Driving While Arrogant: Let's Take His Keys Away

"Humor is the weapon of the wise, for it disarms the arrogant." —Aristophanes

© Bonita Cheshier | Dreamstime

It’s been another dark week in the U.S., as we continue to descend into fascism, MAGA-style. If you don’t feel like laughing, I get it. But as I do my small bit to push back on the darkness, I try to remember the words of Sojourner Truth (1797-1883), a formerly enslaved woman who became a powerful advocate for abolition and women’s rights: “Life is a hard battle anyway. If we laugh and sing a little as we fight the good fight of freedom, it makes it all go easier. I will not allow my life’s light to be determined by the darkness around me.”

I. Ever since Jimmy Kimmel, the late-night TV comic, was suspended by ABC and Disney for the mortal sin of using free speech to take a satiric jab at MAGA and POTUS—then reinstated when a spontaneous boycott cost Disney $4B in market value—I’ve been thinking about the role of humor in our personal and political lives.

I was blessed with a family in which everyone had a sense of humor. I’m not talking about the ability to tell a joke, though that was not lacking. I’m talking about the spontaneous humor that bubbles up in everyday life, the kind that can make life lighter even in hard times, the kind that Clive James meant when he said, “Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds.” Among other things, my family helped me learn to laugh at myself—a relatively pain-free way to confront one’s foibles and a form of grace that comes close to self-forgiveness.

II. Exhibit A: When I was 14, my Grandpa Palmer, whom I revered, taught me to drive on the backroads of Iowa. Grandpa, a machinist, was a self-educated man of few words, and he taught not by telling but by showing. As he drove us from his Waterloo home into the countryside, he’d say, “Just watch what I do.” Then, when we got to a quiet road he’d stop and say, “Your turn to drive,” as he did on one nearly fateful August day in 1953.

1939 Pontiac Coupe

Full of adolescent hubris, I was at the wheel, rounding a curve faster than I should have, when I saw the stop sign too late. Terrified, I slammed on the brakes. We came to a shuddering halt in the middle of an intersection that, by some miracle, was traffic-free. As Grandpa’s ‘39 Pontiac Coupe rattled to a rest on its worn shock absorbers, the two of us sat there in silence, looking straight out the windshield, for what seemed like a very long time.

Then, without turning toward me, in a voice as calm as the Buddha, Grandpa drew on his dry, wry Midwestern sense of humor and aimed a zinger at me: “If I’d of known you was gonna do that, I don’t believe I’d of asked you to drive.”

He never said another word about it, to me or my parents. But he gave me a lesson that has stayed with me to this day, a lesson I can gladly embrace because it left me not with a dart to the heart but with a laugh. For 72 years, my driving record has been accident-free. (Still, I must confess that over those years, I’ve heard Grandpa’s voice again when I’ve given a bad speech or done a bad job leading a meeting, and folks had good reason to regret that they put me behind the wheel!)

III. I’ve often wondered how people who can’t laugh at themselves survive the slings and arrows of life—especially when they become public figures. One answer is clear in the eternally aggrieved swamp creature we call POTUS: they become the Incredible Hulk, lashing out at every slight, real and imagined. They use whatever power they possess to intimidate, even ruin anyone who aims a zinger in their direction.

But when the clumsy Hulk finds himself on humor’s slippery ground, strong-arming doesn’t work so well, as the POTUS-Kimmel dustup reveals. On Kimmel’s return to the air, he noted that POTUS had said, “I can’t believe ABC Fake News gave Jimmy Kimmel his job back”—to which Kimmel responded, “I can’t believe we gave you your job back!” And tens of millions of Americans said “Amen.”

The U.S. might have been saved from its current calamity if POTUS had had a family like mine. But in a family like his, obsessed with amassing power and wealth, there are no guardrails against arrogance: hubris is an essential tool of the family trade. So POTUS will continue to commit the crime of Driving While Arrogant as long as we allow him to stay behind the wheel. We have to take the keys away from him, from the GOP, and from the goons behind Project 2025.

So please attend the next No Kings rally on Oct. 18. Then let’s double down on voter mobilization and registration ahead of the 2026 midterms. We need to connect with folks who have voter’s remorse, who are ready to say to the regime, “If I’d of known you was gonna do this, I don’t believe I’d of asked you to drive.”

IV. One more story from my little stroll down memory lane… I was lucky to have a father who, like his father, knew how to push back on my youthful arrogance—while still making it clear that he believed in me, and in my capacity for self-correction. Dad, who went into business after high school, didn’t have a systematic philosophy of life, so I never got long lectures about the nature of virtue. What he did have was a store of aphorisms that were, in their own way, zingers of the sort Grandpa favored.

In high school, I was a bored C+ student who put his time and energy into extracurricular activities like student council. As a result, I got a lot of coverage in the student newspaper, a fact I was less than modest about at home. After all, I had two younger sisters to lord it over.

Dad didn’t like my braggadocio any more than Grandpa liked my driving. So when I got to boasting, he’d say, “Park, a quick word of advice: never believe your own press clippings.” And whenever my arrogance ran amok, Dad would bring out a zinger with a shaper point: “Just remember, son, today’s peacock is tomorrow’s feather duster.”

V. Those words have stayed with me across all these years because they give me a laugh. Even so, I sometimes forget them, and when I do, I get in trouble. Here’s a recent example…

In early 2019, I received an email that my 2018 book, On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity and Getting Old, had won a gold medal from an organization called the Independent Publisher. Thrilled at the fulfillment of a longtime dream, I quickly shared the news far and wide.

As a kid, I longed to win a gold medal at something, but when it came to team sports or contests involving physical ability, that was not to be. I was tall, skinny, uncoordinated, and I looked like a giraffe on ice whenever I made a bid for the gold. But in 2019, at age 80, out of the blue my dream had finally come true!

A few weeks after the email announcing my prize, I received a box from the Independent Publisher. There it was, my coveted gold medal, along with a letter with more details. I swelled with pride as I held the medal. Then I read the letter—and went to the floor laughing. I had won first place in the subcategory of “Death and Dying”!

VI. That’s not the race I dreamed about winning when I was young, but I guess it’s the only one I’m eligible for these days! Which takes me to one more thought as I come to the end of this ramble. Maybe, just maybe, the ability to laugh at ourselves will allow us, as we check out, to have the coveted last laugh. After all, as G. K. Chesterton said, “Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.”

[NOTES: My 10 books are HERE and HERE. The Center for Courage & Renewal is HERE. I post on Substack every Friday, as time and energy allow. Free as well as paid subscriptions will always have access to everything I post.]