Now look: I'm not actually saying that Obama's communication director Robert Gibbs should have hired me instead of Jon Favreau. 

Writing soaring rhetoric takes a certain type of talent, a talent similar to what it takes to bullshit one's way through a sociology term paper. Grownups can be moved by listening to such rhetoric, but I think we have a hard time keeping a straight face while writing "yes we can" two dozen times in a single speech script.

So Favreau was probably the right man for the campaign. And in gratitude and admiration, Obama named him director of White House speechwriting. But governing is different from campaigning, and now the premium is on prose more than poetry, maturity more than enthusiasm, wisdom more than spunk. 

And of all the hundreds of speechwriters I know, I'm not sure Favreau is the right guy (actually, he's the guy on the left).

Mr. Gibbs, if you agree that the lad needs some supervision, I'm reachable here at Writing Boots; I can give you lots of recommendations.

Reports indicate that the Chicago Tribune is preparing to file for bankruptcy.

The Sun-Times is probably next, and after that, what? 

The sun itself, I suppose.

For the next 10 days I'll be taking in such news from Ohio, where I'm staying with my ailing dad. It's by turns more alarming and more comforting to take in the steady stream of bad news in the company of an 85-year-old man.

Alarming: To my dad, who worked for General Motors when General Motors was GENERAL MOTORS, it's utterly earth-shattering to see the CEO begging for the company's life and readily agreeing to government oversight of every phase of the company's operations.

Comforting: He was actually around during the Depression, fought in the war that ended it and rode the quarter century of prosperity that followed. 

And while he's not sure how or whether this current situation will work itself out, he's entirely open to new ideas and ready to throw out and replace long-held notions about the very purpose and meaning of the United States of America.

His attitude seems to be: Whatever works (with the occasional crusty additional clause, "for all these damn people we've got now"). 

It's odd taking lessons in intellectual flexibility from an old man, but I'm doing it.

Every night when I was a boy, I sat and read in our living room, listening to my father writing letters. He wrote on his lap longhand, with the letter paper backed by one of his long yellow pads, and the scratch and swirl of his black Waterman pen across the page sounded like the scrabblings of a creature in the underbrush. There were no pauses or crossings out, and in time I realized that I could even identify the swash of the below-the-line "g" leaping diagonally upward into an "h" and the crossing double zag of an ensuing "t," and, soon after, the blip of a period. When he reached the bottom of the page, the sheet was turned over and smoothed down in a single, back-of-the-hand gesture, and the rush of writing and pages went on, while I waited for the final declarative "E" or "Ernest"—the loudest sound of all—that told me the letter was done. When the envelope had been addressed, licked, and sealed with a postmasterish thump of his fist, he would pluck a Lucky Strike out of its green pack and whack it violently four times against his thumbnail, like a man hammering a spike, then damply tongue the other end before lighting up. By the time the first deep drag appeared as a pale upward jet of smoke, another letter was in progress. I went back to my book. Sooner or later, the letters would be over, and he would be ready to read aloud to me. "Finished," he would announce, picking up Oliver Twist. "Now, where were we?"