Mr. Barasso Goes to Washington

Have you too noticed that things are no longer funny enough to be laughed about?

Laughter as we once knew it has disappeared. Laughter now is laughter that's uncertain of its future, laughter that sounds like it won't last, isn't sure that what it's laughing about is a comedy or a tragedy. 

Things are now amusing in the way things that are sad or disastrous or even deadly may be amusing to intelligent, sensitive people, if any of these people still exist, and I assume they do, knowing several of them personally. 

Re-reading interviews with the late Marcel Duchamp* I'm amused by how many times Duchamp, a Frenchman who lived through WW1 and WW2, uses the words, amuse, amused, amusement. With all due respect to Duchamp and his preoccupation with amusement, I find it difficult to find anything amusing regarding present political circumstances, nor can I remember the last time I had a really good laugh without thinking about what I was laughing about.

In the Duchampian universe in which people of all races, creeds, and colors now operate, to be amused is to either maintain a detachment from the present state of things, while admitting its ugliness contains certain things to be considered, or an effort to establish some sort of cosmic equilbrium that acknowledges the present is more or less a repeat of the past.

Regarding climate change: it's giving poets much impetus for elegy.

It can't be too long before pigeons are placed on the endangered species list.

Senator Mitch McConnell will make the announcement, surrounded by his braintrust of US Senators. One of them goes by the name of John Barasso, a junior Senator from Wyoming who's just come out against tax credits for owners of electric cars.

*Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, Pierre Cabanne, Da Capo, 1987.