Happy Mother's Day!

Take the day to be kind to the person who brought you into this world, the person who raised you, who helped raise you, who was there for you when a lot of others had other things going on, who loved you even though you were someone who for a moment, a day, a month, a year, most all of your life, only a mother could love. Be kind to your mother, to her memory, even if she wasn't perfect and johnny-on-the-spot like all the mothers on television in the 60s and 70s that you later read had drug and alcohol problems that may well have been brought on by playing characters that don't exist in real life. Be kind even if you are too young still, or still too stupid, to realize that you are far from perfectly easy on the nerves yourself. Understand that as lame as it may sound, she, Mom, probably did the best she could given who she was, the forces animating her, and what she'd lived through, what she was sorting out at the time, the things going on inside her while you at the same time had things going on inside you that blinded you to the things that were going on inside her, and so you can be certain that for much of that time you were driving her nuts with things that you now understand, or will soon, or may one day, we all hope, were thoughtless and inconsiderate and at the very least no less maddening for being understandable, because you were young, you didn't know any better, you were doing the best you could, which is how you, we, all of us, cut ourselves slack for all the heartbreak and crazy and totally unnecessary we visited on our mothers' nerves and so today and every day forward we do the same for them, as best we can and are able, given everything that is going on, inside and out, given imperfections, character-flaws, a disturbing number of which are probably genetic, but still, be kind, show compassion, show the love.

Happy Mother's Day! 

A Lament for Ted

I'm beginning to feel sorry for Ted Cruz. At least I feel like I should be. After all, I felt sorry for Jeb Bush almost immediately, seconds into the first time I saw him speaking on television, back when a lot of smart people still thought he was going to be the GOP nominee and all I could think was, No he's not! Look at the poor guy—

I feel sorry for Hillary now and then. Being married to Bill and putting up with all his indiscretions and then having him be the one everyone likes and you being the brittle, shouting, disciplined, ambitious bitch who is only going to win because the Republicans are going to nominate a real estate developer most of the party can't stand (though they like him better than Ted), as if this were a city council race. Anyway, everyone loves Bernie, no one loves Hillary, which is sad, except that compared to Ted, she's lovable, which is really sad, for Ted, and you'd think no one could be that unlovable, and that there'd be pathos there, but I'm dead inside for Ted, this while fully aware—and you might find this surprising—that I felt sorry for Richard Nixon after Pat died. Seeing him break down like he did at the funeral, sprawled over her casket crying like a baby. It wasn't the kind of thing you saw too often anymore, a former president, someone other than John Boehner, crying his eyes out. Never mind Vietnam, Cambodia, Kent State, Watergate, the Checkers Speech, I felt the pathos of that moment.

No pathos, yet, with Ted. And it's weird. Because you hear kind things said about all kinds of people who are generally considered horrible. Hitler, for instance. You hear it said that Hitler was kind to his dog, that his dog in all likelihood would have had a very high opinion of him had he been allowed to express it. Had Hitler and his dog been together a half century later, you can easily imagine some enterprising ghost writer penning a memoir from the dog's point of view, and you can bet the dog would have had more than a few nice things to say about the Fuhrer.

Stalin, for example. Franklin Roosevelt, of all people—not a Russian, granted, a goddamned commie-friendly liberal from New York, but still—purportedly said after Yalta, "I kind of like Old Joe."

There were people who probably thought Pol Pot was great.

On the other hand, you don't hear anyone, not a soul, coming out and saying, Oh now, I've known Ted Cruz for years, and he may get a little carried away from time to time with that Libertarian nonsense of his, all that Lord Jesus Christ stuff coming out his mouth every third sentence, even us Christians get tired of hearing a fellow go on like that, but really, you shouldn't take all that stuff his old college roommate at Princeton says too seriously, or John Boehner, calling him the most miserable son of a bitch he's ever worked with—what the hell does John Boehner, a government insider who smokes and cries over the goddamnest bullshit, know about anything?

Not one kind word, by anyone. Maybe his wife, if she wasn't so busy at Goldman Sachs. Which by itself is suspect. Don't get me started. I wonder if she's so inside she got to hear Hillary's speech? I wonder if she even told Ted about it. If she had, wouldn't he be talking about it? Or did she start to tell him and he just went La la la la la!!

Maybe his kids want to say nice things but aren't allowed. Maybe he's being kind, taking a tip from Obama, the cool guy all the comics like, the Kennedy to his Nixon, he imagines, though he's not even as likable as Nixon. Nixon's daughters liked him, loved their dad. Anyway, I'm pretty sure they did, that I heard or read it somewhere. And there was his buddy Bebe Rebozo. The staffers on that day he resigned, the speech he gave—a pretty decent speech, really, considering the day he was having—the tears welling in many of their eyes before he did that windshield wiper like wave to all of them and got in the helicopter and flew off to San Clemente or wherever it was they took him.

Maybe Ted needs to be president first. Which, someone please tell him, isn't going to happen. Even though he picked a running mate this week. A failed CEO who understands government, he says—rather bizarre for someone who this morning, on "This Week," said that the problem with Trump and Clinton and Obama is that they believe in government. Which is a little like saying the problem with the current Chief of Surgery and the two candidates with the best chance of becoming the next chief is that they believe in surgery. Which would be a ridiculous thing to say even if you weren't hoping to become the next Chief of Surgery yourself. If you didn't believe in surgery, why spend two years of your life campaigning to become lead surgeon? You'd have to be a self-aggrandizing prick who just liked the idea of being in charge no matter what you thought of the enterprise, which, possibly, answers a lot of questions, and wouldn't make him all that unlike a lot of other politicians, and yet it still is unseemly.

What Trump understands and Ted possibly—tragically, if anyone gave a shit or had a kind thought about him—doesn't understand: the base doesn't really much give a shit anymore about conservative government and/or principles.

They're just really upset.

A lot of people are really upset, and don't believe so much anymore, rightly or wrongly, that the answer to all their problems is less government, that government is the problem, that it is bad, that it needs to be done away with, that the beast must be starved, after which a golden age will begin and we'll all be happy again like the kids in Lord of the Flies.

Ted, who wants to be the head of a government he doesn't believe in, says that a majority of Republicans don't want Donald Trump to be the Republican nominee for president. What the brilliant debater from Princeton, the US Senator from Texas, doesn't seem to get, or want to admit, is that even fewer—a lot fewer—want Ted Cruz to be the Republican nominee for president.

The GOP, the ones who courted these angry disenfranchised people but aren't that angry or disenfranchised themselves, can't believe they're caught in such a pickle. It's goddamned unbelievable. Still, given a big boss man who's kind of funny, and a miserable son of a bitch who isn't, they're going with the first guy, count on it. Better that Trump hang out to dry in November as have to kiss that miserable son of a bitch Ted Cruz's ass for one second.