A Yank on the Edge of England (formerly For All In Tents and Porpoises)

I'm One of the 99 Percent, and Am Committed to the Greater Comfort of Somalians

2011-10-07T08:19:00.000-04:00

Twenty years ago today I was working on my ill-fated (as never-to-be-published) biography of the entertainment mogul and dickhead David Geffen, and pondering whether his having given $1 million to a gay charity whose identity I’ve forgotten constituted generosity. Having just sold his record company for $800 million, he had months before been ordained as a billionaire. Is one who donates one one-thousandth of his fortune, and in the process quite mindfully positions himself to save a bundle on his taxes, truly generous?

Yesterday, I got involved in a little Facebook shouting match regarding Steve Jobs. One of the many Facebook friends I wouldn’t recognise as such if he sat down beside me on the bus to Margate groused that many hi-tech gadget fetishists seemed to think of as the newly deceased Steve Jobs — an industrialist, the CEO of a corporation known to use Asian subcontractors who don’t always treat their employees with the utmost tenderness — as Lennon-like, almost as a martyr. I asserted that Jobs’ integrity may well have exceeded Lennon’s, and that Jobs didn’t only make himself and his shareholders rich, but also created great beauty. (I have been using Macintosh computers with the utmost delight since shortly after my Geffen book got quashed, and am in awe of the whole Apple product line’s gorgeousness. Even the Styrofoam in which my latest iMac was braced in its box seemed to have been designed with loving care!)

Another person commented that Apple products might indeed be much prettier than Microsoft’s, but that, unlike Bill Gates, Jobs wasn’t known for his philanthropy. Which led me to infer that, before one can revel in the beauty of a work of art (or a computer), he or she must first examine its creator’s tax returns.

But that’s another question. The one I really wanted to consider today is that the Occupy Wall Street movement, about which I’m intermittently very enthusiastic, seems based on the reasonable notion that it’s unfair for a microscopic minority of Americans to own a huge percentage of the country’s wealth. The idea seems to be that those, for instance, who got rich betting on the subprime mortgage meltdown of 2007-2008 should voluntarily hand over their ill-gotten megariches to the rest of us.

I do very much like this idea (I believe, in fact, that those who encouraged people to invest in things they were themselves betting against should be publicly disemboweled and fed to rabid mongrel dogs), but another Facebook comment I encountered this morning has me in a quandary. If we down here on street level have the right to demand a greater share of the country’s wealth solely on the basis of the current arrangement being patently unfair, doesn’t the entire Third World have a comparable right to demand from America a greater share of global wealth? Once having persuaded the financiers and Masters of the Universe to hand over their multimillions because it’s outrageous that anyone should have both a penthouse overlooking Central Park and a nine-bathroom mansion in the Hamptons while someone else can’t make his monthly mortgage payment, will we be prepared to help Somalia, say, attain the same average standard of living that Nebraskans enjoy? Some of the Masters of the Universe have their nine bathrooms in the Hamptons because they bet against large numbers of American homeowners being able to maintain their mortgage payments. Most, if not all, Americans benefit indirectly from our forebears having stolen our resource-laden hunk of the continent from the Indians. Are we, when the domestic playing field has been levelled, going to pretend there’s a big difference between the two?

If my giving away a thousandth of my worth isn’t generous, then what is? A hundredth? A tenth? How can I justify having any food at all when children in the world are starving?

The Way It Should Be

2011-10-06T08:03:00.000-04:00

[Please read yesterday's entry first!]

The bride’s father, who, after all, is the one out of whose pocket the band’s deposit came, gets on the phone with the bandleader, though he is at first too furious to speak coherently. As she sputters and hisses, the bandleader is tempted simply to break the connection, but instead becomes lost in a reverie about an earlier bride’s father he made furious. It was about a year before, and the happy couple’s guests were getting on the bandleader’s tits by requesting nothing but songs he loathed playing. They asked for Ain’t No Mountain High Enough, for instance, and for several Abba favourites. Instead of Ain’t No Mountain High Enough, he sang Ike & Tina Turner’s River Deep, Mountain High, complete with an uncanny recreation of Tina Turner’s orgasmic screeching. That shut them up for a while; the bandleader took particular delight in noting that someone’s auntie actually required fanning. He liked to imagine she’d fainted, though he hadn’t actually seen it. But his respite was short-lived, as someone’s uncle came up and slipped him a fiver to sing Abba’s Fernando.

There were many problems with this. First, the song’s fatuity -- Swedes conjuring a Latin American freedom fighter — had always made him itch. Second, as one who’d had a deal with Sony not that long ago, five pounds was an insult. He could imagine that when Elton John played private parties for billlionaires, people would give him the keys to Ferraris to sing particular songs, or the deeds to beachfront homes with nine bathrooms, not bloody fivers. So what he did was sing Carly Simon’s That’s The Way I Always Heard It Should Be, a feminist meditation on the fact that a bad marriage can be a prison.

People stopped dancing two verses into it, and the bride scampered from the dancefloor with mascara streaming down her cheeks. Both the groom and his new father-in-law converged on the bandleader and wrestled his hand-mic from him before he could sing, "You say we’ll soar like two birds through the clouds, but soon you’ll cage me on your shelf. I’ll never learn to be just me first, by myself." But the damage was already done.

“What’s your bloody game?” the bride’s father demanded. The bandleader said someone had requested the song, and showed the bride’s father the bedraggled fiver the Fernando man had slipped him. The groom demanded that the bandleader point out who’d done the slipping, but the bandleader wasn’t one for grassing, and tried to get his two antagonists to consider that the song might have been one of the most exquisite of the second half of the 20th century, along with the Linda Ronstadt-popularised Long Long Time — which he and the band also knew, in case the groom and his father-in-law fancied hearing it. “Will it stop everybody feeling miserable?” demanded the groom, whose own taste the bandleader guessed ran more to heavy metal bands from the Midlands, and who obviously had never heard it. The bandleader said all he could guarantee was that it was gorgeous, and that he loved singing it.

The father of the bride, meanwhile, sought an alternative solution. He asked the guitar player if anyone else in the band could sing, and the guitarist said the girl keyboard player could. Indeed, she’d been singing harmony vocals all along. The father of the bride said there was an extra 50 quid in it for everyone in the band if, for the balance of the afternoon, they told the bandleader to sod off, and let the girl keyboard player sing. The guitarist got him up to an extra 65 quid for each of them. The girl keyboard player, who was overweight, though with luminous smooth skin, thought this might be her big break, and the other musicians, who included a compulsive gambler and an alcoholic, welcomed the extra dosh. Only the bandleader, who realised he would now have to put together a new band — he had no intention of sharing a bandstand with turncoats — was miserable.

The Diciness of English

2011-10-05T04:35:00.000-04:00

Surmising, from the indiscreet utterance of one of her bridesmaids, that the band isn’t going to turn up, the bride herself gets on one of the bridesmaids’ iPhones to say WTF. It isn’t that one of her bridesmaids has multiple iPhones — imagine how expensive that would be! — but rather that several of the bridesmaids have them, and one, Tamsyn, has offered the bride the use of hers. English can be dicey in such matters, and simply isn’t very good on pronouns. Two sentences ago, for instance, we had Tamsyn, the bridesmaid, offering the bride the use of her iPhone, but it’s impossible to ascertain from that whether the phone is the bridesmaid’s or the bride’s.

The bridesmaid’s, and the bride, who should be primping and getting increasingly nervous, uses it to phone the leader of the band, at whom she howls indignantly. How can he even consider ruining what should be the most wonderful day of her life? To what does he expect her family and friends, and her handsome groom’s, to dance? A boombox? When was the last time anyone even saw a bloody boombox?

It isn’t half-one yet, but the bandleader has already downed nearly as much alcohol as the National Health Service recommends for an adult male to consume over a week. (Predictably, it recommends that children consume rather less.) He is, as usual, trying to placate his demons, to render unintelligible the cruel voice in his head that demands to know if he isn’t fatally embarrassed or even ashamed playing weddings and bar mitzvahs and what-have-you to keep himself in lager, fags, and ready-meals (Iceland’s chicken tikka lasagne being a particular favourite) when only nine years ago he had a deal with Sony.

Yes, of course, he is mortified, as who could fail to be? The A&R person (talent scout) who signed him predicted he would be The New George Michael, though neither gay nor a native Cypriot), and here he is not a decade later not singing his own songs at Wembley Arena, but Elton fucking John’s at weddings. Occasionally, the over-perfumed divorced 46-year-old aunt of the bride or groom will notice the charisma that attracted the Sony talent scout in the first place, and spend the rest of the afternoon making his life a misery, leering at him as he sings, chatting him up when the band takes its hourly ten-minute break, but mostly everyone’s too busy dancing and being joyous for the happy couple even to notice him. He might as well be a bloody CD!

“Why don’t you just hire a bloody DJ?” he asks today’s irate bride. “Google lastminutedj.com or something. I’ll return your deposit on Monday.” In fact, he’ll do no such thing, as he’s already drunk and smoked her deposit. And she’s not having the idea anyway. She doesn’t get shrill in her increased indignation, but actually lowers her voice. She says, “Actually, with only 42 minutes before I’m to exchange bloody vows, I’m not going to go on the bloody Internet. What’s going to happen is you and your band are going to get out here now.”

The bandleader loses the ash of his Marlboro — he’ll revert to rolling his own when he’s spent the last of her deposit — down the front of his Adele T-shirt and plays the alcoholism card. Does she really want him to drive out to the wedding site in view of his being well over the limit, and thus constituting a threat to other motorists and especially pedestrians? Would she really want an innocent’s death or dismemberment on her conscience?

“Listen, mate,” she says, in a register beneath that of the chainsmoking actress they brought in to voice the demon inhabiting Linda Blair, “you’ll honour our bloody contract or I’ll hire unemployed Albanians to come break your bloody arms and legs.” One of her bridesmaids, Prim (as in Primrose) bursts into frightened tears at this. Tamsyn and another of the bridesmaid, older, better acquainted with the bride, and thus more familiar with her (the bride’s, not Prim’s) penchant for threats, go all maternal, consoling her, stroking her lustrous strawberry blonde head and murmuring, “It’s just rhetoric, love. There, there.” English to the core, poor Prim finds all the attention upsetting, and is sick.

There are lots of unemployed Albanians in the UK these days, but of course there are lots of unemployed everything everywhere.

Matricide

2011-10-04T04:24:00.000-04:00

Audrey Mendelsohn lived out the final couple of years of her life in a thick fog of dementia in one of those old folks’ depositories with an incongruously cheerful name and meticulous landscaping, in Gurnee, Illinois, a state I suspect she’d never visited while sentient. When I visited her there for the first time after not seeing her for six years (during which she’d essentially ceased to be herself), I exploded in tears. In my profound foolishness, I’d always imagined I’d have a chance to apologize for how awfully I’d treated her during her last years in California.

There was never a question that my mother adored me. Nor was there ever any question that, the meagerness of my accomplishments notwithstanding, she was hugely proud of me. But when my father died, I lost both of them — her because it suddenly dawned on me how she’d made me her mouthpiece for her ever-growing contempt for him. Thinking it would make her and me closer, she’d always encouraged me to share her low opinion of him, and I was overcome with shame when I realized how avidly I’d done so.
I’d realized in the last months of my dad’s life how my mother had always wanted me to be weak. We would pick my dad up at the convalescent hospital to which she’d banished him (because if she “allowed” him to come home after the stroke that left him unable to walk, the house would inevitably catch fire, and she’d be unable to pull him to safety) and drive somewhere for a little outing. When I’d get his wheelchair out of the trunk, she’d frantically try to persuade me not to try to do it without help. Reflexively thinking myself unequal to every physical task, imagining myself always to require the intervention of someone stronger, I’d been regarded throughout my early life as a hopeless wuss, and I blamed her. Oh, did I blame her.

I visited her regularly in her last months in California, and she was always delighted to see me, even when I put my back into being as sarcastic and disdainful as possible — to treating her, in other words, exactly as she’d always treated my dad. I shall take to the grave the shame of the way I treated the two people in the world who loved me most.

So there I was with my mother in northernmost Illinois in the early autumn of 2007, weeping prodigiously at the realization that I’d lost my chance to apologize, when a very shrill fire alarm went off in the convalescent hospital. A voice on the PA system said it was a malfunction, and that there wasn’t really a fire, but the alarm couldn’t be placated. I could feel my mother tense; she, the most fearful woman on earth, remained enough of herself to experience panic on some very primal level. And still the alarm kept shrieking. And still. And still.

I could leave her alone in her panic while I ran through the place, trying to ascertain why no one was turning the goddamned thing off. Or I could hold a pillow over her face until she had never again to panic.

It Wasn't Bartman's Fault

2011-10-01T11:57:00.000-04:00

In my own childhood, I suffered from what might be seen as a variant of the Stockholm Syndrome. Though I was awful as sports, I identified myself in terms of them. I spent years foolishly telling myself that if I wanted it badly enough, I could somehow will myself to much greater athleticism than I had it in me to achieve. In so doing, I condemned myself to years of cruel disappointment or even humiliation. I wonder if a person ever completely gets over years of being chosen second- or third-to-last (there was, thank God, always at least one boy even more hopeless than I in my classes) for every team?

At Loyola Village School, teams were never chosen for spelling, reading comprehension, or art.

The remarkable documentary film I watched on ESPN America last night reminded me how sports bring out the worst in people. At a 2003 National League Championship Series game in Chicago, whose Cubs appeared to be about to make it to the World Series for the first time since something like 1831, a Florida Marlins batter hit a fly ball down the left field line. The Cubs left fielder might have caught it, putting his team within only a few outs of victory, had not the bespectacled 26-year-old Steve Bartman tried to catch it himself — as several other fans to either side of him tried to do as well, and as you or I would surely have done in the same circumstances. The Marlins went on to score a great many runs, and to win the game, and then to win the next evening’s too, and with it a trip to the World Series.

Fans outside the stadium watched a replay of the Bartman mishap over and over on a portable TV, and began chanting, “Asshole!” Their counterparts actually inside Wrigley Field took up the chant, and some of them came over to throw beer at Bartman, who had to be rescued by security guards. And there weren’t 10 of them among the 40,000 in attendance who wouldn’t have reacted to the foul ball exactly as he himself had.

A local TV channel thought its ratings might be enhanced by their making known not only Bartman’s identity, but also the location of the home he shared with his parents; it was a wonder one of them wasn’t killed. I suspect there were moments when Steve and his parents almost wished they would be. I’d bet the whole thing haunts him to this day.

The Cubs shortstop, who made a crucial error shortly after the foul ball, and pitcher, who suddenly lost the ability to get a Marlins batter out, weren’t threatened, nor were the Cubs batters who failed to produce sufficient runs to overcome the Marlins’ big inning. But that’s hardly to suggest that the fans always cut athletes all the slack they need. It was over 20 years before the good folks of Boston “forgave” Bill Buckner for the fielding error that contributed to the New York Mets’ winning Game 6 of the 1986 World Series, and then the Series itself the following night.

I had a small dog in that particular fight, as, back in the days when I was a fervent LA Dodgers fan, I saw then-Dodger Buckner make the greatest defensive play I’ve ever seen in person, sprinting from left-center field to make a diving, skidding catch of a fly ball down the left field line.

I’d imagined, given their reputation for orderly queuing and for murmuring, “Sorry,” if you bump into them, that the Brits might be rather less beastly in this regard, but it turns out that they are actually even beastlier — given, for instance, to shouting, “I hope your kids get cancer,” at David Beckham after he failed to lead the England team to victory in an important international game.

I'll confess it anew. I watched sports nowadays mostly in hope that players I know to be narcissistic jerks or worse will suffer painful injuries.

Piggy on the Beach

2011-09-30T13:07:00.000-04:00

The weather here is spectacular, and we have walked down to the beach just west of the port the past two afternoons to bask in the sunshine. Today a saddening tableau unfolded before us. In the age-old universal tradition, a boy of around 20 hurtled from behind us into the sea, daring it to be too cold for him One of his pals followed. Then a slight kid wrestled his corpulent, protesting mate into the drink after them, though the corpulent one probably outweighed his tormentor by 75 pounds. I thought immediately of Lord of the Flies. I thought too of my own junior high school days, during which I observed that only Billy Snyder, the spastic, and Walter Daniels, the Negro, had it worse than Dale Jensen, a small mountain of a boy, but a gentle, timid sort, who quickly gained a reputation for being disinclined to use his immensity to his advantage.

The three alpha boys at the beach today swam out to the end of the jetty, and then climbed atop it to launch themselves into the North Sea from an altitude of maybe 10 feet. Finding this insufficiently thrilling, they then took to leaping from atop the guardrail (which added another three and a half feet of altitude) at the jetty’s tip. All the while Piggy, as we’ll call him, played by himself, bouncing a football (that is, soccer) ball against the side of the jetty.

His estrangement reminded me of the late summer of 1962 when, after convincing my parents to let me use some of my paper route money to buy our next door neighbor’s surfboard (because to not surf was to not exist in the eyes of the maidens of Orville Wright Junior High School), NDN invited me to accompany him and two other neighborhood boys on a little surf safari down to Palos Verdes.

I was beside myself with pleasure during the long drive down there, which might have been the first time I was ever a passenger in an adult-free car. What wonderful camaraderie the four of us had. How glorious the music (the Beach Boys’ Surf Safari, appropriately enough, and Bryan Hyland’s Sealed With a Kiss) sounded! But then we finally reached our destination, and the facts that the waves were big and I a very, very tentative swimmer (having grown up afraid of the water, as of most things) kicked in. As my mother’s son, I was also given to catastrophic expectations, and was pretty sure that if I actually tried to ride a wave, my surfboard would fly into the air and come down on my head.

I spent the afternoon sitting on the beach watching my…buddies, trying to think up a credible excuse for my non-participation. It was an excruciating lonely feeling, but hardly an unfamiliar one. To a large extent that feeling was the story of my childhood.

Once having got bored with the tip of the jetty, the three fit boys today returned to the beach. Getting dressed, a couple of them playfully walloped and kicked Piggy in a way that simultaneously affirmed their fraternality and reminded Piggy of his place at the bottom of their pecking order. He, naturally, tried to act as though the kick and wallop were much more the former than the latter.

No one was fooled.

A Ticker-Tape Parade Down the Broadway of My Psyche

2011-01-01T12:31:00.000-05:00

Decades ago, after I’d performed with my little rock group at the world-famous Whisky a-Go-Go, someone asked if I’d been a professional dancer, and my girlfriend related having heard a young woman in the audience observe to her friend, “All he’s got going for him is his looks.” On the last night of 2010, I was nearly that flattered again when my friend Janet asked me to make a lasagna for the intimate New Year’s Eve potluck dinner she and Nathan had resolved to host. It turned out that my lasagna was the main course, and two of my four fellow diners seemed to like it well enough to request a second portion. A glorious ending for an altogether glorious year!

In 2010, all I did was achieve sanity. After spending most of my adult life either nearly immobilized by despair or bracing myself for the next visit of what Winston Churchill called the Black Dog, I suddenly found a way to keep depression at bay. As I write this, it’s been about nine months since I was seriously despondent. I’ve never gone that long before. When my daughter got married a few weeks ago, I wasn’t even told about it, much less invited. I rebounded from the news — and from the realization that I probably won’t get to meet my grandchildren — in hours. You can’t keep a good man down, or me.

Or maybe I’m giving myself too much credit saying that I found a way. Maybe it’s the citalopram that deserves a ticker-tape parade down the Broadway of my psyche, or the kindness and wisdom of Ms. Rita Ovens, whom I consulted during the first half of the year at the local mental health center. Anyone and anything who feels entitled may take as much credit as she or he can carry! There’s plenty to go around.

I’d long imagined that being in emotional agony a lot of the time at least helped make me who I am as an artist. That turned out not to be the case. My sunny new disposition has made me no less brilliant, and no less driven. I achieved my goal of writing 300 little essays over the course of the year, over 200,000 words. My efforts didn’t make me the toast of multiple continents, or even of my neighborhood, but I’m fine nowadays thinking that my genius may be recognized only after my death, or not at all. A world in which, for instance, Mark Ruffalo keeps getting hired to act in movies and John Grisham keeps getting paid fortunes to write fiction obviously makes no sense whatever, and one can only drive himself crazy imagining otherwise. Hey now, hey now, Crowded House sang, don’t let them win, presumably referring to the forces that try to demoralize all of us. Words to live by!You do your damnedest, take pride in having done so, and let the rest take care of itself, or fail to take care of itself.

My gal moved back to her own country in the spring, but my love for her only grew, and when we spent a couple of weeks together in the autumn, ‘twas blissful. It doesn't get better than being loved so much by one you love so much. I made a good new friend in 2010, and give myself a rowboat full of credit for having done so, as she, a fellow Census trainee, didn’t give me much encouragement in the early going. My friendship with Nathan and Janet got deeper and stronger. After 20 years and an excruciating false start, my best male friend of my adulthood and I managed finally to get back on track after 20 years’ dormancy.

I went to the gym 320 times over the year’s course. The unrelenting pain in the knee that was mangled when an inattentive teen driver ran me down in the middle of Beacon’s Main Street and my failing hearing and vision aside, I remained the picture of what Tom Wolfe has called rude animal health. Nathan thinks I look buff, Janet that I look lanky.

Everything’s coming up roses, my friends. May your 2011 be as happy as my 2010 has been, and all your Xmases white.

A Common Sense Conservative View of Gay Marriage

2010-12-31T09:27:00.000-05:00

Liberal and so-called progressive (hereinafter, LSCP) acquaintances are forever challenging my fierce opposition to gay marriage, and I’m forever flabbergasted by their failing to see how they shoot themselves in the foot by supporting the idea. I’m not even going to mention Leviticus’s revelation that God views same-sexed erotic interaction as abominable; we’ve been through that and through that and through that. Rather, I’ll belabor the obvious by noting that the legitimization of non-reproductive unions will inevitably slow the birth rate. Fewer births means fewer consumers, and fewer consumers means fewer jobs. If you want to keep unemployment hovering at or even above 10 percent, that is, just start joining gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and the trangendered in holy matrimony!

Not, of course that LSCPs are likely to be troubled by mounting unemployment; why should they be when they imagine they can solve the problem as they solve every problem — by hurling money at it? Countless tens of millions unemployed? Just borrow more money from the Chinese! It’s fine; our grandchildren will pay it back, provided more of us don’t decide to go the gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered route and not produce any.

Many LSCPs purport to love animals as much as they do trees. But let’s imagine that, because of gay marriage, the human population plummets, with the result that there are fewer hunters. The deer population will rise precipitously, and the poor creatures will, because there’s only so much food for them in their natural habit, slowly starve to death. I don’t know about you, but if I were a buck, I’d sooner go out strong and proud and free with a bullet through my head than starve to death after having watched my does and fawns and what have you starve too.

It’s hardly as though we common sense conservatives see no upside to gay marriage. A child with two gay fathers stands to have a superior sense of both interior design and self-presentation. He or she is likely to be far more aware than normal kids of the importance of regular exfoliation and moisturizing, and more likely to appreciate musical theatre. I, for one, would have no reservations whatever about living in a world in which the recordings of Judy Garland singing the songs of master songwriters were appreciated as much as those of Katy Perry, let’s say. A child of lesbian mothers is apt to be precocious at woodworking and home repair, and will probably also develop an early affection for such fitness-promoting recreations as softball and volleyball, and is almost guaranteed to be more inclined than a normal child to believe that one can be attractive without the use of expensive cosmetics that were tested on animals.

Birth rates in societies in which homosexuality doesn’t exist, such as the Islamic and fervently Roman Catholic ones, continue to soar. It’s likely that in a couple of generations, we will continue to have God on our side, as we’ve always had, but stand to be so woefully outnumbered as to make God’s sympathies moot. Seen from this point of view, preventing across-the-board implementation of the homosexual agenda is necessary for nothing less than the survival of our way of life.

I have a couple of points to make about the fact that, through the end of 2009, Gov. Palin’s memoir Goin’ Rogue had sold 1,255,963 units, while her more recent America From the Heart: Ideals My Ghostwriters Cherish, has in a comparable period sold “only” 232,344 units — 23 of which, I’m proud to say, I gave as Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa gifts. First, Noam Chomsky and 10 of his favorite fellow so-called progressives would give you the fake leather elbow patches off their corduroy blazers to have combined sales of half of Heart’s. And the relatively slow sales of the second book owe to common sense conservatives realizing that, classic as it is, it will still be available to buy and savor when they’ve finished their seventh, eighth, or even ninth re-reading of Rogue, which has to be read several times even to begin getting out of it all that there is to get. In the fullness of time, I can see its sales comparing favorably to those of William Bennett's The Book of Virtues and the Harry Potter books.

Spermboys, Pit Bulls, and Second Chances

2010-12-30T11:23:00.002-05:00

Even the most devoted of us common sense conservatives trying to clear Gov. Palin’s path to the White House has to pause every now and again to, as the young people say, “chill out”. Last night, with my two liberal and so-called progressive friends (who said we common sense conservatives are intolerant?) Janet and Nathan, I watched The Kids Are All Right, which has made every Ten Best of 2010 list in sight. I loathed it.

Teen children of a lesbian couple seek out their mom’s sperm donor, a motorcycle-riding organic restauranteur. One of the moms has an affair with him. The other mom is hurt and angry. The two teenaged children feel betrayed (as teenaged children do pretty much regardless of what happens, of course). The two moms remember that marriages and families are hard work, and figure out a way to reconcile. The end.

Performances by Annette Bening and Julianne Moore as the moms: good enough to make you feel sorry for their having to work with a rotten script that contains exactly one interesting revelation: that some lesbians sometimes enjoy watching gay porn by virtue, if I got Moore’s character’s explanation right, of men being sexually protuberant. Performance by Mark Ruffalo as Spermboy: far short of mediocre. Photography and set direction: About on a par with Ruffalo’s performance as Spermboy, which is to say the first thing that struck me about the movie was how very ugly it was, how the camera seemed over and over to have been positioned at random.

I have long believed that, if you don’t count Keanu Reeves, who’s in a class all his own, Nicolas Cage is the worst actor of his generation. At least he takes chances, though; indeed, sometimes his awfulness is absolutely riveting. I’d much rather watch him than a non-entity like Ruffalo, about whom you can say nothing more laudatory than that he’s apparently able to remember his lines. He suggests no life beyond the scene in which he’s appearing, has no depth, is never interesting or surprising. You’ve heard movie stars described as so charismatic that it’s impossible not to watch them when they’re on screen, whether or not they’re speaking? Well, I find myself watching everything and everybody but Ruffalo. How does such a guy keep getting cast?

Here. I’ve done it. I’ve thought of someone as bad — the guy who played Ally McBeal’s love interest on television, Gil Bellows. And he was a Canadian.

I would never have dreamed a movie could make me long for Cameron Diaz’s self-delightedly ditzy singing, but the scene in Kids during which Benning’s and Ruffalo’s characters sing Joni Mitchell’s “Blue” over dinner managed it.

I blame myself. I should have known, as a common sense conservative, that a movie about deviates wouldn’t work for me.

In other news, the Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson, formerly known for wearing a bow tie, spoke for a great many of us on Tuesday when he objected to President Obama’s commending the Philadelphia Eagles football team for giving a second chance to Michael Vick, who raised pit bulls to tear one another’s throats out. “Now, I’m a Christian,” Carlson said. “I’ve made mistakes myself, I believe fervently in second chances. But Michael Vick…should’ve been executed…”

Naturally, the liberals and so-called progressives have been having a field day with this, pointing out that we common sense conservative Christians almost invariably append a statement beginning with but to such declarations as "I believe in second chances".

Yet another case of the LSCPs just not getting it! There is no logical inconsistency whatever in believing in second chances only for those who genuinely deserve them, just as there is none in believing unwaveringly in freedom of speech only for those who don’t wantonly abuse it. That one believes, for instance, that a television evangelist who has allowed himself to be seduced by a shapely young secretary obviously placed in his path by Satan himself should have a chance to redeem himself in no way compels him or her to believe that a person of color who has sanctioned dog-fighting deserves a comparable opportunity.

God's Will and Xanthan Gum

2010-12-29T08:03:00.000-05:00

A great many Palin-related blogs, though I hate to use that remarkably ugly word,. are the work of liberals and so-called progressives whose freedom of speech would be rescinded in a society in which common sense enjoyed greater veneration, but at least they serve to remind us constantly of the shameless perversity of those who would slow Gov. Palin’s historic march to the White House. In one of them yesterday, the author bewailed Sarah’s seemingly having broken a law on which she herself signed off while leading Alaska to previously unimagined prosperity and respect in the world community — S.B. 72, which calls for the minor passengers of recreational vehicles to wear seat belts or other restraints.

Again we confront the LSCPs’ appalling inability to parse metaphor, just as all those years ago when they were up in arms about Sammy Hagar’s “I Can’t Drive 55,” which they denounced as hypocritical in view of Sammy’s enthusiasm for Ronald Reagan, that implacable champion of law and order. Strictly to keep up appearances, such laws as S.B. 72 are indeed on the books, but when the books restrict Americans’ personal liberties, the laws obviously become just ceremonial. It isn’t as though Gov. Palin, famously self-described as a Mama Grizzly, isn’t ever vigilant as to the well being of her fancifully named cubs. If husband Todd, behind the Palin family RV’s wheel, had to brake suddenly, you can bet your bottom dollar that Sarah would either grab the little ones’ ankles before they could become human projectiles, or quickly position herself between them and the windshield or the back of husband Todd’s head.

The whole seat belt thing is so typical of the Obamarxists. Suddenly Americans can no longer be trusted to make decisions about their own safety — as they can longer be trusted, if you believe Michelle Obama, to choose between invigorating exercise in the fresh air and sitting in front of some mindless reality television show, absentmindedly washing down with soft drinks great handfuls of potato chips fried in palm oil, or bon-bons full of xanthan gum. One look at the Palins, who — except for the apparently pregnant-again Pistol — are all svelte enough to be on the covers of magazines, makes very clear that Americans are indeed qualified, with God’s tacit guidance, to make such decisions without the help of Big Government.

Viewers of the most recent edition of Sarah Palin’s Third World Hell Holes, in which daughter Pillow accompanied her parents to Malawi, noticed that she’s an insufferable little eye-rolling bitch, as are so many young people in their mid-teens; it is God's will that, in teenage, children treat the two people in all the world who love them most worse than they will ever treat anyone else again. That Sarah had her many children over nearly two decades confirms that her judgment and foresight are impeccable, as only befits the exemplar of common sense conservatism. As the father of only one child, who in her teens became virtually unrecognizable as the sweet, affectionate, appreciative kid I’d known earlier, I often wished I had another child, whose ongoing adoration would reassure me that I hadn’t suddenly turned into a clueless, insensitive monster. When Pillow rolls her eyes at Sarah and husband Todd for, for instance, failing to understand that the ability to transmit and receive text messages is vital to her emotional well being, they can always summon Pillow’s adorable younger sister Wiper for consolation, or even the twins, Trig and Calculus.

Duping the Dems: Our Nation's Greatness Restored

2010-12-28T08:51:00.001-05:00

If I had any reason to believe that liberals and so-called progressives (hereinafter LSCPs) in high places read today’s column, I wouldn’t write it, because it contains some revelations that could cause a lot of trouble if they fell into the wrong hands. You’ll notice that in the past few weeks a lot of actual Republicans have been taking shots at Gov. Palin. That great American hero Karl Rover said she shouldn’t be starring in her own reality show on television. That former Reagan strategist from Iceland whose name I’ve forgotten and am too lazy to look up said she wasn’t electable. Lovable Mike Huckabee said she was wrong to suggest that Michelle Obama was trying to take away the nation’s desserts. And now Dana Perino of Fox News — the same Fox News for which Gov. Palin is a commentator! – suggests that Sarah doesn’t write all the books and op-ed pieces and Twitter tweets and so on that appear below her by-line.

Naturally, the LSCPs are rubbing their greasy hands with glee, imagining this means that Sarah won’t be the Republicans’ presidential nominee in 2012.

How not to love anyone that gullible, that eager to be scammed?

What’s really happening, of course, is that the Democrats are being lulled into a false sense of security. Imagining, in the wake of all the above-referenced sniping, that Sarah will decide not to run, and that they’ll have to beat only the presidential-looking, but strangely charisma-free Mitt Romney, the left isn’t making a concerted effort to persuade Barack Obama to retire from politics next year, and to prime former Cleveland mayor Dennis Kucinich and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders to replace him and that knucklehead Joseph Biden as their standard-bearers in 2012. They’ll realize too late that they’ve been scammed, and will be stuck with Obama even as his approval ratings drop farther than anyone’s ever, the Republicans will unite behind Gov. Palin, and our nation will be on the verge of being restored to its former greatness.

We learn now with horror and indignation that WikiLeaks kingpin Julian Assange, who Gov. Palin quite astutely suggested should have been hunted down like any other terrorist and disembowled in the middle of Times Square, has just signed lucrative deals to write his autobiography for American and British publishers. A major Hollywood producer will reportedly announce his acquisition of the film rights later in the week; it’s already common knowledge that both Ryan Gosling and Owen Wilson have been approached about portraying the vile Australian rapist and traitor. Justin Bieber, in his motion picture debut, will portray Pfc. Bradley Manning, who leaked sensitive materials to Assange, Reese Witherspoon and Scarlett Johansen his two alleged rape victims.

Mortified though we may be to think of the loathsome cur Assange now being able to pay his legal bills, and maybe even have a few bucks left over for a Lexus, right-thinking Americans can take some solace in Sarah’s having received an advance of $12 million for her America by Heart: Ideals My Ghostwriters Cherish. Sometimes, in this crazy world, the righteous still do finish first.

Quick-Thinking Enough for the Presidency

2010-12-27T09:22:00.000-05:00

That I almost missed Sarah Palin’s Third World Hell Holes last night had nothing to do with the frightful blizzard-like weather that kept me from the gym for the second day in succession (the place was to have been locked tight on Christmas). Rather, it was to do with the fact that, while making myself an ultradeluxe lasagna, with roasted carrots and zucchini, to enjoy over the course of the week to come, I was tuned into the Food Network on the little TV in the kitchen, and they kept showing commercials for catheters. Now, apparently, no Food Network viewer need use a dirty catheter ever again, as you can get 200 lovely pristine ones sent to you for a low, low price. I found most disturbing the juxtaposition of all this dirty catheter talk with Bobby Flay and his Japanese counterpart — Morimoto, if I’m not mistaken — competing to see who could make the more delicious meal using eggnog in everything.

I washed down a Valium with some bourbon, lay outside in the snow until I lost the feeling in my fingers and toes, hurried back inside — to whatever extent one with no feeling below his ankles can be said to have hurried — and got the old Magnavox on and warmed up just in time for the beginning of SPTWHH. Sarah and family this week visited the southern African country of Malawi, where the average annual income is $7.65, and where inexpressible misery is rampant. The lamestream media will no doubt attribute the Palins’ visit to Madonna’s having adopted a Malawian orphan, or sort-of orphan, a few years ago, but I prefer to believe that she made her choice strictly on humanitarian grounds — that she felt it her responsibility as a beautiful white goddess to give the populace hope, just as Madonna had, but without the intimations of perversity, and without diminishing the population.

I suspect that, in view of the tragic recall of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell last week, many centrist viewers might have been offended by the segment in which Sarah, at lunch with President Bingu wa Mutharika, husband Todd and Mrs. Mutharika, expressed her enthusiasm for Malawi’s fervent intolerance of homosexuality. The good news is that centrists are going to find themselves right next to liberals and so-called progressives in the litter box of history in a couple of years. If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem!

I hugely enjoyed the musical portion of the program, during which Malawi’s premiere recording artist, Tay Grin (nee Limbani Kalilani), joined the Mutharikas and Palins for a medley of his big hit "Break Out", the Captain and Tennille’s "Love Will Keep Us Together", and, rather insensitively, Madonna’s "Like a Virgin", during which daughter Bristol’s embarrassment was palpable. I can’t imagine even the hardest liberal or so-called progressive heart not being touched by the taped segment showing Sarah, with tears in her eyes, handing out condoms, Bibles, and autographed copies of Goin’ Rogue in Chichewa, the country’s poorest region.

After that, it was both a wonderful surprise and a great relief to watch Sarah welcome the week’s surprise special guests Hugh Hefner and his new fiancée Crystal Harris, to whom he proposed on Christmas Eve. At 104, Hef is actually older than Crys’s great-grandfather, but the couple’s mutual adoration was nonetheless unmistakable. I loved the great aplomb with which Sarah handled their suddenly trying to stick their tongues down each other’s throats, from the look of it, right in the middle of responding to her question about the Playboy Foundation’s plan to distribute free Bantu-language editions of the magazine in the country’s schools to stimulate interest in literacy. “Hey, you two,” Sarah chirped brightly, missing not a beat, even while husband Todd cringed in embarrassment, “get a room, why doncha?” And her detractors would have you believe she’s not quick-thinking enough for the presidency!

I wasn’t at all sure I approved of how Hef, who clearly likes ‘em young and frisky, was leering at Bristol over his new fiancee’s shoulder later in the interview, but Bris is more than old enough to take care of herself nowadays, and in a fight between Hef and Bris’s new inamorato Gino Paoletti, I can’t imagine any common sense conservative favoring Hef.

An Observer of International Affairs to Be Reckoned With

2010-12-25T09:45:00.000-05:00

This past Tuesday, on a radio show, that genial backstabber Mike Huckabee, whom Sarah will crush like a bug in the course of becoming the Free World's next leader, observed, “"Michelle Obama's not trying to tell people what to eat or trying to force the government's desires on people. She's stating the obvious — that we do have an obesity problem in this country." Well maybe you have, self-admitted “recovering foodaholic” and former 300-pounder, but Sarah, MILF that she is, hasn't, and regards a meal without dessert at the end as no meal at all, so STFU.

Another day, another reason, real or imagined — and almost always imagined! — for the lamestream to obstruct Gov. Palin’s historic march to history. Now they’re up in arms (albeit not nuclear ones!) about Sarah’s having quoted WikiLeaks-leaked diplomatic cables — even though she recently called for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to be not "pursued with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders" — in her thought-provoking USA Today op-ed piece about the urgency of keeping nuclear weapons out of Iranian hands.

God, the lamestreamers can be obtuse.

Imagine someone has robbed a bank on a windy morning, and then, in the process of fleeing, stumbles and spills his big duffel bag full of paper currency, which he hadn’t time to zip up back at the scene of the crime. The wind catches the money and blows it all over city. It’s one thing to condemn the actions of the bank robber, as Sarah condemned Assange, but quite another to condemn a passer-by a couple of blocks away who, seeing crisp $100 bills blowing in the wind, snatches at them eagerly. Sarah’s having repeated information that has entered the public domain no way constitutes approval of the original leak.

If it weren’t controlled by Jewish liberals and so-called progressives who would like nothing better than to see America on its knees, what the lamesteam media would be doing is celebrating Sarah’s keen insights and restraint. Whereas King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has repeatedly asked the US to stop Iran’s nuclear experiments by force, Sarah, now indisputably an observer of international affairs to be reckoned with, wisely urges an escalation of existing United Nations economic sanctions. Take that, you naysayers who have continued to ridicule her for being able to see Russia from her front lawn!

If you’ll permit me, this is something on which I don’t actually share Gov. Palin’s view. I believe that we should implement regime change, exactly as we did in Iraq. Our road in that country wasn’t entirely smooth; about that there can be no debate. But it would be tragic to squander our hard-won experience, and not to apply it to Iran. And let us bear also in mind that we’ve still got lots of troops and equipment in the area. Rather than schlepping it all back here, and then having to pay through the nose to get them and it back to the Middle East at some unspecified future date, why don’t we get the job done now? It’s almost like living way out in the boondocks, driving hundreds of miles to the nearest mechanic, learning that your car needs both to have its transmission fluid replaced and the front wheels aligned, and having just one of those jobs done "to save money". That's false economy of a sort that I can picture no common sense conservative abiding! Bomb Ahmadinejad now!

In other news, Oprah, who recently refused to tell Barbara Walter if she thought Gov. Palin is qualified for the presidency, recently responded to Parade magazine’s question about whether she was scared by the prospect of Sarah’s imminent candidacy by saying “It does not scare me because I believe in the intelligence of the American public." The intelligence of the American public, that selfsame public that re-elected George W. Bush in 2004! And Sarah’s the one constantly accused of being snarky!

Nothing Left to Defend

2010-12-24T08:29:00.000-05:00

According to an Education Trust report issued this week, nearly a quarter of recent high school graduates who attempted to join the army between 2005 and 2009 were rejected because of their inability to score at least 31 out of 99 on a test of basic reading, science, and math skills. The Pentagon is said to be especially nervous about this high rate of failure because 75 percent of those aged 17 to 24 don't even qualify to take the test by virtue of being physically unfit, having a criminal record, or having not graduated from high school. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has admitted, "I am deeply troubled by the national security burden created by America's under-performing education system." This from a man who can't even spell Arnie!

Have we as a people become so despondent and listless under the jackboot of Obamarixt tyranny as to have learned nothing from Gov. Sarah Palin’s ascension to the uppermost tier of American political theorists and leaders? Are we really oblivious to the fact that it isn’t all about the sort of intelligence tests of this sort measure? Has Gov. Palin's having come to embody the hopes and dreams of countless millions not made clear that sometimes being wily, or even just gorgeous, is at least as good as a lot of showoffy book-learning of the sort favored at expensive East Coast universities in which liberal elitists plot against their average, hard-working, God-fearing neighbors? And what of street smarts? How many young persons who have them in profusion are we barring from military service because their dozen-or-so years in public and other schools left them unable to successfully confront such questions as If 2 plus X equals 4, what is the value of X? That’s algebra (or al-Gebra, or al-Qaida!) — many of whose methods, not to mention name, derive from Arabic/Islamic mathematics — and I say to hell with it!

I’d bet my bottom dollar that when news of this study spreads, the liberals and so-called progressives are going to start screaming that so many of our young people being too fat even to take the test owes to American moms making their families s’mores after they’ve finished their moose chili, rather than letting Michelle Obama and her Big Government cronies reward them with a yummy broccoli floret or something. Which leads us to ask ourselves: If we’re going to surrender to tyranny and allow Michelle Obama to say we can’t have dessert, what would be the point of having a military at all? What would be left to defend?

As for the military, the answer — in view of the great success we had in Iraq bribing insurgents to come over to the side of freedom, democracy, and time-honored American values — is obviously to hire as our soldiers, sailors, flyboys, and what have you residents of miserable Third World countries who will, for a stylish uniform, warm barracks, delicious freeze-dried American rations in pouches, and a fraction of what we have to pay our own young people, eagerly defend our way of life.

It’s a win-win situation. Our way of life gets defended, tens of thousands of residents of the world’s most miserable countries get to sleep with full bellies in dry warmth, and our young people get to keep eating as many s’mores as they please, and spend their hours in school sleeping or sending subliterate text messages, without fear of being placed in the path of Taliban or al-Qaida bullets. Common sense conservatism!

In other news, there’s been considerable ballyhoo lately about the movie The King’s Speech, about King George VI’s stammering. I believe that those in whose veins (not to mention arteries!) royal blood flows ought to be able to be able to hire speech therapists — and ghostwriters, and press secretaries! — but I’m not so sure about ordinary folk. I had a classmate in junior high school who stammered so badly while delivering a report in science class one morning that he wet his pants, and burst into tears of shame, and was never heard from again. Some might argue that the teacher was a sadist for compelling him to continue even when it became clear that he could barely get a word out, but I’m not at all sure that those with embarrassing infirmities shouldn't be encouraged to make a spectacle of themselves in front of us normal folk. God must have made them weird for a reason, and I suspect it was to make the rest of us hesitant to have anything to do with them, and thus keep the race strong and proud. For that, no one need apologize!

My Life in Lingerie

2010-12-23T09:28:00.000-05:00

The lamestream media is crowing about the apparent declining popularity of Sarah Palin’s Iowa. The prolific procreator and stranger to the great outdoors Kate Gosselin appearing on the show a few weeks ago with 14 of her 18 children inspired “only” 3.1 million additional viewers to tune in. Last week, without Gosselin to humiliate for not knowing a caribou from carob, Sarah attracted “only” 2.56 million viewers, as opposed to the 4.96 million who watched the show’s debut episode. The lamestream TV critics were quick to speculate that TLC might now decide against the Sarah Palin’s Third World Hellholes series they’d projected for next season.

Shed no tears for Sarah, though. To the rhymes-with-witches of The View, for instance, 2.56 million might not seem like very many, but what we have to bear in mind is that Sarah’s, except in rare cases, aren’t typical casual viewers, but deeply committed patriots intent on taking our country back from the Obamarxists and restoring our precious liberties and what have you. These aren’t people who settle for a particular program because the finger they use to depress the Up or Down button on their remotes gets tired, but who would gladly lay down their lives rather than continue to live under tyranny.

An even bigger consideration is that Sarah’s viewership began to decline only when the Jewish liberal and so-called progressive-controlled media hit her with their very best shot, rushing into production the unashamedly prurient My Life in Lingerie series. If you’ve somehow managed to remain ignorant of this Satanic filth — on CBS on Sunday evenings at eight, right after the still-popular (in spite of its being brazenly left-leaning) 60 Minutes — each week it follows a different “sex symbol” as she shops for and then models attire of the sort in which only a woman’s (male!) spouse should ever be allowed to see her.

And don’t imagine that its ratings haven’t been declining right along with Sarah’s. While 145.24 million tuned in for the first in the series, featuring Angelina Jolie in Victoria’s Secret, subsequent editions, featuring Jennifer Aniston, Pamela Anderson, Jessica Simpson, and Rachel Maddow, have attracted progressively smaller audiences.

I’m idealistic enough to feel strongly that TLC has a moral obligation to present the Hellholes series regardless of their ratings, as it won’t only expand Sarah’s world view before she deposes ObaMao in 2012, but also remind the viewer of how very much better we are than most of the world’s other countries. All too often, I think, we lose sight of that.

It appears now that Sarah’s daughter Bristol, who may or may not be pregnant again, has been seeing a lot of 20-year-old Alaska pipeline worker Giancinto “Gino” Paoletti, who helped her sell her condominium in Anchorage to express her disgust over only 67 locals turning up for Mom’s recent book-signing at the Dimond Blvd. Costco. Husband Todd is said to be incensed about her involvement with a foreigner whose name he can’t pronounce, even though Paoletti was born in Alaska no less than husband Todd himself, and even the most fervent xenophobe can usually handle Gino, at least in the sense of pronouncing his name.

In tacit acknowledgment of her having another bun in the proverbial oven, cute-as-a-button Bris has taken a new tack in her most recent TV spots promoting teen sexual abstinence. Whereas early spots ended with her looking soulfully into the camera and saying, “You can wait; you can!” in the new series, she says, a little bit saucily, in some viewers' eyes, “There’s lots of things you can do that’s like totally fun without his putting it in you, you know.” Younger daughter Pillow, meanwhile, is apparently in negotiations to begin dating the late Michael Jackson’s son Blanket, after having been advised by Bed, Bath & Beyond that neither of them will have to work another day in their lives if they can make this happen. Youngest daughter Paper, meanwhile, has been spending every spare minute during her winter break from school with chums Rock and Scissors, and reportedly continues, at her age, to find boys “gross.”

A Mental Hospital for the Deceased

2010-12-22T08:28:00.001-05:00

This past weekend, Gov. Palin appeared at the Costco in South Anchorage, Alaska, to sign copies of her bestseller America by Heart: Ideals My Ghostwriters Cherish. Costco’s management had wristbands to hand out to ensure that at least the first 500 in line would be able to be able to see Sarah in person. That only 67 people actually showed up suggests that most of the local populace imagined they’d never even find a place to park, let alone get anywhere near the presumptive candidate. Of those 67, two — a blogger who’s been writing critically about Sarah, and a woman wearing a Worst Governor Ever T-shirt — were escorted out of the store. Naturally, the lamestream media and the liberals and so-called progressives (hereinafter, the LSCPs) were beside themselves.

Here we go again. You will find no more avid believers in the First Amendment, the one having to do with freedom of expression, than common sense conservatives; no way! But just as you don’t get to stand up in the middle of Walmart on the morning of Black Friday bellowing, “Fire!” you don’t get to say or write things that are grossly offensive to average, hard-working, God-fearing Americans, which is exactly what the evicted blogger, who ought to see how he likes it in Russia or North Korea, is in the business of doing. I mean, technically, you can, but if you do, it shouldn’t surprise you that two big security guards frog-march you out to the parking lot and dribble your head off the pavement until blood comes out of your ears, or even anus, not to get too graphic, but nothing makes me more furious than the abuse of freedom of speech.

As for the woman in the supposedly offensive T-shirt, that was no woman at all, but the late Wally Hickel, who, following the first of his two terms as Alaska’s governor, went on serve with distinction as Richard Nixon’s Secretary of the Interior. Having declared posthumously that he spent his life on earth trapped in the wrong body, he now dresses as a woman, and is earning money for the first recorded posthumous gender reassignment surgery by singing John Denver and James Taylor favorites in Anchorage mall parking lots; the locals pay him to stop singing. Many Alaskans disagree with his self-assessment as the state’s worst governor, pointing to the undistinguished records of Tony Knowles, Steve Cowper, and Frank Murkowski, but self-loathing, which his campaign managers “spun” as humility, was a key hallmark of his political persona.

The main thing is that, far from having him thrown out of her book-signing, Sarah was having him guided gently back into the parking lot, where the shuttle bus from the mental hospital for the deceased of which he is now resident was waiting for him. I think we can agree, common sense conservative and LSCP alike, that it’s a pretty dismal state of affairs when a political leader gets vilified even for acts of charity.

Speaking of female impersonators, it’s hardly as though Sarah lacks a uniquely clear-eyed view of modern feminism. In one of my own favorite sections of America by Heart, she exposes it as a ploy to make women dependent on Big Government for protection from date rapists, more conventional rapists, and abusive husbands and domestic partners. Pointing out that she herself has watched several Super Bowls with husband Todd and other genetic males, and never once been walloped, clobbered, or even slapped, she denounces as false a 1993 report that found that Super Bowl Sunday is the biggest day of the year for violence against women. Common sense tells her — and us! — that if it didn’t happen to her, it didn’t happen to others either, and maybe it’s time that the feminist wives and girlfriends and what have you of LSCPs and reporters for the lamestream media think about shutting up and fetching their menfolk more Tostitos and Bud Lites, much as that rhymes-with-which Michelle Obama might want to keep to herself her stupid socialist opinions about what we should and should not be feeding our young people, who of course represent our country’s future.

The Boneheadedness of the LASCPs

2010-12-21T08:42:00.001-05:00

The liberals and so-called progressives are having a field day gloating about ought-to-have-been president John McCain’s saying on Saturday, after Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was repealed, “I hope…we understand that we are doing great damage. Today is a very sad day.” The LASCPs are gleefully pointing out that in 2006, the perennial Arizona senator — without whose perspicacity Sarah Palin, his vice presidential running mate, wouldn’t have come to the forefront of American political life — sang this very different tune: “The day that the leadership of the military comes to me and says, 'Senator, we ought to change the policy,' then I think we ought to consider seriously changing it." Against all odds and common sense, a Pentagon study released earlier this month found that allowing sexual deviates to serve without even pretending to be interested in the sorts of things their normal buddies like — gals with protuberant breasts, in the boys’ case, and boys with cute tushes and a fat wallet in the gals’ — might be fine, and both the Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff declared themselves undiscombobulated by the repeal.

To any common sense conservative it’s pretty clear that when McCain said, “The day that the leadership of the military comes to me and says, 'Senator, we ought to change the policy,' then I think we ought to consider seriously changing it," what he was really saying, as any sensible person would have said, was actually, “Yeah, right; when Hell freezes over.” The LASCPs can be so helpless in the face of nuance or subtext! And these people imagine themselves capable of dealing effectively with Putin and Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chavez!

Sometimes, when I think of how much better off we would all be if McCain and Sarah had won in 2008, it makes me so sad and angry that I want to go into the wild and shoot something dead, or smash the windshields of cars with Obama or other socialist candidate bumperstickers.

There’s been a lot of speculation the past couple of weeks, since he pretty much wept through his 60 Minutes interview, about whether there’s something wrong with soon-to-be Speaker of the House John (Boo-Hoo) Boehner, something, that is, besides his having given Gov. Palin a hard time about the recent tax deal. (Sarah, bless her heart, didn’t think it did enough to ensure the ongoing comfort of the rich.) There are those who wonder if Boehner might be a bit too fond of his merlot, in spite of merlot having been portrayed in the 2005 Paul Giamatti vehicle Sideways as the wine of boneheads, or the mentally ill.

The whole episode serves to illustrate how much the country has degenerated morally under the stewardship of the Obamarxists. Years ago, when the would-be Democratic presidential candidate Edmund Muskie cried tears of anger or frustration because a New England newspaper had called his wife Jane awful names, he was immediately pronounced unworthy of high political office. America in those proud days wouldn’t tolerate a crybaby. When Richard Nixon resigned the presidency in 1974 because of the LASCPs’ relentless plotting against him, did so much as a single tear escape his eyes as he trudged for the last time toward the presidential helicopter? Not one! Now there was a leader!

The only thing you can say in Boehner’s defense is that only those things that matter most to most right-thinking Americans — family, or our brave young persons in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the American Dream — get him blubbing. It isn’t, in other words, as though he turns on the waterworks if one of his secretary points out that he has soup on his tie, or if a fellow Congressman threatens to punch him in the nose for not supporting a particular bill.

Speaking of Gov. Palin, Gallup found last month that 52 percent of “us” hold an unfavorable view of her, and a NBC/Wall Street Journal poll gleefully reports that her negative rating has actually increased since the debut of Sarah Palin’s Third World Hellholes on TLC several weeks ago.

As a people, we can be disastrously shortsighted sometimes, and this is clearly one of them. But don’t bet against the tide turning dramatically in the next few months, as we now learn of Sarah’s plan to step boldly out of her comfort zone and into the mainstream media’s crosshairs. On the evening of January 17, she will debate Noam Chomsky and the notorious (the LASCPs would probably prefer acclaimed) feminist, democratic socialist, sociologist and political activist Barbara Ehrenreich on PBS, with Katie Couric moderating.

This time, Sarah won’t be the one embarrassed.

Mr. Bigword Strikes Again: American Exceptionalism Explained

2010-12-20T09:22:00.000-05:00

Well, so much for Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. I know that I, for one, will sleep much more soundly at night knowing that our country is being defended in part by persons better suited to decorating interiors or styling hair or running Websites featuring catty gossip about movie and other stars, persons likely to undermine morale in their foxholes and Humvees and what have you by whining about having been denied the chance to moisturize thoroughly that morning, or pouting if someone wants to listen to Slayer or Slipknot rather than Lady Gaga. So much for our remaining a beacon of moral clarity in this regard, as we now join non-exceptional countries in allowing deviates into our military. Another blow to American exceptionalism!

It’s a tricky thing, American exceptionalism. On the one hand, our believing we shouldn’t have to play by the same rules as everyone else — that we are God’s favorite nation — irks many others; as George W. Bush pointed out, for instance, Islamic extremists hate us for our God-given freedom. On the other hand, we give other countries a standard to which to aspire, and you can’t convince me that isn’t valuable. The liberals and so-called progressives will tell you that our sense of what they dismissively term “entitlement” embitters other countries, in much the same way the beauty and grace of the hottest girl in high school will embitter not only other, less hot, girls, but also stammering, pustule-covered boys who would no more be able to speak to her than to the late Eleanor Roosevelt, even while their hormones are screaming at them to get busy. To those liberals and so-called progressives, I say, “Whatever.” If God didn’t love us most, he wouldn’t have made us the richest and purest of heart and best-looking!

I suspect that having been the pre-eminent hotty at Wasilla High School uniquely qualifies Gov. Sarah Palin to protect American exceptionalism. Last Friday, as you know, she submitted to an interview with Good Morning America’s Robin Roberts, even though the lack of a comma in the program’s title is known to bother Sarah, who’s something of a stickler for faultless grammar and lucid syntax. A lot of liberals and so-called progressives are whining about Roberts having handled Sarah with kid gloves; indeed, there are those who have wondered, with the utmost crassness, if Roberts having crawled up Sarah’s rectum over the course of the interview is going to cause the presumptive candidate eliminative problems at a time when American can least afford her suffering them. A contributor to Salon.com went so far as to assert that Sarah responded to Roberts’ hard-hitting questions with “free-associative demagoguery in a singsongy tone.” Mr. Bigword strikes again; how the liberals and so-called progressives must love that. To them, I say, “Get a life!”

Driving home from the gymnasium yesterday afternoon on the Hamilton Fish Bridge, I passed a big SUV with Palin in 2012 and I Love Jesus bumper stickers, and all of the early afternoon’s despair melted away like lemon drops; it felt like the Christmas season finally beginning in earnest. I smiled at the driver, a burly, ursine caribou hunter type in a bushy beard and baseball cap, but he was apparently entranced with whatever the Christian rock station was playing at that moment (my own car radio is tuned to the Christian hip hop station), and it occurred to me that if I didn’t turn back to the road ahead, Sarah might be denied my vote in 2012.

I feel strongly that she’s going to win in a landslide with or without me, but I think it’s human nature to imagine oneself key to the success of persons or ventures to which he actually matters not at all. As a boy in a Los Angeles beach community, I fretted that if I didn’t listen attentively to their game on the radio, the Dodgers would lose. This may sound foolish or even delusional, but when I became a substance-abusing college student whose infinitely greater interest was in rock and roll, the team went into a frightful decline. For the sake of the country I love, I must not and cannot make the same mistake with Sarah.

2010-12-18T10:10:00.000-05:00

As I immerse myself in The Rich Man’s Table, his imagining of the life of Bob Dylan, I find myself wondering ever more implacably if Scott Spencer is the best living writer in the English language. He lacks E. E. Doctorow's moral ferocity, and his technique, paragraph by paragraph, doesn't compare to Martin Amis's, but for sheer originality of perception and beauty of expression, he stands alone, as witness: "We shook hands. Maya’s grip was slight, her hand little more than cool shadow in mine. She was full of solicitude toward me. 'I know…' — she stretched the word out, discovered rivers of complicity in the globe of the vowel…"

[Here yhe book’s narrator, Billy — the grown son for whose paternity the Dylan character, Luke Fairchild, refuses to accept responsibility — describes his fervently Marxist grandfather’s slide into dementia:] The books of philosophy, history, and literature he had so vigorously cross-referenced in his table talk by now faded from memory. His mind was a burned library — the spines and their titles still facing out from the shelves but the pages within turned to ash.

[At Esther’s bedside, Luke encounters a blues man who’d earlier sued Luke for plagiarism.] Now Joe was standing again, but this time he threw his arms around Luke and pulled him close, the way people will when death makes our squabbles so small, when it suddenly seems that our grievances and competition make as much sense as cattle vying for position in the slaughterhouse.

Many passages in which Billy talks about his father are as startling and revelatory as the best of the real Dylan’s songs:

He was the virtual prototype of the boy parents warned their daughters against. When Luke was young, fucking him was like running away from home, or maybe even joining the circus. He was vile, he was strange, the smell of freedom was all over him, that mixture of smoke and wind and cheap wine, as redolent as peanuts, sawdust, and elephants.

*

Mom used to say (though never to me) that Luke was an innocent, a child, beneath it all. Well, that innocence was long gone, swallowed by the muck of ego, entitlement, and drugs, revelation, conversion, and tantrum, blow jobs, anal sex, private showings, his pick of the litter, and a thousand and one rarefied pleasures and perversions I could barely imagine. He was paying the price for his life, organ by organ. And somewhere within him was the terrible sad panic of a once-holy man starting to realize that, despite everything, his body might outlive his soul.

*

Luke’s voice was startlingly low, a honey croon, so unlike his usual nasal, wise-ass, reedy kazoo of a voice that it caused me to wonder if he had just become a different person, or if his soul was like one of those flashlights that can shine red, white, green, yellow, or blue, mediated by a simple plastic dial over the face of it. But then I realized: this was his Nashville timbre, the almost comically resonant style he affected after he had repudiated the paisleyed psychedelia of the sixties, and began to boyishly idolize the cowboy singers, beer-bellied, eagle-eyed middle-aged men in string ties, the Nashville old guard, terse tough guys with barroom scars on their knuckles, or a bitten-off ear, a shattered knee, guys who spent more money on drugs than the Grateful Dead and Blue Cheer and the Stones combined.

*

He had a number of people on his beck-and-call brigade, people who tended to his menagerie of needs and whims. Needless to say, he did very little of the labor of his own life. It had been at least thirty years since he’d changed the sheets on a bed, or changed a light bulb, or stood impatiently in line for popcorn, worried the movie would start without him. Yet despite his twenty-four-hour coddling, he still maintained his angry, alienated sneer. He still wrote at if he were somehow an outlaw.

*

Luke was our tiny, holy kernel of hunger for heaven, sealed in a package with hundred layers of gaudy paper. He was wrapped in money, and he was wrapped in fame, in sex, drugs, politics, nostalgia, privilege; but when all of that was torn away, what was left? A soul, just a soul, a tiny, frail human soul, racing blindly and in terror through the dark woods.

Sara(h) Smiles, Part 49: Disembowelment and Self-Expression

2010-12-17T08:06:00.000-05:00

The lamestreamers are always up in arms about one thing or another, and lately it’s that Pfc Bradley Manning, who apparently describes himself as a whistleblower (for having leaked classified US army intelligence to WikiLeaks), but whom all right-thinking Americans regard as a traitor for whom no punishment could be too severe, is being kept in solitary confinement 23 hours a day in advance of his trial. The lamestreamers point out that the European Court of Human Rights has in the past ruled that such detentions violate the rights they’re in the business of protecting.

Well, boo-hoo! Such American patriots as Mike Huckabee and Sarah have called for Manning to be publicly disemboweled for treason, and then fed to rabid dogs, and common sense tells us they’re right. And here the lamestreamers are whining about Brad not having enough company, or about his having been denied a pillow and sheets! Will I ever cease to be amazed at the gall of these people?

It gets worse. Council members in the People’s Republic of Berkeley, the notorious college town across the bay from San Francisco, are apparently on the verge of issuing an official resolution praising Manning, leading me to wonder if it isn’t the Berkeley City Council that needs disembowelment. When I lived in the Bay Area, and ventured from time and time into Berkeley for Thai food, I was appalled by the bohemians, opium fiends, sexual deviates, and Satanists I saw shuffling in sandals up and down Telegraph Avenue, many seemingly trying to resemble Jesus, or at least the classic western European conception of Jesus, except not nearly as clean. Others were perpetually engaged in animated shouting matches with adversaries whose presence they alone could detect.

As I have said here many times before, self-expression is all well and good when it doesn’t turn the stomachs of God-fearing average Americans, but in Berkeley it does. If Arnold Schwarzenegger is half the superhero he claims to be, he’ll figure out a way to drown everyone in the city, except the righteous, before he leaves office in January.

The appalling news from Berkeley makes all the more welcome that about Lt. Col. Terrence Lakin having been martyred Tuesday by the military jury trying him for his refusal — on the grounds that orders from Commander-in-Chief ObaMao are illegitimate because he was born in some Third World hellhole, rather than in Hawaii, as anyone with half a brain recognizes as implausible given his being an obvious Muslim and Marxist — to deploy to Afghanistan. The brave doctor now faces three years in prison for his beliefs, but you won’t see the Berkeley City Council planning to honor him.

A member of the British Parliament who previously served as a drugs minister in the Home Office (kind of the State Department) claimed yesterday that the war on drugs has been "nothing short of a disaster," and said it was time to study other options, including decriminalizing possession of drugs and legally regulating their production and supply.

His Home Office experience, Bob Ainsworth said, made clear that prohibition failed to reduce the harm that drugs cause in the UK, while his experience as a defense secretary focused on Afghanistan, "showed that the war on drugs creates the very conditions that perpetuate the illegal trade, while undermining international development and security". The only surprise is that President ObaMao didn’t immediately call a press conference to declare, “Me too!”

We in America have been hearing such nonsense for years now. Sometimes those from whom we hear it have so-called scientific data. At other times they invoke the success of liberalized drug policies in the Netherlands and Portugal. What few ever mention is that an enormous percentage of American convicts were incarcerated for drug offenses, and that the prison industry has been growing faster than nearly any other the past few decades, providing employment for countless thousands. We’re supposed to put all the correction officers and infirmary workers and wardens and what-have-you out in the streets, where they’re likely to be run over by drug addicts speeding away from condominiums they’ve just burglarized in cars they've just hot-wired?

America's is the highest rate of incarceration in the world, and our remaining No. 1 is very much dependent on our maintaining the war on drugs. Prisons: Build, baby, build!

Sara(h) Smiles, Part 46: The Heartstrings of Americans and Others

2010-12-16T08:27:00.000-05:00

The transcript of footage shot in Haiti this past weekend for Greta Van Sussteren’s Fox-TV program On the Record puts to rest forever the lamestream media-fomented misperception that Governor Palin is something other than an acutely perceptive observer of international affairs.

Hardly has their helicopter set down than Sarah has coolly — and perceptively — assessed the Haitians' plight. “These people,” she observes, “have had natural disasters now. The cholera outbreak, it really lets us see opportunity to help and send a message back to those who are more privileged materially to have opportunity here to share with these who are hurting."

When Van Susteren — whose husband is on Sarah’s payroll, but who is unimpeachably objective nonetheless, in keeping with Fox News’ commitment to impartiality — notes that a lot of promised aid hasn’t yet materialized, Sarah laments that “a lot of aid that was planned ended up not where it should be on the frontlines where helping people, unfortunately. And I think they need the word out there that they are still in dire need here in Haiti, and they want that assistance — via materials, people, resources — to help them complete the mission here, and that's restoration of really this most beautiful area of the globe.” So much for those who continue to accuse Sarah of parochialism, who suggest that her adoration of Alaska and Iowa has made her blind to other regions’ woes and wonders!

Van Susteren advises Sarah that President Obama asked his two immediate predecessors, He-Whose-Name-I-Refuse-to-Type — the rhymes-with-which Hilary’s husband — and George W. Bush, to come tell the locals how sad their situation makes him, but that the Secret Service nixed the idea because of Haiti’s post-election rioting and lawlessness. Sarah sagely observes, “That is unfortunate of course that someone of his stature can be here to send that message to the world that there's still help needed. As we are driving around and seeing the armed guards out of the corner of our eye as we pass by, Greta, that's an illustration of the turmoil, the political unrest that is here.” In much the same way, we infer, that America’s armed policepersons illustrate our own growing political unrest under Obamarxism!

When Van Susteren points out that Haiti reminds her of Kabul, of which Sarah probably has indeed heard, Sarah is quick to explain, “That's natural disaster and the political unrest combined. There's elements that have combined to create this perfect storm of a lot of, again, resulting in dire need in Haiti. A lot of people who are more privileged and have more, that are able to share, if they can see this, hear the stories, certainly, I think that the heartstrings of Americans and others can be tugged and assistance can be provided here.”

Where others, lacking faith (the sort she shares with George W. Bush), might see only rubble, cholera, and despair, Sarah sees “beautiful, happy children who seem to be content and joyful and, look around, Greta, they don't have much. The babies don't have diapers. The kids don't have much. Yet they have smiles and they're looking around for, I think, for some little bit of compassion that the rest of us can provide.” It takes a mom like Sarah to remind us that infants don’t need diapers to be the joyful little creatures Jesus intended. Their having diapers might well make those caring for them more joyful, as even the most adoring parent or guardian is apt to have serious reservations about being, well, pooped all over, but leave it to Sarah to put the children first, where of course they belong.

In other news, many lamestreamers, not content to torment Sarah, have been going ever more vengefully after daughter Bristol, pointing out that the voice of the young abstinence enthusiast in her official pronouncements is very different from that in her Facebook messages, and suggesting that the former must be ghostwritten.

Can you tell which is which? “[Olbermann] accusing me of hypocrisy is by now an old canard. What Mr. Olbermann lacks in originality he makes up for with insincere incredulity.” Or: “That doesn’t even make sense you dumbass. And I’m successful because I’m a hard ass worker. Keep talking s--- though . . .”

Are the lamestreamers really unable to understand that the prose Bris composes painstakingly late at night in (Sarah’s) husband Todd’s book-lined library is apt to be very different from that which she types with one finger on her smartphone while changing the diaper of son Tripp, who does have diapers? That the lamestreamers have no conception of how much attention a child requires is probably explainable in terms of so many of them being gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered. And there's no room in Sarah's America for any of 'em.

Sara(h) Smiles, Part 45: The Nerve of the Haters

2010-12-15T08:35:00.001-05:00

In her daily press conference yesterday, Sarah bravely became the first American politician to express outrage at the number of Muslim immigrants who have been pouring over the Canadian border into Washington state the past few months. Islamophobes suggest that such sneaking may actually be the latest form of jihad, the idea being to cripple America by overloading its social services, as the Mexicans, Hondurans, Guatemalans, and what have you have been overloading those of Texas and California. Indeed, there are those who believe that the royal families of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Yemen have been bankrolling the human flooding of our southern border in order to divert attention from what’s happening up in the Northwest.

The Muslims, of course, pose a far greater threat than the Latinos, as they’re too busy being called to prayer to take the sorts of demeaning minimum-wage jobs at which swarthy Spanish speakers excel. And not only are Latinos eager to remove asbestos for whatever the guy who hires them for the day in front of Home Depot is wiling to pay, but theirs is also a far more enjoyable cuisine. Tacos, burritos, enchiladas, pork fajitas, and the like have all become integral in the American culinary landscape, whereas the various lamb dishes and hummus the towelheads seem to enjoy so much have barely gained a toehold. That Sarah herself is known to enjoy several Taco Bell dishes is really all you need know.

I suspect that Latino cuisine’s greater deliciousness owes in large part to the prominent role cheese, or queso, plays in it. I read recently that over the 4000 years mankind has existed, our DNA has not yet got through its head that we — or at least we Americans — don’t need to store fat as our ancestors did back at a time when they might not encounter an edible dinosaur for days; we are genetically inclined to crave fatty food, and thus to find pleasurable the sensation of molten cheese in our mouths. Islamic food denies us this pleasure, just as its music denies us that of actual singing rather than ululating.

To hear the lamestream media tell it, Sarah was disgruntled about how she was depicted — along with Julian Assange, Lady Gaga, Mel Gibson, Malia Obama, LeBron James, Courtney Love, Gen. David Petraeus, Federal Reserve Bank kingpin Ben Bernanke, and gay rights activist Michelangelo Signorile — on Barbara Walters’ Ten Most Fascinating People of 2010 special. None of the others, we’re to understand, expressed anything other than delight with his or her depiction. But the truth is that Sarah had no problems at all with the way she was presented, and in fact has gone on record as being grateful to Walters and ABC for bringing out that she in fact reads voraciously, and often in a particular text’s original language; she is presently enjoying Peter Schlemihl by Adelbert von Chamisso in the original German.

What she was actually disturbed about was that Walters selected Malia Obama, but not elder sister Sasha. It’s a testament to her ability to set partisanship aside when it comes to such matters as parenting, as she is as outraged by how Malia’s selection may have jeopardized Sasha’s self-esteem — just as she’s about to enter adolescence! — as she would be if one of Mitt Romney’s eerily indistinguishable sons had been chosen, but not the other nine.

Sig Rogich, viewed as a key Republican tactician since helping to re-elect Ronald Reagan in 1984, yesterday declared Sarah unelectable. Well, let’s hear, buster, what you’ve got to say when you haven’t been former US ambassador to Iceland — your native Iceland, mind you — and the PR whiz to whom Mike Tyson turned for brand restoration after biting Evander Holyfield’s ear. The nerve of the haters!

In my view only two good things have ever come out of Iceland — Sigur Ros and Bjork, whose infamous swan dress from the 2001 Oscars was indisputably the garment of the decade, regardless of what those in the business of ridiculing stars' attire might tell you. Our having an embassy there makes about as much sense as our having one at Knott’s Berry Farm. A typical waste of taxpayer dollars.

Sara(h) Smiles, Part 44: Fareed It and Weep

2010-12-13T23:09:00.000-05:00

The lamestream media were sploodging all over themselves yesterday about how cruelly Sarah treated her fellow Learning Channel star Kate Gosselin on Sunday evening’s edition of Sarah Palin’s Iowa, leaving the blonde mom and her eight little ones in the middle of a cornfield and virtually daring them to try to find their way back to civilization. For these lamestreamers — most of whom, unashamed hypocrites, are no doubt fervently into Darwin — I have only three words: Survival of the fittest. America in 2010 isn’t for the effete, homosexual, or namby-pamby, but for the rugged outdoorsperson who can skin a caribou even while changing the diaper of an infant with special needs and pointing out the folly of Ben Bernanke’s stewardship of the Federal Reserve Bank. If Kate Gosselin doesn’t like that, she can take her brats and her blonde highlights to any number of socialist nanny states, and STFU.

We now learn that on the Samaritan’s Purse helicopter home from Haiti this past weekend, Sarah was reading Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (known earlier as Remembrance of Things Past) — in the original French. So much for those who regard her as an intellectual lightweight who never reads anything more challenging than text messages and People Weekly, one of the two periodicals (with Us) to have been delivered every week to her office when she was the governor of Alaska, before she realized she could better serve God in other ways.

In other news, that slimy little British kissup Piers Morgan, who’s going, inexplicably, to take over for Larry King on CNN in 2011, has told the British tabloids that he’s “banned” Madonna from his show, even though it doesn’t really exist yet, because she’s not as interesting as the more recent version of herself, Lady Gaga. God, I love when the Satanists and perverts and liberal elitists bite one another’s backs in public. If CNN had any decency — as they haven’t since the appropriately xenophobic Lou Dobbs left them — they’d have offered the job to someone like Billy Graham, of whose son Sarah is now Best Friend Forever. At 92, the great evangelist might have lost a step or two, but King, whose original surname was recognizably Jewish, wasn’t exactly known for his own nimble wit, and he’s only 87.

Mutt Lange, the producer who broke Shania Twain’s heart, but not before producing her 643-million-selling album Come On Over, has been invited to come on out of retirement to oversee the recording of Sarah’s Sanctimony Records debut single with Haiti’s Sweet Micky, denied the presidency of his little country because he’s merely a celebrity with below-average intelligence, mangled syntax, and virtually no knowledge of anything except how to amplify his own celebrity. Sarah is reportedly pushing for their first recording to be of Phil Collins’ "Against All Odds" because it’s made her cry every time an American Idol winner has sung it, whereas Micky is pushing for a reworking of his 1989 hit "Konpas Foret des Pins."

Speaking of CNN, their resident towelhead (though he takes it off when on camera) Fareed Zakaria (near left) this past Sunday labeled as “total nonsense” Glenn Beck’s observation that one in 10 Muslims is a terrorist. What a surprise! He said that there were 11,000 terrorist attacks around the world in 2009, and that there are 157 million Muslims, meaning that 1427 of them would have had to be involved in the average attack for Glenn’s observation to hold water, and we’re to understand that the typical attack involves three or four guys. So here we have yet another case of needing to use common sense, rather than be bamboozled by liberal elitist-manipulated statistics. Whom are you, as a level-headed, hard-working Christian American going to believe, a guy named Glenn — even if he spells it with two n’s — or one named Fareed?

Sara(h) Smiles, Part 43: The Blinders of Liberal Bias

2010-12-13T08:57:00.000-05:00

It should surprise absolutely no one that Sarah’s visit to Haiti over the weekend has been the object of the lamestream media’s fiercest ridicule. They ridiculed the fact that her visit was sponsored by Samaritan’s Purse, the Christian charitable organization run by Billy Graham’s boy, pointing out that during the 1994 Rwandan refugee crisis, Samaritan's Purse staffers stayed in luxury hotels while tens of thousands died all around them of cholera, and sent stretcher bearers to carry the sick only if a third person was available to run alongside comforting the victim with passages from the Bible. They decried Purse’s having required victims of El Salvador's 2001 earthquake to attend prayer meetings before they could receive aid. They ridiculed even her attire — cargo pants, a T-shirt that read My Daughter Almost Won Dancing With the Stars, and All I Got Was This @#$%&* T-Shirt, and designer sunglasses.

These people just don’t get that which is obvious to Sarah and those of us who love her — that it’s all well and good to administer oral rehydration salts to a cholera victim, or to pull someone out from an earthquake’s rubble, but if you don’t tend to their souls in the process, your effort’s in vain. The world has quite enough non-believers running around, spreading Satan’s and the liberal elitists' lies.

They ridiculed Sarah as well for pronouncing “joyful” those being treated for cholera at Samaritan Purse’s facility in the north Haiti town of Bercy (for security reasons, she steered clear of Port-au-Prince, even though husband Todd was itching to shoot rioters). As though you or I, if we were cholera-ravaged African-Americans, wouldn’t ourselves be pretty joyful to find ourselves being grinned at by a beautiful white lady in designer sunglasses!

They ridiculed her for handing out to the local children gift-wrapped copies of her 2009 bestseller Goin’ Rogue, pointing out that relatively few Haitians read at all, and fewer still read English. Such naysayers! We common sense conservatives would much rather believe that while the populace is largely illiterate now, it might not be in five or 10 or 15 years, provided the earthquakes and hurricanes and cholera leave anybody alive. And English is God’s language. When was the last time any of these lamebrains opened a night table drawer in a Courtyard by Marriott and found a Bible in anything other than English?

Honestly, the lamestreamers are so literal and shortsighted, so blind to the power of metaphor! It may well be, as they so delighted in pointing out, that the good, if severely ill, folks of Bercy hadn’t the faintest idea of who Sarah was. But what she was, and is, is clear to anyone not wearing the blinders of liberal bias — a symbol of inextinguishable hope. In the weeks to come we will surely see that her visit to Bercy did more to stop its inhabitants’ vomiting, diarrhea, and leg cramps than all the oral rehydration salts put together.

If there were few surprises in the lamestream media’s reaction to Sarah’s humanitarian mission, it hardly means that the weekend was devoid of surprises. Hearing, from many of those on whose feverish foreheads she placed her cool white hand without regard for her personal safety, that they were less upset about having cholera than about the exclusion of compas star Michel Martelly (aka Sweet Micky) from the runoff election for president, she phoned the head of Sanctimony Records, the biggest Christian music label in Alaska, to volunteer to record a single with Martelly, and to donate 25 percent of the profits to his next presidential campaign.

But you ain’t seen nothin’ yet! Inspired by the popularity of Sarah Palin’s Iowa, the reality show all America has been tuning into so eagerly every Sunday night since mid-November, producer Mark Burnett has invited Sarah to make another series, to be re-titled Sarah Palin’s Third World Hellholes. Each week, between cavorting adorably with family and friends, confronting all the vicissitudey things all average American moms must confront, she will visit a part of the world as miserable as Haiti, and, in association with Christian benevolent groups with political clout, make the locals joyous.

Sara(h) Smiles, Part 42: Cookies for the Haitians

2010-12-11T12:18:00.000-05:00

I’m sure the lamestream media will think of a million ways to besmirch Sarah’s visit to Haiti this weekend. They’ll say she’s accompanying Franklin Graham, spawn of the famous evangelist Billy, on behalf of the Christian relief organization Samaritan’s Purse, just to make herself appear less parochial — and to get on the good side of those evangelicals who might otherwise support the cute-named Mike Huckabee as the Republican presidential nominee in 2012.

But let the lamestreamers make their ugly accusations; the earthquake- and cholera-ravaged African Americans in Port au Prince who have suffered so awfully this year will be no less grateful for the homemade cookies Sarah will reportedly offer them. And I wonder what those who accuse her of having no interest in the printed word will say when — because her firm belief is that the intellect craves nourishment as voraciously as does the body — she is seen autographing and distributing copies of her 2009 bestseller Goin’ Rogue that otherwise might have wound up humiliated on bookstore discount tables. The great irony being that Kreyol is one of the few languages into which the book hasn’t been translated.

Once finished at the Port au Prince Barnes & Noble — assuming it’s withstood the civil violence and frequent visits by Sean Penn that have ravaged the already-devastated city in recent weeks — Sarah and Frank, as he presumably permits close friends and powerful politicians to call him, are scheduled to head for a local cholera clinic, where Sarah will apparently attempt to evoke the martyred Princess Diana by holding up an ill infant for photographers.

As of this writing, it has not yet been confirmed that husband Todd and daughter Bristol will be accompanying the presumptive candidate and her new (not really that new, since she defended his assertion early in 2010 that our current president was born a Muslim) BFF Franklin on the visit to Haiti, though it is known that husband Todd had hoped to be able to bust a cap in the ass of a looter, or three.

The lamestreamers are sure to make a lot of racket about Our Gal’s apparently imminent first visit to the United Kingdom too, for purposes of communing with former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, whom she has described as one of her political idols in spite of having not knowing her from Becky Thatcher (in Tom Sawyer, you see) before John McCain’s thugs insisted in 2008 that she bone up on recent world history. Between now and then, someone presumably advised her that the so-called Iron Lady was a big favorite of her hero Ronald Reagan. Now if only someone would advise Sarah that Baroness Thatcher suffers from severe dementia, and that Sarah might be better advised to head for two other countries she’s gone on record as hoping to visit, Israel and Africa. Or it may be that Sarah is looking forward to chatting with a political leader, even a retired one, over whom she will be able to lord it intellectually.

If we were advising her, we would, on balance, suggest that she give the UK a wide berth. If Sarah and husband Todd have found the American tabloid press annoying, there are no words for what they will find its British equivalent. British newsstands are full of magazines devoted to photographs of celebrities with dark spots under their arms, or cellulite, or herpes blisters. The comperes (that is, hosts) of their late-night television chat (that is, talk) shows are either cheeky (that is, brazen and irreverent) or pompous, and unlikely to be mesmerized (that is, mesmerized) by Sarah’s spunk and charm. And to them, the word spunk means something very different from what it means to hard-working, average Americans, and indolent rich ones alike.

Scott Spencer: I Am Not Worthy

2010-12-11T09:12:00.000-05:00

Thank God for NPR, province of the liberal elitists though it may be (he said ironically). If I hadn’t listened by chance to Teri Gross’s interview with Scott Spencer on my iPod during one of my early autumn constitutionals, I wouldn’t have read his latest novel, Man in the Woods, and been so awed by the beauty of his writing as to seek out all his earlier stuff. All of it humbles me, and I am not easily humbled.

I’m afraid I’ve folded many of the pages of the copy of his 1986 novel Waking the Dead I borrowed from the East Fishkill Community Library, as I've been resolved the past view days to try to demonstrate why I love his writing so much. I might just as well have folded no pages, as every three paragraphs or so he expresses something so beautifully as to take your breath away.

Here the narrator talks about a recovering alcoholic’s yearning for drink:

I wanted a drink, many drinks, many many many drinks. There was a moment after the first drink when you knew there were more to come, and you could walk through yourself as if through the rooms of a cozy paid-for house and the painters had just arrived to put the primer on and soon everything would be painted your favorite colors.

*

I put my arm tentatively around [his teenaged nephews], trying to embrace them in a way that seemed somehow casual, athletic, using that code masculine shame has created for affection.

*

Mileski’s eyes clicked in her direction. He made a small, tight smile that was all but hidden by his beard; the whiskers around his mouth shifted like grass will when something unseen suddenly slithers through.

*

It was one of those extravagantly sunny winter mornings, as if all that low trembling gray had just been wrapping paper and this perfect blue dome was the gift inside.

I’ve had the sort of fight he describes so gorgeously here:

I took the day off from classes and Sarah stayed home, too. We lied to each other and said we wanted to work out our difference, to put our house back in order, when in fact our anger with each other had awakened a kind of awful perversity and what we really wanted was to use the stick of our intelligence to wedge into the crack in the earth between us and to open it further and further — until the other could suddenly see the emptiness below and panic.

*

Here the narrator has just tried to reassure his brother's Asian girlfriend about her lack of facility in English:

She gave me a quick, sour look and I realized that my saying she spoke more English than I spoke Korean and then my saying I spoke absolutely no Korean had turned what I’d meant to be a compliment into a slight. But of course it wasn’t a compliment in the first place. It was merely a bit of patronizing banter and as she turned her mouth down and glanced away from me I felt a surge of horror at myself — true horror — because it seemed suddenly that a sensitivity that I had always assumed was my second nature had turned into (perhaps had always been) something really rather coarse — a salesman’s friendliness.

Sara(h) Smiles, Part 37: Chucks

2010-12-10T08:35:00.000-05:00

According to WikiLeaks, on this Sunday evening’s edition of Sarah Palin’s Iowa, Sara and husband Todd and the children will help her pop — retired science teacher and track coach Chuck Heath — decorate the Christmas “tree” made of the antlers of the moose and caribou Chuck has assassinated over the years, and the spines of a couple of lamestream media types who, during the 2008 presidential election, weren’t quite as judicious as they might have been about whom they approached for interviews. At the time of “publication,” FAITP remained unable to confirm that Mr. Heath will be a contestant in the next Dancing With the Stars series, but knows for sure that he placed third in a university-wide twist contest at the University of Idaho in 1962, and is also adept at more contemporary dances, like the mashed potatoes. We have no more reason to infer that he was ever romantically linked to the recording artist most closely identified with that dance, Dee Dee Sharp, than that Jacqueline Onassis dated twist avatar Chubby Checker.

Our understanding is that Mr. Heath moved his family from Idaho up to Alaska because of his love of nature, which love most commonly takes the form of his going into the wild and killing something. A lot of people find this brand of outdoorsmanship incomprehensible or even objectionable, but if they read their Bibles, which says clearly that God gave us white people dominion over all the beasts and wildlife and so on, they would STFU, to use Willow’s increasingly famous acronym.

In any event special surprise guests on Sunday night’s SPI will apparently include Dr. Stephen Hawking, with whom the candidate will chat about quantum physics and the upcoming 27th season of American Idol, which all the Palins are known to enjoy together with big bowls of popcorn except when flamboyant homosexual contestants are singing, in which event they all hurry into husband Todd’s study for a few moments’ joint Bible study, or a “family conference.” Musically, the show will be Wayne-themed, with Fountains of Wayne, Wayne Newton, and Lil Wayne all appearing and, with any luck, “jamming” after their various individual segments. The Miami Heat’s Dwyane Wade will teach husband Todd how to shoot free throws (though not, let's hope, how to spell Dwayne!), and son Traction will do impressions of his former Army buddies, this in spite of the critics’ lukewarm reception to his earlier such impressions on the show. If a Palin is anything, it’s resolute.

I couldn’t, speaking of television, help but enjoy Internet terrorist Julian Assange’s appearances via video hookup the past two nights on Letterman and Conan. You might have imagined, in view of his imminent arrest on rape charges — in Sweden, it’s considered rape if, for instance, you don’t withdraw in humiliation if your partner asks if it’s in yet — and of the fact that many American political leaders have called for him to be hunted down like a dog (or, in Sarah’s case, like a moose or caribou) that he’d have been ill-at-ease and terse, but he turned out to be an engaging raconteur in spite of his excruciating northeastern Australian accent.

I’ve always been a sucker for such grace under fire. Long before my recent conversion to common-sense conservatism, I passionately loathed Richard Nixon, but had to admit to having been hugely impressed by his courage the day in August 1974 he left the White House for the last time. How he managed to walk to his helicopter and then wave triumphantly (too triumphantly in the circumstances!) at the press without bursting into tears of shame or rage or despair was beyond me. I actually felt sorry for the loathsome son-of-a-bitch, in a way I don’t ever picture myself feeling sorry for George W. Bush.

If you were a science teacher, and your grown daughter didn’t believe in evolution, as Sarah apparently does not, would you perhaps question your own abilities? I think I might, which isn’t to say that I hold with Darwinism, another ploy by the elitists to make the salt of earth feel stupid.

I wonder if, during his lifetime, anyone addressed Darwin as Chuck, as they do Sarah's pop. I think it would have served to make his views a lot more palatable to average Americans.

Sara(h) Smiles, Part 35: Keeping Americans Safe From Australians

2010-12-09T08:34:00.000-05:00

As one who fights tirelessly in this journal for the restoration of our precious liberties and the preservation of tax cuts for the wealthy, I, as all other common-sense conservatives, am very much in favor of freedom of speech on the Internet. But the WikiLeaks unpleasantness of the past couple of weeks reminds us how easy it is to abuse that freedom. Julian Assange, a known Australian, has gravely embarrassed the American government, revealing, for instance, that our brave men and women in uniform continued to torture Iraqis even after Abu Ghraib, and that their commanders understandably got sick and tired of writing detailed reports about the atrocities some of our soldiers, crazed with homesickness, committed. Naturally, I’m no fan at all of that rhymes-with-which Hilary Clinton, but when I learned that WikiLeaks’ publication of sensitive State Department cables will make it difficult for our diplomats to spy effectively on the countries to which she’s dispatched them, I was as incensed as the next patriotic American.

I couldn’t agree more with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell — the handsomest man in Congress, by the way — whose view is that Assange “is a high-tech terrorist. He’s done an enormous damage to our country, and I think he needs to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. And if that becomes a problem, we need to change the law." We must bear firmly in mind that the law is a living thing, written not by God, but by man, and therefore subject to revision. A law that doesn’t protect decent, God-fearing Americans from Australians does indeed call out for revision.

Naturally, I’ve been disgusted with the ObaMao administration’s typically effete, ineffectual response to Assange’s treason. They've blocked his access to his financial assets, frightened the likes of Amazon.com and his Internet service provider out of doing any business with him, frozen funds earmarked for his legal defense even as they were encouraging our Swedish allies to charge him with sexual improprieties, gotten our friends in high places Down Under to threaten to revoke his passport (Julia Gillard may be no one’s MILF, but she knows on which side her toast is Vegemited), and even threatened him with assassination.

They stopped short, though, of advocating that he be hunted down like any other terrorist; it fell to mama grizzly Sarah Palin to summon the moral fortitude for that. And here she showed herself to be very much more circumspect than her fellow former governor and Jesus-lover Mike Huckabee, who wants to see hanged the American soldier thought to have passed documents to Assange. Well, in Sarah’s America, we’re not going to be so quick to hang those who’ve fought to protect our precious liberties, buster.

In other news, results from this year’s Programme for International Student Assessment, announced this week by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, show Asian, and especially Chinese, 15-year-olds to be the world’s best-educated. Ours, meanwhile, placed 23rd in science, 17th in reading, and 31st in math.

We must bear in mind here that while those in the Third World are spending 16 to 18 hours per day studying, our own youngsters are out enjoying precious freedoms of which the Chinese, for instance, can only dream — “cruising” in their own cars, sending each other text messages, listening to iPods the Chinese couldn’t hope to afford, binge-drinking, and getting each other pregnant — just generally having the sort of fun God put American teens on earth to enjoy. Would we really want our youngsters to be as hard-working as those in the Third World? Would that not jeopardize their God-given feeling of entitlement?

So Belgium, Estonia, Iceland, France, and the Slovak Republic all finished ahead of us; so friggin’ what? My guess is that they cheated; honestly now, have you ever met an Estonian you trusted? Be that as it may, in your face, Turkey, Mexico, and Greece, three of the five countries whose kids ours did better than. If we can kick the butt of the so-called cradle of civilization, the birthplace of geometry, I don’t think we need to apologize to anybody.

Sara(h) Smiles, Part 34: Bernanke and Boobs

2010-12-08T09:18:00.001-05:00

I ventured unwittingly yesterday afternoon into a neck of the woods that probably went in 2008 for ObaMao — as those of us who recognize that, if he had his way, he’d turn us into the People’s Republic of America, like to call him, though our strong preference would be not to call him anything at all, as the mere thought of him, with his Ivy League elitism and lefthandedness and teleprompter, make any sensible person want to purge, in the binge-and-purge sense.

What an eye-opener it was! Most of the people on whose ratty screen doors I tapped were up in arms — at least those not too depressed to get up off the sofa — about the imminent termination of their unemployment benefits. Several were outraged because the federal government seems quite happy to toss them out into the street, as they put it, a little melodramatically, even while not repealing George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the rich.

As to the latter, I pointed out recently that few of us would want to live in a society that doesn’t shower perks and privileges on its wealthy. As for the former — the unemployment teat going dry — have these people ever thought that maybe, instead of rhymes with which-ing and moaning, they ought to go out and get jobs? I’ve also pointed out that the less we tax our wealthy, the more gardeners and domestics and so on they’re likely to hire to work in and around their 5000-square-foot houses with more bathrooms than inhabitants. Common sense tells us that keep the rich folks’ tax cuts in place is exactly the way to solve the unemployment mess, not exacerbate it.

I can’t imagine how anyone, not even the closed-mindedest liberal elitist, could have been unimpressed by Sarah’s intellectually nimble, seamlessly eloquent debate with Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on Meet the Press Sunday morning. She evoked Ronald Reagan (in his 1984 debate with Fritz Mondale) when, in response to Bernanke’s predictable recitation of the sort of monetarist dogma we’ve all had coming out of our ears since Milton Friedman’s self-appointment as America’s pre-eminent economist, she sighed, “There you go again.” It was deeply pleasurable to see Bernanke — he of the degrees from Harvard and MIT, Jewish in spite of his ambiguous (that is, berg-less, stein-less) surname — hemming and hawing when Sarah defied him to explain in terms of classical monetarism the unhinging of the inflation-driven growth of the 1990s’ money supply, and the failure of Friedmanian policy to stimulate the economy to nearly the extent projected between 2001 and 2003. I can imagine her critics might have expected her to gloat — to chirp, “Gotcha!” in that adorable way of hers, or just to wink. I don’t suppose she’ll be accorded the credit she deserves for being the picture of graciousness.

Attentive readers may have noticed that I have said nothing about Sarah’s alleged breast augmentation, though a few of the younger bachelors I’ve spoken with on behalf of the Committee to Elect Sarah in 2012 have seemed to want to talk more about them than about her fiscal policies. I personally disapprove of breast augmentation, but do not question that they may come in very handy when she’s locked into what are invariably described as Frank Discussions with other world leaders. If one endorses heterosexuality — and the alternative, as we’ve discussed, is too disgusting to contemplate — then even one who is sensitive to women’s distaste for objectification will acknowledge that a glimpse of a well-filled black lace brassiere might serve to render Vladimir Putin or even Hugo Chavez less recalcitrant, less hostile to America. Thus, we common-sense conservatives applaud Sarah pre-emptively for her sacrifice. In the words of John McCain, “Country first!”

Sara(h) Smiles, Part 31: Dirty Laundry of Our Future First Family

2010-12-07T08:49:00.001-05:00

Regular readers of this journal know only too well how petulant I can be. After over 300 entries, I’d have imagined myself to have 1900 followers, and not 19, and for agents to be ringing me day and night to offer me insanely lucrative book, TV, or even movie deals, or to book me onto Bill Maher or even Dancing With the Stars. Even the sunniest-dispositioned among us needs to have the world tell them they’re a bit of all right every now and again, and if it weren’t for the miracle of citalopram, I’d no doubt have been gnashing my few remaining teeth and cursing the world’s unfairness, as I have traditionally done — at least until yesterday, when, completely out of the blue, I received the most glorious affirmation I could have hoped for. Mike Nizich, Sarah’s major domo, phoned in the afternoon to say that the candidate has been reading FAITP with growing delight the past several weeks, and has agreed it would be the perfect place to dispel various tawdry tabloid rumors about her family.

Sarah and The First Dude, as she has so adorably referred to husband Todd, have indeed had their little flings, as what attractive couple would not after 22 years of marriage? She began seeing the musician John Mayer in 2008, several weeks before John McCain invited her to be his running mate, and the two remained an “item” until Christmas of that year, when the singer, or his personal assistant, foolishly left in the Victoria’s Secret box in which he presented Sarah’s gift — a transparent, marabou-trimmed fuchsia peignoir — the receipt revealing that he’d bought three such peignoirs. When Sarah demanded to know who’d received the other two, the singer declined to respond, whereupon Sarah declared him persona not grata not only in Alaska, but in her heart, and heart of hearts.

During her tour on behalf of her first book, Goin’ Rogue, last year, she saw a lot of another singer, Lenny Kravitz, with whom she would rendezvous in the vice presidential suites of various Marriott Courtyard hotels around the country as the very in-demand singer’s performance schedule permitted. She also saw the golfer Tiger Wood on at least two occasions, this months before his famous Thanksgiving night contretemps with his wife Elin. Apparently Sarah was unaware of the athlete’s being married. On finding out, she sent him this text message: “They say I’m stupid? Homegirl can't even spell Ellen! LMAO.” She was apparently unaware at the time that Mrs. Wood was some weird sort of Scandinavian. According to Nizich, the Palin home is devoid of Ikea furniture.

While Sarah was seeing Mayer, Kravitz, and Woods, Todd, meanwhile, was dating Bryt’tawnee R—, a cocktail waitress at the Wasilla Ramada Inn, and later Jennifer Aniston, the television and movie actress. Just for the heck of it, and because the Palins don’t believe in condemning anything they haven’t tried themselves, Todd had (protected!) sex with a fellow moose hunter and member of the Alaskan Independence Party on several occasions in the summers of 2007 and 2008, respectively, and was relieved to find it disgusting and abominable, exactly as the Bible had said.

During his tour of duty in Iraq, the Palins' elder son Traction became obsessed with shemales after buddies in his platoon gave him the links to a couple of hermaphrodite Websites. His post-discharge (from the army!) affair with Shavonna Starr, Wasilla’s best-loved female impersonator (see her lip-syching Shania Twain’s "I Feel Like a Woman" here) was the worst-kept secret in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough through the first half of 2010. But, as viewers of Sarah Palin’s Iowa know, Mom and Dad convinced him that he and Shavonna weren’t good for each other, since which Trac has been dating the mother of Levi Johnston, father of Bristol’s son Tripp. It's all slightly incestuous, but that's Alaska for you!

Anything else you might read on the cover of a supermarket tabloid, the campaign wants you to know, is sheer fantasy.

Sara(h) Smiles, Part 21: Diplomacy, Sarah-Style

2010-12-06T08:43:00.000-05:00

I was surprised to discover yesterday that Sunday mornings are the best time of the week to ask people to contribute to the Committee to Elect Sarah in 2012. The trick is to emphasize that she’s by far the most overtly Christ-loving of the prospective Republican candidates, unless you count Mike Huckabee, who hasn’t a tenth of Sarah’s charisma, his cute name notwithstanding. At the mention of Jesus, most folks look pretty sheepish about being at home instead of in church, and hurry to get their wallets or checkbooks or debit cards, though we don’t support the latter, to use the colorful patois of the computer salesperson.

When couple of those on whom I called yesterday asked why I wasn’t myself worshiping, I explained that I’d used a video conferencing program on my own computer, speaking of computers, to attend daybreak services. Once past why we weren’t at church, most people wanted to talk either about whether the Obamarxists are going to be able to repeal George W. Bush’s tax breaks for the rich, and about how much they’ve been enjoying Sarah Palin’s Iowa — and how much they were looking forward to last night’s episode.

Common sense conservatives agree that a society that doesn’t shower its wealthy with special perks and privileges isn’t a society worth living in. Though everyone I spoke to yesterday seemed to be of relatively modest means — not a single Lexus or Escalade was parked in any of their driveways, which were full instead of American-made SUVs with NObama bumperstickers — they all agreed it would be a tragedy for the country if the tax cuts were revoked. One gentleman summed up the feeling of all when he wondered aloud, tremulously, what sort of message that would send our young people. I observed that giving the young nothing to aspire to is a hallmark of socialist societies, and we sobbed for our country in each other’s arms.

Sarah’s TV show has become must Sunday evening viewing for nearly everyone. Several people said they’d been enjoying Boardwalk Empire, in spite of star Steve Buscemi’s remarkably hideous teeth, until Sarah’s show debuted, but that they switched allegiances immediately.

After last night’s show, I can’t imagine anyone regretting having decided to catch up on Boardwalk when it comes out on DVD, as Sarah had enough surprises up her sleeve for a person with arms as long as the Miami Heat’s Udonis Haslam. During Sarah’s duet with Lady Gaga on his old antiwar chestnut "Where Have All the Flowers Gone," for instance, Pete Seeger slipped quietly on stage in a suit made of halibut — a wry homage to the raw meat dress Gaga wore a few months ago to MTV’s Video Music Awards. When a stagehand handed him his banjo and he discovered it was considerably out of tune, he quipped, “Something’s a little fishy here,” and the studio audience groaned delightedly while both Gaga and Sarah rolled their eyes adorably. It’s wonderful to see Pete, who’s always seemed good-hearted and noble, but relentlessly earnest, finally allowing himself a bit of puckishness at 114.

The chat portion of the program, in which Sarah and Todd welcomed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Reese Witherspoon, was equally pleasurable — and enlightening. Who’d have guessed that the Iranian bogeyman would be so interested in Reese’s new star on Hollywood Boulevard, or that he and Todd — new best friends forever! — would make plans to go hunting together next spring with their sons Traction and Mohammed? I thought it especially gracious of Sarah to promise that, if she gets elected in 2012 to a certain unnamed office (she’s even more adorable than usual when coy!), she’ll see what she can do about getting Mahmoud his own star.

Common-sense conservative diplomacy in action!

Sara(h) Smiles, Part 21: Rowe, Rowe, Rowe Your Boat

2010-12-04T08:50:00.000-05:00

Naturally, I was only being mischievous, in that endearing way I have, when I suggested the other day that Donald Trump ought to be Sarah’s running mate in 2012. I can’t imagine one as vainglorious as he willingly playing second fiddle to a woman, not even one as hot as Sarah. But I’ve had another idea, and this isn’t a kidding-around one: Mike Rowe, from the Wrangler and Ford commercials — and from the Discovery Channel’s Dirty Jobs, which I’ve never watched because I’m squeamish.

Nearly everything about him is perfect. Start with his name — two virile, no-nonsense, all-American monosyllables, in the tradition of George Bush, but better, since “George” is a fairly…squishy sound, whereas Mike is as hard as a Louisville slugger. Mike’s a fearsome heavyweight champion’s (Tyson’s) name, or a hard-boiled detective’s (Hammer’s), or a tough-as-nails former Chicago Bears coach (Ditka’s). George is a curious monkey’s name, or a homosexual crooner’s (Boy).

Rowe is everything his name promises, as far — in his Wrangler jeans, facial crags, and baseball cap — as it’s possible to be from an elitist liberal who thinks he knows more than the average American just because he has a Ph.D. from an Ivy League university. He was an Eagle Scout, and has big pectoral muscles, but everything about him mumbles, “Aw, shucks.” He’s somebody the average American working man could easily picture hoisting a couple of cold brewskis with, and the gals already think of him as having a cute butt — an asset too few vice presidential candidates have offered in recent elections — because of the Wrangler commercials. Whether he actually has one is entirely immaterial, in the same way that Burt Reynolds’ having an undersized penis became immaterial after Cosmopolitan presented him to its readership as a sexpot.

I won’t say Rowe’s perfect; the skeletons in his closet include having sung with the Baltimore Opera at one point, and his living nowadays in San Francisco, that cesspool of homosexuality and Pelosi-ism. What I’m hoping is that his having lived there and remained straight (please, Lord, let it be so!) will make him even more attractive to common-sense conservatives, especially if he can be persuaded to manifest a little revulsion at his LGBT neighbors, Stacy and Kim.

(Speaking of the Chicago Bears, I have formulated a theory as to why commentators and coaches so love to say football — why, for instance, they’ll invariably say, “They’re a heck of a football team,” or, “He’s a talented football player, or, “If we can stop their running attack, we think we can win the football game” even though it’s redundant in each case; everyone knows full well that a guy predicting the winner of the Saints vs. Steelers game isn’t talking about lacrosse or synchronized swimming.

The reason you don’t hear comparable self-references in the other major team sports, basketball or baseball, is that football is just such fun to say, its first syllable being close to the sound boys make when trying to evoke the sound of an arrow or throwing star flying through the air and then hitting its target. And at the end of that first syllable, your mouth is poised perfectly to add ball, as it is with neither of the other two sports.)

In other news, Sarah has tweeted (God is that cute, or what? How could she be more adorable?) that Julian Assange, Mr. WikiLeaks, ought to be hunted down like a dog, a moose, or one of those wolves she, as governor of Alaska, had sharpshooters picking off from helicopters. Naturally, the lamestream media have been having a field day wondering where she comes off endorsing the de facto assassination of a foreign national. My only quibble — and I think this may have to do with the fact that Twitter tweets can comprise only a limited number of characters — is that she didn’t urge the assassins to save a bullet or two for that rhymes-with-witch Katie Couric, Jon Stewart, Michael Moore, or Bill Maher. Might as well take 'em all down at once, it seems to me.

Kill, baby, kill!

Sara(h) Smiles, Part 20: Savin' the American Economy

2010-12-03T09:10:00.001-05:00

One of the most exciting things about going from door to door on behalf of the Committee to Elect Sarah in 2012 is hearing all the marvelous ideas my neighbors have for takin’ our country back, for regaining the precious liberties of which our foreign-born, crypto-Muslim socialist president has so gleefully stripped us. Yesterday, for instance, I spoke to a widower, Rex S—, who has lived on Cedar Street since 1968, and was a firefighter down in New York City from 1973 until he retired in 2005 because he’d had it “up to here” with women and non-whites, many of them with names he couldn’t pronounce, being shoehorned into vacancies in the Department. His only regret is that, by the time the propagandists decided to portray the NYFD as the heroes of 9/11, he’d long since stopped going to the gym, and wasn’t depicted in any of the over-100 2003 and 2004 calendars for which his younger buddies were invited (and paid handsomely!) to pose, their gorgeous pectoral and abdominal muscles glistening with their heroic sweat, their melon-sized biceps stretching taut the damp fabric of their form-fitting uniforms, their…

Oops.

In any event, given his wonderful ideas, you’d have imagined that Rex had been an economist and not a firefighter. Having heard over and over again first how America doesn’t manufacture anything anymore, and how we’re getting ever deeper into debt to the Chinese, and how there are countless hundreds of thousands of illegal alien children hiding around the country, and how indigenous inner city children routinely drop out the second they’re eligible to do so rather than brave graffiti-covered high schools controlled by gangs who will kill them for their lunch money, Rex came up with an idea that I can’t imagine any common-sense conservative pooh-poohing.

Step 1: Repeal antiquated child labor laws originally conceived to protect the children of white European immigrants at the turn of the last century. Is anybody — and let’s be candid with each other here — all that worried about the children of dark-skinned Spanish speakers? Step 2: Do away with the minimum wage. How dare Big Government tell the American businessman what he or she can or cannot pay his employees! You want jobs created and unemployment greatly reduced, or don't you? Step 3: Hire, at the same hourly rate Chinese factory workers get, or maybe a few cents more if you can spare it, the thousands of alien kids and inner city school dropouts who’d otherwise just be selling crack and getting each other pregnant.

Problem solved! And in the same fell swoop, we also begin redressing the imbalance of trade between ourselves and China. And it gets even better! Imagine the boost to the American morale when we walk through Target or Walmart and see the words Made in USA on shower curtains and cutlery, flashlights and flatware, woks and inflatable wading pools, this, this, and the other!

I fully expect the so-called progressives to get apoplectic, to ask how we’ll be able to think of ourselves as civilized when we’re working “our” young people to death. Well, where were they when we were dropping to 25th in the world — only marginally ahead of Croatia and the Faroe Islands, and behind Cuba, Taiwan, and the Isle of Man — in infant mortality? If they were going to get apoplectic about the plight of the kiddies, why have the so-called progressives had so little to say about those for whom no first birthday party ever need be thrown?

Of course, we common-sense conservatives think of first birthday parties as wasteful and frivolous anyway. When was the last time anybody heard a child on the day of his or her graduation from college say, “You know, Mother and Pop, I have such very fond memories of that first birthday party you threw for me”? The fact is that one-year-olds as a general rule don’t even realize they’re being feted. It’s all for the parents, who in many cases take off from work the Friday before the weekend of the party to buy decorations and cheap gift-bag crapola and a cake and what-not. In so doing, they take a bite out of the gross national product, and play right into the hands of those who would love nothing more than to see America on its knees.

Under Sarah Palin, America will bow no more!

[Would those reading this on Facebook kindly sign up to follow my actual blog? Moreover, would those reading this kindly do all their online Xmas shopping here this year?]\

Sra(h) Smiles, Part 19: His Truth Goes Marchin' On

2010-12-01T13:43:00.013-05:00

Boy, is this a perfect example of what we common-sense conservatives are up against, or what? According to the The Department of Defense’s Comprehensive Working Group’s just-released report on "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," we ought to entrust the protection of our precious American liberties to unashamed homosexuals.

Great idea, Obamarxists! Nearly as great, I might venture to observe, as nationalizing the healthcare, automaking, and banking industries, snatching away the freedom that Americans (at least the white ones) have enjoyed since time immemorial, raising everybody’s taxes, forcing our schoolchildren to attend school on Saturday, but forbidding them to pray, and spending countless tens of thousands of dollars to fly Michelle Obama over to India to shop for saris.

Just picture it. A platoon, or whatever you call them (my emotional problems precluded my serving my country in Vietnam, desperate though I was to do so) of soldiers in Afghanistan has a skirmish schedule the following morning with al-Qaeda. What would you rather have them listening to in their Humvees on the way to battle — Slayer, on the one hand, or Lady Gaga? Which do you suppose will make them more intent on wasting the enemy? And how about if, on the way to the battleground, one of the so-called gay soldiers, made indiscreet by the atmosphere of foreboding inside the Hummer, blurts out to one of his normal buddies that he’s in love with him? The normal soldier’s natural reaction would be to beat the guy comatose, but what effect will his doing in the crowded Hummer have on morale? And if he doesn’t inflict a merciless beating, his buddies are going to be trying to think what he did to arouse the so-called gay one, instead of about their mission. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda, who summarily behead anyone they learn to be "gay", lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered, are perfectly focused. Our boys are at a frightful disadvantage!

I remember in the 1980s a supposedly authoritative scientific report was published suggesting that pornography didn’t, as had long been taken as a given, inspire much depraved behavior beyond viewing it in the first place. It took Ronald Reagan’s brave attorney general, Ed Meese, to dismiss this report as contrary to common sense, and then to toss together one of his own that reconfirmed folks’ existing prejudices. That is unmistakably what is called for now. When we know from the Holy Bible that God regards homosexuals as abominators (and note how much that sounds like Obamanators!), why do we pay a moment’s attention to the “finding” that 70 percent of the very young, and thus easily misled, people who wear our armed services’ uniforms wouldn’t mind their so-called gay buddies “coming out”?

All of which leads to a talk I’ve been hoping we could have. We know, from the fact that we are richer, mightier, and generally a lot better-looking than all others (except for maybe the Scandinavians, but who cares when there are so few of them?) that we are God’s favorite country. And yet, under the so-called leadership of a foreign-born crypto-Muslim whose main exposure to Christianity has been via a Chicago pastor who’s a lot more about hating white folk than loving Jesus we keep our most favored nation in jeopardy by refusing to declare ourselves a Christian country.

To whom does this — can this — make sense? It’s been clear from the outset, when the Founding Fathers paused regularly in drafting the Constitution for Bible study sessions, that this country has always been all about Jesus. That the Founding Fathers generously said it was OK for others to practice whatever weird religions they liked serves only to teach us that nobody’s perfect! Over the course of the past decade we’ve seen all too clearly where tolerating other religions gets us!

Though by law we’ll have to wait until January 2013, the time to put in charge someone who makes no bones about her love for Jesus is right now. His truth goes marchin’ on, with Sarah keeping pace, prettily, prettily!

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Sara(h) Smiles, Part 18: Singin' and Commiseratin'

2010-12-01T09:51:00.000-05:00

Why I am not surprised by how very little the lamestream media have had to say about the debut of the retooled Sarah Palin’s Iowa on Sunday night? Never mind that it was uniformly excellent — certainly the best program of its kind since The Carol Burnett Show went off the air in 1958. That Sarah and her producers were able to get both Eminem and Paul McCartney as musical guests was remarkable, but no more remarkable than how beautifully Sarah sang with them, on "The Real Slim Shady," in Em’s case, and a medley of “Rocky Raccoon” and “Let It Be” in Paul’s. Who’d have guessed that she’d sound so much like Stevie Nicks? I, for one, can hardly wait until next week, when her musical guests will be Lady Gaga and Pete Seeger.

What a lot of talent in the family Palin! We knew already from Dancing With Unwed Teen Moms that Bristol is a wonderful hoofer. And now we discover that her big brother Track is a wonderful impressionist, though I think his performance would probably have appealed to a wider demographic had he…done someone more familiar — Jack Nicholson, say, or John Wayne, or even Beavis or Butthead — than a bunch of guys with whom he served his country in Iraq. To be honest, I thought husband Todd’s stand-up comedy routine could have used some tightening up, as some of the material felt over-familiar. Does anyone really need to hear another joke about the difference between the sexes as it’s manifested in their positioning of toilet seats? And I won’t deny that I put my hands over my ears when one gag began, “I’m not saying that Eskimos are terrible drivers, but…” That said, The First Dude's anecdote about the hunter who fell in love with a moose had us in hysterics. A moose! Can you imagine?

I found extremely poignant the segment in which Sarah, holding the twins Trig and Calculus on her lap, chatted via video hookup with Angelina Jolie and Mel Gibson about being a parent to many children. I gained new insight into the pain that’s presumably inspired some of the latter’s more notorious recent acting-out when he recounted his then-13-year-old second daughter, Lucy, confessing that she is Jewish and a lesbian. Sarah’s telling him with misted eyes that she wished she could give him a great big hug made very clear the sort of woman — and person — she is. It was a lot more compassion than that stuck-up rhymes-with-witch Jolie — whose primary interest seemed to be in promoting her forthcoming film Waco — in which she plays former Attorney General Janet Reno, unglamorously, in an obvious attempt to get another Oscar nomination — was able to muster.

Predictably, there’s been much hoo-ha in the lamestream media the past several days about the FBI’s recent busts of might-have-been terrorist bombers. According to the so-called progressives, we shouldn’t be heartened by these arrests because FBI operatives recruited, funded, and guided those arrested. Your tax dollars at work!

As usual, the lamestreamers are missing the point. It isn’t especially heartening that the FBI is foiling terrorist bombings it in fact masterminded, but that their doing so keeps a lot of patriotic Americans employed, at a time when so many federal employees are begging in the streets. Would we rather have these agents standing grimly in line in the unemployment office, having no money to spend online or at local restaurants, taverns, bowling alleys, garden centers, sporting goods stores, and delicatessens, or seeking out delusionial homeless people to pay to become jihadists? Call me old-fashioned, but I’ll choose the latter every time.

We must also consider that we have a rich tradition in this country of trying to buoy the populace’s spirit through flim-flammery. Many readers will recall how, in the summer of 1969, an America at which the whole world was laughing because it had elected Richard Nixon president was made proud again by Neil Armstrong’s walking on the moon. That he was later revealed to have been walking on a soundstage in Burbank, California, was of relatively small consequence. Comparably, an America reeling from the popularity of disco music and the rampantly vapid Farrah Fawcett’s elevation to the status of national sweetheart was hugely heartened by the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who was unmistakably an imbecile, but an imbecile with an engagingly avuncular manner and good microphone technique.

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Sara(h) Smiles, Part 16: Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder

2010-11-30T08:13:00.001-05:00

Having embraced common-sense conservatism hasn’t been without its pitfalls. Whereas I now enjoy 110 percent confidence that I’m doing that which God wants me to do for His favorite country ever, I’m also stung on pretty much a daily basis by the cruel, spiteful things nonbelievers are forever saying about Sarah. When they ridicule her for slips of the tongue that we who love her find nothing but endearing, or mock her undiagrammable sentences, it hurts me too.

At the mere mention of post-traumatic stress disorder, the so-called progressives get all gelatinous with empathy, imagining its victims to be the victims of George W. Bush’s allegedly inglorious war. (We common sense conservatives, of course, regard our liberation of the Iraqi people — as we would regard the liberation of any oppressed people — as wholly noble.) And yet the so-called progressives’ empathy seems to vanish without a trace in the face of the recent revelation that Sarah is suffering from a severe case of pre-traumatic stress disorder.

The literature to this point reports occurrences of this malady only in celebrities and politicians, whose emotional scarring by something that hasn’t actually happened yet — being surrounded by braying paparazzi while out shopping, say, or being assassinated — is no less immobilizing than the anxiety suffered by war veterans.
John Hinckley shot at Ronald Reagan to impress Jodie Foster, decades before she became Mel Gibson’s most energetic apologist, and Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme wanted to kill Gerald Ford on behalf of the redwoods. An Iraqi journalist threw his shoe at George W. Bush, killing him. More recently, Tony Blair, Nicolas Sarkozy, Silvio Berlusconi, and Fiji’s Minister of Weights and Measures have all been assassinated.

So maybe it isn’t so nutty at all that one in Sarah Palin’s position would feel wary while out addressing a political rally or signing copies of her new book, Notes I Wrote to Myself On My Hand. And maybe too it isn’t really that hard to understand that after a while, her having to wonder constantly if some crazed Obamarxist with a handgun of the sort promised him by the Second Amendment is about to shoot her dead, causes her tongue occasionally to slip — to say North Korea when she means South, for instance. Maybe instead of so gleefully ridiculing her gaffes, the press, just for a change, could concentrate on the fact that she’s offering better suggestions for getting America back on track than all others combined!

In other news, attempts to get that Burmese woman with the weird four-part name to sign on as Sarah’s presumptive running mate in 2012 have apparently stalled; the woman’s apparently too busy letting the Burmese press fawn all over her to think about what’s best for America. Mitt Romney, who no one doubts would look adorable, with his chiseled features and gray temples, standing behind Sarah on podiums — the two of them would undoubtedly make the most telegenic twosome in American political history — is apparently intent on running for president in his own right. Spoiled brat.

My guess is that Sarah might very well have the same problem of egotism with Donald Trump, who would also make a terrific running mate. He’s obviously gorgeous, with a pout that has endeared him to tens of millions of viewers of his reality show The Asshole Boss, has the most interesting coiffure since A Flock of Seagulls, and is obviously both good and very smart, as evidenced by his great wealth. If only someone could persuade him to put the country’s interests ahead of his own, or at least to convince him that the two are in fact one and the same!

Assuming that this will prove impossible, Ted Nugent seems a perfect choice. He’s on record as believing the Second Amendment to be the only gun license or carry permit any American should need. He is disgusted, as are all right-thinking Americans, by forms of sexual expression other than his own. He’s an avid hunter who once proclaimed, “I’m stymied to come up with anything funnier than people who think animals have rights. Just stick an arrow through their lung.” We haven’t seen that sort of decisiveness since the late George W. Bush!

Countless tens of millions of baby boomer rock fans are guaranteed to bellow, “Whoo-hoo!” when his having joined the ticket is announced, spilling Bud Lite all over themselves in the process, but so what?

Drill, babies, drill!

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Sara(h) Smiles, Part 17: White Wednesday

2010-11-29T08:48:00.000-05:00

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Sarah suggested that the day before Thanksgiving be designated White Wednesday, during which all Americans would have the day off work to reflect on the huge contributions to our culture of the descendants of Anglo Saxons. The Rev. Al Sharpton and other self-styled civil rights leaders were expectedly apoplectic with indignation.

Black Friday, to which political correctness precludes anyone objecting, therefore seems an appropriate day on which to compose this précis of the common-sense conservative view of American race relations.

I am no racist; no way. In my college dormitory, I lived just down the hall from an African graduate student; if you’d closed your eyes while he was speaking, you could have sworn you were speaking to a member of the British royal family or something. Later I played briefly in a band with a black person. During my rock and roll days, I “dated” two ebony beauties — not, regrettably, simultaneously. In the early 1980s, as I finally worked up the courage to pursue my dream of temporary office work, I processed words with a black woman named Vertis Johnson, who, along with my wife and Rod McDonough, an English solicitor of Irish origin, is one of the three sweetest people it has ever been my privilege to know.

Neither I nor many other common-sense conservatives would want to live in a world in which there are no Denzel Washington, Jamie Foxx, or Morgan Freeman movies, or one lacking the zingy comedic stylings of Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock, or Wilma Sykes. Scott Joplin, Paul Robson, and Beyonce are but three who spring immediately to mind when one considers the contributions of blacks to music. Blacks have been disappearing from major league baseball in droves the past several years, and were never really present in ice hockey, but those of us who follow the National Basketball Association and the National Football League are well aware that they continue to play those sports with great panache, if rather more self-aggrandizingly than their white, European, or Samoan teammates, and thanks in large part to the fast-twitch muscle fibers of which they have more than their white teammates. It’s hardly possible to see a television commercial these days in which black people aren’t acting just like you or I.

We common-sense conservatives are not saying, then, that there aren’t talented, bright, or even hard-working black Americans. Rather, what we’re saying is that, on balance, there seem to a lot more Rev. Jeremiah Wrights and LeBron Jameses and welfare mothers in Cadillac Escalades and 50 Centses than the nice kind, in Liz Claiborne or Ralph Lauren. So maybe the best thing for all concerned would be if they all went back to the country their ancestors came from, Africa, where their darker pigmentation wouldn’t be wasted, as it is here, where the sun generally isn’t as bright.

It’s imperative to take into consideration that blacks, in the tradition of the 19th century’s Underground Railroad, operate most of the so-called safe houses in which illegal immigrants hide when they first sneak across our borders with the intention of getting degrading minimum-wage jobs and overloading our welfare system. Send them back to Africa and Jose and Manuel and Maria have nowhere to elude the INS when they get here, no barbecue joints in which to wash dishes the first few months, no hair-braiding salons in which to develop remarkable manual dexterity.

Many people who secretly agree that America would be better off repatriating its persons-of-color will pretend to believe otherwise because of the idea’s prohibitive expense. But look at it this way, the cost of sending 40 million so-called African Americans back to Africa will probably be offset within 18 months by the fortunes we’ll save not having to arrest, prosecute, and then imprison black teenaged crack dealers, or buy their mamas Cadillac Escalades because they claim not to be able to walk, and then howl about calling the NAACP when we say, Oh, of course you can walk. American youth will save so much money not downloading hip hop singles about bitches and ho’s and what-not that we won’t have to worry anymore about the escalating cost of college tuition. LeBron James and his kind can take their talents to a new African conference in the NBA, and we can continue to enjoy their exploits, as we will the movies of Denzel Washington and the comedic stylings of Chris Rock, on television, without having to worry about his "posse" bringing loaded handguns into restaurants and strip clubs.

I say it with some trepidation, but no shame whatever: America for Americans!

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Hats Off to Horst

2010-11-27T09:11:00.000-05:00

I’ve just watched the episode of In Treatment in which Gabriel Byrne’s Dr. Paul Weston try to retain a brave face while he learns of the growing closeness between his teenaged son and his ex-wife’s about-to-be husband. What very painful, very shameful memories it brought back.

Wife the First and I separated before our daughter’s third birthday. There were multiple aspects of my personality she’d come to be unable to stand, as I’d come to be unable to stand several of her own. She especially detested my fervent tightfistedness, and began getting chummy before we actually came apart with the latest in a succession of very wealthy men she’d beguiled. This one, whom we’ll call Horst, was the scion of a German electronics manufacturing family. Like the earlier, to whom she’d been engaged, he was no oil painting in the looks department, and English being his second language precluded his dazzling her with the sort of wordplay that is my own stock in trade. But what an awful lot of money he had.

(Tightfistedness is as natural to me as pollen allergies. I am the son of a mother whose family commonly had in the dark of night to abandon rented apartments on which they’d come to owe far more than they had. My dad’s circumstances hadn’t been quite that awful, but he was no more capable of spending money casually — or even unagonizedly — than walking upside down on the ceiling like a fly.)

One Sunday afternoon, Horst drove WTF down from the wine country to collect our daughter in front of my place in San Francisco. As I watched the three of them greet one another delightedly and then drive away, I felt as though getting open-heart surgery without an anesthetic.

Some months later, my daughter and I were taking a moonlight stroll around our new neighborhood on The City’s western edge when she enumerated the people she loved most, and included Horst. It had never been OK with my mother that I love my paternal grandparents, who she felt had treated her poorly in the first months of her and my dad’s marriage. Now I channeled her, telling my daughter in no uncertain terms that she was under no obligation whatever to love Horst, who wasn’t after all, her real dad. And this after I'd promised myself that I'd do better by her than my parents had done by me. I recall with infinite shame her crying in pained confusion.

It turned out that Horst was actually a very nice guy. Aware of my feelings, he made a point of stepping quietly aside whenever I entered the picture, as when greeting my daughter at the airport when the three of them returned from one of their many visits to Germany. After my daughter performed (with jaw-dropping brilliance) in a school play one evening when she was around nine, I thought I’d finally tell Horst how very much I appreciated his deference. He was so intent on sparing me a confrontation that I had virtually to chase him around the gymnasium. A good guy.

A very good guy. Two years after relocating to the UK, I returned to Santa Rosa to finalize the sale of the house I owned there. I lived in mortal terror of running by chance into my daughter, who hadn’t spoken to me for over two years at that point (and who hasn’t, at this one, spoken to me in eight a half). I could too vividly picture her sneering at me hatefully and walking quickly away. My first morning there, though, I was astonished to hear someone calling my voice in the drugstore where I went for breath mints — Horst. When he told me my daughter was down in Santa Barbara studying cosmetology, I was gigantically relieved — and then overcome by jealousy. How was it that he, who had divorced her mother a year or two before, knew my daughter’s whereabouts while I did not? At the same time, it felt only fitting that, for having made her cry on our walk that night, my heart should be bloated with pain.

The older I get, the more conscious I become of how well my parents did by me.

Sara(h) Smiles, Part 15: In Her Hole

2010-11-26T09:56:00.000-05:00

I wasn’t expecting everyone on whose door I tapped yesterday to be gracious about their Thanksgiving being interrupted, but when I explained that I was there on behalf of Sarah’s imminent presidential candidacy, nearly everyone changed his or her tune, and invited me in for at least a turkey wing and some stuffing. A couple of people, though, seized the opportunity to make a big deal of Sarah’s having seemingly forgotten the other night that it’s the South Koreans who are our allies, and not the North. As usual, they seemed to view this gaffe as further evidence of Our Gal’s being a dimwit, but if they’d examined a transcript of her interview more closely, they’d have seen clear evidence not only of a normal IQ, but even a higher-than-average one, as you'd expect in someone with a college degree and everything. "This,” she asserted about the whole Korea mess, “is stemming from, I think, a greater problem when we're all sitting around asking, 'Oh no, what are we going to do,' and we're not having a lot of faith that the White House is going to come out with a strong enough policy to sanction what it is that North Korea is going to do."

That, I submit, is brilliant use of the language — sanction being the one word in English that means essentially opposite things (generally, condone as a verb and penalty as a noun). So was Sarah advocating that we support North Korea’s having attacked South Korean civilians on Tuesday, allegedly in retaliation for the South Korean navy’s firing into North Korean territorial waters during military exercises, or penalize them?

Ambiguity is every world leader’s ace in the hole, and Sarah’s clearly got a king, a queen, and a much livelier intellect than many give her credit for in her hole.

And now, by exclusive arrangement with the Department of State, it can be revealed: She might have let the cat out of the bag, but she didn't have her facts skewed. North Korea really is our ally, and all the lamestreamers ridiculing her can just, as feisty Willow might put it, STFU.

It wasn’t always thus, of course. Indeed, in the two decades immediately following the conclusion of the Korean, uh, conflict — North Korea was indeed very much in America’s diplomatic doghouse. But as Japan began to soar economically in the mid-1970s with the introduction of the Datsun 240Z, 260Z and even 280Z, and Casio digital wristwatches, it secretly asked America for help staying ahead of South Korea. Confident that no one would believe us capable of such a thing, since we have never in our history backed a tyrannical lunatic, the CIA worked to help Kim Jong-Il consolidate his power within the Korean Workers’ Party, and American advertising and public relations firms were secretly drafted to sell to the North Korean public his self-elevation to the status of Dear Leader.

It all worked far better than anyone could have imagined. North Korean saber-rattling — and testing of nuclear weapons — has until very recently kept South Korea too nervous to mount an effective challenge to the Japanese, who rewarded us by sending us Ichiro Suzuki and introducing sushi and Casio keyboards in North America. For that, all Americans should be thankful, for no one who has ever tasted good sushi will deny that it is the most delicious food known to man, and you could count the number of hit records produced in the West since 1982 on which Casio keyboards have not played a vital role on the toes of one of Kim Jong-Il’s notoriously tiny feet, which some believe to be webbed; no photographs are known to exist.

The South Koreans tried to fight back, of course, with Samsung electronics and kimchi, a traditional fermented vegetable side dish, but it was far too spicy for the average American palate, and after decades of enjoying Yamaha and Mitsubishi products, Americans were loath to buy televisions, laptop computers, and MP3 players from companies that didn’t also manufacture motorcycles, in the one case, and automobiles, in the other.

Underestimate Sarah Palin at your own peril!

Thanksgiving Special: The Grateful Life

2010-11-25T10:27:00.001-05:00

I don’t know whether it was the 40 milligrams of citalopram I take every day, or just having gotten fatally fed up with being miserable most of the time, but I have finally learned in 2010 to live gratefully. I have joined the ranks of those who don’t dare if the glass is half full or half empty, but are grateful just to have a glass. It’s been months since I suffered the sort of aching-all-over depression that used to be my default mode. Certainly on several occasions boredom and that too-familiar feeling of futility have nudged me right up to the edge of the abyss, but I seem not to fall in anymore. I’ve finally begun to live the lyrics of the song of implacable hopefulness I wrote on Christmas night 10 years ago when my estrangement from my daughter felt like a knife through my heart.

Once I thought desolation was romantic and sort of cool. Suffering for one's art, and all of that. God, was I fool. Any day you can nearly die laughing or curl up and ache with despair. I choose the laughter. I accept life's dare.

I direct my feet nowadays to the street's sunny side. Often I stumble, Heaven knows. Always, though, I take pride in the fact that I've offered resistance where my demons once had a free ride. High tides float all boats. Misery's defied.

The water gets murky sometimes, but I can refuse to drown. Gazing into the mirror, I can stare my accuser down. You don't get all the days you've spent pouting refunded as you approach death. Between breath and suffocation, I choose breath.

In a year during which a one-time college roommate a few months younger than I died, I am grateful for my excellent health. I am grateful for the love of the extraordinary woman to whom I’m married. I am grateful for the affection of wonderful friends; they are few (my sunny new disposition hasn’t made me less reclusive), but fab.

I’m grateful for my beautiful home, with its view of the Hudson. The sunset Tuesday night was humblingly beautiful; it looked as though the sky were bleeding. I’m grateful that I have plenty to eat, and that my cooking has improved a bit. I'm grateful that the good folks at Central Hudson manage to keep the power on the vast majority of the time. I’m grateful for having rediscovered the work of Scott Spencer, whose writing is on a par with Tuesday night’s sunset.

A year ago, if you’d told me that this blog would have attracted only 17 followers (I somehow managed to sign on in the beginning as my own follower, to my considerable embarrassment), who only rarely comment, after nearly 300 entries, I’d have abandoned the whole idea and treated myself to an extended poutfest. But I’m grateful for those 17, and grateful for the pleasure the work gives me. I am abundantly blessed, and make no mistake.

To paraphrase the Louvin Brothers, I like the grateful life.

Sara(h) Smiles, Part 14: Lovemaking Tips of the Inuits

2010-11-23T23:03:00.002-05:00

Another day, another several dozen America-loving New Yorkers pledged to work on behalf of Sarah’s brand of common-sense conservatism next year and in 2012, another several hundred dollars raised for Sarah’s campaign “war chest,” another bunch of blows struck against the Obamarxism that threatens all of us, even those too hoodwinked by the lamestream media to realize it.

Speaking of the lamestream media, a lot of folks yesterday wanted to talk about Sarah’s declaration that she wouldn’t subject herself to more of that rhymes-with-witch Katie Couric's ridicule, as she was on the CBS Evening News shortly after John McCain invited her to be his running mate in 2008. Behold common sense conservatism in action! How would America gain in any way from Sarah’s once again being ambushed with trick questions like What newspapers do you customarily read? and With which recent Supreme Court decisions do you most disagree? When, in the first instance, Sarah said she reads all of them, or at least all the important ones, do you remember how Couric channeled Billy Idol, sneering to beat the band? Well, if Couric were a tenth as smart as she imagines herself to be, she’d have known that Sarah has a degree in communications from the University of a State With Remarkably Few Coloreds, and knows ethical journalism from the sort the lamestreamers purvey. “I want,” Sarah has declared, “to help clean up the state that is so sorry today of journalism.” Hear, hear!

Much is being made by the left of the second episode of Sarah Palin’s Iowa having fared much less well in the ratings this past Sunday than the first episode. Never mind that advertisements for the first show suggested — misleadingly, as it turned out, but that’s to do with the whim of her producers, and not Sarah herself — that the show would reveal the native Alaskan lovemaking techniques that keep her and Todd itching to get behind closed doors together even after 22 years of marriage. According to TV Guide, though, Sarah in the second episode was to show the viewer how to make moose jerky. Interesting, yes, but obviously lacking the maiden broadcast’s “wow" factor.

Naturally, the lamestreamers haven’t troubled themselves to note in the midst of their gloating that the second SPI trampled the debut of Arianna Huffington’s fashion makeover show on PBS. But I suppose you’ve got to give the strange-accented old shrew credit for coming up with an irresistible concept — making middleaged women more attractive by getting them to dress less dowdily and undergo extensive cosmetic surgery. Yes, of course I’m being sarcastic; in the United Kingdom, where Huffington has almost certainly vacationed, one could easily watch such programmes four hours a night.

In other news, common-sense conservatives are very much in favor of today’s National Opt-Out Day, during which, on this busiest travel day of the year, common-sense conservatives and others will advise Transportation Security Administration airport personnel that they decline to be electronically scanned, and want instead to be patted down.

Predictably, the Obamarxists are citing studies by the Food and Drug Administration, the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, and others who probably share their belief in evolution, to the effect that one is highly unlikely to suffer corneal damage or contract skin, breast, or testicular cancer from the scan. But these are the same people who once told us that fluoridating municipal drinking water would help reduce tooth decay!

A lot of travelers refusing to be scanned is sure to cause chaos at the nation’s airports, and its entirely conceivable that a great many Americans will wind up having to delay their big holiday feast until Friday, traditionally the most fervent consumption day of the year, instead of shopping. A lot of retailers will consequently go under, and the recession will deepen. But that’s a small price to pay for being able to ask Big Government thugs as they pat us down, “Enjoying yourself, faggot?”

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Sara(h) Smiles, Part 13: Think Again, America!

2010-11-23T09:51:00.000-05:00

A lot of people I spoke to yesterday on behalf of the Committee to Elect Sarah in 2012, and Then Again in 2016, as it’s been renamed to demonstrate how very serious we are not only about taking our country back, but keeping it back, were livid about the trial of Ahmed Ghailani, who’d been charged with 280 counts of murder and conspiracy in connection with the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. It was the Obama Justice Department’s bright idea to try him in civil court, rather than by a military tribunal, and his fast-talking, probably Jewish (let’s call a spade a spade!) lawyers convinced the jury that he was guilty of only one count of conspiracy after the Jewish-surnamed (let’s call a spade a spade!) federal judge disallowed the testimony of the guy who sold Ghailani the TNT he used to blow up the embassies just because Ghailani mentioned him only while being tortured.

As we common-sense conservatives see it, Ghailani should have been grateful for any trial, military or otherwise. You didn’t need to know much more about him than his name to know that he was guilty as sin. The only real Americans named Ahmed are wide receivers or running backs. When you give American kids names better suite for Arabs, you’re only asking for trouble. If Bob and Bill and Tom and Jack and Steve and Jebediah were good enough for generations of brave Americans, they’re good enough for NFL and NBA players.

I’m well aware that a lot of liberals can’t bear the thought of torture, and refuse to be consoled by the reassurance that it’s used only on those with accents as weird and foreign as their names. If it keeps one American child from lying awake at night worrying about hijacked jetliners being crash-landed on his or her middle school’s athletic field during football or even cheerleader practice, though, we common-sense conservatives say waterboard, baby, waterboard!

If there’s a silver lining in all of this, it’s that Obama’s Department of Justice has made clear that Ghailani could have been acquitted across the board and still not gone free, as the President has retained what his press secretary has called post-acquittal detention power, a power not even George W. Bush thought to claim. (Two years into his presidency, Obama finally does one little thing better than Bush!) I can’t imagine any right-thinking American having a problem with the president being able to keep a terrorist imprisoned even when he’s been shown in court not to be a terrorist at all. But neither can I imagine any right-thinking American not wishing it were someone as common-sensical as Sarah wielding the power, rather than a Kenya-born Muslim socialist whose middle name is Hussein.

In other news, Our Gal last week decried the "untruths and exaggerated rhetoric" — the latter a word whose meaning she doesn’t quite understand, and almost certainly can’t spell, but not everybody had parents rich enough to send them to Harvard or Yale, so stick it where the sun don't shine LOL — told by Bristol's ex, Levi Johnston, who can’t spell even Johnson. Typically, though, it isn’t her own feelings this profoundly decent woman’s most concerned about, but those of her elder son Track, who, while helping to liberate the Iraqi people, had daily to deal with the cruel irony of risking his life to protect the freedom of speech of those accusing his mom of being an inattentive parent, a money-grubber, and a shameless fame whore.

Here again, we common-sense conservatives diverge from the elitist liberals. We are all in favor of free speech when it’s decent and truthful and doesn’t promote ungodliness. Were our elitist liberal friends not listening in the 70s, though, when many imbued with folk wisdom, the best kind by far, were saying (and singing!) what goes around comes around? Do they really imagine that we as a society aren’t eventually going to have to pay a very high price for our having tolerated anal intercourse, Lady Gaga, and the proliferation of professional athletes with Islamic names? Think again, America!

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Sara(h) Smiles, Part 12: The Bristol Stomp

2010-11-22T18:52:00.001-05:00

I and other common-sense conservatives have just about had our fill now of how plucky, perky, pretty Bristol Palin is being pulverized in the press for still being in the running on this year’s edition of Dancing With the Stars in spite of a lot of allegedly far better celebrity dancers having been sent home in tears. We’re supposed to be ashamed that her success probably owes to the support she’s enjoyed from the countless tens of millions (and counting!) who agree with her mom’s politics.

Am I the first to notice that we hardly heard a peep of protest from the left the past two seasons, when propagandist Michael Moore and then Noam Chomsky, the linguist turned professional America-hater, waltzed home with the Mirror Ball Trophy, apparently thanks to electronic ballot-stuffing by the Obamarxists? I have tonight spent literal hours on YouTube trying to find evidence that it’s possible to dance the paso doble more gracelessly than the elephantine Moore danced it in 2008. Fat chance! And Chomsky’s tango a year ago tonight with partner Edyta Sliwinska was enough to inspire Argentina to break off diplomatic relations with us.

I guess the liberals are as acquainted with the phrases Turnabout is fair play and What’s good for the goose is good for the gander as they are with the brand of patriotism that originally made us great — and will make us great once more when we, behind Sarah, take our country back in 2012.

I think probably Elton John (singing the lyrics of Bernie Taupin) said it best when he said, "Hold me closer, tiny dancer. Count the headlights on the highway. Lay me down in sheets of linen. You had a busy day today."

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Sara(h) Smiles, Part 11: Not Whether to Run, But With Whom?

2010-11-22T10:42:00.000-05:00

It’s a little bit premature, but nonetheless a world of fun to speculate about who will make Sarah's best vice presidential running mate in 2012. Not surprisingly, a lot of the fellow common-sense conservatives I’ve been talking to in the mid-Hudson Valley seem to favor Michele Bachmann, who represents Minnesota’s 6th congressional district in the House. They love her fervent common-sense conservatism related to such issues as global warming, which she has quite correctly identified as a hoax, pointing out that carbon dioxide is "a natural byproduct of nature" and actually required by plant life. There's also a lot of residual enthusiasm in this neck of the woods for the music of Bachman Turner Overdrive, with which Congressman Bachmann has no connection whatever.

Other folks would enjoy seeing Sarah paired with a country music icon — a Carrie Underwood, for example, or even the late Tammy Wynette. But it’s generally felt that Underwood lacks sufficient political seasoning and gravitas, and many are fretful that the Democrats might be able to mount a challenge to the idea of a deceased person serving as vice president — though the Constitution doesn’t specifically forbid it — that would prove both financially and emotionally debilitating. Similar problems may well arise with Carrie Bradshaw by virtue of her being fictional, though she would likely make Sarah more attractive to gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered voters. Oprah, who would make the idea of a Palin presidency more palatable to the differently pigmented, is out because so few Republicans will forgive her for having endorsed the Muslim socialist from whom snatching the country back is what the 2012 election will be all about.

Surely a lot of people would be more likely to vote for a girl and a guy than two girls, so a lot of male running mates are obviously under consideration. As noted the other day, there’s significant enthusiasm in my town for the idea of Iraq president Jalal Talabani, thanks to his refusal to execute Saddam Hussein’s former mouthpiece Tariq Aziz, who’s a sort of Christian. It’s well known that Talabani loves the idea — the American vice presidential annual salary is $208,000, whereas he’s getting only the equivalent of $13.45 per hour, and no dental or vision or limousine, to run Iraq, but getting him naturalized in time for the election is going to be a very tall order, even with powerful common-sense conservatives pulling State Department strings, and no few Republican strategists have fretted openly about the guy’s surname reminding many voters of the Taliban. It’s comparable to Wyoming congressman Jeff Hitler being passed over as Jimmy Carter’s running mate in 1958.

It’s been almost universally noted that a ticket of Sarah and Mitt Romney would be the most physically attractive in American political history, but many observers suspect Mitt might be very hesitant to play second fiddle to Sarah, as too might John Ellis (Jeb) Bush, the former governor of Florida, widely thought to be less an idiot than his big brother George — not that we common-sense conservatives regard George as anything less than the greatest American president of the 21st century. As far as considering taking a back seat to either of these men, Sarah, having run for vice president already, is all like been there done that.

If she asked me — and stranger things have happened! — I would urge Sarah to consider Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of the Burmese democracy and human rights movements. Talk about mama grizzlies! This terrific lady, who won the Nobel Peace Prize (take that, B. Hussein Obama!) in 1991, has had to learn to do her own electrical rewiring and plumbing while spending 15 of the past 21 years under house arrest, but has still found time both to win a Congressional Gold Medal and a star on Hollywood Blvd. Bono likes her, and so do Hugo Chavez and Christina Aguilera! As with the Iraqi guy mentioned above, some major strings will have to be pulled to get her naturalized in time, but it will be well worth the trouble, as every Asian in the country will vote for her, and probably even a few liberals, who will enjoy the idea of having in office someone whose name only they, in their own minds, pronounce properly.

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Sara(h) Smiles, Part 11: Common-Sense Conservatism for Dummies

2010-11-20T07:59:00.000-05:00

In the course of walking from door to door, encouraging my neighbors to help elect Sarah our next president, I am often asked exactly what we common-sense conservatives believe. I think the core belief that separates us from others is in what I’ll call the no-brainer, the simple truth that “hides” in plain sight, but is actually right there for all to see if we don’t allow ourselves to be misled by a lot of fancy rhetoric of the sort in which B. Hussein Obama specializes.

Let’s take our crippling national debt, for instance. Ask a liberal what we can do to keep from saddling our grandchildren with it, and they’ll sneak a peek at their teleprompter, sip their vitamin water to buy time, clear their throats, furrow their eyebrows, fiddle with their cufflinks, have another sip of water, and intone a catchphrase like “cap-and-trade” or “global warming.” But a common-sense conservative will cut right to the chase:

Spend less.

Duh! Does somebody really have to have a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard to tell you that? Alternatively, drill, baby, drill, and sell the oil we don’t use to the Chinese — at an inflated price! Double-duh!

A lot of the people I talk to want to discuss the whole unemployment thing, and I by no means shy away from doing so. We common-sense conservatives recognize that the obvious solution isn’t for the government to hire a lot of undocumented aliens to build bridges to nowhere, for instance, but to lower taxes on the very rich. When Uncle Sam overtaxes the American CEOs, COOs, CFOs, and what have you of big multinational corporations, they, not surprisingly, become disgruntled, and a disgruntled C-whatever-O is rarely as productive as a gruntled one. The corporation’s profits dwindle, and people have to be laid off. This is so hard to follow?

When you actually reduce that same C-whatever-O’s taxes, though, everyone comes out ahead. The C-whatever-O himself works harder and more creatively, meaning, in many cases, that more people need to be hired, rather than fired. When he or she goes home from the office, the C-whatever-O is likely to feel that he or she can hire more domestics or gardeners, and how are these dark-skinned people going to get out to Greenwich or Scarsdale or Bel-Air or Presidio Heights or what have you if not on public transportation? So now more bus drivers are hired to drive more buses, which need servicing by more mechanics, who can afford to get their hair cut more often, so now you’ve got a lot of barbers who suddenly have disposable income with which to take the missus out to dinner, where they leave bigger tips than they might have previously, which means a lot of waitresses can now afford airfare to go visit their grandkids over the holidays, and buy more and bigger presents for them, so now teens who might otherwise be roaming the streets getting each other pregnant or selling crack are being hired as wrappers. Maybe that puts a couple of probation officers or cops out of work, and it’s always sad to see any American stripped of every last shred of self-respect, but the society as a whole come out far, far ahead, and that's what common-sense conservatism is all about! Hello?

Much is made by liberal nay-sayers about American students scoring far lower on math and science tests than their Asian counterparts. I suppose it takes a common-sense conservative to explain that the difference owes to American kids being a lot more well-rounded, and unwilling to spend 18 hours in the library.

We common-sense conservatives believe that the rich are rich for a reason — that they’re smarter than the poor, or harder workers, or just loved more by God. We believe that they deserve our deference and even veneration. We have no problem whatever with their getting to keep a higher percentage of their incomes than you or I, because their doing so guarantees that we continue to have any income at all.

Join us, fellow American. Drill, baby, drill!

Sara(h) Smiles, Part 10: People Who Say Frickin'

2010-11-19T07:21:00.000-05:00

I began volunteering two weeks ago for the Committee to Elect Sarah in 2012 because it was the right thing to do for my country. I anticipated a lot of resistance or even hostility from those of my neighbors who’ve allowed themselves to be hoodwinked by the lamestream media, and asked nothing for my efforts beyond a feeling that I’d done my bit to help restore America to its traditional pre-eminence among nations. I was delighted to discover that only a tiny handful of my neighbors hadn’t come on their own to embrace the values for which Sarah stands — but not nearly so delighted as when I was informed that, because I’d raised more money for the campaign than any other canvasser in southern Dutchess County my second week, I would be one of half a dozen local volunteers invited to meet the candidate and her family when they visited New York City to publicize her new reality show Sarah Palin’s Iowa.

I wasn’t surprised to learn that we would be dining at Applebee’s, whose macaroni-and-cheese I know to be a big favorite of Sarah and other hard-working average Americans. I was a bit surprised to discover that the restaurant would be closed, while we were dining, to the general public, as the general public has come to include an ever larger proportion of common-sense conservatives. But then I realized that autograph hunters and well-wishers would probably make it impossible for any of the Palins to enjoy their meals. If they could close Luddite Bros. department store in Memphis for Elvis, they can certainly close the Times Square Applebee’s for the next leader of the free world!

We five lauded volunteers were led to a big banquet table, to which a big bowl of guacamole and pork rinds (Todd famously won’t allow tortilla chips at the family table) were quickly brought. We volunteers made awkward small talk and munched for a few minutes before the Palins — all except Track, who of course is in Iraq defending our freedom — entered to the accompaniment of Heart’s "Barracuda," which I’d understood Sarah to have been forbidden to use, but some people don’t let Big Government tell them what music they can and cannot enjoy.

In person, Sarah was a little bit smaller than I’d expected, and a little more wrinkly, but as soon as she said, “Hiya!” and grinned her famous grin, all that was forgotten. She’s got to have the whitest teeth in the world, and a really firm grip for a girl, and enough charisma to float a battleship! I wish I’d had a chance to tell her how grateful I am for what she’s doing for our country, but she had the other volunteers to bedazzle, and macaroni to ingest, and it wouldn’t have done for me to try to monopolize her attention.

All her kids were charmers, aside from the controversial Willow, at whose age one is hormonally incapable of being anything other than brutishly surly. When I offered her my hand, she rolled her eyes as though to say, “I am like so sure!” and put both hands behind her back in revulsion.

Traditional as she is, Sarah and her daughters and the female volunteers clustered at one end of the table, while I and Todd and little Trig and the other male volunteer, Jeff, or possibly Geoff, were left to chat manfully to each other. When Jeff tried to kickstart the conversation by asking what it was about tortilla strips that Todd disliked, The First Dude scowled at him in silence for a long moment before snarling, “I’d be glad to tell you if it were any of your frickin’ business.” Jeff blushed luridly, betraying himself as something other than a man’s man, as both Todd and I, I think, instinctively recognized each other to be.

I normally give a wide berth to people who say frickin’, but this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, so I took an excessive swig of my Mountain Dew, belched defiantly, and said that in my view there was no thrill in the world comparable to that of going into the wild and shooting something dead. I expected Todd to offer me his fist to touch my own against and to growl, “You got that right!” What he did, instead, though, was snicker, “You sound like a guy who’s never given the future leader of the free world a mustache ride,” which I found a little ungracious, but of course it isn’t Todd I’ve been going door to door for, nor Todd for whom I and countless tens of millions of other common-sense conservatives will so eagerly vote.

Sara(h) Smiles, Part 9: Your Nobody 'Til Somebody Loves You

2010-11-18T08:23:00.000-05:00

Canvassing in my little town on behalf of the Committee to Elect Sarah in 2002 again today, I was struck by how many of my neighbors liked the idea of recruiting Iraq president Jalal Talabani as Sarah’s presumptive running mate, this in the wake of his having declined to sign the execution order for Tariq Aziz, convicted last month of persecuting Shi’ites not liked by his boss, the late Saddam Hussein. Many folks expressed that they were pleased about this because Aziz was the highest-ranking Christian in Saddam’s inner circle, and perhaps the Middle East’s pre-eminent Episcopalian.

When I interviewed him for Conspicuous Consumption magazine in 1994, I found Aziz to be very much more charming than his frequent rants on the evening news about the West’s being a moral cesspool had led me to expect. He proved to be solicitous and courtly, in fact, an implacable kisser of women’s hands and holder-open of doors for them, twinkle-eyed and wry. And once he had a couple of glasses of gjw, a sort of Iraqi sake, down his throat, he turned into an utterly irresistible raconteur; I wish I were able to relate to you his hilarious story about Michelle Pfeiffer, whom he dated briefly in the 1980s, but after being a major film star for so long, she can easily afford to hire lawyers.

Naturally, not all my neighbors were inclined to let Terry — as Aziz invited me and other Western friends to call him — off the hook, especially when it meant that little videos of his hanging wouldn’t proliferate on the Internet, as had those of Saddam’s. One retired John Deere mechanic over on Offal Street summed up the feelings of many when he said, “The fact that the guy’s a Christian doesn’t mean he didn’t do whatever it was he was convicting of having done, gassing Kurds or whatever.”

Those who didn’t want to talk about Terry all seemed to want to talk about Willow Palin’s having told one antagonist on Facebook on Tuesday, “Your effin fat as hell. Stfu,” and another, “Your such a faggot.” Many were outraged that the lamestream media had been making such a big deal of the middle Palin daughter having, metaphorically, extended her middle finger in defense of her mom’s and big sister’s television programs, Sarah Palin’s Iowa in the one case, and Dancing With Unwed Mothers in Bristol's. “When your in that situation,” one of my neighbors wondered, rather eloquently, I thought, “What are you supposed to do, just lay down on your stomach and let them cornhole you?”

Others were delighted with the introduction of the heretofore seldom-seen STFU, which they’ve been delighted to welcome to their existing arsenals of acronyms, which in most cases already comprise ROFL, LMAO, the rather earthier LMFAO, WTF, and OMG.

But of course there were a couple of elitists who described themselves as “dismayed” (a word as popular with Obama socialists as eschew and palpable) by Willow’s allegedly appalling grammar. To them I say get a life. For the average person who hasn’t been to Yale or Harvard or one of those, your is perfectly fine in all contexts, readily understood — and isn’t that the whole point? — by all.

As for the faggot business, it’s just like the lamestream press to assume the worst when it comes to the Palins. In the United Kingdom, a faggot is either a cigarette or a smaller, weaker fellow pupil whom you feel morally compelled to tyrannize (actually, tyrannise) until he attempts unsuccessfully to hang himself with his school tie, which failure serves only to fan the flames of your and other pupils’ sadism. Knowledge of other cultures is not known to be a hallmark of the Palin household, so we can probably infer that Willow was using it in the more familiar former sense. If this is true, and wholesome young people are now calling one another cigarettes derisively, shouldn’t Big Government, which has for so long been so eager to crush the American tobacco farmer under the jackboot of oppression, be happy, rather than indignant?

I worry about Sarah asking Jalal Talabani to be her running mate. I worry that a lot of people might think she was trying to install the Taliban as vice president, and your all wet, in my view, if you anticipate many Americans being comfortable with that idea.

Sara(h) Smiles, Part 8: The Republican Frontrunners Compared

2010-11-17T08:07:00.000-05:00

I canvass on, and the response remains gratifying. I have observed only one household that was enthusiastic about Obama’s recent tour of weird Asian countries; it was headed by an IT consultant from Mumbai whose wife had a red dot on her forehead. I thought at first that he was introducing himself by profession — as a deejay — but it turned out that he was an IT consultant, and that his name was actually Vijay. I have literally never interacted with an Indian person I found less than charming — though there were moments when Ms. Somi Guha and I wanted to dismember one another — and this was no exception, but I share Sarah’s (unstated, but let’s not be naïve, shall we?) belief that both we and the Indians themselves would be happiest if they stayed on the reservations we were kind enough to grant them, and on which we, bending over backwards to be fair, let them run casinos and ingest peyote to their hearts' content.

I also encountered a couple of voters who, if the election were tomorrow, said they would be more likely to vote for Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee. I appreciate that the latter hides his evangelical fanaticism under great geniality, and has an irresistibly cute surname, one that simultaneously evokes perhaps the greatest character in all of American fiction — Huck Finn — and Applebee’s, which in many communities represents the pinnacle of fine dining. I appreciate too that he can play the bass guitar a little bit, but so could John Kerry, whose last name evoked a beloved Stephen King heroine, and how much good did it do him? I would like Huckabee a lot more if he had a cute regional accent and didn’t think of gay, lesbians, bisexuals, and the transgendered as perverts, except in cases where their (mis)behavior warranted it, as it does far too often!

As for Romney, we’ve never had a president with a more down-to-earth, have-a-coupla-brewskis-with nickname — compared to Mitt, Jimmy and Bill sound like Chauncey and Fauntleroy. (Speaking which, am I the only American sports fan who marvels that there are no professional point guards or cornerbacks named Fauntleroy? Looks to me like an opportunity waiting for an unwed teenaged mother to seize it!) Mitt’s also got the advantage of looking fantastically presidential. Who wouldn’t prefer to see big, chiseled-featured, gray-templed Mitt squeezing the hell out of the hand of a fellow leader rather than B. Hussein Obama, with his disproportionate ears and teeth?

Of course, if we’re going strictly on looks, Sarah is our best choice by a very, very large margin. Can you imagine how the national mood will improve at the sight of the first photos of her receiving Germany’s Angela Merkel — who’s a lot more a GNWF than a MILF, if we’re being honest with each other — or Australia’s Julia Gillard, who might be viewed as a 2 in a flattering light, but isn’t going to take anybody’s eyes off Sarah, who I think most guys would agree is at least a 6.75 (in the over-45 category) at the moment? I know what you’re thinking — that if we elect her in 2012, she’ll be 60 by the time her second term ends, and who’s that hot at 60? Consider this: by 2024, cosmetic surgery will probably have advanced to the point at which Julia Gillard can be a 7, if that’s what she wants, and we’ll probably have made huge strides with botox too.

What I asked voters to bear in mind is that Mitt’s five identical sons look like human Russian dolls, and exclaim, “Holy crap!” when excited, and that his wife Ann is a grown-up version of the universally lusted-after cheerleader in high school who wouldn’t speak to you because she frankly didn’t even see you — you were invisible to girls that hot — or, worse, was so patronizing you wished she really hadn’t seen you. We conservatives know the type only too well. They’re mostly married to so-called progressives with degrees from one of the big elitist East Coast universities — Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and so on — with a lot of ivy. And we common-sense conservatives, in the process of taking back our country, say to hell with ‘em!

George Bush"s Missions Accomplished: A Review

2010-11-16T07:59:00.000-05:00

It should surprise no one that former president George W. Bush’s memoir Missions Accomplished has incurred the disdain of the lamestream progressive media to the extent it has. Did anyone really imagine they were going to read the book objectively? However brazen they may be about their contempt for a leader we common-sense conservatives are confident will come to be recognized as one of our greatest ever, you’d think they’d at least laud his remarkable candor, but fat chance!

He is universally condemned for his lack of candor, and yet how many reviews have you read to date that even mention his disclosure of a brief affair with Katy Perry, then high in the charts with her "I Kissed a Girl," in the last months of his presidency? “The thought of Katy with her tongue halfway down the throat of a [Dallas] Cowboys cheerleader made it so I could have driven nails with [it],” isn’t quite candid enough for you, lamestreamers? And how about the author's admission that when Brokeback Mountain was screened for him and Laura and the Cheneys and the Rumsfelds and the Powells in the White House theatre, he got so turned on watching Jake Gyllenhal and the late Heath Ledger kissing that he had to pretend to have just remembered an important foreign policy decision he had to make, and excused himself to take matters into his own hands, if you will, in the nearest gentlemen’s room.

Much has been made of his assertion that Kanye West’s remarks about his indifference to black people after the flooding of New Orleans was the most disheartening moment of his eight years in office — more disheartening, that is, than learning that another couple of dozen American servicepersons had been blown to pieces in Iraq. While ridiculing him for that, the lamestreamers conveniently ignore his having had the moral courage to nominate not only a black woman, but one with a weird (and not just Shaniqu'aa-weird!) given name, as Secretary of State. He was advised that Condoleeza Rice’s appointment would make America a laughingstock, but he stuck to his guns.

Anyone like myself, whose enthusiasm for sports has always far exceeded his aptitude, can feel the author’s pain when he talks about how, when he tried out for the Yale football team in 1965, the team’s coach, Solly Hemus, snickered at him openly and suggested he might be better suited to cheerleading. Of course that humiliation was nothing compared to that which GWB suffered in his boyhood, when he commonly overheard his mother and handsome former baseball and Navy hero father refer to him in conversation as either “the little dickhead” or Turdblossom, which scarring appellation he would famously repurpose later in life. Those of us who have grown up with a more charismatic younger sibling — former Florida governor Jeb Bush in his case, Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Michael Vick in my own — can identify all too easily with that particular brand of agony.

Having assumed that the only music he liked was by Republican shitkickers, I was intrigued, speaking of Turdblossom, to learn that GWB tried to commission Trent Reznor to compose something more contemporary than “Hail to the Chief” to be used for his entrance music, but that Karl Rove overruled the idea. The reader can certainly understand why GWB was thinking at one point of having Rove pushed out of Air Force One somewhere over the middle of the Antarctic, only for his state visit to Antarctica to be cancelled in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

I have yet to see a single mention, laudatory or otherwise, of GWB’s having sent Aung San Suu Kyi a Sony PlayStation 3 in 2007 to make just a little more bearable her ongoing house arrest in Burma, or Myanmar, or whatever it’s calling itself this week, though the press would surely be all over New Zealand’s John Kay or the Bahamas’ Hubert Alexander Ingraham having demonstrated comparable generosity and thoughtfulness. What does this profoundly good man have to do for a syllable of lamestream approbation?

Sara(h) Smiles, Part 7: Sarah Palin's Iowa

2010-11-15T09:44:00.000-05:00

Every time I think of writing about some fascinating aspect of my life other than my new-found admiration for Sarah Palin and my volunteer work on her behalf, she just keeps pullin’ me back, in the words of Al Pacino in Revenge of the Godfather, — except I can’t be sure without getting it from Netflix again and you can be assured there’s little chance of that happening, whether he dropped his g, as he wasn’t playing an average, normal American like you and I and Sarah, but an Italian-American gangster raised on the East Coast among elitist liberals who imagine they know better than you and I about things in which they have Ph.D.s while you and I, or at least you, dropped out of high school.

In any event, you’ve no doubt heard by now that Sarah’s new reality show, Sarah Palin’s Iowa, debuted last night on TLC, and that the lamestream media are all shook up about her celebration of the so-called Hawkeye State’s mountains and prairies and oceans white with foam and what have you. The whole thing, they say, is a brazen attempt on Sarah’s part to endear herself to the voters whose voices will be heard first when the presidential election primary season kicks off in about a year and a half.

I, for one, love the program, and would probably do so even if I hadn’t embraced common sense conservatism a couple of weeks ago. The concept, if you’ll permit me to use that sometimes-overused word, is uniquely compelling. Each week, a celebrity (Sharon Osbourne was Sunday night’s) parachutes blindfolded into a cornfield in the middle of the state with a bagful of energy bars, a liter of drinking water, a paperback copy of Sarah’s best-selling memoir Going Rogue, a multipurpose knife, and the Bible. If he or she can make it to the International House of Pancakes in Waterloo without being first being picked off by Sarah’s husband Todd and other sharpshooting Alaskans who sharpened their skills shooting wolves from helicopters, he or she becomes eligible for consideration as Sarah’s running mate in 2012. Not only democracy in action, but meritocracy too; to the winner go the spoils!

The sight of Ms. Osbourne very nearly bleeding to death along the side of Interstate 35 just south of Ankeny on Sunday night was very deeply moving, and I think reminded all of us of the importance of the responsible, rather than whimsical, use of firearms, our access to which is guaranteed by the Second Amendment.

Some lamestreamers have decried the hyprocrisy of Sarah’s bewailing would-be biographer Joe McGinniss, not an heir to the Guinness brewing fortune, moving in next door to her in Wasilla as an invasion of her family’s privacy. If she’s so protective of her family’s privacy, they whine, why is she displaying them, warts 'n' all, in her reality show? That's exactly the sort of pettiness you have to expect in today’s ever-more-fractious political environment — not that I either know or care what fractious means, having been befuddled by fractions, as by all math, as a boy.

In other news, it’s just been revealed that Randy Scheunemann, Sarah's foreign policy adviser, a member of her inner circle, and a person the spelling of whose surname requires intense concentration, has since 2003 been paid over $150,000 by the billionaire philanthropist George Soros for promoting Burmese cuisine as a viable alternative to Thai cuisine for American diners.

Because Glenn Beck recently exposed Soros as a "puppet master" orchestrating a coup "to bring America to her knees," I suppose the lamestreamers would like to see Scheunemann lynched or deported or something. We common sense conservatives, though, recognize that there’s some good in everyone. That Soros is intent on handing our country over to the Greeks doesn’t mean that his efforts on behalf of those with peanut allergies don’t deserve commendation. Indeed, my understanding is that negotiations are under way to invite Soros onto SPI as celebrity guest, with Beck as guest marksman.

And there are those who’ll tell you this isn’t a great country!

Falling in Love With Mick Again!

2010-11-13T08:39:00.000-05:00

I find myself liking Mick Jagger more as I write this than at any time in the 38 years since I met him. When I’d seen him at a party at the Continental Hyatt House a few evenings before, he’d seemed snarlingly standoffish; I would soon come to realize, on a much, much smaller scale, of course, that the famous and sought-after have to try to exude unapproachability out in the world, lest they drown in the felicitations of well-wishers. At the mansion in Bel-Air where he and the first (only?) Mrs. Jagger were staying while he finished mixing Exile on Main Street, though, he was utterly charming, gracious and solicitous. He even said he’d heard of Christopher Milk. After our desultory (my fault!) interview, he didn’t have me shown to the door, but made clear that he was enjoying my company. We chatted and snickered at Ralph Williams Ford commercials on TV for perhaps another hour.

The problem was that I was apparently the only person in the world who found Exile, except for the sublime "Tumblin’ Dice", woefully sub-standard. And each of their subsequent albums, except maybe Some Girls, made Exile sound better and better in comparison.

I saw them live at Anaheim Stadium and thought them a cruel self-parody. Decades passed. I’d see them on TV and wonder why someone didn’t try to persuade poor Mick to stop strutting back and forth so frantically every now and again; it looked more and more desperate as the years went by. I found his and Mr. Bowie’s “Dancing in the Street” video very laboured — and watched it through my fingers. I saw Mick 25 years later on the most recent Rock and Roll Hall of Fame special, the one at which the veins in Bruce Springsteen's neck kept threatening to explode, and was embarrassed for him. He was singing with Fergie (do I betray how old I am by thinking it necessary to append of Black-Eyed Peas?). At one point he grabbed for her hand, but she, owing either to inattention or something worse, was having none of it. Dissed! How the mighty had fallen!

Around the same time, I happened to see on YouTube a video of a long-ago live Rolling Stones performance in which some genius somehow gets on stage and makes a run at Keith Richards. Looking fairly pleased about the whole thing, Keith unstraps his guitar and happily tries to knock the guy’s head off. After stagehands get the guy off stage, Keith calmly puts the guitar back on and resumes playing. Tuning's for sissies!

Coolest thing I’ve ever seen a rock musician do. Or at least in the Top 5.

So now Keith’s dictated his memoirs, and they’re apparently highly critical of my old pal Mick, and Mick has written a 5000-word repudiation of them, and I’m frankly awed — by his excellent prose, by his wit, by how persuasively he makes the case that it’s all very nice that Keith has comes to be perceived as rock and roll made flesh, but that he's also an awful parent and friend and an absolute nightmare of a bandmate. “Keith likes to talk a lot,” Mick writes, “about his getting clean from heroin. It is not correspondingly apprehended that he replaced the heroin comprehensively with liquor. Given a choice [you need a comma here, Mick] I select the slurring alcoholic over the comatose junkie as a lifelong professional partner, and I say this with some knowledge of the two alternatives. But neither is strictly desirable.” Gorgeous — and not atypical of the rest of the piece. Or how about “Keith stands back, amazed at the things that just … happen to him. He is frequently the victim of faulty wiring in the hotels in which we bivouac; a surprising number of times this phenomenon has caused fires. Ritz-Carltons are not built the way they use[d] to be, I guess.”

Mick!

Elvis, an unashamed mama’s boy, addressed everyone as either sir or ma’am. I’m not entirely enthusiastic about Elvis’s courtliness having been supplanted by Keef’s implacable brattishness as the rock and roll norm, as it’s given us wholesale substance abuse and misogyny and Motley Crue, none of which is…strictly desirable.

[Sara(h) Smiles resumes on Monday.]

Sara(h) Smiles, Part 6: Grocerygate

2010-11-12T08:11:00.000-05:00

Canvassing some more for Sarah yesterday, I had, as you can well imagine, to answer a lot of questions about what some are calling Grocerygate. Speaking recently in Rectal, Ohio, Our Gal observed, "Everyone who goes out shoppin' for groceries knows that prices have risen significantly over the past year or so." Whereupon a fellow in the Wall Street Journal asserted that no such thing was the case, as inflation through the first nine months of 2010 had been a very low 0.6 percent. Whereupon Our Gal claimed to have read an earlier article in the WSJ entitled "Food Sellers Grit Teeth, Raise Prices: Packagers and Supermarkets Pressured to Pass Along Rising Costs, Even as Consumers Pinch Pennies," and teased the reporter for not reading his own paper, as ordinary housewives and former governors of Alaska like herself somehow find time to do. Sweet payback for a woman whom that rhymes-with-witch Katie Couric famously tried to portray as blissfully ignorant!

The problem, in the eyes of some, being that what "Food Sellers Grit Teeth, Raise Prices: Packagers and Supermarkets Pressured to Pass Along Rising Costs, Even as Consumers Pinch Pennies" actually said was that grocery prices had only just begun to rise, and in fact hadn’t done so during the period during which Our Gal said they’d risen “significantly.”

In other words, another transparent attempt by the lamestream media to make Our Gal seem like a nincompoop.

On discovering that the reporter Sarah was sparring with was named Sudeep Reddy, I immediately suspected one of two things — either that he was some sort of weird foreigner, or that he was in some way related to Helen Reddy, the ghastly Australian recording artist of the 1970s. If the former, was it not safe to postulate that he was a Hindu? Hindus don’t eat beef, and beef-eating is one of the God-given rights we Americans hold most dear, and are you as uncomfortable as I with the idea of a national landscape from which Hindus and vegetarians and animal rights extremists have caused McDonald’s to disappear, and marauding gangs of persons newly stripped of their McJobs are breaking into the homes and offices of hard-working Republicans, desperate for protein and sodium?

You may recall that Helen Reddy’s biggest hit, the feminist (ring, you alarm bells, ring!) anthem "I Am Woman" contained what may be — if you don’t count “She’s precocious and she knows what it takes to make a pro blush” from Kim Carnes’ "Bette Davis Eyes” — the worst lines in any English-language pop song ever: “I’m still an embryo, with a long, long way to go.”

Or maybe Mr. Reddy isn’t a Hindu or related to Helen at all. Maybe he’s a — who’d have guessed? — Muslim, much like our president, and thus a dog-hater. A lot of the folks I call on in the course of my canvassing are surprised to learn that it is haram (forbidden) for a Muslim to keep a dog inside the house merely as a pet without any necessity, need, and/or benefit. The Prophet is reported by Al-Bukhari and Muslim to have said: “Whoever keeps a dog save for hunting or for guarding crops or cattle will loose one qirat of his reward everyday.” (And you wondered why there's been a herd of cattle grazing behind the White House since B. Hussein Obama got his daughters their Rottweiler!) In the world Osama bin Laden and Sudeep Reddy want you to live in, there is no place for Fido! And such a person is lecturing the former governor of one of our most picturesque states on the relative expensiveness of groceries? I don’t think so!

Further investigation into Mr. Reddy reveals that he formerly reported on economics and politics for the Dallas Morning News. Maybe you remember what Dallas is best known for; maybe the words “grassy knoll” make your blood run cold, as they make mine? Maybe right around now you’re thinking that rather than being allowed to try to derail the candidacy of the candidate most able and most likely to Get America Back On Track, Mr. Sudeep Reddy, since he obviously doesn’t hold dear what a majority of decent, hard-working Americans hold dear, ought to be on a plane back to wherever he comes from. I know I am!

Sara(h) Smiles, Part 5: Candy From Babies

2010-11-11T08:22:00.000-05:00

I’d tell you that knocking on doors and asking people to contribute to the Committee to Elect Sarah in 2012 while B. Hussein Obama was in Asia was like taking candy from a baby, but attentive readers will remember that the only experience I’ve had with babies’ candy involved slipping it to them in supermarkets when their mothers are preoccupied. My first choice has always been to drop odd items into strangers’ carts when they’re not looking, but there’s something about the sight of an infant or toddler riding in a shopping cart that renders me incapable of not slipping him or her a Snickers, say, or a Butterfinger while Mama’s gauging the relative ripeness of avocados, or the relative expensiveness of paper towels of comparable thickness and, one supposes, absorbency.

When people answered their doors I had only to point at my Sarah 2012 lapel button to inspire them to break into huge grins and ask me to wait while they got their chequebooks or piggybanks or what have you. One elderly fellow had a huge trunkful of pre-1960 cents (Americans do not have such things as pennies, you know), with olive branches and text on Abe’s flip side, rather than the Lincoln Memorial. He’d been collecting them for 50 years, and had had 5623 the last time he’d counted them, in 2007. I’ve always been rotten at math, but even if it were up to 8000, that would only be $80, and I wasn’t going to try to drag his trunk all the way to my car for $80. When he insisted on Sarah having the money, I told him I would return as soon as I could hire a couple of Guatemalan or Honduran day laborers from in front of the Home Depot in Fishkill to help me.

There are only Mexicans and the occasional Finn in front of the Home Depot in Fishkill.

Just about everyone agreed that there was something very fishy about Obama suddenly wanting to visit his childhood school in Indonesia at a time when his own country is going to hell. Many speculated that, in the wake of the beating he took in the midterm election, he’s trying to find comfort among his own kind — a kind other than our own. One person figured he wanted to see if the desk into which he’d gouged Marxism Forever all those years ago was still at his old school. A couple of people — one of whom claimed to have voted for Sarah in every election since 1988, which I didn’t find feasible, as Sarah was 12 then, and not old enough to hold public office even in Alaska — saw the whole excursion as proof that the president really is a Muslim. “Ain’t there enough weird furriners in this country that he don’t have to go flying all over the damn world to see some?”

A couple of blocks away, I encountered my first whack-job, as we volunteers are expressly forbidden to call them, but call them nonetheless. This guy was sitting around smoking in his own house in mid-afternoon in a coat and tie and black patent loafers he kept bending down to rid of ashes with saliva-dampened fingertips. At no time during my visit, which was at least four times as long as I’d have preferred, did he have fewer than two cigarettes going at once, and I’m pretty sure he absentmindedly lit a third a couple of times. He had nothing but the fiercest contempt for so-called birthers who believe that Obama was actually born in Kenya, rather than Honolulu. His view was that anybody with a drop of sense would have apprehended from his surname that our president was actually black Irish, and that his real birth certificate, a JPEG of which he claimed was readily downloadable as a PDF from the Internet, was in the name of Declan Hussein O’Bama.

I couldn’t help but laugh at the thought that anyone — let alone anyone smart enough to edit the Harvard Law Review — would change the Declan and O’Bama, but leave the Hussein. My host said, “What the hell is so goddamned funny?” and pulled a pistol from the inside breast pocket of his suit, as the Second Amendment gives him every right to do. It was nonetheless enough to make me wish I’d devoted the afternoon to getting the earlier guy’s collection of pre-1960 pennies back to CES2012 offices. But of course there are no pennies in America, but only possibilities — endless ones, wonderful ones.

Sara(h) Smiles, Part 4: Hard Partyin'!

2010-11-10T08:21:00.000-05:00

On my second day of knocking on doors for Sarah 2012, I encountered some resistance, from someone who felt toward Our Gal as I myself had mere weeks before, when I hadn’t yet seen the light. How, this woman asked me, could she possibly vote for anyone so defiantly ignorant, so manifestly stupid? I assured her that I myself had voted for Obama in 2008, and had even danced in the street the night of his election, only to discover two years later that my fellow Americans had come in large numbers to regard his presidency as hardly less disastrous than George W. Bush’s. I said that at some point it hardly made sense to keep fighting the good fight when so many of my neighbors seemed determined to fight the bad one.

I mused rhetorically that it was looking a gift horse in the mouth to have been born American but not to feel entitled. I have long made it a practice when given too much change or not charged for an item or two to keep my mouth shut; I see such serendipity as life’s way of whispering, “You know, Johnny, you’re all right.” To refuse such largesse would be churlish; it’s a small step from that to whipping yourself while looking at photographs of the widow Schroeder, a la Agent Van Alden in Boardwalk Empire. Drill, baby, drill!

Back at the office, I learned that I was to spend the balance of the day planning a party for our interns for that evening. The Mama Grizzly in Charge explained that the campaign was committed to playing just slightly less hard than it worked. She gave me a credit card and told me to buy enough ginger ale, granola bars, Slim Jims, Doritos, and Sara Lee cheesecake to keep a couple of dozen hard-partyin’ interns rockin’ for a few hours. I was to use her iTunes account to download Christian rock and disco for them to dance to, and hire no fewer than four chaperones, to be disguised as security guards, with walkie-talkies and what not, to keep the interns from behaving in a way that Sarah might find distasteful. It occurred to me that we might be able to lure Hollow Notes, the Hall & Oates tribute band in which the little one with the mustache now plays, up to perform for the kids if we offered more than what the Cherry Hill Holiday Inn was paying them, but MGIC said there wouldn’t be time on such short notice to ensure that their entire repertoire was appropriately godly. I was to ensure that there would be enough The Joys of Abstention and Heterosexuality — A Choice I’m Proud to Make (and Re-Affirm) Every Day brochures for all.

The first thing that impressed me about the actual party was that everyone showed up exactly at 7:30, the time at which the festivities were scheduled to begin. In their unnerving bright-eyedness, they reminded me of the Mormon kids who come down from Utah every summer to work as servers at the spectacularly mediocre restaurants in the Grand Canyon. But I suppose I should be grateful that only one of them — a boy, Josh, who was pretty clearly thinking impure thoughts about one of the other interns, Cake (who I understood to have changed her name from Kimberlee in honor of Sarah’s own child-naming style) had to be escorted from the recreation room to the parking lot, where the chaperones beat him so mercilessly that he was pronounced unlikely to be able to vote in any presidential election before 2016, by which time, with any luck, we’ll have renamed ourselves The Committee to RE-Elect Sarah.

Sara(h) Smiles, Part 3: Knockin' on Actual Doors

2010-11-09T09:21:00.001-05:00

Once having phoned the various rock stars I’d been asked to contact, and that stuck-up so-and-so (I’m really beginning to master the lingo, I think!) Michael Palin, I finally exacted Mama Grizzly in Charge’s permission to go out and knock on some actual doors.

There are those (now I sound like Ronald Reagan!) who will wonder why, mere days after the midterm elections, we in the Committee to Elect Sarah in 2012 are already out knockin’ doors in anticipation of a presidential election two years down the road. The answer is that, if Glenn Beck is right and Obama has thousands of socialist brownshirts ready to nationalize the banks and declare martial law and shut down Fox News and what have you, we want to have enough money to evacuate all right-thinking, patriotic Americans up to Alaska, or at least one of the white supremacist strongholds in northern Idaho, and busfare isn’t cheap these days, as you’ve probably noticed unless you’re a liberal elitist in a Prius.

Given the stranglehold Jewish socialists have on the lamestream media, I was frankly expecting to encounter a lot of resistance, but I was warmly welcomed into the first house on whose door I tapped. Middleaged (assuming he’s going to live to about 110), unshaven, Budweiser-gutted, and backward baseball-capped — even though it was a New York Jets cap, and they’re actually a football team — my host zseemed delighted to have company, and was even more delighted when I revealed on whose behalf I was calling on him. He wasn’t able to make a contribution, as he’d been unemployed for 38 months, and was living on what he’d managed to save during his years as a broker of subprime mortgages.

I’d have enjoyed discussing the issues with him, and getting a real average American’s view on the jeopardy on which Obama socialism has placed our way of life, but he turned out to be strangely irate about Elvis Presley’s having done virtually all his military service in Germany. It was his understanding that Elvis, like Bill Clinton after him, didn’t regard fellatio as real sex, and his belief that if Elvis had had to fight the Taliban rather than sit around eating fried banana, peanut butter, and sauerkraut sandwiches and receiving oral sex from apple-cheeked frauleins, he’d have been a very different person when he returned to civilian life, one less inclined to record “In the Ghetto,” say, or “Smoke on the Water.”

I pointed out that Sarah herself has a son, Sprig, in the military, and will be a lot more circumspect about putting fine young American men and women — or at least the kind of young American men and women whose circumstances are so desperate as to make military service seem an attractive option — in harm’s way than B. Hussein Obama, who was busy experimenting with drugs and editing the Harvard Law Review when his country needed him. My host admitted to having not served in the military himself, and of actually owning no Elvis records or CDs; he described himself as more of a Pete Seeger man. I didn’t suppose it would advance anyone’s cause to point out that St. Pete had sung for Obama in 2008, and for other socialists in earlier elections.

He asked if I’d heard the bootleg CD of Pete jamming with Bruce Springsteen, Axl Rose, John Mellencamp, Willie Nelson, and the Jonas Bros. I suspected he was pulling my legs about the Jonas Bros., and indeed he was. His wife or girlfriend or what have you (he didn’t introduce us) brought us a bag of Cheetos and a couple of cold Bud Lites to enjoy while we listened to the music. I didn’t actually like it very much, but trying to pretend I did seemed the least I could do to help take our country back from the Muslims and wealth-spreaders and what have you.

Sara(h) Smiles Part 2: That Ludicrous Cow

2010-11-08T08:33:00.000-05:00

I was so excited about my first day of canvassing for Sarah 2012 that I woke up a few minutes after four in the morning, and then couldn’t get back to sleep. I got up and took a shower, did some calisthenics, realized I should have done the calisthenics first, re-did them, showered again, and made myself some oatmeal, which is rich in fiber. It was still only six, so I took another shower and ironed my socks and underwear. I opened the door and breathed in the fragrance of a new American morning, one full of hopefulness and free of Nancy Pelosi as the Speaker of the House, and put on my Dockers and God Bless Our Troops T-shirt. I listened to a couple of my Toby Keith CDs, exchanged felicitations on Facebook with a couple of my fellow recent see-ers of the light, and headed for work in the Humvee I leased over the weekend in which to drive the two miles to work each day because its gets shameful gas mileage, and it’s our right as Americans to be wasteful of finite natural resources, and if we don’t exercise that right, we’re apt to lose it, and the Committee to Elect Sarah in 2012 pays for my gasoline. Drill, baby, drill!

Imagine my disappointment on arriving at CES2012 headquarters and immediately being informed that I needed to speak with Ruth L—, the self-described MGIC (mama grizzly in charge) (that’s what it says on her door!). In view of my background in the music business, she’d decided to have me spend the day on the phone.

My first calls were to secure the use of the Hall & Oates hit “Sara Smile” for use as the theme song of Our Gal’s candidacy. I discovered that the duo had broken up in 1989. The tall, blonde singer is now working in the plumbing supplies section at a Lowe’s in western Pennsylvania to try to reconnect with his working class roots, while the stumpy little porn-mustached guitar player, whose co-top billing I was never able to fathom, is now leading a Hall & Oates tribute act called Hollow Notes, on whose Website I was amused to note that someone had seen them at the Holiday Inn in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, a couple of weeks ago and thought they were really good except for the guitar player, who “[didn’t] look nothing [sic] at all like the real guy.” And here he was the real guy, albeit 25 years after the fact!

He’s a bitter alcoholic these days, and hadn’t even heard of future president Palin, but was happy to release the rights to the song, and even to add an h to Sara, for $25,000 because the rights weren’t actually his. I talked him down to $300 and a case of Bud Lite, and moved on to my next calls, to a succession of rock personalities who in the past have endorsed Republican candidates or ideals. Sammy Hagar, who once sang so poignantly about his disinclination to kowtow to Big Government by observing the 55 miles per hour speed limit, and who once celebrated that Ronald Reagan “kicks ass,” said he’d be pleased to record a rockin’ new version of the Hall & Oates classic for our use. Ted Nugent eagerly agreed to overdub a guitar solo on it if Sammy were “into” the idea. Calls to the estate of the late Johnny Ramone weren’t returned.

Once having contacted the various rock stars, I next had to call the comedian and geographer Michael Palin at his home just outside London to see if I could persuade him to try to reunite Monty Python, except for the dead gay one, to do an international television special to benefit CES2012. No mincer of words, he said he’d sooner be chased naked through a field of chin-high nettles by rabid Rottweilers. I asked if he might in that case be persuaded to record just a series of Palin for Palin TV spots, but he would have none of that either. I didn't like his snooty tone, and asked where he imagined he’d be without the patronage of tens of millions of American nerds who’d adored Python back in the proverbial day, to the point of being able to recite whole sketches from memory in such a way as to make them seem utterly unfunny, and who now regarded Our Gal as totally hot. He said he couldn’t imagine any Python fan finding “that ludicrous cow” anything other than contemptible.

In the United Kingdom, it’s perfectly permissible to characterize a foolish woman as a cow, and even to use the f-word on television after the sprogs have pissed off to bed, but there are closed circuit television cameras nearly everywhere, and Obama-style socialism. I asked Palin, just out of curiosity, which university he had attended. He said Oxford, which sounded to me like the sort of place that turned out liberal elitists who think they know better than other people. “Well,” I said, “there’s your explanation,” and hung up, or, as they’d express it in the UK, put the phone down.

2010-11-06T10:44:00.001-04:00

One of the awesome things about having grown old is being able to differentiate the battles you might be able to win from those you haven’t a prayer of winning. I have realized this week that it’s futile to rage, rage against the dying of the light of American voter intelligence, have heard the grass growing, have read the writing on the wall. It’s every person for himself now, and I will tender no apology for having slinked over to the other side last night while most of my neighbors were watching wrestling.

I have spent the past 12 hours since joining the Sarah 2012 campaign feeling not only unashamed, but in fact lighter than air. I’d had no inkling how liberating it would feel to embrace someone with as clear a vision as Sarah’s. In the past, I have always had grave doubts when she has spoken of common sense conservatism, because it reminded me of Ronald Reagan. But now, as I look back, I realize that the Reagan years really were very good ones for America. I still had my looks in those days — oh, did I! For the first half of his presidency, I was very happily married to a woman I’d fancied from afar for ages. I was driving a little automobile that I really liked, a Renault Le Car, and felt certain that at any moment I would regain the fame and fortune that I’d enjoyed early in the previous decade. Reagan was handsome and comfortable behind a lectern or dais, and there was no denying that I’d much enjoyed several of the motion pictures in which he’d starred — A Hard Day’s Night, On the Waterfront, Citizen Kane, and what have you.

Having a physically attractive leader buoys the national spirit, without our even realizing it. The early 1960s, when John F. Kennedy and then Don Draper were our leaders, were very happy for nearly everyone, what with all the talk of Camelot and what-not, and so were the Reagan years, during which a lot of appealing “New Wave” music of which I was fond was recorded and performed. In the same way, I think we will all of us be much better off for having easy-on-the-eyes Sarah Palin in the White House, especially if one of her key advisors is able to convince her to ditch the glasses in favor of contact lenses. (Boys don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses.) I’m not denying for a minute that Mitt Romney is a major hunkboat too, but he’s a Mormon, and that makes me hardly less uncomfortable than our current president, with his unappealingly protuberant ears, being a Muslim.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about whether Sarah’s antipathy toward elitism is a good or bad thing. There are those who characterize her stance (I’m getting a little hot just typing that!) as demagogic, and anti-intellectual, but I’m not so sure anymore. I myself didn’t go to one of those expensive private East Coast universities like Harvard or Yale or Stanford, but at the western university I did attend, there were plenty of cretins — plenty of them, so maybe Sarah’s not so far off base after all when she encourages the average person not to allow themselves to be pushed around by someone with a Ph.D. from one of the ivy-covered universities I feel no compulsion to identify by name again so soon after doing so the first time.

It’s pretty obvious that in 2012 it’s likely to be Sara against Hilary; B. Hussein Obama, I think, is going to be good and sick by then of everybody hating on him, and will go back to wherever he really came from with his tail between his legs, and I’m speaking metaphorically, so let’s not have any accusations of racism, OK, especially in view of my having, uh, dated Alice R. Everhart just before Reagan was first elected president. When I start canvassing for Sarah on Monday, I will ask voters which candidate has in the past demonstrated greater verve and imagination — the one who named her daughter after a goddamned Joni Mitchell song, or the one who’s given her children awesome unusual names like Bristol, Sprig, Calculus, and D’Brickashaw.

Leased Hyundais and Anger Management

2010-11-05T08:45:00.000-04:00

I thought I’d really cracked it this time. I thought this time I’d come up with an idea for a business that would not only make me a handsome living, but get a few of my neighbors off the unemployment rolls, and restore their all-important sense of self-worth, and greatly benefit other neighbors.

The idea was this. I would, on an as-needed basis, hire big or otherwise intimidating persons to whom my actual clients could stand up to impress their dates or even spouses. Say, for instance, that Bob Fishkill had been exchanging emails with Mary Wappinger after they “met” on Facebook, or via a matchmaking Website. Say that Bob hadn’t exactly been the middle linebacker on his high school football team, but that Mary had described herself as in the market for “a guy who won’t allow themselves to be pushed around.” Well, before taking Mary to Olive Garden, say, or Red Lobster, Bob might phone me and ask that I send a big handsome bruiser in the Ben Roethlisberger mode over to hit on Mary while Bob was in the little boys’ room. When he got back, Bob would squint at my ringer Clint Eastwoodishly and growl, “Anything I can help you with, pal?” My ringer would size Bob up, look back and forth between him and Mary, swallow hard, and finally slide off his barstool, saying, “Hey, I don’t want any trouble, sir.”

As he hurried away, glancing nervously back over his shoulder, Bob, glowering, would immediately look a great deal sexier to Mary. She and Bob might wind up having mutually pleasurable sex, and embark on a long relationship that would make them both better people, and the big bruiser would go home with a few bucks in his pocket, and some of the self-respect that was unceremoniously snatched from him when the construction industry went to hell two years ago restored.

It sounded good on paper, at least.

My first client was a divorced ophthamologist with a typically Jewish surname who took his date to dinner at the Culinary Institute up in Hyde Park, expecting to be able to appear to intimidate the parking valet. The problem being that the guy I’d hired, Adolfo, hadn’t seen fit to mention on his application that he was narcoleptic. When the ophthamologist and his dental hygienist date emerged from the restaurant, Adolfo was sound asleep behind the wheel of a leased Hyundai Sonota he’d been in the process of parking, and the ophthamologist got into a shouting match with the real parking attendant, who’d dropped out of a series of court-ordered anger management classes a couple of years before to puruse a career as a welterweight boxer. He broke the ophthamologist’s nose with one punch. That Adolfo and the dental hygienist announced their engagement last week gave me no consolation whatever.

I have to date had only one success story. Rob, who has had a crush on a barista, Celeste, at the westernmore of our two Maine Street coffee houses, asked me to arrange for a pair of belligerent butch lesbians to give Celeste a hard time this past Tuesday afternoon, when passions were running high because of the elections. Rob happened to wander in just as the bigger and meaner of the lesbians was telling Celeste that, if cappuccino-making ability were saliva, Celeste wouldn’t be able to dampen a postage stamp. Celeste appeared on the verge of either bursting into embarrassed, angry tears or hurling a potful of hot American decaf in her tormentor’s face when Rob, “overhearing,” stepped into the fray’s midst and asked the lesbians, “Hey, why don’t the two of you drive up to Massachusetts and get married or something?”

As it happened, the lesbians had been thinking of doing exactly that anyway, and took Rob’s inquiry as an omen that the moment was right. Rob and Celeste were seen holding hands at last weekend’s farmers market down by the river, where they pretended to be interested in overpriced organic produce and exchanged knowing smirks when one of our local folksingers began braying one of the Pete Seeger classics for which the area is, for better or worse, known.

Speaking of Tiresome

2010-11-04T10:15:00.000-04:00

If you’d been Pat Burrell, and you’d struck out 11 of the 13 times you’d gone to bat over the course of the four games in which you played, would you have felt right about jumping up and down jubilantly with your fellow San Francisco Giants on Monday night at the moment they won the World Series? I’m not at all sure I would; I’d have been worried that at any second one of my teammates would have snarled, “What the fudge [there’s more born-again sanctimony in baseball than in any other sport] are you doin’, Burrell?” But that’s just me — or, to be grammatical, I.

Spontaneous expressions of jubilation by victorious baseball teams always amuse me mightily, as they’re so un-spontaneous. Intent on demonstrating that they’re absolutely overcome by joy — in exactly the same way they’ve seen previous big game winners be overcome by joy — players jump up and down like poorly coordinated three-year-olds, or hurl themselves atop each other. If they were shown a group of florists, hairdressers, and interior decorators behaving identically on Christopher Street or in the Castro, the ballplayers would surely go apoplectic with revulsion. In a sport in which, after being struck by a 95 miles-per-hour fastball in the shoulder, you’re not allowed to rub it for fear of being seen as a drinker of pink tea, as Ty Cobb liked to put it, and in which players are expected to slobber and spit implacably even if they’ve never had a shred of chewing tobacco in their mouths, this cannot fail to be seen as pretty goddamned funny.

As an enthusiastic watcher of ESPN while I cook, I have now seen the LeBron James What Should I Do? Commercial 750,000 times — that is, even more than I have seen the one about how sexy former Eagle Scout and extremely Regular Guy Mike Rowe’s ass looks in his jeans, whose brand no one can force me to name. What should you do, you spectacularly tiresome egomaniac? Ask Nike to have a heart and take the commercial off the air.

Speaking of tiresome, have you noticed that football coaches and commentators don’t give their audience credit for being able to keep in mind what sport is being talked about? It isn’t just common in 2010 to hear a coach say, for instance, “We think we’ve got a very talented football team, and that we’re going to win us some football games,” which I suppose comes in handy for those who might have imagined they’re talking about lacrosse or synchronized swimming. But I won’t pretend it doesn’t get on my nerves as much as baseball managers and commentators seeming to feel compelled to insert the word “ball” as frequently as possible, as in, “We think we’ve got a very talented ball club this year, and that, if we can stay healthy, we’re going to win a few ball games.”

I’m reminded — and God knows it takes little to remind me — of my perennial dismay at the number of person-hours that are squandered in this Great Country of Ours each year on unnecessarily painting or otherwise including the word Now on signs proclaiming Now Open. As we discussed yesterday, it’s not possible to live through an election without noticing that a very large percentage of Americans are defiant nitwits, but how many of them do you suppose, if they passed a place of business with a sign out in front saying Open, would wonder to themselves, “I wonder if that means now, or as of [for instance!] next February 17?”

Bitch, bitch, bitch! It’s fun!

American Democracy - A Rotten Idea!

2010-11-03T08:35:00.002-04:00

The phone’s ringing off the hook, but no one I know has called me today. I think I must have received a robocall from every candidate for political office in the mid-Hudson Valley area — and her brother. Mostly, I just hang up immediately. A couple of times, though, I’ve listened while a grave-voiced announcer asks something like, “Did you know that [such-and-such a candidate] is in favor of free Cialis for child molesters, and sacrifices parochial school virgins to Satan in months that have a 6th?” Elsewhere, we’re told that this candidate, or that one, favors not only eradicating Social Security, but pushing all our seniors into a mass grave and then burying them alive — after…harvesting their corneas and removing all their gold and silver dental fillings. It seems to me that had it been made in 2010, Lee Atwater’s famous Willie Horton TV ad for George H. W. Bush — the one implying that Michael Dukakis was an habitual early releaser from prison of aboriginal-looking black rapists — would hardly have stood out enough to be noticed.

Are we, as a people, really this stupid? Do surveys demonstrate that the sort of mindlessness that spirals completely out of control in the October of every election year is really what voters respond to? In New York, Andrew Cuomo is expected to be elected governor because the Republican candidate, endorsed by the Tea Party, is a brutish, homophobic numbskull who circulates videos of women getting intimately acquainted with horses — but maybe in spite of the Republican candidate being a brutish, homophobic numbskull who circulates videos of women getting intimately acquainted with horses. The Facebook ads I keep seeing say that Cuomo perceives Albany, the state capital, as woefully corrupt, but has A Plan to Clean It Up. Which I guess is to say that he won’t be making a succession of compromises and unsavory deals, as every politician must, in the interests of pleasing those primarily responsible for funding his campaign, and likely to contribute significantly to his re-election campaign in a few years.

Does anyone really believe this stuff? If so, do you not share my great discomfort at the thought of their being allowed to operate automobiles, much less heavy machinery?

A couple of years ago, Elliot Spitzer had to resign New York’s governorship after it was discovered that he enjoyed the company of call girls. Every time I see him on TV, I’m struck by what a shame this was, as I agree with a great many of his positions. God forbid, though, that an American politician should have foibles.

I feel sure I accurately remember attorney general Janet Reno admitting having screwed the pooch in a big way late in the Clinton presidency; it might have been to do with the Branch Davidians or something, but that isn’t the important part. What is important was that polls suggested that a hefty majority of the American public actually admired her for being candid. I’m forever wondering why more politicians don’t come out from behind the crapola mists. Imagine Spitzer having said, “Yeah, after [however many] years of marriage, I do indeed enjoy sneaking off with a 24-year-old hottie whenever my schedule permits. So yes, I’m an asshole in that way, but what you should care about a lot more is that I’m an effective politician who will, if you’ll all just take a chill pill, accomplish important stuff for the state.” Is it not safe to imagine that a great many voters would have joined me in backing him?

I don’t care if the guy who services my brakes has sex with prostitutes, so long as he ensures that my car stops when I need it to do so. Why should I care in the slightest if a politician patronizes call girls, if he, for instance, fights effectively against corporate greed and malfeasance, say? Is Barack Obama now droppin’ his g’s and takin’ great care to refer in every other sentence to “folks” because his advisors tell him that Americans want him to sound as stupid as they themselves are? How does it make sense that we wouldn’t want someone far better educated and erudite than ourselves making the most important decisions?

Living in America makes me increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of democracy.

The Epigram That Time Forgot - An Oversight!

2010-11-02T10:15:00.000-04:00

I have just realized with horror — because it is one my most luminously wry — that I neglected to include this in my catalog of epigrams the other day:

You're not getting older. You're getting bitter.

You may feel free to deploy it at cocktail and other parties with full attribution.

Oh, and while we're here, I think I'll throw this one in too:

You've got your whole life ahead of you, except for the large portion irretrievably squandered.

My Teabagger, My Love - Part 2

2010-11-02T08:24:00.000-04:00

Trish admitted on our second date — we went to Chili’s for dinner, and then to see Secretariat — that I wasn’t really her type. She’d been thinking more in terms of a Mike Rowe type — a gentile former Eagle Scout in an adjustable baseball cap, a Ford truck, and Lee jeans, the sort of man who, when his truck breaks down in the middle of nowhere on a cold, rainy night, just chuckles, as though at the antics of an attention-demanding toddler, whistles while he opens the hood, and then has the thing back on the road, actually running better than before, within 45 seconds. I pointed out that the other afternoon, when suddenly both turn signals began flashing simultaneously, and wouldn’t stop doing so even after I turned off the ignition, that I had manfully managed to disconnect the battery when I got home, to preclude its being drained. She laughed and said a real man would have figured out how to turn off the hazard lights without having to disconnect the battery. She wasn’t impressed when I pointed out my having done so first thing the following morning, after steeling myself at length for the daunting task of locating the requisite information in my owner’s manual. “Can you picture Mike Rowe being intimidated by an owner’s manual?” she laughed with our server, a buxom young woman with a tattoo on one of her breasts, and I’d never felt more humiliated in my life. Naturally, I loved it.

Trish’s favorite recreations include golf, tennis, and yoga. She admits she was a little iffy about the latter until her gym dismissed its original instructor — who apparently had a red dot on her forehead, and an unpronounceable name — and replaced her with a blonde named Babs, of all things. She is rooting for the Texas Rangers in the World Series because former president George W. Bush used to play for them, and because San Francisco is famously tolerant of ungodly behavior. As a former long-time resident of that city, I am able to attest to this; one New Year’s Eve, my daughter and I saw men embracing and even kissing each other as the clock struck midnight, and it was just disgusting.

Trish works in Human Resources at a media company that owns three of the country’s five highest-rated Christian rock radio stations, though she listens to none of them while driving. Trish enjoys listening in her car to audiobooks like Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue, Angelina Jolie’s reading of which should win her the audiobook readers’ equivalent of the Oscar. We’re accustomed to Meryl Streep nailing strange accents and vocal affectations, but who imagined that Mrs. Pitt was comparably sensational at it?

Trish finds Mitt Romney “cute,” and will vote for him if the Republicans don’t nominate Sarah, even though she is troubled by the rumors of the Mormons secretly regarding Satan as a prophet. She has admitted to me that if she were a lesbian, she would be on the next flight to wherever Marie Osmond lives these days, but of course she is no lesbian, and neither, to the best of my knowledge, is Marie, whom I at one point wanted to make gasp and moan, albeit not converse with, for fear that she'd be one of those who, in response to my slashing wit, mewls, "You're so cynical!"

Trish used to have a better-paying position in a PR company, but resigned when she was asked to get a coffee mug like everyone else’s — one that said Damn, I’m Good! — rather than asked What Would Jesus Do? She wears blouses with gigantic bows, and goes to a hair salon whose specialty is the Laura Bush bob, though she prefers the time-honored coiffure she sports in the accompanying photograph. She has tiny crosses painted on her fingernails every week at a nail salon whose mostly Filipina employees are slowly being poisoned by the fumes, but she will not allow her daughters to wear makeup until they are 15, or to date until they are 16, and then only with a non-Mormon chaperone driving.

Sunday night was Halloween. Instead of Reese’s Pieces or bite-sized Butterfingers or bags of M&M, Trish handed out miniature Bibles, but only to children not dressed as witches or tampered-with Tylenol bottles or members of ZZ Top or Barack Obama.

Ours is a very traditional diet. We eat a lot of tuna casserole, and a lot of chicken a la king. Thursday night is pork night, and Saturday steak night. We usually have fish sticks on Fridays even though neither of us is Catholic. Trish doesn’t mind other cultures as long as they don’t try to intermarry with and dilute our own. She prides herself on her daughters’ never having tasted Chinese or even Italian food, and on their not knowing a tortilla from a hole in the ground — unless, of course, they’ve fallen at their state-funded school under the influence of the children of illegal immigrants. One day when her younger girl was seven, Trish caught her playing at day care with an olive-complected girl, and burned her Barbies in the fireplace. It didn’t smell good, but Trish feels that it was well worth enduring an unpleasant aroma for a couple of days to teach Patsi a lesson she wishes someone had taught her.

My Teabagger, My Love - Part 1

2010-11-01T09:24:00.000-04:00

During my three excruciating years as a member of what was called support staff at the biggest fascist law firm in San Francisco, which had offices on multiple floors of three different buildings, I fell hopelessly in love with one of the telephone operators, solely on the basis of her voice. Compared to her, Kathleen Turner as Jessica Rabbit sounded like Sara Vowell on This American Life. She would growl, for instance, “Mr. Phelps. Please call the operator, Mr. Robert Phelps,” and I would lose all sense of where or even who I was. Hearing her, I could picture her reclining tauntingly on a bed in a black lace corset, seamed stockings, and gleaming stilettos, washing down bon-bons with champagne, smoking through a long, rhinestone-bedecked cigaret holder, and sneering. I always imagined that she was going to say, “…if you dare, little man,” at the end. From the sound of her, there’d never been a femme quite so fatale. I’ve always found scarily self-confident women in corsets quite irresistible, and conspired to meet her.

She turned out to be presentable, but hardly gorgeous. As any boy who’s ever been to what used to be called junior high knows, though, you don’t [copulate with] the face, and I thought that just hearing her voice in my ear as we made love would more than compensate for her being a bit stumpy for my taste. I was still a couple of years from losing my looks back then, and got myself invited over to her condo in moribund Rohnert Park. It was clear from her voice that she smoked, but it hadn’t occurred to me that she might smoke so much as to foul her own nest, to make her condo absolutely reek of cigarettes — albeit not as badly as it reeked of cats. I was there for only a few minutes before remembering urgent business elsewhere.

Much more recently, I fell in love with another speaking voice, that of the woman on my TomTom GPS, but was unable to persuade anyone at TomTom to reveal her contact details to me, or even her name. I had reconciled myself to living out the rest of my life in solitude when, at last Wednesday afternoon’s Tea Party-sponsored Common Sense Conservative Solutions for Problems We Don’t Begin to Understand rally at Pete Seeger Park here in Beacon, I met someone — someone wonderful, someone who has transformed my life.

Her name is Barbara, but she asked me to call her Trish, to preclude my calling her Babs; she finds Babs preciously retro, as I have always found Trish, but I have said nothing. She is the product of a broken home that her carpenter father was unable to fix because of his alcoholism. Both her elder brothers became substance abusers, but she found Jesus, and became a wife at 18 and a mother at 19. She and her husband Todd divorced last year when she was 33 after discovering that they were, in her words, “two different people,” as I’d have hoped for them to notice even on the verge of adulthood.

Trish’s younger daughter was 15 at the time of the divorce, and more than old enough to become a latchkey child, so Trish returned to school to get the degree she’d promised her parents she would pursue, though her dad had probably been too drunk to remember. Proving that feminism can walk hand in hand with conservatism — though not very far, in the high heels in which most fellow prefer to see their gals — she successfully sued her college for sex discrimination when she wasn’t chosen for the cheerleading team, though all the other cheerleaders were female, and actually dated the second-string quarterback briefly, at least until he came out as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered, which is contrary to her own personal beliefs, to which she is entitled.

She believes that it’s fine, and even desirable, for such persons to reside together, in a marriage-like arrangement, because domesticity keeps them from preying on defenseless young persons. But she believes that to officially sanction such relationships would be in contravention of Scripture. One of her bumper stickers urges, “Let’s keep the holy in holy matrimony.”

A Wide Range of Narrowminded Slogans

2010-10-30T08:34:00.002-04:00

Busy as I was trying to concoct world-changing new epigrams, raking the beautiful leaves, watching In Treatment, going daily to the gym, and trying to get Mr. Franzen’s Freedom read before its due date so I won’t be fined, and what have you, I was able to ignore the first couple of dozen robocalls I received having to do with forthcoming Tea Party marches, rallies, fashion shows, and what have you, but yesterday afternoon I received one while between neurotic preoccupations, and was struck by the recorded voice. Everything the guy believed might offend me to the core, but the obvious pleasure he derived from believing it was nearly palpable, a word writers like to use a lot because it makes them feel somehow better than those who actually work for a living.

In any event, I was sufficiently intrigued to attend the big Common Sense Conservative Solutions for Problems We Don't Begin to Understand rally at Pete Seeger Park here in Beacon on Wednesday afternoon, this not 18 hours after I saw Mr. Obama on The Daily Show and was made queasy by his Palin-ish g-droppin’ and fervent overuse of the word folks. It’s not bad enough that he’s demonstrated pretty nearly no moral leadership at all? Or that he’s extended and even amplified some of the most appalling of the so-called security policies of George W. Bush? Now we’ve got to endure his referring to “folks doin’ their best” in These Difficult Times?

If he were really the man of the people he pretends to be, he'd have said there best.

A carnival-like atmosphere reigned at the big rally, with vendors selling flag lapel pins and Tea Party baseball caps and T-shirts and what have you, and blasphemous, often racist, depictions of the Obamas, and corndogs and candied apples, and American flags, and placards expressing a wide range of narrowminded slogans and buzzwords. Putting my customary snootiness aside, I had a corndog (nibbling the breading off the outside and then discarding the actual dog because dogs are made from what’s scraped off abattoir floors) and bought myself a placard that proclaimed I Want My Country Back! It occurred to me that I hadn’t actually carried a placard since the 1996 Gay Pride parade in San Francisco, at which, because I have a famously impish sense of humor, I carried a homemade sign reading I Love My Gay Son or Daughter.

In any event, I felt a far greater sense of camaraderie at the rally than at anything similar I’ve been part of since I was a senior in college marching around chanting, “On strike! Shut it down!” for reasons I don’t clearly remember. These weren’t the ogres the lamestream media had led me to expect, but conscientious Americans sick to death of squandering their grandchildren’s college money on bailing out the big socialist banks, and building bridges to nowhere, and kidnapping defenseless old people and holding pillows over their poor wrinkly old faces until they stop breathing so they won’t overburden the Medicare system and what have you.

Oh, maybe they weren’t using words like eschew and palpable and upload, but they were talkin’ a great deal of sense, and were awesome. I hadn’t fully realized that the reason a lot of folks (we must not let the socialists co-opt that word!) are against gay marriage isn’t because they dislike gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and the transgendered, necessarily, but because letting them marry would inevitably result in huge administrative and staffing costs, and who do you think is going to pay for all that, the Chinese? Hello! We are, you and I, and our grandchildren. Also, it’s disgusting, according to the Bible, which was written by people a whole lot smarter than the ivory tower elitists who say eschew and palpable and know which fork to use for fish.

Where I come from (Playa del Rey, California), we only ever needed the one fork, and there wasn’t rampant unhappiness in those times; think about it!

The Latter-Day Oscar Wilde

2010-10-29T09:23:00.000-04:00

Oh, this is just ever so good. The cable company that cheerfully sends me a bill for $178 for phone, Internet, and TV has decided that it isn’t going to accede to Fox’s apparently onerous "carriage" demands. In spite of their news being the fairest and most balanced available (and in spite too of the flock of pigs flying overhead as I compose this), I have extremely little interest in anything that Fox broadcasts — with the exception of sports and, about twice a year, The Simpsons. I’ve already missed several NFL games I’d hoped to watch because of this dispute, and tonight will be unable to watch the first game of the World Series.

But I’m wondering if maybe, in keeping with the sunny disposition in which I’ve swaddled myself so becomingly for most of 2010, I can’t see a silver lining in there somewhere. The TV on which I’d intended to watch brave little Tim Lincecum embarrass the Rangers tonight has a screen roughly the size of Rhode Island, and, uh, supports HD, but I wonder if I’d enjoy the game more than I did when I was a boy watching on a cruddy black and white set with a screen roughly the size of my iPad’s. But why stop there? It may be that watching the game in HD on a huge screen wouldn’t even be better than listening on the transistor radio I smuggled into junior high school, with an ultra low-fi earphone I lived in terror of my various instructors detecting.

I have made this observation many times before, but at my age, I get to start repeating myself implacably. I have been in the homes of rich audiophiles, and heard music on their state-of-the-art stereo systems, and have recorded in expensive Hollywood studios, but no music has ever sounded better to me than that on the radio in my friend Dave’s 1957 Pontiac the first winter vacation that I was old enough to drive around with a peer looking for trouble.

As we’ve discussed many times in the past, there’s no rational reason for me to be thrilled that the Giants are in the Series, as I left the Bay Area before any of their present players got to it, and even when I lived there, I was under no illusion that any of the Giant players were my neighbors, or even knew anything about the city whose livery they wore. I do know that I don’t much care for the Rangers’ star, Josh Hamilton. I admire people who are able to conquer their demons. For reasons of my own, though, I dislike their ascribing having done so to Jesus. I'm also very iffy about Nolan Ryan, who co-owns the Texas team. When I met him many years ago, while researching my famous anthropological piece about the California Angels, he was very personable and gracious, but I have since learned that he's an avid Republican, and an unrepentant George W. Bush enthusiast.

In other news, I continue to wish to be recognized as the latter-day Oscar Wilde, or at least Oscar Levant, of whose “So little to do, so much time” I have long been an avid fan. Toward this end, I have compiled a treasury of my most luminous epigrams for you to savor at your leisure. Naturally, you will want to attach full attribution should you invoke them at cocktail and other parties.

Hope springs infernal.
God never closes a door without also locking the windows.
To each his onus.
But I do see the glass as half full — of poison.
There is no accounting for taste, or its complete absence.

Reading to the Faded - Part 3

2010-10-28T11:02:00.000-04:00

After The Iliad, Mrs. Tourneau delighted me by having no interest in hearing Beowulf. What she wanted instead was to dance — specifically, the tango. I told her there was nothing I’d have loved more than to oblige, but that an old football injury made dancing impossible for me. There was no reason she had to know that I hadn’t actually played football at all, and in fact injured my knee when a car struck me in the middle of Beacon’s Maine Street (between New Hampshir and Vrmont Streets) 26 months ago because a teenaged driver was paying more attention to sending a text message than to watching where the hell she was going. Mrs. Tourneau sighed and summoned her manservant Jenkins, who danced as though he’d been hit by a few cars in his own time, but who nonetheless sneered at me over Mrs. Tourneau’s lavishly freckled shoulder.

When she could tango no longer, she asked for something light and contemporary, and I began reading my own 2007 opus Third World USA, without specifying its authorship. I wasn’t 1000 words into it, though, before she exclaimed, “That’s perfectly dreadful,” and asked instead for something by somebody good contemporary novelists, like John Grisham. I can endure an insult as gracefully as the next fellow, but not one that lacerates me to the marrow, as this one did. Knowing full well that it might preclude her writing me into her will, I said I wished no longer to remain the employee of one capable of issuing such a request, and let fly one of the epigrams for which I am celebrated, at least in my own fantasies: There is no accounting for taste, or the complete lack thereof.

As I gathered my belongings — my lunchbox and cellphone and medications and condoms and the poison I’d intended to slip into Jenkins’ and Mrs. Jamison’s tea — Mrs. Tourneau began to cry, almost imperceptibly at first, and then so resonantly as to make the chandelier above us tinkle. She said she’d never been any good with men, and had only been fooling herself imagining that things might be different between the two of us. I felt a perfect heel, and admitted I had a reputation for hypersensitivity where my work was concerned. I have always heard even the gentlest criticism of my work as a ferocious personal attack. One might have said, “I think a few of the sentences in the second paragraph are a little bit unwieldy,” but what I’d have heard is, “I hate everything about you, and wish you’d die of some awful disease.”

She dried her tears and said, “You poor, fragile thing,” whereupon I burst into embarrassed tears of my own. She held me while I took my own turn sobbing. She stroked my head as though I were seven, as she claimed at various times to have stroked Norman Mailer’s, and later “Steve” King’s, and most recently Jonathan Franzen's. It troubled me that she would mention King in the same breath as real writers, but we made love nonetheless. I wondered afterward if our having done so guaranteed me a spot on the bestsellers list, or at least a competent agent for a change. She seemed to read my mind and said that I should stop fooling myself — that I should recognize the present blog entry, for instance, as pretty tiresome. I agreed, and conceded that a great many of its predecessors had been comparably lacking. But did it count for nothing that I was on schedule to meet my goal of having written six new little essays or hunks of fiction a week for the entirety of 2010?

Hardly had the words passed my lips than I shuddered for having uttered them. Had I, in my dotage, really become one who offered quantity as a substitute for quality? Was this what I’d become?

Reading to the Faded - Part 2

2010-10-27T08:52:00.000-04:00

It was the manservant, Jenkins, who reminded me of the service manager at a garage to which I used to take my Porsche, who phoned to tell me that the job was mine if I wanted it. He didn’t sound delighted. He referred to me in the third, rather than second, person — as “the gentleman,” rather than you, and palpably hated having to do so. He sounded as though he’d sooner be calling almost anyone, to say almost anything else.

When I reported for work the following afternoon, I could fairly perceive steam coming out of his nostrils, along with a profusion of fine hair you’d have hoped he might have trimmed. He led me into what I’d originally taken as a sitting room, but which I now understood to be the reading room, where Mrs. Tourneau greeted me like a long-missing favorite nephew. I was discomfited to think that I was the reason she was even more heavily made up than the day before, when I’d auditioned for her. I worried that I might have an allergic reaction to her perfume. Jenkins brought us refreshments — sherry and bon-bons for Mrs. Tourneau, tea and communion wafers for me — and I asked what Mrs. Tourneau was in the mood to be read. She laughed trillingly and said she thought we should get to know each other a bit before I began my actual reading to her. She assured me that I would be paid during this period just as though I were actually reading.

She had appeared in a number of plays I hadn’t heard of, but pretended I had indeed heard of, and in some equally obscure films, apparently most often as an ill-fated beauty intent on drinking herself into the abyss. I told her I’d seen, and very much enjoyed her performances in, a couple of the films, and hoped she hadn’t made up their titles to expose me as one who would say anything to get medical and dental insurance. I was much more comfortable when she changed the subject to her girlhood in Ireland. For no good reason, she recounted the weekend of Elvis Presley’s first performance there, and how she and dozens of the city’s most porcelain-skinned beauties had been inspired to remove their blouses and brassieres and run jiggling and giggling through the city centre to get the goat of the Bishop of Limerick, who’d denounced rock and roll as demonic in his abrogations the previous Sunday morning. “It was all in Latin, of course,” she recalled, “but we knew full well what he was on about.”

It occurred to me that all this talk of jiggling and demons might be intended to arouse me sexually. I desperately hoped that no such thing was the case, and was relieved far beyond the ability of mere words to express when she took a big swig of sherry and mused, “What shall I hear first?” But it was out of the frying pan and into the fire, as she revealed that, at the height of her career, she’d lived in dread of someone at a cocktail party or film premiere wondering what she thought of Beowulf or The Iliad, which I’d so hated having to read as a freshman in college. I swallowed hard and told her how much I’d been looking forward to rereading those myself.

About an hour into The Iliad, I realized with horror that I’d fallen asleep, but so too, thank God, had Mrs. Tourneau. She looked years younger when unconscious, and I’d have defied anyone not to find her demure snoring endearing. I had the idea of skipping to the end of the book, and telling her, when she awoke, that I hadn’t realized she’d fallen asleep, but then it occurred to me that Jenkins might be just behind the door, waiting to denounce me.

I will confess now that I hadn’t accepted the job just because of the meager salary and medical and dental insurance, but because I hoped Mrs. Tourneau might leave me a chunk of her estate when she passed on. It occurred to me that she might have intended to leave much it to Jenkins or Mrs. Jamison, or her dog, though none was in view, and that she might have nieces and nephews beyond counting. I could do nothing about the latter, but it occurred to me that the prudent thing might be to poison Jenkins and Mrs. Jamison at my earliest opportunity.

[Concludes tomorrow.]

Reading to the Faded - Part 1

2010-10-26T09:38:00.000-04:00

After about 75 million tries over the years, I finally received a response to my response to a craigslist job posting last week, and it’s singlehandedly made up for the years of disappointment, the years of thinking that, after having drafted a snazzy little email to a prospective employer, I might as well have clicked DELETE as SEND.

The posting read as follows:

Retired star of stage and screen, 84 now and nearly blind, seeks handsome young man to read to her and to run occasional errands.

She was offering $1000/week and both medical and dental benefits. You’d have imagined that one who had pretty much lost her own sight would have offered vision benefits as well, but I wasn’t going to quibble, not this time. A grand per week isn’t a fortune, but it would certainly keep the mortgage and heating and insurance bills paid until someone down in Manhattan decides that what his company really needs is an over-60 non-team player who reflexively corrects others’ grammar and often doesn’t smell that good. I sent the advertiser an email saying that I believed my background as both an actor and a writer made me abundantly worthy of consideration, and rhapsodized how the job would enable me to catch up on some of the classics I’ve been putting off reading since my freshman year in college, when having to read Beowulf and The Iliad left me with a fierce distrust of any literature that’s Good for Me, except I left the last part unsaid. I attached a photograph of myself in my early thirties, when my physical beauty was such that I regularly caused fender-benders in the streets of West Hollywood.

After sending it — after clicking SEND yet again, rather than DELETE — it occurred to me, though, that my prospective employer’s taste might tend less to the classics than to crapola like John Grisham or Danielle Steele, so I dashed off a second email saying that I was also eager to experience the work of popular contemporary authors.
Not two hours after I’d sent it, a Ms. Jamison, who described herself as a Mrs. Tourneau’s secretary, called to invite me in for an interview. Quite the chatterbox, she informed me, unbidden, that she’d be doing the reading herself except for the fact that she had been losing her eyesight even longer than Mrs. Tourneau, and wasn’t getting the hang of Braille nearly as quickly as she’d been led to believe she might. Given that both of them had severely impaired vision, I wondered if I needed to wear a coat and tie. In the end, I decided that I’d better, just in case.

Mrs. Tourneau turned out to reside just across the river, in Newburgh, on a street that had apparently been quite elegant at one point, but which is now largely crumbling, and peopled almost entirely by malevolent-looking young people in hooded sweatshirts and dilated pupils. I was let in by a manservant who reminded me of the service manager of a Porsche dealership where I used to take my Porsche when I was young and rich enough to have a Porsche and foolish enough to have a Porsche. The service manager had made no attempt to conceal that he hated me on sight, and the manservant wasn’t trying much harder, remarking as he took my hat and cane, “The gentleman looks rather more mature than in the JPEG he attached to his email.” It was funny hearing the acronym JPEG — for jammed pixels eschewing grandiosity, if I remember correctly, coming out of so ancient a mouth, but of course I’m longish in the tooth myself lately.

“If the gentleman will follow me,” he said, not bothering to specify what might happen if I didn’t. He led me into the office of Mrs. Jamison, who put on her spectacles to get a better look at me, remembered her spectacles had ceased to do her much good, squeezed my arms, apparently satisfied herself that I am one of those old people who works out dutifully, and asked me to read a few paragraphs of Jane Austen to her. I gathered I had to please her before I would get to meet my actual prospective employer. She seemed satisfied, and said, “If you’ll be good enough to follow me,” not bothering to specify my reward. I was led into what I think might be termed a sitting room, in which sat Mrs. Tourneau, who was wearing rather more perfume and more and more vivid makeup than became one of her age, and listening with eyes closed to Jack Jones, sort of the Barry Manilow of the very early 1970s, but not nearly as hated. “Do sit down,” she said, and I sat.

[To be continued.]

Discovering Long Island - Part 2

2010-10-25T08:34:00.000-04:00

We awoke at the Hyatt Regency Long Island At Wind Watch Golf Club intent on getting our $11.95 worth of WiFi. I used Yelp.com to compile a list of restaurants in the Hamptons, though I secretly craved to return to the sublime Mama Sbarro’s. We ascertained that the Hyatt Regency Long Island At Wind Watch Golf Club’s breakfast buffet would set us back $16 apiece, scoffed at the idea, and set out in search of a diner recommended on Yelp, only to settle for another we encountered before we could find it. Our waitress addressed us as hon, spelling it properly, and we agreed on the cruel irony of a cruddy little diner offering WiFi while the Hyatt Regency Long Island At Wind Watch Golf Club made you pay for it. We shut up on realizing that though it was free, it didn't get us on line.

We stuffed ourselves on eggs and home fries, and headed east. I revealed, as we drove, that my ambition was to find the home of P. Diddy (or, as Claire prefers, Diddy Poo), or whatever he calls himself these days, and advise him that I regard him as the black Donald Trump — as that fervently self-aggrandizing — and thus am no fan at all. I anticipated his being devastated, but no one told him it would easy.

We stopped, by and by, in Southampton, whose main commercial street makes clear that it is patronized primarily by the very deep-pocketed. We went into a gift shop so that Claire could stalk a fridge magnet. I predicted that the proprietor would want to be snooty in the face of such a request, but be unable to because of Claire’s middle-class London accent, which sounds just like Her Majesty the Queen's to the unsophisticated American ear. In this case, the proprietor turned out to be a she, and to lack fridge magnets.

We proceeded through other Hamptons, and made our way by and by to Montauk, at the island’s southeastern tip. There Claire was able at last to buy a fridge magnet, from a young woman with multiple piercings and an unpleasantly jaded manner. There too we nibbled leftover Mama Sbarro’s pizza in view of the famous local lighthouse before collecting notable stones and shells on the beach.

Claire hankered to glimpse some of the famous wineries of the North Fork, but to get up there, we had to take a couple of ferries, and how very pricey they proved to be — $12 for the first, and then $11 for the second, and in the first case you could have dogpaddled from one shore to the other in about 30 seconds. We actually reached the North Fork too late to sample any wines, although not to late to use one winery’s beautifully appointed restroom.

We drove west again through blinding late afternoon sunlight, listening to Accidental Billionaires, got tarted up, and headed once more to Mama Sbarro’s, where things were very different from the previous evening. Our server this time was a preoccupied-seeming young woman who first failed obstinately to notice the plaintive come-hither looks I kept giving her, and then, after deigning at last to ascertain what we craved, delivered our main courses and salad simultaneously. We had her take the former back, and she apparently placed them under a heat lamp, but they were still delicious.

We returned yet again to the Hyatt Regency Long Island At Wind Watch Golf Club, and this time both of us went into the spa, in which no fat men were reading the New York Times. I removed myself when I felt my lovely, recently blow-dried hair beginning to frizz, and we were upstairs in time to watch the Yankees’ season end. We agreed they’ve got to do something about their starting pitching, and retired, though only in the sense of going to bed.

The following morning, we had breakfast sandwiches at Panera, where we enjoyed getting on line. Heading home, we resumed listening to the audiobook version of Accidental Billionaires — and to cringe now not only at the author’s dreadful purple prose and malapropisms (people don’t get cut off at the throat, chief, but at the knees!), but at how the voice actor’s clueless reading made it all seem even worse. When I went to the gym, and opened a book full of Scott Spencer’s mostly glorious prose, I could still hear the voice actor misguided inflections in my mind’s ear, and it ruined the first couple of pages. Don’t let this happen to you!

Discovering Long Island - Part 1

2010-10-24T09:23:00.000-04:00

We drove and drove and drove, and reached the Hyatt Regency Long Island At Wind Watch Golf Club in Unpronounceable, New York (Hauppauge, if you must know) early in the afternoon, intent on further adventure. We gnashed our teeth on discovering that it would cost us $11.95/day per device to get on line, and resolved not be played for a chump. We headed toward the south shore of the Island and discovered that it’s dismal and grotty, as far from picturesque as the two Portlands are, or even the two Perths. There are prostitutes — some of them hideously pockmarked, others crossdressed, but lavishly five-o’clock-shadowed beneath their foundation — and pickpockets, opium addicts and scoundrels on nearly every corner, persons of color, persons of deficient morality and hygiene, the dregs of humanity.

We headed back inland, intent on finding a Starbucks at which we could get on line for the price of a frappucino or two, but agreed that by the time we found one and bought the beverage, we’d probably have agreed that it made sense to give the bloodsuckers at Hyatt what they wanted. I got on Yelp.com, and searched for local restaurants, and discovered that one called Mama Sbarro’s, apparently nothing to do with the national Sbarro’s chain, had received a lot of stars. ‘Twas there we headed after we had bathed and gotten all dolled up.

I shuddered when I saw the place, as there were vinyl checkerboard tablecloths on the tables, and no candles. Claire is very sensitive to light when she dines; if it’s too bright, her palate becomes desensitized. We ordered a gorgonzola salad and a Grandmother’s pizza, and both were so delicious that Claire barely mentioned the lighting. We headed back to the Hyatt Regency Long Island At Wind Watch Golf Club reeking of garlic, and I changed into my bathing costume, noting with horror as I did so that my meager pectoral muscles have begun to sag most unattractively, and that there are gelatinous rolls of ghastly flab around my midsection.

I nonetheless went down to the indoor swimming pool with Claire, and there dogpaddled back and forth a few times; since my shoulder replacement surgery in 1995, I have been unable to swim conventionally. I got out and dried off, and we stared daggers at the throat of an even more corpulent man than I, reading the New York Times in the spa. He showed no inclination to make himself scarce, so I tried to forget about his cooties, as Claire had forgotten the brightness of Mama Sbarro’s, and joined him. How glorious the hot water felt. I made my way over to him, gently removed his wire-rim eyeglasses, gently took the Business section from his fleshy hands, ran my fingers through the hair on his shoulders, and looked soulfully into his watery blue eyes. Our lips met, and then our tongues. Claire gasped disbelievingly from her chaise longue, and I somehow regained control of myself.

We returned to our suite (not the Presidential, but the Deputy Undersecretary of the Interior suite), watched a few minutes of CNN, and called it a day. Tomorrow we would explore a part of the island on which the street corners are free of human debris, where the wealthy frolic. Tomorrow we would go to the Hamptons.

The Woeful Inadequacy of English Pronouns

2010-10-23T08:50:00.000-04:00

How you going to keep them down on the farm, or in the southwestern corner of Dutchess County (The County That Can’t Spell Duchess) after they’ve seen Portsmouth and Concord, New Hampshire? That was the question we had no choice but to confront last wek, as the reality of being back in Beacon sank in ever more deeply. There’d been talk of our taking the train down to Manhattan, but I needed to amend some work I did last week for a client in the business of trying to make it easier for Indian students to adjust to American college life, and then had an opportunity to advise my old friend Karl on his ongoing exchange of poison-pen emails with his housemate.
It’s my perception that Karl enjoys a fierce argument more than he’d probably hasten to admit — that he derives considerable pleasure from composing eloquent demolitions of his opponents' arguments. I always believed that, had country music not called him, he’d have made a very successful trial lawyer. In this case, though — bickering with his housemate about his housemate’s intention to make his girlfriend a de facto member of the household — it seemed to me that Karl was effectively shooting himself in the foot; however pleasurable it was to mock Housemate, to point out his multiple small hypocrisies and misrepresentations, he still had at the end of the day to keep living with the bastard.

(Re-reading the foregoing paragraph, noting the ambiguity that he, him, and his engender, I’m struck once more by the woeful insufficiency of English pronouns. But have I ever done more about it other than bitch ‘n’ moan? Well, by gum, today I tolerate no more! Let’s see if my referring to the first-mentioned of the two males in the account, Karl, with the traditional pronouns, but using te, tim, and tis for his housemate doesn’t make things more lucid.

…bickering with his housemate about tis intention to make tis girlfriend a de facto member of the household...However pleasurable it was to mock Housemate, to point out tis multiple small hypocrisies and misrepresentaitons, he still had at the end of the day to keep living with tim.

My country, ‘tis of thee.

In any event, the gratifying part was that Karl didn’t get defensive in the face of my mild scolding. It felt grand to have my counsel valued, and to think I might have done a friend some good.

Lunchtime brought more small pleasure. My house has a sort of mezzanine, from which one may view the living room. I hope one day to be able to play Pope, to invite enough friends and friends of friends over to fill the ground floor, and then to step into view on the mezzanine to rapturous applause. (The facts of my being reclusive and misanthropic might preclude this, but one can dream.) In any event, I have always enjoyed peeking down at Claire while she enjoys her lunch in front of the living room television. Her realizing with a start that she’s being watched never fails to amuse me; my inner two-year-old may be considerably nearer the surface than others'.

Then it was over to the gym. Before we got on the bridge, I turned on Accidental Billionaires, but the scene in which the Winklevosses, for whom Mark Zuckerberg had ostensibly been working, took their grievances to the president of Harvard was even more unlistenable than a lot of earlier ones. While Claire entrusted the blow-drying of her hair to strangers, I went over to Planet Fitness and continued reading Scott Spencer’s Man in the Woods while pedaling my way to fitness. Back home, we had our traditional late afternoon Long March, and then enjoyed leftovers from Sunday night’s roasted vegetable dinner. Twenty-four hours in the fridge had only made everything more delicious. We caught up on Boardwalk Empire, whose production design I like more than anything else about it, and Mad Men, whose season finale I found wanting, except for the wonderful moment in which that asshole Roger told Megan to go fetch ice so everyone could celebrate her engagement to Don. I didn’t think he was joking either!

The Doctors Are "In"

2010-10-22T13:23:00.000-04:00

We started our first day back from our foliage tour with a delicious full English breakfast, but lacking some of the things an American such as I finds weird, like baked beans and a cooked tomato. Claire puts a lot more butter on things that I, fearing a myocardial infarction, would even consider, but I’m hoping that in view of how seldom I over-indulge in this way, my arteries and veins and what-not will cut me a few inches of slack.

Vistaprint is forever sending me news of irresistible printing bargains, and often I am unable to resist them. In one such moment in 2009, I designed a lawn sign, of the sort fans of certain political candidates will stick in front of their houses. I thought, as I designed it, that Claire I would sit in front of our house, rather in the manner of Lucy Van Pelt, administering psychotherapy to visitors to Beacon who’d just visited the Dia:Beacon modern art museum, and who had to walk past our house to get to Maine Street, with its endless art galleries and chic eateries. To sweeten the deal, we offered cold lemonade along with the psychotherapy, at an irresistibly low price — $1/per cup, or $1.25 with the little metal badge the Dia gives people in lieu of ticket stubs. I’ve been receiving psychotherapy off and on since I was 18, and Claire’s seen both seasons of HBO’s sublime In Treatment, and we’re both kind, empathic, and perceptive people, so I figured we couldn’t be any worse than several of the licensed good-for-nothings who’ve taken my money over the years. Claire tired of the USA and returned to her native United Kingdom, though, before we could help with even one patient’s emotional crisis, and the sign languished unglimpsed in the garage.

Yesterday, though, was the day of the Beacon Sloop Club’s gala annual Pumpkin Festival, at which, for the most part, ancient hippies shuffle around in ugly sandals buying local delicacies and signing petitions and picking up informative brochures and what-have-you from tables manned by community activists. St. Pete Seeger is commonly seen, and earnest folk music sung and played with great earnestness by his acolytes. In early afternoon, we went down with a couple of collapsible chairs, our sign, and a couple of cartons of Minute Maid lemonade from Idolatry, put out our proverbial shingle, and waited. Eventually a man with two young sons came over. When he explained that his spouse was herself a shrink, and that he therefore had no need of anything beyond lemonade, I pointed out that it was unethical for her to be treating members of her own family, but he only smirked at me as though to say, “What a dickhead.”

Claire found us a better, more visible location, and several passers-by grinned with delight at our sign, but the only person who spoke to us at length was another shrink, a 75-ish guy in dark glasses and a baseball cap who just stared expressionlessly at our sign for so long that I was sure we’d attracted a real head case until he finally revealed that he was a retired shrink. By and by, we decided to stop trying to fight city hall.

Later, our friends Nathan and Janet (not their real names, but someone’s) came over for a dinner of vegetables that Claire had roasted in the English manner, and disclosed details of their recent visit to the United Kingdom, one of the many countries from which “Nathan” holds a passport, and that in which they'd visited Claire mere days before. Because he was still feeling jet-lagged, or for reasons unknown to us, "Nathan's" fatigue was such that he fell asleep halfway through his ice cream and berries, whereupon we woke him, guided him to his and “Janet’s” car, and wished them a safe journey home.

They live about 90 seconds away.

The Foliage Tour - Part 3

2010-10-20T09:10:00.000-04:00

Say this for Concord’s Fairfield Inn: they offer a reasonably nice continental (if by that you mean non-cooked) breakfast. There was juice and fruit and bagels (albeit really generic-looking ones, lacking anything resembling even a sesame seed) and individually packaged portions of cereal into which one needed only to pour milk, and cheese, and a waffle machine. I fancied some cereal, but only until I read the ingredients listed on the convenient packages. It’s breathtaking to me how Cheerios and Start Smart, or whatever that new (at least to me) Kellogg’s product is called, can market themselves as health-promoting when they’re so full of chemicals. I decided instead to brave the waffle machine, in spite of the fact that one usually need only utter the word machine to make me cower piteously. But then I remembered the previous evening at Nonni’s on Main Street, and how I’d ultra-manfully presented the bartender with the glass of merlot Claire had found wanting, especially for $7, and suggested, in a virile growl that invited no dispute, that he replace it with pinot noir.

I guess I should have sprayed the iron with no-stick before pouring the batter in; getting it out was harrowing for one who believes deep down that the real world is intent on humiliating him at every turn. But I did it in the end, and ate it, and we headed, willy-nilly yet again, for Brattleboro, Vermont, in which I once enjoyed watching a World Series game on a motel TV set when Nancy and I had a foliage tour of our own late in the last century.

The GPS started toying with us. I have had my doubts about her ever since realizing that she may be a Brit trying to pass as an actual American; she will tell me to stay “on,” rather than “in” a particular lane, and is forever referring to The Motorway. She misguided us in Brattleboro, and then somehow managed to miss the center of Northampton, famous for its lesbians, by miles; we found it only when we gave up on finding it and were trying instead to get back on Interstate 91.

Northampton’s lesbians don’t stomp to and fro wearing glowers that demand, “You got a problem?” as in Provincetown, but occasionally you’ll see a pair of them holding hands, right in front of impressionable children, and it’s disgusting! I’d filled up on pizza leftover from our nite of sin at Nonni’s, but Claire, who adores the stuff, craved soup, and to pee, as I did too, so we traipsed around in the bitterly chilly breeze until finding a suitable place. Then it was back in the Forester, heading toward Springfield, where basketball was invented, and in whose environs the excellent novel Morning I recently bought at Idolatry for $1 was partially set. The more we listened to Accidental Billionaires, the more the writing made me cringe, but we managed to make it home in plenty of time for the long walk for which I’d yearned, having gotten so little exercise the preceding 48 hours.

We had a pleasant dinner, once more rued my having recorded a Spanish-language version of the pilot episode of Boardwalk Empire, and wound up watching Taking Woodstock, which wasn’t as bad as a lot of people had said, and not very good either. I am old enough — and then some (and then some more!) — to know that you can’t have it all.

I have been working on a mordant new epigram to join such earlier triumphs as To each his onus and I do indeed see the glass as half full — of poison. As it stands, the new one reads God never closes a door without also shutting a window, but I’m not sure I’m delighted with it yet. Any suggestions will be carefully considered, and, if sufficiently wry and pithy, summarily appropriated without attribution.

The Foliage Tour - Part 2

2010-10-19T09:34:00.000-04:00

We explored Portsmouth, New Hampshire. It had a lot more chic boutiques and eateries than I’d have expected, and a big performance venue to which the inescapable Chryssie Hynde was going to be appearing with the new man in her life. Claire, who has toyed with the idea of going on Stars in Their Eyes, a UK pop star impersonation show, as La Hynde, was much impressed. We located the restaurants the pale young woman behind the desk at the Holiday Inn had suggested, and studied dozens of menus. Claire bought herself a couple of bottles of locally brewed beer from Smuttynose Brewing Company. We agreed to dine later at the nearby Gaslight Grill, even though it seemed to have neither white linen nor candles, without which Claire finds it difficult to enjoy her dinner. We returned to the Holiday Inn and watched the highlights of the Delaware senatorial debate, Chris Coons against that witch who looks like at least one cheerleader at every high school in America.

Back at the Holiday Inn, I loved my salad, which contained dry cherries and candied, but not cloyingly, pecans. I hadn’t ever heard of fried lobster tails, and ordered them. They were pretty delicious, but Claire’s pasta dish was like something you’d get at a high school cafeteria. I manfully summoned our server and expressed our disgruntlement, and he, apparently sensing that I'm not someone with whom to mess, said without hesitation that he wouldn’t charge us for it.

On getting up the following morning, we headed once more into the city center, and there had breakfast at an apparently beloved local institution called The Rubbery Toast, though I may have swapped adjectives for my own amusement, as happens here so often. The walls were covered in kitsch, some of it (the authentic old signs) sublime, some of it (mosaics by local artists, presumably) ghastly. When we finished, the rain wasn’t vengeful, so we decided to try to get up to Portland, which turned out not to be nearly as charming, at least in the dour drizzle. We found a gift shop at which Claire could stalk a fridge magnet for her remarkable collection. Fervent vegetarian that she is, she wasn’t entirely comfortable with a likeness of a lobster, but eventually found a viable alternative, whereupon we headed willy-nilly for White Mountain National Forest, where I’d hoped to glimpse breathtaking foliage.

It appeared, remarkably, as though a lot of the trees hadn’t burst into color yet as we drove west on the Kancamagus Scenic Byway, and those that had were probably considerably less breathtaking than they probably would have been if not shrouded in mist and glimpsed through drizzle.

I could see that Barbara Ehrenreich’s analysis of the founding of Christian Science was making Claire’s eyelids heavy, and suggested she eject the fourth of the six Bright-Sided CDs in favor of the first of Accidental Billionaires, on which The Social Network is based. It was dreadfully written, but diverting, and by and by, in spite of the vengeful deluge, we arrived in charmless Concord, where Priceline had found us accommodation at the local Fairfield Inn, a far cry from the Holiday Inn!

Viewing Yelp.com on my increasingly beloved iPad, we were able to review our meager local dining choices, and wound up at a place called Nonni’s. Never trust an Italian restaurant whose servers mispronounce bruschetta (broo-SKET-uh is correct). By the time Claire had finished her complimentary dessert (which our server offered so we wouldn't hate her for having delivered our pizza lukewarm) and we’d gotten back in the Forester, Concord’s Main Street was pretty nearly deserted, reinforcing our impression that the city was unlikely to be designated The Northeast’s Hottest Hotspot anytime soon.

We rued the fact that the Fairfield Inn offers Showtime, rather than HBO, as Bill Maher, of whom Claire is so fond, is on the latter. I watched a few minutes of the Yankess/Rangers playoff game, turned it off before the Yankees’ astonishing come-from-behind victory, and was in Dreamland almost before my old gray head could touch the pillow.

The Foliage Tour - Part 1

2010-10-18T09:01:00.003-04:00

We headed for an even more northeastern part of the Northeast with half a thankful of regular unleaded and a lot of crazy dreams, passing Trader Joe’s as we sped east through Danbury, Connecticut. We had Crystal Geyser to sip, and bananas with which to maintain our blood sugar and potassium levels. Because it has become our tradition to listen to read-aloud versions of Barbara Ehrenreich books during our little excursions, we had her provocative, illuminating, typically disheartening Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America on CD. though I’d already read it at the gym.

Once we’d inserted a disk into the player, we were able to put the case out of sight, whereas when I was reading the actual book while on the stationery bike, I knew at all times that the cover was just on the other side of the book I held in my hands. Such a relief! I have long believed that aside from TV graphics, the worst commercial design you’ll see anywhere is on book covers. I wouldn’t have put the cover that Omnibus Press put on my novel Waiting for Kate Bush on the wall of a men’s room in a Honduran leper colony, or in Karl Rove’s study. I pleaded with Omnibus not to do it. I said I’d show their cover and my proposed cover to 50 passers-by in Oxford Street in London, and that if fewer than 80 percent expressed a strong preference for mine, I would give back half my advance, but they wouldn’t hear of it.

The cover of Bright-Sided makes that of Waiting for Kate Bush look in comparison like the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

But there. I’ve gone into one of my blood-pressure-raising harangues, and I mustn’t.
I will tell you that Ehrenreich’s long chapter on how American women diagnosed with breast cancer aren’t allowed to be angry about it because anger doesn’t go well with the infantilizing pink that has come somehow to represent the disease (the NFL continues, as I write this, to wear pink chinstraps and other accessories!) made me proud that I am commonly denounced as cynical. The chapter about how relentless good vibe-mongering might be seen as a centuries-in-the-making response to the harsh Calvinism that was so popular through the first century and a half of American history also fascinated me.

Be that as it may, we made it well into Massachusetts before having to, uh, refuel because the Forester enjoys being driven for long distances on interstate highways as much as it seems to detest being driven to the gym, in Newburgh, parked, and then driven home to its garage in Beacon six times a week. Claire craved a Subway sandwich, but wouldn’t you know that there was none in sight as her craving grew ever more implacable? We got off the highway again in Littleton, Massachusetts, and at Dunkin’ Donuts bought a couple of flatbread sandwiches that contained enough melted cheese to clog the arteries of all 33 rescued Chilean miners and their famllies, but I gobbled mine without complaint because I still remember quite clearly how much I wanted to strangle Nancy when we would go to restaurants in the 90s and she would express her disapproval of what I was eating.

The GPS, which had done an unprecedentedly good job of adhering to the inside of the windshield, wanted us to take what seemed quite a circuitous route back to the interstate, but all that was forgotten when we went by a old train depot that had been turned into a repository for a lot of ancient appliances and picturesque junk that called out to be photographed.

By and by, we arrived at the Holiday Inn in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, just in time to hear that there were flood warnings in effect for the region. We realized widespread flooding might significantly impede our foliage-admiring, but consoled ourselves with a visit to the nearby liquor store, where very cheap vodka of the sort I prefer, or at least don’t mind, was on sale for a lot less than in New York.

What’s the point, I’ve always wondered, of paying for a posh Scandinavian or Russian vodka distilled from potatoes when the cheap, plastic-bottle, distilled-from-asphalt kind you can get for a fraction of the price will get you just as hammered?

I can be such a lowbrow.

What Happens in the Mine Stays in the Mine

2010-10-17T09:11:00.000-04:00

On deciding that organized crime wasn’t really for me, I was extremely lucky to be vacationing in the northern Chilean desert right around the time the miners were rescued, and to be able to strike representation deals with a pair of them. Most of their comrades had signed with International Creative Management (hereinafter ICM) or Wm. Morris, but I was able to convince Refugio and Guillermo, as I will call my clients — I will refer to all the miners by names not their own — that I would be giving them my personal attention, and making a 110 percent effort on their behalf, whereas with either of the aforementioned powerhouses, which I referred to scornfully as "your dads' talent agencies," they would be foolish to expect anything more than a 100 percent effort, and a lot of calls would both be made and fielded by callow underlings who were only just learning to enjoy wearing loafers without socks.

Much of what they told me about their and the others’ ordeal took me very much by surprise. One of their most surprising — and upsetting — revelations was that it was actually 36 miners, rather than the reported 33, who descended into the San Jose mine that fateful day this past August. In the 17 days before they were discovered to have survived the cave-in, with no way of knowing that they would ever be rescued, the 33 we saw emerging sunglassed and exultant last week slaughtered and barbecued the two non-Chileans, and immediately regretted having done so, as only the corpulent Bolivian we will call Adolfo was delicious.

The remaining 34 thereafter tried a variety of techniques to keep themselves amused and in good spirits. On Day 22, one of them had the idea of a spelling bee, but it proved impractical for two reasons — several of the men were illiterate, and the miners obviously had no dictionary down there with them. Dancing With the Subterranean Stars, the brainchild of “Luis” and “Mario,” turned out to be very much more successful, though with nearly tragic consequences. The partners in at least three of the half-dozen competing teams — who danced to a capella versions of the Chilean national anthem and Lady Gaga’s "Poker Face" — came to feel themselves in love, and their doing so engendered considerable jealousy among the non-contestants. When the second-place-finishing team of “Gregorio” and “Rudolfo” declared their intention to wed, in fact, it created a rift between those thrilled by the idea of having a wedding to dress up for, and those who believed they'd been quite tolerant enough condoning the idea of a civil union between the two. The opposing sides didn’t speak for nearly three days, after which the point became moot when Gregorio decided to go back to "Estefan" anyway, inspiring the spiteful Rudolfo to start a lot of unpleasant rumors about Gregorio’s erotic shortcomings.

On Day 46, "Alfredo," who before the disaster had been a regular at the Copiapo Gold’s Gym, declared himself fatally fed up with the lovesick Rudolfo’s “gimiendo como una perrita” (“whining like a little bitch”), crushed his skull between his hands, and claimed Gregorio as his own. He then proceeded to pimp Gregorio out to others in exchange for cigarettes, crack, and such favors as fanning him with the football and pornographic magazines their prospective rescuers were sending down to them; it is widely known that the temperature in their cave rarely dropped below 90 degrees Fahrenheit, though Chile is on the metric system.

Nothing is certain until all the t’s have been crossed and all the i’s and j’s dotted, of course, but I will confide that I have thus far arranged for my clients to appear on both Leno and The View, and to endorse Stars On Ice’s forthcoming production called Chilean Miners on Ice. I have contacted the campaigns of various beleaguered Democratic candidates to determine if they are interested in licensing my clients’ endorsements, but to this point only Harry Reid of Nevada, where there are lots of Spanish-speaking miners, has written a cheque.

[Today's title is by Claire.]

Getting Mobbed Up - The Disappointing Conclusion

2010-10-16T18:19:00.000-04:00

Making karaoke singers pay what amounted to protection money before letting them into clubs was the fun part. But I was soon given tasks that weren’t nearly as enjoyable, and had me working 15- and 16-hour days. In the afternoon, I was to go to karaoke bars that hadn’t installed the new South Korean machines that permitted the operator to disable the pitch correction that has been built into all karaoke machines since 2007, and persuade them to replace their existing equipment. The first time they refused, I was to send them intimidating anonymous emails, saying, for instance, “I'd watch my step if I was you, pally.” On second refusal, I was to contact an unseen accomplice at Yelp.com and get him or her to write a scathing review of the place. Of one place, for instance, he or she might write, “This place is awesome except they don’t have any Fleetwood Mac or Abba or Beatles or Eagles.” Of another, he or she might write, “The projection system sucks, so if you don’t know the lyrics by heart, you’re in trouble, because you can’t read them!” If the proprietor in question continued to resist, I was to burn the place to the ground, preferably with him or her inside. This struck me as harsh, but this was the path I’d chosen for myself.

The good news was that I was paid by the hour, and within a couple of weeks was able to afford the sort of casual wear after which I’d long lusted, designed by persons whose surnames ended with vowels. When you look wonderful, you really do feel wonderful, and when you feel wonderful, women, sensing as much, swarm around you, for a reason that isn’t really that difficult to understand if you’ve ever been romantically entangled, as I have, with a zoologist: self-confidence suggests that you will be an avid and capable protector of the young you will produce together.

In any event, I was grabbing a bite to eat at one of the chic new eateries on Maine Street perhaps 10 days ago, apparently both feeling and looking irresistible in my Carlo Buitoni slacks and blazer, when who should slide into the booth opposite me but the of-a-certain-age beauty whose karaoke humiliation I wrote about in an earlier installment. She was wearing a lot of perfume that wasn’t particularly complimentary to the aromas of my lunch, but had also apparently received multiple botox injections recently, and was looking pretty appetizing. She batted her false eyelashes at me and observed that most women secretly love a bastard, her implication — and my inference — being that she regarded my having engineered her humiliation as bastardly. I slipped the restaurant manager a crisp $100 bill to vacate his small, cluttered office for a short while, and we did that which is required to produce young, though it was my hope that her reproductive days were behind her, as I could easily picture her being far too narcissistic and self-absorbed to be a very good mother.

It turned out that she wasn’t as shallow as I’d imagined, though, but much shallower. When we viewed condominiums together, she insisted on a two-bedroom, explaining that I would not be permitted to glimpse her in the morning until she’d gone through her extensive beauty regime, which typically took 150 minutes. I pointed out that I, at my age, am hardly an oil painting the first couple hours after I get up (or the 14 thereafter, for that matter), but she wouldn’t hear of it. I have had more than my fill over the decades of women who won’t hear of things, and so decided not only to cease to “see” her, but to divorce myself from organized crime. I might no longer dress in clothing designed by persons whose surnames ended in vowels, but I would have my self-respect.

Getting Mobbed Up - Part 4

2010-10-14T09:03:00.000-04:00

I was told to report to Molly Malone’s, a bar on Maine Street that I had determined lacked a jukebox, but which turned out to have one of the new state-of-the-art karaoke machines with automatic pitch correction. I’d been told to report to the proprietor, the pronunciation of whose name I couldn’t even guess from the way it was spelled. But he was a good sport and said I should just call him Boss, or Declan, whichever I preferred. Declan is Elvis Costello’s original first name, and The Boss is what they call Bruce Springsteen. I have grown fed up with both of them over the years, and so asked if I might address him instead as Seamus, or Aidan. He asked if I were a wise guy. I asked if he meant in the old sense, or in the more recent one, connoting affiliation with organized crime. I admitted that I was naturally mischievous, and had indeed been called a wise guy in the traditional sense, and pointed out that I was taking the job in hope of becoming a wise guy in the Martin Scorsese sense. He wearily massaged the bridge of his nose and told me to remind him not to ask me anything else any time soon. He gave me a can of pepper spray to squirt into the faces of unruly patrons and sent me outside, where people had already begun to queue, or line up, depending on how refined they were.

I checked everyone’s ID that first night, even that of those who would never see 45 again, just so I could ask why they’d chosen Molly’s rather than any of the other karaoke bars in the vicinity. Not one of them didn’t say it was because he or she seemed to sing much better at Molly’s than at other bars. I would then point out that might have something to do with Molly’s system being state-of-the-art, with automatic pitch correction. A few people, who seemed to want to imagine themselves terrific singers, harrumphed at that. Several of the others seemed embarrassed. Whatever their reactions, I mused pointedly that the state-of-the-art system was expensive to maintain. I stamped the left hand of those who had the presence of mind to respond to that by pressing a crisp $20 bill into my palm. The others got stamped on their right hands.

One woman, who looked as though full of botox, with an expensive-looking hairdo and attire unmistakably bought in boutiques, rather than at department stores, was sorely offended. She snapped, “You might be interested to know that I was very, very close to signing with Atlantic Records in 1990, but decided to pursue modeling instead.”

“Well,” I said, thoughtfully, music’s loss was modeling’s gain, I guess.”
She wasn’t appeased. If anything, she was only getting more irate the longer she stood there, with her boyfriend or husband --- who was probably 15 years her junior, with the sort of features that are commonly described as chiseled — looking as though he wished the ground would open and swallow him whole. “It so happens that the last time I came here, and sang Whitney, half the audience was in tears at the end.”

When I said, without smirking, I wouldn’t be surprised if they weren’t in tears again tonight after she sang. She looked at her boyfriend, as though trying to inspire him to brutalize me with his fists, but as regular readers know, I exude the sort of self-confident virility that suppresses other men’s production of testosterone, and all he did was shrug at me, as though to ask, “Women: what are we to do with ‘em?”

Once inside the club, most of those with stamps on their right hands discovered that their sense of pitch was strangely intermittent. For eight bars, they’d be scrupulously in tune. But then there’d be eight bars of horror. The woman who’d given me such a hard time — I’ll call her Ms. Tears-at-the-End — wasn’t that lucky. From the opening bars of “I Will Always Love You,” her singing was like a roomful of North Koreans yanking Styrofoam carelessly from small appliance boxes. She hadn’t even reached the first chorus before people began jumping to their feet and hurrying toward the exit with their hands over their ears. She tried breathing more deeply from her diaphragm, but that only made her louder, a more excruciating. Finally, with only half a dozen people left in the club, all of them grimacing, she burst into tears, and ran from the club herself.

I resisted the temptation to trip her as she passed me, but only barely.

Getting Mobbed Up - Part 3

2010-10-13T09:11:00.000-04:00

As I headed with bowed head back to my car after my humiliation at the hands of the loiterers in front of the soul food restaurant, a twerp in a hooded sweatshirt rolled up beside me on his skateboard, and informed me, in a voice unable to decide on a register, that he could arrange a meet between me and a local organized crime kingpin. I looked at him skeptically, and he changed his tune. “Well, maybe not a kingpin, but like a princepin.” I urged him to go play on the freeway. He called after me. “Like you’re doing really good on your own, dude?” I suspect he’d have spelled the two yours identically if given the chance, without an apostrophe, which he’d have saved to pluralize an ordinary noun. But he was right about my having nothing to lose, unless you counted my self-respect, and I’m more than old enough to know that if you go through life trying both to get rich and maintain your self-respect, all you can realistically count on is poverty and self-respect. But just try to get into the First Class section with only the latter!

I gave the skateboard twerp the five benjamins (that is, $100) he demanded, and waited and waited, to the point of nearly concluding that I’d been played for a chump. But then, just as my self-respect was about to decline precipitously as a result of my injudiciousness, I received a text message telling me to be in the allergy relief aisle of the pharmacy sector of the CVC on Route 52 in Fishkill in two hours. I thought it was presumptuous and inconsiderate of them not to ask me if that were convenient for me, but it was probably a moot point.

The appointed hour came and went with no one in the specified place. I tried to amuse myself by comparing the active ingredients in various brands of allergy relief medication. But then, around 135 minutes after I’d received my text message, my friend the skateboard twerp materialized. I surmised I wasn’t supposed to recognize him, as he was now wearing mirror sunglasses and a Jericho Cotchery (of the New York Jets) jersey rather than his earlier hoodie, and sniffling up a storm, though it was November, and there was no pollen in the air. It occurred to me that maybe he had a cat. Addressing me now as “my man,” he said if I were serious about a new career in organized crime, what I needed to look into was karaoke.

Funded by American organized crime interests, South Koreans had developed a method of overriding the digital pitch correction being built into the most recent generation of karaoke machines. Karaoke enthusiasts who’d become accustomed to sounding really good in spite of rotten voices, could, at the click of a mouse, be humiliatingly exposed. Organized crime had contracted with karaoke club doormen throughout the tri-state area to collect “protection” money from vain singers who sought to avoid such humiliation. “It’s like a windfall, my man,” the boy marveled, and you can get in on like the ground floor.” I couldn’t see a downside, but he took pains to make me aware that there was one. Only the week before, down in Hammonton, New Jersey, one of the mob’s doormen had been beaten comatose by the husband of a woman whose version of Christina Aguilera’s "Beautiful" had, according to the nightlife column in the weekly Hammonton Herald, made everyone in Jack’s Hi-Lo Room “long for temporary deafness.”

When I told him I’d think it over and get back to him, he smirked and said, in view of how much I now knew, I was either in or dead. It occurred to me I’d been foolish to expect organized criminals to be gracious and accommodating.

Getting Mobbed Up - Part 2

2010-10-12T08:17:00.001-04:00

I thought maybe it made more sense to try to get mobbed up via what I’d heard called the numbers game in some movies, and the policy racket in others. I headed down to one of Maine Street’s two most popular soul food restaurants, in front of which a little mob of unemployed middleaged persons of the sort I thought likely suspects could commonly be observed loitering in fanciful headwear and facial hair, smoking cigarettes and affectionately insulting each other in voices that too many cigarettes had made raspy.

I wasn’t sure how I should approach them. The only time in my life I ever addressed a black man as bro, steam fairly came out of his nose he was so furious. He was about my own age. We’d both had our eye on a particular parking place in Golden Gate Park, and I, believing that he’d seen it first, called to him, “It’s yours, bro.” What he seemed to have heard, though, was, “If only there were some way to repeal the Emancipation Proclamation.”

The fellows in front of the soul food restaurant were all right around my old age, or younger, so I didn’t think they’d be able to feel patronized unless they really put their backs into it, but I didn’t feel I should take a chance with bro. On the other hand, if I addressed them collectively as “gentlemen,” I thought they’d either think me a high school PE teacher on the lam, or a dickhead. “Guys” wouldn’t work, and “fellas” felt pretty lame too.

And once I figured out how to address them, what would I do if any of them who wanted to shake hands? If I offered them my own grabber traditionally, with the fingers at a 30-degree angle to the ground and my thumb at 90 degrees, would they think I was from the FBI, or roll their eyes at my lack of cool? If I went instead for the classic fingers-skyward/thumb pointed back at myself soul grasp, would they react as though I’d addressed them as bro? If not, should I curl my fingers to hook their own curled fingers after we’d interlocked thumbs? I felt uncomfortably as though back in high school, trying desperately to figure out a way to make my lust known to a pretty girl in such as way as make her neither snicker at me nor hit me over the head with her looseleaf binder.

In the end, after extensive hesitation, I realized that those who hesitate are lost, took a deep breath, and just bounded into their midst, blurting, “How’s everybody doing this afternoon?”

The one in the bedraggled Mets cap turned away in disgust. The one in the dingy captain’s cap arched his eyebrows at me censoriously, sipped deeply from whatever he had in his brown paper sack, and did the same. The one in the do-rag spat in the general direction of my feet, and then arched his own eyebrows at me, as though to ask, “You got a problem with somebody nearly spitting on your feet, motherfucker?” But the guy in the straw fedora and Find the Cure T-shirt said, “Can’t complain.” His companion, a desiccated-looking old-timer with a space between his teeth through which you could have pushed a mandarin orange, said, “Shit, I sure as hell can,” and laughed the brittle, rattly laugh of someone who didn’t have years of laughter to look forward to.

When I told them I was interested in playing the numbers, the one in the do-rag spat again, closer to my feet this time, and the one with apparent emphysema wheezed incredulously. His pal, in the straw fedora, shook his head and said, “Shit.” Between them, they'd used four syllables to say it twice. “Ain’t nobody played the numbers in this town since before Rodney King, Jack.”

[Many of my books are now available for download from Amazon. They include The Total Babe & Other Wine Country Yarns, Lentils on the Moon (aka A Message From Jesus in Braille, aka A History of the Jews in the Hudson Valley), Self-Loathing: An Owner's Manual, Third World USA, The Mona Lisa's Brother, and, for baseball nuts, Foul Balls and Alpha Males. ]