Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 21

This should be a great time for journalism what with two wars going on, and ambitious writers should be packing their bags for overseas, not hanging out in Washington watching Republicans try to imagine what, if anything, they believe in. With cable news, print, news networks, websites, millions of podcasts, we are the most communicative people on earth; it’s no wonder we’re so sick of each other. We’re flooded with information and entertainment intertwined, inseparable, insufferable, and thank goodness for the Off switch and the Delete function and the pleasure of silence. But still we long to be smarter than we are.

The wars are complicated though and involve history, which we Americans try to stay innocent of and one would need to read dense books that would lead to more books, which might leave you more conflicted and confused. And that’s why the big story still is Mr. Presidefendant, irrelevant elephant though he be, and the Congressional Trumpists yelling at each other. There are rumors of Republican moderates but they don’t wear caps: they need to maintain deniability.

The real wars have consequences, people die, history shifts, but the Congressional kerfuffle was easier to cover because the cast was small and made up of classic characters — everyone went to high school with a Jim Jordan and a Matt Gaetz — and it took place in Washington where there are good restaurants and everyone is interested in pretty much the same stuff.

We may be, as some have said, a beacon of freedom to the world, but mostly the beacon is shining in our eyes and blinding us to reality. We are cautious travelers and avoid misery at all costs and as a result we’re rather ignorant of most of the globe. The Christian missionaries who set out to save souls in Africa and South America saw the world much more clearly. Our knowledge of the world comes mostly from refugees who’ve landed among us and thanks to them, even in the Midwest, you can find Pakistani, Indian, Vietnamese, Brazilian, North African restaurants where forty years ago there were only Cantonese, Mexican, and Italian. The bounty of America has brought the world to us, breaking into our parochialism, enriching our lives. A writer could walk a couple miles along Lake Street in Minneapolis and talk to foreigners and learn more about the world than if you hung out in D.C. But the young journalist hopes someday to fly on Air Force One to Paris and Beijing and ride in the press bus behind the armored limo through vast throngs of people waving tiny flags. He dreads being assigned to go to the Midwest and stay in cinderblock motels and spend long days interviewing large taciturn people about soil erosion. When you’re assigned to the agriculture beat, there is no return.

Considering our ignorance of the world, it’s no wonder that someone can attract vast attention by being outrageous, running around flapping his dinguses and rattling his doohickeys, but in church on Sunday we closed with a favorite old hymn that tells us to simply look around with awesome wonder at the stars, the rolling thunder, the mountain grandeur, forest, brook, birds singing in the trees, and feel the greatness of the Creator and be caught up in transcendent beauty and have faith that these troubles shall soon pass, which we, in our vast American splendors, are quite able to do. It’s a gorgeous autumn. You walk through the great cathedral of American elms along the Central Park Mall and the grove of pines north of the Great Lawn and the enormous scowl of the presidefendant vanishes like a cloud in the sky.

Thousands of people accomplish this transcendence every day, simply by walking among trees. Today I came home from a walk and donated $100 to a very attractive young woman who is running for Congress against a schmo who looks like he’d shoot your dog if it came in his yard. Youth and beauty over rage and revenge. It made me feel good. She is the daughter of dairy farmers, a Democrat, waiting on tables, running for office.

I admit that I was influenced by her beauty. The Great Scowler has sometimes smirked but I’ve never seen him smile a genuine smile that came from the heart. She looked like someone I’d want for a neighbor. There was a glow about her. I’m tired of anger. Let’s give admiration a chance.

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It’s never too late to be polite and once you’ve gone that far you may as well be friendly. I come from Scots and Yorkshiremen who were suspicious by nature and brought up judgmental and were happiest when alone in a stone hut working with wood but I’ve adopted the “Never too late” point of view after I called up a relative whom I’d avoided for fifty years because she’d said mean things about me and she was so happy to hear my voice that I reformed and became a Christian again. I’ve come to the Lord hundreds of times and it’s always a pleasure. I’ve said it before: life is good, never mind what the cranky and anxious may say, and that’s why so many of us elders are overstaying our welcome, snarfling up Medicare and Social Security, clogging the highways, standing confused at self-checkout trying to figure out how it works. We like it here.

Now of my three score years and ten,

Eighty-one won’t come again.

Subtract from seventy eighty-one,

It means my account is overdrawn,

Which makes me privileged to be

Surviving into bankruptcy.

I’m avoiding sickness and injury

And plan to live an entire century.

There’s plenty of reason for anxiety but think back to the Romans and the B.C. era and imagine how they felt with the year numbers declining annually and you come to 11 B.C. and then 10 and 9 and it’s like a countdown to disaster. Will you wind up at zero? Will the world cease to exist? Nobody knew.

Not to give it away but life does come to an end. Cher is still singing at 77 and Mick Jagger plans to keep strutting and striking punk poses at 80 but one day they’ll retire to Happydale and be wheeled through the ornamental gardens by undocumented migrants, meanwhile the world goes on without them. So it has been and so it shall be. And though prophecy is not my field, I feel confident that civil society with all its liberal values of tolerance and restless endeavor will prevail.

Americans believe that opportunity and kindness can overcome barriers of race and religion. I live in Manhattan amid a great diversity of humankind in which people like me, Episcopalians with a B.A. in the liberal arts, do not exert particular influence or enjoy special privilege. The families of foreign oligarchs are said to occupy upper floors of needlelike towers in mid-Manhattan but they must make their way around town along with the rest of us; there are no special lanes for limos. The city attracts aspiring artists, writers, actors, musicians, who are prepared to live in poverty, wait on table if necessary, while scrambling for a break. The quickest way around town is the subway, where unemployed actors, highly paid CEOs, cleaning ladies, digital geniuses, and ordinary working stiffs merge in a river of humanity. There is no Business Class on the A train. In the subway stations, you will find refugees from South America selling cups of fruit, as well as panhandlers, and outright crazy people, all on foot, and to a refugee from the Midwest and suburban freeway culture, this is at first disconcerting and then inspiring. The civility that prevails gives you faith in your fellow man. The politeness shown to a parent of a little kid in a stroller, or an old man using a cane, or an autistic person, is just as third-grade teachers have taught their pupils for generations. People who shove are spoken to, or at least glared at. Passengers stand packed in a rush-hour train doing their best to respect each other’s personal space.

Every year, a dozen persons or so are shoved into a moving train as it comes into a station. A few are killed. To install sliding glass shields to prevent this would cost billions and so New Yorkers make it a practice to stand back from the tracks, to be wary of weird or troubled persons and keep your distance, and to stand with others and not alone. Safety is in numbers: where there are others, there is civility.

I stand in the 86th Street station and the downtown B train races in and brakes and it’s dramatic and then the doors open and we step in, the dancer, the laryngologist, social worker, the tourists from Ohio, and me, the journalist. Life is good. Stand back from the platform edge.

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One bright spot last week was a phone call from my niece Mylène with her Portuguese family in the car on their way back from Newport, including her dad, Antonio, an irrepressible free spirit who, though monolingual, walks into bars and cafes and shops and sprays Portuguese in all directions as if everyone was an old pal of his. Pure amiability.

She put her phone on speaker and I told her three jokes that she put through the Portuguese pipeline — the dying man who smells fresh apple pie and crawls to the kitchen and reaches for a knife, whereupon his wife brushes him away and says, “Leave it alone, that’s for the funeral” — the old man who buys two dozen condoms every week in the drugstore and when the clerk finally inquires what he needs them for, he says he feeds them to his dog so she poops in plastic bags — the man walking past the insane asylum who hears the inmates shouting, “Twenty-one, twenty-one” and puts his eye to a hole in the fence and is poked in the eye with a sharp stick as they shout, “Twenty-two, twenty-two” — and after each translated joke, I heard Antonio’s distinctive guffaws.

According to Google, “guffaw” in Portuguese would be “gargalhar” though it also offers “dizer” and “rir ruidosamente” and “chortle” is “cachinar” and “chuckle” is “cacarejar” or “rir abafado,” and it was heartwarming to hear three old jokes ding the bell in a foreign tongue. “Heartwarming,” BTW, is “comovente.”

The world as we once knew it is splitting at the seams. Wars and rumors of wars, horrendous pictures of suffering, dismal predictions by scientists that go ignored, and the Republican Party, which all of my uncles and most of my aunts supported, considering the Democrats to be godless, is powered today by resentment, which was utterly alien to my people. They did not close their eyes before meals and pray for revenge.

So for me, the transmission of jokes to a carload of foreigners, had a sort of magic about it.

I am very much comovented over the birth of Mylène’s boy, Dio, Antonio and Helene’s first grandchild, which is what brought her family here for a month of adoration. It wasn’t to visit Washington, D.C., and watch democracy in action.

Antonio promised that when I go to Portugal for the baptism next summer and see the little boy committed to the Christian faith whether he knows it or not, Antonio will have three jokes to tell me. And I will reciprocate.

A little child was brought in to be baptized and the priest had forgotten the date and the church was closed for renovation and the rectory was empty of all utensils except an antique chamber pot, but it was clean and so he put water in it and blessed it and baptized the child and the sexton who arrived late saw this and thought, “Lord, what people of faith they are.”

The beauty of jokes is how they can cross language barriers and political divisions and crankiness of all kinds. A man can walk into a bar full of strangers and if he bides his time and minds his manners there will come a moment when he can lean forward into a gang of guys arguing about something that matters not, and he says, “So a man walks into the bar with his hands full of dog turds and says, ‘Look what I almost stepped in.’” Or the talking dog who walks into the bar and says, “How about a drink for a talking dog?” And the bartender says, “First door on the left is the toilet.” And if they don’t laugh, then he needs to find a better bar.

A Republican congressman walked out of a contentious conference assembly in the House and said, “I think we should hold a lottery and whoever loses can be the speaker.”

Or to put it another way — a Republican was sent to the guillotine to be executed for insurrection and he lay down, blindfolded, and they pulled the rope but the blade wouldn’t drop. They tried again and again, no success, and decided he’d suffered enough and they’d commute the sentence to imprisonment. So they took the blindfold off and the Republican looked up and said, “No. Wait. I see the problem. The blade’s stuck. Give me a pair of pliers and a screwdriver, I can fix it.”

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October chill is in the air even when the sun shines and we count on this to bring us back to common sense after the delusions of summer. Back in August I was contemplating what to say when accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature and now I’m cleaning out boxes of stuff in my closet. If I were a Nobel winner, the University of Texas would offer me a couple million for the stuff but now they won’t so I’m donating it to recycling. Smart move.

Some people want to eliminate the shortstop to permit higher-scoring ball games and attract more women in the 20–30 demographic who are bored by shutouts and double plays and consider that a “perfect game” would be one with 20 or 30 triples, but wiser heads have prevailed, thanks to the chill in the air.

Some say the limerick is not

Long enough, that the limerick ought

To be brought up to date

From five lines to eight.

I give the matter no thought.

Five is enough, I’ve been taught.

Prefer seven? Give it a shot.

Eight crosses the line.

As the Germans say, “Nein.”

But ten — you got the jackpot.

But the Academy of American Limericists has decided that a limerick is five lines. Period. Put it out of your mind.

The hot topic back in August was alternative mathematics, which factors in perceptions and expectations as well as hard numbers, and according to Y, formerly known as X, leading mathematicians were in a fever, seeing the foundations of math, symbolic logic, continuity, numbers themselves, thrown to the wind, replaced by an infinity of possibility, and thousands of Ph.D.s were looking for work in the hospitality industry, but that came to a screeching halt when the leaves turned and the birds headed south.

It’s hard to ignore reality for long. I don’t see much hope for Congress in this regard — when you elect people who are anti-government to govern, you must reap the whirlwind ­­— but I see it happening to Taylor Swift. I’m a friend of her parents, I’ve known her since she was a child and her nickname was Lorrie, we share a passion for gospel music, I have a tape of her singing “It’s G-L-O-R-Y To Know That I’m S-A-V-E-D,” and even after her gazillion-dollar Eras tour, which made her the Most Popular Person In The History Of The World, she is still loyal to her old friends and family and she and I still FaceTime Scrabble on Friday mornings, and last week I beat her with two bingos, “dallied” and “habitat,” and I said, “Girl, it’s October, time to recognize reality.”

She said, “What are you getting at, Uncle G?”

I quoted the lines from “Beat It” on Sail On:

I’m looking at you, you’re a plastic statue

Of a make-believe man with a chemical tan

And an intelligence gap under your red cap.

You can fool the rubes, the goons, the boobs,

But you’re history, mister.

You’re not needed.

So beat it.

I said, “In all the hullaballoo, they missed the message, but I didn’t. You got fifty million fans in the palms of your hands, but they don’t know you like I do, Lorrie. They know the glitter, the emotion, the poetry, the triumph, but I know the serious side of you that never appears in the songs, your passion for policy and justice and saving the world and calming the savagery with decency and hope, and when Eras hits the movie theaters, that’s when you need to announce you’re running for president.”

She was silent. “Make your move,” I said. “I’m thinking,” she said.

“You’re the only one who can come into this Trump-Biden rematch that nobody wants and blow it apart. You can finance a campaign out of your back pocket. You’ve got 99% name recognition. You’ve got a phenomenal organization up and working. And, sweetheart, the fans can sense that you are one smart cookie. America is in desperate need of a woman president and you are that woman. This is your moment.”

It was her turn and she put down the word “maybe” with the Y on a triple space for a score of 31.

“You can do better than that,” I said. I’m waiting. When the news breaks, Joe can go plan his library and the Wide Ride can take his bodyguard squad to Riyadh and the rest of us can resume our lives. No time for failure, Taylor. Give us a lift.

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String theory was once a hobby of mine — the study of how two adjacent fishing lines or cords or laces or reins will, even though carefully laid individually in a drawer or case, in the course of a night become promiscuously intermingled, tangled, even symbiotic ¬¬— and I thought it might help me understand the affairs of the world but now suddenly the news has become unbearable and incomprehensible.

The opinion columnists take the long view and offer reasonable analysis of the Palestinian dilemma and Israeli politics and the strategic thinking of Hamas, but the rest of us are witnessing the murder of civilians, women dragged away screaming, bleeding children in the arms of Palestinian parents, the wreckage of hospitals, homes blown apart, sheer evil unleashed on people like us, and we stare at the pictures until we can’t bear it and then we look again.

Meanwhile, the leaderless Republicans in Congress seem divorced from reality, and a week ago we were supposed to be fascinated by a possible romance of a pop star and a football player, rumors of which made their merch sales boom, and a commanding majority of Republican voters seem prepared to vote happily for a convicted felon to be president of the United States, should it come to that.

This is why I was glad to go to church last Sunday. I walk into this peaceable hall where there is still one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and we repent of the evil we have done and also the evil done on our behalf and vivid images come to mind. These matters have not been reworked by therapeutic theology for our ease and comfort. We expressed contrition and were forgiven and we shook hands all around. And after the closing hymn, our organist John played the postlude, Bach’s Pièce d’Orgue, which begins with arpeggios like swallows flying over the grass, then solid chords like tall trees, which sent us out onto Amsterdam Avenue in a state of quiet elation.

I have loved Bach (1685–1750) since I was 20 and dated an organist and sat outside her practice studio and listened to her go at his chorale preludes. She is gone but the music is permanent.

Bach spent his last years slaving as a church organist for the Lutherans of Leipzig, who were suspicious of genius, paid him a pittance, so he depended on the fees he got for playing funerals, and in a bad year, when the death rate was low, he was desperate. He begged them to hire good singers for the choir and instead they hired their friends and in-laws. They sat through his gorgeous chorales coughing their big honking Lutheran coughs, and as he got old and his eyesight faded from all those years of writing music by candlelight, he worked at editing his organ works in the faith that they would live beyond him and they did and still do.

I went to church with my friend Brian visiting from Denmark where he pastors a church whose congregation is aging so he preaches at a good many funerals, meanwhile his wife is five months pregnant, so he sees life coming and going. We are suspicious of piety and we didn’t talk about the Middle East. We sat in a coffee shop on Broadway and told jokes, which are classics, not quite up to Bach’s, but I’ll bet he knew some of them. Ole is on his deathbed, close to dying, when he smells a rhubarb pie fresh from the oven and manages to crawl to the kitchen and get out a knife and fork. Lena slaps him hard and says, “Leave it alone — that’s for the funeral.” A man walks past the insane asylum and hears them shouting “Twenty-one! Twenty-one!” They sound happy and he puts his eye to a hole in the fence and someone pokes it with a sharp stick and yells, “Twenty-two! Twenty-two!” The auto mechanic is sentenced to death and lies under the guillotine but they can’t get the blade to drop so they decided to commute his sentence and he said, “No, I see the problem. Hand me a pair of pliers and a screwdriver.”

Since then, everything has gotten worse. I still feel that cheerfulness is the only rational course to take but I’m not talking about that this week. And Dominus Vobiscum to you, pal.

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We Minnesotans believe in low-key. We don’t make a big deal about it unless it’s about our kids. And so one morning last week, when I ordered steak and eggs for breakfast and got a splotch of ovular grease and sirloin of Percheron and stale toast, after I sawed away at the horsemeat and the waitperson asked how everything was, I said, “Fine.” It dawned on me in that very moment that I have never ever not even once sent food back to the kitchen.

It was a revelation. I think I would complain if a cockroach was swimming in the soup or a colony of ants resided in the wedge salad, but a breakfast like the one I got, I accept as the luck of the draw, same as you accept potholes or panhandling drug addicts. This is a Minnesota point of view: “Who do I think I am to complain about a tough steak in a world where so many go hungry?” I always regarded this as virtuous, but now it seems like cowardice, the fear of unpleasantness.

Flattery is offensive to a Minnesotan. My mother recoiled if someone praised her cooking and I do the same when someone praises a book I wrote. My wife says, “Accept compliments gracefully,” and she’s so right, but you can tell when you’re being buttered up and when people speak from the heart. I was walking along Wabasha Street in downtown St. Paul last week (after the breakfast) and a couple passed me and the man said quietly, “It’s good to see you again, sir.” A quiet welcome from a city I left years ago and it touched me. The modesty of it said that he’s a Minnesotan too.

Minnesota reticence can be a problem; it often comes off as indifference. There are many jokes about this — the Norwegian who always took his wife with him on trips so he wouldn’t have to hug her goodbye — a Minnesota extrovert is someone who stares at your shoes instead of his own — but it’s a handicap. I had coffee last week with a woman I’ve known for forty years, an odd serendipitous friendship, and we talked for an hour and she was so easy to talk to and we said goodbye and I hugged her and said, “I hope you know that I cherish being your friend,” which surprised me, hearing the words come out of my mouth.

I left Minnesota because I was slandered there and thrown under the bus and in true Minnesota fashion I tried to ignore it, which only made it more painful and so I found the comfort of anonymity in New York where people customarily send a bad breakfast back for the chef to reconsider, which, as my wife points out, tends to improve the overall quality of breakfasts.

I’m sure that is true but I can’t change my upbringing. When I didn’t clean my plate, Mother told me that the starving children of China would consider themselves lucky to have that fried liver and cauliflower and tater tots for dinner. I haven’t eaten liver since I left home at 18 but the lesson was learned: shut up and be grateful.

So I’m perplexed by the Anger Caucus in the House of Representatives. Matt Gaetz is not from Minnesota, nor is Jim Jordan, nor is the embittered billionaire in the courtroom in New York. There he is, stark naked and raving mad, sharing nuclear secrets with members of his golf club, composing fictional tax returns, insulting the judge, a politician whom some people look on as a male Mona Lisa and other people see as a sculpture fashioned from giraffe turds: either way, he’s one of a kind. The Anger Caucus doesn’t send a bad breakfast back to the kitchen, they hurl it against a wall and throw chairs and overturn tables, which is coming to be accepted as normal behavior.

This makes me appreciate Minnesota more. I still have friends there and I cherish them more and more as the years drift by. I wouldn’t come right out and say so, of course, lest it seem like flattery, but if I had breakfast with a friend and she were served horsemeat, I would take it back to the kitchen. She’d say, “Please don’t, it’s okay,” but I’d tell the cook to try again. “This woman taught special ed for thirty years; she deserves better.”

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I hear people complain about police and city planners and the health care system, but never about firemen or EMTs, and few complain about slow delivery of mail, perhaps because so few people write letters these days. I do and delivery is prompt. I wrote a postcard with a limerick for a new father:

Byron is his child’s wiper

And poop does not make him hyper,

He cleans the behind

With a calm focused mind

And fastens a fresh tiny diaper.

A phone text would be eco-friendlier but a written message has the hope of being taped to the fridge, maybe saved in a drawer and 50 years from now the infant’s children will find it and be amused. Fundraising appeals are tossed and paid bills but the little poem about defecation will give pleasure long after I am gone: this is the hope.

The complaints about the cops and whatnot may find their way into the newspaper but then it’s old news as are most things political. When the great man sits down with the ghost who will write his memoirs, he knows that the world has moved on, he is last week’s bagel, he knows this. Whatever he said and did is going, going, gone.

Longevity is the motivation for writing, same as for sculpture and painting and songwriting: to reach beyond your lifetime into the misty future, even if what you create will wind up credited to Anon, still it’s a game worth playing. I do a sing-along at my shows and it’s touching to hear a big crowd sing all the words of “I Saw Her Standing There” and “In My Life,” 50 years after John and Paul wrote them.

The great-grandfather of stand-up, Mark Twain, lives on. Even if people don’t know he said, “The report of my death was an exaggeration,” they still quote him, and also “To be good is noble. But to show others how to be good is even nobler and much less trouble.” I can’t recall the last time I heard someone quote Ulysses Grant’s memoirs.

Memory is a gauge of emotional engagement: we sit around a table and converse and it’s a cloud of chaff in the wind and then something is said that vibrates. My wife looks at an old photo album and here’s a photo of a beach in 1928, an uncle the kids called “Pizey” because he called the kids “Sweetie Pie” and her grandma writes under it, “He looks rather coquettish” because Pizey is wearing a fancy straw hat and skirt and blouse. “They were always up for a good time,” my wife says. There it is: she comes from fun-loving people and I come from puritans. I intend to be more like her.

I read Anne Frank’s diary when I was in high school in Minnesota and I still remember being stunned by “In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.” But then I have to google it to get what followed it: “I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.” It still moves me, that a 15-year-old girl locked with her family in an attic in Amsterdam could write such a thing.

Here in America we’re locked in our own attics of social media, isolation, working from home, driving the freeways. “People are good at heart” is the basis of civil democracy; it’s what allows us to speak decently to those who disagree with us. And we feel this goodness when we walk down the street or go to a ball game or a Taylor Swift concert. We need to fight isolation with festivals, parades, public events, door-to-door campaigning.

So as Mark said, I’m telling you to be good and get on the side of civility. I walked in Central Park recently and two pages fell out of my notebook, which a woman picked up and handed to me. “The kindness of strangers,” I said. “Especially in New York,” she said. I see better times ahead. Put this in a drawer and read it two years from now and see if I’m not right.

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I imagine that someday at America’s boarding gates, after the wheelchair passengers are boarded and Those Who Need Extra Time, then active military, there will be other categories of merit to be given precedence, Persons Traumatized By Flight, Persons In Need Of Affirmation, Persons Trapped In Bad Relationships, and why not add Unappreciated Poets and Third-Grade Teachers to the list. And then you let the Fat Cats board for First Class, and then the peons and peasants.

I am a Fat Cat, to tell the truth, and I’m sheepish about it so I walk, eyes averted, down the empty Elitist lane between long lines of the underprivileged, and I come to the TSA agent and am eyeballed and pass through the scanner and off to the gate and if this were Christian Airways the agent would ask, “Have you loved your neighbor as yourself? Have you extended a hand to the fallen? Do you love the Lord with your whole heart?” and of course the answer is No, no, no, and so I’d be seated in 27B next to a talkative Scientologist and denied a screwdriver and not allowed Wi-Fi and my seat wouldn’t recline and I’d be given a crying infant to hold, but I fly Delta so no questions are asked.

I am a privileged white male. I acquired a vocation in eighth grade when my teacher Mr. Anderson showed me a story by A.J. Liebling and I decided I wanted to Lieble. I attended college when tuition was $360 for the school year and now Medicare has paid a bundle to replace my mitral valve and if it hadn’t been done, I’d be dead and not gallivanting around the country doing shows as an octogenarian stand-up as I did last week in California.

My audiences skew older than Taylor Swift’s (and also they’re smaller) but in California for some reason I drew a lot of millennials, which is a tougher crowd. They don’t want to hear jokes about aging. To them, it’s a catastrophe waiting to happen. Part of my show is an a cappella sing-along, which old people find very moving, to stand and sing “How Great Thou Art” into “Kumbaya” into “Brown-Eyed Girl” into “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” but the millennials don’t want to sing. It strikes them as juvenile. Plus which, they don’t know the words. Millennials have been flooded with data all their lives, there are gigabyte marks on their foreheads, as a result of which they have no memory. I sing “My country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty” and they look at me blankly: what is this?

I want to give them a communal experience, standing shoulder to shoulder with strangers and feeling the fellowship based on mutual knowledge of “Can’t Help Falling In Love With You” but they refuse. I get it. I used to want to be cool myself. Back in 1970 or so, I saw the Grateful Dead play at a hockey rink in Minnesota and they sang “Brokedown Palace” and I felt euphoric, one of the select, even though I wasn’t smoking, but the Dead are gone and I’m on my way out myself, and now I find myself feeling fellowship with Kentuckians and Indianans, doing shows in reddish cities, and hiking around the parking lot I see plenty of dreadful bumper stickers but during the sing-along it turns out they know “It Is Well With My Soul” and we sing it softly in dim light, four-part harmony, a thousand of us, and I’m sure the baritones include men of authoritarian bent, but still peace is flowing like a river, and we feel transported by it, the unity of souls, at least in this moment. For me, a transformational moment, to be united with people I keenly disagree with, who are pledged to the Orange Lunabomber.

But I cherish those harmonious moments. I had a beautiful crowd in Tennessee who knew the Battle Hymn, even the verse about the circling camps and dews and damps and flaring lamps. I love those people. It’s a privilege to know them. I could’ve become a valet parker and instead I wound up befriending strangers, some of whom would deplore me if they knew me better. What a good life. I have no complaints. I was good and unhappy when I was young but I’m over it. And I do believe that the truth is marching on.

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Every day the naked American emperor stalks us, hollering in the hallways, screeching from the screen, demanding attention, and who can avert their eyes from him, his enormous hairy hindquarters, his baggy pectorals and jowls, his tiny privates squiggled up under his protuberant belly, his bared teeth, the glare of his stare, the shouts of “Deranged!” and “Leftist!” and “Weaponization of Witches!” and how can other Republican candidates compete against this Enormity, this Never Before Seen, this Once in a Lifetime Solar Eclipse and Monsoon of a Man?

They can’t. They talk to six customers in a café in Grover’s Corners or address a couple dozen loafers in a Legion club or appear at a Pumpkin Fest in Plimptonville, meanwhile the World’s Greatest American commands millions of eyeballs every time he belches, his every twitch and tremor is discussed by a hundred columnists, he is in our dreams, every time we hit a bump or feel a lump or take a dump, we think of him.

I feel sorry for Nikki Haley. She has dignity, she often states facts (“Every time I hear you, I feel a little bit dumber,” she said to the smarmy Ramaswamy), she has a fine up-from-the-basement life story, she is not under indictment anywhere in the land, but now she is being talked about as the Behemoth’s possible running mate. Think of it, the prospect of being hitched to this landslide of a man, listening to him snarkle and blather and chortle hour after hour, like taking a job as cleaning lady in the Elephant Pavilion.

Poor Ron DeSantis. He went to Yale, he turned Florida red, he took on Mickey and Minnie and Pluto, he made teachers not say Gay, and he was a serious contender but the media attached words like “lack of charisma” and “sinking” to him and once they color you gray, you’re gray for good. You can hire charisma consultants, appear with your happy children and vivacious wife, you can have your face brightened, but the word “loser” appears in a balloon over your head, meanwhile the Emperor comes through the curtains and flashbulbs pop and microphones hum.

Poor Mike Pence. For one brief shining moment back in January 2021, standing in marbled majesty, gavel in hand, he did the Right Thing and refused to turn the Republic into a Fiefdom, which caused a mob of knuckleheads to storm the Capitol and send Pence running to an undisclosed location, but he stood tall for Rectitude and Devotion to Duty, and now here he is on the campaign trail making small talk in a Dunkin’ Donut shop with a couple of truckers trying to decide between the Caramel Crème and the Pumpkin Peppermint.

Poor Chris Christie. Once the Emperor’s Boon Companion, now his lone accuser, the former governor does his spiel for a crowd of six Starbucks sales associates on their vaping break who haven’t the ghost of an idea who this porky guy is.

The Emperor skipped the second Republican debate because emperors do not debate, they proclaim. His nonappearance was pure genius on his part. Instead of appearing to be one of eight mortal beings behind eight identical lecterns, he became a gigantic illusion like a dark cloud in the sky that appears to be a face with eyes and hair. Invisibility became the whole point of the evening; as the children bickered, everybody wondered where the bogeyman had gone to.

Poor liberals. They are addicted to whispering about the man and what can possibly be done and what if and what then and how can it be and what is to blame  — and you can’t go to a dinner party in Manhattan without hearing the clump clump clump of his feet and the thump thump thump of his finger in your chest.

It’s very simple, people. Stupidity is contagious, it makes us dumber, as Ambassador Haley pointed out. Back in the fourth grade, we were terribly bored, having learned addition and subtraction and the solar system, and so when it came time to elect a class president, and Mrs. Moehlenbrock selected three good kids as candidates, word went around the back of the room to write in “Poophead” and it struck us as a brilliant radical thing to do. Poophead won, narrowly. Mrs. Moehlenbrock put the ballots in the wastebasket, said nothing, and we went on presidentless to study the Civil War and memorize the Gettysburg Address. But we’re grown up now. Clorox doesn’t cure COVID. Up is that way, not down there. Let’s get back to business.

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I get the news from my wife, who sits reading the paper across the breakfast table from me and tells me what I need to know, ignoring much of page 1 and picking out the story of the Italian Jews who were sheltered in Catholic monasteries in spite of an anti-Semitic pope and saved from the Holocaust and the story about Florida’s war on undocumented workers, which deprives Floridians of a ready workforce to help clean up the wretched mess after a hurricane and the pictures of beautiful colorful clothing worn by Sudanese women even during their cruel civil war.

It’s not a partisan newscast, it’s humanistic, it’s not about issues but about people, which makes me think she should run for president, which would be good for the country — Mexico is going to have a woman president, why should we lag behind — and I do believe her style is a winning one. My mother was a conservative but she loved Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt because she felt they cared about people. Joe Biden’s trip to Maui to commiserate with fire victims by reminiscing about the time he almost lost his Corvette as a result of a kitchen fire — dumb, dumb, dumb, Joe — why did Jill let you say that stupid clueless thing? A Corvette is not the equivalent of someone’s home, Joe. Who is briefing you for these appearances? Fire him.

I haven’t mentioned candidacy to Jenny because I know she’d say, “Get real. No way.” And also because I have no wish to be First Gentleman. I have a good career as an octogenarian stand-up and after forty years imprisoned in the blue taffeta skirt of public radio, I can finally go out on stage and speak my mind. I’m not about to give that up to become a smiling nonentity, a piece of furniture, which is what a political spouse needs to be.

I’m not willing to give up the luxury of free speech, not even for the good of the nation, and I do think a Jenny presidency could be just what the times demand. She’s never held office, which means she speaks clear English, no b.s. She comes from a very tight family and she values this highly. She has experienced poverty. She has seen mental illness up close. She has made a life in music, playing in orchestras, under the baton of all sorts of conductors, which enables her to read character and distinguish true leaders from egotists. Sitting in the string section, she knows the difference between “painful,” “passable,” and “passionate and profound.” Music is a public service and like other public services, health care, education, law enforcement, legislation, it has the power to change people’s lives for the good. This is the purpose of it and it has little to do with charisma, PR, and the conventional wisdom, and the murmurs of the media.

But this horse is not going to run, so that’s that. So rather than accompany my wife on the campaign trail, standing just behind her and to the left, maintaining appropriate facial expressions, careful to avoid nasal excretion or outbursts of methane, I am writing a musical, which is a crazy thing for an old man to do. The chance of my writing a hit musical is less than the chance of my winning the U.S. Open, but so what? Success is not what old age is about; it’s about having a good time. This musical has stuff in it that won’t be found in The Lion King or Chicago, such as an excellent duet about making love.

Dogs mate and cats mate,
Even older couples copulate.
Let’s us unite and get tight.
People driving through drive-throughs mate,
Even folks with high IQs mate.
Let’s undress and coalesce.
Episcopalians of course mate
Even if it’s not right.
And there are Quaker women
Who have ten Mennonite.
Folks who make headlines mate,
Where no one can see.
And porcupines mate,
Very delicately.
It’s a delight to unite,
When push comes to shove, let’s make love.

A First Gentleman wouldn’t write a song like that and it’s nothing you could sing on public radio and even if I finish the musical it’ll never get produced. Too outdated. But hopelessness is no problem for people in my age bracket. It’s just good to be busy. I hope Joe is enjoying being Leader of the Free World. But if my wife takes him on, he’ll have to get smarter quick.

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