Once upon a time I was the only person who brought a dog to work, here at the Star office, but now we arrive to a daily menagerie — from the itty-bitty black and tan dachshund puppy and scraggly little terrier belonging to Isabel Carmichael to the 21/2-year-old rescue (a charming fellow with a soft, brown nose, named Marty) who was recently acquired by Paul Friese, to Archie, Jane Bimson’s bright-eyed Jack Russell, and Jack Graves’s adorable, purebred O’en, with his soft blond coat. 

The dog belonging to me and my husband is a lazy, plump, foxlike creature with a red coat and a stubborn nature. We call her Sweet Pea. I don’t know what we were thinking when we gave her that name. Dozens of other monikers were offered up by the younger members of the family, to be considered and discarded. Sweet Pea came to us from the Animal Rescue Fund of the Hamptons, where she was known as Victoria, which we all felt was too grand and ladylike for a quizzical canine who had washed up in the aftermath of one of the 2017 hurricanes. Sweet Pea definitely seemed sweet when we met her, and, like a pea, she is, yes, small. Still, I still almost laugh when I call her name: The only other Sweet Pea I can think of is Olive Oyl and Popeye’s baby, which seems such an incongruous reference.

My daughter found Sweet Pea at the ARF adoption center in late 2017; by the time my husband and I arrived to inspect her, later that day, they had bonded. To this day, Sweet Pea will run to her as fast as she can when she spies her entering a room, and will positively knock over bystanders in her rush to climb into her lap. Sweet Pea has not forgotten.

ARF told us Sweet Pea had been among the animals brought to the States following Hurricane Maria, which hit Puerto Rico in late September 2017; Sweet Pea was at ARF by mid-November. She was — and I have a hard time visualizing or believing this — a skinny little thing back then. Her paperwork says she was only 19.4 pounds when we met. Now she is nearly 26, and the veterinarian has instructed us to put her on a special diet. She may look like a fox when viewed from behind, but viewed from above, she is torpedo-shaped, a chunky little sausage.

That Sweet Pea was a warm-weather pet is evident by how much she detests snow, sleet, and rain. On a recent wicked, wet day, she ran to the car when we set out, but absolutely refused to climb back out again when the time came. For a small dog, she is mighty. I went into the house to fetch her a treat, as bribery, but even then she had to be seriously coaxed and dragged from the car, as I got soaked in the downpour. Forget trying to get her to walk in the snow.

At home, Sweet Pea likes to sleep and sleep and sleep — on the master bed. We don’t have the heart to kick her out of the bedroom or put her in a crate. In order for there to be room for us to sleep, we have to bribe her down to the foot of the bed with a goodie and put a heavy pillow as a sort of barrier behind her. We always start out the night with the hope that she will stay in place, but she inevitably finds a way to creep up during the night and ensconce herself between our shoulders and heads.

To be honest, even though she is a near-daily presence here at the office, she isn’t particularly welcome in certain circles of the building. She likes to sit guard at my desk, eyeing my colleagues with sleepy suspicion, and has been known to bare her teeth and snap at people for no discernible reason. She is probably 6 or 7 years old, and although she was possibly a street dog in Rincon, her daily lapdog habits lead me to believe she whiled away her days sitting on some doting person’s lap, watching people pass by the window and being fed bonbons. I like to think of her fault as being simply too devoted and loyal, but I’m not sure the rest of the staff would agree. As to whether she is genuinely sweet, well . . . the best thing I can honestly say about her behavior is that it is variable. Maybe we should have named her Crosspatch.         

A 160-yard-long black plastic pipe washed out of the ocean at Georgica last week. When I finally got around to looking for it on Sunday afternoon, I was disappointed that it had already been cut into shorter lengths and dragged away. 

We had been first alerted to it by my friend Tim Garneau, who sent a few smartphone photographs and was the source of the 160-yard estimate. Paul Vogel, another friend, who is the de facto early-morning mayor of Georgica Beach, emailed a report at about the same time.  From Tim’s photos, it was obvious that the pipe had come from a dredging operation, but how and from where remained unknown.

Georgica Beach is a good place to seek surprises cast up by the sea. The stone jetty there, which has produced a subtle rise in the onshore sand, traps floating objects on an easterly swell. Among the items I have picked up at Georgica are money, sunglasses, a gold-and-jade bracelet, and two insulin pumps, one of which was still beeping in the sea-grass wrack line. The beachcomber’s glory days are long since passed, however. My paltry finds are but trifles when matched against those that used to appear in the age of sail. 

Long Island shores, north and south, had for centuries taken their toll on ships. A miscalculation at night or during bad weather could put a vessel on the bar, where it might as soon break to pieces as be refloated. A ship’s pilot unlucky enough to steer onto the Montauk rocks would have no hope of rescue.

Places along the coast carry names memorializing such wrecks: Cullo den Point in honor of the British warship that sank there during the American Revolution, Amsterdam Beach for a British steamer by that name that went aground in 1867 carrying a load of fruit, raisins, lead, and wine to New York.

Perhaps the most intriguing East End wreck came in 1816 when a mysteriously empty ship struck the bar at Shinnecock. As the wreck master prepared it for auction, a bystander found a Spanish silver coin in a piece of rigging; visitors to the hulk discovered more coins here and there. Then, two young men, determined to do a thorough search, crept aboard with candles and a tin lantern. 

Making their way from fore to aft, they at last spotted the shiny edge of a coin in the cabin ceiling. Prying the boards apart, one of the men was showered with silver dollars, but his companion dropped the lantern and much of the trove rolled into the sea.

On subsequent trips, the men found other coins, but kept quiet until much later. When the ship broke up that winter, people began to find money in the sand. Farmers took ploughs to search; one came away with a princely haul worth $60. Now and then for years afterward, bits of Spanish silver could be found. It is hard not to believe that some of that loot might still be out there.

It was the day before I, perhaps the only “company man” left in America, was to be interviewed, and I was trying to think of clever things to say.

First, I would say, when asked what changes I’d seen here in the past 50 years, that the greatest change I’d seen was that there was far more hair growing out of my ears and nose than there was atop my shiny head.

What else? I would say that because my father pursued many careers and married many times, I in contrast was impelled to lead a quiet, happy life, which is what I’ve done. 

I would say too that the world’s ills could largely be traced to ideological rigidity, in thinking and belief, and that, as Oscar Wilde said, life was too serious to be taken seriously. In other words, wonderful things may happen if you loosen up and go with the flow. 

The athletic life, which I’ve lived for almost 79 years, and about which I’ve written for 40, because it mirrors the eternal movement and variety that we know as life, is primarily joyous and therefore worthy of celebration, which is why I say I’m in the joy department when asked what I do.

And, yes, though I know suffering teaches us what to want, I persist as the Candide of Harbor View Drive — a romantic, a bit of a wiseass, and far more hopeful than despairing, in the face of all the evidence to the contrary. Simply programmed that way, I guess, buoyed as I am on arising each day with the prospect that there’s always another pitcher of margaritas to make.

And tennis. Dr. Eugene Krauss, of Riverhead and Great Neck, is to be thanked for that, having endowed me with titanium knees in my 60s so that I could continue kicking my peers’ butts well into my dotage, which, I suppose, is a bit obscene, just as is the fact that I’m still here at The East Hampton Star — “since the Paleolithic era,” I tell the tours — sitting on a plush chair in a corner office surrounded by well-thumbed books and photos of Mary, in the company of our dog, O’en, who, lying on a plush bed nearby, is casting half an eye my way, waiting desperately to pee.            

It always feels strange to walk around the old neighborhood again. Williamsburg is scarcely more recognizable to me than Montauk is, and sorry if that makes me a hipster or whatever. At least I lived in Montauk first, decades before moving to a crummy shared apartment on Wythe Avenue, an arrangement entered into with great reluctance, hours before flying to San Francisco and the Audio Engineering Society Convention, homelessness looming large upon my return. 

I’d driven all the way to Brooklyn on Saturday, to Main Drag Music, a cavernous shop that dwarfs the tiny Bedford Avenue storefront of its late-1990s youth, now located, coincidentally, directly across Wythe Avenue from that crummy shared apartment. 

I’ve been looking around for stuff to sell, and that beautiful limited-edition Epiphone John Lennon “1965” Casino electric guitar rarely gets played anymore, so why not? Better to spend the proceeds taking refuge in some faraway land than have it gather any more dust. 

Four months after landing in that crummy share on Wythe, I found a place of my own a few blocks away on Driggs, and 20 years ago tomorrow hauled my possessions up to that sixth-floor apartment, with a little — very little — help from three of the laziest movers alive. I didn’t care; I had a place of my own again, and I never wanted to lose it. 

A few months ago, alas, I did. 

Damn near everything in the old neighborhood triggers a memory, indelibly etched and always to provoke an emotion. The early years, dragging guitars and amplifier down the 75 steps and into the taxi, over the bridge or, more and more as Billyburg exploded at the turn of the century, within the neighborhood, to the gig. 

Late-night, sometimes all-night adventures with bands and friends and fans, the crackling, sparkling, nonpareil spontaneity of loud rock ’n’ roll in a packed Lower East Side club, the nervous energy and boozy hilarity of Friday night revelry, I’ll never forget. 

The married years, post-Sept. 11 and cocooning in the sixth-floor walk-up, trying to be grown-up but never quite. And then the bad times: the death, in quick succession, of her father and younger brother — word of the latter reaching me exactly 10 years after that flight to San Francisco, once again, incredibly, en route to the airport and San Francisco and another Audio Engineering Society Convention. The long separations, the recession, the layoff, the divorce, the return to school, until finally I sought sanctuary in East Hampton.

It was just for the summer, I was sure. I’d be back by October, but surely November. So I tried and tried to hold on to that sixth-floor walk-up, and for a long time I did. 

“Rock ’n’ roll was new, then,” the guitarist Danny Kortchmar said to me, a year or two after I’d hauled those possessions up to that sixth-floor walk-up for the first time, during a long and winding discussion in a Connecticut recording studio. He was talking about the 1960s, but now it was 2001. “It isn’t new anymore.” 

I thought about that, walking past the old 331/3 Recording Studio on Grand Street — now a photography studio and event space — and to tiny Grand Ferry Park on the East River, where, in the distant twilight, the lights on the Williamsburg Bridge blinked, dim and doleful; and of something John Lennon wrote to his friend Stuart Sutcliffe, in the months before Sutcliffe’s death, at 21. “I can’t remember anything without a sadness so deep that it hardly becomes known to me.”

I’d taken the “Lennon” guitar to Main Drag for a minor repair, before putting it up for sale. The case lying on the counter, I lifted the latches one by one and opened it, and out came a rush of memories — the thrill of strumming it for the first time it, of its inimitable tone coming through an overdriven tube amplifier, of wielding it on stages in New York City, doing what I loved. 

It was new then. It isn’t new anymore. Still, it’s hard to let go. 

Christopher Walsh is a senior writer at The Star.

There was a time when, as a young mother, I drove from the South Fork to New York City once a week in a meticulously maintained old Cadillac (we called it the Brown Cloud) for singing lessons. It’s hard to say exactly what my motivation was; perhaps it just was a respite from family life. 

 The teacher I found in New York was revered among some of the city’s up-and-coming young professionals in the opera world, so I was honored to be at her piano’s side. She taught in an apartment with a dramatic view of the Hudson River, a setting sophisticated enough to imbue me with high notions about my singing. But I never had a misimpression that it might be possible to use my light soprano professionally. My teacher had me concentrate on the American Songbook, and I still sometimes run through one or another classic song in my head. At the time, I vocalized to high C, while now I don’t get much above an F as a high alto.

I realized as I grew older that whatever talent I had as a singer could be described as it had been when, in a quartet of high school students auditioning for the New Jersey All State Chorus, the leader said, “She held her group together.” In other words, my singing was steady and on key, useful in a group — but pretty mundane praise.

I was 13 when I had my first singing lessons. My mother, who varied between wishing I would become another Shirley Temple and envisioning me as an opera star, knew of a voice teacher not far from home, whom I could reach by bus. That early teacher didn’t offer much about technique, but plunged me right into a serious repertoire, with lyrics principally in Italian. One of the songs was the sad but lovely Handel aria “Lascia ch’io pianga.” I recommend your finding it on YouTube if you are so inclined. It’s about cruel fate.

Before I left New York City to be married and move out east, I spent some time with the prestigious Canterbury Choral Society at Manhattan’s Church of the Heavenly Rest, under the direction of Charles Dodsley Walker. After some years living here on the East End, someone told me about the Choral Society of the Hamptons.

Before I first started singing with 

the Choral Society, I wasn’t particularly enthralled with the idea, being snob­bish enough to assume it would be mediocre. But then one day I saw a man with an unforgettable name listed as a member: Dinwiddie Smith. He had sung at the Church of the Heavenly Rest at the same time I did, and if this local group was good enough for him, it was good enough for me. I have been a dedicated chorister ever since.

One of the good things about the Choral Society is that it just gets better and better. Today, many members are professional musicians, as teachers or directors of church choirs, and they lift up our voices. The society also has a superior conductor and music director, Mark Mangini, and engages other fine conductors from time to time. (This gives me an opportunity to let you know that our next concert will be at the East Hampton Presbyterian Church on March 31, under the direction of Walter Klauss.)

As my years with the Choral Society go by, I have become more and more grateful to be a member. Only last week, on a wicked winter Monday night as we wrapped up our re­hears­al at East Hampton’s Presbyterian Church, I stepped outside and realized it was really too cold to walk home. I asked another of the stalwart, longtime members — a fellow singer who has become a longtime friend — to give me a ride home, and I must say I enjoyed riding down Main Street in her Tesla.

young mother, I drove from the South Fork to New York City once a week in a meticulously maintained old Cadillac (we called it the Brown Cloud) for singing lessons. It’s hard to say exactly what my motivation was; perhaps it just was a respite from family life.

 The teacher I found in New York was revered among some of the city’s up-and-coming young professionals in the opera world, so I was honored to be at her piano’s side. She taught in an apartment with a dramatic view of the Hudson River, a setting sophisticated enough to imbue me with high notions about my singing. But I never had a misimpression that it might be possible to use my light soprano professionally. My teacher had me concentrate on the American Songbook, and I still sometimes run through one or another classic song in my head. At the time, I vocalized to high C, while now I don’t get much above an F as a high alto.

I realized as I grew older that whatever talent I had as a singer could be described as it had been when, in a quartet of high school students auditioning for the New Jersey All State Chorus, the leader said, “She held her group together.” In other words, my singing was steady and on key, useful in a group — but pretty mundane praise.

I was 13 when I had my first singing lessons. My mother, who varied between wishing I would become another Shirley Temple and envisioning me as an opera star, knew of a voice teacher not far from home, whom I could reach by bus. That early teacher didn’t offer much about technique, but plunged me right into a serious repertoire, with lyrics principally in Italian. One of the songs was the sad but lovely Handel aria “Lascia ch’io pianga.” I recommend your finding it on YouTube if you are so inclined. It’s about cruel fate.

Before I left New York City to be married and move out east, I spent some time with the prestigious Canterbury Choral Society at Manhattan’s Church of the Heavenly Rest, under the direction of Charles Dodsley Walker. After some years living here on the East End, someone told me about the Choral Society of the Hamptons.

Before I first started singing with 

the Choral Society, I wasn’t particularly enthralled with the idea, being snob­bish enough to assume it would be mediocre. But then one day I saw a man with an unforgettable name listed as a member: Dinwiddie Smith. He had sung at the Church of the Heavenly Rest at the same time I did, and if this local group was good enough for him, it was good enough for me. I have been a dedicated chorister ever since.

One of the good things about the Choral Society is that it just gets better and better. Today, many members are professional musicians, as teachers or directors of church choirs, and they lift up our voices. The society also has a superior conductor and music director, Mark Mangini, and engages other fine conductors from time to time. (This gives me an opportunity to let you know that our next concert will be at the East Hampton Presbyterian Church on March 31, under the direction of Walter Klauss.)

As my years with the Choral Society go by, I have become more and more grateful to be a member. Only last week, on a wicked winter Monday night as we wrapped up our re­hears­al at East Hampton’s Presbyterian Church, I stepped outside and realized it was really too cold to walk home. I asked another of the stalwart, longtime members — a fellow singer who has become a longtime friend — to give me a ride home, and I must say I enjoyed riding down Main Street in her Tesla.

It doesn’t freeze up the way it used to. That was what a guy I went to high school with but whose name I cannot recall at the moment agreed on at the counter of Goldberg’s Bagels the other day. 

We had gotten on the subject in the usual way: lightly chatting while waiting by the cash register. Ever since Bucket’s Deli closed for good some years ago, Goldberg’s has become a sort of town center, where on many mornings, the estimable Joan Tulp of Amagansett sits down with friends, including former Police Chief Tom Scott, for a relaxed breakfast. The cold weather early this week came up quickly.

We traded memories of how my father took us kids iceboating on Georgica Pond and even salty Three Mile Harbor during one or two winters. My friend recalled driving in another friend’s Jeep on a frozen Napeague Harbor.

“That took balls,” I said. 

“The water wasn’t so deep,” he replied. Ah, what passes for Bonac humor.

That said, there was almost ice enough for sailing early this week. Skating had begun on the ponds here, and when I had a look at Poxabogue earlier in the week, it appeared promising. Next will come digging the boats out, sharpening the runners, finding extra warm layers of outer clothing, then packing it all onto the truck. 

Thirty or 40 years ago, there would not have been quite such a rush to get it all ready before it was gone. Not only did we get good ice more often, the slabs stayed intact for long stretches of the winter. Now, if we’re lucky, we get a few days of hard freeze, then a warm-up, often with rain. “Unless you get on it that day, you’ll miss it,” I told my old acquaintance at Goldberg’s.

The problem is, not expecting ice, I had scheduled all kinds of things for tomorrow. There is always Saturday, but I’ll likely be busy then, too.

“We’re going to be in for some snow, O’en,” Mary said as we were driving along last Wednesday, before realizing she’d mistaken me for the dog, a good sign.

That she would think to compare me, a Mr. Burns look-alike (in fact, I can rub my hands, and, with a protruding fang, say, “Excellent, excellent” just as he), with such a dignified, snowy-coated beast was comforting, especially in weather that is becoming anything but.

I still worry every now and then, as does she, that we are a bit boring as masters, too old to trot along with him, at least in my case, and too eager to pull the sliding glass door shut when he’s still wanting to chase tennis balls in the frigid gloaming. 

As a ball-chaser he is mercurial. He’ll do it for a while, if he’s pretty sure there’s a treat waiting, in which case he’ll follow the commands — “Bring it . . . Front . . . Sit.” But eventually he’ll get distracted, by a stick, the scent of a mole, or some such, affording us the chance to duck back inside to warm our hands.

It would be nice to go some place warm, I guess, for the winter months, but the warmer the place, it seems, the more off-putting the political climate. Maybe somebody will invent something you can spray on, to protect you from nativist spleen. Of course, to be fair, there should be lotion Trumpians could apply, too, lest they be irradiated by World Federalists. That having been said, as they say, I found that people were quite friendly when we were in Naples a few years ago, probably because most of the other vacationers we met were from Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, and Canada, where from time to time we say we should move to, if it weren’t so cold, which serves to underline the point I made above. Cold place, warm hearts. Warm place, old farts.

Temperate place, warm hearts and old farts, I guess, which is why we’re still here, engaged in the eternal round of despair and hope, small town contention and amiability. Come to think of it, despair and hope pretty much dominated the conversation at the media forum in Sag Harbor that we went to today. There were challenges to be sure, not the least of which was posed by the perplexing half-done crossword puzzle I’d taken with me, but there was hope too that local news, offered in varying formats, through print, websites, podcasts, and local access television, would remain germane, a future that seemed assured when I arose from the American Hotel table an hour or so later with the puzzle finished in its entirety, usually a sign of good things to come, even if it looked as if we were going to be in for some snow.

Our car has been acting rather erratic, lately, which makes me grateful that it is only a short walking distance between the place I live and the place I work, some 70 or 80 yards. The East Hampton Library abuts my property, as well, making a neat triangle between my front door, the Star office, and the library; it’s also only a hop and skip across Main Street to Guild Hall, the fourth point on my compass. 

I never have to go very far from home to be enlightened.

The temperature had fallen below 20 degrees on Monday when I set out to return a book to the library, and the big question was whether The Star office’s driveway-side door was closer to the library’s front or back door. 

These are the calculations of a senior citizen in winter.

A few months ago, the library installed a handy-dandy beverage machine that grinds and brews a choice of Starbucks coffees, as well as chai and cocoa, which cost only $1 if you take your own mug or $2 if you take a paper cup, and the lure of the coffee machine brought me to the front door of the library. Because it was so cold, I opted for hot chocolate. Continuing my cold-avoidance maneuvers, I walked through the stacks and out the library’s back door to minimize the number of steps back to my desk.

These are the simple pleasures of a senior citizen in winter.

I love going to the library, and very much enjoy its architectural elegance. How lucky we are to have such a well-run and well-supplied institution at the heart of our village.

Being there also gives me an opportunity to glance at a portrait of my late mother-in-law, Jeannette Edwards Rattray, which hangs near the reference desk. As a member of its board of managers, as well as a neighbor, she was a force in the library’s evolution. Indeed, she had grown up in “the Purple House,” which stood between the library and the Star office, where the north wing of the library was constructed in the 1970s. She, like me, made frequent triangular trips between the compass points of home, work, and enlightenment.

The “East Hampton Free Library” had its beginnings at Clinton Academy at the turn of the last century and moved slightly south, nearer Buell Lane, in 1912. Its driving force was a group of 12 local women; its first librarian was Ettie Cartwright Hedges. Interestingly, it was another determined woman, Mary Lorenzo Woodhouse, who donated the land as well as the money to construct the original part of the pretty building, which was meant to look like a timber-frame house in a village in Kent, England, where East Hampton’s original settlers were said to have come from. 

Guild Hall and the John Drew Theater, as well as the Nature Trail, were also gifts to the community from Mary Lorenzo Woodhouse and her husband, Lorenzo.

Last Saturday, I was among the crowd gathered at Guild Hall for a Metropolitan Opera screening of “Adriana Le­couvreur,” starring the marvelous diva Anna Netrebko, and had time to think about the enduring bounty of these Woodhouse gifts. 

What sort of village would we be, without Guild Hall, the library, and the Nature Trail? I know my own everyday life would be much diminished, and I’m sure I’m not alone.

Root canals need rebranding. I was thinking about this while sitting in a dentist’s chair earlier this week with all manner of devices in my maw, staring at the ceiling.

Going into the day’s excitement, I had told people around the office where I was going to be. To a person, at the words “root canal,” they shuddered or cringed in empathetic fear. 

Though I had undergone the procedure previously, about two years ago on a different molar, I remembered next to nothing, having been entirely whacked-out on laughing gas. At the time, I was worried and agreed when offered the hose end — self-regulated like a hookah. What did I know? I huffed and puffed and pretty soon I was high as a Georgia pie. (Those of you who know the reference will get what I mean.) 

All I can recall from root canal numero uno is that it seemed the same Tom Petty song was playing in the room as I took my first deep inhalation and an hour later, when someone charitably dialed the oxygen ratio back up, and I slowly climbed out of the very deep, black pit in which I had been for the preceding hour. I left my car in the dentist’s parking lot and walked, stumbled really, back to The Star. A week later, I still felt as if I had a hole in my head.

Lucid this time around, the root canal was hardly anything. A little Novocain here or there, maybe 45 minutes of drilling and poking around, and the job was done, hardly worthy of as scary a name as root — dah, dum, dum — canal.

Years ago, one of the New Yorker cartoonists drew a knee-slapper of a page poking fun at the restaurant industry’s effort to rename fish. I don’t remember much other than the concept and the “before” moniker of a made-up fish — the greasy-mouthed bleb. I know, sounds delicious right?

“Greasy-mouthed bleb” has for me become a kind of stand-in for renaming something unappealing to sound a little more appetizing. But though I have thought about this a long time (but actually not so hard), I haven’t come up with much, having learned from the technician exactly what the procedure involves. 

English is full of euphemisms. Panicked house-saving is called “dune restoration.” People don’t die anymore, they “pass.” But root canal? All I have come up with so far is “wallet whacker.”

And there, for the second week in a row, was another word I didn’t know in a Times column —  midichlorian. It was in Maureen Dowd’s piece about saucy dancing women come to take over the government.

It wasn’t in my Shorter Oxford English Dictionary at home, it wasn’t even in the online dictionary that Irene said would save me any more trips to our spine split, dog-eared Webster’s at the edge of Jamie’s desk.

But Mary found it, through Google, the modern equivalent of the Delphic oracle. It’s of “Star Wars” coinage and refers to cells within us that link us to The Force. She liked that idea. We are, then, all one, she said. It would be nice if we were all Obi-Wan too, but alas. Obama’s midichlorian count made Republicans tremble, Maureen Dowd said, until he disarmed them with his professorial side.

And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s midi­chlorian count has made them tremble too. Not only does she dance, but she thinks the top marginal income tax rate, now at 35 percent, ought to be doubled. Actually, it’s not such a radical idea. That rate was as high as 90 percent in the 1950s, when bottles of milk and clean diapers were delivered to the door, when one wage earner per household largely assured a pleasant life, and when personal incentive remained undampened as far as I know. Google says the top marginal rate even reached 94 percent during World War II.

Given the fact that we’ve been making war on the installment plan for the better part of the past 20 years, it doesn’t seem out of line that the obscenely wealthy who’ve been showered with tax cuts ought to write down the obscene national debt a bit, or at least fortify some bridges. They’re the ones who have been cutting a rug, and have been pulling it out from under the middle class, whose fiscal health is paramount if a democracy is to thrive. So, yes, let’s redress things somewhat. And along that line, I’d like to say that the administration’s assault on SALT (our state and local property tax deductions) is fundamentally a soak the middle class scheme — at least as it concerns many of the half-million Long Island homeowners who itemize — that ought not to stand.  

One wonders what foreigners who hold two-thirds of our national debt might do were they treated by the administration the way those living in New York and California have been. I know, I know, he’s trying.

Warren Buffet has said he owes his wealth, which he intends to give away, essentially to the accident of birth. Ben Franklin said that once one had enough for oneself and one’s family one ought to give the rest back to the country. Teddy Roosevelt in his Progressive Party platform of 1912 advocated for “a single national health service,” inveighed against the unbridled monied interests and unlimited campaign contributions, championed middle-class wage earners, was pro-immigrant, and asserted that “the test of true prosperity shall be the benefits conferred thereby on all the citizens, not confined to individuals or classes.”

“Dismaying,” I can imagine the midichlorian-deprived exclaim as they, like Tolkien’s Gollum, fondle their Rings and whisper, “My precious, my precious.”