An Easter Reprieve (Sort Of)
A spring meditation, plus a Tom Waits Holy Day
The news was unremittingly bleak this week. Again. Which is why I’ve come to have grudging respect for the news. While nearly everything in the last decade has changed around us — our political climate, our industries, our friends, our economics, our stability, our standing in the world — the news has stayed the same. It sucked five years ago, it sucks today, and it’s on a trajectory to suck well into the future. So thanks, news, for giving us one thing we can depend on.
If I were in the protracted essay business this week, I’d have my pick of the parade of horribles. Kristi Noem and her husband Byron — not to be confused with her boyfriend, Corey Lewandowski — emerged as the early favorite to win the 2028 GOP nomination if they run on the same ticket, as no one stands as good a chance of swinging the coveted dog-shooting, crossdressers-with-a-huge-boobs-fetish vote. Attorney General Pam Bondi became the second member of Trump’s cabinet to get the axe. Not because she was the most corrupt AG in U.S. history, which she was, but because she still didn’t manage to be corrupt enough for Trump’s taste. Since despite her best efforts to target Trump’s enemies, Mike Pence remains unprosecuted for helping George Soros, the Venezuelans, Dominion Voting Systems, Hunter Biden’s laptop, and the Constitution steal the 2020 election.
Lucky for Trump, he’s appointed his own personal attorney, Todd Blanche, as acting Attorney General, perhaps the only person more complicit than Bondi in the Epstein Files cover-up. Meaning corruption-wise, Blanche is already off to a good start. Trump went on to twist the knife into Bondi, saying she “will be transitioning to a much needed and important new job in the private sector.” As I wrote on Notes: Translation? No consolation puppy treat. Not even a lousy ambassadorship, like when they had to get rid of Don Jr.’s girlfriend. Unless maybe Trump makes Bondi a lifeguard at Mar-a-Lago? Which at least would be more dignified work than the work she’d been doing (destroying the Justice Department).
The Iran War “Little Excursion” is going badly, proving that President Stable Genius has about as much of a handle on foreign affairs as he does on domestic economic ones. But at least he’s giving his voters what they demanded: more unwinnable foreign wars in the Middle East, yet another inflation surge, and over four-dollar-a-gallon gas? Which has made even plenty of the bro-caster dim bulbs like Joe Rogan and Theo Von, who helped swing the manosphere Trump’s way last cycle, finally get wise and jump off the Trump train. Never politically astute to start with, they’ve been shocked to discover that Trump is a sociopathic narcissist who lies every time his lips move and who will say anything to anybody at any time to inflict his diabolical will. If only someone had warned them……
But I’m not doing a protracted essay this week. Because it’s Easter weekend, and I have a stack-up. So even though I’ve just given you 495 fresh words (I counted), there’s a lot going on around here. As longtime readers know, spring is always the season when my acute case of Shad Fever acts up. The hickories and Americans are running up our rivers, and my son Dean and I caught 37 of them the other day without trying hard. Then I got greedy, and returned solo the next morning to catch a mere three. As fly fishing legend A.K. Best said, “The fishing was good, it was the catching that was bad.”
But the big family Easter Dinner always falls on us. This year, preparations are occurring smack in the middle of my wife having to guest-preach a Good Friday sermon at our church (on one of the last seven sayings of Jesus on the cross — “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me” — a question I ask as often as possible. JK, God!) So it is left to me to clean up the yard, select the menu, grocery shop, make dinner, slop the hogs, get behind the mule, and tend to new life, as my bluebird pair has returned and gotten busy, laying their first egg as I deport their arch-nemeses invaders, the sparrows. Who are thinner on the ground this year, as I believe word has gotten out in the sparrow community about Uncle Blaine’s catch-and-release sparrow trap.
But rather than leave your Easter baskets empty, I thought I’d reprint an old Ask Matt from the twenty-tens, long before Substack was even a glint in Hamish McKenzie’s bloodshot Kiwi eye, back when most journalists had editors, expense accounts, and were still being told “learn to code” when they got laid off, before all the coders were replaced by AI. It’s a meditation on spring in Washington D.C. An “evergreen,” as we in the writing trade call it. Or mostly evergreen. You might have to look past any dated references to things that no longer have cultural currency, like Tila Tequila or democracy. And while I’m leaving this open to all, in the spirit of Holy Week generosity, don’t kid yourself that you’re not cheating yourself by smacking into paywalls most weeks. Not only are you missing out on the good folks/camaraderie of my comments section (some of the finest people on the internet — a low bar, but still…..), where I often dip in to mix things up. But my pieces tend to be back-weighted with goodness, therefore, if you’re just reading the throat-clearing intros, you’re not even close to getting the whole experience. So give yourself an Easter treat — even if you’re Jewish or atheist — and become a paid subscriber now. Also, stay tuned after this short’s conclusion for some Easter(ish) music picks.
Dear Matt,
Can you tell me why spring is so great? Everyone is so happy and cheerful that spring is here, but all that really means is that days when the humidity and temperature peak at 99 simultaneously are just around the corner. Aside from the fact that spring is just a prelude to Washington D.C. turning into one giant sauna, it’s also the time when I get to breathe tiny particles from nature into my nose and lungs that make me sneeze and wheeze all day long. And it’s like everyone who is happy spring is here is stoking my misery. Am I just dark and twisted? Or is there a saneness to my madness? Please, I have to know if there are any other spring-haters out there.
Daisy Gardner
I’ll tell you why spring is so great: Because I get to look smoking hot in my Easter dress, which I’ll wear well into May. Because the long, cold winter is over. Because you don’t have to knock off work at 4 p.m. if you want to see the sun that day. Because you can stop smelling like Vicks VapoRub, in order to alleviate your nasty winter cough. And you can start walking around with a completely legal dipenhydramine high, from the antihistamine you must take to alleviate your crippling pollen allergies.
Look, I know how isolating it can be when you don’t get something that everybody else seems to. It’s the same way I feel when listening to upper-middle-class white people extol the gritty realism of The Wire. (How would they know, have they ever been homicide detectives in Baltimore?) Or whenever I’m unfortunate enough to encounter a Steely Dan fan. (The problem with Steely Dan, besides their horrible music, is that their fans would rather talk about Steely Dan Theory than listen to “Rikki Don’t Lose that Number.” Yes, I know Charlie Parker and Miles Davis supposedly influenced them — but that doesn’t stop “Aja” from sucking.)
Spring in Washington D.C. is a particularly glorious season. The cherry blossoms bloom around the Tidal Basin. Hickory and American shad make their annual run up the Potomac, providing the most freshwater excitement many of us will see all year (George Washington himself used to fish for them). The White House Correspondents Dinner is held, affording a hunchbacked third-string congressional reporter for States News Service a shot at having sex with a fourth-string celebrity, like Tila Tequila or one of the homelier Kardashian sisters.
So you have to take pleasure where you can. In five weeks or so, D.C. will be a big box o’ humidity, and we will again play out our sweltering summer rituals: watching the waterways get choked with hydrilla and milfoil, sweating like glazed hams, and going to work with our shirts off.
But for now, it is beautiful. And beauty always holds extra potency with the knowledge that it will be short-lived. For truth be told, D.C. does not have a lot to celebrate otherwise. We have some nice Georgian and Federal style architecture. But we don’t have any trademark cuisine to speak of, unless you count the dogs from Ben’s Chili Bowl (I don’t). With the exception of the Caps, our sports teams mostly lose. Our local politicians are low-grade charlatans, but not corrupt enough to be interesting. And whatever native character the city might have developed if it had a personality has been diluted by a large cast of transients. They hail from other cities across the nation where they were found insufferable, so their citizens wisely banded together, elected them, and sent them into exile here. It’s enough to make you live in Maryland. So I do.
Then, of course, there’s Hitler to consider. He has nothing to do with your question. But my editor goaded me into name checking him so that we could, in good conscience, work “Springtime for Hitler” into the headline.
So spring — celebrate it. It’s a time of new beginnings. Don’t wish the seasons away. You have to start thinking more positively. With the end of the world fast approaching, you might only have a few of them left.
Bonus Tracks: Upon concluding my elementary-school lectures this time of year, after the schoolchildren put their guns back in their desks, they bumrush me, asking, “Mr. Slaybash, what’s the Reason for Easter Season?” Two things, I tell them. Chocolate, and Jesus — not in that order. But perhaps that dichotomy has never been better musically captured than in Tom Waits’s “Chocolate Jesus,” off of one of the greatest albums of all-time, 1999’s Mule Variations. Here Waits is performing it on Letterman, telling a little story beforehand, as only Waits can:
Back in my wayward fundy youth, my parents briefly forced me to listen to Christian music only, as opposed to the devil’s, when they fell in with the wrong, legalistic crowd. I mostly hated it. But one guy I liked was Matthew Ward, who along with his singing sisters in their band 2nd Chapter of Acts, emerged from California’s hippie-Jesus scene of the seventies. Here Ward is, from his 1979 solo album, Toward Eternity, singing a song that isn’t explicitly about Easter, but always makes me think of it: “Summer Snow.” A singer’s singer, Ward’s vocals from the 1:40 to the 2:12 mark still give chills to this day.
As a person of whiteness, I know a lot of white kids. (Hazard of the trade.) But I don’t know any who have fallen as far down the black-gospel rabbit hole as my son, Luke, who has it pumping through our house day and night. I asked him for a soul-stirring Easter contribution, and he hit me with this obscurity from 2007, Baltimore’s own Morgan State University choir doing “He Blessed My Soul Without A Word.” Like most good gospel, it starts slow, and heats up as we go. By the 3:30 mark, someone should arrest soloist Thomas Allen for killing it, as he hits notes that don’t seem humanly possible. As of this writing, the song only has 506 views, and Luke is probably responsible for 490 of them.