The Patriot Post® · Martin Luther King & Alan King
I understand that Rev. King is one of the great sacred cows of American history, but I resent the fact that America celebrates his birth as a national holiday. After all, the amazing George Washington first had to share a holiday with Abe Lincoln, and then wound up being relegated to having to share the occasion with the likes of Polk, Buchanan, Wilson, Harding and now, Obama, on Presidents’ Day.
Understand, I wasn’t opposed to the Civil Rights Act, believing, as I do, that all Americans, except for convicted felons and Democrats, should be allowed to vote. I do wish that we hadn’t seen black citizens squander their franchise on the likes of Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Adam Clayton Powell, Sheila Jackson Lee and Maxine Waters.
One of the other drawbacks to the Civil Rights movement is that it provided the likes of John Lewis, Charles Rangel and Jesse Jackson, with a halo and a steppingstone to national prominence.
A couple of my objections to Martin Luther King, Jr., may strike you as trivial, as personal objections often are, but I see no reason to conceal them. I disliked those shiny black suits he adopted as his trademark. To me, they signaled a con man on the make. I also hated that phony cadence he adopted whenever he was speechifying, which was just about all the time.
In addition, like professional athletes who spend so much time on the road, apparently, at least according to J. Edgar Hoover, Rev. King was a serial adulterer.
The irony is that the one thing I did admire about the man was his line suggesting that people should be judged by their character, not the color of their skin. But, fortunately, for his legacy, he has been judged by the color of his skin, not the caliber of his character.
Although I was never a fan of circuses, I experienced a pang of regret when I got the news that after 146 years, Ringling Brothers is at last folding its tent.
The elephants had already been moved to preserves, the freaks will no doubt find gainful employment in Hollywood, while the clowns, I’m guessing, will all be heading off to Washington, D.C.
The L.A. Times, which supports sanctuary cities and open borders, ran this headline the other day: Intact Border Tunnels Pose Security Risk. In the story, the paper reported that the drug cartels have dug scores of tunnels into the U.S., and that even when we shut them down on our side of the border, Mexico does nothing on their end. Therefore, the tunnels are quickly reopened.
If I were President Trump, I would ask my Director of Homeland Security to start inserting land mines beneath our turf. At one point, I wanted to electrify our border fence, but that could lead to birds and animals being killed. We’re already decimating the bird population with Obama’s windmills. No need to also start frying them, unless, of course, chickens learn to fly.
But I see no downside to planting mines, say, 10 feet down. The nice thing is that the drug smugglers would be both dead and buried.
A reader, whom I’d made laugh, asked who makes me laugh. The answer is lots of things and a great many people. For instance, when I saw all those college students weeping over Trump’s victory, I couldn’t stop chuckling. When I recently viewed a montage of MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on Election Night registering everything from disbelief and shock to panic and grief, I couldn’t stop laughing.
But those people hadn’t set out to make me laugh. It was just a natural reaction, like when you see people slipping on banana peels or icy sidewalks. But when it comes to people whose mission it is to amuse, I can be a pretty tough audience. One of the problems is that when people tell me a joke, I may laugh at the absurd set-up, but I have usually anticipated the punchline and have finished laughing by the time we finally arrive at the payoff.
That is why I suggest you never tell me a joke. It won’t be a pleasant experience for either of us.
That’s not to say I never laugh at professionals. For years, I laughed on a regular basis when Sid Caesar, Carl Reiner and Howard Morris, were making Saturday night a good reason to stay home.
But I can still recall those singular occasions when people made me laugh so hard, I fell off a chair, a bed or a seat in a movie theater. It has happened four times in my life.
The first time it happened, I was seated on the aisle and was watching a Danny Kaye movie called “The Court Jester.” As a rule, I could take Kaye or leave him alone, so perhaps I was just in the right mood. But there comes a time in the movie when, for the purposes of the plot, the villain wants to kill Kaye, but because the bad guy is a knight and Danny Kaye is just a schmendrik, a joust is out of the question. The solution is to make Kaye a knight, but time is of the essence, so they have to rush Kaye through a process that should take days or maybe weeks or months in about five minutes of screen time.
You might not find it funny, but it had me literally rolling in the aisle of the Egyptian theater on Hollywood Blvd.
The next time it happened, Jackie Mason was performing the first of his one-man shows in L.A. I was laughing so hard, I would have been rolling in the aisle, but my wife had the aisle seat, so I was wedged in. You’ve heard of busting a gut, but I came very close to experiencing it.
The third time, I was lying in bed watching Richard Jeni’s comedy special on HBO or Showtime which he titled for reasons I never discovered, “Platypus Man.”
That was the time I rolled off my bed. I was laughing so hard, I drowned out at least half the lines. So I tuned in again the following evening. This time, I only drowned out a third of the lines. Because they weren’t airing it again, I had to run out to Blockbusters and rent the video. I still laughed, but at least I was able to remain off the floor.
No such luck with number four. I had gone up to Lake Tahoe with a friend who also happened to be Sammy Davis’s P.R. man to try to persuade Sammy to let us adapt his bio, “Yes I Can” to TV. We failed, but it was Sammy’s night off from performing, so he comped us to his replacement, Alan King.
My friend had seen the act many times in the past, so he went off to gamble and I went to the show. As Sammy’s guest, I had the little table just below King and the microphone. Within minutes, I was laughing so hard, I was once again on the floor. I was laughing so hard, I couldn’t catch my breath. I was in a panic. It occurred to me that from where I was, I could reach up, grab the ashtray from the table and throw it at him. As close as I was, there was no way I could miss. And if I hit him with it, he would have to stop talking.
I even remember starting to reach for it, but simultaneously, I began thinking of the consequences. What if I killed him? Would the jury buy that it was a clear-cut case of self-defense? In any case, my own thoughts distracted me enough so that I stopped hearing Alan King long enough to catch my breath.
Years later, when Mr. King passed away, a mutual friend suggested I write it up and he’d get a copy to King’s widow. She let me know she appreciated hearing how close I had come to making her a widow 20 years earlier.
As you all know, I try to keep nothing secret from my readers. So, I am now going to share one of the big ones, which I refer to as the Alphabet Game.
We’ve all heard that games and crossword puzzles are supposed to help people avoid or at least postpone the onset of Alzheimer’s because they stimulate brain activity. I make no such claims. I came up with the exercise because I get easily bored when I’m kept waiting, and now I’m of an age when I have to spend more time than I like in various waiting rooms.
Because I sometimes forget to bring a book and have no interest in reading the Golf Digest or the American Dental Journal, I contrived a time-passer.
It consists of coming up with famous people whose first or last name starts with a particular letter. According to my rules, I have to come up with their first and last names unless they’re members of actual or pretend royalty, so I allow myself to count Peter the Great if I’m working on First Name “P” or Count Basie if I’m listing last names starting with a “B.”
You can only include friends or relatives in the unlikely event that people outside your circle might actually have heard of them.
I started out with a series of 20, then moved up to 25. Once, at my doctor’s, I had to cool my heels so long that I counted a hundred last names starting with “M.”
I keep track by using my fingers something like an abacus. I count off the names on my left hand, and when I reach five, I keep track of those groups on my right hand. When I have all five fingers raised, I start over with another letter.
If I help any of you fend off Alzheimer’s or even survive those really boring parts of our lives, that’s reward enough for me.
On the other hand, if some smart guy out there comes up with a way to make money off my brainstorm, I hope he doesn’t forget me, the way Mr. Pet Rocks did.