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
Watching Zohran Mamdani campaigning before Election Day, smiling, full front teeth visible continuously with only a momentary closure of lips for long periods of time, the friendly expression looking genuine while walking through crowds shaking one hand after another, turning up the charm, offsetting the word “Socialist” around his neck, maintaining his nonstop grin, a physical feat as amazing as the Dodger outfielder who leaped against the wall and snagged the Blue Jay triple and broke the hearts of millions of Canadians. As amazing as when my friend Bob Douglas would set down the mandolin and pick up a pair of spoons and play them against the outstretched fingers of his left hand, playing snazzy ragtime percussion, like your church choir dropping their gowns and becoming the Rockettes.
The wonders of this world never cease to amaze. I took the 8th Avenue subway to midtown Manhattan a couple weeks ago in the heaviest downpour in memory — the train stopped at Columbus Circle, the track flooded ahead, so I climbed up to catch a cab and waded in a river where Columbus’s statue stands and got drenched in the typhoon. Even in the mass metropolis, Nature exercising command when it chose, office workers ducking down into the subway, soaking wet.
Read MorePoor Canada, losing the Series the way they did, two straight losses in front of 40,000 rabid fans — and who knew Canadians could be rabid? Canadians, for heaven’s sake, but there they were, putting their Canadianness aside and screaming, praying, demanding justice be done, the Blue Jays ahead three games to two, all they needed was One Win, but no.
Before our eyes, one rally after another was snuffed out and then that tremendous triple in Game 7 and the impossible leap of the Dodger center fielder, his glove stabbing high in the air even while colliding with a teammate to snatch the ball and then the DP in the 12th and thirty Dodgers jumped up and down hugging each other while the 40,000 sat stunned in silence at the cruelty of it — the crappiest Prez in U.S. history had slapped a tariff on Canada out of pure spite at a TV commercial, God in Heaven owed the Series to the North, but no. And I sat stunned at midnight in New York, realizing that baseball is not about justice. That’s why it’s called a Game. And I guess life is a game too.
Read MoreI spent last week in St. Paul, seven days, five of them gorgeous and sunny with bright fall colors preceded by two wretched cold rainy days, serving as contrast, just as Muzak makes you appreciate Mozart, and it put me into a mood of wild unreasonable optimism, the very thing our country was founded on, if you ask me. Conceived in hope and dedicated to the proposition that tomorrow may bring something truly astonishing.
The Midwest I grew up in didn’t encourage wild hopes. “Ikke tro at du er noen,” said the Norwegians and you could tell from the tone of voice what it meant: don’t think you’re somebody, mister. Don’t get your hopes up. Look out you don’t trip on your shoelaces.
Read MoreThe jewel heist at the Louvre proves what I’ve long felt, that going to an art museum induces stupor and you don’t notice what’s right in front of you clearer than day. Two men going to work on a Sunday in Paris, cutting a hole in a glass case, escaping out a second-story window on a hoist, as museumgoers strolled by — I’ve felt this same stupor looking at Degas. Two masked men in tutus could’ve tippy-toed past carrying a guard in handcuffs and I wouldn’t have noticed. Apparently, looking at jewels produces an even greater stupor. The burglars could’ve taken their time and made off with a wheelbarrow of crowns and gone out the front door.
One more reason for you and me to not invest in emeralds and to keep a hand on our wallet when in a museum.
Read MoreI flew to St. Paul last week as it took a turn toward winter with a cold rain and me without a warm coat but then thought better of it and the sun came out and the fall colors brightened. My sweetie was starting rehearsal for Mozart’s Così fan tutte, playing viola, a good enough excuse to come back to my old hometown. The Mississippi still flows by, magnificent as ever, and the downtown sits on a high bluff and the trains still run through Union Depot, one to Chicago, one to Seattle, each daily.
I have a soft spot for St. Paul, having found a career there when I was thirty. I loved radio, having grown up in an evangelical family that refused to get a TV, and a started a live variety show on Saturday nights, a chance for me, a writer, to be friends with musicians, a low-income aristocracy of warmhearted people. The show started in a storefront and went to a theater and toured the country and other people ran the business and I had the fun.
Read MoreWherever you go in the world, if people ask you where you’re from and you say Minnesota, they say, “It gets cold there, doesn’t it.” When New Yorkers travel to Minneapolis, we don’t say, “That’s a really big city, isn’t it.” That would be dumb. But somehow we haven’t created a brand personality for ourselves other than weather. We wanted to be an arts mecca and a tech center and we had our chances but didn’t make it. What we’re left with is our status as America’s Number One producer of turkeys, which doesn’t have the same allure.
With global warming, Minnesota’s status as the Boy It Gets Cold There State is not even accurate, and what’s worse, it’s taken away we Minnesota males’ chance to demonstrate competence. After fourteen inches of snow, you go out the door and hear tires screaming and smell burning rubber and see Nadine the neighbor lady at the wheel of her Buick stuck in a snowbank and you walk over and tap on her window. She opens it. She looks crazed, in a rage, foaming at the mouth, and you say, calmly, “Let me help you.” And she gets out and you get in and you rock the car gently back and forth, and expertly rock it over the hump and out of the snowbank. She offers you money. You say, “No no no no. My pleasure.” You walk away.
Read MoreIt’s good to see Zohran Mamdani meeting with New Yorkers who opposed him in his run for mayor, including a closed-door meeting with a bunch of rank-and-file cops. Earlier in his career Mr. Mamdani uttered the words “defund” and “police” close together in one sentence, which is dumb, and he’s not saying it anymore. It’s what you’re supposed to do after you win a primary and become the Democratic candidate, meet with people who disagree and say fewer dumb things.
There are dedicated cops and some not so much but when you need the police you need the police, you don’t need a pollster, a nail polisher, or a politician. My lasting memory of New York cops goes back to when I landed at JFK and headed for the cabstand, heard shouting, saw people waving their hands and a young woman lying on the sidewalk apparently unconscious. A guy in an orange jacket got on his walkie-talkie, and two cops came running, one of them got on the phone and the other one lay down beside the woman and talked to her and put an arm around her.
Read MoreI am a hard worker and last week I put in a string of 12-hour shifts bent over a laptop and found it exhilarating even though it’s hard on your legs. You get up and walk into the next room and feel off-balance, so you do a few squats but come right back to your work. Two surgeons repaired my defective heart and gave me a couple bonus decades and I don’t wish to spend this astonishing gift recumbent in Boca Raton sipping rum fizzes. I intend to finish this book and then hike up Columbus Avenue to morning Mass at St. Michael’s.
I was brought up Brethren but I escaped into Episcopalian. Brethren believe that if you study Scripture you will find the truth and graduate into redemption but your grammar needs to be correct and punctuation proper. Anglicans believe it’s a miracle. The candles, the smoke, the Black lady deacon who reads the Gospel in a powerful voice.
Read MoreIt’s a sunny day in old New York and I’m a happy man even though I’m at an age when friends are falling left and right but what troubles me right now is the death of newspapers and that means the eventual death of the Republic because people are slippery where power is involved and lying is a natural talent. In 1971, an employee of the RAND Corporation, Daniel Ellsberg, gave the Pentagon Papers to the Washington Post where Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein published it, showing that every president from Truman on had lied to the public about what was happening in Vietnam and Richard Nixon got nailed for it and had to resign.
If Whatsisface got nailed for lying, he wouldn’t even change his tie. He has turned it into an art form. Every morning we read the Times and ask ourselves, “How can the man not be amazed at his own naked bravado? Does the man not have a pair of pants?” He once built ugly apartment buildings and hotels and now he is a world leader who stands for an hour in New York, a city that despises him, and stands naked in the U.N. for twice his allotted time and they sit quietly and applaud at the end. Does no one possess a gavel? Is this just one big practical joke by the Queens Deutscher Bund trying to trick us dummkopfs into wearing lederhosen?
Read MoreIt is a beautiful October in Manhattan thanks to global warming and I understand it’s a balmy fall in Minnesota too, though Minnesota needs a good freeze to tell the farmers it’s time to harvest. There are few farmers left still farming in Minnesota, thanks to robotic harvesters — old Zeke looks up from his computer screen and says, “Alexa, pick the pumpkins,” and it’s done.
There are twice as many professional humorists as farmers these days as well I know. And now everybody’s son and stepdaughter are lining up to get a degree in Stand-Up. Yes, you’re right, it’s a B.S. and that’s all you need nowadays, and so I’ve had to take up teaching. And I do stand-up at nursing homes where all the jokes are fresh, even the one about the old man who came into a bar and sat next to a young woman and said, “Do I come in here often?”
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