Looking forward to a week of uninformation
The Column: 07.31.23
A team of four men and one woman is on a mission to fix the 21st century and bring it more in line with the 18th and who can argue with the Supremes and who knows what the Ghost of Originalism may tell them to do next? At the moment, federal law prohibits destroying or tampering with restroom smoke detectors on airliners, a curtailment of individual liberty we’ve all come to accept but do the Supremes, riding around as they do aboard private jets owned by wealthy chums? We don’t know. Will small children’s right to work 12-hour days in factories be restored to them? Will the right of Lutherans to carry concealed weapons to the 11 a.m. service be upheld? You tell me.
I do believe that there is a Higher Law than what the Supremes declare and that a person is obliged to think Highly rather than Supremely, and one could argue that the right to Survival trumps (pardon my language) the Mind of Justice Alito, and as we look around and see petroleum and plastics degrading the planet, we might decide that the supremely wealthy who placed the five on the Court and who profit from pollution are thereby outlaws and the crime is giving their fortunes preeminence over humanity. What to do?
Well, environmentalists are not about to storm the Court the way the MAGA crowd stormed the Capitol. Environmentalists are gentle souls, birdwatchers, gardeners, armed only with laptops and they have no experience at storming, so they’d have to work hard going door to door for a year to elect a Congress and president who’d expand the Court to a more reasonable size for a nation of 330 million — say, a Court of 36 instead of 9.
And then I remember what Mark Twain said: “To be good is noble; but to show others how to be good is nobler and no trouble.” Showing others how to be good is the privilege of a person who is days away from turning 81. Go fight the good fight, my children, and I will donate $25 to your cause and otherwise I plan to spend my days in pure pleasure, sitting on the porch, writing limericks, drinking ginger tea, playing Scrabble with my wife and putting down words like NAKED and AMATORY.
Fighting evil is noble but in my old age I’ve come to feel that cheerfulness, gratitude, comedy are the essence of life, and so I look forward to the imminent arrival of my English relatives who love this country so sweetly. They are hikers and in America there’s more to hike. For me the visit is a vacation from listening to people bemoan Mr. Mar-a-Lugubrious and despair about what they read in the morning paper. My Brits can talk your ear off about the depredations of the Tories and they look on the monarchy as a malignancy but they love America in all its splendor, and so I’m taking them to visit Grand Canyon and gaze at geology and descend the Bright Angel Trail into the depth and then learn a great lesson — it is harder descending and easier coming up — which may be applicable in life generally — and we won’t be flying to Arizona, we’ll take the train out of New York and up the Hudson and over to Chicago so they can see the splendor of Ohio and Indiana, and then the Southwest Chief for the splendor of Missouri and Kansas. Most Americans would prefer to fly over Kansas. My Brits will be awestruck at the prairie, the little frame houses on the vast flatness.
I myself am a secret monarchist, as were my relatives in Rhode Island and Connecticut in 1775 except they weren’t secret about it. I miss Elizabeth II, the perfect modest model of a modern English monarch, tramping in the rain with her corgis. When Her Majesty met President Schlump and he opened his big yap and hee-hawed at her, we saw a contrast that was not favorable to our side.
We’ll be gone a week looking at America and I will read no news during that week. It’s hard, what with bulletins beeping on my phone, but I can do it. If Justice Thomas throws out the indictments of the Trumpkin, I won’t know about it. I’ll be looking at this magnificent country. When Thomas Keillor left Yorkshire and came here, he knew what he was doing, even if he wasn’t aware of it.
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