Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 28

I went for a walk in the park Wednesday and saw crocuses blooming and cherry trees budding and high school gym classes out running and it really seemed as if spring is coming to New York, a great city that deserves a break. An excellent story by William Finnegan in last week’s New Yorker opens a window on the Democratic incompetence and squalid corporate corruption that frustrates all attempts to replace Penn Station. Every Democrat should read it.

This hellhole sits in Midtown making millions of people miserable, and nobody in power holds out any prospect of success, meanwhile the Democratic Party is plagued with progressives out to prove their purity by winning defeat.

I live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, populated by liberals who read the Times religiously and grieve for the sorrows of the world and then comfort ourselves with an $8 croissant and a cup of premium Ecuadorian rain-forest coffee with oat milk. As an old lib, I felt obliged to go to a play Wednesday night about homelessness, which had no story line, just a good deal of suffering onstage (then in the audience), some shouting, weeping, most of it incomprehensible, but the audience worked diligently to appreciate it and gave it a partial standing ovation.

The Times, of course, gave it a rave review (“heartbreaking”) and the critic, who had the advantage of having read the script, managed to find a sort of narrative, but to us groundlings, it was ninety minutes of sheer misery, like sitting on the floor of Penn Station waiting for a train and being hustled by panhandlers and crazy people, but given our upbringing, we felt guilty for not enjoying it.

Well, I refuse to go to the theater and pay to be punished.

The theater is for entertainment. It can be light or dark but it must have a story and be comprehensible and engage the audience and take them someplace. The Times critic found it meaningful that the actors glared at the audience — it “implicates the audience,” he said. Well, I’m not implicated: I didn’t write this play. I’m not responsible for making hundreds of people waste an evening.

I grew up in Minnesota so I was brought up to be nice. I have never raised my voice except at athletic events. I do not complain to the person at the drive-up window that the onion rings seem to be day-old rings. When I call to refill a prescription, I say “Thank you” to the clerk and I’m gratified if, instead of “No problem,” she says, “You’re welcome.” It means she was brought up as I was. “No problem” is a brush-off. “You’re welcome” is a kindness. But I am ashamed of myself for not walking out of that play.

My fellow Minnesotans may imagine New Yorkers as pushy and rude but they’ve never ridden the C train during rush hour with a hundred people in a lurching car standing a few inches from each other and avoiding contact. An exercise of extreme delicacy. Sometimes a homeless person comes into a car and makes a pitch for money. People listen. But the homeless person needs to have a story that is understandable and succinct, and if it is, people will put money in the hat. It’s not enough to just glare at people.

I go to church and if, one Sunday, Father Dylan lashes into us for our indifference to the poor, I will accept it up to a point if the man seems Spirit-driven, shouts, weeps, is passionate to the point of lunacy. But I won’t pay $75 to go to the theater and be glared at. That’s just privileged people flagellating themselves with dental floss.

The social justice movement is very appealing. There’s no need to march and carry signs — that ended decades ago — now you just check the boxes and click on LIKE and you’re in. This is likely to wipe out comedy and lead to more dreadful theater, perhaps a play about climate change in a theater full of smoke and the thermostat set at 105. Actors moving through the audience jabbing people with plastic forks.

Raise the minimum wage to $15. Fix the health care system to provide drug rehab. Rebuild Penn Station. Enough with the charades. Be real.

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(Watch)

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In case you’re wondering why I was not in church Sunday morning, I was in the Omaha airport at 6:30 a.m. waiting for a flight back to New York, listening to an announcement that unattended baggage would be confiscated, eating a breakfast croissant and blueberry yogurt, drinking coffee, which came to $19.74, which happens to be the year I started doing my old radio show.

I grew up Sanctified Brethren, so it was odd to wind up in comedy, but my mother loved Jack Benny and Lucille Ball, so there’s the hitch. I started the show to amuse her, and I succeeded. And the one Saturday night in Omaha did too. A tall woman and I sang love duets while a piano player with wild hair kept the beat and I did octogenarian stand-up and the audience accepted this pretty well.

I get sort of euphoric singing harmony because I’m a writer and writing is drudgery, not so different from cleaning hotel rooms. All writing is rewriting and it’s never finished. No writer reads his own work with pleasure. But singing harmony to this woman is like a trapeze act, I hang upside down and swing and she times her leap and catches my wrists and it’s sort of amazing every time.

We sang Paul Simon’s “Under African Skies,” a song I love though I don’t understand it (“This is the story of how we begin to remember … after the dream of falling and calling your name out”???) and the piano player gets a great rambunctious break and then the tall woman whistles through her teeth, grinning, and the audience whoops and yells, and then I talk about a quiet week in Lake Wobegon.

Omaha is a well-kept city with a handsome classic downtown and I ate lunch in a downtown café a few tables away from a long table with six middle-aged guys around it and I loved listening to them talk. I couldn’t hear what they were saying but the tones of the voices, the cadences, the overlaps, made it obvious they’d known each other for decades, the harmony of old friends. The tall woman, our producer Sam, the wild-haired one, and I have known each other for decades and our conversation on tour is not so different from the six guys. Old friends. It’s a blessing you don’t expect when you’re young and beset with your own troubles and then it dawns on you that familiarity is beautiful.

The plane descended through scattered clouds and suddenly there was New York harbor, the tiny statue of Miss Liberty, the towers of lower Manhattan, Governors Island, the Lower East Side, Chinatown, the Brooklyn Bridge, the great panorama of boxes and plazas and the stories contained therein, the intensity and density of human life, and the great park in the middle of Manhattan where my love is out for a walk. She missed me when I was away. She saw the Vienna Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall and it was fabulous but now it’s time to resume daily life. I take a cab to the apartment and I embrace her, we talk to our girl up in Connecticut, we play Scrabble.

I could live cheerfully in Omaha, I can be happy in New York, all I need is my love, a good church, a few old friends, and a measure of good luck. The city has a place in my heart because my dad brought me here when I was 11 and it was the only time in my life I had him all to myself for a couple weeks, a great privilege, and I think of him here. He spent his Army years in New York working in the main post office, which is a few blocks from the main library where I like to go to work. I sit in a long reading room, at a table with reading lamps, surrounded by people in their twenties all studying, most of them Asian, and I like being among them, these young strivers. I’m striving myself. It’s crazy but I feel I have yet to do my best work. If I’m in St. Paul, I’m surrounded by my past, and in New York there’s only the future.

Except when I cross over to Grand Central Station. My dad took me there, for the sheer grandeur of it, and when I walk in and look up at the arched ceiling with the sparkly lights, I get to be 11 again. Then down to the subway, take the shuttle to Times Square and ride the C train home.

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I was down in Frankfort, Kentucky, last week and sat in a café one morning and a fortyish woman in a white uniform approached and said, “What can I get you, Hon?” and I, being a Northerner, was rather touched because female food service workers up North don’t go around Honning male customers. I’ve been Deared a few times but only by women older than I and they may have Deared me from dementia. Once a waitperson in Minneapolis Friended me and I almost spilled my coffee.

(Notice that I don’t refer to them as a “waitress.” The “-ess” is a diminutive, it’s a patronizing relic of male dominance; she is a Waitperson, even though that term could be mistaken as “Weight Person,” meaning “fat lady.” Anyway, female service personnel in Minnesota do not address a man as “hon” or any other term of affection and if he addressed her as Hon, he could be arrested, handcuffed, and taken downtown.

I’m fine with that. We live in a changing world and I try to go with the flow. But I can admit to you, dear reader — may I call you “dear,” sweetheart? — that “Hon” touched me and I also admit that I overtipped her, and the Honning was a factor in that. It made me feel like it was 1958 again and Jerry Lee Lewis was on TV playing stand-up piano on “Great Balls of Fire,” back when rock ’n’ roll was more fun, before it was taken over by alienated loners.

I ordered biscuits and gravy for breakfast, Southern food, I wanted to fit in. I didn’t want other patrons to look at me and see my bowl of artisanal granola and think, “That man wants to confiscate our guns and teach our grandchildren about transgentrification.”

The woman came by a little later and said, “How’s your breakfast, dear?” I said, “It’s wonderful,” though actually it was rather mediocre, but I didn’t want to cause her anxiety because — this is going to sound pathetic but forgive me — her “hon” had given me a very warm feeling deep inside. Me, a published author who once got a terrific review in the Times and who’s attended luncheons at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, but neither the Times nor the Academicians ever called me “hon” and she did and it means something to me.

I am a privileged white Anglo male — privileged in that my parents loved each other and didn’t drink and I got a decent basic education in the public schools and I grew up fundamentalist, which once you’re done with it, life gets much easier, and attended a land-grant university back when you could pay your tuition with a part-time job and I got into radio by virtue of the fact that I was the only applicant for the job — and the woman who waited on me probably didn’t have those advantages.

Maybe the “Hon” was an appeal for kindness by a woman who’d suffered indignities and felt exploited and trodden upon. Maybe she hates her job. Maybe her younger no-good brother got to go to college and she didn’t. She’s smarter than he is by a long shot and look how he messed up his life. As it says in Ecclesiastes, “The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, but time and chance happeneth to them all.” In other words, we’re not so different from the mouse who scurries through the underbrush only to feel the claws around his neck and hear enormous wings flap and suddenly he’s fifty feet in the air being delivered to the eagle’s kiddos.

But I’m not looking over my shoulder. I am pledged to cheerfulness. I was supposed to die twenty years ago but surgeons got to work and my sentence was commuted and I am very grateful. You would be too, buttercup.

One beautiful thing about getting old is the irrelevance. It’s a troubled world and my importance in it is very slight, not like when I was young and the center of the solar system, and now I enjoy the world more than ever, including biscuits and gravy in Kentucky, home of Mitch McConnell (“Be good, Mitch baby. Lighten up, kiddo.”), and I advise you to live longer. Smile at the woman who serves you breakfast and don’t order biscuits and gravy. Bran flakes with berries is much better for you.

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I flew down to Florida for a few days and regret missing the blizzard in Minnesota. I love snow, but I’m afraid of slipping and falling and joining the Joint Replacement Society, whereas in Florida you’d only slip on a banana. I needed to walk and take long strides, which facilitates clear thinking. And what I think, after a brisk walk, is that Florida is a lovely place if you don’t have anything to do and want to be with other people who don’t either. The major industry is relaxation. The bars open at noon, people have a few screwdrivers and go home and take a two-hour nap and watch a golf tournament and then maybe read Instagram or hang out with their iguana. The air conditioning is so cold, you have to wear a parka indoors. There is background music everywhere. Every lobby has a television on that nobody’s watching, music that nobody’s listening to, an environmental drug to keep people from thinking.

Northerners go to Florida to find happiness and after about thirty-six hours they realize that climate does not solve their problems: even though it’s 75 degrees, they still are themselves and that’s their problem. They feel isolated, their life is purposeless, they believe stuff they know is not true. You don’t notice this sort of thing in Minnesota because you’re struggling for survival. Your sidewalk is under deep snowdrifts you are morally obligated to shovel, otherwise you’ll be a pariah in the eyes of your neighbors, and they will never invite you to their potluck again, so you pick up your shovel and heave heavy snow ten feet over the snowbanks and then sit down on the icy sidewalk to rest and the coronary hits you and now you notice the coyotes closing in. You live in south Minneapolis but carnivorous animals are on the lookout for the halt and the lame so you call your wife on the cellphone and she comes out with the shotgun and kills a couple of coyotes and hauls you on a toboggan out to the street where the EMTs pick you up and take you to the hospital where you find out it wasn’t a coronary but a colonary — when you sit down on ice, you get polaroids. So you sit on a butt warmer and you’re fine.

In all of this, you never feel isolated or pointless, just terror.

In Florida, people live in dormitories for the elderly, watching golf on TV, which turns your mind to lime gelatin. In their working lives, they practiced law, healed the sick, managed money, and now they doze in a perpetual twilight and seem to prefer this life to their former working life, which calls into question the very meaning of our free-enterprise culture. I mean, if Methodists preferred to be mollusks, then why bother going to Bible Study?

Senator Scott of Florida had a good point when he suggested cutting back on Social Security and Medicare. Why should our tax dollars go to subsidize inertia?

I had a couple empty days in Florida and missed out on the snow adventure in Minnesota, a bad choice, though the 16 inches they actually got fell far short of the historic Halloween blizzard of 1991. That was a high point of my life. I was living in a log cabin in the woods, snow up to the windowsills, my water heater frozen, power lines down, pump was dead, and brown bears were clawing at the windows, making deep anticipatory feeding sounds. I was resigned to meeting my Maker when instead a young woman rapped on the door. She was on skis, holding a flare to scare the bears. She came in, lit a fire in the fireplace, taped up the power lines, started the pump, the water heater came on, and she made a pot of dandelion tea. I married her of course and it’s been thirty years of happiness, aside from a couple of misbegotten vacations in Florida. Florida gives a woman a chance to show off her legs, but Minnesota winter demands competence, which is a better basis for falling in love, so I have found. Opening a window to a chill wind gives you reason to crawl into bed with your arms around each other. Sitting in adjacent chaises and clinking your pineapple mai tais is not the same thing.

If you read about a snowstorm forecast for Minnesota, get on a plane with your lover and head for Bemidji, the headwaters of the Mississippi. It’ll be an experience you’ll cherish forever. Guaranteed.

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We’ve learned something about privacy lately, namely that it doesn’t exactly exist. The case against the man accused of murdering four students in Idaho shows that cellphone tracking and ubiquitous surveillance cameras make it possible for law enforcement to learn a great deal about a person of interest. Spy satellites enable intelligence agencies to focus in on you as you park at the drive-up window and see how many Egg McMuffins you ordered and whether you take your coffee light or black. And a defamation lawsuit against Fox has subpoenaed internal memos showing that the network’s top stars managed to forget what is fact and what is not and why they should care.

There’s no getting around the fact that we’re more visible than we can imagine and if you care to be paranoid, you now have a reason to be, though in fact the spyware is gathering so much data, gazillions of gigabytes, more than anybody can analyze, and so there is safety in confusion.

Our ancestors came to this great vast country expecting to find freedom, including the freedom to pee in your own back forty without the Department of Urination ticketing you and when the neighbors got too close they headed west and crossed the Missouri and looked for wide-open spaces where you could see for a mile and not see anybody and so know that others aren’t watching you.

To be observed, or feel observed, is to be inhibited. And as I write this, I realize I’m sitting in my living room in my underwear and the shades aren’t pulled and if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go put on a pair of pants.

Okay. Good. Thanks for your patience.

Anyway, I live in Manhattan where privacy derives from anonymity. Living in St. Paul I felt watched, passersby wondering why someone from the town of Anoka is wearing such a nice suit, people who know people who used to know me and who say I need to be taken down a notch, but in New York I’m just one more old white guy and unless I collapse on the sidewalk, they leave me alone. There are a million of us OWGs here and we are easily overlooked, thank goodness.

Frankly, the number of men and women who could walk down a New York Street and be instantly recognized is rather low and getting lower. Frank and Elvis are gone and so is Marilyn. Pop culture has become so diverse, subdivided, stratified, overpopulated, that famous people are famous to only a few. They may have millions of followers on TikTok but nobody is following them down Columbus Avenue.

At the moment, the biggest star in New York is Flaco, the owl who escaped from Central Park Zoo when a vandal cut open his cage, a big six-pound owl with pointy ears and a six-foot wingspread whom the cops saw walking down a sidewalk and tried to capture but he got away and now he’s living in Central Park, feeding on rodents and squirrels and birds, and authorities have decided to let him be.

My wife spotted him Saturday perched high in an American elm in the park, very well camouflaged — she spotted him only because a crowd of fifty or so stood around the tree, many of them with big-lens cameras on tripods, as many cameras as you’d see at a presidential press conference. Flaco’s breed of owl has a life expectancy of 50 years and he is only 13 and Central Park is his hometown so he may well be around here long after us OWGs.

He is a true celebrity. He grew up in the zoo so he is accustomed to people staring at him and now, thanks to the intervention of a vandal, he achieved freedom. Flying was a problem and evidently he spent some time as a pedestrian but he managed to get up into a tree where he can now gaze down on his fan club. He has become our own adolescent child. Does he feel the urge to leave home and does he have the strength to head for the Catskills? Or will he stay in his enclave of woods surrounded by apartment towers? He is a Eurasian eagle-owl, unlikely to find a suitable mate in Manhattan, and what if he should take up an illicit romance with a swan? We wait. We watch. We worry he may eat poisoned rats. A city is in wonderment. We don’t know or care who is mayor but we care about Flaco.

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Sing Along (Watch)

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I am an American and the bacon cheeseburger with onion rings is my source of sustenance, just as I prefer baseball to soccer or a republic to a monarchy. My sweetie serves me locally sourced non-GMO tofu with artisanal farro, which I regard as cattle feed but I eat it knowing that she is right and it is good for me.

Wives tend to be right about 87 percent of the time and this high incidence of correctness can be hard to get used to; a man may start to feel that marriage is a correctional institution. I put on a suit the other morning and she said, “You can’t wear that, people will wonder how can his wife let him go around looking like that.” She said the pants were not the same shade of black as the jacket. I couldn’t see it. I guess I’m so occupied with the environment and economic justice that I don’t have time to worry about matching colors, but I put on a different suit. I don’t want to be a public spectacle unless people are buying tickets to see it.

I love this woman and will do anything to make her happy. Anything. I was making my breakfast a couple days ago and she looked at me and said, “Your jeans are falling down.” I was cracking eggs into a saucepan. She said it again. I had an inspiration and ignored her and scrambled the eggs as my pants descended. “What are you doing?” she said as my pants slipped down to my ankles. She laughed so hard, she almost fell over. I never did slapstick before but this was a wonderful Buster Keaton moment and I pass it on to other men as a useful maneuver. She was highly amused and this is a woman who loves Tchaikovsky and opera and books about European history.

If you want to endear yourself to your spouse, drop your pants. It works.

I write this as I sit in a hotel room in Wichita, on a weeklong tour of doing shows. We miss each other but we also enjoy being apart. She can get together with her musician pals and reminisce about Tanglewood and who was the guy who played the viola solo in “Don Carlo” and wasn’t he married to that pianist who played that Philip Glass sonata at Aspen and bats flew out of the rafters and attacked her, the one who became a veterinary aromatherapist in Oklahoma?

Meanwhile I’m on the road, eating greasy food, keeping a diary, a diary, as it turns out, of diarrhea. And every night I stand in front of a mirror, practicing dropping my trousers. There’s an art to doing it, slowly, naturally, no-handed, and the facial expression of inept solemnity and profound unawareness. I’ll never do this in public; it’s only for her. I love making her happy. Once she accused me of poor aim while urinating and I told her that Minnesota is the center of North America and this gives us the right of continence, to pee where we like. She laughed. Not hard but convincingly.

I believe I am a necessity in her life. You can’t walk up to a stranger on the street and ask him to scratch your back up between your shoulder blades. You can’t ask a man at the bus stop how he feels about your hairstyle. You tell a stranger on the street that his pants and jacket don’t match, he may post an unflattering photo of you on Instagram.

For her I am willing to leave Minnesota and live in New York where I don’t know anybody. But after thirty years together, I know when she’s happy. She comes back exhilarated from a hike around Central Park; she is delighted as the chandeliers rise to the ceiling at the Met and the lights dim, the orchestra tunes, the maestro enters the pit, bows, baton raised, and a gorgeous familiar story is about to begin.

I feel that opera should be inclusive and tell the stories of ordinary people and not just European aristocracy and so I am sketching an opera in which the soprano is furious at the tenor and showing him the proper way to clean a bathroom — “Apri gli occhi, guarda dietro le cose” (Open your eyes, look behind things) — and to calm her he proclaims his love for her — “Farò di tutto per renderti felice” (I will do anything to make you happy) — and as he does his pantaloons start to slide and she points at them but in his passion he doesn’t notice and the pants fall to the floor. I was wearing underwear when my pants fell but I leave it to the director to decide. The tenor’s back is to the audience and personally I think opera could use a pair of what the Italians would call “glutei nudi.”

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I am an old Democrat who’s been traveling around doing shows in Republican towns in the Midwest and it’s making me a better person. I stand up on a theater stage and I hum a note and the audience hums it back and I sing “My country ’tis of thee” and by the “thee” they’re singing so beautifully and are thrilled to do it — they thought I was going to do stand-up but here we are singing “America” and they know the words. It’s a Protestant crowd and when Martin Luther launched the Reformation, he substituted congregational singing for Latin liturgy and clerical costumery and now here are a thousand of them singing four-part harmony, no organ, and they love it. We go into the spacious skies and amber waves and da doo ron ron da doo ron ron and the bright golden haze on the meadow and working on the railroad, songs they haven’t sung since grade school, and I know that they believe a lot of trashy stuff that isn’t remotely true and guess what — I DON’T CARE.

I love these people. Maybe they see me as a guy who’s out to tax the pants off them and confiscate guns and teach gender transition to third-graders but guess what — THEY DON’T CARE. I sing “Mine eyes have seen the coming of the glory of the Lord” and they sing it joyfully. Maybe they belong to a big church with an organ the size of a cattle truck and an organist who loves the eclectic and is contemptuous of the standards and here is this old lefty singing “O Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder” and this is their first chance in decade to sing “How Great Thou Art” and they put their shoulder to it and sing it with evangelical power.

So maybe they voted for the guy with the ducktail who wouldn’t know “Abide With Me” if it bit him in the butt, but it doesn’t matter.

I’m done thinking about him. I’m done with anguish in general. Dolphins are dying, penguins perishing, giraffes are in jeopardy, lynx are getting extinct — so learn to enjoy pigeons and squirrels. You see the headline in the paper about the latest mass shooting and resist reading the details because frankly you’re tired of being horrified and it does nothing for the victims to know how the sudden appearance of the shooter at the parade on this sunny day caused such havoc and small children were trampled. Your anguish is not helpful in the least bit. I’d rather know about their happiness in the hours before it happened.

This is the beauty of being eighty years old, my kiddos, the ability to disengage from the tumult and the tragedy and enjoy the everyday ordinary. Last week, in Iola, Kansas, I saw a man eating his blueberry pancakes with his fingers, no butter or syrup, picking them apart and relishing each bite. I’ve been on earth for eighty years and never saw this until then. Someday I’ll see someone eat a cheeseburger with a knife and fork.

Much of Kansas is quite flat, as you may have heard, and many of you, asked for your impression of Kansas, would draw a blank, but one night in Wichita I was so moved by their singing of hymns and doo-wop and “Oh, Susannah” and “In My Life” and “Stand By Me” that I couldn’t stop and I swung into “O say can you see” and miraculously hit a good key, not too high, and the troops went at it like Mormons and made a tabernacle out of it and the sopranos sailed up high over the land of the free and the home of the brave and it was monumental. I sang bass, quietly.

Journalism is about tragedy and malfeasance and corruption, it’s not journalists’ job to report on happiness, you need to experience that directly, which I did, night after night, standing in dim light among strangers many of whom intensely disagree with me, but I feel their humanity, their love of beauty, their cheerfulness, my fellow Americans, and I shall leave politics to people smarter than I, and keep my distance from anguish, at least until next summer when I may exercise my right to be righteous. Or maybe not. I do think the House and Senate, instead of opening sessions with a prayer, would do well to open with a song. Maybe “We know we belong to the land and the land we belong to is grand,” followed by “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me.” It might help.

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There are new improved robotic programs available that can respond to a request (“Need a job application. 500 words, it says. Okay? The job is Vice President for Impact. Whatever.”) and the bot will create text with a dull mechanical style, a useful tool for the many young people graduating from high school with third-grade writing skills. The problem comes when you’re hired for the $100,000/year V.P.I. job to manage impact and equity access at the Associated Federation of Organizations and the bot is cranking out memos about the pipeline issues of educative assessment and initiatives access and prioritizing social learning to normalize and de-gender programming, and suddenly you need to chair meetings of the impact task force and explain things that you do not yourself understand.

You are now in a thick and tasteless soup. The pay is good but you’re a fish gasping for breath. There are ten thousand vice presidents for impact and the impact they make is that of a soft sponge dropped on a hard floor. It’s all jargon, words that serve only to fill space.

You’d be better off going over to Joe’s Garage and getting a job starting cars this cold February.

Starting a frozen car is an act of mercy and it’s well within your skill set. You don’t need a robot. You can afford to be cheerful, ask people how their day is going — it’s going better now that you’re there. Many of your clients will be drivers who’re not clear on how to attach jumper cables to batteries ¬¬— is it positive to positive or positive to negative? And they read somewhere online that if you get it wrong, sparks will fly and you’ll need to wear diapers for the rest of your life.

But here you are in your white overalls that say “competence” and you pull up nose to nose with the client’s car and she gets out. “Having trouble?” you say. “I don’t know what happened, it started yesterday,” she says. “And now I’m half an hour late for work.”

What happened is that the temperature dropped forty degrees. “Don’t worry, everybody’s running late today,” you say. You open the hood of her car and attach the cables, positive to positive, negative to neutral ground, such as the hood. You wave at her to turn the key and start it and of course she pumps the gas and floods the engine.

“Just hold the pedal to the floor.” She can’t hear you; her window is frozen. And she is weeping. You open her door and motion for her to get out. She is weeping for fear her husband will come out and yell at her. You pat her shoulder. You take her place and hold the pedal down, The car starts. You remove your jumper cables and she holds out a credit card and on impulse you wave it away. “Don’t worry about it, have a nice day,” you say.

You have now done a plain good deed for another human being in trouble. Her life was in disarray and you got her back on track. She will go to her job as Executive Director for Inclusive Pedagogy at a nearby college and spend the day harassing the faculty with warnings about respecting students’ cultural subsets, but you have had a genuine interaction and made an impact: you started a car. She thinks about this all day as she talks inclusivity jargon and she decides to go back to teaching first grade. It pays a fraction of what E.D. of B.S. pays but you get to do real work that changes children’s lives for the better.

Better and better bots will be developed, millions of texts will be analyzed by mega-computers, you’ll be able to choose prose styles from Jane Austen, George Bush, Coleridge, Joan Didion, Emerson, Francine Prose, Al Gore, Hemingway, St. Ignatius, and some of it’ll almost sound right, meanwhile you’ll go on texting your friends (“Wassup?”) and then one day the Chinese will run a joke into the system — two penguins on an ice floe, one says, “You look like you’re wearing a tuxedo” and the other says, “What makes you think I’m not?” — and this nonsense will bring down the whole grid, Wi-Fi gone, stoplights out, no Google, no TikTok, and all the folks in the Impact Department will need to find other jobs, such as unclogging toilets. Somebody has to do it and they have the necessary experience, having done more clogging than anyone else.

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