"I worship the quicksand he walks in"

A sly inversion of the old adage “worship the ground he walks on,” the line turns adoration into a diagnosis. Ground is stable, deserving of reverence because it supports and sustains. Quicksand is the opposite: deceptive, unstable, and ravenous. To “worship the quicksand he walks in” is to confess a fixation not only with a person, but with the very forces that will swallow him, and, by extension, those who follow. The comedy lies in the mismatch; the sting lies in recognizing how often devotion seeks out danger and calls it destiny.

The phrase skewers our appetite for spectacle. In celebrity culture and politics alike, charisma draws attention, but crisis keeps it. The worshiper is enthralled by the sink, not the stride, by the drama of misstep, scandal, and teetering brinkmanship. Art Buchwald’s wit suggests we mistake turbulence for depth and confusion for complexity, cheering the very vortex that consumes judgment. The target is not merely the vaunted figure but the audience that confers sainthood on a quagmire.

There is a psychology here: some loyalties are forged in chaos. The more a leader flails, the stronger the bond of those who conflate suffering with authenticity and instability with truth-telling. “He walks in” carries a present-tense immediacy, implying a continuous entanglement, an ongoing muddle that becomes the proof of his realness. Worship shifts from virtue to crisis management; faith becomes a survival strategy in a swamp of one’s choosing.

Satire exposes complicity. By elevating the quicksand, we normalize the conditions that trap us: outrage as fuel, confusion as content, degradation as entertainment. Buchwald’s jab asks whether our devotion is discernment or addiction to collapse. Admiration, properly ordered, chooses bedrock, habits, institutions, and character that can bear weight. Anything less is a liturgy of sinking, a prayer to be pulled under with style.