Excuse me while I have a few words with Joe

Excuse me while I have a few words with Joe

Now that Joe and Jill are moved in and their stuff unpacked and shoes lined up in the closet, the country is getting used to the idea of a slender president who owns dogs and has a working wife who is openly affectionate, and what remains to discover is what recreational activity will the man take up? People need to see their president having fun: a sense of humor is at the heart of democracy, so let’s regain it.
So far he’s been hunkered down at his desk, doing his job, which is good to see. Leader of the Free World is a full-time job and other than Sundays at church, he’s stuck close to home. But the man needs to enjoy himself, too.

Remember when Kamala Harris introduced him to come out and speak and the man jogged out to the lectern? Big stage, long jog — he was trying to counter Republican talk of him being doddery and frail, and now I pray to God he doesn’t take up running. Please. Remember when Jimmy Carter ran in a marathon and collapsed and the Secret Service had to scoop him up? He looked like death on toast. It was the end of the Carter presidency right then and there. A president should avoid all sports that might lead to physical collapse. It’s terrible for the stock market.
Golf, it goes without saying, is off the list. Too many optical memories. And the sight of the presidential posterior as he bends for a putt is off-putting. And what it costs the Secret Service to secure a golf course for two hours is absurd and obscene.
Ronald Reagan looked terrific on horseback, thanks to his years at Warner Brothers. Same with John Kennedy at the helm of a sailboat, rudder in hand. But those aren’t Joe’s scenes. Seeing his fondness for his big dogs won over a lot of people who feared he might harbor communistic tendencies. Dog-lovers are not pinkos; commies have always preferred cats. Those dogs are working dogs, not show dogs, rescue dogs, and they can be retrained as retrievers and go pheasant hunting. Of course it would irritate the vegan caucus of the Democratic Party but the pluses outweigh the minuses — Joe tramping through tall grass in South Dakota, his faithful dogs by his side, and suddenly there’s a frantic flutter of wings in the tall grass and he raises the shotgun to his shoulder and shoots and the dogs retrieve the deadsters and in the act of shooting, he becomes iconic, Man the Bringer of Provisions. He could do this by raising carrots and onions, of course, but hoeing lacks the impact of shooting. Just ask the pheasant.
The last Democratic president to win South Dakota was LBJ in 1964. Biden hunting pheasants could change that and maybe win Wyoming and Montana. It needs to be changed. The country is in crisis when one of the major parties turns its back on rural America and forces them to vote psychotic. We Democrats do well among fencers and archery enthusiasts but we’ve crossed gun owners off our list. Guns have been around since the 14th century. In rural America, guns are normal; it’s not like L.A. that way. Get over it.
Be a hunter, sir. Head for South Dakota with the dogs and spend the night in a cabin by a roaring fire and feast on pheasant, have a whiskey or two, enjoy immature jokes. Face it, we’ve let the Left go gentle, trapping us in the caregiver role, making us susceptible to defeat by tough-talking autocrats. Half of America sees us Democrats as the Party of Croquet, Crochet, and Croissants. You can change this, Joe, by simply picking up a shotgun. You’ve come a long way in one year. The Republicans tried to label you as Biden, a stranger with weird friends and lots of odd baggage, but you’ve become Joe. Trump was a verb but you’re a noun, a real person, an uncle, a brother, and when you take the dogs to the cabin in the Black Hills, your country cousins will be enormously pleased. Do not go golfing. If you have clubs, throw them away. Air Force One lands in Rapid City and you and the dogs come down the ramp and you’re grinning as you get in the pickup and head for the hills and I’m seeing a 75% approval rating, maybe 80, 85 if you bag your limit.

Posts to the Host

(Email comments on the column The Old Scout Stands In Line at the Clinic, February 17, 2021)
Please don’t use Alabama as the butt of a joke. I love my home state, voted blue and love GK. We aren’t all what you see on TV. Thank you.
TM
The point you made about sending people to Alabama offends me. I live in Alabama where the stars shine bright and I live with my dog and my husband and read Mary Oliver and Emily Dickinson by the lake. Last time I checked, we are the United States of America, we need to start acting like it. United as people, with liberty and justice for all.
Tricia Stearns
I’m glad to know there is a Democrat who loves Alabama and someone who loves Mary Oliver, Tricia. It’s the sort of information one doesn’t find in the New York Times, you only get it from hearing from people. I’m sure there are many of you and God bless you all. But you know (better than I) that you are outnumbered by Alabamans proud of their right-wing football-crazed redneck culture. I didn’t get this from TV, I got it from Alabamans who moved away. I have one beautiful memory of doing a live broadcast of PHC in Birmingham on a Saturday when it awoke to thirteen inches of snow. We went on the air from the Alabama Theatre, as the audience was trickling in, and half an hour into the show, Emmylou Harris and her band walked in the back door and stepped out on stage and sang (without a sound check) “From Boulder to Birmingham,” a great show business moment. When I wrote in the column that I wished the lunatic right would all move to Alabama and Mississippi, I was opining that our political polarization is permanent, and the solution is segregation. Not a nice thing to say, I agree. I could just as well have suggested North and South Dakota. But the people who stormed the Capitol and the people who agree with them (which includes some friends and relatives of mine) have nothing to say to me nor me to them — we’re on different planets. Men who love body armor and assault rifles should live far out in the sticks, not in populated areas. This is a new development in our time. At 78, I don’t have illusions about sitting down and reasoning together. My state, Minnesota, once elected a pro wrestler governor, and we became the butt of jokes for a while. I’m in favor of modest government by capable people who do their jobs well, especially at a time when people are dying of a contagious disease. GK
My friend, can you say a bit more about “respecting science”?
How do you do that when it comes to moral choices, like getting a vaccine or understanding climate change? There are plenty in the science community who offer sound critiques to the mythos of this virus and its vaccine solution. But now we are considered kooks because we don’t “follow science.” Soon we will have a red V on our chests.
Christopher Guilfoil, Eugene, Oregon
I’d never try to persuade you to get vaccinated but if you don’t take the virus seriously, then you won’t be coming over to my house and we won’t be breaking bread. You have a perfect right to be irrational, but you’ll find yourself in a minority of curmudgeons and you may not be comfortable with everyone in that tribe. You may find yourself among people who refuse to bathe or brush their teeth or people who believe that clothing is unhealthy. Just saying that irrationality takes many forms. GK
I’m a small town Minnesota girl in my late 60s, now widowed, enjoying the benefits of my dear departed’s Sarasota residence in a gated, golf course community filled with grumpy old trumpers. I find myself pining in the middle of winter for my sweet little ranch house back home in the cold and snow. Just as many trumpers back there, but an old high school friend, a good DFLer, likes me a lot. He doesn’t fit the golf course community profile. He’s Norwegian, tall, lanky legs, and a belly that is really out of sync with the rest of his body. He looks and talks like he’s one of my bachelor farmer great uncles. A successful farmer that loves meetings and is taking good care of his county’s business, he adores me. Do I dump the Florida real estate, go back to the glacial temps of Minnesota farm country, and encourage him to travel once his county commissioner job is done?
Lonesome
Dear Lonesome, Yes. GK P.S. You said it, not I.
Wow!!! This is a most beautiful essay! So many insightful ideas to unpack!
“This is the problem with getting old: you’re forced to face up to mortality …”
“More and more people around me are dying and it’s never the ones I wish would expire … I dread the phone ringing, for fear that one of the righteous has fallen instead.”
“— so I hope for eleven more years, fully marbled, which makes me cheerful and cheerfulness is the key to the kingdom.”
“My mission is to live gracefully and be amused at mortality …”
“Be useful. Every day you make your partner laugh is a good day.”
Now I have a new word to add to my vocabulary courtesy of GK. “Well marbled,” which describes me on several levels :-)
But I would take issue with GK on one point. I do enjoy road trips.
Isolated as a monk, but serene,
Dennis Krawczak
Dennis, A writer can’t help but love to be quoted. I’m reading a book by Patricia Hampl, The Florist’s Daughter, a memoir, which is one of those books I savor sentence by sentence and envy and feel powerful impulses toward plagiarism, but you’ve convinced me that I am good enough as is and don’t need to steal from others. Thanks. GK
I read “Old Scout Stands in Line …” as I stood in line at age 69 for shot number 2. I’ve never seen so many happy people anticipating a needle in the arm. There was a stereo playing a ’70s and ’80s mix tape. Hope springs eternal. A palpable sense in the air that we all just dodged a bullet. There were folks with canes, and whoops of cheer. The first party I’ve attended in a year. And I got the sticker to prove it. “Big wheels keep on turning, Proud Mary keeps on burning, Rolling rolling rolling on a river …
Miguel Perez-Gibson
I enjoyed my vaccination experience, too, Miguel. Being directed by people, told where to go, where to stand, gave me a feeling of comfort reminiscent of third grade. Most of the time, I’m an adult who is asked to exercise his own common sense, but in the mass vaccination assembly line, with hundreds of people and a tight schedule, keeping social distance, every step was guided by someone. Right-wingers refer to this as “medical tyranny” and I thought of Mrs. Moehlenbrock’s third-grade classroom and felt comforted. GK
I need clarification regarding your recent line, “Every day you make your partner laugh is a good day.” Does it matter if she’s laughing with you or at you?
Bob Krum
Back when I was an important person, it may have mattered some. My wife has a good ear and a keen eye and though she is the soul of kindness, she misses nothing, but back in my semi-celebrity days I think she gave me the benefit of the doubt. Those days are past. She does an excellent imitation of my snoring, which makes her laugh. She is highly amused by flatulence. And once in a while, she hands me a Kleenex and says, “Right nostril” and we both laugh. “What would I ever do without you?” I say. This is the question that has no answer. But when I read her a passage of writing, she laughs very generously and that is wonderful. I read her a line about a company called Universal Fire that makes artisanal firewood and also sun-dried organic manure and she thought that was hilarious. GK
It’s been a pleasure reading your writing for the last twenty years or so. I’m a 43-year-old resident of Toowoomba, Australia, a teacher of philosophy, and if you were to pick up my paperback edition of Lake Wobegon Days and let it fall open by itself, it would open to the description of the first murder in New Albion — M. Tourtelotte, the incompetent and hapless voyageur, struck on the head with a paddle by his frustrated companion. Never has a passage of text elicited such profuse and reliable laughter as that. I use this passage in my Philosophy of Mind unit as an example of how artificial intelligence (AI) could never achieve the nuance, satire and humour of a human writer.
So on behalf of me, and my Philosophy students, thank you!
Kind regards,
Greg Bland
I am a 78-year-old resident of the Upper West Side of Manhattan and what I know about philosophy you could put on a teaspoon and still have room for two cashews and a walnut, so you have made my day, Mr. Bland. I visited Australia in the spring of 1985, soon after writing Lake Wobegon Days, and visited my friend Arnie Goldman who taught English at the University of New South Wales. He was American, a baseball fan, and married an Australian named Pat when he was a private in the Army. As his C.O. said, “Nothing thrills the privates like a pat from down under.” And he really did love Australia. So in his memory, I will send you (signed) a copy of my memoir and a new novel, if you’ll pass along your address. (Unless you are a fictional creation by my assistant Helen trying to cheer me up, in which case I forgive her.) GK
I listened to your show for decades after I moved to Madison, Wisconsin, in 1976, and went to a show here at Breeze Stevens Field, where you walked around the field singing before the show. My late father never listened to the show, but read your books and put up your saying about “some luck lies not in getting what you want, but getting what you have, which once you have it you might be lucky enough to realize is what you would have wanted had you known.” I carry it in my wallet now, since his passing. Thanks for that, and I’m glad to see you are enjoying your life.
Best regards,
Ken Axe
That’s a good quote, Ken, and an example of how you can take a simple truism and create a tangled sentence around it and thereby make it seem profound. It has sort of come true for me, as it has for many people my age, but when I wrote it, part of a Lake Wobegon monologue on the radio show, my life was rather tangled up and not particularly happy. I was restless and working too hard and not thinking clearly and I think back to those days with many regrets, but the PHC staff was loyal and enormously capable and I got to meet great people like Jean Redpath and Chet Atkins and Tom Keith and now in the pandemic I find that I love writing more than ever. And the woman across the breakfast table has stuck with me through it all. Good to hear from you. GK

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