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I did a show just before Labor Day in Annapolis, across
the bay from Baltimore, and it was good to look around at
Druid Park and Edgar Allan Poe's neighborhood, Fell's
Point — Poe, who gave us that midnight dreary and the
raven who kept saying "Nevermore," and over on Hollins
Street you can find the home of H.L. Mencken, a writer I
loved when I was a teenager for his cynical wit. Mencken
disparaged religion, education, journalism, marriage,
democracy, and patriotism.
I loved his line, "The older I grow, the more I distrust the
familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom." And "All men
are frauds. The only difference between them is that some
admit it. I myself deny it." And "The capacity of human
beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than
that of any other animal." And "I never smoked a
cigarette until I was nine."
I admired his irreverence until I was in my thirties and
through a process of crazy luck I got to do a Saturday
night radio show that lasted for forty years, in which I
carried on the radio shows of my youth, and created Guy
Noir and Dusty & Lefty and Lake Wobegon. Mencken
said, "Genius is the ability to prolong one's childhood,"
and I'm no genius but I'm still trying and when you grow
up and find work you love and the woman you adore, you
are obliged to put cynicism aside and take up gratitude
instead.
At the show in Annapolis, I told the story of my ancestor
William Cox who was a seaman on a British man-o'-war
and who was sick of life at sea, the cruelty of the officers,
the beatings, the filth and bad food and vermin, and when
the ship docked at Baltimore in 1825, he decided to jump
ship, and late one night, he snuck ashore and headed west
as fast as he could go. Desertion was a capital offense, no
judge or jury, you simply were hanged from a yardarm,
and he made it to Pennsylvania and settled there, back
before ICE was on the lookout for people like him, and
his daughter Martha Ann married David Powell, who was
my great-great-grandfather, and they headed west to
Iowa, where their son John Wesley Powell settled and
then came to Minnesota and fathered my grandma Dora.
I am now her age, and I am still trying to make her proud
of me.
After the story of Samuel Cox, I drifted into the story of
Francis Scott Key, a Baltimorean, who watched the
British bombardment of Fort McHenry in the War of
1812. The British had every right to do it, having suffered
years of attacks by American pirates operating out of
Baltimore, preying on British cargo ships, but he wrote a
heroic poem from the American point of view, and it was
put to a British tune, "The Anacreontic Song," and at
that point I hummed a note and it happened to be the
right note, and the crowd stood up and sang it with great
spirit for the great song it is, not a song of triumph but a
song about survival. Key saw the flag flying after the
bombardment ended and that gave him the poem.
What stands out about the show was the man who came
up afterward to say he enjoyed it. There was something
crisp and well-defined about him that suggested he was a
military man, and he said, yes, he had attended the Naval
Academy there in Annapolis and had a long career,
retiring with the rank of captain. He said the Academy
superintendent who was fired by the DOD was a well-
respected woman admiral and so were other high-ranking
brass who were dismissed. He said, "A sailor is trained to
follow orders but what was ordered in Iran was not
thought through at the top and what happened aboard
the carrier Abraham Lincoln was abuse of the crew.
Officers are supposed to look after the sailors because they
do the work." He said Russia is a spent force: losing to
Ukraine is like Ohio State losing to The Little Sisters of
the Poor. He said China is the nation to watch, that their
navy is larger and better equipped than ours.
He spoke in crisp sentences. His own observations. He
gave a good solid handshake. As a humorist, I don't get to
meet many military men. Mencken said, "The older I get,
the more I admire competence." That goes for me too.
Garrison Keillor is an author and radio personality. His latest book is "Cheerfulness". Buy it at a 38% discount! by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR.