It's a simple, cheerful life but with occasional grim complications that one simply ignores, such as mortality or the Seventies or the demise of the downtown department store. I love my downtown store, a block from the old stone courthouse where Alvin (Creepy) Karpis of the Ma Barker gang was tried for kidnapping in 1936, near a fine old popcorn shop, just down the street from a haberdashery where the other day I got fitted for a seersucker suit and was shown how to tie a bowtie. A great mystery, like the Trinity, suddenly made clear. You don't get this sort of instruction at a mall.
With a seersucker suit and a bowtie, I am equipped to run for public office on the States' Rights ticket and stand up for Our Way of Life and let's support our boys fighting for Unconditional Victory in Korea -- that's what I associate with seersucker, a man perspiring heavily and mopping his brow with Coca-Cola and crying out against the gummint and pointy-heads who interfere with Our Way of Life. A charlatan, in other words. My daily uniform is black T-shirt and jeans, which, if you saw me on the street and didn't know me, might lead you to believe I speak French and love jazz. Non non non, madame! Je suis un authentique Americain.
An American
guy is capable of many costumes -- Riverboat Gambler, Sensitive Aesthete, Wilderness Scout, Lounge Lizard, House Husband, Dangerous Radical and Scourge of Society, Aging Preppie -- and I've tried out most of them, but as you enter your golden years, your interest in masquerade naturally diminishes, and so it's interesting to see America's Oldest Presidential Candidate out on the hustings transforming himself into a yahoo and a cracker. Whatever consultant told him to do this is being paid way too much.
The political exploitation of wounded American soldiers by Senator McCain and his eagerness to introduce race into the race was yahoo behavior, but never mind -- if you lived through the Nixon years and then read the transcripts of the tapes, you are not surprised by anything in politics whatsoever. A bitter, paranoid man of towering personal insecurity, Nixon talked like Broderick Crawford and thereby beat a decorated war hero, George McGovern, even as Nixon was directing an American retreat and defeat in Vietnam that he (and Senator McCain) blamed on student protesters. And the famous G-man J. Edgar Hoover was gay. He and his lover, Clyde Tolson, brought Alvin Karpis to St. Paul for the trial. So what? It's an amazing country.
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