Laughing It Up
While I was just in NYC (actually more in Connecticut than NYC), I had the opportunity to have breakfast with my old friend Roger Baumann. Roger is just about the sweetest guy I know. It’s not just me that feels this way, Kim says the same thing about him all the time too. The only person as sweet as Roger is his lovely wife Julie, but I don’t get to see her as often as I see Roger. The notable thing about my breakfast with Roger, besides the somber occasion of our meeting around the memorial services for our mutual friend, is that Roger and I had a good belly laugh about some stories involving a few other mutual friends who were not in attendance. This was less about being snide and making fun of people and more like telling funny stories from our shared past and putting what might otherwise be serious issues into a different light that put a humorous perspective on it all. These are very therapeutic moments and I’m sure we are not the only ones to enjoy such therapy. I’m sure someone somewhere is telling a story at my or Roger’s expense and having their own belly laugh at some foibles that we committed in some past life. The point is, that as Art Linkletter used to say, laughter really is the best medicine and it is a fine curative for whatever ails you. You just feel good after a good laugh.
Roger and I had last seen one another in December when we had also met for breakfast, except that time it was with our recently departed friend, Greg and our other Musketeer, Larry. On that occasion the four of us laughed so hard and long for three hours that the other people at the midtown eatery started to wonder what was wrong with us. What was wrong was that we were having a good time in a world where there are too few good belly laughs available. I speak of that day often and it stands out as one of those wonderful moments in life when your heart is lifted onto another plane.
I can remember another one of those days almost thirty years ago. I was in Bermuda with a gang of my guys from BT Bank of Canada. That gang was a team of derivative traders and we were at a global derivatives offsite. While I had previously run global derivatives, I was enjoying a corporate “time-out” at Gulag Toronto and since crying about it would not help, I chose to laugh about it as much as possible. The guy who helped me laugh about it the most was my pal Michael who is an irreverent Welshman with a great sense of humor. Michael has always been one of my best friends for exactly this reason, he is a relentless hedonist with a permanent mischievous grin on his face. He and some of the guys wanted to get their scuba certification while in Bermuda, but they also wanted to drink wildly every night. I was the mother hen (I was already certified) telling them that booze and diving did not mix. They tried to heed my warning, but eventually tossed caution to the wind. The laughing came in on two accounts, one at each of our expenses. Michael learned that you can vomit through your scuba regulator as they had been told by the instructor, but he hadn’t realized just how many fish that would attract as the instructor would ponder on the boat afterwards (he hadn’t seen the vomiting part and had passed all the students with flying colors). The other was about me getting out of the water because the salinity was causing my lips to chap. Michael and the guys developed a special scuba emergency hand signal wherein one rubs one’s finger across one’s lip in distress. That was good for several years of laughs.
It’s hard to manufacture those laughable moments and its not entirely clear what ingredients are necessary for them, but when they happen they are priceless, as the Mastercard ad might say. One can almost lose control of oneself in the right circumstances and rolling on the floor is not out of the question at those times. I only wish they were more common because they are so very good feeling.
There is a different kind of laughing that comes to mind as well. It is that nervous laughing that is generated by something that should be funny, but is simply too ominous to be entirely funny. I had one of those moments just today. I was reading my daily version of the Washington Post’s midday Post Most and there was a piece entitled Six Drastic Plans Trump Is Already Promising for a Second Term. This could almost be the headline of a story in The Onion since it verges on the absurd with all the criminal and civil entanglements that stand between Donald Trump and another run for the presidency. The six are worth laying out, just to show how laughable the man is in his simplistic and strictly power-motivated view of the world.
The first is that he wants to solve the country’s drug problem by instituting a strict policy of executing drug dealers. The man is such an innate bully that his mind automatically runs to capital punishment as a solution to scare the country straight out of its drug program. Brilliant….and more than somewhat laughable. The second great proposal is to move all homeless people to massive tent cities outside of the major metropolitan areas. To begin with, he estimates homelessness of far greater proportions than any agencies or statistics indicate. Secondly, he has no plan as to where to go with the problem after he has everyone in these elaborate tent Hoovervilles. Typically hilarious Trump proposal, solving a problem that doesn’t exist as he pretends it does (or at least not to that scale) with a half-assed unfinished solution.
His third idea is right out of the Hitler playbook. He wants to form a federal police force to combat what he views as crimes, unrest and protest. We could call this the Anti-Antifa, but since Antifa means “against fascism” and since two negatives equal a positive, that would make this new force, which would presumably be juxtaposed against his famous Space Force, as the Schutzstaffel, or more commonly known in Nazi Germany as the SS. What a truly democratic and enlightened solution to the country’s growing culture of violence.
We all know that Trump’s fourth plan is to strip job protection from a vast swath of the Federal Bureaucracy. This makes perfect sense since it would raise the number of Trump-appointed positions in the government from about 4,000 in a normal election cycle to about 45,000. As we know, trump had such an easy time finding loyalists of high quality to staff his positions (Not) last time, this is another brilliant idea. It solves the disloyalty, deep state and swamp-draining problem in one fell swoop so long as you don’t care that the United States government, the most powerful governance organization in the world and of all time, will simply not be functional under those conditions.
He then wants to eliminate the Education Department (started in 1979) presumably for the same reason that we find it effective to put our fingers in our ears and make random noises to keep from hearing things we don’t want to hear. If you can’t stop progressive thinking, it seems wise to forbid thinking altogether.
And last, but not least, he wants voting to revert to a one-day event with all paper ballots executed in person. Technology be damned. Absentee balloting be damned. Voting by mail be double damned.
I find myself laughing it up, quite nervously I must add, as I contemplate the next two years of more and more of these humorous proposals. I long for the days when I can return to laughter as the best medicine rather than the psychotropic drug that Donald Trump must be taking every morning before he starts texting on Truth Social.