Would Biden eliminate windows, abolish suburbs?

Well, so much for that.

We absolutely can't elect Joe Biden president.

He wants to abolish windows. And the suburbs, for goodness sake.

Next thing you know, Biden will go after white bread and Kool-Aid.

Before you decide life is hopeless and decide to take your own life, calm down a little.Biden hasn't said he will do any of these things. America's favorite fabulist, Donald Trump, claims these will be the result of some of Biden's policies.

Never enough friends to start throwing them away

"Nothing is more important than friendship. Not fame. Not money. Not death."
-- BANG THE DRUM SLOWLY

There is a scene in the movie "Tombstone" when an acutely ill Doc Holliday leaves his sickbed to help Wyatt Earp in a gunfight Earp can't win alone.

Turkey Creek Jack Johnson asks, "Doc, you oughta be in bed, what the hell you doin' this for anyway?"

Holliday responds, "Wyatt Earp is my friend."

'Free college' could be a very good thing for America

"Free college? What a crazy idea!"

If you live in the U.S., you have almost certainly heard people saying that. You may even have said it yourself.

"Hey, nobody gave me free college."

"Hey, I had to pay for my own college. Why should they get it for free?"

Well ...

Shortly after the turn of the 20th century -- 110-115 years ago -- the fairly standard level of education for many people was finishing the eighth grade. They learned to read, write (penmanship, not creative writing) and do simple mathematics.

Then they went on to apprenticeships to learn trades, or clerkships to become attorneys, bankers or other such white-collar jobs.

Eighth grade was enough for most people. My grandfather Paul Kindinger (b. 1895) had an eighth grade education and he was a police officer for 20 years and was police chief of his small town for 12 years from just before Pearl Harbor into the early '50s.

Different times require new solutions for new people

Another time, another place

Different times?

Different places?

Maybe, but the truly sad part of it all is that we are different people than we were 70-80 years ago.

We have heard the so-called "Greatest Generation" praised so much it's almost painful, and it is not my intention to do that here.

They were different, though. Mostly because they had to be. When you grow up during the Great Depression and the Second World War, you learn quickly there are things you have to do and things you have to do without.

When there's no money for food, you go hungry. Or you get in line for bread or soup. And given the way you were brought up, you feel somewhat guilty over not being able to support yourself.

If we don't make things better, they'll just get worse

The uncertain future

"On the day Trump leaves office, we’ll still have a younger generation with worse life prospects than their parents had faced."
-- DAVID BROOKS, New York Times"

David Brooks might be the closest thing we have to a philosopher among modern newspaper columnists.

The talk about one generation not having it as good as the previous one has been around for a while.

In fact, my late father who was born in 1926, often said his generation had it much easier than ours in several respects. He essentially worked for one employer -- the U.S. government -- for his whole life.

Uncle Wiggily a fond memory from a long time ago

1949 edition.

Sometimes memories come from the strangest places.

It has been many years -- maybe even half a century -- since I have given any thought to Uncle Wiggily.

There aren't a whole lot of cultural things still around that I would honestly say were before my time.

In 1910, a writer named Howard R. Garis published the first Uncle Wiggily story in the Newark News. Between then and his retirement in 1947, he published more than 15,000 stories about the long-eared rabbit in that newspaper.

Don't blame Trump for lack of historical perspective

You will never hear me say anything nice about Donald Trump.

It has nothing to do with politics. Trump has been a joke to me since I first heard of him more than 30 years ago. He has fewer human qualities than any human being I have ever known.

When he originally scheduled his Tulsa campaign rally for this Friday, folks were outraged that he scheduled it for Juneteenth, the day celebrating the end of chattel slavery in 1865.

They compared it to Ronald Reagan kicking off his 1980 presidential campaign just outside Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964.

Not much can save this year except baseball

I have long believed that the happiest memories of all are when wonderful things happen to people you love.

Most of the truly special days of my life have involved the people I love, just as some of the truly awful ones have been when bad things happen to the same people.

June 2010, Houston, Texas

But what about the great days that are just about experiencing things that make you happy? Those days matter too, even if we don't get to share them with anyone else at the time.

During seven decades on Earth, the people I love have mattered the most to me, and acquiring six grandchildren over the last 12 years has given me so much more to enjoy.

After people comes baseball. From my first double-header in 1957 at Crosley Field in Cincinnati to stadiums -- major and minor -- all over the country over the next 60 years, there are no bad times at baseball stadiums.

July 2010, Arlington,  Texas

Well, very few.

I wasn't that lucky when I went to the Rangers' ballpark in the summer of 2010. I got a great field box seat for $80. The rain was supposed to stop, but it didn't and I had to leave to drive back to San Antonio.

Well, at least I saw the ballpark.

Once we moved to Georgia later in 2010, I started doing something I really never thought I would do again -- I watched ballgames on television.

The last four years, I've bought the MLB.TV package so that I can watch Washington Nationals games. I have played Rotisserie Baseball every year since 1991 and a couple of years in the '80s before that.

Baby Shark and Clutch & Drive

The thing was, when baseball struck and cancelled the World Series in 1994, I was so angry with the ongoing games between player and owners that I promised myself if anything like that ever happened again, I would say goodbye to baseball for good.

Of course, I never expected that the previous season would conclude with one of the happiest moments of my life -- the Washington Nationals winning the World Series.

Almost as special as Virginia winning the NCAA men's basketball championship earlier the same year.

So a great year is followed by a ridiculously awful one -- my wife had major surgery for a life-threatening condition, my brother in law died after a long battle with cancer and a beloved fraternity brother died in his mid '50s.

In addition, Donald Trump is still president and there's been no baseball because the owners keep crapping around with the players.

2020, please get lost.

Next year had better be a lot better.

It's not enough not to teach children to hate

We Americans have always been good at teaching our children to hate.

We were settled by people who believed it was the duty of folks we later called WASPs to educate the other races and bring people with no religion (or maybe just the wrong religion) home to Jesus.

Some call slavery America's "original sin," but what we did to black Africans actually started after our genocide against native Americans. We take pride in religious freedom and say our country stems from a Judeo-Christian tradition, but countless German and European Jews died when Adolf Hitler was willing to let them leave because too many "good" American Christians thought we had too many Jews in this country already.

Half a century since a truly memorable time of life

The older I get, the more time's distances seem amazing to me.

I think it was Tennessee Williams in the wonderful "Glass Menagerie" who called time the longest distance between two points, and as I slip uncontrollably into old age I see how right he was.

Fifty years ago this spring was one of the happiest times of my life up to that time. Although I didn't really know it at the time, May 1970 marked the final weeks of my first real relationship.

It was about three weeks till the lovely Shelley Marcus would return home to Connecticut for the summer, and except for a strange week in September, that was it for us.

There are two things I remember vividly about that time.

First was Kent State. The killing of four antiwar protesters by the Ohio National Guard on the sunny Monday in Kent, Ohio, sent shock waves through our generation. And some of the responses around the country showed us that what was called the "Generation Gap" was maybe as wide as that big hole in the ground in Arizona.

"They got what they deserved."

"They should have killed 400 of them."

"Bums."

Only 5/12 gone, but one horrible year already

It's been a helluva year, hasn't it.

Five months gone out of 12, and we've gone from a toxic presidential campaign to a virus that has killed more than a hundred thousand Americans to a racial incident in Minnesota that is turning everything upside down.

George Floyd's death in Minneapolis at the hands -- or more accurately, the knee -- of a racist police officer has resulted in demonstrations and/or riots all over this country and in Europe as well.

It seems as if President Trump has become such a disaster that the whole world is watching America even more than usual.

No baseball the toughest part of my COVID-19 spring

Ryan Zimmerman

“Baseball is like church. Many attend but few understand.”
-- WES WESTRUM

In many ways, I haven't been hurt at all by the COVID-19 pandemic.

It hasn't changed anything for us financially. I've been retired for more than 12 years, and our monthly income hasn't been affected at all except for the total value of our retirement yo-yoing with the market.

I used to go to the movies regularly, but I've only seen three in theaters since we moved to Georgia in 2010. I don't go to ballgames in person, either.

Indeed, the one way my life has really changed -- other than wearing a mask every time I go somewhere -- has been a spring without baseball to follow. For the last four or five years, I've paid for the MLB-TV season subscriptions so that I can watch ballgames whenever I want.

And no, I do not want to watch Korean baseball.

The last game I saw was Washington's wonderful come-from-behind victory in Game Seven of the World Series. If you want irony, how about the two teams I have followed since I was a teenager -- Washington baseball and Virginia basketball -- winning their first championships in my lifetime the same year.

And then both having their next seasons disrupted by the pandemic.

Sometimes life really sucks.

***

Short takes and random thoughts for a May weekend:

-- Donald Trump has been a disaster as president from Day One, but despite analysis that 90 percent of deaths could have been avoided had he not delayed in acting, he continues to insist he has done a wonderful job. Unbelievable.

-- Just finished watching George Takei's wonderful Broadway show "Allegiance," about the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. The entire cast was outstanding, but the amazing Lea Salonga stood out as always.

-- Every few years I go back and watch episodes of "The West Wing." Along with "Moonlighting," it's one of my two favorite TV series ever. There have been plenty of other good ones, but the one recent series that comes awfully close to making that list is "Madam Secretary."

-- An unnamed White House source put an interesting twist on the old saying about someone playing chess while their opponents play checkers. The source, no fan of Trump's, said that while some people are playing chess, Trump is eating the pieces.

Some experiences don't stand the failings of memory

What's almost as bad as not experiencing something?

How about experiencing it and not remembering?

From the time I was a little kid, I knew that Halley's Comet would pass within view of Earth exactly once in my lifetime. The comet gets close enough to see with the naked eye once every 75 or 76 years.

Naivete of Americans becoming a frightening thing.

Being optimistic is nice.

Being naive is less nice.

Being delusional is not nice at all.

A Washington Post-Ipsos poll released today said that 77 percent of Americans surveyed who have been furloughed or laid off during the current pandemic believe they will be rehired by their former employers once the stay-at-home order ends.

Donald Trump: Egg or Plant?

In other results, 62 percent of the same group said they believe in the Easter Bunny and 54 percent believe Donald Trump's tan is real.

Something like 33 million Americans have filed for unemployment insurance the last six weeks, and it's expected that when unemployment figures are released Friday, they will be the highest since the Great Depression.

So how will the end of the stay-at-home order change that?

Something like two-thirds of American workers have been employed in what is known as the "service industry," meaning that these are people who one way or another wait on customers.

Trump looking worse and worse as pandemic spreads

"LIBERATE MICHIGAN!"

-- Donald Trump

Gretchen Whitmer is trying to save the people of Michigan whether they want her to or not.

And Donald Trump is going to cause trouble no matter what the Michigan governor does.

With the number of Americans dead from the Coronavirus heading toward six figures and beyond, Trump is trying desperately to keep people from blaming him.

As of today, more than 72,000 of Trump's constituents have died, and more than 30 million have filed for unemployment.

Many companies have been reporting that their business is off as much as 90 percent. When unemployment numbers for April are announced Friday, they may be as high as 20 or 30 percent of the workforce.

Eulogy for a great guy who will be sorely missed

Marty Malin

Real geniuses don't need to tell people how smart they are.

Generally the folks who brag about their intellect -- as the "very stable genius" does -- are trying to make you believe they're something they're not.

I first met Marty Malin at Christmas 1994 when my sister Hilary brought him to Virginia to meet the family.

Before the decade was out, I had a brother-in-law and two nephews.

My sister is one of the smartest people I know, so it didn't surprise me when her two sons turned out to be gifted. Actually, incredibly gifted.

Unbridgeable differences push U.S. to the brink

Right about now, a lot of Republican senators who refused to convict Donald Trump and remove him from office ought to be very worried.

Why?

Because yes, he really did suggest at his press briefing Friday that an instant cure for COVID-19 might be ingesting some sort of home disinfectants.

Of course he swears he was being sarcastic, but no one who saw him saw any trace of sarcasm. As he floundered for an excuse, he even said it was a prank and that he said it just to see how people would react.

Fake news?

No, fake president.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

Pandemic might force meaningful change in U.S.

Bernie Sanders dropped out of the presidential race Wednesday.

If that unifies the Democratic Party and makes it easier to defeat Donald Trump in November, it's all for the best. To primary voters this year, Sanders was just a bridge too far. I always felt his proud use of the word "socialist" was a mistake. I'd have gone with Social Democrat.

I feel like Sanders saw this election as one for revolutionary change, while most Democrats -- myself included -- wanted more than anything just to get rid of Trump.

The great irony is that the Coronavirus pandemic may have transformed circumstances enough that it ought to be a true change election. Particularly in the area of health insurance.

Americans dying due to Trump's horrific priorities

NYC

"I want to wake up in the city that never sleeps ..."

The last time I visited New York City was a little less than two and a half years ago.

It was the first time I had been in Manhattan since the mid 1990s, when my middle sister got married.

In October 2017, Nicole and I stayed in a hotel near the Empire State Building. We only had two days and three nights, and it was raining hard one of those days.

Mostly, we visited Ground Zero and the museum that honored the events of Sept. 11, 2001. It was sort of overwhelming, but as I look at pictures of present-day New York, I find myself thinking that not even Osama bin Laden could shut New York down the way the Coronavirus has.

I imagine we'll go back at some point. I know my wife wants to. NYC is one of my three favorite American cities I have visited numerous times but never lived there. The other two are on the West Coast, San Francisco and Seattle.

When we visited NYC in the fall of 2017, the streets were as crowded -- even on the rainy night -- as anywhere I've ever been. I cannot even comprehend streets as empty as in the picture above.

Where the other day's quotes came from

Casablanca

There are so many great movie quotes.

Most fans would recognize the true classics right away.

"Gonna make him an offer he can't refuse."

"Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."

"Here's looking at you, kid."

Of course, there's always my personal favorite.

Animal House

"You f**ked up. You trusted us."

The 15 quotes I posted yesterday don't rise to that level of specialness, but they're all interesting and they all demonstrate what made their movies interesting.

Sometimes the great quotes aren't the famous ones

No. 14

It's always fun to remember the great quotes from our favorite movies. Some of those quotes become so well known to us that we throw them around a lot.

I picked these in response to a challenge on Facebook a few years back, and I took sort of a different twist. In most cases here, the quote I used is not the one everyone thinks of when they think of that particular movie.

It a secondary one that still resonates.

One great irony. One of the quotes -- No. 6, to be exact -- is one I can't remember the movie. Help me out of you can.

Anyway, here they are. I'll post the movies tomorrow.

1. I never did one thing right in my life, you know that? Not one. That takes skill.

2. Zero ... point ... zero.

'No responsibility' a far cry from 'buck stops here'

"The buck stops here ..."

"I take no responsibility at all ..."

Two presidents of the United States. The same country, but very different at different times.

Two years before either of them became president, very few people could have imagined either of them in the Oval Office.

Harry Truman was your average senator, product of the Pendergast political machine in Kansas City.  He became vice president as a compromise choice when FDR needed to dump Henry Wallace from the ticket.

Nobody expected much of him, but he combined intelligence, honesty and empathy and his eight years as president were successful enough that historians regard him as an outstanding president.

Even self-quarantining can have a good side to it

A hotbed of Coronavirus exposure

Seattle is a long way away from most parts of this country.

I have lived in 10 different states from coast to coast, and only once have I lived less than 1,100 miles from there.

I have been there three times, first in 1989 to cover a basketball game at UW, then for three weeks in 2009 for a summer vacation with Pauline and her family at Snoqualmie Pass and 10 days in December 2011 to meet our new grandson.


I also have a friend who lives there, although the only time we knew each other was in 1977, half a world away in Vienna, Austria. She had a summer internship at the American Embassy and I was over there for two years with my first wife.

Undignified result a lifesaver for my true love

Back in another lifetime, or at least it seems that way now, I was a regular reader of the National Lampoon.

The Lampoon knew no boundaries. They had 8-year-old Drew Barrymore calling "E.T." director Steven Spielberg "a lousy lay" and President Nixon playing gay games on his friend Bebe Rebozo's boat.

Margaret Rutherford

But the one that stuck with me was apparently a true story. Elderly British actress Dame Margaret Rutherford had undergone major surgery and had to wear a colostomy bag for the remainder of her life.

Once I learned what that was, I decided that a colostomy bag had to be one of the worst indignities of old age.

That was nearly 50 years ago, and until the last 11 days, I had never really heard anything more about colostomies.

Shocking death of a good friend a real heartbreaker

I didn't meet Brandt Heatherington until I was in my 60s.

We went to the same school at different times, but even more important, we were members of the same fraternity. Sigma Phi Epsilon was a big factor in both our lives and it brought us together in friendship.

In November 2010, I got together with people from my chapter for the first time in 25 years. It was the 30th anniversary of our chartering, and I saw folks from my own tenure that I hadn't seen since we all were young.

I don't recall meeting Brandt then.

We became friends through Facebook, keeping up with Sig Ep stuff and commenting on various things. I saw how much he loved our chapter, and how hard he and others were working to re-establish it as the best fraternity at George Mason University.

We actually met in October 2017 at the annual golf tournament held by our chapter. I played surprisingly well and won two prizes, only one of them relating to skill.

Knee surgery in the past without all that much drama

"What a week I'm having ..."

With apologies to Eugene Levy for stealing his wonderful line from "Splash," after a rough start to the week it hasn't been all that bad.


My oh-so-minor knee surgery was scheduled for Tuesday at 10:15 a.m.,  and I learned late Monday afternoon that my cardiologist had not provided the necessary cardiac clearance.

So I started scrambling and got an appointment to see the cardiologist at 8:15 a.m.

I was up before the sun, and the cardiologist -- one of my doctor's partners -- gave me the clearance with one caveat. She saids my blood pressure was high enough that they might not risk doing the surgery.

Klobuchar coming out of the shadows for Democrats

“There’s an old story of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and when he died, his body was put on a train and went up across America, and there was a guy standing by those tracks along with so many Americans, and he had his hat on his chest and he was sobbing, and a reporter said, ‘Sir, did you know the president?’ And the guy says, ‘No, I didn’t know the president, but he knew me. He knew me.’ I will tell you this, there is a complete lack of empathy in this guy in the White House right now. 

"I will bring that to you. “If you have trouble stretching your paycheck to pay for that rent, I know you and I will fight for you. If you have trouble deciding if you’re going to pay for your childcare or your long-term care, I know you and I will fight for you. If you have trouble figuring out if you’re going to fill your refrigerator or fill your prescription drug, I know you and I will fight for you.”
-- AMY KLOBUCHAR, Feb. 8, 2020

Senator Amy Klobuchar

I think it was last September when I first put the bumper sticker on my car.

I spent a lot of time thinking about who I would support this year. In many ways, I think the 2020 election might be the most important of the last 50 years.

I had thought for a long time I might be supporting a senator from Minnesota for president in 2020. Of course, I once thought it would be Al Franken.

Overwhelming need to win infects us all

If there's one thing about history that is truly ironic, it's that heroes can turn into villains without changing anything about themselves.

In fact, it happens for many of them long after their deaths.

I'm not talking about Founding Fathers who owned slaves. The case I have in mind is far more recent.

Take Vince Lombardi, probably the most legendary of NFL coaches. He had amazing success in the 1960s and was the winning coach in the first two Super Bowls.

His most famous quote was the one in the box to the right, and while Lombardi never suggested cheating to win, he later realized that when you say there is nothing other than winning, stuff happens.

Roger Kahn's books show a true love of baseball

It was April 1983, and the early spring weather was raw.

Baseball season had started, and the Class A Gastonia (NC) Expos had a doubleheader scheduled with the Columbia Mets. I was covering the Expos for the paper now known as the Gaston Gazette, and had in fact been honored as South Atlantic League sportswriter of the year the previous season.

I was the proverbial big fish in a small pond when it came to baseball writing, but on this day I was going meet the biggest fish in the ocean. Roger Kahn, the man who wrote "The Boys of Summer," was coming to town with the Mets.

Roger Kahn

Kahn was a minority owner of the Columbia Mets, and he was planning to spend the summer with the team writing a book about minor league baseball.

It didn't work out that way. The owner of the franchise was a minor-league George Steinbrenner, and he got angry every time people talked about Kahn.

After a month or so of that, Kahn gave up on Columbia and shifted his attention to the Utica Blue Sox of the short-season New York-Penn League for the book that turned out to be "Good Enough to Dream."

Macy's closings one more sign of vanishing social life

Back in the early 1970's, the wonderful humor group Firesign Theatre had a newscast on one of its albums that included the following exchange between two "happy talk" anchors:

"Well, Patty, last year, the world ended."

"As we know it, Hugh."

(both laugh)

You might have to be under the age of 60 to believe this, but the world -- at least the one we grew up with -- is coming to an end.

I know starting out this way makes me sound like a grumpy 70-year-old, which at the moment is what I am. Still, what sparked the idea was news that Macy's will close 125 of its stores between now and 2023, most of them in "lesser-performing malls" around the country.

Is the American Dream vanishing or can we save it?

"I need to get personal here. Given the Senate hearings last week, I am trying not to spiral down through hopelessness and bitter cynicism about the end of the dream that was America. It is exhausting to keep your heart beating with the hope and trust that most Americans understand or care about how things stand today and realize what is slipping away.

"If you did not see a lot of the Senate 'trial,' consider yourself fortunate, as one feels fortunate when not looking at a gory car wreck. If you did, can you help me just not give up on this country right here and now? You can criticize me all you want for this post, or give me the usual platitudes and attitudes, but there has to be someone who understands and perhaps still has a lifeline to hope that they can share?"

***

One of my closest friends in the world posted this on Facebook Sunday morning, and I have literally been sitting here for an hour looking at her post and searching for an answer.

I've thought about Mencken and his 100 years that I've quoted so often, or about Sinclair Lewis and his character Buzz Windrip. But what I keep returning to is Benjamin Franklin and his answer to the person who asked what kind of government we were going to have.

"A republic ... if you can keep it."

When it comes down to it, there are really only two different types of governments -- authoritarian and non-authoritarian. It has always been a lot easier to be a citizen of the first type. You don't really have to think. You just follow the rules.

You obey.

That's all that is expected of you in that sort of society.

The shocking thing is that in many ways, we have been living in that sort of society for the last 35-40 years.

Maybe a lot longer.

I'm not sure there was ever a Golden Age. You look at things a lot differently if you're a white male of a certain age. I do know that during World War II, folks who ran companies made 14 times as much per hour as the average employee in those companies.

I know that in the 1950s, the top income tax rate for the biggest wage earners was 91 percent and that even after a major tax cut in the early '60s, the rate was 70 percent.


I know that at peak, roughly a third of American workers belonged to labor unions, including most of those in good manufacturing jobs. Unions made it possible for someone with a high school diploma to buy a house, support a family, buy a new car every few years, take yearly vacations and send their kids to college.

Back when we made things for the world.

We made things the world needed. Cars, appliances, steel, and workers from Michigan to New Jersey worked damned hard and took great pride in what they did. As long as they worked hard and followed the rules, they didn't have to worry about arbitrary firings or layoffs.

They didn't have to worry -- at least they thought they didn't -- about health insurance or retirement. Their unions negotiated those things for them as part of their contracts.

The problem was, though, that while working class people might tend to see their gains as a sort of new normal, the megarich tend to see things like that only as temporary setbacks. They're always looking to claw back some of what they lost.

And if there is one thing they don't want, it's employees who feel secure in their jobs and in their lives. The big bosses want to see their minions sweating when they walk into the room. When they say jump, there are only two appropriate responses.

You can jump.

Or you can ask how high.

Of course the entire world isn't like that. In the free countries of Western Europe, folks pay more in taxes and get far more in return. They get health care, retirement and at least four weeks vacation a year. If you look at it, life in France and Germany for working people is a lot like it was here in the '50s and '60s.

I have a feeling America is basically finished for the baby boomers. I've got three close friends who are past traditional retirement age and are all still working. Not so much because they want to, but because they need to. Two of them have had life-threatening illnesses.

They may end up working till they drop. Nearly half of all boomers have little savings and will have little to live on other than Social Security.

My friend Christine, who lives in Florida, actually had a pretty good idea. She suggested that four or five friends who were alone in the world could get together and rent a house together. Splitting expenses five ways could enable folks to live a lot better.

Will America get past all this?

Maybe, but our children and our grandchildren will have to work damn hard -- and fight even harder -- to get this country back to a place where everyone is in it together.

I don't know about your kids, but I'm betting mine can be a big part of the solution.

In a Molly-free world, mediocrities like Trump thrive

Sometimes the good actually do die young.

It just depends on what you mean by young. Molly Ivins was 62 when she died of cancer in 2007, not that young for an athlete but as a columnist she might have had another 15-20 good years.

She was the one who coined the name "Shrub" to describe George W. Bush, the one who described a lesser Texas politician by saying he was so dumb that if he lost any more IQ points he would need to be watered twice a day.

That was when we first heard the outraged whine from the right wing.

"Molly Ivins can't say that, can she?"

She could ... and did. For more than three decades she was the funniest, most sardonic voice of Texas liberalism. More than just being liberal, though, she was the voice of the average person against the rich and powerful.

A 2019 film.

In the early '90s, when Rush Limbaugh was becoming popular, he was ranting about how racism was a thing of the past and liberals should stop complaining. Ivins was in a Texas diner and heard several men agreeing with Rush. "What will the ni**ers find to complain about now?" one of them said.

When his fans raved about how funny he was, Ivins pointed out that the definition of humor is exactly the opposite of what Limbaugh does.

Humor is about making fun of the powerful, not humiliating the powerless. Ivins said Limbaugh's ridicule of the homeless, of people with AIDS and poor people in general was about as funny as kicking a cripple.

I don't remember if Ivins ever wrote about Donald Trump. He did have some political involvement in the 2000 election, although he was never as big a deal during her lifetime as he became later.

I think Trump is damn lucky Ivins isn't around to write about him.

We will never see her likes again.

***

Here's an example of her greatness.

Guess I need to be more "woke" than I am

Short takes from a journey through a disorganized mind:

Goodnight, ladies?

CALL ME A RECIDIVIST: When it comes to Facebook, I really have a hard time staying out of jail. And this time, I probably deserved my three-day sentence.

I had been seeing the picture to the right ever since New Year's Eve, apparently taken at a party at Trump's Mar-A-Lago.

Several other people -- who apparently were more subtle than I am -- questioned whether the ladies pictured were actually ladies.

One poster even used an Austin Powers meme in which he said, "She's a man!"

My problem was that I used a word that has been around a long time, but in recent years has acquired a meaning I should have known better than to use it.

It's important to make an effort to be kind

"Only Phineas was never afraid, only Phineas never hated anyone. Other people experienced this fearful shock somewhere, this sighting of the enemy, and so began an obsessive labor of defense, began to parry the menace they saw facing them by developing a particular frame of mind. ...

"All of them, all except Phineas, constructed at infinite cost to themselves these Maginot Lines against this enemy they saw across the frontier, this enemy who never attacked that way -- if he ever attacked at all; if he was indeed the enemy."

-- JOHN KNOWLES, A Separate Peace, 1959

I read Knowles' wonderful novel before generations of high schoolers had to read it as an assignment. I think it must have been 1961 or maybe '62 when I discovered it, and there are few stories that have meant as much to me over the years.

If all of us -- boys, at least -- were either Finny or Gene, I don't think I knew any of the former. Nearly 60 years later, I'm still not sure I have.

He was a young man with complete confidence in himself, someone who never had to make himself feel better by making someone else feel bad. If he teased people at all, it was to encourage them to rise above themselves.

Oh, to have been a Phineas.

Oh, to have been a person who never tried to make himself feel better by making someone else feel worse.

For most of my teens and 20s, I was not a very nice person. I was the worst to my younger siblings, inventing a veritable dictionary of nicknames that were not designed to make them feel good. There is no way I can ever take any of that back.

I can try and have tried to be better.

I got a very pleasant surprise a year or so ago when I was talking on the phone with my youngest sister about an ongoing family dispute I have not really been a part of. I made some sympathetic comments and said I would try and be part of the solution after it was over.

"What a surprise that you turned out to be the kind one," she said.

I may never be Phineas, but I can be -- and am -- better than I was.

And that's something.

***

Our moral leader

If kindness -- and yes, class -- is in short supply these days, part of the problem is that people we expect to be role models are anything but.

We have always looked for our president to epitomize the best in America, to be someone who makes us proud.

Instead we have Donald Trump.

Enough said.