10:25

Just texted a friend, “You could watch this without sound and be haunted forever by the body language alone.”

I’ve also texted tonight, “This is real, real pain.”

I’ve also sent off the Churchill quote from 1940, “If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.”

Terrified? I asked a third friend. No, fortified.

***

(Nope, can’t do it, very sorry. Good night.)

(But if anybody wants to challenge my civic spirit, first recognize that as publisher of Vital Speeches of the Day, a magazine that goes back to 1934, I’m the only person you know who will pay a printer thousands of dollars to print this speech [so we can tell future historians what horses’ asses we all were. I want them to know.])

9:20 ET

Dick.

***

(I’m doing everything I know how to do.)

At ProRhetoric.com this morning, I have a roundup of the gist of small-town mayors’ speeches in January and February. They reveal more optimism than you’d think in the face of bigger problems than you’d imagine among citizens who are trying very hard to get along. The piece begins …

***

President Trump is giving his big speech to Congress tonight.

But even when we have a president who does try to mouth rhetoric that remotely rhymes with reality, I’m not satisfied to take a White House resident’s word on how things are going in the country. How in the world would he know?

To conjure the real state of the union, I always survey the state-of-the-village speeches delivered every January and February at city halls, county libraries and local country clubs by mayors of towns across the country. Small-town mayors have the advantage of being far closer to the action of which they speak; and they’re compelled be at least marginally accurate while speaking to people who drive the same streets, drink the same city water, pay the same property taxes.

Life in America sounds considerably better on the ground (except when it sounds considerably worse).

I hope you read the rest.

***

As for tonight’s speech, I’ll surely watch it but I can’t promise I’ll do my usual live blog, as the right drug combination I’d need to do it justice—

We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers… and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls …

—should not be ingested on a school night. —DM