My plan for the next four years
The Column: 01.03.25
Somebody has to be the worst president in U.S. history, they can’t all be No. 14 as Joe Biden was in a survey of American historians or No. 8 like Ike or No. 35 like Nixon, and isn’t it only fair that the worst (No. 45) should be given the opportunity to improve his ranking? Of course it is. Meanwhile, I don’t need to follow his second term day by day; I can better occupy my time with the crossword puzzle and the book reviews and skip the funny pages. I don’t check my IRA every morning or my blood pressure or the WNBA standings or the air quality index, so why should I upset myself at the thought of Kash Patel running the FBI or Tulsi Gabbard as head of national intelligence or an anti-vaxxer as Secretary of Health? If I want to study lunacy, why not become a therapist and get paid for it?
So I am focused on the positive aspects of life. I’ve just succeeded at taking a lazy one-week vacation with my family at a resort in California at which I slept late and hung out beside a pool under an umbrella and sipped lavender lemonade. My work ethic relaxed severely, I was very agreeable the entire time, I even started to sort of like myself.
Once I sat in a hot tub with four people who seemed to be employed in the software trade and listened to their palaver and didn’t understand a single word of it, not even “the” or “a” or “since.” It was very rewarding. None of them asked me what I do for a living so I just sat in bubbling hot water watching the mountains turn pink in the sunset and feeling very lucky not to be influential like Thomas L. Friedman of the Times who returned from a trip to China with a new perspective on world affairs.
Life is good once you master the art of Deletion. Every day my laptop is full of emails asking for money to do worthwhile, even noble, things, which, if I donated to them, I’d soon be living in a cardboard box in a vacant lot, and so I click on “Unsubscribe” and they go away for a while. Instead, I google “What is the prospect of international peace and understanding?” and find that the U.N. thinks it’s inevitable and dalailama.com says it’s based on compassion and foreignpolicy.com thinks the prospects are not good. We didn’t used to have Google, my kiddoes, we used to sit and worry about these things and now at last clear answers are available. Contradictory, but still.
An old man sees progress on so many fronts, such as the advent of the frozen waffle and spreadable butter. I remember the heavy waffle irons of yore, the risk of a small child yanking the contraption down on his head and therefore never getting into grad school, the mixing of dough and prying the roasted waffle off the hot iron and spreading rock-hard butter on it and ripping the delicacy to shreds. Now it’s two minutes from toaster to mouth, no problem.
Advances have been made in packaging: tiny slits enable a person to open a bag of jelly beans or caramel corn without using brute force and perhaps injuring a shoulder and needing shoulder replacement.
As a liberal Democrat, I felt obliged to read about environmental degradation, poor math scores among low-income children, declining respect for governmental institutions, the loss of wildlife species, explosive economic inequity, the advance of AI toward self-replication, nations falling into chaos and refugee populations growing, the fascination of the working class with billionaire leaders who use political power to enrich themselves, and so on and so forth, and now I’ve discovered artificial tears can take the place of reading about crises. A couple squirts in each eye and I feel bad for half a minute and accomplish about as much as I would after reading the Times or the Post.
And so I am avoiding having lunch with Democrats — it’s the same conversation over and over: “Did you read about, etc., etc. I can’t believe it, so on and so forth.” The man will do what he will do. Let John Thune and Mike Johnson agonize over it. I hope he can beat out James Buchanan, ranked as 44th by historians, the man who sat on his hands as the country blundered into the Civil War. It’s a low bar but as long as the South doesn’t delete itself, Trump can do it. And if the South does, well, 39 states is still a lot of states and much more united.
Chances are high that Garrison Keillor will be performing live in a location near you this winter. Check out his schedule and find a show!
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You may be able to escape to a hot tub at a California resort or fly back and forth between Minnesota and a New York apartment or sell folksy material with some slightly salacious and personal content and limericks, with talk about being old and being "above it all" by choice. Millions upon millions will be very unlikely to have those options, whether it's the millions of poor or nearly poor folks, old folks and poor/old folks, disabled folks, women, children, those hard workers in the Civil Service, the U.S. Postal Service, member countries of NATO....and on and on, the ones that apparently this New Greater America society has decided are expendable in one way or another.
That said, as critical as it sounds, I guess I understand why you're taking the position you're taking; each of us only has one life, after all, and that son of a roy cohn has already consumed way too much of our lives, so why give him more? I get it. Thing is, he and his crowd have invaded and occupied the country and avoidance - for most of us - will be impossible. Still, to love and respect this sweet gift of being alive, it does seem a higher calling to seek and embrace joy and happiness, so I do get it - and yet still find it challenging to accomplish it! Maybe the best way to "resist" thump and his depravity is to bar him from our peace and happiness. Seems like a plan....
It is difficult to imagine you in a hot tub, but I reckon it's kind of a California version of a sauna, something that those "Norwegian bachelor farmers" might have used, farther north than St. Paul/Minneapolis.
Anyway, best of luck to you and to all of us. Once more into the breach!
What I have decided, on this front, is live and embody the Serenity Prayer: "Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." As a citizen of this country, I feel it is my civic duty to stay basically informed. We got here because too many of our citizens paid no attention to anything but the price of eggs and because too many of them were being lied to outright or by omission. So I, a former news junkie, will consume FAR less news but still know what is happening. But I will not let the Orange Menace steal my joy or make me hate the (very) few people I know and have always liked who voted for him. I'm determined to let him take no more from me than he will already have the horrible authority to do.