The Huskers cover "Love is All Around," the Mary Tyler Moore Show's theme song. Watching the opening sequence played again and again since she died yesterday has made me nostalgic for the days when Dayton's and Donaldson's faced each other across 7th Street along the Nicollet Mall, currently disfigured by renovation. I worked part-time at Dayton's for a year or two and took my meals at the Harvest House Cafeteria, which was just over your left shoulder when you got to the top of the escalator Mary is ascending in the Crystal Court. For a song, you could get a thousand buttery calories--say, salisbury steak with scalloped potatoes, green beans, bread and butter, pie and coffee. The Nankin--cheap, mediocre Chinese, and lots of it--was another option. You can tell from the restaurants that poor people are now supposed to stay home in their poor neighborhoods. Not even a McDonald's downtown. Subway, I guess.
I got a bad case of the old-man grumpies. Things used to be a lot better when Nixon was president. Here is Philip Roth on the current occupant:
“I was born in 1933,” he continued, “the year that F.D.R. was inaugurated. He was President until I was twelve years old. I’ve been a Roosevelt Democrat ever since. I found much that was alarming about being a citizen during the tenures of Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. But, whatever I may have seen as their limitations of character or intellect, neither was anything like as humanly impoverished as Trump is: ignorant of government, of history, of science, of philosophy, of art, incapable of expressing or recognizing subtlety or nuance, destitute of all decency, and wielding a vocabulary of seventy-seven words that is better called Jerkish than English.”
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