The perils of a summer September

The temperature dropped a little this week, from the 80s into the 70s, a relief for us elderly who go back before global warming. I like winter and we used to get a touch of it in late September, a few snowflakes, a little frost on the windows. Winter is a beautiful time of quietude and reflection. Weathermen talk about Minnesota being “hit” by a snowstorm but snow doesn’t hit, it falls gently to the ground and lies there until plowed or shoveled.

I was around before lightweight thermal wear was developed and I walked to school through waist-high drifts knowing that if coyotes caught me and took me to their den and devoured me, the world would get along just fine in my absence, and so I was alert to coyote sounds and didn’t dally and felt great relief when I walked into Benson School.

Winter served its purpose: to teach us that, as Galileo said, the world doesn’t revolve around us or exist for our comfort and pleasure. It has a will of its own.

Summer weather in September isn’t good for this country; it leads to moral relaxation. A big crowd of generals and admirals sat and quietly listened to their crazy Commander’s meandering speech inviting them to join in a domestic war against his political opposition and they politely clapped instead of rising up and grabbing the demented man and clapping him into custody. Their oath is to defend the Constitution, not him, and his suggestion to establish a police state should’ve been met with force. But the weather made them dozy.

Craziness and stupidity are a dangerous combination and you find less of it in folks in the North because the wolves and coyotes eat them or they fall through the ice. If you planted the Commander in a cabin in northern Minnesota with a pair of skis and no phone, he’d be helpless. You can’t impress a grizzly by waving a fistful of cash at him.

The world is changing rapidly but some things remain the same. A great many young people worked hard in college studying computer science — young people whose education is about to be suddenly obsolete thanks to AI, but the ability to speak English clearly and persuasively and with grace and humor is as valuable as ever, maybe more so. And the Commander’s stumblebum hourlong mumbling embarrassment in front of dedicated officers should’ve been the end of him, but the show goes on. He strode to his executive helicopter and the Marine at the door saluted just as smartly as ever.

We seem to be watching the Fall of the Roman Empire in our lifetime. The Romans accepted inept emperors and the Germans let the gas out of them, pffffffffffffffft, and it was goodbye Ovid and hello Henry. This is history, you should look it up sometime.

I hold my generation responsible for the narcissist songwriters and pious progressives who prompted America to elect this corrupt and proudly ignorant regime in which patriotism is replaced by personal fealty. Hardworking tax-paying immigrants are flown to foreign gulags, meanwhile the palace crowd is cashing in on public office. Mencken predicted that the White House would be adorned by a downright moron one day and here he is. We have him.

It seems to me that we Episcopalians used to pray for the president of the U.S.A. and now we don’t anymore. I guess today he might be included among the Sick and Distressed.

I had uncles who were Republicans but they distrusted generals going back to their own days in the military and they had a low opinion of politicians. The Pentagon Papers proved them right. They’d be astounded by the Quantico Follies.

The Republican Party is trying to deal with the Commander the same way you’d deal with your daughter if she went to live with a 400-pound guy with swastikas tattooed on his face and a proclivity for triple quarter pounders and peppermint vodka — you’d be polite, invite him into your home, and not indicate by the slightest wince or groan your utter disgust, but so far this approach is not working and now you are praying that please, Dear Lord, may there not be offspring.

What Washington needs is four feet of snow and two weeks of minus-40 lows and let the gentleman sit in his Evil Office and think these things through more clearly.

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