They would go after Patrick Henry these days

My head is filled with dread consulting the calendar and the news. Give me liberty or give me death, the sort of talk that could get you locked up for hate speech.

It would be funny if it were a mockumentary like “The Office,” but it was not quite. Sen. Chuck Grassley was trying to referee a shouting match between Sen. Cory Booker and FBI Director Kash Patel live on CNN. Booker portrayed Patel as a clown, who said Booker is despicable. This in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s shocking murder. Tut, tut, the senior senator from Iowa was rousted from his repose and gaveled the rasslers to pipe down. All in a day’s work with the Judiciary Committee.

Lord help us.

The attorney general vows to hunt down left-leaning foundations that fund speech that she hates, Trump expresses his loathing for those who question him, and the vice president took over Kirk’s right-wing podcast to threaten retribution on whoever speaks ill of the mighty.

I’m curling into the fetal position. This is how they will find me. My heart palpitates.

I have to fly to a wedding in the Bay Area, with a layover in Denver. If I survive thanks to Trump and Musk DOGEing the FAA, I will return to run the gauntlet with doctors who will scan my heart, check out that spot-on my lung, and ice my prostate tumor until it shrivels up and turns into a slushy.

With any luck I will die before they do away with Medicare or the jackboots kick down my door for saying things untoward. Imagine the possibilities.

This is one of the few benefits of growing old. It used to be that you would have to hire a babysitter to attend the protest of creeping authoritarian government — creeping down from Trump through the Iowa Capitol right down to Storm Lake. Fortunately, my immediate worry these days is about missing my appointment with Fratzke and Jensen Funeral Home.

So much to address, so little time.

I have a book coming out, right after a doctor visit, that will require my presence in literary hubs like Decorah, where the attorney general would like to sue the sheriff, if she could, for not pledging to summarily sweep up immigrants for deportation. I am expected to say something.

What are you allowed to say anymore? If they don’t gag you may they shoot you? This will be a difficult question for John Roberts and the Supremes, who will rule for those who cloaked them.

These characters on TV appear to have been raised by wolves. Our fate is in their hands. Ashley Hinson is hard-core. She wants to lock up somebody. She is full-stop MAGA. It worked so far in Iowa, so she bets on it getting her elected to the Senate. Though I would like to think the tide is beginning to turn back to sanity in Iowa, I would not bet the Century Farm. There is a whole lot of crazy going on aimed at people who don’t goose-step it right.

So go ahead and lock up all the immigrants, shut down the packinghouses, fire the indiscreet jaw flappers, arrest the reporters and dig me a hole six feet deep while the pulmonologist at the Iowa City cancer center — don’t mind the name “cancer center,” son, it’s just where the pulmonologist likes to hang out — determines my fate.

We could sure use a laugh or two, but too much fun is not tolerated around here.

It helps me almost laugh when Kash Patel hurls insults at Sen. Adam Schiff, until you appreciate that Patel actually is in charge of the FBI.

If it is Friday, it is time for a CT scan and a word with the vascular surgeon. This is what occupies the mind as you read about the University of Iowa losing federal funds for medical research and clinical trials.

Five weeks hence, that frigid needle will probe my prostate at the Mayo Clinic, which is forced to curtail some services at its outlying centers as belts tighten across health care against the onslaught of reduced support for medicine, especially in rural areas.

In between doctors and the news, you walk the dog for lack of a quart of Scotch, and pray along the lakeshore that nobody notices you mumbling to yourself. They will never find me behind the Sunset Park Bandshell hiding with my notes. By the time your head clears and you think it is safe to return, a boat off the coast of Venezuela is bombed for the cameras. Ka-boom to you! Drug runners, they said, but who knows? Trump warned there’s a lot more where that came from, buster, so watch yourself. Personally, I want to thank President Donald Trump and Ashley Hinson for not bombing me on a one-way boat ride, and for preserving my Medicare at least til I die, which the actuarial charts favor imminently.

Art Cullen is the editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa, where this column appeared. For more columns and editorials, please consider a subscription to the Times Pilot. Or, if you wish, you can make a tax-deductible gift to the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation to support independent community journalism in rural Iowa. Thanks.

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