ArcaMax

NEW ORLEANS QUESTION: What did you do for those beads?

ANSWER: I got run over by a truck and now I'm lying in the street like a busted Barbie.

Yeah. I know. It wasn't Mardi Gras, though everything in the United States now leads uphill to the cross.

I call 'em "Watermelons," those columns that come in like a slow ball over the plate, aimed straight at your bat by a guy who's gonna be playing in Omaha next season.

Elections. Scandals. Christmas. Trump says drones helped win the Civil War.

Watermelons one and all. Oh, you still have to write as well as you can, but the idea for the column is in your pocket, and the idea is the hard thing.

President Jimmy Carter's death is a big ole watermelon. He was 100. He used to be president. He built houses for the poor.

If you're an endlessly patriotic conservative writer, Carter was a weak-willed political eunuch, another in a long line of treasonous liberals, an astonishing number of whom have a better military record than flag-humping Donald Trump.

If you're a liberal columnist, Carter was the only evangelical Christian who didn't make you want to burn the New Testament, a godly man with a good marriage and a charitable hammer in his hand.

Watermelons. Six hundred words, and you can knock off early.

Same with mass killings. School shooting? Watermelon. Some repressed bobo starts shooting up the Gay Pride parade? Watermelon. "Loner" white boy cuts loose with Daddy's rifle at a school assembly? Watermelon with the phrase "troubled teen."

Make 'em cry. Make 'em demand tighter gun laws or more treatment for the mentally ill. Get many emails from guys who take a shower wearing a pistol in a waterproof holster. In those emails, waterproof holster guy swears not to protect you when the apocalypse comes. Good. If there's an apocalypse, I want to die toward the beginning so I don't have to live through the whole thing.

So, Carter's death is a watermelon, and the mass killing in New Orleans oughta be an even bigger watermelon. Dead presidents are only worth something as faces on money.

But Carter doesn't die every day, though his ideals do.

That's the problem with the mass killing. They happen all the time. You can be a columnist with talent on loan from God, but mass killing column number 2,000 is gonna be a little weak.

Columnists have lives, too. When people who misunderstand democracy storm the United States Capitol, every columnist takes a deep breath and says, "Well, I got one for this week. Hell, I may be able to stretch this out for two weeks."

Once you know that, you can go out to dinner with your spouse, and you can have two glasses of wine because you're not going to spend tomorrow rooting around for an idea. Anyway, when you're writing about the end of democracy, a hangover helps.

I'm always sad when bad things happen, but I grew up in newsrooms, and bad things have a use in that business.

Rest in peace, New Orleans. The candlelight vigil better end before then next one starts.

To find out more about Marc Dion, and read words by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his of his best columns, is called "Mean Old Liberal." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com, and for Nook, Kindle and iBooks.