Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 63

Interesting times we’re living in and I wonder what name we’ll give it when it’s over. Corona Spring is too pretty. Maybe it’ll be The Darkness of the Don. Maybe we’ll call it Twenty-19. It’s not like a hurricane or blizzard, nobody will have great stories to tell, just memories of claustrophobia and social aversion and being thrilled because we didn’t have to go on a ventilator.

I grew up among taciturn loners, adherents of a separatist Christian cult that believed in silence — “Be still and know that I am God” was their favorite verse — so quarantine is nothing to me. My uncle Lonnie toured the country in a freak show as the World’s Most Silent Man, appearing with the Fat Lady, the Penguin Boy, the Alligator Woman, the Human Pincushion, and a sword-swallower and fire-eater named Vince the Invincible. Lonnie sat on a stool in his green plaid suit and the barker said, “And now I direct your attention to a man who holds the world record for silence. Lonnie has not spoken a word for 47 years. Why? We do not know. Feel free to talk to him, as you wish. I have in my hand a ten-dollar bill and I will give it to whoever can get Lonnie to respond.” Ten bucks was serious money back then. People yelled insults, trying to arouse a response, and Lonnie sat and took it all in, and if someone yelled, “The man is deaf!” Lonnie shook his head.

He came to the Minnesota State Fair Midway every year and I went to see him. We sat in his trailer between shows and he talked a little. I told him I wanted to be a storyteller. He said, “Why?” I said, “We need stories to be able to understand ourselves.” He said, “Oh, really?”

He became the World’s Most Silent Man when he was 30 and still living on his father’s farm and one day he took ten dozen eggs to town to sell and the buggy hit a bump and the eggs broke so Lonnie stopped and made a fire and fried the eggs on a shovel and a hobo came along and shared the eggs with him, a hobo who worked in a carnival every summer as a geek in a freak show, and he offered to get Lonnie a job and Lonnie, who hated farming and had been ready to leave home for years, joined the show. He loved the show people and that became his life.

It was easy work, being the WMSM, sitting politely while people cursed and abused him, and he fell in love with Leila the Tattooed Girl and they traveled the country in their own trailer, leading a secluded life like the one we have now with the virus. The virus Lonnie feared was stability. He spent his life on the road, died with his boots on while onstage and they did six more shows with him and he became the World’s First Posthumous Performer.

I went into the storytelling trade, working solo, but now the virus has brought an end to that, and I think about joining the WMSM’s old freak show. The Penguin Boy and Fat Lady are gone, replaced by the Abusive Nanny, the Cat Strangler, the World’s Most Drunk Driver, and a genuine Klansman. I would be the Corona Man. The barker would yell, “I direct your attention now to the tall dog-faced man who is an asymptomatic bearer of the deadly COVID-19 virus and who will now be passing through the crowd selling vials of souvenir sanitizer.” I’ll jump off the stage, howling, and the crowd will disperse, the tent will empty, and the crowd waiting in line will come in for the next show.

Life is good and we are so lucky. You need a sad dog-faced Corona Man to jump out and throw a scare into you and you go home feeling achy and feverish and people put you to bed and fuss over you and time passes and one morning you realize that you are okay. Dread and fear are what make a great story; the awareness of death is the prerequisite for all our pleasures; when I jump out at you with the bag of Purells, you will be thrilled even if I am more than six feet away, and your family will be more precious to you and your cheeseburger and fries will feel like a king’s feast.

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After a week in Corona Prison with my loved ones, I must say — if I were to croak tomorrow, I’d look back on the week as a beautiful blessing. Feeling closer than ever to friends, the complete loss of a sense of time, the intense gratitude for the wife and daughter. We should make it an annual event. A week of isolation. Call it Thanksgiving. The one in November we can rename Day of Obligation.

The news from Washington is astonishing, each day worse than the day before. The con man at the lectern, the trillion-dollar re-election bailout. Satire is helpless in the face of it. Nothing to be done until November.

I’m an old man, I don’t worry about myself, I worry about the millennials and Gen Z and those little kids eating supper with their parents at our family Zoom conference the other night. Growing up with GPS, will they ever appreciate the beauty of a map? Will they bother to learn to spell, given spell-check, and doesn’t the love of language begin with forming the letters? Thanks to Netflix and a thousand other things, they’ll keep boredom at bay, but isn’t it boredom that brings out the creative urge in a person? Meanwhile, Greenland is melting, the sea is rising and warming, and the clock is ticking, and Washington, D.C., has become utterly foreign, like a moon of Uranus, pun intended. The millennials’ charismatic spokesperson, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is five years away from running for president, and will America be ready to elect a hyphenated person in 2028? It’s doubtful.

It struck me as weird to see millennials enthused about a 78-year-old student radical from the Sixties. My generation has hung on too long and we need to be overthrown. We consider experience to be a prime requirement for public office and we’re wrong. Biden and Sanders have far too much experience, most of it wrong. The U.S. Senate is no qualification for higher office whatsoever. None. Look around — it’s governors who are doing the work of dealing with the Situation. The Senate is an echo chamber. Two years ago, Ocasio-Cortez was waiting on tables and tending bar at a taqueria in lower Manhattan, a natural doorway to politics, much better than law school.

My generation is over. The world belongs to the young and we geezers are tourists. (Have I said this before? I think so. My wife is nodding. I guess I have.) Do we allow tourists to vote in America? And here is an issue nobody in public office will touch with a ten-foot pole: why not establish polling-place testing for voters over 60 to eliminate those suffering from dementia from obtaining a ballot?

And so I am proposing that the right to vote cease at age 70. An arbitrary age, I admit, but so is 18. I know plenty of 12-year-olds who’re better qualified than some people my age. Face it, intellectual acuity declines with the passage of time and the ingestion of animal fats and malted beverages, and if it’s low to begin with, a person comes to a point where you need close supervision. I speak from personal experience. My knowledge of basic math peaked in the 11th grade, my science literacy long before that. I made my career in the field of fiction, a useful trade but not so conducive to good citizenship. I am a Biden supporter for the same reason Trumpers support Trump — because my man does not make me feel inferior: I listen to him speak and I think, “I could’ve said that, or something like it. I don’t think he’s going to do too much damage. And he’ll surround himself with smart people, just as I have. Right? Right.” Is this the sort of reasoning our country needs right now?

Personal admission: I was in New York during the Minnesota primary and so, for the first time in my adult life, I didn’t vote. It felt good. Why bet on a game when your team isn’t playing?

At 77 I am on a glide path and enjoying my days and don’t have so much at stake as that little family eating supper. The dad is a journalist, the mom is a nurse, two crucial lines of work. I am an old man with a good wife and daughter, whom I’m now going to ask if they can see where I put my glasses. Thanks for reading this far. Be well. Keep in touch.

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We have been getting some questions about life in Lake Wobegon under social distancing. Here, Garrison answers a few from Tony & Toni in South Rockwood, MI. Please feel free to email [email protected] with more questions!


 


Q. Is the Sidetrack Tap closed?


A: It is not closed. It is a refuge for skeptics and radicals and a place that offers Freedom of Speech, all the more so as the night wears on. It is a sweat lodge for men. Women run the schools and run the church, women uphold the ideals, and the Sidetrack Tap is where men are free to express ridicule and contempt. There are fewer customers in there now, many fewer. And they are all sitting six feet apart.


 


Q. Are services cancelled at Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibly?


A: Services are not cancelled at Our Lady but church is cancelled at LW Lutheran. No wine at communion, just wafers. Pastor Liz is relieved of the need for a homily that explains this plague. Father Wilmer’s homilies have always been short and inscrutable. It’s a solemn Mass with everyone sitting seven feet apart.


 


Q. Can you still get a piece of rhubarb pie at the Chatterbox Cafe?


A: Rhubarb season is still months away. You need fresh rhubarb to make good rhubarb pie. No need for mediocre — we’ve got pumpkin pie for that. Dorothy keeps the Chatterbox open as a civic duty, it’s a social center, the town hall. But everyone wary of course. Some people maintain that rhubarb has medicinal power beyond antibiotics but they have their own rhubarb, canned, in big jars in the basement, and they take it straight, no crust.


 


Q. How do the Norwegian bachelor farmers practice social distancing?


A: The bachelor farmers are fatalists. They’ve been isolating themselves most of their lives. They sit on the bench in front of Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery and nobody sits down with them except fellow bachelors. Nobody. They keep their own counsel. They show no signs of Christian faith whatsoever — for all we know, they may be Hindu or Zoroastrian — but they’re still ours, our distant relations who keep their distance.

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Days of social isolation have told us things about ourselves that we don’t want to know. Instead of using the time to read Tolstoy or listen to Beethoven, we watched a video of a cat sitting on a whoopee cushion.

It’s an extraordinary moment in history when the American family is brought together by the threat of contagion and I, the eldest of my family, sit in the chimney corner and wait for my offspring to say, “Tell us about your life when you were young, Papa,” in which case I’d tell about Uncle Jim’s farm and his horses Prince and Ned and the haymow and the cistern where we lowered the milk cans to cool, but nobody asks, which is okay by me. In the 21st century, a city boy’s experiences on a farm in 1946 are not so riveting and it hurts to tell a story and see your audience look around for a route of escape.

So how did it happen that in my childhood I loved to hear my elders’ stories, especially if they had no obvious moral? My prim and proper Aunt Ina told how she’d gone to a car dealer in Minneapolis in 1928 and though she’d never driven a car, she bought one and she and two girlfriends drove on country roads all the way to Yellowstone Park to see the geysers and then sold the car and took the train back to Minnesota to resume a circumspect life. Aunt Ruth told how Grandpa woke his children on a winter night and bundled them up and took them into the woods to see a silver timber wolf who was howling at the moon. Aunt Jo told about sitting in the schoolhouse doing her math problems and a girl said, “Look, your house is on fire” and Jo looked and it was. Adventure, wonder, disaster.

It was women who told stories in my family, the men did not. Men felt responsible for upholding authority and maintaining orthodoxy, and good stories are seldom about orthodoxy. When you tell a story on yourself, you are open to ridicule.

A few years ago, I did a tour promoting a book of mine and was put up in a private lodge at Sundance with high windows and views of snowy peaks and tall pines, where, alone on a chill March afternoon, I took off my clothes and went out to the hot tub. I stepped out on the deck and the door closed behind me and clicked a definite ker-chunk of a click. It was locked. I had no key. Naked men often don’t.

I sat in the tub for a while, hoping a cleaning lady might drop in, or the Lone Ranger, or St. Jude, and when nobody did, I wrapped myself in a blue plastic tarp I took off the woodpile and trudged barefoot down the gravel road and knocked on the door of another lodge to ask for help. I learned that a naked man wrapped in blue plastic does not win friends easily. I knocked on the doors of five lodges with lights on and cars in the driveway and nobody showed their faces though I did see curtains move slightly. I waved in an urgent way to three men driving by in a pickup and they avoided eye contact and drove on. The blue plastic was cold. My feet hurt. I was contemplating the idea of dropping the tarp and getting myself arrested for public indecency and getting warm in the back seat of a squad car. At the sixth house, a woman came to the door and opened it a crack. She agreed to call the resort office. She didn’t invite me in, so I walked back to the hot tub and was rescued an hour later by a security man, and that was the parable of the naked author in the blue plastic. Moral: a best-selling author is Somebody and a naked best-selling author is nobody in particular. You may be distinguished but don’t forget to wear pants.

I told this story at dinner last night and it was appreciated. A barefoot naked man wrapped in a plastic tarp walking down a gravel road in March seemed like a fitting metaphor and what else is a metaphor for? Onward we go. We face something between Napoleon’s invasion of 1812 and a whoopee cushion, and whatever it is, let us show what stuff we are made of. Or whereof we are made. Ppppppppp. (Was that you or was that me?)

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A day of spring appeared out of nowhere Monday, trees blooming in the park, a troop of tiny kiddos roped together with teachers fore and aft, sociable dogs, and yellow daffodils in bloom, though I’m not a botanist, and maybe they were begonias but to me they’re daffodils because begonias sound like pneumonia and so Wordsworth and Herrick wrote poems about daffodils. Let’s just assume that’s true.

I came home to try to read the instruction book for my new printer, which was written by an electrical engineer for another electrical engineer, one pro trying to impress another, two guys who whizzed through college math courses that to me were a solid brick wall, and here I sit, reading through pages of fabulous technical know-how trying to figure out how to print on one side of the paper, not two, and it simply isn’t there — the secrets of the universe are freely available through this machine, but I can’t find the ON switch.

This is my complaint against poets: they write for each other, knowing that nobody else is interested, and for that reason nobody else is interested.

Candidates for public office speak to others of their ilk, fellow politicians, officeholders, coatholders, executive assistants, so when Joe Biden stood up Tuesday night in victory, he tried to be exultant but politics doesn’t lend itself to exultation. He cried, “All of you who’ve been knocked down, who’ve been counted out, who’ve been left behind, this is your campaign!” But that’s not his line, it’s Bernie’s. And Bernie stood up and said, “I tell you with absolute confidence that we are going to win the Democratic nomination and we are going to beat Trump.” I know a number of guys from Brooklyn and none of them would say “with absolute confidence” except ironically. “Absolute confidence” is the code word for Highly Dubious.

Bernie is out to correct the glaring inequality of book ownership in America: 90 percent of the hardcover books in private hands are owned by 5 percent of adults. Five percent whose shelves are jammed with expensive books that they will never read and that they keep on their shelves merely for decor, to appear to be literate while countless young people live with nothing to read but food labels and Facebook. It’s unjust.

As a published author, I get free copies of books from publishers hoping I will provide a blurb such as “full of wistfulness and futility yet somehow spangled with hope,” which I send to every book publishers give me, including Proust’s “A la Recherche du Temps Perdu” all about when he was temping at Purdue, doing research, and there it is on my shelf, and meanwhile, America needs a woman to take charge — I speak from experience here — and instead we have a choice between three elderly men.

I know about old men, being one myself. They have fragile egos and hang onto old grudges and every day they feel a powerful urge to lie down and sleep. They can pick up new jargon but their competency is declining at an alarming rate. We face four years with an old man in charge: which one would you entrust with the care of small children? Which one would be an adequate teacher of remedial English? If each of them were your wife’s ex-boyfriend, which would you be okay with as a weekend houseguest?

Politics is all about optics. Jimmy Carter fainted while running a marathon and fell, knees buckling — presidents should never run in public view. Ronald Reagan rode a horse and looked good and beat him. John Kerry went windsurfing in a wet suit and lost: presidents don’t go around in spandex. The three old men all look rather old. One wears a red cap, “Keep America Great,” and the other two are capless. Joe is not going to take up golf but why not a chainsaw? Bernie needs to be seen with his arm around a dog who is looking at him lovingly.

It is spring, hope is springing, young people out running, and dogs are meeting their friends and daffodils are here. I give up on the printer. The statistic about 90 percent of all hardcover books being in the hands of 5 percent of the adult population was invented by me in order to get your attention in an authoritative way. The daffodils were genuine, assuming they were not begonias.

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The beauty of COVID-19 is how shiny clean everybody looks since the panic set in. I’m in New York City this week and the stores are completely sold out of hand sanitizer, Hi-Lex, alcohol, antibacterial wipes, every kind of cleaner, and when you get on the subway at rush hour and stand within six inches of four different people, they smell nice, like a doctor’s office. They try not to talk or even exhale. They avoid eye contact lest the virus be spread visually. Some people wear face masks, which are useful for preventing them from picking their noses, which, once you’ve touched a deadly railing, could implant the virus in your body and in a week or two you’d be in a TB sanitarium on a desert island, tended by nurses in hazmat suits. If someone on the train coughs, everyone disembarks at the next stop and wipes their face and, as an extra precaution, swigs a little mouthwash or maybe vodka. Eighty-proof vodka is a proven sanitizer. The incidence of COVID-19 among bums at the Union Gospel Mission is extremely low. Gin does not work as well, so ad agency execs are surely at risk. As for Corona beer, sales are way down because, as your mother probably said, You Never Know.

I am old enough to remember the polio scares of the early Fifties when we stayed away from beaches and public pools and didn’t go to movie theaters. I was brought up fundamentalist so we didn’t go to movies anyway, and thus felt that God was protecting us and had sent the polio as a warning to Catholics and Episcopalians. So we avoided them, which we would’ve done anyway. To us righteous, polio was not that scary. Nobody in my family got it. A girl named Shirley did and she came from a family that drank and took the Lord’s name in vain. Case closed.

What spooked the stock market last week was not only the virus but also the spectacle of the Leader of the Free World announcing that we have nothing to fear but fear itself. He looked like a sixth-grader giving a science report who had not bothered to read the textbook. This was slightly terrifying. A reality TV star in charge of national intelligence. The gentleman is an ace at twittering but when he says more than the 280-character limit he becomes vacuous and blathery. His strong suit is insult and ridicule — reassurance is alien to him, he’s a New Yorker, when a New Yorker hears tones of reassurance, it means “Put the pen back in your pocket, don’t sign the paper” — so the assignment has been passed to his mannequin friend Mr. Pence who is good at silence, which is better than blather at this point.

At a time of political unreality, it feels good to have something real to worry about, even if it’s mostly imaginary, and people have latched onto COVID-19. It has a nice ring to it and the OVID part makes it sound classy, poetic.  People are talking about canceling trips, staying indoors, restricting contact with others, and considering their doomsday options, perhaps a houseboat on Lake Superior, maybe the Mojave desert. It’s exciting, having a possible black plague on the horizon. It takes your mind off the election.

My dear wife, who caught germophobia from her mother, has made our kitchen and bathrooms so clean you could eat off the counters, if we were eating, which we’re not since we heard that there are 19 foods that carry the virus and nobody knows which 19. She has turned the temperature of the dishwasher up to where it melts plastic and so our mixing bowls have become platters. Our bedsheets have been boiled so that a king-sized sheet now only fits a narrow cot. My jeans are two sizes smaller so I am wearing PJs. We are using motorized brushes in the shower and our skin is rubbed raw. Our only intimacy is an occasional elbow bump.

Everyone is watching the situation closely. Republicans believe the epidemic will hit big cities hardest, keeping Democratic voters home in the fall. Democrats believe it will knock the Dow Jones down to where Republicans are disheartened. As for me, I think the Leader is inhaling so much hand sanitizer that he doesn’t know a Corona from a White Owl or an El Rey del Mundo. What provision does the Constitution make for ditziness? It’s not a High Crime or Misdemeanor but isn’t this guy supposed to have helpers around?

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America desperately needs a woman president. I thought that in church Sunday as we sang, “Seek and ye shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you,” a gorgeous hymn with a chorus of Alleluias, and the altos around me sounded like my old aunts, and the teenage acolytes, both girls, stood up so straight and solemn, holding candles, as a woman priest read the Gospel.

Two days before, I sent my friend Heather off with her one-year-old daughter at 6 a.m. and put her into a cab with a stroller, fold-up crib, big suitcase, utility bag, and purse, and strong-minded toddler, to go to the airport and fly home to New York. The night before, she sang at a big jazz club downtown, tossing off Hoagy Carmichael, Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, Lennon-McCartney, and now she arose cheerfully, packed up, headed out the door, no sweat. It was a glimpse of heroic competence such as few men could manage. Barack Obama, yes. The current guy? Oh my God. Have you ever seen him carrying a child? Can you even imagine it? Him changing a diaper? No way.

Standing at a lectern and hollering about injustice is an act; motherhood requires discipline and commitment. But we Democrats have a 78-year-old Vermont socialist with a bum ticker knocking on the door. We desperately, desperately need a woman president but Liz is too robotic and Amy is too Midwestern. She’s running for president but she sounds like she’s running for county commissioner. She lacks poetry.

I am fond of Bernie, being 77 and retro myself, but I tell you: a man our age belongs in a glass case; he is fighting the battles of yesteryear. He reminds me of the men who picked me up when I was 16, hitch-hiking home, and they wanted someone to listen to them, so I did. They were angry at the government, their bosses, and their wife, and for twenty miles they unloaded. They stopped at my road and I thanked them, but I wouldn’t have elected them president.

Donald J. Trump is the issue, not capitalism. He is a living monument to the impotence of journalism. Every honest writer has beaten on him and the man is fresh as a daisy. He walked away from impeachment as if he’d won the heavyweight championship of the world and he set out to purge the administration of all appointees who don’t kiss his shoes. He pardoned a whole string of big-time chiselers at the behest of pals of his and will likely pardon Stone and Flynn and Manafort, his consiglieri, and if he shot somebody dead on Fifth Avenue, he would pardon himself, and his people wouldn’t blink. If he issued an executive order canceling the 22nd Amendment and declaring himself president for life, the Supreme Court might object but he would simply ignore them. Chief Justice Roberts has no fighter planes or tanks at his command. If Trump renounced Jesus Christ and spat on the New Testament and burned it, the evangelicals would stick with him because, having stuck with him this far, it would destroy their transmission to make a U-turn. So the November election is crucial.

If he’s re-elected, he’ll change the rules of spelling and capitalization to make his style the correct one. Him and me don’t agree about this but he’s the boss and his word goes and this sentence will be perfectly gramitical a year from now, U weight and sea.

I’m too old to fight. If the scholars of the Electoral College want him, then so be it. My ancestor John Crandall was a minister in Salem, Massachusetts, in the 17th century and he preached against the Puritans who cut off the tongues of dissidents, but he lost that argument and had to leave. If Donald the First beats the old socialist and we must flee to Canada, so be it. The second term of Trump, however long it lasts, will be more amusing when viewed from afar.

There is no wall to climb over. There are places in North Dakota where there isn’t even a barbed-wire fence, you just walk down a gravel road. The national anthem is more difficult than ours but we can learn it. The bacon is round, not in strips, but the rules of hockey are the same, and they have modern medicine. Democracy is a long-term problem and, at 77, I’m a short-termer. I just want to have a good time. Good luck to the young. Montreal will suit me fine.

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I was brought up by evangelicals so I can understand the fervent campaign to elect a revolutionary socialist to the White House. My people believed that we alone knew the mind of God and that He loved us more than the ignorant pagans around us. So when I see the old revolutionary shake his fists and shout against injustice, I relive the righteousness of my childhood. Happy times. I haven’t felt half so superior since.

It’s more satisfying to be part of a militant righteous minority than to be in the anxiety-ridden confused majority — to be a nightrider rather than a passenger in the long wagon train. The problem with righteousness is that it isolates you from those who are less righteous, which is okay if you’re self-sufficient and living in the woods but if you depend on others, you need to cut corners. When I was 20, I looked down on people who hadn’t read the right books, but then one day you need to call a plumber and your world starts to broaden.

But I’m an old man and the world belongs to the young. I am only a tourist, so I guess I will go drink some toilet bowl cleanser or maybe move to Iceland. I enjoyed Reykjavik when I was there years ago with my pal Bill Holm, an Icelander. We roamed around town, eating herring, and he got good and drunk and I watched and took notes. The language is so complicated that Icelanders don’t want to hear you try to speak it — Icelandic for “I have done more for Christianity than Jesus” is Ég hef gert meira fyrir kristni en Jesús, which is a mouthful — so they speak excellent English.

Iceland felt small and comfortable and America feels much too large and ungovernable, on the verge of fracture, and this time the issue is the love of children. Half the country seems fully committed to lousy public education and spotty health care and the freedom to pollute air, water, and soil as you please, leaving our children to face desperate crises by 2050 if not sooner. A society that tends to the elderly and lets children fend for themselves is looking through the wrong end of the binoculars. In Iceland, you’re paid child benefits and get paid parental leave as a fundamental right. It is better for society if children are brought up by parents rather than in the woods by wolves. (Duh.)

What keeps me in America is baseball and also the fact that my wife is herring-intolerant. She can’t live in a country where you might go to someone’s home and be served fried eel. I can’t live without baseball, a rational game. Soccer is not, it’s like volleyball without a net or hockey without sticks. And in America I’m somewhat clearer about the bounds of decent behavior so it’s easier to be cranky without running the risk of being enrolled at the Home. The other day, in a bunch of aging lefties, I announced that I see no problem with Mike Bloomberg spending a couple billion on his campaign and people listened politely. Nobody threw organic kale at me.

In America, I could join the Elks or Moose or the Order of Hoot Owls, an exclusive lodge of cranky men and wear mystical capes and swords and bow and cross my heart and make secret rituals part of my life. I won’t but I could. I won’t go to Las Vegas and take up high-stakes poker either but I could. In Iceland, I wouldn’t have those options.

Meanwhile, we live in this movie in which the Top Guy is cruising, enjoying the incredible helicopter service, the motorcades, the precision of the Marine guard salutes, the microphones all pointed his way. He opens his mouth and great blatty ignorance comes out and a vulgarity you wouldn’t accept from your child’s sixth-grade teacher, but here he is, a New York developer pretending to be president. He is heading for re-election and we’re watching it happen.

I know that if I sat down to dinner with Republicans, we’d have a good deal in common with each other, and almost nothing in common with the Current Occupant. He is among the strangest presidents in our entire history. Why are we drifting toward the cataract? Who will take the oars?

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“Shout out, do not hold back! Lift up your voice like a trumpet!” said the prophet Isaiah, which we read in church on Sunday, but nobody shouted. We are flatlanders, brought up to be still and behave ourselves and listen to instructions, but if the instruction is to shout out and raise your voice, wait to see if other people do it and then, depending on which ones do, maybe do it yourself but quietly. And we are Episcopalian so what would we shout? A poem by Mary Oliver? A recipe for bouillabaisse?

I would shout, “God help us and do it soon.” I was provoked last week to wonder where I would go if Democrats hand over the White House and the Current Occupant remains for sixteen or twenty years until he’s in his mid-thirties and I thought, “Iceland.” England is an obvious choice but I don’t understand Brits when they talk and Icelanders speak beautiful English. I was in Reykjavik once, driving around, lost, and saw a large white home by the sea and walked up and knocked on the door and it was opened by the president of Iceland. It was his home. He told me how to get back to my hotel. He spoke perfect English, of course. Imagine knocking on the door of a white house and it’s opened by the C.O. The thought is depressing, not to mention his English.

But the Sunday service moved on to the confession of sins and I thought of my unfair bias against pop music of the past thirty years and the replacement of melody and harmony with rapping and tapping and my shameful bias against people with tattoos. This is wrong of me to dismiss my fellow creatures just because, on a crazy impulse years ago, they had enormous orange flames inscribed on their left shoulder. Or the young woman I saw in the grocery last week with green leaves tattooed on her neck. Just because she imagined herself as a trellis is no reason to look down on her. Someday I may be in a vegetative state myself and I hope people are no less kind for that.

I confessed this to Almighty God to Whom all desires are known and from Whom no secrets are hid, including my envy of a friend who lives in a majestic house with umber tile floors and rattan carpets atop a hill overlooking the blue Pacific, which he earned by cranking out mindless TV shows in which unattractive people snarl at each other to the accompaniment of a laugh track, which enables him to jet down to Brazil and hike into the rain forest and have more fun than I do and so I entertain hopes that he will fall off a ledge into a slough and be bitten by poisonous fish and catch a rare fish-transmitted disease that leaves the victim feeling lethargic and stupefied and for which the only cure seems to be fasting, chastity, and immersion in cold water. I imagine visiting him to express my insincere sympathy. I confessed the sin of envy but as you can see it is a continuing problem.

On my way home I remembered more sins, including a loathing of braggarts who cannot bring themselves to ever admit being wrong and a strong intolerance of ducktails on older men. I know of a man who is very committed to maintaining the swoop of hair with distinct comb tracks behind each ear, touching them up every fifteen minutes or so even though he is allegedly fully employed. I knew boys in high school sixty years ago who were dedicated to their hair but the habit tends to fade as one acquires children, wives, debts, etc. Barack Obama has zero-maintenance hair, unimpeachably so. Nobody imagines him spending time doing his makeup and sculpting his hair. The gentleman in question is also the biggest braggart in the history of America. When you hear him spout off about his perfections and you see the duck marks on his head, there is a cognitive dissonance like the sound of a stack of china dropped on a concrete floor.

Be that as it shall be, I am thinking that Iceland may be worth a look. My people left Yorkshire in 1774 and came here and it’s been good but eventually things run their course. Next Sunday in church I will say a prayer for the man and for his hair. I think baldness would be good. He is bald-faced so why not the top too?

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I flew into New York last week, descending over the East River onto LaGuardia, and outside Baggage Claim I was surprised to find men and women in official yellow vests guiding us tourists toward the taxi stand, helping with luggage, saying, “Welcome to New York” and “Thanks for using LaGuardia” and “Enjoy the city.” This is not the New York that we Minnesotans expect to find, but thank goodness the cabdrivers are still genuine New York cabdrivers, surly, scrappy, contemptuous of the stupidity all around them.

In Minneapolis, the cabdriver who drove me to the airport told me, without prompting, about his brief career as a guitarist in a band, his failed marriage, the difficulty of getting back to music. Call me a cynic but it struck me as a plea for a big tip, which I, a Minnesotan, duly gave him. In New York, no cabdriver would take that tack. He is a fighter who will get you from the airport to the Upper West Side five minutes faster than anyone else could.

New York is a good place to visit when you feel the country is falling apart. On the island of Manhattan, high-rises keep rising, water mains break, rush hour is crazy, you can’t help but feel the fragility of the complexity of the place and yet people cope. They cram into subway cars and find privacy in a book or a pair of headphones. I sat next to a woman once who, I swear, was listening to Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” while looking at a solid wall of people’s legs and rear ends. Everywhere, you see the resilience of the human spirit.

The country is splintering, farmers going broke, government stewardship of the planet is a dead issue, the Arctic is melting, we’ve come to accept dishonesty in high places, and in January we watched the cruel punishment of Chief Justice John Roberts, Jr., chained to a chair and forced to listen to the Senate’s impeachment trial, like making Wynton Marsalis listen to one hundred hours of air horns. But the president won a big victory, just as the state of Kansas did in the Super Bowl, and now we move on to other matters, such as socialism: what percentage of American voters consider themselves socialist? Five? Eight? Three?

My phone rang in the cab. It was a friend I’d recently been miffed with. She said, “My kid told me a joke and I thought of you. Knock, knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“Amish.”

“Amish who?”

“That’s funny, you don’t look like a shoe.”

It was the first knock-knock joke I’d heard in years: I don’t know many nine-year-olds. I am a mature American male, a tax-paying Episcopalian, and this joke kills me. It made me forget whatever it was I was miffed at her about. This is the beauty of jokes: if they’re funny, they erase bad feeling. “Why don’t Amish water-ski?” I ask. “Because it’s so hard on the horses.” She groans but she is amused.

I’m sad that the lightbulb joke has vanished in America, it was clever, often funny, but it made fun of categories of people and this was seen as offensive. How many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb? (One but the lightbulb has to want to change.) Irishmen. (One to hold the bulb, nine to drink until the room spins.) Jewish mothers. (None. I’ll just sit in the dark and suffer.) Episcopalians. (None, we have candles.) Amish. (What light bulb?) Germans. (Nein.) Comedians. (This is not a joke, it’s a question.)

Trump is the first president in my lifetime who’s incapable of telling a joke, a remarkable thing about him, plus his inability to smile. When he refers to dissident Republicans as “human scum” and African countries as toilets, he’s not kidding. This is old-fashioned New York street talk. Trump is New York through and through, elected by Midwesterners who were charmed to find out that someone could talk like that and run for public office. They decided we needed an abusive leader. Meanwhile, the yellow vests at LaGuardia who said “Welcome to New York” were under strict orders from a powerful boss who can fire them in five seconds: this was not voluntary, trust me. I liked our cabdriver. He didn’t tell us about his problems, he just got us where we were going. Meanwhile, the big news is that Melania has put Trump on a diet so he loses five pounds a week. In a year, we’ll be rid of him entirely.

 

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