Read the news, then count your blessings

Democracy is almost all the entertainment a person can stand, no need to go to the opera or comedy clubs, and now the thought that a senator from West Virginia, which is to clean energy what California is to cauliflower or Virginia to virginity, will be writing the legislation aimed at curtailing greenhouse gases is a story that should be taken up in high school civics classes, to let young people, who will live in the country this old gent is legislating, know what a precarious business government is. The man who drives the car is sitting backward looking out the rear window. Is this what the Founders had in mind when they invented the U.S. Senate? Evidently.

Anybody who thinks too hard about this will wind up in the loony bin, so I don’t. I enumerate my blessings instead and remind myself that I am a lucky man. Luck is not the same thing as privilege. Privilege is having a chauffeur and luck is when the train comes just as you go through the turnstile and walk across the subway platform just as the train stops and the doors open, which makes your entire day up to that point feel fortuitous, perfectly timed, and you feel blessedness. Having a chauffeur makes you feel sheepish.

I felt lucky when I read a tell-all backstage memoir by a dancer in New York City Ballet, lucky that I never took that road. I never tried to be a swan or a prince, gallivanting across a stage on my tippy-toes, leaping with legs extended. For a teenager in Anoka, Minnesota, putting on tights and ballet slippers would’ve made me unique, and I wanted to be normal. So I went into the writing business instead. No editor yet has told me my thighs were too big. Starvation was never part of my regimen, nor was psychological abuse. My old editor Roger Angell wrote gentle rejection letters along the line of “Probably we are all wrong about this but your story about Mazumbo the elephant strikes us as lacking your usual felicity and depth.”

Writing has its own hazards. Hemingway fell into deep depression and early one morning, he blew his head off, an old man of 62. Virginia Woolf walked into the river with rocks in her pockets at 59. The poet John Berryman jumped off the bridge in Minneapolis at age 57. Anne Sexton was 45, Sylvia Plath, 30. I had two friends who suffered from depression, a grim darkness for which they had no words, and they killed themselves. To be spared this leaden affliction is a matter of luck.

I am grateful not to be afflicted with an enormous talent, be an opera composer, for example, driven to endure poverty and self-doubt, sitting in a garret revising the score 57 times, begging for foundation grants, wrangling with opera management, kissing the feet of wealthy patrons, warring with the librettist and director, standing in the alley during the premiere and watching audience members leave during the intermission, and then the vicious reviews in the morning. Thank you, dear Lord, for mediocrity. Middleness suits me very well.

This is the privilege of growing old, looking back and recognizing one’s good fortune. Close calls, car crashes narrowly averted that would’ve obliged my friends to speak at the memorial service about my promising career tragically cut short and instead of that we meet for lunch and talk about hearing loss and ocular degeneration.

And I’m lucky to be old and not have to think about supply-side economics, the unique theory that prosperity is created by giving big tax breaks to the rich, which then trickle down to the rest of us, a theory that enabled Reagan and the Bushes and Mr. Trump to vastly increase the national debt, which would have horrified Nixon, Eisenhower, and all the Republicans previous.

If you think long and hard about Republican economics, you will need to go to the cocktail lounge and sit in a dark corner and keep ordering double martinis until you feel no pain, which I choose not to do, having discovered at last the secret of happiness, which is Delete and Unsubscribe. Less is more. I google “Camping in Canaan’s Land” on YouTube and get a video of large fundamentalist men jumping up and down in their religious ecstasy and three minutes of it clears the darkness away. I imagine Senator Manchin and George W. and Alan Greenspan hopping up and down and it makes me feel better.

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The Back Room this weekend will include a re-writing of “Frankie and Johnny” an audio download of a monologue from September 1980.

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This week's classic feature show is from The Fitzgerald Theater in September 2015. Sierra Hull plays "Queen of Hearts" and "After You've Gone," and Heather Masse sings "High Heeled Woman" and "September Song." Plus: Heather joins Garrison on "Columbia, Gem of the Ocean" and "When We're Gone, Long Gone"; Guy Noir heads to Earl's Barber Shop for a trim; and a message from our sponsor, the Manitoba Chamber of Commerce. Join us via our Facebook page at 5PM on Saturday or check it out now.