A CURIOUS MIX OF BRITISH FOLK MUSIC AND AMERICAN POLITICS
By Mike Stevenson
Rewatching the wonderful 1985 movie “Back to the Future.” I just can’t get over the fact that about 50% of the movie audience came away from the movie believing that “Biff” was the hero. They didn’t like Marty McFly, these people liked Biff.
They like him so much, they thought Biff would even make a great president someday.
I just don’t understand… I thought we ALL were supposed to hate Biff.
By Sarah Kendzior | May 4, 2026
I was five miles in the woods, looking for the Last Incorruptible Thing.
“Aren’t you a brave soul,” a woman said when I emerged. She wore jogging clothes and a knowing smile. I looked like the Unabomber’s little sister.
“Not brave,” I said. “Just walking round the river. Get that springtime weather while it lasts! I went in the woods to watch birds. Plants and birds and rocks and things.”
America lyrics, the last refuge of an American mycological liar.
“Mmm-hmmm,” she said. “You find any mushrooms?”
“If I did, I’d tell you no. And if I didn’t, I’d tell you yes,” I said, since she knew my game. She laughed and jogged away.
I had a pocket full of Missouri Gold: morels, the most elusive of mushrooms. A successful morel hunt is a victory. But the search is the real reward.
The morel is the Last Incorruptible Thing. You cannot plant them. You cannot buy them in stores. You can only spot them in the wild. Morels demand complete surrender to nature’s whims. They grow for three to four weeks each spring, and no one knows when or where. They pop up like middle fingers to corporate control.
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Morels encourage revolt against the digital panopticon. No self-respecting morel hunter posts their hot spots online or reveals their finds in real time. Morels cannot be recorded by Ring or tracked by GPS. They are immune from AI chicanery. Make an AI morel and watch no one care: digital tricks hold no power here. Morel hunters guard their secrets in the analog world: in the depths of the forests and the recesses of their minds. Morels are escape artists, and you escape with them.
I am a member of the morel majority. Every spring, I wait for the surface of the world to shred and the last pure truth to show.
In the forest, you have one mission. You stagger like a zombie until a morel emerges like a brain. You extract it with a loving touch and guard it until it’s time to feast. Nothing tastes as sweet as serendipity.
A proper morel hunt requires that you walk the woods for hours with eyes to the ground. The outside world fades into irrelevance, a distant realm of misplaced priorities like mortgages and jobs. In the real world, the morel world, you seek loamy soil, south-facing slopes, fallen sycamores. You go slow. You dodge branches and climb creek beds. You take nothing for granted.
With this knowledge, you learn not only the mushroom but the land. What you can grasp from the crunch of a leaf or the rise of a flower. You sense when the season is starting and when it’s getting too late. You know that you could be wrong, and that being wrong is the most pleasant surprise of all.
* * *
I have had a banner year for morels and a terrible year for most everything else. I found dozens in three counties and would have found more if the first morels had not appeared when I was across the country at my father’s funeral.
The day after I returned to Missouri, I left at dawn and came home late. I walked miles through the forest, grateful to have a singular and uncomplicated goal. As Townes van Zandt sang, Sorrow and solitude, these are the precious things. It hurt to be near people.
Morels don’t wane like sympathy.
I’m obsessive enough to know when I’ve found barren terrain or got beat to the punch by fellow obsessives (respect), but I keep moving. A highlight of the hunt is stumbling upon bizarre shit in the woods. This year, I found the ruins of a 19th-century monastery, a shipwreck so far from the river that it rots in a meadow, and a stone staircase to nowhere, making me wonder if morels found there would be haunted.
Did I actually find morels in these places? Shit if I’d tell!
I got scratched, bruised, bloodied, and sore, but never bored. My thoughts stayed captive to the forest floor. When grief ripped through me, I retraced my steps, wondering if I’d missed one, and often I had. That’s the mercy of morels: they are reticent by nature, and when they reveal themselves to you upon your return, it’s like getting the do-over you don’t get in life.
Live fast, die young, leave a good-tasting corpse. Morels aren’t meant to last, so you can’t mourn them when they’re gone.
A week into my quest, the temperature rose. I grew apprehensive. Morels are immune to the evils of the modern age: surveillance, commodification, even industrialization. In St. Louis, they paved paradise and put up parking lots, and morels grew in the cracks. St. Louis is no paradise, more a paradise lost, and its underground rises up on the regular. Morels are no exception. A St Louisan will spend all day scouring distant forests only to spot one in the bushes behind QuikTrip on the drive home.
April’s heat wave ended my season. I stayed in denial and sweated out the hunt, knowing the soil was too dry, the grass was too tall, and, in my heart, that it was over. I had an irrational fear that this was the last time. Then I read of Americans elsewhere enjoying their bounty and knew nothing could outwit the morel. They are incorruptible. They aren’t meant to make sense. They defy prediction, including bad predictions. I could keep on believing.
My real regret was personal. If morel season was over, and I lost my singular goal, something else would arrive to fill the time. I knew it would be grief, and it was.
There were days where I found nothing, but nothing is good enough for me. There are people for whom nothing is good enough, meaning nothing ever satisfies them, and people for whom nothing is good enough because the point is the quest.
The latter type thrives in morel season, when life is brutish, short, and magical.
* * *
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Cartoon by Benjamin Slyngstad.
April 26, 2026
Today Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate of the Department of Justice Civil Division wrote to the lawyer for the National Trust for Historic Preservation demanding that the organization drop its lawsuit against Trump’s planned ballroom on the site where the East Wing of the White House used to be.
The letter claimed that there was “another attempt on President Trump’s life” last night at the Washington Hilton, where Secret Service agents apprehended a man carrying a shotgun, a handgun, and multiple knives on the floor above the room where the White House Correspondents dinner was taking place last night.
The man, whom police have identified as Cole Tomas Allen, 31, of California, sprinted through a magnetometer before authorities stopped him. Shots were fired, although it remains unclear who fired them. A Secret Service agent wearing a bulletproof vest was shot but has been released from the hospital. According to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro, the government is charging Cole with two counts of using a firearm and one count of assault on a federal officer using a dangerous weapon.
Shumate said last night’s incident “proves, yet again, that the White House ballroom is essential for the safety and security of the President, his family, his cabinet, and his staff. When the White House ballroom is complete, President Trump and his successors will no longer need to venture beyond the safety of the White House perimeter to attend large gatherings at the Washington Hilton ballroom. The White House ballroom will ensure the safety and security of the President for decades to come.”
“Put simply,” Shumate wrote, “your lawsuit puts the lives of the President, his family, and his staff at grave risk…. Enough is enough.” He demanded the National Trust for Historic Preservation “voluntarily dismiss this frivolous lawsuit today in light of last night’s assassination attempt on President Trump. If your client does not dismiss the lawsuit by 9:00 AM on Monday, the government will move to dissolve the injunction and dismiss the case in light of last night’s extraordinary events.”
This is an odd angle to take, since, as Bluesky user Tom Shafer pointed out, the Hilton ballroom seats 2,945 people and Trump says his proposed ballroom will seat only 999. And to be clear, a judge has permitted the construction of the secure facility under the ballroom to continue despite the lawsuit; it’s just the ballroom itself that’s currently at issue.
Attending the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is not an official requirement; this is actually the first time Trump has chosen to go as president. As Emily Davies, Isaac Arnsdorf, Jeremy Roebuck, and Joe Heim of the Washington Post reported today, the Trump administration could have provided a higher level of security last night as it has for other gatherings of high-ranking officials, but it did not designate the dinner as a “National Special Security Event.” Even so, Secret Service agents did indeed stop Cole before he could enter the ballroom.
Yesterday, David A. Fahrenthold, Luke Broadwater, and Andrea Fuller of the New York Times reported that the Trump administration has secretly awarded the company it chose to build the ballroom a no-bid $17.4 million contract to repair two ornamental fountains in Lafayette Park near the White House. In 2022 the Biden administration estimated the cost of the work to be $3.3 million. The journalists explain that the Trump administration dramatically increased the estimated cost by adding an additional 27% for inflation and then adding another inflation estimate of 24%, then increased its estimate by another 50% because it wanted to get the fountains fixed quickly, then simply gave the contract to Maryland-based Clark Construction.
While Trump claims the ballroom will be paid for by private donations, the government will pay for the fountain repairs. This means the contract should have been open for competitive bidding. To justify awarding the contract without that process, the journalists report, the administration cited an “urgency” exception to normal procedures meant for war or natural disasters.
The focus on last night’s event has obscured this upcoming week’s big story.
Trump has justified his refusal to seek congressional approval for his attack on Iran by claiming Iran posed an “imminent threat” to the U.S. While Trump’s own intelligence agencies contradicted that claim, it enabled Republicans to argue that Trump had authority to launch the strikes under the 1973 War Powers Act, which allows the president to act to counter an “imminent” threat.
But the War Powers Act says the president must notify Congress of any such action within 48 hours of its start. Then, by 60 days after that notification, the president has to stop using the military for that action unless the Congress either declares war or authorizes the use of the military for that specific action. Democrats have fought hard against Trump’s unilateral decision to go to war, but Republicans have refused to press him to get congressional approval, apparently hoping that Trump would find a way out of the Middle East crisis before hitting the 60-day mark.
But so far he has not, and the 60-day window closes on May 1.
Trump appears to believe the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports will hurt the country so badly that Iranian leaders will have to agree to his demands. But that pressure will take time to build. “I have all the time in the World, but Iran doesn’t,” he posted Thursday. He told reporters: “Don’t rush me. Don’t rush me…. So we were in Vietnam, like, for 18 years; we were in Iraq for many, many years.… I don’t like to say World War II, because that was a biggie, but we were four and a half, almost five years in World War II. And we were in the Korean war for seven years. I’ve been doing this for six weeks.”
If Trump doesn’t find an end to the conflict, Republicans must either vote to authorize what is already a deeply unpopular war or let Trump continue his war without congressional approval, adding fuel to accusations that he is becoming a dictator. After all, Trump claimed in January, after he had attacked Venezuela without congressional approval, that the War Powers Act is unconstitutional and would “take away our Powers to fight and defend the United States of America.”
The idea that the president can use the military as he wishes without authority from Congress demolishes one of the fundamental principles of our democracy: that we have a right to a say in how our lives and treasure are spent.
Rather than enabling Trump, Republicans could reassert the authority the Framers of the Constitution put in Congress’s hands and stop his deadly blundering.
“We’ve heard a lot of talk from Republicans that they’ll give this president 60 days,” the second-ranking Democrat in the House, Katherine Clark of Massachusetts, told Mike Lillis of The Hill. “And this is a failed effort. And it’s long past time that he come to Congress and explain what the strategy is and what the exit is. Republicans have been saying that is a crucial timeline for them. So put your vote up on the board.”
Source: Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American