Weekly Comments: Health Update. Colbert of CBS. Political Satire.
#1268 July 20, 2025
OHIO HEALTH RIVERSIDE METHODIST HOSPITAL. COLUMBUS: First, a quick update. I’m headed home tomorrow (Monday). No need for a rehab facility. No pain. Easy walking, climbing stairs. Fantastic heart surgeon and entire medical crew. More at the bottom.
CBS announced they will end their late-night show in May. Steven Colbert is known as a brilliant satirist. He has a huge staff and production crew to make the show funny and interesting. But when the star is paid $20 million and the show loses $40 million (instead of making the expected substantial profit for CBS), it’s no surprise that the show will be cancelled.
Will Rogers was also known for political satire. He joked about Presidents, Senators, Congressmen, Governors, and lower-level officials. His satire was based on their policies and not “personal appearance.” If he said something negative about a person, he usually ended with a compliment. He is known for, “I joked about every prominent man of my time, but I never met a man I didn’t like.”
Let me mention two prominent men he didn’t like because of policies. One was a southern senator who was a devout racist. Another was Mussolini. Will interviewed the Fascist leader of Italy. Will intended to include comments from Mussolini in his newspaper column, but decided against it. Will knew the quotes from Mussolini would make his policies sound far better than they were in practice.
Colbert suffered from a declining “live” audience, and therefore declining revenue from commercials. (ABC and NBC late-night shows are facing similar declines.)
As to Colbert’s satire in the last 10 or 12 years… how much of his humor do you remember directed at Biden, Obama, or other prominent Democrats? How about Trump and other Republicans?
Back to me…On Tuesday, the portion of the aortic artery at the top of my heart was replaced. Six days later, I get to go home. I’ll need someone with me 24 hrs. a day for a week, in case of an emergency. Obviously, still some restrictions. Plus, walking and other exercises.
I’m mentioning the following only because it might help a few of you make a life-saving decision or at least reduce health problems and cost. If my aortic aneurysm had popped up two years ago, my recovery would have taken longer than expected today. In those two years I built up muscles (arms, chest, legs) and lost 50 pounds. These changes for me, and others in a similar situation, can reduce the need for (or severity of) health issues such as heart surgery, knee and hip replacement. If you are young, make changes in lifestyle and maintain it. I wish I had been motivated to make these changes 40 or 50 years ago.
I’m going to borrow a closing from Will Rogers. After his gallbladder surgery in June 1927, he received telegrams from President Coolidge, plus several Senators, Governors, famous actors and business folks. Well, I haven’t heard from Trump (unless an envelope might have arrived asking for a contribution).
But I have received so many prayers, best wishes and other wonderful greetings that I feel like Will when he wrote his syndicated newspaper column three days later: “People couldn’t have been any nicer to me than if I had died.”
Randall Reeder
WillRogersToday (dot) com
P.S. Happy birthday to our son. On his first birthday, Neal Armstrong walked on the moon. Today, Mark’s an engineering professor and Department Chair at the Air Force Institute of Technology, near Dayton.