This morning, as I hauled the garbage cans to the curb, a thought occurred. A once-ubiquitous phrase (or slogan) has fallen out of favor. “The number one problem in America is that we’ve become a litigious society.” I’ve never once pulled a Dick the Butcher with his “let’s kill all the lawyers,” since I know so many—some miserable, others happily sloshed from the horn of plenty—and that would classify as industry-shaming. (On a cranky day, IRS agents and Major League Baseball officials are up for grabs.) Could be hardly anyone raises the anti-lawyer black flag now because Trump hogs all the attention with his you-sue-me-and-I’ll-sue-you-back distraction (not from The Epstein Files or his redecoration of the White House, but his wimpy—and not the burger!—pass-the-buck fiddling over Ukraine and the Middle East).
I was walking outside of my office on nearly-deserted N. Charles St. the other day and the stoop was slick with water from a faulty third-floor air conditioner. My eyesight’s crummy, my gait quick but as clumsy as when I was a kid, and if a spill should’ve taken place, busting a bone or worse, I wouldn’t have even considered taking the guilty party to court, even though some kind of unenforced code must’ve been violated.
I like my neighbors: they’re friendly and have a quip at the ready when we converge. We retrieve each other’s Amazon packages from the vestibule—since random thieves roam around the immediate vicinity; don’t believe there’s no crime in Baltimore—and one of them, every other week, places a shoebox on the second stoop stair filled with “one man’s junk is another man’s treasure” books, old socks, pencils and on occasion an apple or two, with a scrawled sign that reads, “Free! Help Yourself!” The box is empty within 90 minutes. Translated: it’d prick my conscience to level proceedings, or even complain to the blessedly laid-back landlord, against the owner of that shitty air conditioner.
Likewise, while on line at the local bodega recently, an elderly fellow (lapping yours truly by a dozen years or so, which, as fate is merciless, is hard to pull off), dropped his cane on my left foot. I was wearing sneakers that were stylish 20 years ago, and the cane’s heavy tip, no protective rubber, landed on my middle toe, leaving an interior bruise and stream of blood. Was this actionable? Maybe, since it wasn’t a ham sandwich that dented my tootsie, and ripe for a misanthrope’s rubbing-his-hands glee, eager to settle the score, but not me.
The infirm senior citizen apologized immediately—the “experts” are wrong when they moan that manners have vanished in Trump’s America—and I smiled, and waved him off. He graciously offered a cigarette as a good-will gesture, which I accepted to assuage his momentary guilt, even though I was carrying a full pack of Marlboro Lights in the right pocket of my chinos.
And since I’m tooting my own horn (to the sounds of “Green Onions”)—you call it bragging, I’ll say toot, toot, and an organ riff—when I was walking our dog Billy on Monday, there was the strangest sight on a road in North Baltimore. A mammoth psychedelic red Coca-Cola truck had taken a wrong turn, and was wobbling on the narrow thoroughfare, barely missing parked cars and, less significantly, squashing plastic bags of leaves. (The latter for the environment, although isn’t the plastic contradictory? It would be a boost to the senses if people just burned the leaves like 50 years ago.) It was kind of a hazard, but I didn’t take down the license plate of the 96-wheeler, figuring the guy driving, while undoubtedly well-paid, with a union job, didn’t need grief from me piled on his already jammed Seafood Plateau of grief. Besides, Baltimore’s city government is so incompetent that if I lodged a complaint it’d probably be flagged in the wrong column and my property taxes would rise again.
I’ll sign off with a paragraph from veteran hack/journalistic nomad Andrew Sullivan about Trump… just as one more reminder that East Coast punditry ought to be, metaphorically, flattened by a Coca-Cola 96-wheeler.
In his Aug. 8th Substack entry, “The Permanent Stain,” Sullivan writes: “This very Greek tragedy—conservatives killing the Constitution they love because they hate the left more—is made more poignant by Trump’s utter cluelessness: he doesn’t even intend to end the American experiment in self-government and individual freedom. He isn’t that sophisticated. He is ending it simply because he knows no other way of being a human being.”
Every Trump action is a fucking “Greek tragedy,” that always threatens “the American experiment.” The real “tragedy,” and it’s not Greek or Shakespearean, is that tools like Sullivan, relentlessly in pursuit of that Yankee dollar, lards his Jive Talkin’ with two-cent words like “poignant” and “sophisticated” all for the approval from remaining friends in the “cheap seats” of the Beltway’s Tap-Tap-Tappers, providing them with a 30-second respite from the quandry of “Do I take the buyout?”
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023