way on a one-way street, and especially treacherous are the delivery bikes. New York cops ride around in squad cars and during rush hour a squad car has zero chance of catching a speeding outlaw bicyclist racing through the three-foot gap between parked cars and cars stuck in traffic.
Read MoreThe Christmas season is a trial for us Christians who must wend our way down miles of aisles of trashy merch as musical garbage drizzles down from the speakers in the ceiling and try to keep the nativity of Our Lord in mind, no easy thing, and for this I blame Charles Dickens who took a holy occasion and hung tinsel on it. His message of cheerfulness and sharing in the face of selfish greed is all well and good but it’s not the same as the story of God come to Earth to be made man to show His love for us. One is neighborliness and the other is a miracle and a mystery.
I also blame Irving Berlin and the composers of “Jingle Bells” and “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” and all the other standards that become termites in the brain. I hear them in the grocery store and I ask myself, “Are there no workhouses? As Scrooge said, “Are there no prisons? Are they still operating? If I had my way, everyone who goes around humming ‘White Christmas’ should be baked with his own pudding until he turns brown and be buried with a sprig of holly through his heart.”
Read MoreWe had a couple of summery days in November in New York but now, thank goodness, summer is over and we can get back to business. Thanksgiving is done and we spent it with talkative friends and since I was brought up to believe it’s impolite to interrupt, I sat through a two-hour dinner saying nothing but “Uh-huh” and “Oh, really.” And on Sunday I stepped out into a bitter cold wind and walked to church. It felt good.
Summer is too perfect, the dreaminess of it, like an all-Debussy festival, you long for some interesting weather, possibly a tornado. It makes me question the idea of heaven as eternal bliss, which comes from desert tribes who didn’t know about ice and snow.
Read MoreThe great George Will has passed the fifty-mile mark as a newspaper columnist, and all the rest of us in the trade admire the fact that he still enjoys doing it. It’s palpable in his work. Anybody can throw spitballs but Mr. Will loves the American language and the construction of sentences and paragraphs. This, rather than his correctitude, is what makes him worth reading. It’s a pleasure.
I enjoy the New York Times and I love it all the more now that I see it has practically no power at all. When I took Professor Hage’s Journalism 101 course, back when Kennedy was president and I was a parking lot attendant and a fan of Pete Seeger, I imagined that the great and mighty picked up the Times with fear and foreboding, and I went into journalism for the thrill of being a nerd in horn-rimmed glasses who could bring down the powerful. I got a job writing obituaries at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, and after six months on the burial detail, I left quietly.
Read MoreMy mother, Grace, and her sister Elsie were lifelong best friends, two adjacent younger girls in a family of 13, and our two families had Thanksgiving together every year, usually at Elsie’s house because she was the better cook, a perfectionist, whereas Mother had six kids, four of us boys, which didn’t encourage perfection. Mostly, she served chow.
We were quiet devout people, the women exemplified mannerliness and motherhood, the men were taciturn and could quote Scripture, nobody smoked or drank or swore, the baby napped on a bed among the coats, and the afternoon proceeded along two tracks, heading for a collision: the dinner on one track, Packers-Lions game on the other.
Read MoreIt’s the hunting season and also the mating season for deer, a cruel combination — you’re excited by the scent of a female, she turns her beautiful brown eyes your way and your heart pounds and you paw the ground and snort and wave your antlers and then you smell beer and turn and a guy in a red plaid jacket blows your brains out. I never hunted because my dad and uncles weren’t hunters so there was nobody to show me how to do it.
Hunting is hereditary and I’m astonished that a half-million hunting licenses are issued annually in Minnesota and I don’t know any hunters: it means that I’m an outsider, an oddball.
Read MoreMan has almost unlimited power to do damage and cause suffering, as we have been learning lately, and some slight power to do good, but as we grow up and pay attention to our surroundings, we see that we are beneficiaries of great gifts for which we can claim no credit, and so we have a day of thanksgiving in November, just as we’re bracing for winter. My aunt Eleanor was the patron saint of Thanksgiving and rented a nearby Legion hall and organized a dinner for a hundred or more Keillors back when I was a kid, before cellphones, so instead of taking selfies we had conversation.
My aunts told stories about the farm and how Grandpa drove a horse-drawn mower to cut hay with the reins in one hand and a book in the other and the day the house burned down and he raked through the ashes looking for photographs and how he drove home with his first Model T Ford and lost control of the car and pulled back on the wheel yelling “Whoa!” as the car slid into the ditch and he sat in it laughing at himself.
Read MoreEvery morning when I wake up, I ask myself: what have I done the previous day that entitles me to draw upon the nation’s precious water supply and enjoy a hot shower? I don’t see this as a basic human right; it should be earned. And what I did the other day was accompany my beloved to the Met to see Puccini’s Tosca.
She dearly loves grand opera and I dearly love her, and I was glad to go for the chance to see the tenor be executed and the soprano leap to her death. I enjoy violence more when it’s accompanied by great music.
Read MoreI like flying out of the Atlanta airport. I go through Screening and the TSA lady scouts through my briefcase and wipes my shoes with a cloth to detect explosive fragments and then she says, “You’re good to go, sweetheart.” First I’m a suspected terrorist and then I’m a close personal friend. I did two shows in Georgia last week, after the tragic election, at both of which I walked out onstage and said, “It’s been a hard week for us Marxist-Communists, but there’s a song I want you to sing that is often played triumphantly by brass bands but it’s not about triumph so much as survival, the fact that after the rockets’ glare and bombs bursting in air, the flag was still flying” and I hummed the note and a thousand people stood and sang it majestically, a cappella, with four-part harmony on the land of the free and the brave. Some ushers told me the audience was at least half Republican. It was very moving. What they did to the nation was shameful but at least they’re capable of human feeling. They sang gorgeously.
The next morning, a woman came over to me in the dining room of the hotel and said she had flown from Houston to see the show and had enjoyed it and we fell into conversation. She’d grown up in Vicksburg in the Sixties and discovered early on that she had an affinity for math and studied it in college and rose to a point where she was often the lone woman in the room. She remembered some of her professors hinting that she’d gone into math in order to find a good husband. But her love of math was based on a love of logic, that there are clear lines between true and false, that truth can be proven, and her sorrow about the election was that falsehood had won and would wield great power.
Read MoreSo America has gone and done it, elected the evil grandpa, which goes to show that literacy is in serious decline. Nobody who read the transcripts of his two-hour rants would want this old man in the White House. I’ve been reading them with fascination for the past couple months and they are beyond description, the anger and violent obsessions, the confusion, the incredible frequency of blatant falsehoods, the absence of any coherent philosophy, but now the Secret Service is going to have to guard him on his daily golf round, probably requiring the help of the Army and Marines, and who knows if there will be another election in 2026? Congress will be deadlocked, the man owns the Supreme Court, who will stop him if he declares the name of our country is now United Trump?
The beauty of being on the losing side is that there is no shame. Kamala Harris was a serious and tireless candidate who ran a heroic campaign and spoke about the real world, and the outcome shows the high degree of misogyny among American women. She could have been an excellent president. Everyone in my life voted for her, nobody ever walked up to me and tried to talk about her opponent’s good points, so it’s clear that I don’t live in his country. And because I’m 82 and he never talked about cutting Medicare and Social Security or deporting elderly people or accused us of having bad blood or eating dogs and cats, I can rest easy. His 20% tariffs are likely to cause inflation but an old man doesn’t need much to get along.
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