So What Are We to Do Now?

The great George Will has passed the fifty-mile mark as a newspaper columnist, and all the rest of us in the trade admire the fact that he still enjoys doing it. It’s palpable in his work. Anybody can throw spitballs but Mr. Will loves the American language and the construction of sentences and paragraphs. This, rather than his correctitude, is what makes him worth reading. It’s a pleasure.

I enjoy the New York Times and I love it all the more now that I see it has practically no power at all. When I took Professor Hage’s Journalism 101 course, back when Kennedy was president and I was a parking lot attendant and a fan of Pete Seeger, I imagined that the great and mighty picked up the Times with fear and foreboding, and I went into journalism for the thrill of being a nerd in horn-rimmed glasses who could bring down the powerful. I got a job writing obituaries at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, and after six months on the burial detail, I left quietly.

And now, despite journalism, the American people have elected to high office a conman and fabulist who dismisses the Times as fish wrap and he has proposed people for Cabinet positions whom you wouldn’t want on your co-op board, whose résumés set off shrill alarms, and it’s clear that the man is using his appointments to express his contempt for government, same as if a man who hates baseball bought the Yankees and hired a coaching staff of soccer moms. The Times wields less power than the rector of the president-elect’s church if he attended church, which he does not.

But the Times photo desk, bless their hearts, is enjoying the game of choosing unflattering photographs of the Cabinet nominees. The Defense Secretary is wearing a drugstore tie and too much hair product and looks as though he’s pleading innocent to a charge of public urination. The Attorney General looks like a Florida blonde who hostesses at a steakhouse and comedy club. The Secretary of State’s pants are bunched up in the crotch and his paunch is prominent and he’s telling his wife, “I’ve been waiting here for half an hour just like you told me to.” The Surgeon General is wearing a billowy red dress she bought at 70% off list price and there are food stains on her bosom. The Treasury Secretary seems to be saying, “That’s not my linguini. I ordered the one with clam sauce.”

These are not the pictures their mothers would put in a nice silver frame and place on the piano. Each of us has been photographed in moments when we did not look impressive or even mentally stable, and we dispose of these pictures insofar as they come into our possession. The Times photo desk enjoys displaying them for the amusement of readers. You sit down to your bran flakes and here’s a photograph of the president-elect that tells you (1) he thinks he’s incredibly handsome and his hair is a work of art and (2) he hasn’t learned how to do makeup.

It’s the only real power the press has, the ability to irritate. The great man talks about his very high IQ and never needing Viagra and the press quotes him and it doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t. His outrageousness dulls the mind of the body politic and we go into WHATEVER mode. Elon Musk, a man whose companies have $15 billion in contracts with the federal government, is put in charge of cutting government spending? Whatever.

You and I have approximately nothing to say about this and that’s the benefit of being a loser. The people who are celebrating now are on the hook and you and I may as well join a choir or read Great Books. The time you would’ve spent reading stories that make you draw on your reserves of profanity would be better spent practicing kindness and doing your part to keep American humor alive by telling jokes. People used to do this.

The Congressman went to church on Sunday and took a seat in a pew next to a hefty woman and when they stood for the opening hymn, he noticed that her dress was caught in her crack so he reached over and pulled it out. She glared at him so he figured she wanted it back in and when he did, she slapped him hard and said, “I wouldn’t vote for you if you were St. Peter himself.” He said, “Ma’am, if I were St. Peter, you wouldn’t be in my district.”

© Garrison Keillor 11/29/2024