Suffice it to say when Diane finally got back to the Kingdom’s capital, her condition was even worse than feared. Her appearance was described by one of the nation’s leading heralds of unwelcome news, the New York Times, and it was upsetting just to read:

   Using a wheelchair, with the left side of her face frozen and one eye nearly shut, she seemed disoriented as an aide steered her through the marble corridors of the Senate, complaining audibly that something was stuck in her eye.

   It gets worse, Jim Newell, another herald of bad tidings, in this case for Slate, told of a "conversation" that he and another reporter had with Diane; Newell asked how she was feeling, and she said:

   “Oh, I’m feeling fine. I have a problem with the leg.”
    A fellow reporter staking out the (Capitol) elevator asked what was wrong with the leg.
   “Well, nothing that’s anyone concern but mine,” she said.
   When the fellow reporter asked her what the response from her colleagues had been like since her return, though, the conversation took an odd turn.
  “No, I haven’t been gone,” she said.
   "OK."
   “You should follow the—I haven’t been gone. I’ve been working.”
    When asked whether she meant that she’d been working from home, she turned feisty.
   “No, I’ve been here. I’ve been voting,” she said. “Please. You either know or don’t know.”

    Plainly, and avoiding evasions and euphemisms favored in both fairy tales and the Upper Chamber, Diane didn’t know whether she was coming or going.
   Not Diane’s fault. We all get there sooner or later. A least the Good Fairy tried to alert the Democrats to the folly of magical thinking that pretended that that age doesn’t matter and presidents live happily ever after.
  
FAIRY TALES ARE SUPPOSED TO END with a  moral, such not letting the wolf in through the front door, or avoiding the temptation of eating someone else's porridge, although it’s apparently okay lose one or more shoes after the dance or to kiss a frog.
   The moral of this story is that it's going to end badly unless Democrats stop pretending that it’s okay to have a president who's 80 and more, and that just because nothing has gone wrong for him so far, that things will continue to do so for the next five years.
   It won't.  Wishful thinking is ridiculous thinking. Sooner or later – and I’m betting on sooner, because I'm Joey's age and every couple of months I've been writing remembrances about more and more of my contemporaries – a crisis will develop, and the Kingdom’s kind, compassionate and caring Democrats are going to have to find a replacement for Joey. 
   Anticipating this before it actually happens is a two-step process:

• Democrats have to to stop believing in fairy tales. Joey is going to die. Maybe that will be preceded by his having a stroke. Maybe he’ll develop Alzheimer's disease. Maybe he’ll be confined to a wheelchair; maybe they’ll call it Wheelchair One.
• Secondly, Democrats need to persuade Joey to quit the race for a second term, or, if he refuses, to throw him out of the race by defeating him in the primary elections.

IT'S TIME FOR DEMOCRATS to treat Joey as the Big Bad Wolf, as dangerous to the country as the Evil Prince and his Russian Pal/Puppeteer.
   Competent, realistic and tough-minded Democrats need to step forward and present themselves as alternatives to Joey. And persuade the country that there are plenty of other potential Main Guys and Main Gals  throughout the Kingdom.
   If you want some names - everybody keeps asking me for names, since I've written this sort of essay many times - I've attached a list of people, many of whom are still a mystery to most of us, but who, when you start to think about it, are credible.
    The fact that most of us know little or nothing about Joey alternatives is my best argument for Joey getting out of the way so people can become familiar with his possible replacements.
    Frightening forces, known as Republicans, are afoot in the Kingdom.
    Sadly, we've reached a point in our history where every election is a crisis.
    As the Evil Prince has demonstrated, the Constitution has flaws, half the electorate feels some kinship to the Evil Prince, and  that's why we are only one election away from catastrophe.
    Consider what's at stake: climate catastrophe; an American dictatorship committed to discrimination by race, religion, gender and national origin; economic inequality; censorship; biased courts; and the rest of the Republican agenda.
   The sad fact is that this story is never going to have a happy ending unless Democrats get serious about fairy tales, stop pretending Joe is going to live forever, offer their sincere thanks for his exemplary service, and then gently guide him out of the Oval Office and in this way, save the Kingdom.
                                                                                 *     *     *
                              DEMOCRATS WHO COULD BE PRESIDENT
   Ranked by age, which isn't a factor for any of them - they are all youngsters in Democratic  standards - and any of them might do a credible job.
   I've supplied a similar list in previous writings, which have been pretty much based on the same theme.  This one is plucked from a recent Washington Post roundup:
   

• Amy Klobuchar, 63, Senator from Minnesota.
• Kamela Harris, 58, vice president.
• J.B. Pritzker, 57, governor of Illinois
• Gavin Newsom, 55, governor of California.
• Raphael Warnock,, 53, Senator from Georgia.
• Gretchen Whitmer, 51, governor of Michigan.
• Josh Shapiro, 49, governor of Pennsylvania.
• Jared Polis, 48, governor Colorado.
• Pete Buttigieg, 41, U.S. secretary of transportation.

  
   Feel free to add some of names of your own. Time's a-wasting.

 JACK MONAGHAN, who died May 4 at 89, was a newspaper editor of the “old school.”
   “Old school” is a cliché, and one that always needs an explanation, first as whether it’s a compliment, and secondly, what it actually means, thereby using  precious space in a story and toying with a reader’s fragile attention span.
   It’s unclear how Jack would have treated this cliché if he were editing this piece, as he did during the last century as managing editor of The Evening Bulletin, the more robust and lively of Rhode Island’s  two sibling dailies, the other being the morning Providence Journal.  Both papers were owned by the same company, but they had different personalities, reflecting the eccentricities of their editors, like Jack.

   Reporters never knew how Jack might react to our stories.  He had standards, not a good omen for a story centered on a cliché.  But numerous other factors were always at work:  whether a deadline was closing in; how many other stories he was juggling; and what kind of a mood Jack was in – which was mostly upbeat, because  he absolutely loved newspapers and the fact that he was working for one of the best.
  What wasn’t in question was that Jack was in charge. Totally, absolutely, indisputably, the boss. Yes, he would listen to a reporter defend his story – just not for very long. And it surely wouldn’t be a negotiation.
   Jack was not among the new breed of collaborative editors eager to bat around the pros and cons of a story  with a reporter, seminar style.  Jack also disliked long stories, especially the narrative kind that were gaining favor throughout the industry, mammoth expositions that not only consumed entire inside pages, but whose writers sometimes took their sweet time in getting to the point.

  Jack was a hard news guy, devoted to breaking news stories that started out with scant facts early in the Bulletin’s news cycle and were developed steadily the rest of the morning and into the early afternoon, constantly being updated and rewritten,  edition by edition,  until they were as complete a masterpiece as possible by the final, premier City Edition. What especially moved him were stories with a political element – especially if they were discomfiting to a powerful, but sketchy office holder, who wouldn't want the City Edition version in his scrap book.
  Jack was fair – both as a journalist (a word he likely considered pompous) and as a  boss. But if he was a challenging editor, who demanded both excellence and loyalty, he returned the favor, not only as an editor, but as a friend.

  That friend part confounded those of us who were “Jack’s reporters” – a handful of general assignment/ “rewrite” staffers tied  to our  phones and typewriters, and later computers, to churn out stories on deadline.
    That's because - to use another cliché -  Mr. Tough Editor turned out to be a softie, an unusually warm friend. He not only fraternized with the troops, he verged on the sentimental (a line he would have excised from this  story).
   Below, I’ve included some personal recollections, followed by  a long excerpt about Jack  from a memoir by the late C. Fraser Smith, one of the Journal-Bulletin’s towering journalists and a Monaghan contemporary,  describing what it was like to work at outstanding newspapers like the Providence Journal and The Evening Bulletin in their heyday.
   Unfortunately for Jack, this makes for just the kind of long-winded pieces that he abhorred, but in this instance, is helpless to prevent.

 MY AWARD-WINNING SUIT
   When there were lots of thriving newspapers, the Associated Press and United Press International news services, plus various professional associations, gave out lots of prizes for best deadline story, best feature, best blurb written on a computer and so forth, and I happened to win one, which was to be handed out at  hotel dinner in  the near future.
   Jack decided that I needed a suit for the occasion. I’m not sure why, but it’s possible that it was because reporters were slouches when it came to clothes, and Jack did not want the Journal-Bulletin’s table to be embarrassed when I walked up to recieve my plaque and no money.
   So, one day after the City Edition was wrapped up, he walked me to a downtown clothing store, Briggs Limited, where he was on a first-name basis with the owner and instructed “Briggs” to work up a suitable suit for his young associate, wool, dark blue with faint pin pinstripes and a three-button vest. I, and certainly not the newspaper, had to pay for it. But I relished the outing – it felt like Jack was my own father, taking me to buy my first grownup outfit. It wasn’t my first suit, but it was the best one I ever owned, and I still wear it a half century later.
 
JACK & FRIENDS' CANOE TRIPS

WHAT DID JACK THINK OF “HIS” REPORTERS?
   Because Jack was objective to a fault, you could be on his team for years, but never sure where you ranked.
   For example, I was often slow in turning out feature stories, which the rewrite crew worked on after the City Edition’s deadline. My pace infuriated Jack, who wanted stories yesterday, to use another cliché. He once took a story away from me and gave it to another reporter to finish.
   And he couldn’t stand to see a reporter transcribing a tape-recorded interview. I was a prime offender, because I was a terrible note-taker with an even worse memory, but  obsessed with getting quotes exactly.
   Whereas, Jack, a Brown University classics major, who was  in “intelligence” during his Army service, was a brilliant guy who remembered everything.
   Jack also was possessed of  a  “what-have-you- got-for-me-today” attitude, which gave no credit for stories you thought were terrific, but that were yesterday’s news, no longer remembered either by readers or editors. So,  you were constantly on edge, working , but never confident, of meeting Jack’s demanding requirements.
   I got a hint of where I stood one day when, with some excitement, Jack told me that I was to write a small Page One blurb announcing that the Journal-Bulletin   was switching to an entirely  computerized system; this blurb, Jack said, was historic, because the tiny story was the first demonstration of how it actually was done.
   That Jack wanted me to write this blurb, on a computer, was a compliment.
   I think.

  JACK &  JOAN.  CHIP &  MARGO.   AND PHOEBE

    Jack adored his wife, Joan. His official obituary says that they were married for 53 years, and that they traveled widely.  Joan died in 2019. Her loss was deep, painful and obvious. Jack often spoke about her, never with tears, although you wouldn’t have minded if there were.
   One of the couple’s accomplishments was bringing together Bob and Margo Chiappinelli. “Chip,” whose byline was S. Robert Chiappinelli, was a top-tier feature writer and columnist, who disliked the negative, critical, gotcha character of most  news stories – the kind that Jack relished. Nevertheless, Chip’s talent wasn’t lost on his editor. Last year, Jack, not an eager public speaker, retold the story of the Chiappinelli's “arranged” marriage – by Jack and Joan – which he narrated  at their 50th wedding anniversary. He read from a script, which went on at considerable length, and which was expertly crafted.
   Jack was a big fan of Phoebe, our late Labrador-Husky mix, who was universally described as “sweet.” Jack made several trips from his home in Cumberland to visit us in Newport. I suspect that Phoebe justified  such a trip – an Odyssey in Rhode Island terms. 
   Phoebe was the central fixture in an anti-Trump blog that I wrote, with fresh photos of Phoebe included in each posting, along with “her”  alarmed observations  about the seditious president. Jack was a faithful reader, and he would generously flag grammatical and spelling errors. After Phoebe died, I converted the blog into personal column, minus the Phoebe photos. The editor’s corrections likewise went missing.

 FRASER SMITH ON JACK MONAGHAN

   C. Fraser Smith was one of the giants of a generation of Journal-Bulletin writers that included Jack Monaghan. He covered city politics and developed a poverty beat during the national war on poverty, and for a year, he moved his family in a troubled public high-rise housing complex, so readers could get a taste of what that was like. He went on to work at the Baltimore Sun, and later for an NPR station in Maryland, and wrote books.
   In 2019, he published a “The Daily Miracle – A Memoir of Newspapering.” The book includes a number of pages about Jack. Fraser  came to Rhode Island to promote the book, and visited the monthly luncheon of “The Geezers,” a gathering of ex-Journal people which, for this occasion, included Ham Davis, the onetime chief of the Journal-Bulletin’s Washington bureau, who’d come down from his home in Burlington, Vt.
Fraser died two years ago this month. Here’s what he wrote about Jack:

  At another point in the memoir, Fraser recounts the appearance in the newsroom of an organized crime enforcer named Dickie Callei, accompanied by his lawyer, a state legislator and  future chief justice of the  Rhode Island Supreme Court, Joseph A. Bevilacqua.
   Fraser gives two versions of what Callei wanted from the paper. Jack’s was that Callei was upset that the paper wasn’t using enough of his criminal record, which he wanted known so as to scare his targets. 

HOW DO WE STOP the gun madness?
   By saying “enough” to guns and the people who own them.
   We need to stop being so polite, so understanding, so deferential, so respectful of guns and people who are crazy about them.
   I’m talking not just about folks with AR-15s who need  them for their killing sprees at the mall, the synagogue, the Third Grade, the country music festival, the driveway, the home of a neighbor the gunman thinks is too noisy or the home of a neighbor who thinks the gunman is too noisy.
   I mean everybody who has a gun of any sort for any reason: a small caliber squirrel gun; a shotgun for duck-hunting; a scoped rifle to kill Bambi in the name of better forestry management; the family heirloom musket over the fireplace or the just-in-case Smith & Wesson on the bedside table.
   The killings will stop when the rest of us decide guns don’t belong in our homes.

I KNOW HOW RIDICULOUS this sounds.
   Absurd and impractical. I know that.
   There are too many guns and too many people who are devoted to guns to think they’ll simply go away – ever.
   Guns are too deeply woven into our lives and our culture to believe that attitudes will suddenly change. Then there’s that Constitutional “right” to kill 48,830 people a year.
   But change has happened to other things that kill us.
   I’m thinking cigarettes.
   At one time, smoking was a part of everyday life, and non-smokers were a huge part of the problem.
   Non-smokers in the bad old days were extraordinarily conciliatory to the cigarette crowd, so understanding of their addiction, so accommodating to their habits, so respectful of their “rights.”
   Hate the smoke; suffer the smokers.
   Even in non-smoking homes,  thoughtful hosts rushed for  ashtrays that were always at the ready in case a visitor asked "Okay if I light up?"
   No longer.
   Who wants a friend who's killing himself while putting your life in jeopardy?
    Today, the only smokers you see now are in black-and-white movies.
   Just 11 percent of adults smoke, the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention says, compared to 42 percent in the 1960s.
  
LET ME REPEAT: I understand what I’m saying is nuts.
    Worse, I have absolutely no idea what specific steps will finally put guns on America’s cultural trash heap – just that someday, that’s where guns will end up.
   It won’t happen overnight, and certainly not in my lifetime, although that's not saying much, since I’m 80.
   It won’t happen with a sudden attack on the people who own guns, or with a “Shame On U” bumper sticker or with a pithy personal insight: “You are a despicable child-murder-in-waiting, you creepy monster gun nut."
   Just as happened with cigarettes, guns will become so despised by so many people that almost anyone we know simply won’t want them.
    But first, we have to identify the culprits.

 I SUSPECT most of us feel that the problem with guns is the people who own guns. Which is true, sort of. But there's a problem, too, with the rest of us who have little or nothing to do with guns.
   We are the “Un-Gunned.” And we're wimps, just like the Gunned people say we are.
   We are afraid of hurting the feelings of, and eventually becoming estranged from, the people who own guns.  Gun owners are our fathers, sisters, aunts, best friends, fellow gym rats, neighbors, worshipers in the next pew, electricians, uncles and our neurosurgeons.
   We think we should be inclusive – especially in a democracy.
   Big mistake.
   The other day, I was looking at the website of the Brady organization. That’s the outfit that works to stop gun violence and is named for the late Jim Brady, the press secretary who was severely wounded in 1981 when an assassin tried to kill President Ronald Reagan.
   Here's what the group has to say about gun owners:
   “Brady acknowledges the important role that responsible gun owners play in our communities. Gun owners are an essential part of preventing gun violence.”
   That sounds so reasonable, so inclusive, so insightful, so coalition-building.
   And it's so absolutely, completely and totally absurd.
   Can you imagine the American Lung Association posting something similar:
   “We acknowledge the important role that responsible smokers play in our communities. Smokers are an essential part of preventing cancer."
   There is no such thing as a responsible smoker.
   And no such thing as a responsible gun owner.
   Want to stop the killing? Get rid of the guns.
   How? Get gun owners to wish away their arsenals.
   We can’t take their guns away.
   But we can make owning a gun a terrible thing, a thing of shame, something that people just don't want to do.

LET US COUNT the obstacles.
    It’s a cliché to say there are more guns in the United States than people.
   A group called “American Gun Facts” puts the number of guns at 466 million; the population is 334 million.
   This means that if you placed an AR-15 in every baby's crib; put a shotgun in every student’s backpack; stocked every maximum security cell with a Beretta; and made sure that that every nursing home complied with Medicare’s “packing heat” requirements, there would still be plenty of guns.
   About 30 percent of U.S. adults owns at least one gun, according to the Pew Research Center; another 11 percent of people told Pew that while they don’t own a gun, someone else in their house does. About one-third of gun owners say they have at least least five.
   Why?
   For work.
   For collecting.
   For sport.
   For hunting.
   For protection, which is Reason Number One.
   I understand Reason Number One.
   I’m a scaredy cat.  I can imagine that if I was traumatized by crime, felt someone was out to get me or my family and knowing that the cops might not  be around when it counts, I’d be first in line at Don's Good Guys' Guns Ammo and Camo Last Stop.
   All of us are so stupid about guns.

BUT WE DON'T have to be stupid forever.
   Take drunk driving.
   When I was growing up, drunk driving was celebrated; it was the subject of epic tales of wild rides on hairpin mountain roads, unimaginable close-calls with the cops, near collisions with un-drunk drivers, heroic Odysseys  limited only by the raconteurs' impaired recall.
   Eventually, dead people’s mothers got MADD; and now drunk driving is not just against the law, it’s a cultural sin.
   I mean people still do it; but no one defends drunk drivers unless they are paid to, and no one is proposing a Constitutional right to drive drunk.

ONE DAY, having a gun in the house will be considered just as dangerous as having a pack of cigarettes on the kitchen counter or an empty six-pack in the front seat.
     Someday, lock-down drills to survive school shootings will be ancient history, just like  duck-and-cover drills to survive nuclear war.
   Someday it will be safer to go to school, go shopping,  turn into the wrong driveway, ring the wrong doorbell,  have an argument with your spouse or to ask a neighbor to lower the noise so the baby can sleep.
   Someday, enough Americans will get angry enough about guns.
   "Seriously. You own a gun?"