I’d like to think I share something with the late Art Buchwald, but I’m sure it isn’t talent. We both have been columnists in Paris. His Paris was in France and mine was in Kentucky, but they were both Paris.

            We have both been chubby smart alecs and we both speak French, very poorly. Other than that there probably aren’t that many similarities between us.

            Then why do I feel such a huge loss at his passing?

            He was the first satirist that I really read when I was young. That might be it. When I found out that a person could make a fairly nice living making fun of the stuffed shirts, the politicians and the hypocrites, it was a real eye opening thing for me.

            A lot of people since his death have been writing and talking about his terrible childhood and the fact that he enlisted in the Marine Corps when he was only sixteen years old to get away from his upbringing. That is all interesting in a Horatio Alger sort of way I guess, but what I find fascinating is what he did after the war with the talents and assets he had.

            He dropped out of high school to enter the Marines. Then, after the war, he bluffed his way into a college and using his GI bill benefits, he attended college for three years and then dropped out of that.

            You might say that titles and honors were never what he was after. He took the bulk of what was left of his GI benefits and bought a one way ticket to Paris.

            Gutsy move.

            After again bluffing his way into a job as a restaurant and night life columnist with a French newspaper he took his terrible French language skills and did such things as bobsledding with Olympic teams and, get this, taking a tour in a limousine from one end of the Soviet Union to the other – and this was in the very early 1960s when the USSR wasn’t a very friendly place for Americans.

            Returning home to Washington he really found his niche’. With the possible exception of Will Rogers, you can’t name a better political satirist. PJ O’Rourke and John Stewart couldn’t hold Art’s jockstrap when it comes to making fun of politicians.

            Buchwald did his humor in a non nasty way. All he had to do was point out the stupidity and inanities of such politicians as Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson to make his point. Art was probably a liberal at heart but he was an equal opportunity smart-ass.

            Some people are upset with him for his choice to not take dialysis which led to his death. I’ve seen both sides of the dialysis question. I’ve watched my mother go through 13 years of it and it wasn’t pretty. I recently escaped the ordeal by getting a kidney transplant two years ago. Art was 80 going on 81. He had already lost a leg and I’m sure the prospect of spending his last couple of years attached to a hemodialysis unit just didn’t jibe with his outlook on life and how it should be lived.

            As you know, his last year was full and even exciting. He was surprised to not die when the doctors said he would so he left the hospice and went home to write another book and resume his column.

            He went from being an unwanted child to being a world figure to being a good example about a dignified death. Not a bad run for an overweight high school dropout with glasses and no prospects.

            Somewhere in heaven today God is laughing so hard he is about to fall out of his throne.