Columns
From the New York Times, Time magazine, and the complete Chicago Tribune syndicated columns
From the New York Times, Time magazine, and the complete Chicago Tribune syndicated columns
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.”
Read MoreToday I am going to get organized and the first item of business is to establish a Home Plate in which I will put things such as billfold, keys, glasses, phone, pens, meds, nail clipper, checkbook, postage stamps, cufflinks, shoelaces, eyedrops, matches, grip tape, flashlight, magnifying glass, things that in the time I’ve spent looking for them in the past few years I could’ve translated The Iliad and made peace with China and unionized college athletes, both men and women.
On the other hand, do we really need a new Iliad? The poet hit a homer and the Odyssey is even better. Ulysses is tempted by the babes along the way but he makes it back to Penelope and is a happy man.
Read MoreI come from pot roast people and the past two months have been rough on me, when, doing penance for the holidays, we’ve been on a bunny rabbit diet, grazing on bowls of greenery. My mother made pot roast for Sunday dinner, which made me think of it as sacred food. She put chuck roast in a covered pan in the oven at low heat when we left for church and when we returned four hours later, the kitchen was redolent with goodness. I don’t recall that she ever tossed a salad. Cows ate salads so whatever good was in them came to us by way of beef.
Urbanites are in flight from their pot roast heritage unless it’s called “pot-au-feu,” which is the same thing — cheap beef cooked slowly — but served by someone with an accent.
Read MoreI haven’t yet been invited to give a commencement address this spring and I’m okay with that. I am 81, an age that’s gotten a bad rap recently, and I’m not famous anymore, but nonetheless I do have things to say to the Class of ’24 and I come cheap and have my own gown if you’re unable to provide one.
I did a radio show for years whose name, if you rearrange the letters, spells “Pie Aroma in Microphone,” a show of wholesome humor and uplifting music, nothing satanic or hallucinatory and only gently satiric, and yet it did well in New York City, and New Yorkers curbed their irony when they came in the door and listened politely.
Read MoreI spent a couple hours on the phone the other night with a man I haven’t seen since high school, he in Northern California, I in New York City, two old men recalling our youth in Minnesota. I love the telephone; it can be so intimate — like radio, which is the business I was in for years — the voice carries so much humanity, even the silences speak.
He was the older brother of my high school friend Pete who had died a week before of stage 4 squamous carcinoma that had spread through his body, making chemo and radiation pointless, but his brother and I didn’t talk much about death, we let our memories drift back to high school. His family was Catholic, mine was evangelical, he was the handsomest boy in school and dated my cousin Delores briefly, remembered her beauty; his mother was a friend of my mother-in-law, two smart women devoted to the arts and other good causes; he delivered the evening paper and remembered his customers; he was a third-string football player who didn’t mind sitting on the bench. His brother was a star halfback. Both of them, to me then and still, epitomized smarts and the essence of cool. In a little farm town, they stood out.
Read MoreIf a person lives in a democracy, which thus far we do, you soon learn that politics is not an orderly business like cosmetic dentistry or carpentry, it is more like pond hockey or maybe a conclave of sociopaths or an ostrich jubilee, and the messiness can drive you crazy, like finding potatoes in your sock drawer and rutabagas in the medicine cabinet, and the alternative to despair is amusement.
So when the Alabama Supreme Court decides that an embryo is a human being and you see Republicans scrambling to distance themselves from this lest they alienate young people of voting age who were conceived in vitro, you wonder if someday sperm will be given the same protection and male masturbation will be considered child abuse.
Read MoreI was in Texas last week doing shows, which is my line of work, and was sorry to leave because, frankly, it was the most fun I can remember having while wearing a suit and tie and now I look at this sentence and am surprised to be writing it. We Minnesotans aren’t known for euphoria, we experience sexual ecstasy and we think, “Well, that wasn’t bad, a person could do worse, that’s for sure,” and on top of my northern self-restraint, I grew up fundamentalist which, even after you depart from the fold, leaves you with a lifelong allergy to pleasures of all kinds.
Fun is not our thing. We leave the party before the dancing starts. I do a show and remember what went wrong. In photographs I look like a defendant the jury has just voted unanimously to convict after ten minutes of deliberation. We are susceptible to alcoholism because we keep drinking, waiting for it to make us happy, until we lose consciousness.
Read MoreI’m an old man but not utterly clueless and as I hear music come out of the ceiling, I hear rap and hip-hop become monosyllabic, a string of shouts and macho mumbles with machinelike percussion, a sort of anti-music, and then along comes a young woman who sings actual stories in whole sentences to a real melody and you have Taylor Swift and she takes over the music business and becomes the most famous person on earth, bigger than Vladimir Putin. When Putin fills a stadium, you know it was at gunpoint. Mister Marlago fills small plazas but it’s all the same people, mostly retirees with time on their hands who love hearing that same speech over and over. Taylor draws huge paying crowds who are overjoyed from start to finish and also buy the merch and go home happy.
I accept the fact that I am a back issue, a relic, and that younger people have taken over. Eight years ago I played the Hollywood Bowl; a few weeks ago I played a 200-seater in Menomonie, Wisconsin. It was fun. People in the seats talked back to me. We hung out in the lobby afterward. I caught influenza from one of them. Do Taylor’s fans get to share their germs with her? I doubt it very much.
Read MoreIt is Lent, the season meant for us to meditate upon our wayward ways, even us Episcopalians whom you rarely find falling down drunk in the gutter or shoplifting at Walgreens or getting into fistfights — no, for us failing to write thank-you notes is major — but still we have our shortcomings, which, I must say, are clearer to me this week when my wife the violist is away playing Beethoven for a ballet in Minneapolis. Without her here, my life goes slack, I sometimes spend all day in pajamas, my mind jumps from one lily pad to another, I can’t focus. My room is a mess, the bed is a tangle of bedclothes.
My grandma Dora always made her bed upon arising, believing it lent order to the day. She was a seamstress, schoolteacher, railroad telegrapher, farm wife, mother of eight. Her bread was light and crusty. She had firm habits: she drank Postum, ate Grape-Nuts, slept with the window open for fresh air, and she was a progressive Methodist who believed that women and persons of color were the equal of white men and that science could solve many of our problems. Compared to Grandma, I am a hopeless mess. I mean it.
Read MoreBefore it dies, I want to come out in favor of the hyperloop project in Minnesota to create underground tubes in which people would travel in capsules propelled by electromagnetic force at speeds up to 700 mph. No seat belts, no use of carbon fuel, no roaring engines or jarring bumps. They’re proposing a link between Minneapolis/St. Paul and Rochester, 85 miles, which by my calculation will take about 7 and ½ minutes, or one cup of coffee, whereas now it takes 90 some minutes, or about the length of the opera “Hansel and Gretel” if you include the search for a parking spot and the hike to where your appointment is.
Minnesota’s, of course, would only be an experiment, which, if successful, could be extended and thereby make the country smaller — three hours from Chicago to L.A. but without the pollution — and eventually you might eliminate the vast underpopulated middle, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, the Dakotas, Nevada, Wyoming, and Montana, which would become one huge federal agricultural reserve, run by the Department of Agriculture, tended by migrant workers, no need for towns and cities. Kansas has 105 counties, a pointless bureaucracy ruling over wheat and soybean fields. Farming is heavily subsidized by the feds anyway and in the name of efficiency, why not let them run it, allocating acreage based on nutrition, convert wasteful grazing lands to vegetable crops. Eliminating those states would reduce the U.S. Senate by 20 seats, which could only improve it, and likely send the Republican Party careening into history, which it has been seeking for some time now. And who can name the last great senator from Kansas or South Dakota?
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