Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 6

A night at the opera

I went to the Met recently to see Beethoven’s “Fidelio” and hang out with 3,800 very well-dressed patrons to see a passionate story about political tyranny but mainly to see the soprano Lise Davidsen who is worth the price of admission and more, especially when surrounded by the Met chorus, mostly men, imprisoned for political crimes but nonetheless in gorgeous voice. As for Lise, architects have designed enormous opera houses and finally they’ve designed a singer whose voice fills it so you feel it even in the cheaper seats.

I like “Fidelio” because it’s Beethoven so it’s got soul and also the story is simple, there aren’t a lot of counts and countesses to keep track of or Wagnerian goddesses, and I think German sings better than Italian, it sounds more like my kind of folks. It has warmth. And there’s no need to bother with the English subtitles: Leonore dresses up as a man so she can rescue her guy Florestan from being hanged. That’s all you need to know. There’s some growling and hollering by some basses and baritones and there’s a kerfuffle with another soprano but when the 6’2” Leonore comes onstage you know you’re at an opera and you know what’s up. The tenor is going to be strangled if the soprano doesn’t save him. And when she strides across the stage and lets fly with that powerful loving tone that stuns even the brass section, you know she’s up to the job. This is no Mimi or Madame Butterfly, this is a Norwegian lyric dramatic soprano who’s pregnant with twins and canceling her schedule to deliver them –– “Fidelio” is her finale until 2026, and here she is singing so gorgeously while carrying two embryonic people — sometimes you see her put a hand on her abdomen as if to say, “Stille, stille.” This is a woman to reckon with. I married a woman like her. So have other men. After Lise delivers the twins, I wish she’d take over the Democratic Party.

And at the end of the opera, prisoners released, reunited with their wives and sweethearts, there’s a big joyous crowd scene “Wer ein holdes Weib errungen” (Whoever has won a noble wife) with happy children waving and women dancing and flags waving — he did compose “The Ode To Joy” after all; the man knows how to throw a party — and the curtain comes down and it gets a standing ovation, as it should.

The Met is also doing “Moby-Dick,” which I won’t see though I admire their bravery — there’s only one woman in it (in a boy’s role), otherwise a shipload of doomed sailors — but I’d advise them to aim for the Strong Woman/Joyful Ending model — stories of warrior queens, Catherine the Great, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Eleanor Roosevelt, and a big choral festival at the end perhaps with a parade of animals. Why should that be limited to Aida? Find a place for an elephant, a pair of camels, and a team of horses. It’s called SHOW business, people, it’s not a sharing of painful memories.

Too many people think of opera as something that requires costume jewelry and a hairstyle and a glass of Cointreau and the use of critical terms (insight, luminosity, otherworldly), but the Fidelio intermission was very amiable and easygoing. I stood in line at the Men’s for a while and got into several conversations, one with a New York guy and another with a male couple from the Blue Ridge, all of us stunned by the gorgeous singing. And after the standing O, the crowd streamed across Lincoln Center plaza, a spring night, the fountains spritzing, the buzz and honk of Columbus Avenue, people descending into the subway, cabs lined up, a delicious New York night made all the more thrilling by having seen a genuine Star on stage.

I’s amazing that this was accomplished by a Norwegian soprano. I know Norwegians and they are self-effacing by nature, taciturn, stoical, and this one is absolutely joyous. The story is that she hoped to become a folksinger but someone heard her and said, “No, honey, this isn’t for ‘Michael, Row the Boat Ashore.’ This is the shore.” The Kennedy Center under its new management may go to auto shows, beauty contests, and pro wrestling, but high art lives in New York. As we say in Tromsø, “Hvert liv krever stor skjønnhet.” Every life requires great beauty.

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Why I have a bright red wallet

It is highly informative to watch another marriage in a moment of stress and see how calmly they handle it compared to the hysterics that I’d go through in similar circumstances: 6:20 a.m., a nephew and his wife are assembling their bags to catch a cab to the airport for a 9 a.m. flight and the guy suddenly can’t find his wallet and so the search begins, bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, as I stand watching in my pajamas — the two are guests in our apartment — and it amazes me how calm and cheerful they are. “Are you sure you saw it this morning?” she asks, matter-of-factly. “Yes, I’m sure,” he says and because he is a tech wizard, not a fiction writer, she takes him at his word.

I’ve been in his situation numerous times when I proceeded rapidly from mounting despair to self-loathing and having to be institutionalized in a locked ward and tranquilized, but this young couple doesn’t go there. The search proceeds. The wife makes a few helpful suggestions in a calm voice, no shrieking, no wild hand gestures. Minutes pass. No panic. The husband unzips a pocket on his knapsack and there is the wallet. All is well. No divorce lawyer got involved, no therapist, priest, or psychic.

These two are rationalists but I am a writer and Democrat and I need assistance when leaving on a trip to make sure I have my wallet, phone and phone charger, ID, Visa card, meds, hearing aids, notebook and pens, eyedrops, boarding pass, and make sure I am wearing a belt. I’ve lost some weight and sometimes, approaching the TSA desk, briefcase in one hand and ID in the other, I feel trouser slippage and how would Security deal with a depantsed person — would there be due process or might you be put directly on a flight to El Salvador? You tell me.

The Leader of Our Great Nation shows a powerful sense of self-confidence that was denied to us who grew up in Christian homes in the Midwest. We were given a keen sense of our own insignificance. I saw — under ferocious preaching on Sunday that did not encourage a large ego — that we were not worthy of admiration, and only by God’s grace did we presume to come to His Table. In school, we learned about LaSalle, Marquette, Father Hennepin, Joseph Nicollet, who had claimed the Midwest for France, but Louis XV was more interested in sugar from the Caribbean than fur from the North and so he withdrew and Voltaire said, “All we lost was a few acres of snow.” This remark still stings, centuries later. We could’ve been French and instead we raised corn to feed the hogs.

I left home for New York to make my wife happy, the best reason there is, and here I learned to enjoy my insignificance. Nobody notices me on the subway so I get to look at them. I’ve stumbled and fallen three times and each time four people rushed to my side within three seconds to help me up, not because I’m an author but because I’m human. I fell on Amsterdam Avenue and whacked my head and lay stunned on the sidewalk for a moment and six people rushed to my side, helped me up and a man hailed a cab for me and they kept asking if I was okay — I was more than okay, I was gratified. In Minnesota I was a motorist, here I’m a pedestrian. I’m aware of a civil society around me: I look out for you, you look out for me.

And sometimes an old friend calls from back home and pours out her or his heart in a way they never would’ve in the social gatherings where we used to meet. Around the dinner table we talked politics but in the hush of the late-night cellphone call, we speak from the heart. A friend of half a century calls and talks of her husband, a scholar and musician, his tenderness toward my family, and how she looks upon his suicide as a noble deed, to cut short the pain of his decline. I listen and don’t comment. I used to be a celeb, now I’m a confidant, a great honor. It doesn’t say so on my ID but those who need to know seem to know. I don’t do therapy, don’t offer rationalism, just try to be the best listener I can be. Thanks for listening.

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What the silent man thinks

I’ve had an easy life, like canoeing down a river, one mile leads to the next, Tuesday follows Monday, obey the rules, portage around dams, don’t approach alligators unless their eyes are closed, and don’t argue with men with large eyebrows carrying shotguns.

I am a writer, it’s as simple as that. I wake up in the morning with an urge to use English rather than learn a new one and to do as Mrs. Moehlenbrock said: check for mistakes and read it aloud to hear if it makes sense. I was only ten at the time and she made me feel important as if I had something to say. I retain this confidence, despite having written plenty of dumb stuff. J.D. Salinger knew how to stop; I don’t. Being a writer by habit means that I spend time thinking to myself, which disturbs many women, who think I’m embittered, depressed, bored, or wishing someone would amuse me with anecdotes from the country club, but I’m not: I’m thinking. I’ve loved several women who didn’t understand that thinking would stop if I started talking. This happened on many occasions. Brilliant ideas one moment, small talk the next. But now I’ve found a woman who is up to the job: she is a Reader. She likes to be quiet for long periods of time without my engaging her in book club-type conversation about Themes and Interpretations nor the phone ringing and our offspring asking if we will stay at the hotel in Bethesda, Maryland, for two nights or three and will she have her own room. I can accommodate having a reader in the same room I’m thinking in, and my only qualm is simply this: why do I never see her reading one of her husband’s books and chuckling melodiously?

If you slept nightly with a thinly clad man over a period of thirty years, would you not want to know what’s on his mind, especially those intimate secrets that can only be revealed in humorous fiction? Wouldn’t you?

And the answer is: No, probably not. Romance requires a certain mystery, dim light, faint music, suggestive fragrances. Intimacy is about intimations, it’s not about flash photography. Very few people marry their proctologist, it’s a fact. Look it up. (Or rather, don’t.)

I hope this makes you feel special, dear reader. There is something going on between us that is not shared by the slim elegant woman reclining fifteen feet from my right elbow. I asked her, “How’s that book you’re reading?” She said, “Interesting.” In other words, “Don’t talk to me.”

As it says in Mark’s Gospel, she and I “are no longer two, but one flesh.” But what different fleshes the two are: she is a bird, I am a bull. Does this give me the power of flight? I don’t believe so.

As a friend of hers told her thirty years ago, “If you marry an older man, someday you’ll be married to an old man.” And here she is. But the old man is a happy old man, thanks be to heaven. He sits at his loom and enjoys making sentences into paragraphs and then remaking them, an occupation that has preoccupied him since puberty. I’m not bragging, just remarking on the unusualness of it and feeling grateful. I had my chances to take up drugs that make you stupid. I quit drinking because I could feel the clarity that resulted.

In my youth, I saw Albert Woolson, the last living veteran of the Union Army, riding in a parade in Minneapolis, an ancient man waving a flag in his tiny translucent hand. It was good of him, who’d been a drummer boy in the Army and had seen Lincoln in the flesh, to agree to ride around and symbolize history, but I decline to be the last of my kind. I loved my predecessors, Benchley and Perelman and Thurber and Woody Allen, but I cheer for the up-and-comers. We need to keep comedy flying, all the more so as we observe a successful fascist movement led by an aging playboy from Queens who has turned the Republican Party, whose cause Albert Woolson was loyal to back when it had ideals, into a cult. Donald McDonald has never told a joke so it was funny. Pompous nincompoops seldom do. But enough about that. Do me a favor and make someone you love laugh out loud. Start with the little ones and move up to the tall ones. They’re the hardest.

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The beauteous face in utero

I once walked down Wabasha Avenue in downtown St. Paul and was stopped by an old wino who asked for something to eat and when I gave him a couple bucks, he said, “You’re Garrison Keillor, you can do better than that.” The man had bad habits but his thinking was clear. I was a nobody from Anoka who got his picture on the cover of Time and my notoriety should mean profits for the needy. But that was many years ago and fame fades fast. I haven’t been recognized by a wino for at least thirty years.

There’s a new and larger crop of instant celebs every year and if I got drunk and needed dough, I wouldn’t know Naomi Nobody from Louise Illustrious, due to my not watching TV except for baseball all those years. I was too busy being well known but it’s okay, ordinary daily life can be fascinating too.

Last week Jenny and I had the vast pleasure of a visit by a young couple from California who are expecting a baby girl in June, both of them tech wizards who are adept at explaining things to a man from the Typewriter Age, the woman from a Japanese family, so there was rich information about Japan, the language and culture, plus the woo-woo aspects of California, and then there was the absolute wonder of gazing at 3-D ultrasound pictures of the embryo’s face, noble, a beacon of hope, and feeling the joy of the young mother and papa. They are quietly beside themselves. The embryo is about the size of a cob of corn, but if corn could bring joy like this, Iowa would be paradise.

I grew up under Eisenhower, the man who commanded the army that defeated Hitler, and now I feel we’re headed toward a Hulk Hogan presidency. I pray otherwise, but the sun set on the British Empire and perhaps it is our turn now. But having this couple visiting us has been a great gift of wonder and contemplation and I pray the baby grows up in a country that cherishes honor and benevolence and beauty.

A person needs beauty in this crazy world in which you order a prescription refill online and it won’t go through and you wind up talking to a woman in Ulan Bator who thinks you’re complaining about “reception.” This is a well-known national pharmaceutical chain, it’s not Donny’s Drugs operating out of the trunk of his car, and it’s out to build its profits at the expense of service and I need latanoprost eyedrops to keep glaucoma at bay so I don’t need a dog to guide me to the corner bus stop. Our family had schizophrenic spaniels when I was a child and I never developed a close loving relationship with a dog as other children did, which explains my pervasive detachment from social relationships and lack of facial expression, which is why I went into radio rather than becoming a TV newscaster.

I looked solemn on the cover of Time and that’s the only expression I have; I don’t do delight, just solemnity. In my wedding pictures, I look like a pallbearer.

But looking at this 3-D ultrasound of a radiant child, eyes closed, waiting for June, makes me want to support the orchestras so she can sit in a hall and hear Beethoven and Mozart and Messiaen done by classy players and make sure Yosemite and Zion are still around. I paddled down the Mississippi from Bemidji to the St. Anthony Falls when I was in college and hope she can too and take the architecture tour around the island of Manhattan. She needs to hike the mountains and stop by the Little Bighorn to ponder that classic fool, George Custer. Gettysburg and Mardi Gras are worth her while and the Minnesota State Fair.

A panhandler named the Internal Revenue Service needs to approach Elon Musk (the W.R.M.) and Jeff Bezos and the other guy and ask for an appropriate donation. It’s a great country, friend, and it’s up to us to defend it. If Donald McDonald is your idea of greatness, then there’s no drug available to help. Sobriety can help but then you lose your spot in the clubhouse. But we’ve got to keep this country great for the sake of this beautiful apparition achieving perfection in her mama’s midsection. Greatness is good for people once you know what it is.

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What I saw Sunday in New York

Church was fairly full Sunday, the second in Lent, and I stood in back before the organ prelude, enjoying a cup of coffee and a couple introduced themselves, Tom and Jean, visiting from Washington, D.C. Interesting people. He is newly retired from the Defense Department, responsible for maintenance of nuclear stockpiles, and they were visiting New York simply because they like the city. I didn’t introduce myself: I like the city because I’m anonymous here.

So we sat together in the third pew and I read the bulletin and the Gospel reading caught my eye, from Luke, the verse in which the Lord gathers His own like a hen gathers her brood under her wings, so I scribbled a limerick:

The Bible says God’s like a hen

Who collects His brood now and then.

We are chicks in his sight

And not all that bright,

Including us illustrious men.

There was a long prayer, led by a cantor, praying for the Church, our Bishops, for all who believe in God, for the peace of the world — it covered a lot of territory, some of it tricky — how do you pray for “those in positions of public trust” when many of them you wish would disappear? We prayed for the poor and all who suffer, for refugees and prisoners, and I thought of the migrants deported in chains to El Salvador despite a federal court order. Lord, have mercy, the congregation intoned. We prayed for our enemies and I thought of mine — I have four, and I prayed that they not know how much harm they caused — and we prayed for a blessing on all human labor, and I remembered the doormen in our building and Lulu our cleaning lady, and we prayed for those who have died, and I immediately thought of Alan K. Simpson, the Republican senator from Cody, Wyoming, who died last week.

Senator Simpson listened to a radio show I used to do and he wrote me a fan letter on official stationery and once, when I was in Washington, I had coffee with him and he told me a story about a contest that cowboys used to conduct when he was a boy. They’d take turns dropping their trousers and competing to see who could pick up a silver dollar using only his bare buttocks, and if necessary, have a playoff for a half-dollar or a quarter. There was a genuineness about the man that was pure gold. I knew he was a conservative and it didn’t matter; what was important was the integrity.

I stole the story and used it often in monologues, changing the cowboys to Norwegians, members of the Sons of Knute. It’s an anecdote that never fails.

I confessed my sins, which, the past week, had been mostly things left undone rather than done, failure to love my neighbors, and so forth, and after Communion, I shook hands with my neighbors, including Tom and Jean, and after we were dismissed to go out in the world to do the work we were put here to do, I invited them to come have coffee with me and my friend Richard.

We hiked down Amsterdam Avenue to a lunch place and ordered breakfast and had a very amiable time. Tom and Jean, it turned out, are Catholics so they’d come to my Episcopal church as tourists, and we started telling Catholic jokes. Tom told the best one.

Three nuns die and come to the gates of Heaven and St. Peter meets them and says, “I know you’re nuns and you’ve led holy lives but still I have to ask you each a question. He asks the first: “Who was the first man?” She says, “That’s an easy one. Adam.” He asks the second, “Who was the first woman?” She says, “That’s an easy one. Eve.” He asks the third nun, “What was the first thing Eve said to Adam.” The nun said, “That’s a hard one.” “Right,” said St. Peter, “come on in.”

It was a fine Sunday. I took a detour into Central Park and saw yellow daffodils and white crocuses, small clusters, and I looked around and saw I was surrounded by youth, young couples pushing baby strollers, runners, little kids galloping around the playground, young couples arm in arm, youth out for a ramble, and I prayed for them. The meek shall not inherit the earth, the meek have failed to do what needed to be done; I pray for the young to bring justice and mercy and good humor to the land.

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Another executive order from me

I’ve gotten a rave report from Bayfield, Wisconsin, that relatives of a friend slaughtered a hog and put on a pork feast for neighbors and that fresh pork compared to store-bought is like gin compared to turpentine, but I dare not mention this in my own home because my love looks down on pork due to fairy tales she was read as a child. Those stories omitted the fact that pigs are omnivores and will devour a rat or lizard as readily as plants and flowers, and does the size of the prey place the Three Pigs on a higher moral plane than I with my bratwurst? Does a lizard not have feelings? Is a baby bunny not capable of loyalty?

I will say this for our Current Occupant, he has never come out against pork — he feasts on it and so does his man Musk — a herd is but a appetizer, billions of dollars’ worth of hog go down that gullet, he devours the tusks too, and the Man is the first Occupant in my lifetime who’s taken a swing at the Canadians, who due to their northernness consider themselves uppermost but who are trying to transport their chaos south — five political parties, two languages, an unsingable national anthem, round bacon — by way of a porous border.

The Occupant is plowing new ground. His denunciation of President Zelenskyy, accusing him of starting Russia’s war against Ukraine, is new diplomatic territory for this country. Secretary Rubio, who was brought up to be anti-communist, is having to learn how to swim backward.

And now Reuters reports that the U.S. plans to deport 200,000 Ukrainians who fled to the U.S. legally, had an American sponsor, were financially responsible, simply as an act of cruelty to impress the war criminal who is our new ally.

The world wonders: “What will satisfy the man?” A presidential order requiring Bill Clinton to shine his shoes? Restoring capital punishment and hanging Joe Biden from the yardarm of a frigate in a rainstorm? The man is ambitious. Will we own the Gulf of America or can other countries use it?

To use part of the State of the Union speech to honor a boy cured of cancer even while pediatric cancer research funding is so low is not for the faint of heart. You and I would be hard put to do it. Members of Congress are not fools, they have assistants who read to them, and half of the Members stood and applauded when he denounced pediatric cancer without calling for funding to be restored. Great operas have been written featuring treachery on this scale. The Creating Hope Reauthorization Act, extending incentives for pediatric drug development: dumped. The Give Kids a Chance Act, to allow children with relapsed cancers to undergo treatments combining cancer drugs with other therapies: which one of you could walk into a sick child’s hospital room and tell the family, “Sorry. Pack up and go home. Canceled.”

The problem is that we need a King, and the Occupant is the person for the job. Create a constitutional monarch, but elective, not hereditary, because as we’ve seen in the U.K. the bloodlines can run thin and the heirs can be pale and sniveling. Give the king the power to ride in parades and wave and appear at dedications and grieve for the dead and pin medals on people. It’s the perfect job for a jackass.

The American people were looking for excitement.

Nixon was intriguing and Clinton flipped some skirts but Carter and Reagan were rather straight, and Bush 1 and Bush 2 were patrician and Obama was under severe restrictions as the First A-A and so he and the family had to be model prisoners for the whole eight years, keep their eyes straight and shoelaces tied, so the electorate decided to take a break and elect a playboy from Queens who needed rifle volleys and salutes, a chopper at the ready, and a golf course vacated for him and his four friends.

But the chaos. The gazillionaire in the china shop. The appointments of numbskulls. The clowning in Congress. How much is enough? Elect a king (or queen) every four years, give them the Smithsonian for a castle, let them be a spectacle for the amusement of the street people, and let some modest rationalist run the government. As Custer once said, “What could possibly go wrong?”

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What I found out in Kansas

I became a cheerful person when I was in my twenties and got a job in radio. I’d been a mediocre student and was trying to be a poet but was averse to poverty so I needed a job and I landed the early morning shift because nobody else wanted to get up at 4 a.m. I come from somber fundamentalist stock, but I knew my job was to be lighthearted on cold dark Minnesota mornings, which is sort of like being a chaplain on Death Row, and I learned to impersonate lightheartedness and got good at it. And now I’ve been doing it for sixty years and actually love it.

I did a show at the Fox Theatre in Hutchinson, Kansas, last week that was one of the happiest of my long career, had a couple wonderful hours with a thousand Kansans, many of whom may have voted for this disaster of a president and his tycoon in the black cap and shades who’s running the government. But we didn’t talk about that. We sang “My country ’tis of thee” and The Battle Hymn of the Republic, including the verse about the circling camps and the dews and damps and dim and flaring lamps. We omitted political commentary entirely.

I am good at deletion. I deleted tobacco 40 years ago and alcohol 25, stopped them by simply not doing them anymore: you go through a rocky few days of distracting yourself with popcorn or writing limericks or drinking gallons of herbal tea and pretending it’s whiskey.

I finished a novel this week called So Long, Wobegon, which has been a wooden yoke around my neck for three years. I accomplished it by deletion. You write and you write and you write and you cut about 29/30ths of the whole mess and you’ve got something darned decent, maybe better. Non-writers don’t know this; they think writing is a talent, but it’s actually a drive, you’re driven to do it and once it’s on the page you can tell what is dead leaves and rubbish and you delete it. The laptop is a beautiful tool that lets you highlight the rubbish and click on CUT and it’s gone. A miracle.

Back in my youth I grew a big black beard that I wore to make myself look literary, same as I chain-smoked and soaked up whiskey in the belief that it was required of an author, and the day I went to a barber and got a shave was one of the happiest days of my life. Writing is in your head, it’s not a Look.

I did the show in Hutchinson with my singing partner Heather, the Tallest Best Vocalist in America, and our piano player Rich the Intuitive, and it was a piece of cake. She’s half my age, conservatory-trained and I’m a grumbly baritone but she turns me into a sweet alto — another miracle. We sang the Grateful Dead’s “Brokedown Palace” and Blake and Yeats and Burns and Emily Dickinson and Paul Simon —

This is the story of how we begin to remember.

This is the powerful pulsing of love in the vein.

This is the dream of falling and calling your name out.

These are the roots of rhythm and the roots of rhythm remain.

Meanwhile the tycoon in the black cap and shades is in charge, and the Republican Party, once anti-communist, is doing Putin’s bidding, and the White House is lost in irrational whimsy in imitation of William McKinley. It’s a wretched time in American history and it was a happy night in a small town in Kansas.

I came home and our dinner guests were despairing about the damage the guy in the black hat has done to USAID, the pregnant women and the children who will die of preventable diseases all because we’re no longer in the business of humanitarianism, we have ceased, by executive order, to be a benevolent nation. It’s all true but I took the opposite position, that cheerfulness is the American way, that despair is defeat. Do your best and forget the rest. Good cheer is contagious, can make you courageous. Pick up your feet and clap on the backbeat.

My generation was lucky. Our parents endured the Depression and the war, and we grew up with a plenitude of opportunity. We owe it to the kids to clean up this disaster. The Democrats need to set aside identity issues and unite as Americans to save the Republic.

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On the road in Roanoke

As we watch a white Christian patriarchy exert its influence in Washington, I think back to H.L. Mencken whom I admired back in eighth grade for his sharp tongue. I come from soft-spoken people who shunned mockery and I abandoned Mencken in my twenties when I became a romantic liberal but Project 2025 has made him relevant.

We’re living in Mencken’s world now. He said, “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron. The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”

There are worse things than being wrong: one is to be wrong and know it and try to ignore it, like the parade of Republicans insisting that they won the 2020 election. It’s like the man who walks into the doctor’s office with a wiener in his ear and a stalk of celery up his nose and says, “Doctor, what’s wrong with me?” and the doctor says, “You’re not eating properly.”

Pardoning people who attacked cops is not funny. Every one of us was instructed as children to respect the police and to stop when they say stop. You know it and I know it. It’s an outrage, and when Senator John Thune evades the subject by saying, “I’m not looking back,” he insults his own intelligence. He’s from the party of Lincoln and he presents an IQ of four score and seven.

It’s like the man and his wife who crashed into the bridge abutment and died and found themselves in heaven living in a beautiful house next to a golf course with an eternity of sunny days on which to play. The man said, If you hadn’t made me quit smoking, I could’ve been here ten years ago.”

President Crypto issued an executive order that revoked birthright citizenship, which is in Section 1 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. It’s like the Texas hockey team that drowned during spring training. It’s like what do you call the worst president in the history of the United States? You call him “Mister President.”

How did we come to this point, the glowering snowy-haired man with the South African in the West Wing demanding access to Treasury computers? Will the Republican Congress allow the two of them to declare a national emergency and suspend the Constitution for a year? The Supreme Court has no army. This fragile system works by common accord, by honoring tradition. When the chopper hit the jet landing at Reagan, the President was supposed to express grief for all those lives. Did he not look at the photographs of the young figure skaters and their families coming back from Wichita, all those bright faces who blew up just short of runway 33? Where is the humanity? Why did he blame Biden and Obama? We don’t expect the leader of our country to be hopelessly trashy.

There’s a story here to be written by you historians in your thirties. As for me, I love my life, the road life, going to Roanoke last Saturday and a theater full of people who, I discovered in the course of two hours, knew three verses of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” by heart, no coaching, plus “It Is Well With My Soul,” “America” and “America the Beautiful.” They sang a cappella and Heather Masse and I sang harmony to them. We did other things and people laughed a lot but that was the part of the show that fed my soul. Southerners singing in harmony.

They laughed when I said, “Canada can’t be our 51st state! It has no South! You can’t have America without a South. You need bluegrass, the blues, country, gospel. You need music.” When corruption and deceit are in the driver’s seat, a person needs to seek out beauty. I watched a video of a girl dancing with a bird perched on her head. I wrote a limerick for her. I walked around Roanoke’s majestic historic downtown. But good Lord, those shining faces upturned, singing about reading His righteous sentence by the flaring lamps, you knew America is still here in the watchfires of a hundred circling camps.

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A modest request from an older citizen

Please tell me that our current Occupant is not going to take over the Metropolitan Opera and the Lincoln Memorial and the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown and that the Met will continue to do opera and not celebrity tribute shows and Lincoln’s statue will not be given a movable jaw to speak posts from Truth Social and Cooperstown will not switch to enshrining owners of ball clubs.

Let him have the Kennedy Center and turn it into a country pop dinner theater with a motel and casino but please let the Smithsonian continue keeping history and not be purged of history the Occupant doesn’t care for.

Please tell me he does not have the power to rename the Pacific the Terrific Ocean, nor the power to change the rules of baseball to include blocking and tackling. If the National Park Service puts oil derricks in Yellowstone and Yosemite and the Statue of Liberty is made movable and is programmed to shimmy and twirl a baton, that’s okay; I seldom go to New York Harbor or whatever he decides he’d rather call it.

I am among the secular leftist minority who did not vote for him, but 49% of the American people did and God has anointed him to make the country great and we misfits have to get with the program, so if he wishes to eliminate the word “diversity” from the language and also its synonyms — variety, variable, complex, plural, divergent — or words that sound like it — university, adversity, courtesy, artistry, Traverse City — I have to accept this. Take it slow, Mr. Current, one thing at a time. Gulf of America is fine but let us get used to it and leave the names of the 50 states as they are for now. If Indiana should become Melania next week or New Hampshire become Trumpshire, it has an unsettling effect and a person starts to wonder, “Will east still be east tomorrow or will it be south and will I ask Siri to direct me to my office downtown and I’ll wind up at a recycling center in a distant suburb?”

The Occupant likes to capitalize letters as a way of emphasizing the importance of words he likes, such as Mandate and Greatest, which leads me to believe he may have changes in mind for English grammar as a way of making it American since the British can no longer be considered reliable allies in the America First movement so why should they own our language, the language we’ve made “hot”?

I’m sure he’d like to eliminate the past tense and make everything present and give the presidency the sole power to speak in the future tense. The past tense only leads to pissy arguments about factuality that get us nowhere. Now is what matters, not then. Then is gone, wake up to today.

And what is the use of “that” and “which” and “their” and “they’re” and “there”? Let the Department of Grammatical Efficiency purge it — big waste of time and it just gives them elitists a chance to make there corrections their and make us feel inferior. Which is absurd. That is that, from now on. Dump all apostrophes.

Pronouns. Big problem. The answer is to simplify. No more plural pronouns and eliminate pronoun/noun disagreement, one more place where elitist copyeditors, most of them transexuals, like to stick there No. 2 pencil in and correct you. No more of them and those and ours and let’s have singular pronouns from now on and I say, “Let it be him. If God is male, that should be good enough for you.”

I (who am a He) am prepared to go along with all of this and if he wants to make Tennessee Tiffany I say, “God bless him,” and a few baseball owners in Cooperstown is okay too and if the Met wishes to revise “Aida” so Aida and Radames do not die in the tomb, it is a launching pad from which they climb into a rocket and fly to Mars to sing “Y.M.C.A.” and play golf and live forever, okay by me, but a movable talking Lincoln, let’s wait on that, okay? He looks good, sitting, hands on the arms of his chair, silent, thinking things over.

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Sunday morning, so help me, God

I seldom invite friends to come to church with me and, after Sunday’s morning service that was so deeply moving, I don’t know why. If you knew a great bakery, you’d tell people. If you read a great book, you wouldn’t keep it a secret. But off I truck to the West Side of Manhattan and in the big door past the greeters, drop my two cents in the offering plate, head altarward, stop at my pew, genuflect and bow, and take my seat.

The genuflection disturbs my fundamentalist ancestors. I can hear them mutter, “Oh please, not that again.” Genuflection they regard as Catholic, papist, alien to the pure faith, and my Anglican church they consider decaffeinated Catholicism, and though I love my ancestors, I tell them to shove off. I know my own heart. This is my home.

I glance at the bulletin and see that I am going to weep this morning because Brother John the organist has chosen my mother’s favorite hymn, “It Is Well With My Soul,” for a Communion hymn. John has brought up our congregation to be a singing congregation; he does this by playing softly and tenderly and relaxing the tempo. Sometimes we sound rather magnificent. Such as in the opening hymn, acolytes processing, candles in hand, the deacons and clergy, all of them women, and we sing “Trust and Obey” at full volume, even I who am neither trustworthy nor obedient.

We acknowledge God from whom no secrets are hid, we recite the Creed, and we acknowledge that we have opposed God’s will in our lives. We are absolved and turn to the people around us, blessing them, and we go forward for Communion, and the Communion hymn reduces me to rubble:

Lord, lift me up, and let me stand

By faith on heaven’s tableland,

A higher plane than I have found.

Lord, plant my feet on higher ground.

My voice shakes and I feel tears on my cheeks, asking my Creator to raise me above the clutter and the cross-talk, the chit-chat, the crapola, and face the heavenly eternal, and accept the unbelievable fact of the faith, that God gave Himself to suffer humiliation and death for our sins. We all do this together. It isn’t a show, we don’t come to admire somebody’s talent and wit, we are joined in one body for each other’s sustenance and inspiration.

The Gospel this morning is one I’ve heard a hundred times, “Do unto others as you wish the bastards would do unto you,” and this is no piece of cake. It says: Love your enemy, bless those who curse you. If someone takes your coat, let them have your shirt too. Do not judge, do not condemn. What the hell? I do not love my enemy. He is Putin’s patsy and so we should let him take Ukraine and let him have Poland and Sweden too? I don’t think so. But this apparently is what Jesus said, that I should love the unelected Nazi who is cutting American aid to starving people in Africa.

So I’ll take that home and wrestle with it for a while. I have confessed my sins as a poor father, a distracted husband, an absentee citizen, and now I recognize my ignorance of the Golden Rule, but then the organ sweeps us into “It Is Well With My Soul” and I weep openly while singing bass:

When peace like a river attendeth my way

And sorrows like sea billows roll,

Whatever my lot, Thou has taught me to say,

It is well, it is well with my soul.

And I see my mother, Grace, at the piano in the living room and her six children singing the words. She canned dozens of quarts of stewed tomatoes, green beans, apple sauce, from the garden, and she fixed pot roast and she vacuumed and changed the beds, she laughed at my jokes, and she also played the piano. It’s her song.

I listen to the postlude and shake hands with the rector, thank John for the hymns: it’s not easy to make me weep, I am not that sort of sensitive male, I’m a comedian, this is the work that God has sent me out into the world to do, and I am grateful for the commission. I walked into church thinking about deadlines and the news and my aged ailing pals and I walk out into the sunshine, feeling shaken, raised up, grateful for the love of God and the people around me. I wish you’d come with me sometime.

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