Buttermilk Sky

Domestic terror scorecard, 2009:

April 4 - Responding to a domestic disturbance call at the home of Richard Poplawski, Pittsburgh police officers Paul Sciullo, Stephen Mayhle and Eric Kelly are shot and killed. The heavily-armed Poplawski says he fears "the Obama gun ban that's on the way."

May 31 - Dr. George Tiller is killed in the vestibule of his church in Wichita, Kansas. The gunman is Scott Roeder, who has ties to radical Christian clerics and the terrorist organization Operation Rescue.

June 10 - White supremacist James von Brunn opens fire at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., killing security guard Stephen T. Johns.

December 25 - Umar Abdulmutallab attempts to set off an explosion on a Delta plane landing in Detroit. The al-Qaeda wannabe succeeds only in setting his underpants on fire.

We're winning the war on terror.

Labels: apple pie, guns, terror

It's December 24, and that cable channel has already begun its marathon showing of A Christmas Story, the film which has become our Official Holiday Classic in the twenty-odd years since its unheralded release. I am always a little surprised that the National Rifle Association doesn't protest its subtly anti-gun message, pointing to twelve showings in twenty-four hours as proof of sinister socialist-liberal indoctrination. Maybe it's too subtle for the gun lobby, which tends to see the world in primary colors, like a target. But their stated belief that only private gun ownership will keep us safe and free is embodied in Ralphie Parker's fantasy of protecting his family from burglars with a Red Ryder BB gun. Of course, he gets the gun at last, and the first time he pulls the trigger, he manages to shoot himself in the face. He also breaks his glasses and has to pacify his mother with phony tears and an outrageous lie. Far from making him safe or free, the gun has made him Glenn Beck.

Ralphie is the fictional version of Jean Shepherd, the writer and radio genius who died in 1999. (That's him in the department store sequence, directing Ralphie to the end of the Santa line.) Shepherd cultivated the image of a man's man -- amateur pilot, car expert, sport fisherman, ham radio enthusiast, and a proud member of the Playboy family of writers. But I cannot remember hearing him talk about hunting or target shooting. All his stories of guns and fireworks are set in the Indiana of his childhood. It is not clear what Shepherd's army experiences were, or why he was discharged in 1944, but he seems to have lost his taste for shooting things and blowing things up.

Part of A Christmas Story's appeal is its ruefulness about getting what you want, only to have it bring you within an inch, literally, of irreversible disaster. In a few hours, all over America, real Ralphies will unwrap real guns under the tree. A small percentage of them may be tempted to aim them at bullies, or girls, or the teacher who gives too much homework. So perhaps it's not a bad things if, while they open their gifts, the TV in the corner chants, "You'll shoot your eye out, you'll shoot your eye out."

Merry Christmas, gang.

Labels: guns

Don't worry, this won't be another series of dumb jokes about Tiger Woods and his putts/putz. Here at the Sky, we take the sober, historical view. And we haven't noticed anyone else even suggesting that there is a racial component to America's latest obsession. (Maybe on the right bank of Blogenheim, but who goes there?) In America, race is what the sociologists call a "master status," an immutable category of definition, and there are only two races, white and not-white. Mr. Woods, for all his rainbow ancestry, is distinctly not-white, and every day his name is linked with another woman of the sort the media describe as "Nordic blondes," including, of course, his wife. Deep beneath the surface, unheard but felt like the pedal tone of an organ, is the ancient theme of "oversexed black man coming for 'our' white women." Even worse, the white women are clearly meeting him better than halfway. We're back at the turn of the twentieth century with Jack Johnson, who was blacker than Woods and far scarier -- a heavyweight boxer instead of a golfer. Johnson was eventually prosecuted under the Mann Act, which, like all sexual-transgression laws, is applied selectively to Enemies of the Establishment (like Charlie Chaplin). Tiger Woods will not meet a similar fate; eventually, he will be forgiven, especially if he returns to pre-surgery form and resumes winning major tournaments. His fate in the meantime will be more like that of Sammy Davis, Jr., who married a Swedish actress in the 1960s -- lost professional opportunities and the occasional death threat. After all, we can't impeach him.

And having drawn Bill Clinton into the mix, I will go ahead and suggest that Tiger Woods is feeling extra heat because he is a stand-in for Barack Obama, another not-white man of mixed ancestry. Obama has all the personal discipline that Clinton conspicuously lacked, cigarettes being the only vice he permits himself. Clinton was called "the first black president," not because he had African ancestors but because the unbelievable shit-storm of hate he experienced from the day of his election was indistinguishable from racism. Many Americans recognized that he was being accused of all the traditional black crimes -- rape, murder, drug dealing -- and that his impeachment was a political lynching. (Lynchings almost always involved a sexual crime, real or imaginary.) Obama attracts similar hate just by being not-white -- he knows what would happen if he ever did anything besides look. The Democrats in the House would be standing in line to impeach him, their customary spinelessness remedied by the rigidity of righteous outrage.

A man can look, though...

I may have to give up writing about politics. I'm not ruthless enough for these times. Yesterday I found myself feeling a twinge of pity for Rudolph Giuliani.

I was glad the Yankees invited him to ride in their parade up Broadway, because he has had an unfortunate year. His pal Bernie Kerik is headed to prison. Glenn Beck has hijacked all the juicy aspects of 9/11 -- the fear, the rage, the paranoia. That federal judgeship is unlikely to happen, no matter how suicidally bipartisan the Obama Administration becomes. Best he could hope is a daytime syndicated show, Judge Rudy dispensing justice to neighbors quarreling over dog poop and broken iPods. Even the glamorous opera stars he married nine years ago onstage at the Met, Angela Gheorghiu and Roberto Alagna, have filed for divorce.

Today Giuliani announced he will not run for governor of New York next year, but may consider running for the Senate. Nobody wants to be one senator among a hundred if he has a shot at becoming the Big Baccala. And I'm not even sure he could win. The special election in the New York 23rd is particularly ominous. While Giuliani's credentials as a racist are impeccable, he has never been convincingly homophobic or anti-choice. Suppose he won the nomination, only to have Jabba the Rush brand him a RINO (Republican In Name Only) and demand the party bring in another Doug Hoffman, maybe from Texas where they raise USDA prime crackpots. America's Mayor could lose to someone called Gillibrand, as anonymous now as the day she was appointed.

I'm sorry, I have to stop now. It's too sad.

Labels: sadness

When a psychiatrist (that's a shrink who's been to medical school) becomes so unhinged that he can see no alternative to mass murder, everyone wants to know why. The last I heard, Nadal Hasan was still in the ICU, but everyone already seems to know why. Apparently he had been in communication with a radical cleric.

Which radical cleric? Could it be Fred Phelps, who, along with his posse, has lately been picketing the school attended by the Obama girls? (Apparently the Quakers are among those who don't measure up to his standard for Christian hate.) Perhaps it's the Pope, who is threatening to withdraw funding for homeless services in Washington if the District recognizes same-sex marriage. Or a new candidate, the Rev. Flip Benham, who has announced that the cure for breast cancer is childbearing. (I knew my mother shouldn't have stopped after three kids.)

Then I checked the latest edition of the Newspeak Dictionary, which reminded me that the phrase "radical cleric" applies only to Muslims. I should have known. No Christian pastor would encourage mass murder. Only mass suicide. And by "encourage" I mean have his goons shoot anyone who refused to line up for the Kool Aid.

Wolf Blitzer knows. He was incensed that Major Hasan will be represented by counsel if and when he comes to trial. This is, if I may use the word, a radical shift for the Wolfman. Back when the O.J. Simpson murder trial was a daily ratings bonanza for CNN, I don't remember Blitzer getting his whiskers in a twist because Simpson hired half the lawyers in America to defend him. Could his objection stem from the probability that Hasan's court martial will not be televised? Or is Blitzer positioning himself to replace Lou Dobbs as the network's drive-time demagogue?

As one, it seems, the right is enraged that three accused terrorists from Guantanamo, including Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, will be tried at all, and tried in New York City, only a mile from the former World Trade Center. I have my own problems with this -- the clumsy timing of Eric Holder's announcement just a few days after the Ft. Hood shootings, the improbability of finding twelve New Yorkers with the ability to keep an open mind, the likelihood of more teabigot rioting like last summer's -- but if we start making distinctions between defendants worthy and unworthy of the forms and processes of justice, we are finished. These guys need lawyers, too, good ones. And appeals. And reviews. And then, if the government's case is as good as it appears, they can claim their virgins.

I hope somebody finds the brain lesion that makes people believe in gods, before it's too late.

I wish I had nine dollars. Or a car. With every fill-up, the local service station is giving away a copy of Going Pogue, Sarah Palin's memoir of her years as a groupie with the Irish band. I believe. I haven't read it, or heard a thing about it. Has it been released? Books are no longer published, I've noticed, they're released, like movies and CDs, if there are still CDs. I understand that the ex-governor has embarked on a publicity tour, appearing with someone called Oprah and also at a cable news channel called Fox, too. I am just dying to hear what she has to say about Shane MacGowan. It must be pretty racy, because Newsweek put Sarah on the cover in a very suggestive type running outfit, and she is very angry. Naturally she wants to leave all that groupie business behind and get ready to run for president, in spite of elitist people making her look stupid by quoting from her book, and publishing pictures she once posed for, and blah blah blah.

Also two people from The Nation have chosen this very moment to bring out a book called Going Rouge, obviously hoping with such a similar title to fool people who are inexperienced at buying books. This is typical of the unfairness and hate that everybody directs at Sarah just because she used to sexually service a certain very good band. At least she was never filmed while doing so, which is more than I can say for some authors who are also promoting their books right now, also.

I sure hope the library has a copy. I sure hope there's still a library.

Labels: literature

What did I take? Advil? Probably too many. OTC crap, always double dosage if you want to get any effect. Mouth is dry. Computer making noises. Just like my old PC before it died. Motherboard went to smash. Why no fatherboards? Never mind. Turn on TV news. Everybody on same story. Can't be good. Shooting at Fort Hood. In Texas? Damn, they were serious about secession. Fired on Fort Hood. Fine with me. Goodbye, don't let New Mexico hit you in the ass on the way out. Not official, some soldier. Jeez, shot a bunch of soldiers. Nine dead. Maybe more. Shooting on army base. "Gentlemen! Fighting in the War Room?" Peter Sellers.

Shooter was a major. And a psychiatrist. Oh, perfect. Treated soldiers with PTSD. Who said "If you stare into the abyss long enough, the abyss will stare into you"? Ray Nitschky? Can't be right. A real major, or like Frank Burns? Oh, he has a Middle Eastern name. We'll hear about this for days. They say he's dead. Went to Virginia Tech. Where the Korean kid killed 32 people. Another talking point leading nowhere. Just keep talking, right? Twenty-four hours to fill, every goddam day. Post-racial America reflected in a more varied cast of sociopaths. Black serial killer in Cleveland. Eleven bodies in his house. Nobody dumps them in the lake any more? Maybe had no car. I need some water. And a No-Doz.

The cables are all over the story. Already brought out the music that tells you to grieve. Yuck. Atrocities should take place over the weekend, when MSNBC has a full schedule of true crime and prison docs. Hard to take them seriously. "The news goes on twenty-four hours a day." Charles Foster Kane. I can close my eyes and imagine how this will be covered. At least dead soldiers means the late-night buffoons will leave it alone. More time for Ferguson's fag jokes. Wonder how Jack Price is doing. Every sniggering comic should have to spend time changing his Foley bag.

Oh, picture of the major. Nadal Malik Hasan. Probably doesn't use Malik, but every killer gets the tripartite name treatment. James Earl Ray. John Wayne Gacy. Dates back to John Wilkes Booth. Nobody is going to say it, so I will: This guy looks like Beldar Conehead. Is that disrespectful to his victims? Blame caffeine. I'm not the one politicizing it. Rick "Secesh" Perry competing with Kay Bailey Herbert Walker Terwilliger McClure Hutchison for camera time. Probable primary rivals next year. Perry trying to prove he has bigger balls. Good luck, Ricky. Nothing else to see but ambulances rolling along Texas freeways. More and more opinion, little of it supported by facts at this point.

Funny how one story squeezes out everything else. No newspaper could survive on one topic a day, but these people, with hours to fill, go all-Fort Hood as they went all-Michael Jackson. Great story from Boondock, New York, 23rd CD elects a Democrat after being Republican since 1872. I remember it well, the big Grant landslide. Republicans at this point more a cult than a party. Hoffman brought in Big Guns with actual guns (Palin, Beck, Armey) to ensure his defeat. Another great story: Bernie Kerik allowed to plead guilty to one of the many charges against him. No longer head of Integrity Division at Giuliani, Inc. From Secretary-designate of Homeland Security to federal inmate. O Fortuna.

Back at Fort Hood, death count rising. More than thirty wounded. Base locked down, and surrounding schools for good measure. Why? Surely Texas, of all places, has a plan in place for gun violence. Luby's, Waco, last spring in Houston. Cheney attempt on life of elderly lawyer. I believe it involves arming everybody. Major Hasan did not want to be deployed to Afghanistan. Could have hired Orly Taitz to file a lawsuit claiming commander-in-chief is not native-born, but decided this was less insane. Probably a Freudian. I need to eat something.

E-mail from one of those organizations I subscribed to last year and can't shake off. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Neptune) blocking S. 1963, "Caregivers and Veterans Omnibus Health Services Act of 2009." Excellent timing, Tom. You're an MD, let's see if you can pull your head out of your own ass without a full surgical team. I have no idea what liverwurst is even made from, but it's good. Almost time for BBC news. A little perspective, a lot of Europe, and way too much about cricket. Oh, somebody has given H1N1 flu to a cat.

Breaking news: Major Hasan shot four times but still alive. Likely to recover. Which is good, because nobody else knows exactly why. Death toll up to twelve. Uh-oh, teabigots are back. Spread out, look like a crowd. More excellent timing: The always hilarious Michelle Bachmann says she wants her people "armed and dangerous" on health care issue. Please let ex-Governor Dingbat have her assault rifle with her. No? Damned TSA. 1872, knuckleheads. Keep it up. If I type "Fort Hood Obama" into Google right now, will I get a hundred right-wing blogs explaining how it's All Obama's Fault, like the Cleveland serial killer and the military coup in Honduras and the embarrassing tape of Carrie Prejean and her born-again boobs? Unlike victory for hate forces in Maine, which is kind of his fault, really.

Insurance lobby seems distracted. Running scare commercials about health care bill during Olbermann and Maddow shows. Really want to hit that audience. For all I know running them on male impersonator Glenn Beck, too. Does he still have sponsors? Companies that buy gold jewelry, penis enlargement pills, Girls Gone Wild? Don't know if the last two work, but I don't think I'd put gold in a mailer marked "Gold Jewelry" and drop it in a mailbox. That's just me. Distrustful. Any more liverwurst? Sorry, all-day TV dulls the sensibilities. Tomorrow I'll know that mass murder happened. Nothing will have changed. I'll read instead. Yes, I will, yes. Yes.

Labels: Another lone nut

The Buttermilk Sky organization is calling for a moratorium on "douche" and related terms, including "douche bag" and "douche nozzle." We recognize that it is fun to say and was never included in the FCC's list of proscribed words, but, hey, enough. It is, after all, just French for "shower," and it refers to an antiquated form of feminine hygiene unknown to any woman under the age of fifty. Are douche bags still made and sold? We suspect they have gone the way of the red rubber enema bag and the linen baby diaper. We also detect an overtone of sexism in calling everyone who behaves in a sleazy or idiotic manner a "douche." And frankly, we're just tired of hearing it.

Here is a list of suggested alternatives:

• herring-sniffer
• sneeze guard
• flatulist
• mugwump
• schlafly
• teabigot
• fleashit
• clonehead

Thank you for your cooperation.

Labels: Words. Words. Words.

"I am without doubt the person who's been the most persecuted in the entire history of the world and the history of man," announced Silvio Berlusconi, Italian prime minister and Man of Sorrows. The self-described "dam against the Left in Italy" has to keep taking time off from governing to defend himself against various charges of bribery and corruption, and it's forcing him to curtail his nude parties and limiting his opportunities to make foot-in-mouth comments about how tan President Obama looks. Long accustomed to corrupt, incompetent government, Italians shrug and discuss their chances in next summer's World Cup.

But Mr. Berlusconi has a rival in suffering, and it's our very own Rush Limbaugh, denied an opportunity to invest millions of dollars in the St. Louis Rams. Needless to say, this has nothing to do with his comparison of the NFL to "the Bloods and the Crips," or his suggestion to a black caller that she "take the bone out of your nose and call me back." It's a huge plot to violate his First Amendment right of free speech (duh?) by the NFL Players Association, the NFL itself, the Obama Administration and, of course, the liberal media's "blind hatred." (That means you, Olbermann.) The whole spectacle is funnier than a circus train full of fundamentalists.

"College" football -- I prefer to think of it as minor-league football -- may be a religion in some parts of this country, but the National Football League is first and last a business, a capitalist enterprise that keeps its eyes firmly on the marketplace. Its enormous public-relations apparatus swings into action whenever a player is arrested, or fails a drug test, or gets caught doing something America won't tolerate, like arranging dog fights. It can't afford to annoy the season ticket-holders, or the even more important television sponsors. It is deeply conservative, patriotically supporting every war that comes along and deploying military color guards and bands at every possible occasion. So how disgusting do you have to be for the NFL to tell you you're money's no good? Now we know.

You're right, Rush-trade, it's a plot. All the decent people got together and said no to the Oxy-addicted racist with the hog-like countenance, just as they said no to John McCain eleven months ago. You may have millions of listeners, but it's short of a majority, even among NFL owners. You may have millions of dollars burning a hole next to the Ring-Ding crumbs in your pocket, but you'd be better off sponsoring a NASCAR team, or -- and I'm just thinking out loud here -- looking into Italian citizenship. Those people will put up with anything.

Labels: Oppressed white men

The respected French intellectual Bernard-Henri Levy recently published this petition:

Apprehended like a common terrorist Saturday evening, September 26, as he came to receive a prize for his entire body of work, Roman Polanski now sleeps in prison.

He risks extradition to the United States for an episode that happened years ago and whose principal plaintiff repeatedly and emphatically declares she has put it behind her and abandoned any wish for legal proceedings.

Seventy-six years old, a survivor of Nazism and of Stalinist persecutions in Poland, Roman Polanski risks spending the rest of his life in jail for deeds which would be beyond the statute-of-limitations in Europe.

We ask the Swiss courts to free him immediately and not to turn this ingenious filmmaker into a martyr of a politico-legal imbroglio that is unworthy of two democracies like Switzerland and the United States. Good sense, as well as honor, require it.

Labels: good sense and honor

Is it over? Has Ken Burns' The National Parks: America's Greatest Idea finally ended? I think I saw about three episodes, or perhaps one episode three times. When Burns was pimping it on every talk show except Prime Minister Question Time, I suspected it would be a dog, and I was right. Old photographs? Check. Narration by Famous Actors? Check. The same wan fiddle-and-guitar music Burns has been using since The Civil War? Spectacular nature film indistinguishable from the spectacular nature film on two dozen other channels and programs? Check and double check.

I know, other people were rapt. I am not an outdoor person, I admit that freely. I don't like heat, bugs, unpaved paths, sleeping on the ground, or even standing on the ground. I descend in an unbroken line from people who lived in Wales and Cornwall and spent most of their time in mines. All the melanin was bred out of us by the end of the Stuart era. I have to put on sunblock to watch Lawrence of Arabia. As for eating outdoors, a hot dog at the ballgame will cover it for me. When someone tried to induce my father to cook outdoors, he invariably replied that it took thousands of years for humanity to reach the point of preparing food in the house, and he was not about to reverse all that progress. A wise man. Why do you think the weather report always describes today's principal air pollutant ("fine particulates," whatever that means)? So, OK, I gave it a shot, and one waterfall looks much like another. I'm glad the parks are there and all, but don't expect me at Yosemite anytime soon.

I also confess to a certain lack of affect over the location of the Olympics seven years from now. A lot can happen in seven years; I may not be the only person who doesn't give a damn, especially if the Mayans are right -- yes, I got bored and took a couple of peeks at the "History" Channel -- and the world will end on September 21, 2012. (Of course, if the Mayans were such ace prophets, why didn't they anticipate the sudden disappearance of their whole civilization?) I thought President Obama was badly advised to schlep all the way -- what? Schlep, it's a good Welsh word. To schlep all the way to Denmark to make a pitch for the games. He's the President of the United States, not the Chicago Chamber of Commerce. Better he should fix the current Kafkaesque nightmare of obtaining a visa to come here, which is the real reason they picked Brazil. And I have to admit, I'm intrigued by the possibilities of the opening ceremony in Rio, with fifty thousand people all dancing the samba.

Anyway, challenged by the title of the Burns extravaganza, I composed a list of ideas I consider to be at least as great as national parks:

The First Amendment, polio vaccine, the blues, free public libraries, Louis Armstrong, the GI Bill of Rights, Astaire and Rogers, archy and mehitabel, Social Security, musical comedy, synthetic rubber, pizza delivery, the music of Aaron Copland, and the phonograph. I am open to suggestions.

Labels: another cranky minority opinion

The naked, gagged, bound body of William E. Sparkman, census worker, was found hanging from a tree in an isolated cemetery in Clay County, Kentucky, but no one is saying he was murdered. Asphyxiated, yes, with "FED" written on his chest, but the state troopers will go no farther than "not a natural death." The investigation continues. What is not in question is the seething hostility to all things relating to the federal government, particularly next year's scheduled census, among the fringe right. Census workers who have survived report being greeted with racist epithets and loaded shotguns in rural areas, and spokesmen for the tinfoil helmet community have made no secret of their conviction that the fascist socialist Kenyan Nazi in the White House plans to use data gathered by his minions to further oppress white people, a/k/a "real Americans." If this is found to be murder, I think we can rule out the Weather Underground, the Black Panther Party, and the Wobblies.

Clearly Mr. Sparkman's terrible death is not covered by that condescending cliche "teachable moment," i.e., an opportunity to learn and grow from police imbecility (the Gates case) or thuggish behavior (the Joe Wilson episode). This does not mean, however, that some good may not come of it, in the same way that the murder of Emmett Till energized the civil rights movement in the 1950s. I don't believe the teabigots have thought this all the way through.

Contrary to the voices in many people's heads, the census is not a terrorist plot but a regular event mandated by the Constitution (Article I, Section 2). The founders wanted to be sure that, within the very narrow strictures they had created, the apportionment of Representatives would be as democratic as possible. Anticipating population growth and westward expansion, they provided for a census every ten years. Today the census determines not only representation but federal funding for the states. So what happens if (hypothetically speaking) the people who keep electing Michelle Bachmann decide they don't want to be counted? They don't have to be counted. The Constitution says the government has to conduct a census, but it provides no legal penalties for refusing to cooperate. All that happens (still hypothetically speaking) is that when the census is published, the Minnesota legislature studies the numbers and re-draws the map, and Bachmann's district disappears. Michelle goes back to spritzing perfume at Nordstrom, or whatever she did before. I'm fine with this. More money and power for reality-based America.

Let's conduct the 2010 census entirely by mail. Make forms available in post offices and other public places for people who don't get mail. Hire some of the millions of unemployed clerical workers to assist the non-reading and weed out the joke submissions. Let's see if white Americans become a minority even sooner than predicted.

An accurate idiot count is not worth even one more life.

Labels: the paranoid style in American politics

Lamps are going out all over Europe, or at least getting harder to read by. The European Union, intent on becoming the most hated institution on that continent since the Gestapo, is phasing out the use of Edison-type incandescent bulbs in order to conserve energy. These will be replaced by compact fluorescents (those curly things), halogen lamps and, eventually, LEDs. The new devices are appallingly expensive but last for years and use less electricity. The lower electric bills should help to offset the depression brought on by gloom and creeping shadows, especially in places like Scotland and Scandinavia, where the sun is an infrequent visitor.

Darkness of another kind is coming to the city where America was invented. The Philadelphia Public Library will close its doors on October 2. Main building, branches, research library, bookmobiles, classroom outreach, all gone. The Pennsylvania legislature declined to vote enough money to keep them open. I have no idea how much money it would take, but I guarantee it's a lot less than the bonuses AIG paid its incompetent executives last year with the collaboration of the United States Treasury. Every city once blessed by the benevolence of Andrew Carnegie has seen hours cut and librarians laid off, but to lose the entire system is something new and terrible. And every city has seen library use increase dramatically in the last year, as people use its resources to look for work, improve job skills, read books they can no longer buy, or just keep warm. It makes no sense. It is madness. It makes me understand, dimly, why people get angry enough to tie teabags to their hats and carry semi-literate signs full of outrage. At least the media pay attention.

I don't see anybody stepping up to be the Carnegie of the 21st century. Bill Gates could easily afford it, but he'd want to digitize the collections. J.K. Rowling is reputedly the richest woman on earth, thanks to her talent as a writer, but American libraries are not her problem. Oprah doubtless has a prior commitment to the Chicago Public Library. And why the hell should we expect individuals to get out their checkbooks when the state legislature won't, and the federal government won't? Would the legislators find a way if the Eagles threatened to move to Omaha unless they got a stadium full of flashy things and sky-boxes bigger than my first apartment? You know the answer.

I'd be even angrier, but my old cynicism got a boost when I read this amazing news from the Telegraph UK:

US distributors have resolutely passed on a film which will prove hugely divisive in a country where, according to a Gallup poll conducted in February, only 39 per cent of Americans believe in the theory of evolution.

Movieguide.org, an influential site which reviews films from a Christian perspective, described Darwin as the father of eugenics and denounced him as "a racist, a bigot and an 1800s naturalist whose legacy is mass murder". His "half-baked theory" directly influenced Adolf Hitler and led to "atrocities, crimes against humanity, cloning and genetic engineering", the site stated.

The film has sparked fierce debate on US Christian websites, with a typical comment dismissing evolution as "a silly theory with a serious lack of evidence to support it despite over a century of trying".

Jeremy Thomas, the Oscar-winning producer of Creation, said he was astonished that such attitudes exist 150 years after On The Origin of Species was published.

"That's what we're up against. In 2009. It's amazing," he said.

See? We've had free public libraries for over a century, and free public schools even longer, and this country still teems with people who are dumber than a California jury. Fine, close the libraries! Kill the remaining newspapers! Fill every minute of TV time with reality shows, no-talent contests, infomercials and Glenn Beck! Bring on the Dark Ages 2.0!

I have to go hide my books and lightbulbs.

Labels: Despair -- it's what's for dinner

Mark your calendar. The right is now officially beneath contempt.

The insurance lobby and its shameless bodyguard are spreading the story that Natasha Richardson's death was caused by the godless Canadian healthcare system. (Quebec has no med-evac helicopters, neurosurgeons weren't hanging around the hospital waiting to examine her, etc., etc.) When they lied about Stephen Hawking and the UK's National Health, Hawking told them they were full of shit. Much less risky to violate a dead woman.

Fact: People die every day of subdural hematoma. Kurt Vonnegut died in New York City, home to some of the world's most expensive private medical care. Garrison Keillor's brother David died in Minnesota. Chances of survival diminish when you don't seek immediate care because you feel fine. Time is the significant factor, not having Dr. House on speed-dial.

I don't know why I should be surprised. Since when have the right cared whom they caused pain? A week ago their radio arm was soliciting fresh Chappaquiddick jokes from mouth-breathing listeners and, no doubt, getting them. But this is different. Natasha Richardson's young sons don't need to hear that their mother would be alive but for incompetent Canadian doctors and their health-care-rationing politicians, even if it is crap.

Somebody produced a TV spot promulgating this garbage, and somebody is buying the time. I hope Liam Neeson hires the scariest lawyer he can find and sues them for every dime they haven't stashed under the floorboards.

From the Moonie Times:

"We are witnessing a slow, steady takeover of our true freedoms. We are becoming a socialist nation...if we permit [Obama] to raise our taxes to support unconstitutional causes, then we will be in default. This great America will become a paralyzed nation." (italics mine, jeremiad Jon Voight's)

Interesting choice of words. I'm no Freudian, but I think Mr. Voight is unconsciously recalling his last good movie, Coming Home (1978). He also states that Obama wants to start a "civil war," which is even more revealing from a racial standpoint. Not as bad as the Missouri congresslady who calls for a "great white hope," but definitely off the same menu. It's good to be in the ultrarich bracket whose taxes Obama proposes to raise, isn't it? Unless of course you don't think you should have to pay taxes at all.

And the quest for the next Reagan continues.

Labels: Hooray for Hollywood

Today is the seventieth anniversary of the German invasion of Poland, the beginning of Adolf Hitler's six-year effort to bring universal health care to the world. (The strenuous work of the liberal media had prevented most Germans from knowing that Hitler was actually an Austrian.) Only England resisted, fending off socialized medicine until 1945. In the wake of the SS Panzer divisions came doctors like Josef Mengele, forcing safe, legal abortion and stem-cell research upon the enslaved peoples of Europe. Beyond the dark and roiling waters of the Atlantic, nothing stood between freedom and single-payer tyranny except Ronald Reagan, John Wayne, and their comrades in the 101st Chairborne ("The Screaming Chickenhawks").

I am clearly labeling this as satire because I don't want it to find its way into Wikipedia or otherwise take on a life of its own, like Mencken's bathtub hoax and the Kenyan birth certificate created by that guy in Australia. The Right has really taken the fun out of blogging. There's a website (find it yourself) which offers photographic "proof" that Barack and Michelle Obama are human-reptilian hybrids, and I'm damned if I can tell whether it's serious or not. Gotta love the First Amendment. In Thailand, you get hard time for cracking wise about the king, and he doesn't even have any power.

I'm told that in certain quarters, August 29 has been proclaimed Sarah Palin Day, honoring the day in 2008 when John McCain sprang her on a largely unsuspecting nation. Surely this is meant to be funny, like Talk Like A Pirate Day, only instead of "Aarrrgh!" and "Prepare to be boarded, wench!" we'll all speak in Klondike gibberish and carry toy assault rifles. I need to believe this. I need for a microphone to pick up Limbaugh muttering to his producer, "I can't believe they're buying this shit." I want Sean Hannity to rip off his rubber mask and reveal that he's Weird Al Yankovic. I'm almost certain that Orly Taitz is a Sasha Baron Cohen character, something he threw together after the failure of Bruno. (He could have put more thought into the name. "Let's see...LaGuardia Schwartz? Tempelhof Bernstein? Heathrow Horowitz? Ah! Orly Taitz! Makeup! Pile it on!")

Do you really think liberalism, fascism and socialism are identical? That people rode on the backs of dinosaurs? That the Holocaust is a myth? That FEMA, which couldn't deliver bottled water to the Superdome, is even capable of operating a gulag? That there are WMDs somewhere in Iraq, and pretty soon we'll find them? Or are you, for financial and political reasons of your own, just pretending to be a stone idiot?

If anybody wants me this afternoon, I'll be attending a tea party with a white rabbit and a dormouse. Leave a message.

Labels: the nature of reality

When it comes to television, I'm always inexcusably lagging behind the other kids, staring at clouds and wondering how cheese is made. If I think about it at all, I think about why so many British and Australian actors are needed to portray Americans these days. Deep stuff.

To this day, I have never seen a minute of Gray's Anatomy. If not for The Soup, I would have to pretend I know who Jon and Kate are. I could not pick Ryan Secrest (sp?) out of a crowd. Lost is lost on me. Until a couple of months ago, I had never watched Boston Legal. When it first appeared I glanced over and said "Lawyers? Shatner? Ergh." I understand it has since been cancelled.

Why? This show is awesome. And by that I mean awesomely prescient. I watch it every day on some little cable channel or other, the kind that carries commercials for the Latter-Day Saints and companies that will get your IRS debt knocked down. Who ever thought Captain Kirk could bring the funny? Or that practicing law was so sexually stimulating for the practitioners? But mostly it's the stories -- talk about torn-from-the-headlines. So far, Crane Poole & Schmidt ( great name) has represented:

A black man arrested by a Boston cop for looking at a house. Standing on the sidewalk, looking at a house. He found it beautiful.

A man whose wife died after her HMO insisted on sending her to India for a heart transplant.

A man with terminal cancer who attempted to buy a lung on the black market. Ironically, his body parts ended up on the black market. Did I mention he had cancer?

There it is. The Gates-Crowley case, health care reform, and the most recent round of New Jersey Political Follies. Unlike Law & Order, these writers didn't read about reality and then alter it a little. They created it.

Awesome.

Labels: television

For a politician supposedly molded in the take-no-prisoners crucible of Chicago politics, Barack Obama displays an Anne Frank-like faith in bipartisanship. I can imagine him writing in his diary,
"In spite of everything, I still believe that Republicans are basically human." Perhaps this will disillusion him: He has nominated Rep. John McHugh (R-NY) to be Secretary of the Army. Although McHugh breezed past the Armed Services Committee, two Republican senators from Kansas, Sam Brownback and Pat Roberts, have used an arcane rule to keep him from being confirmed, ostensibly because they heard that some Guantanamo prisoners might be transferred to Leavenworth. As we know, detainees in legal limbo give off deadly rays like the radioactive sea monsters in 1950s movies, which might harm the soybean crop if they were admitted to Kansas. I'm sure Obama Derangement Syndrome played no role in their action. The point is that the Army is raising an additional 22,000 troops, the fighting in Afghanistan escalates daily, and no one is in charge. This should outrage military families as soon as they hear about it, which is difficult to do over the yowling din of the teabag terrorists and their media ringleaders. Oh, well, another constituency the Republicans have decided they can do without.

Their response to Bill Clinton's mission of mercy for Laura Ling and Euna Lee was predictable but nonetheless revolting. By any measure, this is the feel-good story of the summer: Two young journalists arrested on baseless charges, held in solitary, convicted of espionage and sentenced to twelve years at hard labor in a country where that really means something -- and then, seemingly in a day, they were home with their families. One even has an adorable young daughter! Apparently, their rescue cost this country nothing but a hilarious photo-op with Clinton and Kim Jong Il posing like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Not good enough, apparently because the North Koreans asked for Clinton and not George Bush. (There's a thought to trouble your sleep.) The Republicans appointed John Bolton their Official Denouncer -- Bolton, who has yet to utter a sentence that isn't completely idiotic. Better to let the women rot than even talk to a charter member of the Axis of Evil. They work for Al Gore, don't they? Serves 'em right. Aid and comfort. Appeaser. Where's my Haldol?

Army families? Check. Asian voters? Check. Latino voters? After unleashing racist pipsqueaks like Jeff Sessions and Tom Coburn on Justice Sotomayor, I imagine they're down to die-hard, back-to-the-Bay-of-Pigs Cubans, the only immigrants the Republicans don't despise. That leaves just one more group -- non-idiots. By now you've read this gem by Brian Beutler in a publication called Investor's Business Daily:

"People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the UK, where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless."

There is a molecule of truth here: Hawking is indeed brilliant. And physically handicapped. He has lived with ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease) for forty years, far longer than anyone expected -- all of them in the UK. Beutler's editorial was so spectacularly stupid that Dr. Hawking himself issued this statement: "I wouldn't be here today if it were not for the NHS. I have received a large amount of high-quality treatment without which I would not have survived." Yeah, well, he says he's British. Why hasn't he produced his birth certificate?

Watching the party of Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon implode is like shooting a moose from a helicopter, except that you don't need to feel ashamed as you watch it stagger into the woods to bleed slowly to death.

Labels: GOP death panel

At The New Yorker online, Alex Ross is presenting material from the FBI file of Leonard Bernstein, who was apparently seen as a serious threat to National Security from the 1940s onward. Today's installment, "Bernstein and Nixon's Plumbers," is not to be missed. At the height of the Vietnam War and on the eve of the Watergate burglary, White House operatives like Patrick Buchanan and Egil Krogh fretted that Lenny might be slipping subversive Latin messages into "Mass," the piece he was writing for the 1971 opening of the Kennedy Center. As the air thickens with ravings about "death panels" and "FEMA camps," it is useful to remember that American paranoia has a long, long, long history.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2009/08/bernstein-and-nixons-plumbers.html

I guess one of these days I should work out how to do that hyperlink stuff.

As Bernstein remarked in a talk about terrorism many years later, "Who am I to have political effect? I just work here." Maybe by 1986 he had stopped trying.

Labels: FBI, Leonard Bernstein, the paranoid style in American politics

One thing about psycho killers -- they love to write. The Unabomber, David Berkowitz, Zodiac. the light verse of Bonnie Parker, all the way back to Jack the Ripper, their egos require them to explain, to posture, to share their Deepest Thoughts. They use violence to grab our attention and then bend our ears like an annoying passenger on a long flight. And a good thing, too. Theodore Kaczynski's "manifestos" are the reason he's in Supermax today. His brother read one and said, "That sounds like Ted." The FBI couldn't find him for ten years, and his own prose style betrayed him. Today, of course, he would have a blog like this one.

Hard as it is to believe, not all unbalanced people have seats in Congress or jobs with Fox News. Most of them only have the internet. This, too, is good, because it gives us a fighting chance to track down the James von Brunns before they lock and load. OK, we dropped the ball on him, but what about the latest entrant into the He-Man Woman-Haters Club, George Sodini? Here he is on January 6, seven months ago: "It is 8:45 PM. I chickened out! I brought the loaded guns, everything. Hell!" George didn't get along with his mother and couldn't get a date, so he felt completely justified in carrying his four handguns into a Bridgeville, Pennsylvania, health club and opening fire on a women's aerobics class, killing three. Hundreds of law enforcement officers spend their days trolling the 'net for child pornography and terrorist chatter -- is anybody reading the homicidal maniac blogs? Well, could they spare someone? Sodini was thoughtful enough to post some anti-Obama ravings, too, but maybe there are just too many of those to monitor. Let's stick with the loaded guns and the final, horrific entry: "Death Lives!"

It's August and you may be on vacation in some picturesque spot, so I'll summarize the coming "debate":

1. All his guns were registered. Therefore they were legal. Guns don't kill people, people...zzzz...Second Amendment...mmmm.....excuse to take our guns away...gggggg......

2. Just as there is still racism in America, there is misogyny. Shock. Surprise.

3. The male ego is a fragile flower.

4. Insert Hillary Clinton joke here.


Enjoy the beach, you jammy bastard.

Labels: deja vu all over again

On paper -- or rather, in e-mails -- it looked like a good idea. Physical intimidation worked during the 2000 Florida recount, why wouldn't it work just as well at town meetings in 2009? Because in 2000, we didn't have the PATRIOT Act, that baggy omnibus legislation rammed through a supine Congress in the wake of 9/11, which has been used to designate practically anything, including the wearing of an anti-Bush t-shirt at an airport, as an act of terrorism. Surely rioting at a public meeting is an act of terrorism. If you can be tased for asking a question of John Kerry, what should you get for shouting down Arlen Specter?

When the far right concocted the PATRIOT Act, it never occurred to them that one day they would be out of power and that it might be used against them. Well, they are, and it should. As long as this thing is law, the Obama Justice Department should make use of it. Round up a few of the noisiest terrorists and lock them away without frills like habeas corpus or bail. This is war. The apologists for terrorism and the inciters to riot will squeal. Let them. I seem to remember that inciting to riot was a crime long before 9/11, often invoked against people peacefully demonstrating for civil rights or an end to the Vietnam War. How would John Boehner like to share a cell with Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck, one retching from alcohol withdrawal while the other, unmedicated, pounds his head on the bars? I guarantee ten million hits on YouTube.

The right counts on liberals and progressives to be the adults, to be willing to allow all points of view and to encourage free speech. Disappoint them. Take control of the debate. Don't be afraid to use their weapons against them. It's not a fair fight if only one fighter is wearing gloves.

Is it too soon to talk about revoking the naturalization of Rupert Murdoch? Maybe get a jump on the paperwork? OK, another time.

Labels: fighting fire with fire

Or, Why John Roberts Thinks Those Civil Rights Laws From the 1960s Are Unnecessary And Should Be Allowed To Expire


Professor Gates came home last night
(Obama's in the White House)
From a long, long China flight
(and Obama's in the White House)

Front door stuck so he went to the back
(Obama's in the White House)
Let himself in and began to unpack
(and Obama's in the White House)

Neighbor decided he looked wrong
(Obama's in the White House)
Soon a police car came along
(But Obama's in the White House)

Cops said Gates had broken in
(Obama's in the White House)
Hooked him up and took him in
(With Obama in the White House)

Didn't want to see ID
(While Obama's in the White House)
From Harvard University
(Yet Obama's in the White House)

Booked and charged with burglarizing
(Obama's in the White House)
Next day, cops apologizing
(And Obama's in the White House)

Free at last, free at last
(Obama's in the White House)
Profiling is in the past
('Cause Obama's in the White House)


with full props and much love to Gil Scott Heron, wherever he may be

Labels: Henry Louis Gates, Jr

It took guts for Lindsey Graham to acknowledge, in his opening statement, that Sonia Sotomayor will be confirmed as an Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court -- not because of her superior qualifications, but because he doesn't have the votes to sustain a filibuster. It took guts because he had to admit he can count to forty, and that he knows it's less than forty-one. I'm sure the Palin/Plumber wing of his party already suspects Graham of being a secret elitist intellectual.

That hurdle behind him, however, Graham and his Republican colleagues seemed to be incredulous that Judge Sotomayor was in their committee room and not home doing their laundry. They were puzzled to find that she had dissented from another judge "of Puerto Rican descent" -- don't you people all think alike? They joked about smoking crack with her. The always loathsome Tom Coburn put his special seal on the hearings with a hilarious Ricky Ricardo impersonation. (Refresh my memory -- didn't he do the Chico Marx "tootsie-frootsie ice-a cream" routine for Samuel Alito? No?) The justice-designate maintained her composure and sense of humor, never once complaining about being the victim of an attempted lynching, high-tech or otherwise. New Yorkers are tough.

Like a breeze stirring the thick summer air of the capital, a change has surely come. Forty-five years ago Martin Luther King and his fellow civil rights leaders were subjected to every hateful epithet, the most common and most absurd being "communist," but nobody ever called them racists. For racists like Rush Limbaugh and "Bitburg" Buchanan to call an opponent a racist, they must first tacitly acknowledge that racism is evil. Of course, they define racism rather narrowly, as failure to respect the privileges which should naturally accrue to white men, but still, it's a paradigm shift, or a quantum leap, or whatever ill-adapted buzzword you like. The earth moved. I've never been prouder of my screwed-up country.

At around the same time the King of Pap was taking his place among the Loved Ones of Whispering Glades -- sorry, Forest Lawn -- news came of an outrage at a very different cemetery. It seems the proprietors of Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip, Illinois, have been charged with digging up the remains of maybe three hundred people and dumping them in a vacant lot in order to re-sell the plots. This African-American burial ground is the final resting place (as far as we know) of Dinah Washington and Willie Dixon, and also of Emmett Till, who, you would think, endured more than enough indignity in life. The dead, of course, don't care -- all the anguish belongs to the living, some of whom waited for hours in brutal July heat to examine burial records and gravesites. This kind of thing just doesn't happen at Forest Lawn.

Here's how I know there is something wrong with me: All day, I've been trying to work out a coherent relationship between this atrocity and Roland Burris's announcement that he will not run for another term in the Senate, and connect them to the long-standing Cook County tradition of inviting the deceased to participate in elections. Horrible, isn't it? I can only plead temporary insanity brought on by heat, humidity, and political psychosis.

I can't listen to Sarah Palin's voice, it aggravates my tinnitus, but I have read and re-read her resignation speech and I can't make sense of it. I even tried that Babelfish program that translates texts into English, and it typed what the hell? and began to cry. Did she actually mean she could serve the people of Alaska better by quitting? That's a rare display of honesty from any politician. But why is quitting not quitting? Because she isn't a quitter? And what's all this about dead fish? Some kind of code? Woodward and Bernstein may have played a role in causing a president to resign, but I never heard of a blogger, even a liberal blogger, ending the career of an innocent governor. Or is she innocent? Who is investigating her? I would like to distance myself from the snarky suggestion that her speech was written by Trig, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was a page missing because he spit up on it. Yeah, that could be it. Babies will do that.

Meanwhile in far-off South Carolina, Mark Sanford is still governor. That rather bald statement does not begin to clarify the Argentinian mistress, the "several other" adultery partners, the five days when the governor was MIA, the weird goings-on at the headquarters of The Family (some sort of evangelical frat house in Washington), or the eagerness of many South Carolina Republicans to see him go away. And remember, I'm talking about the party of Strom Thurmond and Lindsey Graham. Also, I seem to recall that Susan Smith, who drowned her two sons in a lake, was the step-daughter of a Republican county chairman who molested her. If ever a party deserved a little Mark Sanford, it's South Carolina's. (I notice that Fox News has sentenced the governor to wear a scarlet (D) after his name, like Mark Foley and Larry Craig and David Vitter before him. You can fool all the Hannity viewers all the time, I guess.) The way things are going for the Republican Party -- party, huh, more like a wake -- I'm not ruling out a Palin/Sanford ticket in 2012. If Barack Obama doesn't cancel all future elections and declare himself President for Life, that is. I have to stop watching Fox News.

I should probably stop watching news altogether. The Supreme Rulers of Iran now know that a fake democracy can be worse than the real thing; people take it seriously and then you have to start shooting them. Come on, holy ones, don't you know how to steal an election? You wait a couple of days to announce that your guy won. You don't do it while voters are still lined up at the polling places, and you don't announce your guy won a landslide, even carrying his chief opponent's home town. There are books you can read. See my comments above concerning Cook County.

If I didn't watch the BBC, I wouldn't know about the latest chapter in the mad, bad, sad history of North Korea. The American media tried to convince us that dangerous things might happen around July 4, possibly involving an attack on Hawaii. It all sounded strangely familiar: a weakling ruler needs to get out of Dad's shadow, and all he can think to do is start some shit. Kim Jong Il is fading fast, and has to prove he's as big a man as Kim Il Sung before handing the country over to Kim No Vak or whatever the son's name is. So he loads his "missile" onto what appears to be a rusted-out Liberty Ship and starts trundling it across the Pacific. It's kind of Duchy of Grand Fenwick with nuclear potential. Then the ship turns around, and a mainland base dumps a couple of missiles into the ocean, startling the fish. Well, it seems the whole exercise was designed to call attention to the launch of new Taedonggang Beer. They couldn't afford an ad campaign because they spent too much money buying an English brewery and shipping it to the Democratic Republic. Lager mavens say it's the best beer on the Korean peninsula, which is a good thing. Let's say you're a North Korean farm worker getting along on 1,500 calories a day. Word comes from the Ministry of Agricultural Enlightenment that henceforth you are to grow hops instead of rice. You could use a cold brewski right about now, couldn't you?

At least one front in the Republican war on reality collapsed last week, when Al Franken took his seat as junior Senator from Minnesota. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) has already pronounced him a "clown" who lacks the gravitas required of a Senator. Unlike Jim Bunning, former journeyman pitcher. Or Bill Frist, so-called doctor who publicly admitted he did not know how HIV is transmitted. Or -- look, it's too hot for this. I think I can smell the wildfires in California.

Ah, the Golden State. If Plato were here, he'd make California Exhibit A in his case that democracy is no good. As Jefferson or Churchill or Jerry Colonna observed, it's a bad form of government but the others are worse. Representative democracy just about wobbles along, squeaking and shuddering, but direct democracy, such as they enjoy in referendum-mad California, is a disaster. Put simply, people will never vote to raise their own taxes no matter how many billions of dollars the state is in debt. Just cut somebody else's services, they think, slamming the "NO" button until the touchscreen flickers. I hope the folks who are fighting the blazes don't mind being paid in promises. They just might walk off the fireline and leave the glamorous homes of those fiscal conservatives to the mercy of the flames. That would be terrible. And irresponsible. Childish, even.

Labels: death and politics

The wisdom of the ancients tells us that celebrity deaths come by three, and sure enough! we have been deprived this week of Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson. I have given this confluence of loss my attention, and I conclude that Robert Ballard, who explored the wreck of the Titanic, does not have a vessel capable of plumbing the depths of my indifference.

McMahon was never more than a minor irritant at the edge of the screen; his principal achievement was inspiring the character of Hank Kingsley in The Larry Sanders Show. Jackson was a modestly talented dancer who impressed a lot of people who never saw the Nicholas Brothers. As for Ms. Fawcett, allow me to paraphrase a waspish nineteenth century literary critic: The work of Farrah Fawcett will be admired when the films of Ingrid Bergman have been forgotten -- but not until then.

The media, ah, the media, they are well and truly launched on one of those orgiastic grief-fests that mark the passing of the famous, the glamorous, and the reasonably young. Every ten years or so, people with otherwise empty lives gather in public places to light candles and tell sad stories of the death of Diana, Lennon, Elvis, and so on back to Valentino. Don't bother trying to find out about the so-called real world until Jackson is interred and the coroner's final report is released. No time for the flu pandemic, the pirates of Somalia, the North Korean missile supposedly menacing Waikiki, the Iranian election, the economy, the Mexican drug wars, the suspension of Manny Ramirez, or any of the other issues that so engaged us just a few days ago. Don't even expect to see the pope unless he has a comment about "Billie Jean" to share.

I never thought I would understand, and even slightly sympathize with, the world-view of traditional Islam, but I get it. I do. They don't hate us because of our "freedom," or because we're Christians, or whatever your neighborhood demagogue has been telling you. They hate what we represent. They see us as shallow, trivial and obsessed with the meretricious. They don't care what we do at home, but they will die to keep us from exporting this gunge to their societies. They may be relatively secular, they may not want to fling burqas over their daughters, but neither do they want them flashing their crotches like Britney Spears. If they see Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations" as a contest between Britney and the Taliban, they may reluctantly go with the Taliban.

I wouldn't. I don't want to live in a traditional society, whatever the tradition. I'll take the crap that comes with the freedom, because the alternative is far worse. If American society really is getting dumber, trashier and more discouraging, I want to be in a position to say so. Just don't ask me what I think of Jacko.

Labels: fake news

I thought I knew every euphemism for shacking up, including "shacking up." For instance, "playing house," "bumping uglies," and the mysterious British "how's your father." "Walking the Appalachian Trail" is a new one for me. Apparently Mark Sanford found a stimulus package in Argentina for whom he is prepared to give up his wife, his four sons, his prestigious job as chairman of the Republican Governors Association, and his hopes of being the presidential nominee of his tottering party. For now, he is still governor of South Carolina. I read the written statement of self-justification and indignation distributed by Mrs. Sanford, and I'm getting an inkling of why he fled. Two days ago she was lying for him, now she's quoting Scripture at us. I'm surprised she hasn't (yet) blamed The Gays for weakening the institution of marriage by participating in it.

America is riveted, as always, by the latest outbreak of hypocrisy from the family-values party. The governor's rambling press conference, together with published e-mails to his beloved, fall somewhere between the queasy-making phone conversations of Prince Charles and Mrs. Parker Bowles, and the blubbing public confessional of Jimmy Swaggart caught with a hooker. In other words, we've been here before and we'll be here again, in the creepy twilight world where fundamentalism meets fucking.

Meanwhile, across the sea, Italy is having a political sex scandal that makes this look like a high school crush. Silvio Berlusconi, the 72-year-old prime minister (and grandfather), is cavorting with a eighteen-year-old model, throwing nude parties at his villa, and stoutly denying that he hires pros because "it interferes with the pleasure of conquest." I doubt that any romantic, badly spelled e-mails will surface; what's love got to do with it? Every paper not owned by Berlusconi blazes with headlines, and the response of most Italians seems to be, "And? What time is the football on? Where should we eat?" How I wish I lived in an older, subtler culture. Not the medieval madness gripping Iran, but the world enjoyed by the heirs of the Roman Empire. Che dolce vita!

Labels: love, love and sex, sex

No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American judiciary. For more than two centuries they have ignored the phrase "well-ordered militia" and interpreted the Second Amendment to mean "The Founders want us to have private arsenals." It's far too late for any kind of meaningful guns-for-Gameboys program, especially with right-wing paranoia at record levels. I am not in favor of more gun-control legislation. I want the legislatures to turn their attention to the other side of the equation and allow all Americans to purchase body armor.

At present, only law-enforcement officers are supposed to have bullet-proof vests. Clearly they should be available to civilians as well. If we have to walk the same streets and ride the same public transit as the armed and rabid, we must be given a fighting chance. Apart from the obvious benefits, it could be a boost to the fashion industry. Who wants some cumbersome camouflage-color vest when you can wear Kevlar from Donna Karan or Giorgio Armani? The white wedding dress as a symbol of purity is passe -- nothing says "pre-marital abstinence" like a bullet-proof Vera Wang gown. I confidently predict this will be da bomb with hip-hop artistes who have their own fashion lines: attend your favorite club and return to your crib unperforated. Finally a reason for those baggy clothes! And when foreign visitors deplane and see our duty-free shops full of the latest in body armor, they'll know just what kind of country they have come to.

I can hear the objections: the neighborhoods with the worst gun violence are also the poorest neighborhoods. How can we get armor to those who need it most? The politicians who court the NRA and pose, grinning, with their assault rifles will have to make sure there is a provision in the federal budget for protecting low-income families. May I suggest a surcharge on ammunition? How about a real "death tax" -- the gun industry pays a penalty for every person killed with a firearm? Well, the ways-and-means people can work it out. I don't do detail.

Will people wear their armor? I would leave that up to individuals. Many states have laws requiring bikers to wear helmets and drivers to use seat belts, and even texting is being restricted after some memorable train and bus crashes. But hey, if you feel lucky...guns, freedom, bullet-proof vests, liberty, it's all a rich gumbo. I feel safer already.

Labels: guns

What is up with Stephen Colbert? On tonight's show he mocked old people for learning self-defense and then made fun of Simon Schama's accent. What's next? Knee-slapping imitations of people with Parkinson's disease? Chelsea Clinton jokes?

Iraq changed you, man.

Labels: humor

Have you seen this man?

Nearly five months ago, Chesley Sullenberger III, a veteran pilot with U.S. Air, lost both engines shortly after taking off from LaGuardia Airport on a flight to Charlotte. With a calm that still astonishes, he set the plane down on the middle of the Hudson River, clearing the George Washington Bridge by less than a thousand feet, and saved the lives of all 155 people on board.

For about two weeks, "Sully" and his crew of four were everywhere: the Superbowl, the Inauguration, the David Letterman show. He was modest, humorous, matter-of-fact -- everything we love in a hero. Then he testified before a Congressional committee on working conditions in the airline industry. He told of wage cuts, layoffs, compromised maintenance, and friends who could no long afford to fly for a living. After that, he vanished without a trace.

I'm serious. I just typed his name into one of those search engines -- it's the one that starts with a G, tip of my tongue, I'll think of it -- and found no references later than February 1. That's around the time he went from Sully the Hero to Lefty the Labor Agitator. I guess Michelle Malkin isn't calling him an "angel" any more, but are all the media so terrified of appearing to show favoritism, or even tacit approval, for unions and union workers? You can be a Texas-born veteran of the Air Force and an unquestioned goddam Hero, but if you seem to criticize free-market capitalism, be prepared to pay the penalty.

I hope he's all right.

Labels: labor, media, Sully

We should have listened to Dick Cheney. He warned of another terror attack, and he was right: Last Sunday, Dr. George Tiller was assassinated by a terrorist in the lobby of the church he attended in Wichita, Kansas, right in the heart of flat-earth nut country. For some reason, the suspect, Scott Roeder, has not been hooded, shackled, and bundled off to Gitmo for several years of extra-Constitutional confinement; instead, police are treating this cowardly attack as an ordinary homicide, which is like treating 9/11 as a case of really bad piloting. The world may well conclude that Christian terrorists are handled more humanely than Islamic ones, a headache the Obama Administration does not need.

Now is the time to heed Cheney on "enhanced interrogation." Twenty minutes of vigorous waterboarding should elicit the names, addresses, and favorite football teams of all those in Roeder's terror cell. Further "questioning" will allow the plot to be traced up the food chain to those who bankroll murder in order to advance their medieval worldview. After their arrest, I have no idea what will happen, since the Senate evidently does not believe any mainland prison can hold hard-core evildoers. Maybe Mongolia owes us a favor.

I apologize, Mr. Former Vice President. And if you have any suggestions about those who give aid and comfort to terrorists, like Pat Buchanan and Bill O'Reilly, I'm listening.

Labels: Dick Cheney, reverence for life, terror

This blog may disappear abruptly because some asshat at Google has decided it is being operated by a robot. It is not, but I can find no other way of communicating with these fools. They give me an indecipherable word to copy and then complain when I do not copy it. Google is the American branch of alQaeda.

Labels: Death to Google

Say this for Barack Obama -- he does not take the easy way. I'm sure he could have accepted a commencement invitation from Howard University, been treated like a king, and returned to the White House in time to shoot some hoops with the weekend staff and eat dinner with Michelle and the girls. Instead he went to Arizona State, which doesn't consider him worthy of a lousy honorary degree, and Notre Dame, where he confronted angry agents of a foreign dictator, the heilige Fuhrer. In both places, his dignity and good humor never deserted him. I don't know what Arizona's problem is, apart from lingering grumpiness over McCain's defeat, but the anti-choice forces were out in all their ugliness at the other minor-league football franchise, enraged because Obama supports the law of the land since 1970. I suppose it would have been even worse had he reversed the military's idiotic "don't ask -- don't tell" policy, but he chose not to do so last week, costing us yet another well-qualified Arabic translator. (As Jon Stewart put it, cutting to the heart of the matter as only he can, "How do you justify torturing people for information, when there's nobody who can understand what they're screaming?") It's also unlikely that David Souter will be replaced with another Opus Dei terrorist like the three that are already perched like vultures on the Supreme Court of the United States, eyeing our Constitution as if it were a freshly-killed antelope.

Jeez, I can remember when Souter was appointed, nearly twenty years ago. Nobody seemed to know much about him even in New Hampshire. Quiet, never married, lived with his mother in a ramshackle house, no computer, no close friends. The first Supreme Court justice who fit the profile of a serial killer. ("When a dog returned home with a human femur, sheriff's deputies dug up the woods behind the old Souter place and discovered the remains of twelve paper boys missing since the 1960s. 'He was a nice boy, kept to himself, used to help my wife with the groceries. We were just so surprised,' said neighbor Clarence Beebe.") Well, he worked out better than that, no Brandeis but certainly no Scalia. Get ready for the shitstorm, even if Minnesota has two senators by then. Come on, Tim, sign the damn paper. Send Al to Washington and don't be such a baby. I'm sorry you didn't get asked to run for vice-president. Did it ever occur to you to give McCain a lap-dance? What, you thought he chose Palin for her mind?

And poor Bristol Palin is back in the news, having reversed herself about abstinence again. (What torture was involved there, d'ya think?) She had it right the first time: abstinence doesn't work. Well, it works -- if you never have sex, the chances of getting pregnant are infinitesmal -- but she meant to say that it's too hard. (She's a Palin, and not articulate.) We knew this already. Abstinence is excruciating for middle-aged men who have taken a vow of celibacy. It's impossible for a couple of seventeen-year-olds, brimming with hormones, who think they're in love. That's why contraception was invented. It's my belief that Bristol got pregnant on purpose, hoping to get away from her awful parents, but the baby-daddy let her down. She needs to marry the first lumberjack or traveling salesman who passes the house, or risk becoming a victim of her mother's insane ambition and even more insane religiosity. And if she's planning a visit to the UK, consider a name change.

The other day I was thinking about that wonderful old BBC series I, Claudius. Remember the episode when Tiberius has retired to Capri, leaving Caligula to run amok in Rome? The imperial family is frantic to get word to him, and Claudius suggests writing a letter to be hidden in his history of Rome, which he intends to send to Tiberius. "Fool!" his mother explodes. "He's not going to read your history! He won't even look at it unless it has pictures of naked women!" Apparently George W. Bush didn't look at his Presidential Daily Briefing unless it had a verse from the Bible and one of those mawkish "inspirational" illustrations beloved by religious television channels. Donald Rumsfeld seems to have figured this out, unfortunately not until Bush had ignored secular-text-only memos with headings like "Bin Laden Determined To Strike Inside US." I wonder if they ever got around to "Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher, all is vanity." It's a long book, not all of it worthless.

I'm glad to see that the nut-right has found something to do with used teabags besides throw them into landfills. Did you know that red states don't even have bottle deposit? Any form of recycling would imply lack of faith in the imminent return of Vampire Jesus, who will wipe away every Superfund site and make every strip-mined mountain whole. Teabag Day should become an annual event, a time to release pent-up rage before their regular holiday, April 20, and avoid further bombings and campus massacres. And I'm sure they'll get better with practice. The people who mocked Obama for being a community organizer lacked the skills to obtain a park permit in Washington and failed to anticipate the possibility of rain in Philadelphia. In spite of nonstop promotion on Fox News, the turnouts didn't begin to equal last year's immigration reform rallies in Los Angeles, much less the two million people who stood in freezing weather to watch the Inauguration. Fox broadcasters aside, I didn't see any of the rich people who will be most affected by Obama's tax policies. The people I did see appeared to have been abducted from a Wallace rally in 1968 and returned last month by the alien ship, without having aged a day or gained an IQ point. In other words, people who are still angry about busing being manipulated by slightly more cunning people who are still angry about the New Deal. History passed them by so long ago, they can't even hear it in the distance, and that makes them all the angrier. I can imagine no better symbol for the Republicans than a spent teabag. Any serious tea drinker will tell you the bag is inferior even when it's new.

My fellow Americans:

Yesterday, a ruthless band of pirates boarded a merchant ship, the Maersk Alabama, which is owned by a Danish company but has an American crew. They were armed with state-of-the-art weapons including rocket-propelled grenade launchers such as those used by terrorists and insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. At this hour, the crew has regained control of the ship, but the pirates are holding Captain Richard Phillips, an American citizen.

It is clear that these criminals do not respect international law, and it is the policy of the United States never to negotiate with terrorists. I have consulted with my national security adviser, Lindsey Graham, and with my Cabinet. I am particularly grateful for the counsel of Vice President Palin, since she informs me that she can see the Straits of Hormuz from her bedroom window. I am pleased to tell you that it is their unanimous belief that we should launch an immediate attack on Iran, which has been arming and training terrorists for many years. We have obtained satellite photos which clearly show pirate training camps on the Iranian coast. These will be our first targets, but not of course our only ones.

I want to stress that we wish no harm to the Iranian people; we hope they will soon enjoy all the benefits of democracy and a free market economy as the people of Iraq. But there is no room for piracy in the twenty-first century.

Thank you and good night, my fellow prisoners. Americans.

Labels: John McCain

"Health and Human Services nominee Kathleen Sebelius recently corrected three years of tax returns and paid more than $7000 in back taxes after finding 'unintentional errors.'" (Erica Werner, Huffington Post)

I know how President Obama plans to make up the enormous deficit he inherited from the Cheney-Bush regime. He will continue to appoint deadbeats to public office, and even if they withdraw their names like Tom Daschle, they will be encouraged to look over their financial records and write hasty checks to the Internal Revenue Service. There is probably an IRS auditor combing the returns for future nominees as I type.

It happens I have some experience of their methods. I owed a lot less than seven grand, and they promised to pursue me to the limits of the solar system. Of course, I've never been a senator or a governor, just a working stiff chosen at random. I paid. It's what we do, even without the promise of a presidential appointment. Avoiding prosecution is usually enough.

At the rate of a few thousand bucks a bureaucrat, of course, this is going to take time. The rest of us may wish to participate in a voluntary program proposed some years ago by Roy Blount, Jr.: Buy stamps and throw them away.

Think about it.

Labels: chutzpah, taxes

I see that Keith Olbermann has taken to referring to the de facto head of the Republican Party as "Boss Limbaugh." I think he had it right before, when he called him "Comedian." Limbaugh could wear Boss Tweed 's pants, but he couldn't fill his shoes. At the height of Tammany power, Tweed ran the biggest city in the country. All Limbaugh runs is his mouth.

If Limbaugh recalls anyone, it's Falstaff, the broken-down knight who dreams of political power. And we all know what happens to Falstaff when his friend becomes king -- he is publicly humiliated and given three days to get out of town. No self-respecting statesman can afford to have a dissolute glutton in his inner circle. The difference, of course, is that Falstaff is never vicious or nasty. Orson Welles once called him "the only truly good man in literature." I don't know about that, but surely he's more loved than hated. If the first is out of the question, I guess you're entitled to go for the second. And who exactly fears Limbaugh? I haven't seen anyone except Republicans crapping their nappies. No doubt the Democrats hope he'll avoid a massive coronary until after the 2012 elections. I'm starting to regret giving him that gift membership in Pie of the Month Club.

As the Republicans wander the political desert tasting the unaccustomed brackish water of defeat (did I just type that?), it's not surprising that Limbaugh has become their unelected Moses. The great war hero McCain turned out to be a confused, slightly pathetic old man. Romney is too creepy, Giuliani too repellent, Huckabee too fringy, Palin too stupid to replace him. Jindal needed exactly thirty seconds to become a national punchline, and Jeb Bush is still named Bush. Charlie Crist means nothing to the rank and file, Arnold was born far away from America, and Rap Master Michael Steele would probably be happier working for the International House of Waffles. I couldn't figure out why their Congressional leadership makes my skin crawl, and then one morning it came to me in the form of an old joke by Joy Behar: John Boehner looks like a child molester, and Eric Cantor looks like the child he's molesting. (Joy was talking about Daddy Bush and Quayle, but doesn't it work better with these two?) Further, Mitch McConnell looks like Eric's oblivious granny, who tells him to go play with Uncle John while she watches her stories. It's all I can do not to call Family Services.

In one of his recent performances, Lewis Black joked about re-animating the corpse of Ronald Reagan. Of course, that's ridiculous. You can't re-animate the dead. The Republicans will have to clone him.

Labels: child molesting, politics

"I don't care what the papers write about me; my constituents can't read," William "Boss" Tweed is supposed to have said. "But they can see those damn drawings." He was talking about the work of Thomas Nast, among others, depicting him and his associates as a cabal of bloated crooks. Strange how potent line drawings can be.

Even now, when literacy is common, there's nothing like an editorial cartoon to touch off anger and violence, as when a Danish newspaper committed the cultural faux pas of publishing drawings of the Prophet Muhammad. The presence of a Muslim or two on the paper's staff could have prevented a lot of trouble -- all it needed was for someone to say (in Danish), "What the hell are you doing?"

I have no idea how many black people work in the editorial department at the New York Post, but apparently none of them saw the infamous chimp cartoon before it went to press. As everyone knows by now, it portrayed a dead chimp labeled "stimulus bill," inspired (if that's the word) by an occurrence the previous day in Connecticut, when police had to shoot a 200-pound chimpanzee which had mauled a woman. A black journalist, or even a culturally sensitive white one, could have pointed out that this drawing would be seen as racist, given the long history of slandering black people by calling them apes and monkeys. A sensitive journalist would have explained, patiently, that even though George W. Bush was frequently compared to a primate (there may still be a website called Smirking Chimp), it was a comment on his facial expression and overall intelligence, not his race. If the Post's editor and publisher didn't get it (and apparently they don't), the journalist still could have warned of the inevitable firestorm from New York's favorite political arsonist, Al Sharpton.

For the record, I thought the cartoon was dumb and insensitive, but probably not racist in intent. It took a momentary topic of public interest -- worth maybe forty-five seconds on Leno or Letterman -- and tried to use it to express a political viewpoint. That's what cartoonists do (classic example: David Levine's drawing of LBJ displaying a surgical scar in the shape of Vietnam). It would have worked just as well, I suppose, if the police in Connecticut had shot a rabid dog or a rampaging bear. The Post's crime lay in not being able to see the cartoon as an African-American might well see it, as a racist slur on Barack Obama. Of course, thanks to Rev. Sharpton, the whole Western world had now seen it, in addition to the paper's relatively tiny fan base. And he had help from people who should know better, like Julian Bond and Spike Lee.

All this self-serving outrage could not have come at a worse time. Yesterday the Rocky Mountain News published its last edition after a century and a half, leaving Denver with only the Post. San Francisco is on the brink of losing its only daily, the Chronicle. The Minneapolis Star Tribune is on its deathbed, too, and many cities and towns have no newspapers at all, leaving them at the mercy of USA Today, which has the substance (and the appearance) of a Howard Johnson menu. Even the New York Times, the self-styled "newspaper of record," is visibly shrinking. The era of the dead-trees newspaper seems to be hastening to its end after roughly three hundred years. Even if some of them survive as online ghosts, they will never be the same. It's not as if we don't need newspapers, but they aren't profitable, or profitable enough.

We at the Sky believe, along with the men who wrote and ratified the First Amendment first, that a free press is more important than all that other stuff -- habeas corpus, personal arsenals, not having troops quartered in your house. We don't believe you can have a functioning democracy if citizens are dependent upon radio and television stations which are on their way to being owned by six people; on the Internet (sorry) where just anybody can write an opinion and call it fact, much as I'm doing now, yeah, I smell the irony; on a handful of papers where once there were hundreds. We believe a bad newspaper like the New York Post is better than no newspaper at all. And we were just about to call upon the Obama Administration to save our press.

Billions for banks, insurance companies, auto makers and Wall Street bastards, but not a penny for newspapers? They are as essential to this country as water, energy and schools. They are disappearing because of the rising cost of everything from ink to transport, not the gross mismanagement characteristic of those other industries. They employ thousands. They are a lifeline for people who, incredibly, still don't have computers. They print letters from the known, the unknown, and the quite mad. They can drive you crazy and turn your fingers gray, but they still bring you a snapshot of the world at the moment the press-run began, a time capsule that isn't updated every five minutes when it doesn't disappear altogether. If they're nothing else, they're the daily crossword. An old, yellow clipping that falls out of a forgotten book can recall the past better than a Proustian madeleine. Go ahead, do that with a dead website.

I love the Internet. It contains multitudes undreamed of by Walt Whitman. That's the trouble. Its very freedom (which I will die defending) makes it a treacherous source of information. We need many newspapers written and edited by serious professionals if we are to make sense of a hopelessly tangled world. If money is the only thing making them disappear, give them the money. Even USA Today is worthier of salvation than the companies that made Hummers and Sierras, or the banks that gave mortgages to the unemployed. For better or worse, a nation's newspapers are its memory and its soul.

Labels: journalism

You tell me
It's the birthday of Emily Dickinson
Victor Hugo Philip Larkin
Langston Hughes W.H. Auden
Dante

I'm all ears

And then you read a poem
By some guy named Bob
About drinking coffee in a kitchen
While frost dulls the windowpane
And a cat sleeps upstairs

A poem so twee
It's barely alive

Day after day
I wonder if some publisher
Whose books sell in the hundreds
Sends you cash
(or sacks of coffee)
To read this stuff

Day after day
I dream of Yeats
Pope
Coleridge
Pushkin
Basho

And I get Bob
The adjunct professor
With his kitchen table poem
And his cat

Maybe I'll see
What else
Is on
The radio

Labels: Writers' Almanac

Look on the bright side: At least Bishop Richard Williamson is unlikely to compare legal abortion to the Holocaust, a rhetorical device much loved by Christian clergy, because according to him, there was no Holocaust. The Nazis killed 600,000 Jews, tops, and they probably had it coming because the Jews are bent on world domination, according to the bishop, recently welcomed back into the Church by ex-Hitlerjugend Joseph Ratzinger, a/k/a Pope Benedictineandbrandy XVI. Oh, and the Vatican is controlled by Satan anyway, says the bishop. Well...

All this has caused quite a tempest, and for the usual reason: money. Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, has called on the Pope to explain his actions. Here's something I didn't know: when Germans file their tax returns, they can check a box for a portion of the payment to go to the Catholic Church, the Lutheran Church, or any other recognized religion -- like the checkoff for public funding of presidential campaigns on US tax returns. (Why the American religion industry hasn't demanded something like this, I don't know.) Since denying the Holocaust is a crime in Germany punishable by imprisonment, there is talk in the Bundestag of cutting off this lucrative source of church money. Of course, Williamson doesn't live in Germany -- he runs a seminary in Argentina, you'll be surprised to hear -- and the Vatican's position is that he can say whatever he wants about the twentieth century as long as he doesn't violate Church doctrines prescribed in the preceding nineteen.

The timing is curious. This year on Good Friday, by papal decree Catholics will once again pray for "the conversion of the Jews," an insulting bit of liturgy that was dropped some years ago. In apocalyptic Christianity, this conversion is a necessary step in bringing about the Final Days. We already have a pretty good idea what this pope thinks of Islam, so why is he planning a trip to Jerusalem this year? Having angered all the Jews in Italy, is he looking for more people to piss off? Or are his intentions more sinister? At the very least, ecumenism is dead and it's every believer for himself.

For two thousand years, Christians have been expecting the end of time. They have been consistently disappointed, but that's why it's called faith. Now for the first time, they are capable of self-fulfilling prophecy. The days ahead will be terrible -- we seem to be in for a global depression, ecological catastrophe, and more hideous violence as in Darfur, Rwanda, Gaza, Sri Lanka, Kashmir, a dozen other places. True believers of every stripe will be tempted to utter a despairing "Fuck it!" and detonate whatever they have lying around. The last thing they will need is encouragement.

Labels: apocalypse, money, religion

The bloom is off the rose, the shine is off the apple, the honeymoon is over. All the millions who stood in the cold to watch Barack Obama's inauguration, and the millions more who voted for him, are through. They elected him conditional on Tom Daschle becoming Secretary of Health and Human Services, and they feel disillusioned, used, empty. They will never hope again.

I know because the Experts said so. The pundits, the insiders, the receivers and dispensers of wisdom: Chris, Pat, Sean, Michelle, other Chris, George, David, Glenn, Joe, Bill, Dick, Jeff, Bob, Greta, the whole choir of political brainpower. Curious thing: One year ago, all of them assured me that Hillary Clinton had the nomination all sewed up; the only question was whether she would run against Mitt Romney or Rudolph Giuliani.

Another curious thing: Millions of Americans who had jobs in February 2008, and who did them diligently and competently, don't have them now. The Experts, however, continue to cash large paychecks despite being consistently, spectacularly, hilariously wrong. There has never been an Expert recall, or an Expert layoff, or even a cut in Expert hours. It's the safest job this side of pope.

Even more curious: Some people still pay attention to them.

Labels: pundits and half-wits

There is so much insane crud flying around, I hardly have time to notice it all, much less compose sentences as I was taught long ago, in the days of something called public education. It's what these virtual watercoolers are for, isn't it? Shooting the breeze, checking in, dodging work, wondering if other people are noticing it, too?

A mother of six in California had herself implanted with eight embryos (for some reason) and proceeded to incubate eight precious little miracles. She'll be hitting the media circuit any day. She will not be repaying the hospital for the enormous cost of seeding her, mining them from her uterus, warming them up, giving them oxygen and fitting them with anti-theft devices. Cully-fornia is so broke, the governor is sending out IOUs in lieu of tax refunds, but who's counting? They're just so darling. Aren't they? At around the same time, a man who lost his job at another Kaiser Permanente hospital went home and shot his wife, their five children, and himself. Circle of life.

Rod Blagojevich is now the former Embattled Governor of Illinois, having been removed from office by the state senate 51-0. The conclusion was foregone on the day of Patrick Fitzgerald's bleep-filled press conference, but the "trial" gave all the senators a chance to appear on television and perform their arias of outrage and indignation. (I especially enjoyed the downstate Republican who declared that never before had Illinois suffered such a disgrace, perhaps forgetting that the previous governor is still in prison.) Then Blago brought the show to a climax with a Liebestod that lacked poetry -- literally, no more Oxford Book of English Verse -- but combined bathos, self-pity, veiled threats, sentimental evocations of his immigrant parents, bitterness, defiance, and a plea for campaign finance reform. I felt he missed an opportunity to link himself with the hapless Cubs or the Haymarket Martyrs, but maybe he's saving some material for the inevitable autobiography.

I watched the first NFL Championship Game as a child of fourteen. There was a football game. No Roman numerals. The Green Bay Packers won, as they often did in those days, when Vince Lombardi dwelt among us. Today, the Superbowl is a national barbecue/sideshow/extravaganza with a football game tucked somewhere inside, the carnival before Carnival. It was actually a good game this year, if you could get past the quarterback hagiographies and the armies of commentators. John Madden looks more and more like a stone creature come to life in a crummy Italian Hercules movie. He and Bob Costas know their football, period. Everyone else should please go away.

As usual, I was left speechless, but laughing, by the sheer excess. Gen. David Petraeus took time off from his job as head of Central Command to flip a coin. Faith Hill and Bruce Springsteen (who shocked America by not singing "Born In the USA") provided the entertainment. Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, the hero airplane pilot of the moment, looked much younger than he does in photographs. The only thing missing was Octuplet Mama. Maybe next year.

The Republican National Committee elected its first black chairman, Michael Steele. What? You don't keep up with lieutenant governors of Maryland? All day I tried not to think of Dave Chappelle's character Clayton Bigsby, the blind Klansman who doesn't know he's black. Steele knows -- it's what got him the job, after all -- but he thinks being anti-choice cancels it out. Not for David Duke, an actual Klansman, who is disgusted with the GOP and threatening to take his followers elsewhere. Will the party change its symbol from an elephant to an Oreo? Is this the end of the forty-year Southern Strategy? Who do they think they're fooling? People who still think "they all look alike," I guess.

But who's really in charge here? Will the Party of Lincoln (Savings & Loan) be led off the cliff by Steele, Palin, Limbaugh, McConnell, Jeb Bush, Bobby Jindal, or some other rough beast whose hour has not yet come round? Can it possibly move farther to the right without falling off the edge of the earth? (Read your Bible!) A surprising number of its members, including the new chairman, seem to think the problem is a failure to "get the message out," that if you can just package shit to look like Shalimar, people will not only buy it, they'll spray it all over themselves. The resounding rejection of the McBush/Dingbat ticket less than three months ago made no impression on them. I shouldn't enjoy their delusional ravings as much as I do, but I'm not a nice person. I lack Family Values, faith, patriotism (although not as much as I used to) and a love of consumerism. I've been wearing these shoes for five years, and when they fall apart I'll buy another pair. And they won't be Prada. So you see, I'm no help.

Where was I?

Michael Phelps was photographed taking a bong hit at a party. To paraphrase S.J. Perelman, America was immediately divided into two camps, in the larger and drowsier of which I find myself. What shall we tell the children? How about I can't believe this is still illegal? Jeez. Cannabis is a huge cash crop in California, which spends billions of dollars every year to make sure nobody grows more than six plants for personal use. And the state is broke. Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Is anybody in Sacramento thinking at all? Bitte?

Why is President Obama being so nice to the Republicans, putting them in his Cabinet, visiting them on Capitol Hill and even -- ugh -- eating with them? Sure, keep your friends close and your enemies closer, but never forget they are your enemies. It might also help to recall that you won. By a lot. "In victory, magnanimity," said Churchill, even as he lobbied to shoot the German leadership without legal niceties. "With malice toward none, with charity for all, " said Lincoln, just before he took a bullet to the head. Enough with the charity, says Buttermilk Sky. It's time to kick asses and take names, and you already know their names.

Labels: miscellany