Contrary to what you may think, spring is not a season; it’s just nature’s favorite way of torturing us. One day, the sky is blue, the sun is warm, all the trees are in bud, I’m drinking my morning coffee on the porch, and hope has sprung eternal. Then overnight, it all goes awry. Up in heaven, Robert Frost and his two tramps know exactly what I’m talking about:
“You know how it is with an April day when the sun is out and the wind is still, You’re one month on in the middle of May. But if you so much as dare to speak,
A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,
A wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you’re two months back in the middle of March.”
To make matters worse, tomorrow is April Fool’s Day. I thought about trying to put one over on you, but there are enough people in Washington trying to do just that, so, instead, I’ve decided to tell it like it is: the Epstein files are a complete hoax! Moreover, House Speaker Mike Johnson is a free and independent thinker, Kash Patel really was on the Olympic hockey team, Pam Bondi has been moonlighting as blind justice, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is the reincarnation of Hippocrates, J.D.Vance is a limousine liberal, and you-know-who would never manipulate the markets for his own gain and is, in fact, the front runner for next year’s Nobel Peace Prize.
I wish there were one small oat of truth in the previous paragraph, but alas, you know there isn’t. We are mired in political muck that would make Mr. Frost’s “Mudtime” look pristine. And as for his two tramps—“strangers” he calls them—I’d take either one over any of the fools currently sailing our ship of state.
Spin is a dangerous tool in the hands of a lousy carpenter. I watch Karoline Leavitt manhandle the press from behind her holier-than-thou podium and wonder how she can sleep at night. The only person more injurious to a free press is her boss, the one who calls one reporter “Piggy” and tells another “I don’t like you. You’re a terrible reporter.” This is hardly the stuff of transparency or healthy debate; this is intimidation, pure and simple. In fact, it sounds more like the death knoll of democracy.
Enough! Back to this idiosyncratic spring. Every evening, my wife and I watch the local TV prognosticators try to get the next day’s weather right. Granted, it’s a tough job; as she likes to say, “it’s the only job I know of where you can be wrong fifty percent of the time and come back to work the next day.” She’s not wrong.
All I’m asking for is a little consistency in the weather and in the news. It’s tiring to wake up every morning and wonder what atrocity has occurred overnight. If, as the pre-Bezos Washington Post once believed, “democracy dies in darkness,” then maybe we need to begin sleeping with the lights on.
As the title of this Musing indicates, spring is really more a question than a statement. I don’t know about you, but I’m ready for a gradual unfolding of vernal splendor, a chain of temperate days that make my morning cup of coffee on the porch taste like nectar.
I’ll be right back.
