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Ammo Grrrll looks into the future: I THINK THAT I SHALL NEVER SEE…quite a few things!
Joyce Kilmer, author of the beloved and universally known American poem “Trees,” declared that he thought that he would “never see / A poem as lovely as a tree.”
Soon I shall list some things that we cannot BELIEVE we HAVE seen. And then several things that, like Mr. Kilmer, we will never see. No, not ever. But first an important word about Mr. Kilmer.
“Trees” is a short, sweet, simple religious poem and Kilmer was a devout Catholic. So, of course, the work has been much mocked and parodied by what passes for the intelligentsia in this great land. I feel duty-bound to mention that Alfred Joyce Kilmer was a poet, yes, but he was also a soldier. As a wealthy married man with five children, he surely could have avoided service in the meat grinder that was World War I, but he enlisted in 1917 and was tragically killed in 1918 by a sniper while scouting for a German machine-gun nest in the company of Wild Bill Donovan in the Second Battle of the Marne. He was 31.
So put THAT in your pipes and smoke it, arrogant, ignorant modern critics! I’m sure the obscene bleatings of a junkie are much to be prized over a dead soldier who liked trees.
Anyway, here are a few things that we HAVE seen that I never would have believed even 10 years ago, to say nothing of when I was young.
I’m sure students of history know that in the battle for women’s suffrage, one of the arguments in FAVOR of it was that women were the kinder, gentler, more nurturing sex and would bring those sensibilities to the body politic.
So imagine my shock and awe when for thousands of women, the main issue – and one which will be harped upon in ads running every 10 minutes until the merciful Chinese EMP attack – is the right to kill their babies up to the moment of birth. My former state, Minnesota, is a “Multi-Sanctuary” state where you can travel to kill your baby when the labor pains are three minutes apart — OR wait just a few years until a three-year-old plays dress-up with a dress and then declare that the little boy is actually a girl and have him castrated. Your choice. Because it’s a “woman’s right to choose.”
What else? We have seen a mostly-peaceful, interracial mob of thugs come together in Minneapolis to burn a police station to the ground while everyone in authority just let it happen. The daughter of the wretched Governor (Polka? Waltz? Chaha? Something…) even informed those thugs that the National Guard would not be on hand. That was a first for me.
Here’s another: A pathological liar in a TV series who met the police at his door with a “noose” around his neck went on television while an otherwise intelligent person like Robin Roberts watched Jussie, an ACTOR, cry on cue. He choked back tears as he spoke about the Bad MAGA Men who had been out shlepping around rope and bleach on spec in below zero weather – just IN CASE they ran across a gay black man. Did anyone else call “Poppycock” (or words to that effect) the MINUTE they heard that preposterous tale?
Nobody asked why the MAGA dudes didn’t actually hang him. Nobody asked why they let him keep his cellphone and even call people on it during the “assault.” Nobody asked what HE was doing out and about in frigid weather. Nobody asked why he had not a scratch on him from slapping at the potential lynchers, one-handed, while his sammich never left his other hand. Not one word of his pasture patty story made any sense. And that was BEFORE the authorities found the store cam stuff the paid black “assassins” bought. With a check.
He is not serving his sentence, and to my knowledge, has never repaid the poor Chicago Police Department for the hours of overtime they spent chasing phantom MAGA guys. Also, if Robin Roberts, or Kamala, or Spartacus has ever said publicly, “Boy, that’s one on us – we made some unwarranted racist assumptions and some hysterical statements, and we’re kinda sorta sorry,” I haven’t heard about that either.
There was a months-long crisis in the shipping pipeline while the Secretary of Transportation, a Howdy Doody clone who had once been a boy mayor of a potholed municipality, but mostly was just GAY as a criterion for his high-paying job, declared he was taking maternity time off. He sat in a bed with his husband pretending that the two of them had actually birthed the babies they held. I never saw that coming. It made my skin crawl. Not that two gay guys had “acquired” babies – whatever — but that they were pretending to chest feed and lying in bed as though they had just been through the 18 hours of labor (to pick a random number) that women (okay, I) had been through. Talk about stolen valor!
Truth to tell, I have rarely been very impressed with the miscreants who inhabit Congress. But even someone as cynical as I am could never have anticipated several brain-dead losers of various colors in Congress billing themselves as The Squad being unable to say a mumblin’ word against rape, baby-beheading, immolation of children, or taking civilian hostages. Oh, I’m sorry – they DID say a word – they said it was “justified.”
So these are things we HAVE seen. Is there ANYTHING that we will NEVER see? Like in the late Mr. Kilmer’s poem? Why yes, yes, there is! A Partial List:
*Obama’s Passport history. Ditto, Obama’s Academic Coursework and Grades
*Ghislaine Maxwell’s little black book of clients (that’s how we know that DJT is not in it.)
*A non-white mother of a criminal being held legally responsible for his or her criminality.
*The murderous trans girl’s manifesto
*A forensic audit of BLM
*A transcript of what the pukes in the Biden Administration have told Israel – apart from these few words we know were said: “Die, Jews! Just Lose! We’ve got the Michigan blues!”
*An audit of any city run by a black woman mayor. Heck, ANY big city mayor.
*The complete security tapes from the January 6th walkabout in the Capitol.
*A complete list of the payouts to victims of sexual harassment by members of Congress
*How many FBI agents attended the January 6th “insurrection” as provocateurs.
*What red states and towns the illegal alien criminal invaders have been sent to.
*A non-racist and logical explanation of why black people cannot find a picture I.D.
*An abject apology from the 51 “agents” who certified that the Hunter Laptop was just Russian disinformation. And the subsequent firing of those liars and election inteferers.
I’m waiting…how ‘bout you?
Ammo Grrrll has seasonal thoughts on WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM PROFESSIONAL SPORTS – especially BASEBALL. She wants commenters to know that she “will be slightly less interactive today as her son is here and we will be at a Spring Training game. It is just a coincidence (honest!) that this column was next up in the pipeline.” She writes:
Unless you are very lucky, the first thing you learn about professional sports is that their sole purpose is to break your heart. Your team is not going to make the playoffs. And if it does, it will be annihilated by the New York Yankees in the first round. Your football team is never going to win the Super Bowl, even with four bites at the apple. But at least you won’t have to sit through the Satanic Half-time Ritual with the Mandatory Wardrobe Malfunction because, with your team, the game has traditionally been over before half-time.
So, yeah, bitter disappointment is the norm no matter how hard you root for your team. How loyal a Vikings fan was I back in the day when all the players stood for the National Anthem because Bud Grant never would have allowed them to kneel?
Well, once I was approached by a New York ad agency to star in a commercial in which I would have to pretend to be a Packers fan – and I TURNED IT DOWN. Now, that’s commitment. Or economic insanity. Potato, Potahto.
It is an altogether good thing to learn early on that MUCH of life is going to be a vast surging disappointment. And still you will survive and even thrive!
You are probably not going to make the Cheerleading Squad. (I didn’t, and it broke my heart). You are probably not going to be a Homecoming Queen. (I wasn’t, but I knew THAT wasn’t in the cards!) You may not get into the college of your choice. (I did because back in the Pleistocene Age, you got into college with good grades and excellent test scores – isn’t that a quaint and backward notion?) You are probably not going to think up something like Amazon, Space X, or TurboTax. (I didn’t.) You are more likely to spend your time thinking up funny names for the harridans on The View and it doesn’t pay nearly as well.
In other words, the chances are excellent that you are going to be an Ordinary Person who works hard at an unexciting job for 55 years, lives and loves and procreates and enjoys grandchildren, Sudoku, and Pickleball. And you will realize at the end that that was much more important than being a cheerleader. Though I sure wish I would have thought up Amazon.
But, but, but, once in a great while, when the stars align, a miracle can happen. Always be on the lookout for miracles.
Else, what can we say about the 1987 and 1991 World Series wins for the Minnesota Twins? Or one of the greatest sports feats of all time, the 2004 ALCS series against the Yankees with the Red Sawx down 3 games to naught and behind in the 9th inning of Game Four to boot.
And God, who had been wearing his noise-cancelling headphones because he was so tired of listening to Bostonians whine in that particularly annoying accent, suddenly heard their prayers and declared: “Okay, Okay. It’s possible I have punished Boston enough.” And He smiled on Big Papi and decreed that a miracle would occur. And He saw that it was good.
The scruffy, scrappy Red Sox came back and won Game Four and the next seven straight games to make the World Series an anti-climactic bore, mostly because the usually excellent Cardinals decided not show up for some reason. I have long advocated that that ALCS Series be shown to cancer patients for never-give-up inspiration.
Today, with the emphasis on year-round fitness, and especially weight-training, baseball players look more like every other professional athlete than they used to. Time was a young fella could hope to be a baseball player even if he wasn’t 6’10” or didn’t weigh 300 lbs.
If a kid was gifted with some sort of bizarre, one-in-a-million people coordination, or the eyesight of Ted Williams, and was willing to practice, practice, practice, he had at least a prayer of making the majors. There was “Little” Freddy Patek, who must have got darn tired of hearing announcers call him that. There were a whole bunch of slender, muscular, HUNGRY players from the Dominican Republic. And, of course, Babe Ruth himself, who nobody would have guessed was a professional athlete if he had been a contestant on “What’s My Line?”
In professional football and basketball, because players are usually only seen with other enormous teammates and ex-player interviewers, it’s not always clear just how DIFFERENT they are from ordinary male mortals.
I was once in an elevator in a hotel in Atlanta when the Celtics were in town to play the Hawks and who should walk into my elevator but Kevin McHale and two teammates. I had always been a Celtics fan and blurted out to Mr. McHale that I was a Minnesotan and had been following his career from high school on. They were all polite and friendly. But, Good Golly Miss Molly, they were YUGE! I felt like a little Arizona barrel cactus amongst the California Redwoods.
We had a similar experience when Joe did some minor legal favor for Joey Browner of the Vikings and he invited us to a little party with a few other Vikings and their lovely ladies. Mr. Browner is a soft-spoken and classy man who often helped opponents he had just flattened to get up when they probably would have preferred to remain on the ground to take a short nap. He was only an inch taller than our Joe/Max, but outweighed him by 50 lbs. of solid muscle. Looking at Joe and Joey side by side a person would say, “One of these guys is a slender, fit, nice-looking attorney. And one of these guys is a safety on the Vikings who has been selected for four Pro Bowls.” And everybody would get it right in one.
One of the greatest things we learn from baseball, perhaps more than any other sport, is that as a batter if you succeed in getting a hit one out of three times, you are a virtual superstar! For Ted Williams and (oh so close .388) our beloved Minnesota Twin Rod Carew, they pushed that to 4/10 and it has never been equaled in 75 years!
Now that’s not a good lesson for a surgeon, an airline pilot, or even a programmer, as they have to get as close to 100 percent success as is humanly possible. But for non-life-threatening human endeavors, it is good to know that you don’t have to be perfect to be a success.
In one interview after his retirement — I am quoting from memory here, so give me a break… — the sportscaster asked Williams what he thought his batting average would be in the current era. Williams said, “I don’t know, probably about .220.” The sportscaster was incredulous. “You had a lifetime average of .344, and you think you would only hit .220 today? Why? Because of the way managers use several pitchers a game?”
“No,” replied Williams. “Because I am 70 years old.”
The New York Post devotes its cover story to President Biden’s election-year budget. By Josh Christenson, the story is headlined “Biden unveils massive $7.3T budget with $5.5T in tax hikes, plans for ‘highest burden’ in US history.” The Post has created a classic cover to flag the story (below). It should probably come with some kind of a warning: “Viewing may induce nausea.” I’m filing this under Laughter Is the Best Medicine.
Nietzsche may have been on to something with THE WILL TO POWER! Thus spake Ammo Grrrll:
This may come as a shock to my faithful readers, but I am no student of Philosophy. For some survey course, I was forced to read Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. I went to the used bookstore on campus and found a copy. When I got back to the dorm, I found that the previous owner of the volume – a girl named Kathy, the flyleaf said — had used a pink marker to highlight the parts that she didn’t understand. Initially, I thought that this could come in handy for me if she had already sussed out the salient points.
Sadly, however, it soon became clear that every single page was solid pink. Not that I disagreed with Kathy. It could not have been less clear to me or any less useful had it been written in Sanskrit. I also noticed that in the final third of the book there was no more highlighter – Kathy had clearly just given up. Krikey, not a single picture or even a whimsical little joke illustrating a point, as Einstein allegedly did with his definition of “relativity.”
“When you sit with a nice girl for two hours you think it’s only a minute, but when you sit on a hot stove for a minute, you think it’s two hours. That’s relativity.” Sometimes the putative quote says “pretty girl” and sometimes it’s attributed to something he said to his secretary, but in any event, it’s clear and mildly humorous, when ol’ Immanuel was neither. Being of a logical and practical bent, I questioned whether anyone could sit on a hot stove for even a SECOND, let alone a whole minute without a trip to the ER, but I took his point.
I believe I also signed up for some course that covered Friedrich Nietzsche’s “will to power” vs. Sigmund Freud’s “pleasure principle” vs. Viktor Frankl’s “will to (or search for) meaning.” But, if that was after I met my beshert – my fated lifetime love – a future novelist named Joe/Max who was not an enthusiastic or even frequent class-attender, I may not have gone to the class very often.
Joe/Max and I knew a couple of Philosophy majors in college and kidded those friends about looking in the newspaper near graduation for Help Wanted ads down at the Philosophy Factory. Well, the joke might have been on us because both Jerry Seinfeld and Steve Martin were Philosophy majors and look where it took THEM!
Anyway, though I thought a lot of Freud’s insights were poppycock, I was more attracted to his “pleasure principle” than to the “will to power” or “the search for meaning.” Almost all the men I knew growing up – hard-working farmers or small businessmen who put in 90-hour weeks lacked the luxury of free time for philosophizing.
And then there were the ladies. Heavens to Betsy, the mother of my sister’s boyfriend had EIGHT kids, all of whom were boys. Early on, the neighbors across the street in South Dakota had nine kids and both parents worked! My experience with housewives and mothers was they literally NEVER stopped working. So for both men and women, “meaning” came from doing their jobs. Almost everybody went to church, so we also learned that “meaning” came from serving God and being kind and helpful to our Fellow Man. Works for me.
Now, in my dotage, the more I observe the behavior of Leftists and bureaucrats of any stripe, the more I think that Nietzsche and his “will to power” may have been on to something. Lordy, how Leftists LOVE to control others!
I can understand how attractive “power” is when we all start out with absolutely no power at all. None. Nada. Bupkiss. In fact, so little power that two yuge giants (and any of their friends and relatives) can pick us up and just PUT us anywhere they want us to be! In a little bathtub, in a crib when we aren’t even sleepy, in an alleged “playpen” with boring toys when we would prefer to be carried around like a pasha instead.
Plus, if you had siblings – and in the ’50s almost EVERYBODY did! – you were a prisoner to some extent of the birth order. As a First-Born, I was definitely in charge. Poor Joe/Max had four older brothers and had to form shifting alliances with some to protect himself from others.
And it only gets marginally better for YEARS. Once we get to a size where the giants no longer pick us up, or the siblings no longer immiserate us, we still have no money, no jobs, no prospects, little knowledge, no transportation, and no ability to live independently. If the slightly less scary giant tells us that we are eating Liver and Lima Beans for supper, it’s not like we can just go down to the Automat and get a burger instead. Not that Alexandria, MN or any previous even smaller towns I lived in had an Automat. Heck, we didn’t even get a fast-food hamburger joint until I was in high school.
I have known many persons of the male persuasion who so deeply resented that lack of independence that they were looking for jobs (shoveling, raking, sweeping out stores, paper boy) at a very young age. They figured out that money was a kind of power and especially if you could accumulate enough to get that Grand Prize of Independence – a vehicle!! A bicycle was a welcome miracle that allowed you to get quite far, but a car was the pinnacle, not only because it could go REALLY far (especially at nineteen cents a gallon), but it allowed you to have a female passenger.
Being a girl person, I did not covet a car so much, but I did have a pretty strong “will to autonomy.” I have never wanted to boss around another human being – and resisted all managerial jobs my whole life – but I really really really didn’t want to be bossed around myself. There were times in my working life when employers made a whole separate shift just for me so I didn’t have any supervisory responsibility. That is the truth, my hand to God.
After feminism reared its ugly Betty Friedan-like head, I noticed that a great many women LOVED to boss people around. They were devoted to status and lording any small area of power over others. Any encroachment on what they perceived as their turf worked out as well as a Crip trying to take over a busy corner of a Blood’s drug trade.
As it happened, when I was an antiwar activist, the real actual Lieutenant Governor of the State of Minnesota was a very nice Democrat named Rudy Perpich (PBUH). He and I were on a radio show about the war once, we hit it off, and when we both left ‘CCO Radio Station at the same time, he gave me a card with his personal number on it and said to call him if I ever needed help with something. He even joked that his job as Lieutenant Governor wasn’t very taxing and he could stuff envelopes.
A few months later, when our group needed a permit for a (genuinely) peaceful demonstration, and also his endorsement, I sauntered on into the Lieutenant Governor’s Office where I was met by an arrogant gaggle of gatekeepers – all women – who tried to insist that I go, one by one, THROUGH them in order to gain access to Mr. Perpich. This really mattered to them, because if a nobody like me could just waltz right in, then, what was the use of THEM?
The women pointed me from one gauntlet to another that I was going to have to run. When Rudy himself came out of his office, he saw me and said, “Well, hi, Susan,” and to the chagrin of the gatekeepers he ushered me right into his office. He signed the Permit, said sure, use his name on the list of endorsers, and bid me adieu. He was like that. If looks could have killed when I came back out, it would have been another Jonestown in there.
I miss approachable leaders like that. His father was a Croatian immigrant and miner in northern Minnesota. He himself was a dentist before he got into politics. Later he served two non-consecutive terms as governor and dedicated one entire $25,000 pay raise to the promotion of – wait for it — bocce ball. You had to love a guy like that.
The women gatekeepers who were so jealously guarding their little fiefdoms seemed addicted to power. I would imagine that it is only about fifty times worse today. People prize their spot on the Organizational Chart, commensurate with money and the ability to boss underlings around. Plus, now, you have to be mindful of Diversity, Incompetence, and Entropy – or whatever those DEI letters stand for.
And so we find ourselves in an era when legions, hordes, whole divisions of Entitled Groups and a few regular old Lazy Incompetent White Male Guys simply LIVE to tell the rest of us what to eat, what to drink, what to drive, when to get inoculated, where to live and, worst of all, what to think. Soon with the brilliance of Google Gemini we will not even be able to research something to think for ourselves. We will only be spoon-fed the thin DEI gruel that Big Brother or Obese Sister want us to ingest.
I do think “The Will to Power” (“der Wille zur Macht” in German) debate is over and it has won the day. But, “as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” We will combine the other two motor forces in human behavior and find “meaning” in having “pleasure”: through love, beautiful friends, music, comedy, art, babies, obliterating the bulls-eye, a peaceful Shabbat, and a medium-rare steak.
The Coffeehouse in which Max Cossack works most days on his ninth novel has a new treat – a combination Chocolate Chip Cookie and a Brownie. A delight I call a Brookie. Always inspired by Theodor Herzl’s motto in the face of the difficulties of finding a safe Jewish homeland – “If you will it, it is no dream” — yesterday, I “willed” Max to bring a Brookie home to me. And he did.
Richard Lewis had the gift of making people laugh. It is a gift that gives physical pleasure. It resides in the realm of the id. You can see his gift on display in the brief exchange with Bob Costas on Costas’s old late-night show Later. By internal evidence, this clip must go back some 36 years, to 1988 or so. It’s not canned material. It wasn’t a routine. Lewis was just naturally funny and here he was on a roll with his audience of one.
RICHARD LEWIS: "I made Bob Costas laugh so hard, NBC refused to air it thinking it made him look silly. I went crazy and bugged the network so much they thankfully caved."
Rest in peace to a man who was literally too funny pic.twitter.com/9P4iYvewmj
— HarryHew (@harryhew) February 29, 2024
Ammo Grrrll is not CLOTHING THE EMPEROR. She writes:
In the middle of an unhinged hateful rant about Donald J. Trump AND especially about us, his “cult-like” wretched, stupid followers, Bob Costas let slip on the CNN ‘s Smerconish show that Biden is too old and needs to step aside to avoid losing to President Trump. He actually invoked the Emperor and His New Clothes image in reference to Biden. He seems to feel pretty strongly that President Trump is going to beat the Depends off Biden in November and that is unthinkable enough for Costas to advise Biden to step aside.
The dam has broken. For a long time that dam had many fingers plugging up all obvious holes and calling them “misinformation.” Conservatives who believe “misinformation” are only a stone’s throw from “Deplorability” on their inevitable path to “Insurrection!” There was a solid phalanx of deniers shrieking daily that Biden was fit as a fiddle.
Joe, they swore, was a fine speaker, but sadly cursed with a whimsical stutter that only appeared at certain times. That this was a lie was obvious to all but the lying liars who lie day in and day out for a very lucrative living. Good grief, NO, Joe Biden does not have a “stutter.” I have known several people with stutters and that is not how stuttering manifests itself.
The problem is that Biden’s brain doesn’t work anymore and he cannot reliably finish slurring all the way to the end of a WORD, let alone express a coherent thought. Heck, he cannot even READ a thought. He stops. He freezes. He looks like his last working synapse just burned out in his head. And then he mumbles, “Well, never mind.” Or, “You know the thing.” On at least two occasions that I am aware of, he could not remember Obama’s name and just called him “my boss.” He yells; he whispers; he sees dead people in the audience. He cannot get a quote right that is WRITTEN OUT in front of him.
His advanced dementia is glaringly, nakedly, apparent. But he comes out, shot up with who knows what, and APPEARS to be clothed. And quite nicely at that. Fig leaves have not been in fashion as strategically-placed nudity covers since The Garden of Eden. And so when he’s not skinny dipping in front of the female Secret Service agents, Joe wears fine suits of superior cut. But in reality he is a shambling updated version of a Greek Minotaur with the clothes of a sentient being and the head of a lost, vacant, angry old gasbag. The world knows it and has acted accordingly.
The lying liars who lie rally round and you can almost hear the strategy meetings: “Okay, the public isn’t buying the stutter deal, guys – and I’m sorry if I misgendered anybody – but, if we allow any criticism through our algorithms, let’s just say it’s his age. You know Trump/Hitler is no spring chicken, either. Yeah, AGE is the word to repeat, not, God forbid, SENILITY.”
And, just like that, every media outlet even slightly left of center starts repeating “age” like an old 33 vinyl record with a bad needle. The late and much-lamented Rush Limbaugh used to play mash-ups of the news-heads all repeating verbatim whatever the powers-that-be had told them to say. Because most of the left is childish, irresponsible, and stupid, it believes that since children like to hear “Good Night, Moon” every night, grown adults will also enjoy hearing the same word repeated until they mute the television, or, alternatively, shoot it.
But, see, AGE isn’t entirely accurate either! It’s NOT his damn age! Sure, he can’t ride a bike, negotiate a stairway, or find his way off any stage. Sure, he “trips” over a sandbag that some Christian Nationalist probably put in his way. So age has SOMETHING to do with it, but it’s not the whole story. He’s not just old; he’s corrupt, mean, creepy, and demented.
Novelist Herman Wouk was still turning out novels when he was past 100. My mother was cogent and still witty at 94. although I would have recommended her for no higher an office than Vice President. As Border Czar she would have kicked butt and taken names. And I might have been tapped to be the shortest high-fashion runway model in history. Alas, this was not to be.
Somebody old who was still productive? Does the name Benjamin Franklin ring a bell? Born in 1706, Ben held numerous posts such as College President of what eventually became the University of Pennsylvania; also, Deputy Postmaster in 1753. But he was a relatively young man then. His inventions are important and numerous.
What stands out is his stint as Ambassador to France, of great importance during the Revolutionary War, which term ended in 1785 when he was 79 years old. When French Foreign Minister Vergennes said to Thomas Jefferson, “It is you who replace Dr. Franklin?,” Jefferson replied, “No one can replace him, Sir; I am only his successor.”
See, here’s the thing about OUR guy. You know the one. We KNOW he isn’t perfect and we don’t pretend that he is. We aren’t planning to marry him. Over half a century ago at a family dinner at my late in-laws’ home, my mother-in-law opined that she would not vote for a man who had divorced his wife. And my father-in-law said: “You recently returned from Israel. Did you check to make sure your pilot and co-pilot were not divorced?!” And, good-natured little lady that she was, Minna laughed at herself and said, “Oh, Lyosh, you are right.”
Right now the Ship of State is racing headlong for an iceberg and is most of the way there. Our fellow citizens can see that we desperately need a new pilot, or captain, and it’s so bad that it’s beginning to dawn even on a few brave African-Americans and Jewish Democrats – as well as the traditional conservatives — that some bold new thing needs to be done. And urgently.
Perhaps I can contribute a marching song for our epic battle ahead. A songwriter named George F. Root wrote around 35 Civil War songs (per research on the Office of the Historian Website) which were hugely popular. I was shocked to learn this. My own dear departed mother taught me the following song before I was school-age, probably around 1950. That’s a fur piece from the Civil War, so Mr. Root’s work definitely resonated through the ages.
One of his most famous songs was for the Union prisoners held in unspeakable conditions. I’m sure that the prisons for the Confederate POWs were bad too, but Andersonville was notorious. And he wrote a song of inspiration to keep the Union POWs’ spirits up.
When I became aware there even was such a horrible thing called war, I thought only of World War I. I had seen pictures of my Grandpa in his uniform. And I was raised knowing that a Marine uncle I had never met had been killed in World War II. But the Civil War was not on my radar except for that time when I was in my stroller and I told Mama I wanted “fweedom.” No, wait, that was somebody else. I probably said I wanted a cookie. Anyway, I knew this Root song and sang it walking home from school. It had a great cadence.
Tramp, tramp, tramp
The boys are marching.
Cheer up, comrades, they will come.
And beneath the starry flag,
We shall breathe the air again
Of the free land in our own
Beloved homes.
In homage to Mr. Root let me offer this song to inspire not only the political prisoners from January 6, who have been held without trial for years, but also for all our suffering citizens imprisoned by the Orwellian cultural and political horrors we see every day:
Trump, Trump Trump
We will be voting!
Cheer up, comrades, we will win!
At our peril we bestow
A fourth term on Barry O.
If we ever want our country free again.
The comedian Richard Lewis died this past Tuesday evening of a heart attack at the age of 76. The New York Times has posted a good obituary by Clay Risen here. Variety’s obituary is posted here. Richard told the story of his personal struggles in The Other Great Depression: How I’m overcoming, on a daily basis, at least a million addictions and dysfunctions and finding a spiritual (sometimes) life.
Lewis had the gift of making people laugh. I thought he was incredibly funny. You may have seen him over the past 20-plus years on any of the 41 episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm in which he appeared. A fan has posted a 90-minute YouTube video of A Complete Timeline of Richard Lewis and Larry David Banter & Arguments (seasons 1-11).
Curb creator Larry David provided a statement to Variety on Richard’s death: “Richard and I were born three days apart in the same hospital and for most of my life he’s been like a brother to me. He had that rare combination of being the funniest person and also the sweetest. But today he made me sob and for that I’ll never forgive him.”
I met Richard when he performed at the 2015 Temple of Aaron fundraiser in St. Paul. The professional photographer Matthew Witchell was on hand. Richard greeted us warmly and posed for photographs with those of us lucky enough to attend. At the right is the photo of my wife and me with Richard. You may deduce from the photo that we were happy to meet him.
No one enjoyed the show that night more than I did. Richard performed his routine on the pulpit. Whenever he made an irreverent joke or observation, he would turn around and face the ark. Raising his hands and looking upward, he sought forgiveness and amplified the humor of his jokes.
Richard found love relatively late in life. He fell in love with Joyce Lapinsky of St. Paul’s Highland Park Senior High School, class of ’69. I thought Joyce was the most beautiful girl in a class that was full of beautiful women (and I only knew the ones who were friends of my guy friends).
After seven years of dating, Richard took Joyce to meet his therapist. He recounted his lack of confidence in his ability to select a mate. He also recalled complaining about having “some minor communication” problems with Joyce and that that was the reason why they couldn’t move forward in the relationship.
The therapist rendered judgment. “In a voice that was almost satanic — it was so dark and loud that it seemed to echo through the neighborhood — my therapist screamed at me, ‘This is as good as it gets!,'” Lewis said. “It shook me to my core.” I take that from ET’s account of Richard and Joyce’s relationship yesterday in connection with Richard’s death.
For his performance at Temple of Aaron Richard worked in a variety of funny observations about his father-in-law, Chuck Lapinsky, of blessed memory. The material sounded like it could have been part of his regular stand-up act, but it must have been good for that one night only.
JTA has posted an obituary here. JNS recounts his devotion to Jewish causes and quotes Richard talking about his father, William Lewis. He called his father a “god of kosher catering” in New York and New Jersey. “My father was so well known as a caterer and so booked up that he was actually booked on the weekend of my bar mitzvah so I had to have my party on the Tuesday,” he told JTA.
Last night I met two friends for dinner at the French Meadow restaurant in St. Paul to discuss Book III of Plato’s Republic. When we sat down I mentioned Richard’s death and pulled up the photo of Sally and me at Temple of Aaron to show them on my phone. When the owner later came over to our table to say hello, the first thing she said was that she had sad news — Richard Lewis had died. She looked and sounded deeply grieved as she talked about her friendship with Richard through Joyce. As far as I can tell, everyone who knew him liked him. RIP.
Vaunce News 