Betsy Robinson

 

 

On walkers and canes they shuffled, in wheelchairs pushed by their children and grandchildren they rode, flanking a multitude of Boomers who'd made a lifestyle of youth and piloted the protesters on motorized scooters. "People get ready . . ." sang the young people who had used their smart phones to organize the buses and convoys. From all over the country they flooded the streets of DC, finally so tightly packed against the reinforced spear-topped White House fences that the old people crashed through.

 

But neither broken hips nor the Orange Man brigades could quell the swell of outraged pensioners at a missed payment of their hard-earned Social Security.

 

They hobbled, they limped, they slow-motion surged from the Ellipse onto the White House lawn and into the Kennedy Rose Garden which no longer had flowers since the woman the Orange Man doesn't sleep with replaced them with concrete. They filled the East Lawn, the West Lawn, and the South Lawn, where several elderly women were heard to exclaim, "I found a rotten Easter egg."

 

"I don't suppose we could eat them," replied another, miffed at the cost of her breakfast since the inauguration.

 

David Hogg, the new vice chair of the Democratic National Committee and former Parkland School gun control activist, rolled his meemaw to the quickly erected podium and lowered the microphone to her chin.

 

"I have one thing to say," she bellowed over the electronic squeal.

 

"All right, all right there, young lady," came a gruff but hopeful voice over an invisible sound system.

 

"Bernie Sanders!" laughed David Hogg's meemaw. "Take it away, Bernie!"

 

And as David carefully rolled his grandmother down the portable ramp that had been hastily but expertly invented for quick assembly by a gaggle of MIT students who understood the future and wanted to do their part, Bernie took the stage.

 

"Welcome! Welcome to everyone! We are the richest country in the world. You have all worked hard for your retirement income! And finally, finally, it seems we have an issue that brings us all together.

 

"Just for a moment here, let's hear from you. Tell us where you came from, and if you don't mind, your political affiliation.

 

"You there, yes you in the lovely blue muumuu with the nice pageboy hairdo—reminds me of my mom in Brooklyn, always did her hair nice. Yes, tell us, where are you from and anything else you care to share."

 

"My name's Estelle. I'm from Michigan, and I voted for Trump—"

 

As the boos erupted, Bernie raised his hands like Moses. "Everybody, everybody is welcome here. Excuse me, excuse me one moment, Estelle, I think we need to establish our commonality." And instantly a respectful calm was restored.

 

"It is a big country," continued Bernie, "and people come with all different issues. But here and now—this is a place to come together for our common good, so there will be no booing." And as a mumble of apology undulated through the crowd, "All right, Estelle, go on. Tell us what brought you."

 

"I was a librarian for 50 years—"

 

"Wonderful, wonderful," mumbled Bernie. "Never mess with librarians. Go on, Estelle."

 

"I'm ashamed of my vote. You'd think I'd have realized—"

 

All around her, old people cooed and comforted with several on either side of her caressing her arms.

 

"Thank you, thank you," whimpered Estelle, her limpid blue eyes filling with tears behind her thick lenses. "I never made a lot of money, but I never spent a lot either. I was smart, so I thought with my Social Security I'd be all right. But now— Now—" Unable to go on, she collapsed in tears.

 

"All right, all right, we understand, Estelle. We're so glad you're here. Who's next?"

 

A tall bald Black man way in the back raised his hand, and Bernie shouted for him to speak.

 

"I'm from Tennessee and I only voted for Trump because of RFK, Jr., but now I realize that a guy with an oil and gas family trust fund don't know nothing about living on Social Security. I heard he mixed it up with anti-social obscurity due to malnutrition and food deserts."

 

"Yes! Yes!" bellowed the crowd.

 

"Next," said Bernie, pointing. "You there in the wheelchair with the oxygen tank. Can we get some help here? Somebody hand her a microphone."

 

"Thank you, thank you," gasped the woman. "I appreciate— I've got COPD—"

 

"Take your time, take your time, dear," comforted Bernie. "We're here for the long haul. Give her some space, people."

 

The woman coughed, cleared her throat, and then spoke in a voice that belied her medical appliances: "My name is Maria. I'm a Mexican American, a citizen of this country for 60 years, and I'm living in a nursing home in Southern California—"

 

"Bless you," mumbled Bernie.

 

"Bless you, bless you," echoed the crowd.

 

"I thought the wildfires would do me in, but thank God they didn't touch us."

 

"Thank God," said Bernie.

 

"Thank God, thank God," echoed the crowd.

 

"I'm so glad you made it," said Bernie soberly. "What brings you here today, Maria?"

 

"Well, this may sound silly—"

 

"Nothing is silly," said Bernie. "Take your time. Tell us."

 

"Well, I was brought up to believe the Golden Rule. All my life I tried to do the right thing. I paid my taxes, helped my neighbors, and volunteered at my children's school. Two of them served in the military and died in Iraq."

 

"I'm so sorry," said Bernie. "Thank you for their service."

 

"Thank you, thank you," echoed the crowd.

 

"And the other one, well he died of AIDS in 1982."

 

"Aw, gee," said Bernie, wiping his brow and shaking his head with sorrow, and a wave of sympathy rolled through the assembly.

 

"I was about as mad as a mother can be at Reagan for never even mentioning the crisis. But at least he didn't try to make it worse.

 

"But this—" she gestured toward the White House, "This is much worse. I'm a Christian, and like I said, I believe in the Golden Rule, but also there's the 'eye for an eye,' which the Orange Man said is his favorite Bible passage. So I think it's time we did unto this regime as they have done unto us."

 

A murmur of confused delight began to reverberate across the White House lawn, spreading quickly back to Pennsylvania Avenue, then to 17th and 15th Streets on the west and east and as far as H Street and Constitution Avenue on the north and south as Maria's voice resounded through the sound system.

 

"What are you saying, Maria?" queried Bernie, a slight smile twitching at the corners of his mouth.

 

"Shut them down!" boomed Maria in a voice that came from a place beyond her oxygen-deprived lungs. "No tax payments, no food deliveries, I call on all White House service personnel to walk out now! No cleaning people, no butlers, no maids. Walk out! Walk out!"

 

And miraculously, an explosion of uniformed workers—cooks in aprons, chauffeurs in hats, doormen, even many office workers in business clothes—hearing Maria's cry, exploded out of the White House.

 

"No traffic, no commerce, no communication! Many of us are already sitting, so we don't even have to move."

 

"You mean …?" said Bernie, now with a full-face grin.

 

"Yes!" declared Maria. "A sit-in. Nobody move for as long as it takes. My grandson, Jesus, brought me here, and he and his friends from colleges around the country brought tents and supplies—"

 

And as if ascending out of an ocean, battalions of young men and women rose with backpacks and duffle bags bursting with food, medications, books and magazines, and even solar-powered appliances for cooking, entertainment, and medical sterilization.

 

And as the 70 million pensioners and their supporters heaved themselves to the ground, at a window somewhere in the White House private residence, a big bloated blob of a man with tiny hands and a decompensating brain, peeked out the window and muttered, "Wow, what a crowd size. They love me. They really really love me."

 

 

 

Full disclosure: I believe I am semi-intimately related to Mr. Dave Barry even though we've never met or enjoyed carnal knowledge. At only 9% into an advance e-copy of Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass—How I Went 77 Years without Growing Up (pub. date, May 13, 2025), I was so delighted, entertained, and aroused that I prematurely ejaculated on Facebook:

 

Dave grew up in the 1950s in Armonk … just a hop, skip and a jump from where I was growing up in Briarcliff Manor.

 

His parents were married the same date as mine were. They were both smart and funny like mine. His father became an alcoholic but recovered. Mine didn't. And on and on and on.

 

I don't know whether to be jealous or in awe that I'm seeing a kind of parallel life in an alternate reality if only my family had been sane, nonviolent, and Presbyterian.

 

But it turns out that's where our parallel existences diverged.

 

Although Barry claimed to have been aimless after leaving college, flitting from bookkeeping to a local paper to misery at the Associated Press to teaching writing to business people, from my point of view as a writer who's slogged through publishing mud for more than 40 years, he was a goddam bird dog—zeroing in on Gene Weingarten (another writer who makes me guffaw) at the Miami Herald's Sunday magazine, Tropic … which is where this book became my personal hilarious writer's tutorial.

 

Lessons from Dave Barry: To do a successful humor column, it is critical to care nothing about the truth of your subject, what your subject is, or basically anything. Sometimes the stupider the questions, the more entertaining the column. Hence, my imagined interview with Dave Barry about his new memoir:

 

BETSY: Why class clown? For goodness sake, you were only in school for 12 of your 77 years (well maybe 16 if you count college, but by then you seemed to have outgrown clowning for clowning's sake). So isn't it kind of disingenuous to qualify your life by 1/6.416666666 of its duration? Speaking of which, what do you think of clowns? In my experience, they are often sad and depressed and they make lousy dates.

 

DAVE: Aw gee, I never dated a clown, Betsy. I'm sorry you had such traumatic experiences. We only picked that title because everybody in the focus group voted for the cover with six-year-old me in a party hat. I do look pretty cute, despite the buzz cut my father insisted on giving me, but he was probably drunk when he did it, or in the middle of writing a sermon—did you like the parts about my dad?

 

BETSY: Very much, Dave. Your dad seems like a swell guy, the way he helped so many people and took you, with his camp group, to the march in Washington, DC, to hear Martin Luther King, Jr. speak. (BTW, nice historical significance, giving the memoir the obligatory gravitas required for a Pulitzer. Smart move.*) Speaking of which, you said you didn't realize at the time that you were witnessing history. What were you doing standing there in the crowd in front of the Lincoln Memorial?

 

DAVE: To be honest, Betsy, my mom had insisted I wear laced shoes, and one of the staffers in my Camp Sharparoon inner city kids group thought it'd be a great joke to tie them together. So I spent a lot of the speech trying not to faint from the heat or fall down because we were packed so tight I couldn't bend over to untie them. But I've heard the speech on video many times—thank goodness for YouTube—and, like I said, it's mind-expanding.

 

BETSY: Speaking of almost dying, (I know we weren't but you seem okay with leaps of nonlogic), one of my favorite of your millions of quoted parts in the book (Great recycling! More leisure time to practice your broom and lawnmower marching skills and think about what to eat for dinner!) was your interview with Bob Graham, the then governor of Florida. And speaking of almost drowning in a harmonica accident (readers, you'll have to buy and maybe read the book to understand that—You're welcome, Dave!), have you ever played harmonica? I know you spent and spend a lot of time in a band—currently with a lot of famous writers—but how do you feel about blowing into a small box?

 

DAVE: Wow, what a creative question. Well, honestly, Betsy, I long ago stopped blowing into anything because it makes me hyperventilate, and particularly if I were to do so while standing next to a pool. I really valued Bob Graham's warning and establishment of the Harmonica Safety Day (Read the book!). Who knows how many lives besides mine have been spared. Full disclosure: I still do have impulses to blow into small containers, particularly if they make funny noises.

 

BETSY: What's a mutilated verb? I've heard of mutilated body parts and your description of your colonoscopy made me laugh so hard I may have fractured one of mine. But until your book, I never heard of "mutilated verbs."

 

DAVE: Wow, you're a real word person, aren't you? Try this:

 

It is my conclusion that the explosion in your head at the mention of this mutilation is due to the failure of the relief valve in your ears and may in the future result in sentences that are just too long for their own good.

 

See what I did? Lots of verb ideas have been mutilated into nouns: "conclusion," "explosion," "failure" and maybe some other ones that you added to this totally unauthorized revision of my book. Thus you pressed some really dull verbs into service. An unmutilated way to write it is:

 

"I conclude that your head exploded because your ears are blocked."

 

BETSY: Okay … So how about farts? You talk a lot about body emissions. Any final toots?

 

DAVE: Speaking of "toots," how come they don't rhyme with "foots" which brings me to footnotes. Did you like them?

 

BETSY: About footnotes**

 

_____________

 

*I'm not being cheeky. Dave has a whole section where he makes fun of newspaper writers' obsession with winning Pulitzers, so this sentence is a bit of an homage. BTW, Dave did win a Pulitzer—I'm not making that up—so I'm sure he won't take offense if he ends up reading this after all his book tour interviews, signing autographs, and setting fire to many pairs of perfectly good underpants (Read the book!).

 

**There are lots of footnotes in this book and, in the digital edition, the way they pop up when you tap the footnote number makes the jokes on top of jokes even funnier. Way to go, Dave!

 

_____________

 

DAVE: Thanks, Betsy.

 

BETSY: My pleasure, Dave. And thanks for the free book in exchange for an honest review … which I guess this really isn't. Whoops. Well, thanks anyway, and I'll think of you whenever I have nothing else to think about.

A Facebook post reported:

 

The New York Times published a list of about 200 terms that the Trump administration reportedly prohibits or avoids. The list includes words such as activists, anti-racism, belonging, breastfeeding, climate crisis, community diversity, disability, discrimination, equality, feminism, gender, immigrants, LGBT, mental health, minorities, oppression, orientation, pregnant, racial justice, racism, sex, transgender, and victims.

 

The NYT stressed that the published list is likely incomplete, as more internal memos exist than those obtained by the newspaper.

 

(For a complete list that is free to read, see Diane Ravitch's blog.)

 

A couple of commenters thought that no matter what MAGA censors, they can't change reality, and therefore this word ban was "bonkers, stupid, and ineffective."

 

My response:

 

The ban is neither bonkers nor stupid. It is a very effective way to control what we, the people, believe. The censorship is calculated carefully to accomplish a whitewashing of communication and therefore people's mindsets. This is what dictatorships do. This is what the Nazis did. This is an endeavor that is tried and proven effective.

 

In the 1940s, my mother was one of the first female copywriters in a NYC advertising firm, and she used to say if you can get people to believe advertising, you can control what they think.

 

Not taking this stuff seriously and not understanding its effectiveness is how Democrats have been repeatedly defeated. We have a kind of arrogance that is self-sabotaging: we like to believe we think independently and therefore cannot be controlled by the language around us. But this simply is not true.

 

Cognitive linguist George Lakoff's book Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2004) became wildly popular during the rise of Trump, helping warring families bridge political gaps by teaching them how to reframe their thoughts and find common values. Following the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack in Israel, as anti-Semitic speech exploded, Lakoff wrote on Facebook:

 

"All thought is carried out by neural circuitry—it does not float in air. Language neurally activates thought. Language can thus change brains, both for the better and the worse. Hate speech changes the brains of those hated for the worse. It creates toxic stress, fear and distrust—all physical, all in one's neural circuitry active every day.

 

"This internal harm can be even more severe than an attack with a fist. It imposes on the freedom to think and therefore to act free of fear, threats, and distrust.

 

"It imposes on one's ability to think and act like a fully free citizen for a long time.

 

"Hate speech can also change the brains of those with mild prejudice, moving it towards hate and threatening action. When hate is physically in your brain, then you think hate and feel hate, you are moved to act to carry out what you physically, in your neural system, think and feel.

 

"That is why hate speech in not 'mere' speech."

 

And so it follows, if you ban, for lack of a better term, "inclusive speech"—speech that invites thoughts of equity, acceptance, and empathy—you will gradually transform the culture to be accepting of a dictatorship.

 

This stuff is serious. Wake Up!