10/07/2025
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Dentists, Fish on a Dome

682 Words: This & That

THIS

Went to the dentist yesterday. Thank my lucky genes, my teeth are fabulous. Honestly, I’ve never had a cavity in my life.

It helped, I guess, that I grew up in a locale where the tap water was fluoridated. I drank water like a fish as a kid. While all the other kids were hydrating with Cokes and other tooth enamel-annihilating bevs, I was bending over those great Chicago Park District concrete water fountains. Nothing in my life has ever tasted as good as my first sip of water fountain water on a hot July day after playing baseball on a dusty, dry, rock-hard Riis or Amundsen park diamond.

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The actual sitting-in-the-chair is not the worst part of a visit to the dentist. It’s the week or so leading up to it. For pity’s sake, my dentist’s office sent me countless messages reminding me of my upcoming appointment. My phone was non-stop buzzing. Calls. Texts. Hell, I even got emails, You have an appointment Monday, October 6th…. What is going on? Are these people insecure, or what?

Let me answer that. Yes, they are insecure. Because, now that the visit is over, I’ll be inundated with messages demanding to know how I enjoyed my visit. It’s like they’re desperate to know: Do you like me, huh, do ya?

Funny thing is, I started ignoring all those pre-appointment messages immediately after the first one. I did so to my own detriment. Because I’m a heart patient, a cancer-remission patient, and I’ve had a couple of artificial joint replacements, I have to take a heavy antibiotic dose every time I see the dentist. His office did indeed send me a reminder to pick it up at my pharmacy but I missed it because it was just another one in an endless series of stalk-y, annoying, infuriating, ignored messages. It was like the boy who cried wolf. The receptionist asked me if I took my antibiotic and I said, no, I forgot. She shook her head and looked at me as if I’d belched in her face.

I wanted to scream, If you hadn’t pestered me with a thousand messages, I wouldn’t have forgotten!

To top it off, every time I see my dentist (I go, religiously, every six months) the receptionist demands that I fill out a lengthy questionnaire on a tablet. Dozens and dozens of questions and checklists, exactly the same as I answered the last time I was in. One question was, Are you under the care of a physician?

What in the hell kind of a question is that? I have a doctor. Like everybody else on Earth. Of course I’m under the care of a physician. I answered: I have no idea what this question means.

Then they wanted the name, address and phone number of my primary care physician. All I know is his name. That’s it. Look it up if you’re so curious about him.

So, anyway, my exam completed, I dashed over to my headquarters at Hopscotch on Dodds Street to begin my day’s writing. I ran into an old pal, Dana Habeeb, a professor of urban environmental issues. When I told her I’d just come from the dentist, she launched, unprompted, into her own screed about how her dentist’s questionnaire is so ridiculous and how his office harasses her in the lead-up to her visit. Turns out she sees my dentist. We commiserated like a couple of PTSD sufferers.

Anyway, I got a new toothbrush (soft bristles), one of those little floss dispensers, and a tiny tube of toothpaste, all free, out of the deal. Now I don’t have to worry about my dentist’s harrassments and nosy questionnaires for another six months.

♦︎

THAT

Tristra Newyear’s and my new podcast episode has dropped. Our re-jiggered effort is called Fish on a Dome and for our inaugural drop in this new iteration, we interview audio book narrator and outhouse archeologist Jessica Marchbank, plus we chat with and play a track from Iraqi-American musician Dena El Saffar.

♦︎♦︎♦︎

 

09/27/2025
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Caligu-lite, Donald Trump, Li'l Duce

528 Words: Struggling

I’ve gone back and forth on this more times than I can remember. That is, my feelings about how I should look at and treat those who voted for Li’l Duce.

The night he was elected the first time, back in 2016, I wrote on FB, “America, you disgust me.”

That hasn’t changed. There are some 75 million voters in this holy land who’ve consistently demonstrated they don’t give the slightest damn that their candidate once mocked a disabled person.

If your kid did that while talking about a disabled classmate, you’d whack him one. A grown man did it and has been elected President of the United States of America twice.

I’ve detested Donald Trump since the mid-1980s when he was first making waves as the playboy real estate magnate of New York City. The magazines Vanity Fair, New York, and Spy covered him like a blanket back then, portraying him as a psychologically damaged clown — which he is. In fact, back then I used to say if I were king I’d decree that every single human being has to scrub his or her own toilet. It’d be the ultimate and just imposition of humility on those who make “little people” do those kinds of things for them. Every time I said it, I had Donald Trump in mind.

When he became a presidential candidate, I thought his campaign would be comic relief during the endless 2016 election cycle. Then came the dark night of November 8th and 9th nearly a decade ago.

Yeah. I’m still disgusted.

I’ve struggled to think and do the right things vis à vis the MAGA cult and the few tens of millions more who weren’t similarly deluded or outright racist/misogynist/transphobic/white supremacist/xenophobic/just plain lunkheaded but voted for him because prices were high, or they wanted to see “change,” or whatever bullshit reasoning they gaseously expelled from the wrong orifice.

The cultists, I quickly concluded, were beyond me. No way could I ever understand or hope to engage them. I remember that street corner preacher who used to rant about the abomination of homosexuality up and down State Street in Chicago’s Loop, waving his Bible and using a mic and portable amp. No one ever thought to stop and say, My good man, what say we have ourselves a lively debate on the topic?

What would be the use?

Same with the MAGA cult.

But how about those few tens of millions who felt the American system is broken and that’s why they pulled the lever for Caligu-Lite?  Perhaps I could — perhaps I should — try to reason with them. Perhaps we all should. After all, I think the American system is broken, too. We’ve got common ground.

Yet, every time Li’l Duce pulls off one of his Führer-esque stunts — and they seem to be pouring down on us like a summer thunderstorm now — I find that nice-guy, bipartisan, kumbaya approach to Trump voters harder and harder to pretend to. Those voters’ll tell me I’ve got Trump Derangement Syndrome, that comparing him to Hitler is the primary symptom thereof, but, for pity’s sake, the dude’s got Hitler’s playbook down, people.

It’s a struggle, I tell you.

09/26/2025
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Caligu-lite, Li'l Duce

441 Words: Nothing Lasts

Starbucks is closing stores.

Now there’s a line that would have been unthinkable from the 1990s and into the ‘teens. Some 30 years ago, when Jerry Seinfeld was still doing standup, he cracked that he noticed a new Starbucks had opened in his neighborhood. It was inside another Starbucks.

So many Starbucks were popping up around the country — around the world — that it seemed they were growing inside each other, like scifi Aliens.

That was then; this is now.

We can speculate any number of reasons for the store closings. Union busting, coffee tariffs, a corporate mid-life crisis, and even the spread of local, independent coffee houses. Take your pick. Or mash them all together. No matter. Starbucks is no longer growing.

It is shrinking.

The only sure thing we can conclude is nothing ever lasts. Especially not in this throwaway consumer culture.

What else, what other erstwhile rock solid thing that we hold dear and dependable will go poof any time soon?

A lot of us are scared to death that democracy itself is teetering, thanks to the Resurrection of Li’l Duce. (And, by the way, I’ve come up with another nickname for the Crazy-Commander-in-Chief: Caligu-lite. I like this one almost as much as Li’l Duce.)

Democracy! Hell, our whole American identity is based on the idea of democracy (even if, throughout our history, it has rarely been practiced in a truly comprehensive democratic manner). The rise of an emotionally crippled, morally bankrupt, psychologically stunted greed monkey has indeed put our aspirational better angel in mortal peril.

If we stick to corporate powerhouses that have vanished or become mere shadows of their former selves, we can cite Sears, Blockbuster, Radio Shack, Lehman Brothers, Pan Am, Bethlehem Steel, Woolworth’s, Kodak, and a few dozen more.

And how about empires, real actual political, geographical realms? Caligula’s Rome is now just a place where American tourists go to see St. Peter’s and sample authentic Italian cooking. Ancient Greece is a driving tour of crumbling architectural ruins. Ancient Egypt is a few pyramids and the Sphinx. Genghis Khan’s Mongol Empire was the greatest, in terms of land area, in the history of the world — it lasted just shy of a hundred years. The British Empire now is just another tourist trap, monetizing Americans’ bizarre fixation on its outdated, interbred royalty.

All empires die.

While we’re fretting over the possible demise of our own empire — even if we liked to think of it as a shining city on a hill — we might also take heart in the possibility that the Reign of Caligu-lite can, like every other empire or wannabe realm, implode.

Fingers crossed.

 

09/20/2025
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Colleges & Universities

63 Words: Higher Education

In case you’ve been wondering what is happening to American universities, here’s the answer in a nutshell:

  1. American universities used to exist to broaden the minds and outlooks of their students for the express purpose of making them better human beings.
  2. American universities now exist to narrow the minds and outlooks of their students for the express purpose of making them better employees.
09/19/2025
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Charlie Kirk

26 Words: Kirk

The entire tragedy of September 10th can be distilled into two simple sentences:

  1. Charlie Kirk should never have been shot and killed.
  2. He was an asshole.
09/12/2025
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America

323 Words: Amazing

We use the term amaze in all its forms promiscuously these days. Your social media feed today likely will have at least one or two posters talking about being amazed that their friends somehow came through for them, although if you’re amazed your friends’ll help you in your hour of need you really had little faith in them in the first place.

So, what kind of friend are you?

Anyway, I’m generally loath to use the term for that reason but I will now. I’m amazed.

Amazed that 24 years ago, the whole world rallied around this holy land. 9/11, al Qaeda, 3000 dead, horror, shock, innocent victims. In my recollection, just about every country reached out to help. Even Cuba, for chrissakes.

Hell, a bunch of Maasai villagers from east central Africa got together and did what they could. For us. For you and me. People they’d never met or knew anything about. Just that we’d been harmed and they wanted to help.

That, I’m sure you’ll agree, is truly amazing.

Now, barely a quarter century later, we’ve pissed all that goodwill away. We’ve fought, or participated, financially and materially, in at least four major wars since then. We’ve flipped the bird to the rest of the world’s nations that’d signed the Paris Climate Agreement. We’re in the process of chipping away at the ability of other countries to abide by the Montreal Protocol. We’ve swung toward a trade protectionism that has driven much of the rest of the world into the arms of China and Russia. We’re rounding up undocumented immigrants and shipping them off into hellish foreign prison camps. We’re turning our backs on NATO just as Vladimir Putin is salivating over eastern Europe. We’ve cut off much foreign aid. We’re even stifling the Voice of America.

Who would want to ship 14 cows to us to help us weather any future catastrophe?

Much of the world loved us once. They don’t anymore.

Amazing.

09/10/2025
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WFHB Fall Fund Drive 2025

611 Words: Can You Hear Me Now?

We’re living in Trump’s World now. He’s remade America and is continuing to effect changes upon this holy land even as we speak. One of the changes that affects me personally is the crushing of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Of all the things that could have discouraged or depressed me during this scary slide into neo-fascism, the announcement that the CPB was going out of business — thanks to Congress’s cut-off of funding for it — was the one that sent me spiraling downward. I mean, jeez, these are the people who gave us Carl Sagan and Sesame Street. Through the CPB’s largesse, tens of millions of kids learned to count, many of us found out how big the universe is, we heard tales of the Civil War, Prohibition, Baseball, and gay life in San Francisco in the 1970s. And, partly thanks to CPB grants, I was able to do my Big Talk thing on WFHB.

So, yeah, I was downcast when the CPB went under but I refuse to stay glum. Damn it all, I’m gonna fight my ass off against Li’l Duce and his lickspittlers.

WFHB’s Fall Fund Drive begins today and runs through Sunday, September 21st. My station has lost somewhere in the neighborhood of $135,000 a year in CPB funding, starting in three weeks. That’s when the station’s new fiscal year begins. We’d already got our CPB check for the current FY. On October 1st, we’re going to have to figure out how to keep the station going with a significant chunk of our budget suddenly gone poof. We’ve already laid off two hugely dedicated and valuable staffers, Noelle Herhusky-Schneider, our assistant news director, and Josh Brewer, our operations manager. Their last day will be September 30th.

Brooke Turpin, our Development Director, told us during last week’s Fund Drive training sessions that we shouldn’t get too political during our live, on-air pitches over the next two weeks and I promise I won’t. But here on The Pencil the gloves are off. I’m gonna rip into that greed-monkey son of a bitch in a too-long red tie like a tiger mama protecting her cubs.

As I have been doing since the summer of 2015.

We need your help. I need your help. I go live on the air tomorrow, Thursday, September 11th at 5:30pm during my normal Big Talk slot, to beg for money. I hate doing it. As I explained to Brooke, pleading for money brings me back to those long-ago, not-at-all lamented days when I had to beg, borrow, and steal to keep myself afloat. “It reminds me,” I told Brooke and GM Jar Turner, “of when I was desperate.”

“Well, guess what,” Jar said, “we are desperate.”

I ask you to click on this thing:

or to call in during my show to contribute to WFHB. You can donate anytime online and, really, any time over the phone (812.323.1200). Please make sure to mention Big Talk when (and if) you donate. All the WFHB producers and show hosts are being challenged to demonstrate how much listener loyalty we generate, based on how much dough our shows can bring in. And, by the way, this Fund Drive has a $100,000 matching donation, given by an anonymous source. It means every dollar we squeeze out of you this time around will be matched, up to a hundred grand, by that unnamed soul. So your contribution will be, in effect, doubled.

Anyway, please help. We need it. I need it. I want you to be able to hear my guests and me on Big Talk for years to come. And keep on fighting against that no good slob in a too-long red tie.

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09/06/2025
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Uncategorized

591 Words: His Stairway To…

Throughout this entire ten-year American Caligula nightmare, I’ve managed to keep my spirits up. Mostly. Sort of. Okay, every now and then. Call it whistling past the graveyard, or the Pollyanna in me elbowing her way out, or flat out traumatic denial, I’ve tried to console myself and those around me in any number of ways.

For instance, when Li’l Duce won the 2016 election, I said — again, to myself and to others — Well, the majority of voters didn’t want him; or, Don’t worry, this is just a bump in the road; or any of a dozen fairy tales I lullabied myself to sleep with each night.

That got me through the first five years — a year of campaigning and then the 45th Presidency — with my sanity and whatever shreds of optimism I had left intact. Then, the Mad King did it again, rose from the grave, ghoul that he is, and won the 2024 election. I hit bottom that November night nine months ago, some time around 2 or 3am, when CNN ran the headline, Trump Wins Presidency.

You may as well have told me my best friend had died.

Which, come to think of it, would be less traumatic to me than the ascension of a wannabe dictator in this holy land that I’ve long tried to kid myself was immune to that kind of horseshit.

And, speaking of ascension, the Greed-Monkey-in-Chief has started a fundraising campaign…, no, wait, I mean a fraudulent scam asking for donations of $15 from tens of millions of Americans so he can sit at the right hand of the god he has never shown any indication he believes in, honors, worships or otherwise is on speaking terms with. Li’l Duce wrote in a message from one of his political action committees accounts, “I want to try and get to heaven.”

Fitting, isn’t it, that the Hustler in the White House would imply it takes dough, big dough — your dough — to  achieve his eternal oneness with the creator of the universe. I mean, religious clip artists have been a staple in American movies and novels since…, oh, since forever. And need I run a list of televangelists who’ve fleeced gullible saps to the tune of billions of dollars over the years?

Li’l Duce‘s going to rake in piles of cash with his plea. God, he says, saved him from that assassination attempt near Butler, PA 13 months ago. That’ll go a long way to convincing the criminally credulous that their boy is in good with Holy Trinity’s top banana. Many of those easy marks already are used to forking over their hard-earned cash to blatherers, crooks, sharpies, smoothies, and flimflam men clever enough to drop god’s name while holding their hands out.

The fantasy tale I’m telling myself these days is, As soon as the Hoodlum-in-Chief dies, the Republic Party’s gonna fold in on itself.  The GOP these days no longer has a platform, no longer espouses a philosophy, no longer says anything but Hail to the Chief. Without him, they’ll be rudderless, leaderless, pointless.

You think that mascaraed pimp JD Vance is going to assume the mantle post-Trump? Hell, he’ll be pilloried for the unforgivable sin of not being Trump. Look what happened to George H.W. Bush post-Ronald Reagan. And Reagan was only a saint, not a demigod like Li’l Duce.

The Saint Ronald Reagan Candle — Swear to God, It’s Real.

The idea that the Republicans will implode after Trump helps me get to sleep at night. Still, the lullaby is getting harder for me to hum.

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08/25/2025
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Dorothy Parker, Fascism

864 Words: Mrs. Campbell’s Résumé

Dorothy Parker is one of my favorite figures in American history.

Parker

Born in 1893 in Long Branch, New Jersey, one of those beachside communities south of the New York metro area, she grew up to be a writer. And when I say writer, I really mean it. She wrote poetry, fiction, plays, screenplays, essays, and criticism. She was a member of the fabled Algonquin Round Table, where she was referred to as Mrs. Campbell. She’d been married, twice, to another writer named Alan Campbell (actually, they were her second and third marriages; she’d married a stockbroker just before he shipped out to fight in World War I when she was 23). She must have been gaga over this Campbell fellow to have married him twice. Like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.

In any case, Parker (or Mrs. Campbell, if you prefer) hung out with the likes of Robert Benchley, Robert E. Sherwood, Franklin P. Adams, Alexander Woolcott, Harold Ross, Edna Ferber, Heywood Broun, Ruth Gordon, and Harpo Marx — as brilliant, cutting, imaginative, and outspoken a group of Americans that have ever existed. Parker not only held her own among them, the lot of them had to scramble to keep up with her. One of my favorite books is The Portable Dorothy Parker, a compendium of her wildly varied works including her signature short story, “Big Blonde.”

The Algonquin Roundtable is one of the two historical places I’d wish to be reincarnated in (the other being the writers room of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour). I’d probably swoon over Parker, although she’d never be available to me considering she was herself in thrall to that Campbell guy. In fact, their relationship largely is reflected in the 1937 movie, A Star Is Born. Parker and Campbell co-wrote the script and, like the main characters in it, her fame dwarfed his.

To this day, Parker’s light and breezy but incisive as a scalpel poems ring true, as relevant as they were a hundred years ago. A couple of examples:

Her take on falling in love with creative types, “Bohemia.”

Authors and actors and artists and such Never know nothing, and never know much.

Sculptors andsingers and those of their kidney

Tell their affairs from Seattle to Sydney.

Playwrights and poets and such horses’ necks

Start off from anywhere, end up at sex.

Diarists, critics, and similar roe

Never say nothing, and never say no.

People Who Do Things exceed my endurance;

God, for a man that solicits insurance.

And, perhaps her most famous poem, “Résumé”:

Razors pain you;

Rivers are damp;

Acids stain you;

And drugs cause cramp.

Guns aren’t lawful; Nooses give;

Gas smells awful;

You might as well live.

Once, when told her editor was hollering for her to turn in a story she’d missed the deadline on because she was on one of her honeymoons, she replied to the messenger: “Tell him I was too fucking busy — or vice versa.”

She had a definitive attitude toward wealth. She wrote: “I hate almost all rich people, but I think I’d be darling at it.”

Which brings us to this observation of hers:

I think I knew what side I was on when I was about five years old, at which time nobody was safe from buffaloes. It was in a brownstone house in New York, and there was a blizzard, and my rich aunt — a horrible woman then and now — had come to visit. I remember going to the window and seeing the street with the men shoveling snow; their hands were purple on their shovels, and their feet were wrapped with burlap. And my aunt, looking over her shoulder, said, “Now isn’t this nice that there’s this blizzard. Now all these men have work.” And I knew then that it was not nice that men could work for their lives only in desperate weather, that there was no work for them in fair. That was when I became anti-fascit, at the silky tiones of my rich and comfortable aunt.

Parker, who by 1939 when she wrote this, had become a successful Hollywood screenwriter with Alan Campbell. She was as comfortable as a bankable script writer could be in those days. She wasn’t in Rockefeller or DuPont territory but she was never in danger of missing a meal. Nor did she have wait for a blizzard to earn a paycheck.

And then, along came the communist witch hunts. Anyone in Hollywood who didn’t genuflect before wealth was drummed out of business, including Parker. The FBI kept a 1000-page file on her. She was denied a travel visa during World War II (she wanted to work as a war correspondent) because she’d once belonged to the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee. And, worst of all, she’d been a loud advocate for civil rights. After the war, movie work became so scarce for her that she had to collect unemployment checks.

There are a few people, gone now, whose take on the reign of Li’l Duce and the creeping fascism overtaking this holy (unholy?) land I’d love to know. Mike Royko is one. George Carlin is another. Eleanor Roosevelt, of course. Frances Perkins and and Malcolm X, too.

And, of course, Dorothy Parker.

 

08/20/2025
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Censorship, Soft Language

981 Words: Bleep!

I just did something I know I’ll regret. I violated my own standards. I knuckled under. I played it safe.

I censored this week’s episode of my own radio program, Big Talk.

Ugh!

Now, inasmuch as all editing, even self-editing, can be construed as censorship, I’m always censoring either my radio show or my written work. I spend hours every week snipping out my and my guests’ uhs, ums, ers, belches, sneezes, belly grumblings, tongue trips, misspeaks, and every other conceivable form of audio detritus before I load the latest episode into WFHB’s programming software. That’s normal. What I did today was not.

My guest this week is colleague and friend Tristra Newyear. The aim of this particular episode was for us to riff on the return of the Indiana University students (and their parents) to Bloomington for the 2025-26 school year. I led off by saying, The students are coming back, the five scariest words in this town. I went on to rant about the stores being packed, traffic getting snarly, nowhere to park downtown, people driving the wrong way down one-way streets (do one-way streets only exist here?), doting parents loading their kids’ shopping carts with luxury towels and bed linens, and all the rest of the sins, mortal and venial, the flood of humanity now washing over our little village commit.

At one point, I said, “I want them to be shot.”

A joke. An exaggeration. A throwaway line. Tristra laughed and said, “Can we say that on the air?”

I immediately covered myself by saying, “… with a hypodermic needle filled with beneficial drugs…,” at which point Tristra added, “…drugs that help them read street signs.” Not exactly Mark Twain or Richard Pryor, but that was our flimsy attempt at humor.

Then, in the middle of the night I woke up. Damn it, I said to myself, someone’s gonna piss and moan about it. Someone’s gonna accuse me of advocating gun violence against college students and their parents. And, for pity’s sake, college kids are under siege enough these days, from university administrators whose goal in life is to transform academia into a high-end resort hotel and self-help retreat to Li’l Duce extorting money from colleges and universities and trying to force them to become Chamber of Commerce propagandists.

So, for the next six hours or so, I quibbled with myself over bleeping the word shot. The angel on my right shoulder whispered, Don’t put the radio station in a bad spot. Don’t open yourself up to any accusations. Be a good boy. The devil on my left sneered, Don’t give in. Don’t let the hand-wringers and pearl-clutchers win. Don’t be afraid.

At approximately 9;45am, the angel won. That little schmuck. I re-edited the audio file for this week’s Big Talk episode and inserted a bleep over the word shot. That’s what you’ll hear Thursday at 5:30pm on 91.3 FM or anytime at wfhb.org.

I’m not happy with it.

I hate soft language. I detest the censorship imposed on America’s conversation by both the Right and the Left. I can’t stand the social media finger-waggers who peek under everybody’s beds and sniff around everybody’s garbage bins looking for things to be outraged over. I’m never gonna let them tell me what to do, I’ve always told myself.

And I haven’t. Until now. Damn it.

Funny thing. Corporate America has become humanity’s word policeman. Anybody who’s outed in the media for dropping an N-bomb or uttering misogynistic drivel gets fired. Nike, McDonald’s, Walmart, Apple, CVS, and Cigna get to say, Hey, look at us! We’re good guys! We don’t tolerate that kind of verbal wickedness!

Which, I suppose. is good. On the other hand, with everybody and his brother in a public setting not able utter N-bombs or judge a woman by the size of her breasts, we came to think the absence of that kind of mouth-spew on the airwaves and the internet meant nobody thought that way anymore. We were shocked that a presidential candidate who gave voice and license to the worst, racist, women-hating, white supremacist, foreigner-loathing element of our holy land’s populace could be elected. Twice!

Who knew? We all could have known how very many “deplorables” were out there if only we’d let them speak freely. An enemy that’s invisible can’t easily be fought.

But, I may be going off on a tangent here. Or maybe not. Sunshine is the best disinfectant. I’d rather know if a guy tends to drop N-bombs than not. Free expression tells us much about our fellow species-mates.

And, for chrissakes, people, learn to take a joke. Learn to tell the difference between hyperbole and a criminal threat. Remember that scene from “Twelve Angry Men,” where one juror says to the other, I could kill you? The Henry Fonda character uses the incident to prove his point that people’s words shouldn’t always be taken literally. I could eat a horse. I’m dead. It’s to die for. I could have clobbered him. We’re always speaking over the top, embellishing, distorting, fudging, and inflating. They’re all verbal exclamation points.

Speaking of movies, I remember someone asking me, many years ago, what I through of “The Big Chill.” Throughout the whole movie, I said, I was pulling for terrorists to break in and wipe out all the characters.

Again, a joke. An exaggeration. A throwaway line. I might have been able to get away with it in the 1980s or ’90s but not today.

I want them to be shot. Anybody who’d think that was a call to action is, to borrow a handy phrase from James Carville, a goddamned idiot. Or, in keeping with this post’s theme, They oughtta be taken out and shot.

I still have a bit more than 30 hours to delete my bleep of the word shot. I probably won’t do it.

I’m not proud of myself.

 

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