One day while I was wrestling myself into a more comfortable position in my reclining chair, I had some thoughts about the apocalypse. This happens all the time.
You may remember that it all begins with the rapture, when all the good folk are swooped up into Paradise, leaving the wretched refuse behind on earth to sort things out. Doesn’t sound like a good deal for many of us, myself included.
Now along comes Mr. Cluck, the eminent Bible scholar and Scripture salesman who is BFF to all conservative Christians as long as they are properly obeisant. To him, that is. He has amassed a large flock of people who fervently believe that he will save them from accidentally becoming what they fear most in life, being thought of as “woke.”
And I thought … what if we could somehow adjust the parameters of the rapture just the teensiest bit? If we could arrange that all those who voted for Cluck would be the ones inhaled and transported to Paradise or Limbo or wherever they are supposed to end up?
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I thought to myself, if that happened this country could then undergo some changes. So I started a list.
- A very large number of billionaires would be gone. These folks really don’t make much of a positive contribution to America but they do have the habit of moving large chunks of money around which disrupts and sometimes ruins the lives of ordinary people. We’d not miss the chaos.
- The loony-bin section of the gun owners of America would be suddenly absent, and perhaps we could at long last get something done in the area of firearms limitation to make all of our lives safer.
- With the population suddenly cut by 40%, our national housing shortage would cease to exist.
- Say goodbye to long lines at the DMV.
- You could get a good campsite anywhere in the country with no problem, even without a reservation.
- Fox News would dry up overnight as its customer base sailed away into the raptosphere. The network’s collection of gratingly inane voices would be blessedly absent from waiting rooms all over town.
- Dialogues dealing with racism, climate change, gender equity (and many other topics) would no longer be thought controversial but instead as useful exercises in moving toward a more equitable and sustainable future for those who were left behind.
- The Fascist population of the US would be reduced immediately to zero.
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Well, another year has passed and I am still not making my own lefse. For those of you who aren’t sure what lefse is, it’s a particular sort of soft flatbread that Scandinavians of all types use to fill with anything in sight. Butter and sugar, mashed potatoes, leftover turkey stuffing … if it can be bent or squished, it can be rolled up into a piece of lefse. Think Norwegian burrito.
For a boy with Norwegian heritage, this inactivity is something akin to a mortal sin against the motherland. (It’s basically a given that I will never be allowed to enter Valhalla). Every December I think: Hey, I need to get one of those sets of lefse-making tools and get started. And then I go to the websites and find that today’s best price for a set is $222.51. And it is highly unlikely that it will arrive in time for the holidays.
So each year I decide to put off buying one until the following summer thinking that then I’ll have lots of time to practice before December rolls around. And each year I forget to do it.
It’s one of my longest-running holiday rituals.
So don’t expect anything from yours truly, but if someone more reliable offers you a piece of lefse to try you should accept it gratefully. There are commercial varieties occasionally available, but they retail for about a hundred dollars a pound, and although this stuff is tasty, nothing is that good.
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From The New Yorker
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We have a new group of birds in the berm this morning. Now that our latest snowfall has melted away there are a handful of juncos picking up what’s been scattered on the ground.
They’re humble little creatures, quite happy to eat what falls from the plates of more fastidious birds. There is apparently no 5-second rule in junco-land. No matter how long a delectable has been down there it’s still fair game.
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A coward comes from behind, an armed man against an unarmed one, and kills him. The victim was the CEO of a health insurance company. The perpetrator has labeled the discarded cartridge cases to try to put a face of protest on his crime. But it is murder. There is no justification for such a crime.
The shooter has not been located or identified as yet, but there are presumptions being made that he felt wronged by the company and pursued his resentments to an extreme. Again, no justification. We can hope that the criminal will soon be apprehended.
On another hand entirely, health insurance is an industry whose members I have long believed should be forced by law to fly this banner, so as to reflect their true nature.
Anyone who has enough dealings with health insurers will eventually find themselves tearing the hair from their head and rending their garments. In my own contretemps with them it never occurred to me to shoot the s.o.b. on the other end of the phone conversation, but if they had been nearer to hand I might have pinched them good and hard.
We buy these policies to try to avoid bankruptcy when and if a major illness comes along. And at those times we too often find that instead of the insurance company supporting us, it backs quickly out of the room, salaaming as it leaves, all the while exclaiming “Not our problem.”
I can recommend an article in today’s New Yorker: What the death of a health-insurance C.E.O. means to America.
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Little Home In The Valley 