A Methodist church near my Pennsylvania cottage is having one of its regular spaghetti dinners. I have never gone. I have assumed that in this tiny Poconos town, the meal will consist of overboiled pasta covered in Hunt’s tomato sauce with chopped-up cocktail franks and topped with “parmesan” from a reclosable bag. I don’t imagine that rural Methodists do anything like the Sunday gravy of my Italian friends. I could be wrong; the good ladies of the greater community often come up with some sumptuous spreads after local events that I have attended.
The New York Times anointed The Bee Sting by Paul Murray as one of the best novels of 2023. Perhaps that is why I pulled it from the library shelves despite its heft. I noted the blurb on the back from Gary Shteyngart, who said the book was a “hilarious whirlwind.” Shteyngart, a writer whom I admire, has written stuff that made me laugh out loud. The Bee Sting, on the other hand, is the saga of an Irish family that falls into economic distress from the recession of 2008. It may be a remarkable book, but hilarity is not one of the attributes I would ascribe to it. I read its almost 650 pages with but a slight smile on occasion and certainly without a laugh.
Perhaps I just don’t understand hilarity. After all, The Bear, the FX show that I watch streaming on Hulu, is frequently listed as a comedy. I don’t get that. On occasion I smile during it, but more often I feel tension as I watch. The Bear is marvelous, but it is not a comedy.
A friend referred to a couple who had “been married for forty fucking years.” I thought that they may have been husband and wife for four decades, but I doubted that they were married for forty fucking years.
JD Vance has said that if he had been Vice-President on January 6, 2020, he would not have certified the results of the electoral college. For your discussion group: Under what circumstances should Vice President Kamala Harris refuse to certify election results in January 2024?
An astute observer said: “A conservative is one who wants the rules enforced so no one can take his pile the way he got it.”
We learned this year that Presidents have absolute immunity for some official presidential acts and presumptive immunity for the rest. For your discussion group: If you were Biden, what acts would you be emboldened to take because of the Supreme Court’s immunity decision?
