Wayward Landlubber

For a while now I've been wanting to write a little something about a lot of nothing. A tribute to my old cat, Gracie maybe, or the beauty of nature, the susseration of the river, as it makes its slow journey to the ocean, or the delight of a Blue Heron wading in the shallows. But now is not the time. We are citizens of a land that is no longer familiar to us. We have watched it getting closer, like a jagged rock threatening to slice into our hull, but we are helpless, our steering is damaged, we are on a collision course, and the helmsman is incompetent. There could have been a solution, but that is gone. We are no longer protecting, however awkwardly, the Constitution of the United States. It is gone, POOF. We can credibly ask the question, will there be a 2028 presidential election? We can even ask, what will it look like? Russia has elections, very well run elections. India has elections, also tightly controlled, which is a phrase you never want uttered in association to democr...

I'm no expert on humor and comedy, but I hope someday to come pretty close. I don't know how it happened but it seemed to just open like a rosebud as i grew older. I can remember sneaking down the staircase to almost see the Johnny Carson in the far corner of the living room when i was a child. Some of the comics I listened to were Lenny Bruce, Mort Saul, Don Rickles, the Smothers Brothers, Laugh-in, all the way to John Stewart, Stephan Colbert, and a host of others. Somehow, along the way, this saying stuck in my head and never left: HUMOR SHOULD OPPRESS THE COMFORTABLE AND COMFORT THE OPPRESSED. It may have come from Mel Brooks. It took me a while to recognize the truth in that. It could be no other way. If you reverse it, humor should comfort the comfortable and oppress the oppressed, you are a sycophant of power in the first case, and a sadist in the other. Only a Republican could fail to see that, and you know which group they choose to comfort. One of Mel Brooks many film...