Readers of my last column will recall that, after enjoying the dubious honor of predicting our illegal interventions in Venezuela and Iran in these pages, I have decided to get out of the “prophesying war” business for good. So far the curse of the back-page column appears to have been lifted.

Instead of war with Cuba, the headlines are currently being dominated by Al. Do you know him? “Al” is what my maternal grandfather calls AI (I can never decide whether this is simply the result of his having seen the abbreviation written in a san-serif font or a vague association with HAL, the evil computer in 2001.) Grandpa is not the only elderly gentleman from the Midwest trying to make sense of this phenomenon. Pope Leo XIV recently devoted his first encyclical to Al (as I will continue to call him). The document is over 42,000 words long. I for one would rather hear what His Holiness has to say about his White Sox finding themselves with the third-best record in the American League.

Along with abolishing just war theory, tourist phrasebooks, the electrical grid, and whatever is left of our attention spans, Al will probably mean the end of some of my favorite misspellings. How lucky I was, I realize upon reflection, to have worked as an English tutor in those halcyon days when a personal essay might begin, “If I were on a dessert island, the first thing I would do is build a raft.” (To where, Candy Land?) I hope I am not the only person who will miss “intensive purposes,” “deep-seeded hatred,” “ripe with errors,” the fortuitously apt image of “the Untied States of America,” and “baited breath.”

As I write this, there are 162,492 unread emails in my inbox. Every few months I think about trying to clear them out, but bar-napkin arithmetic suggests that even if I could delete 200 emails a minute it would take me more than 13 hours to reach the fabled “inbox zero” status. Instead I just let them pile up on what I think of as the “Quentin Crisp principle.” The English dandy famously argued that there was no point in doing housework because after a certain amount of time—he reckoned it at four years—“the dirt doesn’t get any worse.”

Occasionally, though, I lose my nerve and venture to delete a marketing email or two. The problem is that I always end up reading them. “Your summer just got more interesting, starting today.” This is not a mordantly understated hostage note, but a message from my local PBS affiliate informing me of the upcoming schedule of children’s programming. My own brood are not really the target audience for whatever is being shown on public television these days. Our four-year-old’s favorite movie is Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. (Nice parenting, I know.)

Anyway, the email surprised me, as I was fairly certain that I had already hit the “unsubscribe” button. Stupid me. A few minutes of clicking around revealed that for more than a year I had been sending them $25 a month. I know how it happened. Last year my wife and I wanted to watch the conclusion of the BBC’s production of Wolf Hall. Five hundred bucks is a lot to pay for a couple of hours’ television, and the show itself proved to be disappointing even given the limits of the source material. But one line from the second-to-last episode has stuck with me.

“You want power?” growls Mark Rylance’s Thomas Cromwell to the Duke of Norfolk, played by Timothy Spall. “GET IT LIKE A MAN AND NOT BY PANDERING YOUR FUNNY NIECES!”

Believe or not, “funny” was not the f-word spoken by Rylance in the original BBC broadcast. For some reason, the well-heeled septuagenarian liberal crowd who are the target U.S. audience for this sort of thing are still squeamish about at least some of the items from George Carlin’s infamous list. An alternate version must have been dubbed with them in mind. I don’t mind this. In addition to being printable in a family magazine like this one, the bowdlerized version is an all-purpose genteelism, as in “Why can’t kids keep their FUNNY shoes on in the car?” or “Why did I agree to write the FUNNY funny back-page column of The American Conservative?”

Speaking of which: Has anyone else noticed that Trump has become completely humorless? I don’t mean his personal sense of humor, which goes without saying. I mean that the man himself has somehow become so tedious that it is difficult to imagine anyone even wanting to make fun of him.

One man who remains a source of amusement, Vanilla Ice, was until recently scheduled to appear on Trump’s behalf at something called “The Great American State Fair,” alongside Milli Vanilli, Bret Michaels of Poison, Morris Day, Flo Rida (more on him anon), Young MC, and at least some of The Commodores. But the musical performances may now be put on ice, as most of the artists (though not Mr. Ice himself) withdrew from the concert, in dereliction of what the president seems to think was their patriotic duty. Instead of quietly pretending he never had anything to do with the event, Trump is going to war. He now says that instead of “overpriced singers nobody really wants to hear,” the event on the National Mall will feature “the Number One Attraction anywhere in the World, the man who gets much larger audiences than Elvis in his prime, and he does so without a guitar.” (Hint: he doesn’t mean Liberace.)

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Feuding with the Kennedy Center is one thing. But when you are president of the United States and your time is somehow less valuable than that of a guy whose greatest contribution to music is (almost) rhyming “straps” with “slap” (as in those immortal lines, “Them baggy sweat pants and the Reeboks with the straps / She turned around and gave that big booty a slap”)—what can I even say?

Give it a funny rest, Donald.