Why I'm happy and you should be too
The Column: 03.22.24
It’s so good being an old man that if I’d only known, I’d have arrived at 81 sooner, and I don’t just mean senior discounts. I mean the liberation from hipness, being out of the loop, going to bed early, not reading book reviews or pundits. William Butler Yeats said it all in 1919: “The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” My wife just walked over in her pajamas as I was googling the Yeats and she leaned down and I was filled with passionate intensity, so I’m no better than you, I’m just older.
I don’t go to movies anymore — don’t know the actors and the butter on the popcorn is worse than ever — don’t watch TV because the remote is way beyond my pay grade. That’s why I’m not a Republican: I never watched “The Apprentice” — and there was a deadness in the man’s eyes that told the truth. I read a transcript of his speech in Rome, Georgia, a week ago: “We have the stupidest people in the history of our country running things. These are stupid, these are stupid people. And we should be saying, ‘Crooked Joe, you are fired. Get out of here. You are fired. You’re incompetent. You’re incompetent. Get out of here. You’re destroying our nation. Get the hell out of here. You’re destroying our country, Joe.’ He doesn’t have a clue. He doesn’t even know. He doesn’t know he is destroying it. He has no clue. He has no clue.”
No other president could have talked like that except maybe in his sleep, stood up in public at a microphone and said, “You’re stupid. You’re a stupid dummy. Dummy, dummy, dummy, dummy, dummy. Get me? You’re stupid.” This man makes George W. Bush seem like Winston Churchill. The party of Lincoln is falling in line but we’re Americans, we don’t pay money for a bowl of cat turd soup that’s labeled Cream of Mushroom, so don’t lose hope. If the voters listen to the man and look into his eyes, he’ll win Alabama and Mississippi, claim fraud, and go live in Riyadh. Praise the Lord.
Old age is all about gratitude. I’m a lucky man. I chose the right parents, two fundamentalists so I’m guilt-ridden, yes, but there was no fetal alcohol syndrome. Guilt made me a better husband. In the 8th grade, Mr. Orville Buehler saw me joking around in shop class while my rotary power saw was screaming through a 2x6, and he kicked me out and sent me up to LaVona Person’s speech class, a turning point in my life. I made my living by talking and avoided hard work, avoided drowning and highway fatality and drug addiction, avoided therapy so I never found out how troubled I was, which would’ve depressed me.
I am funnier now than I used to be, thanks to flatulence. Women don’t experience this because they talk a lot and so the pressure never builds up, but every man over 70 has four or five eruptions a day and so laughter follows us wherever we go. That’s why Speaker Johnson had that look on his face sitting behind Joe during the State of the Onion. I am still doing shows and my band sits behind me and has a whee of a time. And now Palm Sunday is coming when we Piskies clap our hands and dance and then Easter when one candidate will be in church hearing about the Resurrection and the other will be playing golf and not counting the shots he doesn’t like. And then Opening Day on March 28 and the nation returns to rational thinking. If a pitcher stands on the mound and yells, “You’re a dummy, you got no clue, you stupid dummy,” he still has to throw the ball and the batter can take a swing. It’s a beautiful game. No longer the national pastime, but we old liberals like it.
Things are looking up. It was a miserable winter, dreary rainy days instead of snow, but now the daffodils and tulips are blooming, and this spring I am really truly going to sit down and read Moby-Dick. I was an English major, I took a course in Melville in 1963, wrote a paper about the symbolism of Moby-Dickand got a B on it but never read the dang book. I’m told it’s good. Ahab goes down with the whale, Ishmael survives, using Queequeg’s coffin for a buoy. Melville’s buried in the Bronx, at the end of the No. 4 subway. When I’m done with the book, I’ll go out and put daffodils on his grave.
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Yeah,
You're good
That's why I keep reading you
Mr. Trump's lack of eloquence may itself speak volumes about the intellectual decline of our country. Some say that's the way our "leaders" want it; a dumbed-down populace that, "... can't sit around the kitchen table and discuss how badly they've been screwed by their 'owners' that threw them overboard thirty [now fourty five] f*cking years ago" (George Carlin). On the other hand, others see Trump as an unfortunate, distorted anomaly. A temporary aberration in an otherwise functioning, however imperfect, democratic republic.
Mr. Keillor, your image of President Lincoln is apropos. I wasn't paying much attention in high school, an attestation to my own stupidity and lack of acumen so I didn't learn this until just recently rather late in life: President Lincoln held the Union together, but he did so not just for America, but much more so for the entire world. Mr. Lincoln not only showed the world, but he proved to the world that a nation, "...of the people, by the people, and for the people..." could and would prevail.
Before Mr. Lincoln's example of these United States as a successful democratic republic, with just a few minor exceptions in ancient Greece and classical Rome, democracy was a vanishingly rare geo-political anomaly. Tyrants and despots who abused their populace dominated and ruled all over the world. It was Mr. Lincoln who stood firm, and by his actions (which resulted in the death of over 600,000 young American men, sadly) showed the world that people could govern themselves and that nations, "of the people, by the people, and for the people...shall not perish from this earth."
To paraphrase President Lincoln: If I have to free all of the slaves to preserve the Union I will do so. If I have to free some of the slave to preserve the Union I will do so; and if I must free none of the slaves to preserve the Union, I will do so. But above all else, the Union must and will prevail.
And so to this day democratic republics, due to Lincoln's perseverance, prevail not just here in America but throughout the world, a few anomalous, distorted nation-states abused by their leaders notwithstanding, such as North Korea and Myanmar.
Thus when the "tangerine tinted tyrant" threatens to turn this nation of Lincoln and his democratic legacy into his own personal fiefdom "from day one" with his personal cronies and henchmen packed into federal administrative jobs, the American people need to say, "Enough!"
As President Lincoln, a truly eloquent and wise man, so unlike Trump said, "This nation of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from this earth..."
Let's not give Trump another chance to destroy our precious democratic-republic "of the people, by the people, for the people..." as imperfect as we have been in implementing that. It is still the country of "we the people." Without Trump we can keep it that way.