Flying out West for a look-see

The Column: 09.01.24

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I flew to Minnesota to have my eyes looked at and coming into TSA territory, approaching the magnetometer, I waited for the agent to point at my shoes and yell, “Are you over seventy-five?” and give me the pleasure of saying, “Thank you very much. I’m eighty-two.” Simple vanity on my part. But she didn’t and it struck me as an insult, the assumption that elderly people are incapable of acts of terrorism using explosive footwear. I’m no engineer but I think that by googling “incendiary soles” I could figure out a way to make my sneakers deadly.

But now it seems TSA has changed its procedures and those of us with medical implants such as my pacemaker/defibrillator must be patted down by an agent, and so I was and it made me feel important again, a potential threat to national security. I’m not a convicted felon like Whatsisname but I like to imagine I have felonious potential and being patted down by a man with a badge came as a distinct honor. A person incapable of causing trouble is ready to be packed off to Shady Acres to sit at a table and do jigsaw puzzles.

The agent put on blue plastic gloves so as not to pick up any lethal germs from my clothing and he patted me down with the backs of his hands, first front, then back, from top to bottom, and he instructed me to part my legs so that he could pat me down there, which reminded me of my old pal Arnie Goldman who married Pat, an Australian, and whose Army sergeant said, “Nothing makes the privates so happy as a pat from down under.” Arnie was a college pal and he died years ago and I remember him with pleasure. But I also think about what sort of crime I might commit.

I’m nobody who’d be intending to blow up a plane or demand that it fly me to Iran. No, I’d only hijack a plane so I could grab a microphone and lead the passengers in song. In my old age I’ve become passionate about the emotional benefits of group song. I feel that my generation is the last who know the words to great songs and when we’ve departed the planet, nobody will sing “Auld Lang Syne” or “America the Beautiful” or even “Happy Birthday to You,” they’ll just switch on Google Choir and hold up their phones and fifty phones will sing “God Bless America” in unison.

I love the old Republican hymn from back when the party was dedicated to liberating Black slaves from a lifetime of humiliation and drudgery in the cotton fields, and now and then I find an audience that knows the words, including “the watchfires of a hundred circling camps” and “evening dews and damps” and “the dim and flaring lamps,” and when a thousand mature Americans raise their voices together about the truth marching on, it gives you hope that indeed truth is on the march and facts matter and certain people did say what they said even if they now deny it. Journalism that aims for honesty is a foundation rock in a democracy and those who denigrate it need to have a flaring lamp stuck up their rear end.

Back in the Sixties we sang “We Shall Overcome” and of course we didn’t overcome, as we realize now; a New York real-estate developer came along who represents every single thing we ever set out to overcome and he is riding high on his water buffalo, but there is still hope.

I write this sitting in the waiting room of an ophthalmology clinic in Minnesota, listening to the screams of a terrified child as a nurse puts drops in his eyes. It tears at your heart. I pray that the boy will use his eyesight to accomplish great things, art, science, literature. I pray for the schizophrenic granddaughter of my dear friend who died last week, that God comfort her and grant her a good life in this beautiful world. I pray for Kamala and her joyful campaign crisscrossing the blessed country. And I pray for her opponent, that the bone spurs that exempted him from the draft spur him in a miraculous moment to tell the truth and confess his sins, his hundreds of thousands of lies, and spare the nation four years of unnecessary suffering. Thank you, Lord. And put this confession on YouTube so we can watch it over and over and over.

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