Sunday, November 19, 2006

Boys and girls together

Considering that most people didn't know her name two months ago, it's truly breathtaking to see how quickly Nancy Pelosi has displaced Hillary Rodham Clinton as Most Reviled Woman in Red America. When you come down to it, Clinton is just an ambitious junior senator, while Pelosi is, as we're constantly reminded, two heartbeats from the Oval Office. (And as we're not constantly reminded, those hearts belong to a moron who nearly choked to death eating pretzels and a drunk with a pacemaker who likes to play with guns, whose combined approval rating barely reaches fifty percent.) The blabosphere was ready to fling crap at anyone who replaced Man Mountain Hastert, but the thought of a woman in power really has the O'Reilly-McCain-Limbaugh axis checking their trouser Derringers every five minutes. Since it's hard to make the "frigid lesbo" charge stick to a mother of five -- just wait, it will be along -- let's snipe at her appearance. If a woman lets herself slide, she's beneath contempt; if she's slim, dark-haired and relatively unwrinkled at 66, she must be vain and irrelevant. It's the classic lose/lose. More troubling is the mountain that writers like Maureen "One of the Boys" Dowd are trying to make of the Hoyer-Murtaugh molehill. I believe Pelosi supported Murtaugh for majority leader not because he had the votes but because she wanted to show her gratitude to the man who stood virtually alone against the war for so long. In any case, the Speaker is majority leader of the House in all but name, so who cares? It was far more intriguing that the Republicans have given up on attracting African-American voters to the extent of choosing an outspoken white supremacist as Senate minority whip. Who says there are no second acts in American lives? (I know, Fitzgerald. Well, for him, there wasn't.)

At least The New York Times knows what matters. On page one for two straight days we read of the death of Bo Schembechler, legendary football coach and great American. He blew off a doctor's appointment to give a pep talk to his Wolverines, you know. And then, on the eve of the biggest game of the year, he died. I tell you, it's like Moses never getting to spike the ball in the Promised Land. Keith Jackson called the timing of his death "absolutely spooky," so it may actually be one of the signs and wonders we're told to anticipate. Would that make Pelosi the Scarlet Woman? Perhaps Pat Robertson will clarify when he's had time to recover from the election results.

The Michigan-Ohio State score? I don't know. Who cares?

Monday, November 13, 2006

Vast file of trivia

"I have a garbage can mind," the great Jean Shepherd used to observe, by way of explaining why he could remember obscure radio characters and comic strips rather than Official History, and why he was a pioneer collector of what Funny Times calls "News of the Weird," odd and inexplicable items that fill in the gaps of our world picture. Having grown up with Shepherd's wised-up, insidious voice in my head, I still seek out such flotsam; it's why National Briefing is my favorite section of The New York Times. Combining wire-service filler with local crime, N.B. is frustrating in its refusal to provide follow-up, but consistently funnier than Metropolitan Diary or the columns of David Brooks. This is what I was reading on November 4 when everybody else was carbo-loading on Ted Haggard:

Delaware: Man Ordered To Wear Sentence. A Wilmington judge ordered a man who twice exposed himself to a 10-year-old girl at his workplace to wear a T-shirt with the words "I am a registered sex offender" in bold letters...Deputy Attorney General Donald Roberts said he requested the T-shirt punishment because he was concerned about [Russell Teeter] exposing himself to children at the gardening business he runs... (Reuters)

Clearly the judge and the deputy AG need to get out more, especially during Spring Break. Hester Prynne and her big red A were a long time ago. The "I am a registered sex offender" shirt is supposed to make Mr. Teeter (who is 69) a social outcast, but you can see far more unsettling boasts on the clothing of young men and women almost everywhere. Perhaps if he were required to wear an albatross around his neck...

Friday, November 10, 2006

Crossing the 'baugh

How much is too much? If you make an excellent living being outrageous and controversial, the question is a frustrating one. Howard Stern found that out when he joked about the singer Selena shortly after her death, causing thousands of outraged fans to protest and sponsors to threaten withdrawal from his show. It was too soon, and the King of All Media was forced to read an apology in English and Spanish.

Clearly, competing with Stern is no lap in the pool. A couple of morning radio artistes who go by Opie and Anthony challenged their audience to get wild and crazy, and one couple phoned to report that they were having sex inside St. Patrick's Cathedral. (Two adults having consensual sex in a Catholic church -- I was appalled, too.) Their punishment was temporary banishment from our precious American airwaves. They're back now.

But they raised the bar. Troi Torain, known to radio fans as DJ Star, actually got himself arrested for threatening to assault the four-year-old daughter of a rival, describing her as a "little half a lo mein eater" and her mother as a "slant-eyed whore." His most shocking trash-talk was reserved for himself: "You're looking at the new Lenny Bruce." Prosecutors eventually decided that none of this was criminal, though I'm not sure about that last statement.

Fact is, mobs can turn on you quicker than hot milk -- look at Robespierre, or the Ceaucescus, one-time president and First Lady of Romania. One day you're on the balcony waving, the next day you're staring at a line of bayonets and wondering when you lost the love of the nation. What do people want? God, what do they want? How do you know when you've moved the line and when you've trampled on it?

A question Rush Limbaugh may well be pondering. Celebrities who engage in politics -- let's be honest, liberal politics -- have been fair game since Helen Gahagan Douglas ran for Congress. Now that the studios and the blacklist can no longer control their lives and careers, the media have taken over. Frankly, stars often deserve a smackdown. Devotees who had spent serious money to be in her presence let Barbra Streisand know what they thought of the Bush impersonator she included in her latest tour (and the Democratic diva responded with some colorful language Dick Cheney would have appreciated). Awards shows have cracked down on actors who think a statuette is a signal to preach to the unwashed about capital punishment. At best, this kind of thing trivializes serious issues; at worst, it convinces people that Mr. Celebrity will take care of them. (Don't worry about the Amazon rainforest, Sting is on the case!) In or out of politics, we all love making fun of the famous for gaining weight, losing weight, driving drunk, getting married, getting divorced, entering rehab, dressing badly, dancing badly, coming out, getting a facelift or dangling a child off a balcony. But Rush, we don't make fun of them for being sick. In no sense could it be considered a career move. Having a disease that prevents you from working, speaking or sitting still is not a choice like driving a Prius. It's an issue that chooses you. Even people who don't know a stem cell from a sleeper cell, but possess a modicum of human decency, a scintilla of empathy, a tiny trace of conservative compassion (the kind that tastes sour and weird) -- even they agree that you are a sorry sack. Go away.

Genius is overrated

A sportswriter once asked Warren Spahn what it was like to play for Casey Stengel, widely considered the most brilliant mind in baseball during his stewardship of the New York Yankees. Spahn had started his Hall of Fame career under Stengel with the long-vanished Boston Braves, and they met again on the 1962 New York Mets, both teams of near-epochal ineptitude. With his customary dry wit, Spahn remarked, "I played for Casey before and after he was a genius."

Now that Karl Rove has been revealed to be no smarter than the average Republican, it's useful to remember that there are at least two kinds of genius: those who create in relative solitude through gifts the rest of us can scarcely fathom (Mozart, Leonardo, Einstein) and those wholly dependent upon the talents of others and conditions outside their control (Oppenheimer, say, or the general or admiral of your choice). Once he contrived to install George W. Bush in the White House with a majority in both houses of Congress, Rove could no more prevent the disastrous invasion of Iraq (assuming he wished to) than he could stop a tropical depression off the African coast from becoming Hurricane Katrina. These probably would have been enough to end the Republican hegemony of the last six years without all the help they got along the way.

In full panic mode, the Republican Party is not a pretty sight. As poll after poll foretold disaster, they struck the Big Tent and scrambled aboard the Armored Personnel Carrier of Hate. Racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, nativism, mocking the chronically ill -- by Tuesday night, when the last commercial had aired, all I wanted was a prolonged shower with strong soap. A confession: I hate being lied to. I used to wear a button that said THEY'RE LYING! Nobody ever asked me who "they" were. We all know it's happening, and we know there's not much we can do except refuse to believe anybody, and that makes you tired and depressed all the time. We choose the lie that offends us least. I think that's what happened last Tuesday.

Who can say if "negative" campaigning works? Few voters will tell pollers they vote their hatreds. Maybe people in Tennessee are congratulating themselves on saving white womanhood from Harold Ford, Jr., or maybe they saw how far to the right he was on issues like same-sex marriage and thought, Six of one, half a dozen of the other. There are plenty of "New Democrats" who inspire as little confidence as the "New Nixon" trotted out in 1968, tanned, rested, and ready to bomb Hanoi and subvert the Constitution. What's the use of controlling the Senate if the Majority Leader won't fight for reproductive freedom? Why should I be thrilled by the new Speaker's gender credentials if she categorically rules out impeachment before picking up the gavel? And all this "common grounds" talk had better be just that, talk. We didn't elect them to make common ground with war criminals and incompetents. Now that Howard Dean is a genius, he needs to remember who made him one.

Monday, November 06, 2006

Holiday for voters

What do Texas and New York have in common? Not much, you're probably thinking. But tomorrow voters in those states have an opportunity to vote for colorful gubernatorial candidates who don't stand a chance. Kinky Friedman is running in Texas as an independent, and Malachy McCourt is the Green Party candidate in New York. Neither was invited to the Big Official Debates because they would have cleaned the clocks of their grayface opponents. Since there's no guarantee your vote will even be counted, why not get a little thrill from your thirty seconds inside the Booth of Democracy?

I plan to vote for Malachy, as he prefers to be addressed, because Eliot Spitzer has such a gigantic lead over the other guy, he can't possibly need me. I'm exhausted by Spitzer, whose ads began running, I'm pretty sure, during the Super Bowl. A lot of people think he's already the governor, including Spitzer. He showed his class by de-endorsing Alan Hevesi at the first sign of trouble, and disinviting him to the victory party. It's going to be one of those administrations.

Hevesi I will vote for, because his race is closer. The Republicans must be pounding their heads on their desks for not nominating someone a little more confidence-inducing to run against him when he seemed unbeatable. Mr. Callaghan (I think that's his name) may be a financial wizard, but he looks as if he couldn't keep the books of the Applepicker County PTA. A grownup haircut and a suit that fits would help. Sure, Hevesi broke the law by getting a state car and driver for his wife, but he's been more than competent as comptroller and I don't care. If a preponderance of voters agree with me tomorrow, that should be the end of it. If they vote him out, that's pure democracy in action, and if they don't, our lame-duck governor and his toothy pal Bruno in the State Senate should let the matter drop. Then Pataki can hurry on back to Budapest, where he's evidently establishing residence. How clever of him to realize he has a better shot at becoming prime minister of Hungary than president of the United States.

And what if Kinky and Malachy manage to pull off dazzling upset victories? I hear you ask. Aren't they completely unqualified for the offices they seek? Happily, no. The job of governor has been performed by the likes of Lester Maddox, Ronald Reagan, Jesse Ventura, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mitt Romney and the Bush brothers. The only requirements would seem to be a pulse and a change of clothes. If anything, Friedman and McCourt are over-qualified.

As for the Senate, I don't think I can pull the lever for Hillary "I Voted For the War But I've Changed My Mind" Clinton. I'll have to see who the Greens are running. I have no idea because I didn't get a sample ballot from the Board of Elections. I also don't know if our old clunk-clunkers have given way to snazzy touch-screen models, or whether I need a photo ID. I'm only sure that the line will be slow because of an apparent requirement that poll workers prove they voted in the Smith-Hoover election of 1928. Never have I seen anyone behind the big book who wasn't at least 75, and mine being a reasonably common name, the search can be excruciating. The price of freedom.

Sunday, November 05, 2006

The rich are different

When it comes to The New Yorker I'm like a dog with a knuckle bone -- I worry it for fear of missing a juicy morsel until my people have to take it away. I was about to throw out the October 30 issue when my eye fell on an item titled "Gift Horse," with a charming drawing. Rebecca Mead reports that Miss Georgina Bloomberg, the mayor's younger daughter, is an avid equestrian who has organized a charity called The Rider's Closet, which provides previously-owned riding habits to the underprivileged. I didn't know this was such a problem, but this is why I love the magazine. It's educational. The habits are distributed to colleges with riding programs and the like, where parents no doubt welcome any financial relief. My wicked imagination keeps conjuring pictures of homeless people in $200 jodphurs, but I'm getting therapy.

The whole family is dedicated to public service. Georgina's father has contributed staggering amounts of his own money to stem-cell research and anti-smoking programs; it's because of him that the cigarette-addicted are forced to smoke in the cold and rain, and the rest of us are forced to hold our breath as we hurry past office buildings in the daytime and restaurant and bars at night. His latest public health initiative would require restaurants to replace trans-fats with healthier products like canola oil. (Don't look at me, I thought canola was an Italian pastry.) It's well known, or at least constantly repeated, that Americans are the fattest people on earth, and changing the oil in the friolator is supposed to address this.

Sorry, I'm not buying it. The problem is a lot more systemic than how the fast food gets fried. It's not that working- and middle-class people don't care about their health or don't know about nutrition, or even that they skip going to the gym. Increasingly, they just lack the money to buy organic produce and lean meats, and even more, the time to shop for them, prepare them, sit down and eat them. The family dinner is vanishing faster than the family farm. Parents work long hours to make ends meet, kids rush from tennis lessons to soccer practice to parking themselves in front of a computer or TV screen, and at every stage dinner is replaced by grazing on chips, pizza, burgers and fried chicken-like objects. Want healthier Americans? For starters, raise the minimum wage, provide national health insurance and guarantee the availability of affordable housing. Simple, right? Thank you.

Wait... Bloomberg. Bloomberg. Michael Bloomberg? Is this the same Michael Bloomberg who made a deal to put a Snapple machine in every public school? So the kids can wash down their Ritalin with sugary caffeine? I'm getting a mixed message here.