As humorist and social critic H.L. Mencken wrote, “A man who can laugh, if only at himself, is never really miserable.”
As readers of this column may know, I have terminal cancer.
I admire these guys for very different reasons.
I’ve heard people say that human beings are the only creatures that know they will die.
Like Teddy Daniels, a former candidate for Pennsylvania lieutenant, who is prominently featured in a series of doomsday, deep-fake ads on Facebook and Youtube.
I could call up any large chain store in a city and talk to someone without being told to call corporate ownership on the other side of the country.
As the poet Theodore Roethke once wrote: “In a dark time the eye begins to see…”
“Learn a new language and get a new soul.”
I have said and done many things of which I am not proud. That is, I am no golden bird cheeping about human frailties from some high branch of superhuman understanding.
I have always considered it a strength, not a weakness, to consult with people with whom we vehemently disagree.
Of course there’s irony here in that LinkedIn is asking writers — who, after all, make their living by writing — to help “educate” a technology that would automate their jobs.
I can’t shake the conviction that a sense of perpetual aggrievement is one of the key components of the engine driving our national estrangement.
Like many of you, I have a wish list for the coming year.
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