A declaration of independence

The Column: 03.27.26

I’ve started a new career as a stand-up comic after fifty years in fiction and as anyone can see 2026 is the worst time to do comedy, maybe since the Middle Ages. We have a regime of wackos who are anti-science, anti-education and rather whimsical about raining deadly destruction on other people, and how do you satirize terminal stupidity? So I don’t. I go after Thoreau and his brand of individuals. “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” — horse hockey. I go out and do 90 minutes about the pleasure of being an elderly English-speaking American Episcopalian guy and people enjoy this. It’s about the pleasure of community.

Thoreau was the first in a long line of alienated loner cowboy poet heroes marching each to his own drummer, including plenty of felons and billionaires and sociopaths who drive cars with 95-decibel tailpipes and folks who get a kick out of blowing up things coming down to the current alienated loner Leader who had the power to pay the TSA workers but didn’t for five weeks while Americans waited in lines at airports for three and four hours. He has his own plane and doesn’t go through a metal detector. He ought to go through a soul detector.

It seems clear that it was an American missile that hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in southern Iran killing more than 170, most of them young girls, and if you have a heart, you can imagine the horror of little kids and teachers under a building collapsing on top of them, you can hear it and see it, but our Leader does not march to that drummer. Nor does he bother to argue that Iran posed such a threat to us that the wholesale bombing was justified.

I never mention him in my stand-up routine nor anything else on the front page of the paper. I grew up in a beautiful country and that country still exists. In Hudson Falls, New York, I gave 500 people the chance to sing “My country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty” and also “Abide with me, fast falls the eventide” and “Mama’s little baby loves shortnin’ bread” and “They built the ship Titanic to sail the ocean blue” and they knew all the words, and then I sang “I met a gin-soaked barroom queen in Memphis, she tried to take me upstairs for a ride” and the whole crowd was right there — my people are good upstanding folks of gentle disposition, including a good many therapists, schoolteachers, geriatric psychologists, administrators of recovery programs, Methodists, but they felt a communal identity, they were not about to secede from the group, and we came to the chorus and they sang the HONK-y tonk women and really made it honk.

They’d never been in a barroom in Memphis, wouldn’t know a woman of the night from a daycare director but this was the blues, American blues, as brought to America by a bunch of Brits, and they enjoyed being in that club of 500, not one Thoreau did I see who clapped his hand over his mouth. We even went on and sang the second verse about the divorcee from New York City who covered me in roses, she blew my nose and then she blew my mind, and we honked again.

In twenty years, you won’t be able to stand up in front of a crowd and get them to sing the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women” because the internet and the cellphone enable everyone to find his or her own private cavern that’s all about coelacanths or arthropods or genderless people who wish to identify as carbon-based life-forms and everyone will have several podcasts of their own and there will be mighty few experiences common to all.

So I’m going around preaching to the choir, reliving the old culture that’s fast disappearing. Every day, in Central Park, in Strawberry Fields, you find people sitting playing guitar and singing “Imagine” or “I Saw Her Standing There” or “Baby You Can Drive My Car” fifty years after those songs were hits. It’s sweet. People go to ball games because it’s the same as always, nobody has suggested changing three strikes to four or eliminating the shortstop to allow more scoring.

I love being on the road, driving through Connecticut and down to Long Island, mixing with the customers. My parents never talked about politics: it was far away and they were focused on family, the immediate, work, play, weather. Let the angry young men and evangelicals who gave us these wackos take responsibility for it, and I intend to enjoy my life in my country. God bless it.

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