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
The 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.
Read MoreWhen I go to Trader Joe’s on Columbus Avenue to buy groceries, I do it to buy guy food, which my beloved cannot buy because she knows it’s not good for me. I don’t do this secretly; I come home in broad daylight and unpack the bag and she watches without comment. Sometimes, in place of comment, she’ll tell about something she read in the Times about some encouraging development in health care or public education, meanwhile she watches me put away the frozen mac and cheese, large potatoes for baking in the microwave, a few ears of sweet corn, a couple filets mignon, frozen lasagna, frozen meatballs, frozen knockoff White Castle sliders.
I don’t buy greens because that’s her territory, along with other vegetables, coffee, olive oil, cereal, rice, condiments, et cetera. With coffee, for example, she has a specific dark bean from a particular valley in Guatemala that meets her standards. Me, I’m happy with Maxwell House Instant. Coffee is coffee. She favors Portuguese oil from hand-harvested olives. Me, I’m fine with Mazola.
Read MoreI took the fast train last Friday from London to Edinburgh to do my solo show at Queen’s Hall and sitting in the café car watching the countryside pass at a hundred miles per hour, I felt utterly happy. It was the fourth day of my tour and finally I was emerging from the prison grip of jet lag, which I’d tried to sleep off, which only makes it worse. The cure is daylight, movement. Now I was feeling resurrected.
When I visit Scotland, I think of my grandpa William Denham who emigrated from Glasgow to Minneapolis in 1905. I only knew him as a querulous old guy with high-top leather shoes who pronounced “girls” “gettles” but cousin Joyce told me he left to escape the Calvinist cruelty of his stepmother. William and his wife had 13 children, my mother Grace the 10th, but the first kid was born only four months after the wedding. He was never forgiven. When he returned years later to visit his dying father, he kept a detailed journal of the voyage and it goes blank once he reaches Scotland. My guess is that guilt and shame shut the door. The story couldn’t be told.
Read MoreI am looking forward to November 6 when at last we may be done with the “How in the world is this actually happening in America today” conversation and we will return to enjoying our lives, watching the weather, maybe reading a classic or two, maybe read aloud to a child, perhaps take a walk out of earshot of freeways, maybe astonish a distant relative by writing a letter longhand in ink offering your humorous take on life as you observe it, maybe deal with the boxes of junk in the back of your closet. We will leave the past decade to platoons of authors to dredge through sloughs of the irrelevant and ridiculous and our national leaders will turn their attention to the real world.
In New York, traffic will resume moving on Fifth Avenue, which the Secret Service has pinched tight to protect Melania and Barron up in their tower, and someone will show mercy to poor Rudy in his cruel downfall and it will no longer be required of all Republicans that they reaffirm that up is down and it’s 1953 and Commies in the State Department are selling us down the river and we’ll go back to being the country God intended us to be, one with a sense of humor and gratitude for His generosity and a decent respect for the facts.
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