Ridiculous Headline of the Week

From the New York Times:

DeSantis Says He Would Pass a Bill to ‘Supersede’ Obamacare

I'm not even bothering with a link, just as I didn't bother clicking on the headline. I wouldn't have been able to read it, and in this case the headline is the story.

I hope I don't have to tell you what's wrong with it. Was it written by an intern who never had a civics class? Who knows?

There's a serious matter behind this, though. Far too many Americans have no real idea of how our system works, still less how it's meant to work, and don't really care. They think they are ruled by one person--whoever has the presidency--and the idea doesn't bother them. They don't want self-government. They want to be ruled by a benevolent despot who will take care of them. I cringe every time I hear someone say "Obama gave us" or "Trump gave us" or "Biden gave us" some desirable thing, frequently one over which the president has little or no control. 

I wrote about this at some length a year and a half or so ago.

Andrew Marvell and That Chariot

Douglas Murray, in his weekly poetry column at The Free Press, pays tribute to the most famous poem of Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress." (I was told long ago that his name is pronounced "marVELL," rhyming with "bell.")

I should say "deservedly famous." The poem is a standard anthology piece, and until yesterday I don't think I had read the whole thing since I was in college. But it occupies more space in my mind than that would suggest, partly because it occupies more space in literary culture. Eliot alluded to it in "The Waste Land":

But at my back from time to time I hear
The sound of horns and motors....

I can think of several other references, including a well-known poem by Archibald MacLeish, "You, Andrew Marvell."

And partly, in recent years, because I'm haunted by the couplet which Eliot is echoing:

But at my back I always hear
Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near....

As a friend of mine who's around my age said not long ago "Time's wingèd chariot is idling in my driveway."

It seems to be a well-known fact of psychology if not of physics that the velocity of time's passage increases in inverse proportion to its remaining quantity. Almost as big a mystery is this question: Knowing that time is passing more swiftly, and that I don't have all that much of it left, why--why why why?--do I continue to waste as much of it as I do? 

"Pagliacci" Rhymes With "Scratchy"

I guess I've heard this a dozen times or so, and it's still funny.