Don't Let Your Deal Go Down

olympics.com

I am fond of facts, even ones I don’t fully comprehend, such as the fact that curling stones are made from a heavy form of granite from magma expelled by an ancient volcano on an uninhabited island off the coast of Scotland, this stone and this stone alone is what curlers slide down the ice as the sweepers run alongside sweeping. I read this in the Fake News but it has the ring of truth and if you can prove otherwise, I will buy you all the haggis your heart desires.

The mind is flighty, easily distracted and this is why, as I scroll down the Fake News from the New York Times on my cellphone, every few inches there’s an ad for American Express to remind me that they’re not about abstract expressionism or overnight mail or nonstop bus service but they do credit cards, okay? Get that?

It’s why our Leader needs to come up with a Major News Story every other day, because the citizenry is not focused on him entirely but is distracted by interesting facts such as
that the entrepreneur Gordon Bowker who founded Starbucks was a fan of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and so named the company for the first mate of the Pequod,which went in search of the great whale. But before settling on that name, he seriously considered naming it Pequod. Mr. Bowker is now a multibillionaire but if he’d put out a coffee with the word pee in the name, I’m not sure he’d be a thousandaire today. Americans take their coffee seriously; we don’t drink joke coffee.

So the Leader got a banner headline in the Times for ranting at the six Justices for voting against his sweeping tariff assessments, calling them “unpatriotic” and “disloyal” as if their oaths were to him personally, not the Constitution. He said he was ashamed of the three conservatives who voted against him. It reminded me of the odd fact I read, that fans of losing football teams may experience a 20% drop in testosterone. I imagined Melania putting an arm around him to comfort him and the Leader saying, “I’m really tired tonight, okay? I’d rather be by myself for a while.”

In the high school I graduated from, history was not taught seriously, it was assigned to basketball coaches, substitute teachers, anyone available. And they didn’t need to know much, just read the textbook and keep a chapter ahead of the class. It was a patriotic version of history, so all presidents were noble and every war was just, even World War I in which ten million soldiers died for the pompous arrogance of rulers along with twelve million civilians in a war that accomplished nothing except set the stage for World War II. We took a lighthearted view of WWI as if it were a season of football, men in plumed helmets on horseback charging into massed artillery.

Earthly cares weigh heavily on our shoulders and it’s a shame what happened to that arts center in D.C. — what’s its name? And the enormous mausoleum soon to be constructed by the White House. And who’s going to pick the grapes and slaughter the chickens if we deport the people doing it now? We’re going through a strange phase of our history, government by whimsical impulse, changing weekly, as the Exec looks for new amusements, where a pro wrestling exec is now Secretary of Education and an anti-vaxxer is Secretary of Health. Satire has taken over the federal government. Check out the Dude’s speech at the National Prayer Breakfast. Who is writing this show?

And then I’m distracted trying to think of the words to an old song and I google Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers and listen to them sing, “Don’t let your deal go down till your last gold dollar is gone” and I’m in somebody’s backyard in southeast Minneapolis in 1962 with a bunch of folkies and we’re all singing, little kids are tearing around, there’s a case of beer in a washtub of ice.

Speaking of ice, why is curling an Olympic sport? Sliding a rock on ice? I mean, really. Why not snow shoveling? Making angels in the snow? But enough about that. I saw my doctor last week and he said I look great and I am taking that as a fact. The man has an M.D. degree. Not an M.A., an M.D. I checked.

Garrison Keillor © 02.23.26