Some Republicans Worry That Señor Trumpanzee Might Be The Wrong Messenger For Their Vision-- But He's Not

Do one ever accused Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy (R) of being a moderate. He hasn't been in the Senate long and he's already run up one of the worst voting records of any member. ProgressivePunch rates him an "F," of course, but an F that equates to a 5.19, worse than extremists like Ted Cruz (R-TX), Mike Lee (R-UT), Roy Blunt (R-MO) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA) for example. According to Buzzfeed, when Cassidy was asked during an interview on C-SPAN’s Newsmakers program about whether Trump, Louisiana senate candidate David Duke, and a growing number of pro-Trump white supremacists have hurt the GOP’s brand, Cassidy said Republicans’ electoral woes this fall aren’t so much a question of policy, but rather Trump himself. Cassidy: "The message that we have is pretty good… it may turn out that Mr. Trump is not the messenger. Maybe he is. But it really seems to boil down to Mr. Trump’s personality being not what people like, as opposed to some of the issues."

It's a somewhat different way of phrasing Garrison Keillor's widely syndicated OpEd, addressed directly to Señor Trumpanzee this week.

The cap does not look good on you, it's a duffer's cap, and when you come to the microphone, you look like the warm-up guy, the guy who announces the license number of the car left in the parking lot, doors locked, lights on, motor running. The brim shadows your face, which gives a sinister look, as if you'd come to town to announce the closing of the pulp factory. Your eyes look dead and your scowl does not suggest American greatness so much as American indigestion. Your hair is the wrong color: People don't want a president to be that shade of blond. You know that now.

Why doesn't someone in your entourage dare to say these things? So sad. The fans in the arenas are wild about you, and Sean Hannity is as loyal as they come, but Rudy and Christie and Newt are reassuring in that stilted way of hospital visitors. And the New York Times treats you like the village idiot. This is painful for a Queens boy trying to win respect in Manhattan where the Times is the Supreme Liberal Jewish Anglican Arbiter of Who Has The Smarts and What Goes Where. When you came to Manhattan 40 years ago, you discovered that in entertainment, the press, politics, finance, everywhere you went, you ran into Jews, and they are not like you: Jews didn't go in for big yachts and a fleet of aircraft-- they showed off by way of philanthropy or by raising brilliant offspring. They sympathized with the civil rights movement. In Queens, blacks were a threat to property values-- they belonged in the Bronx, not down the street. To the Times, Queens is Cleveland. Bush league. You are Queens. The casinos were totally Queens, the gold faucets in your triplex, the bragging, the insults, but you wanted to be liked by Those People. You wanted Mike Bloomberg to invite you to dinner at his townhouse. You wanted the Times to run a three-part story about you, that you meditate and are a passionate kayaker and collect 14th-century Islamic mosaics. You wish you were that person but you didn't have the time.

Running for president is your last bid for the respect of Manhattan. If you were to win election, they couldn't ridicule you anymore. They could be horrified, but there is nothing ridiculous about being Leader of the Free World. You have B-52 bombers at your command. When you go places, a battalion of security guys comb the environs. You attract really really good speechwriters who give you Churchillian cadences and toss in quotes from Emerson and Aeschylus and Ecclesiastes.

Labor Day and it is not going well. You had a very bad month. You tossed out those wisecracks on Twitter and the Earth shook and your ratings among white suburban women with French cookware declined. The teleprompter is not your friend. You are in the old tradition of locker room ranting and big honkers in the steam room, sitting naked, talking man talk, griping about the goons and ginks and lousy workmanship and the uppity broads and the great lays and how you vanquished your enemies at the bank. Profanity is your natural language and vulgar words so as not to offend the Christers but the fans can still hear it and that's something they love about you. You are their guy. You are losing and so are they but they love you for it.

So what do you do this winter? Hang around one of your mansions? Hit some golf balls? Hire a ghostwriter to do a new autobiography?

What the fans don't know is that it's not much fun being a billionaire. You own a lot of big houses and you wander around in them, followed by a waiter, a bartender, a masseuse, three housekeepers, and a concierge, and they probably gossip about you behind your back. Just like nine-tenths of your campaign staff. You're losing and they know it and they're telling mean stories about you to everybody and his brother.

Meanwhile, you keep plugging away. It's the hardest work you've ever done. You walk out in the white cap and you rant for an hour about stuff that means nothing and the fans scream and wave their signs and you wish you could level with them for once and say one true thing: I love you to death and when this is over I will have nothing that I want.

OK, geography whizzes, it's time once again to strut your geographical stuff. Plus: "How do you show the unshowable?"

This cover was trickier than we civilians probably would have thought, since how, after all, do you illustrate black holes, which can't be seen? Tom O'Neill tells the story in "Behind the Cover: March 2014 -- How do you show the unshowable?"

by Ken

In January I passed along the monthly geography quiz that National Geographic cleverly prints on the sheet that -- stuck inside the sealed plastic that carries your subscription copy -- serves as your address label ("Who's up for a jography quiz? Plus Garrison Keillor's 'personal geography' of 'home'"). I guess I was feeling kind of cocky because somehow or other (well, it involved a certain amount of guessing) I had gotten all five questions right. That just about never happens. There are months when I'm lucky to get one of the five questions right.

That quiz accompanied the February issue of the magazine. I only just remembered that I've been carrying the March issue around for weeks now, stuck in my briefcase, with the plastic sheathing still intact. Today I finally cracked it open, and I only managed three out of five, though one of the ones I didn't get -- the country of which Tbilisi is the capital -- was one I should have gotten, if only my brain hadn't become so balky about coughing up names that I know are stored in there somewhere. On the other hand, one of the ones I got right -- the "small African country located on the Gulf of Aden" question -- I wasn't at all sure about. The name sprang out of that same brain with no particular connection to anything, and I wasn't even prepared to swear that it was the name of a country. On number 5, I just guessed, and I guessed wrong.

You win some, you lose some. Anyway, here's the March quiz.

Are You a Geo Genius?
Test your knowledge with questions from the National Geographic Bee.

1  Which small African country located on the Gulf of Aden averages less than six inches of rain each year?

2  The Blue Nile flows through Lake Tana, which is located in the northern part of what country?

3  The Indus River, one of the longest rivers in South Asia, empties into what sea?

4  Tbilisi, located on the banks of the Kur River, is the capital of what country?

5  Lake Volta is located in which West African country known for its production of palm oil?

QUIZ ANSWERS BELOW

BY THE WAY, IF YOU DIDN'T HAPPEN TO SEE
THE JANUARY PIECE WITH THE EARLIER QUIZ --

I would encourage you to look at it, not so much for the geography quiz as for the appreciation of (and link to) Garrison Keillor's "Personal Geography" of his home back in the day as well as now, the Twin Cities. The piece ranges widely, backward and forward, over time as well as space; it's one I think you're going to remember for a long time to come.


QUIZ ANSWERS

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Who's up for a jography quiz? Plus Garrison Keillor's "personal geography" of "home"

The cover story of the February 2014 National
Geographic is "The New Science of the Brain."

by Ken

I don't know how long National Geographic was including a monthly geography quiz on the mailing insert that includes the subscriber's address on subscription copies before I noticed it. But however long it was, it spared me that many months' or more likely years' worth of humiliation. Because once I started looking at the quizzes, I started stinking at them. So let's not kid ourselves, the fact that this month I suddenly got all five questions right probably has something to do with why I'm making a federal case of it tonight. True, one of my answers was a guess, but it was a semi-educated one; there's a limit to how many countries the answer to no. 5 could be to start with. And true, several of these questions are a lot easier than the ones we usually get in these quizzes. I mean, with the island in no. 4 identified as Hispaniola, how sad would you have to be to get this one wrong?

Still, I guessed right on no. 5, and swept the rest of the admittedly readily sweepable field.

Are you a Geo-Genius?
Test your knowledge with questions from the National Geographic Bee.

1
The Rio de la Plata borders Argentina and what smaller country?

2
The Balearic Sea and Ionian Sea are both part of what larger sea?

3
Which Southeast Asian country, crossed by the Tropic of Cancer, is bordered by India and China?

4
Cape Engaño, easternmost point on the island of Hispaniola, is in what country?

5
Xultún, a typical Maya site with mural-filled rooms, is located in which Central American country?

BUT THE MUST-READ ITEM IN THE ISSUE IS . . .


Olivia Rowe is my aunt Josephine's great-granddaughter. Her level gaze and dark hair remind me of Aunt Jo, who was a gardener and kept a flock of chickens. Olivia keeps pigeons, 14 of them. This one is named Angel.

Above is one of the illustrations that accompanies "There's No Place Like Home: A Personal Geography by Garrison Keillor" (with photos by Erika Larsen), and the caption is obviously by the author. "Home," of course, is the Twin Cities, and the promised "personal geography" isn't just mental; there is in fact a precious "crude map" drawn by the author called "TWIN CITIES (ROUGHLY)," which really does provide a nice basic orientation. ("The key to our geography," Garrison says, "is the river. Anyone can get lost trying to navigate the freeways through the suburbs, but once you find the Mississippi, you know where you are.") The map includes both of St. Paul's lakes and all six of Minneapolis's ("pools of ease and elegance on the asphalt grid"), but not Lake Minnetonka, "the prairie Riviera, off to the southwest."

Editor-in-Chief Chris Jones explains in his Editor's Note, "A Prairie Home":

A few years ago I was in the middle of a meeting when one of our senior editors ushered in a tall man with a large, expressive face, wearing owlish glasses and dressed in a khaki suit. In a voice once described as "a baritone that seems precision-engineered to narrate a documentary about glaciers," he addressed the group and pitched a story idea. He wanted, he told us, to do a story about his own "personal geography." That man was the author, radio personality, and storyteller Garrison Keillor, and there could be only one answer to the appeal.

Keillor’s reminiscence, "There's No Place Like Home," is the result. You might say it's a piece he's been writing his whole life. Ostensibly, it's about Minneapolis-St. Paul. He conjures word pictures of neighborhoods with stucco bungalows, lakes with names like Minnetonka and Nokomis, and the sweep of the rocket tail fins on a white Cadillac convertible. But it's also something different and very special.

Keillor's piece is an interior geography; it's the map of a man's soul. In summoning up the Twin Cities of his youth and adulthood, he talks about what it means to be not just from a place, but of a place. Early on, he says, he realized that Minneapolis-St. Paul was a much better place than Manhattan in which to be an original. In his essay Keillor tells us why where you come from matters. "If you want to know the truth," he says, "I feel understood there."

Keillor likes driving rural Minnesota roads. “One evening,” says photographer Erika Larsen, “I went along.” She shot this near Buffalo Lake.

Actually, it's not just "understanding" that Garrison feels in the Twin Cities. Here's how he explains it:

"So how was it to grow up there then?" they say. "Oh, you know. It could've been worse," I reply. We are not braggarts and blowhards back where I come from. But if you want to know the truth, I feel understood there. I sit down to lunch with Bill and Bob or my sister and brother whom I've known almost forever, and it's a conversation you can't have with people you met yesterday. You can flash back to 1954 and the island in the river where we used to mess around, or the front office you shared with Warren Feist that looked across the street to the Anoka Dairy, or the toboggan slope behind Corinne's house, no footnote necessary, and they are right there with you. I come home and feel so well understood. I almost don't have to say a word. I was not a good person. I have yelled at my children. I neglected my parents and was disloyal to loved ones. I have offended righteous people. People around here know all this about me, and yet they still smile and say hello, and so every day I feel forgiven. Ask me if it's a good place to live, and I don't know -- that's real estate talk -- but forgiveness and understanding, that's a beautiful combination.

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Thurber Tonight: An encore presentation of "The Curb in the Sky"

AN ANTHOLOGIST CAN'T PLEASE EVERYONE, BUT --: As you can see from this June post, I wasn't pleased to discover that Garrison Keillor, editor of the Library of America Thurber volume, had omitted "The Curb in the Sky" (along with the whole of "The Ladies' and Gentlemen's Guide to Polite English Usage"). -- Ken

Again,* from "The War Between Men and Women"
(and again, you can click on it to enlarge it)

[*The previous night's post, noted below, which featured "The Topaz Cufflinks Mystery," had also come with a drawing from "The War Between Men and Women." -- Ed.]

"When Dorothy grew up she became quite pretty and so even more of a menace. Gentlemen became attracted to her and then attached to her. Emotionally she stirred them, but mentally she soon began to wear them down."

-- from "The Curb in the Sky"

by Ken

Tuesday night I described "The Curb in the Sky" as "seriously amusing but also strikingly, ineffably poignant." As compared with last night's "The Topaz Cufflinks Mystery," another tale of a, shall we say, "unintact" marriage, this one falls on the other side of the invisible line that, as I put it, "once you've stepped over, you've overstepped."

I noticed in Keith Olbermann's "Fridays with Thurber" reading of "The Greatest Man in the World" that he announced at the outset that he was reading as always from the Library of America edition of Thurber Writings and Drawings edited by Garrison Keillor. I guess it's a useful book, with so much swell stuff included, but one of the first things I discovered when I finally acquired a copy a year or two ago was the omission of what I consider one of the most essential Thurber texts, "The Ladies' and Gentlemen's Guide to Modern English Usage" (from The Owl in the Attic).

Now, looking at the online contents listing for the LoA volume (somehow or other I quickly managed to misplace my copy), I'm shocked, shocked, to discover that "The Curb in the Sky" is omitted! Now I love Garrison Keillor immoderately (didn't I just quote him at length the other night?), but jeepers, to not include "The Curb in the Sky"? What the dickens was he using for brains?


DON'T LISTEN TO THAT DOPE KEILLOR! TO
READ "THE CURB IN THE SKY," CLICK HERE


THURBER TONIGHT (including BENCHLEY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, BOB AND RAY, E. B. WHITE, and JEAN SHEPHERD TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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Unlike the real Paul Ryan, Andy Borowitz's version at least grazes up against reality

Ryanomics masquerades as "fiscal prudence," another reminder that way more pressing than our Deficit Problem is our Reality Gap (aka Truth Crisis), which would make it impossible to actually deal with deficits even if we weren't still in a depression.

"Speaker of the House John Boehner, appearing alongside Rep. Ryan, offered these words of praise for the Wisconsin congressman: 'Preachers like Harold Camping go around predicting the end of the world, but it’s guys like Paul Ryan who do the hard work of making it happen.'”

-- from today's Borowitz Report

"'The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons. ... Republicans: The No. 1 reason the rest of the world thinks we're deaf, dumb, and dangerous."

-- Garrison Keillor, from "We're Not
in Lake Wobegon Anymore"

by Ken

My friend Paul circulated the above, and while it sort of rang a bell, I didn't have any reason to think it was anything but Garrison K nailing it once again. In fact, he explained, it was written in 2004, and appeared in adapted excerpt from his book that was published as "We're Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore," in which he pondered the question "How did the Party of Lincoln and Liberty transmogrify into the party of Newt Gingrich’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk?"

Some of the ellipsized matter would have given the piece's age away. Here's the full paragraph:

The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk. Republicans: The No.1 reason the rest of the world thinks we’re deaf, dumb and dangerous.

That is some kind of writing, and even if you read the piece way back when, I think you'll be exhilarated reading it again.

I don't suppose Garrison would have encouraged to think that the passage of seven years would make things much better, but I wonder whether even he would have expected them to get this much worse. In the interim the Greed & Selfishness Republican pulled the plug on the economy ("Just 'Cause We Can!!!"), managing magically to further enrich the superrich proprietors of the Greed &Selfishness Movement. And the American public, thanks to those decades of carefully engineered under- and mis-education, joyfully embraced the role of Rich People's Stooges under the guise of teabaggish "fiscal prudence." They've even anointed their own intelleckchul profit, the halfwit Paul Ryan.

Of course none of the Magnates of Greed & Selfishness have the slightest interest in fiscal prudence. Their only concern is pushing our already staggering level of income equality to ever-higher heights. All in all, what we have is much less a Debt Crisis than a Truth Crisis, now that the Economic Inequalizers have broken completely from any obligation to truth or reality. This calls for further discussion, but not today. For tonight we turn the floor over once again to the man with his finger on the funnybone of Ryanomics is Andy Borowitz.

Republicans Propose Replacing Social Security with Groupons
Plan Would Offer Deep Discounts for Cat Food, Surgery

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) – Presenting what he called a revolutionary plan to slash the nation’s mountain of debt, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) today proposed eliminating the Social Security program in its entirety and replacing it with Groupons.

“Instead of waiting each month for a check from Social Security, America’s elderly will receive valuable Groupons for everything they need, from Ramen noodles to cat food to caskets,” Mr. Ryan said in an appearance on Fox News.

Adding that Groupons would also help provide for elders’ medical needs, the congressman illustrated his point by holding up a Groupon offering 30 percent off on open-heart surgery in Cincinnati.

Moving on from Social Security, Mr. Ryan also proposed replacing Medicare with a new program in which seniors are shot at by Predator drones.

Additionally, Mr. Ryan said, in his new budget so-called “friends with benefits” would lose their benefits.

“If they’re really friends, they should be satisfied if the evening ends with a voucher,” he said.

Speaker of the House John Boehner, appearing alongside Rep. Ryan, offered these words of praise for the Wisconsin congressman: “Preachers like Harold Camping go around predicting the end of the world, but it’s guys like Paul Ryan who do the hard work of making it happen.”

The only difference between this and any actual Paul Ryan proposal is that this one contains just a whiff of . . . well, not sense, but at least reality (I mean, there really are such things as Groupons, which is more than you can say of anything that appears in the real Representative Ryan's jibber-jabber), that fearsome no man's land where no right-winger dares to tread.

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Garrison Keillor reflects on the Republican Party's convention visit to his neck of the woods

"It is a bold move on the Republicans' part -- forget about the past, it's only history, so write a new narrative and be who you want to be -- and if they succeed, I think I might declare myself a 24-year-old virgin named Lance and see what that might lead to. Paste a new face on my Facebook page, maybe become the Dauphin Louie the Thirty-Second, the rightful heir to the Throne of France . . . "

"[I]f you question [Governor Palin's] qualifications to be the leader of the free world, you are an elitist. This is a beautiful maneuver. I wish I had thought of it back in school when I was forced to subject myself to a final exam in higher algebra. I could have told Miss Mortenson, 'I am a Christian and when you gave me a D, you only showed your contempt for the Lord and for the godly hardworking people from whom I have sprung, you elitist battle ax you.'"

-- Garrison Keillor, from "George Bush with big hair" (see below)

I realize I'm a bit late passing on this piece. One nice thing about great writing, though, is that with age it tends to bloom rather than wilt. And if you think I'm going to try to edit or paraphrase or somehow synopsize Garrison Keillor, you're nuts. -- Ken


George Bush with big hair

The hustling Evangelical with ethics issues and a chip on her shoulder could be our first woman president.

By Garrison Keillor

Sep. 10, 2008 | So the Republicans have decided to run against themselves. The bums have tiptoed out the back door and circled around to the front and started yelling, "Throw the bums out!" They've been running Washington like a well-oiled machine to the point of inviting lobbyists into the back rooms to write the legislation, and now they are anti-establishment reformers dedicated to delivering us from themselves. And Mayor Giuliani is an advocate for small-town America. Bravo.

They are coming out for Small Efficient Government the very week that the feds are taking over Fannie and Freddie, those old cash cows, and in the course of a weekend 20 or 50 (or pick a number) billion go floating out the Treasury door. Hello? Do you see us out here? We are not fruit flies, we are voters, we can read and write, we didn't just fall off the coal truck.

It is a bold move on the Republicans' part -- forget about the past, it's only history, so write a new narrative and be who you want to be -- and if they succeed, I think I might declare myself a 24-year-old virgin named Lance and see what that might lead to. Paste a new face on my Facebook page, maybe become the Dauphin Louie the Thirty-Second, the rightful heir to the Throne of France, put on silk tights and pantaloons and a plumed hat and go on the sawdust circuit and sell souvenir hankies imprinted with the royal fleur-de-lis. They will cure neuralgia and gout and restore marital vigor.

Mr. McCain has decided to run as a former POW and a maverick, a maverick's maverick, rather than Mr. Bush's best friend, and that's understandable, but how can he not address the $3 trillion that got burned up in Iraq so far? It's real money, it could've paid for a lot of windmills, a high-speed rail line in Ohio, some serious R&D. The Chinese, who have avoided foreign wars for 50 years, are taking enormous leaps forward, investing in their economy, and we are falling behind. We're wasting our chances. The Republican culture of corruption in Washington hasn't helped.

And a former mayor of a town of 7,000 who hired a lobbyist to get $26 million in federal earmarks is now running against the old-boy network in Washington who gave her that money to build the teen rec center and other good things so she could keep taxes low in Wasilla. Stunning. And if you question her qualifications to be the leader of the free world, you are an elitist. This is a beautiful maneuver. I wish I had thought of it back in school when I was forced to subject myself to a final exam in higher algebra. I could have told Miss Mortenson, "I am a Christian and when you gave me a D, you only showed your contempt for the Lord and for the godly hardworking people from whom I have sprung, you elitist battle ax you."

In school, you couldn't get away with that garbage because the taxpayers know that if we don't uphold scholastic standards, we will wind up driving on badly designed bridges and go in for a tonsillectomy and come out missing our left lung, so we flunk the losers lest they gain power and hurt us, but in politics we bring forth phonies and love them to death.

I must say, it was fun having the Republicans in St. Paul and to see it all up close and firsthand. Security was, as one might expect, thin-lipped and gimlet-eyed, but once you got through it, you found the folks you went to high school with -- farm kids, jocks, the townies who ran the student council, the cheerleaders, some of the bullies -- and they are as cohesive now as they were back then, dedicated to school spirit, intolerant of outsiders, able to jump up and down and holler for something they don't actually believe. But oh Lord, what they brought forth this year. When you check the actuarial tables on a 72-year-old guy who's had three bouts with cancer, you guess you may be looking at the first woman president, a hustling Evangelical with ethics issues and a chip on her shoulder who, not counting Canada, has set foot outside the country once -- a trip to Germany, Iraq and Kuwait in 2007 to visit Alaskans in the armed service. And who listed a refueling stop in Ireland as a fourth country visited. She's like the Current Occupant but with big hair. If you want inexperience, there were better choices.

(Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion" can be heard Saturday nights on public radio stations across the country.)

© 2008 by Garrison Keillor. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc.

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[9/2/2011] Thurber Tonight: An encore presentation of "The Curb in the Sky" (continued)

"The Curb in the Sky" was first published in The New Yorker of Nov. 28, 1931, then appeared in book form in The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze (1935) and The Thurber Carnival (1945).


"Any psychiatrist will tell you that at the end of the way Charlie was going lies madness in the form of monomania. You can't live in a fantastic dream world, night in and night out and then day in and day out, and remain sane."

-- from "The Curb in the Sky"

The Curb in the Sky

(from The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze)

When Charlie Deshler announced that he was going to marry Dorothy, someone said he would lose his mind posthaste. "No," said a wit who knew them both, "post hoc." Dorothy had begun, when she was quite young, to finish sentences for people. Sometimes she finished them wrongly, which annoyed the person who was speaking, and sometimes she finished them correctly, which annoyed the speaker even more.

"When William Howard Taft was -- " some guest in Dorothy's family's home would begin.

"President!" Dorothy would pipe up. The speaker may have meant to say "President" or he may have meant to say "young," or "Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States." In any case, he would shortly put on his hat and go home. Like most parents, Dorothy's parents did not seem to be conscious that her mannerism was a nuisance. Very likely they thought that it was cute, or even bright. It is even probable that when Dorothy's mother first said "Come, Dorothy, eat your -- " and Dorothy said "Spinach, dear," the former telephoned Dorothy's father at the office and told him about it, and he told everybody he met that day about it -- and the next day and the day after.

When Dorothy grew up she became quite pretty and so even more of a menace. Gentlemen became attracted to her and then attached to her. Emotionally she stirred them, but mentally she soon began to wear them down. Even in her late teens she began correcting their English. "Not 'was,' Arthur," she would say, "'were.' 'Were prepared.' See?" Most of her admirers tolerated this habit because of their interest in her lovely person, but as time went on and her interest in them remained more instructive than sentimental, they slowly drifted away to less captious, if dumber, girls.

Charlie Deshler, however, was an impetuous man, of the sweep-them-off-their-feet persuasion, and he became engaged to Dorothy so quickly and married her in so short a time that, being deaf to the warnings of friends, whose concern he regarded as mere jealousy, he really didn't know anything about Dorothy except that she was pretty and bright-eyed and (to him) desirable.

Dorothy as a wife came, of course, into her great flowering: she took to correcting Charlie's stories. He had travelled widely and experienced greatly and was a truly excellent raconteur. Dorothy was, during their courtship, genuinely interested in him and in his stories, and since she had never shared any of the adventures he told about, she could not know when he made mistakes in time or in place or in identities. Beyond suggesting a change here and there in the number of a verb, she more or less let him alone. Charlie spoke rather good English, anyway -- he knew when to say "were" and when to say "was" after "if" -- and this was another reason he didn't find Dorothy out.

* * *

I didn't call on them for quite a while after they were married, because I liked Charlie and I knew I would feel low if I saw him coming out of the anesthetic of her charms and beginning to feel the first pains of reality. When I did finally call, conditions were, of course, all that I had feared. Charlie began to tell, at dinner, about a motor trip the two had made to this town and that -- I never found out for sure what towns, because Dorothy denied almost everything that Charlie said. "The next day," he would say, "we got an early start and drove two hundred miles to Fairview -- "

"Well," Dorothy would say, "I wouldn't call it early. It wasn't as early as the first day we set out, when we got up about seven. And we only drove a hundred and eighty miles, because I remember looking at that mileage thing when we started."

"Anyway, when we got to Fairview -- " Charlie would go on. But Dorothy would stop him. "Was it Fairview that day, darling?" she would ask. Dorothy often interrupted Charlie by asking him if he were right, instead of telling him that he was wrong, but it amounted to the same thing, for if he would reply: "Yes, I'm sure it was Fairview," she would say: "But it wasn't, darling," and then go on with the story herself. (She called everybody that she differed from "darling.")

Once or twice, when I called on them or they called on me, Dorothy would let Charlie get almost to the climax of some interesting account of a happening and then, like a tackler from behind, throw him just as he was about to cross the goal-line. There is nothing in life more shocking to the nerves and to the mind than this. Some husbands will sit back amiably -- almost, it seems, proudly -- when their wives interrupt, and let them go on with the story, but these are beaten husbands. Charlie did not become beaten. But his wife's tackles knocked the wind out of him, and he began to realize that he would have to do something. What he did was rather ingenious. At the end of the second year of their marriage, when you visited the Deshlers, Charlie would begin some outlandish story about a dream he had had, knowing that Dorothy could not correct him on his own dreams. They became the only life he had that was his own.

"I thought I was running an airplane," he would say, "made out of telephone wires and pieces of old leather. I was trying to make it fly to the moon, taking off from my bedroom. About halfway up to the moon, however, a man who looked like Santa Claus, only he was dressed in the uniform of a customs officer, waved at me to stop -- he was in a plane made of telephone wires, too. So I pulled over to a cloud. 'Here,' he said to me, 'you can't go to the moon, if you are the man who invented these wedding cookies.' Then he showed me a cookie made in the shape of a man and woman being married -- little images of a man and a woman and a minister, made of dough and fastened firmly to a round, crisp cookie base." So he would go on.

Any psychiatrist will tell you that at the end of the way Charlie was going lies madness in the form of monomania. You can't live in a fantastic dream world, night in and night out and then day in and day out, and remain sane. The substance began to die slowly out of Charlie's life, and he began to live entirely in shadow. And since monomania of this sort is likely to lead in the end to the reiteration of one particular story, Charlie's invention began to grow thin and he eventually took to telling, over and over again, the first dream he had ever described -- the story of his curious flight toward the moon in an airplane made of telephone wires. It was extremely painful. It saddened us all.

After a month or two, Charlie finally had to be sent to an asylum. I was out of town when they took him away, but Joe Fultz, who went with him, wrote me about it. "He seemed to like it up here right away," Joe wrote. "He's calmer and his eyes look better." (Charlie had developed a wild, hunted look.) "Of course," concluded Joe, "he's finally got away from that woman."

* * *

It was a couple of weeks later that I drove up to the asylum to see Charlie. He was lying on a cot on a big screened-in porch, looking wan and thin. Dorothy was sitting on a chair beside his bed, bright-eyed and eager. I was somehow surprised to see her there, having figured that Charlie had, at least, won sanctuary from his wife. He looked quite mad. He began at once to tell me the story of his trip to the moon. He got to the part where the man who looked like Santa Claus waved at him to stop. "He was in a plane made of telephone wires, too," said Charlie. "So I pulled over to a curb -- "

"No. You pulled over to a cloud," said Dorothy. "There aren't any curbs in the sky. There couldn't be. You pulled over to a cloud."

Charlie sighed and turned slightly in his bed and looked at me. Dorothy looked at me, too, with her pretty smile.

"He always gets that story wrong," she said.

* * *

TOMORROW'S SUNDAY CLASSICS PREVIEW: Squeezing the piano out of a Brahms piano quartet

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