Death of a scribbler

I am uncomfortable with the gloating which the death of Christopher Hitchens has caused here on the Upper Left Side of Blogenheim. Here is the entirety of yesterday's post by esteemed blogger Roger Ailes:

Ashes to ashes. Smoking will do that you.

Christopher Hitchens has died. He is not survived by thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed by America's occupation of Iraq.

Hitchens was a great, and sometimes misguided, polemicist, but he wasn't a politician or a bureaucrat. It seems a tad excessive to hold him responsible for a war, any war. Me, I'd save this kind of snark for the death of, say, Dick Cheney. They have to run out of heart valves eventually.

It's always sad when people of ability lend their talents to evil, but Hitchens was not Albert Speer or even Leni Riefenstahl. He worked for no government or political campaign. And exactly how much power did his gorgeous prose have? His hatchet job on Mother Teresa is unlikely to carry much weight when canonization time rolls around. (Or has it? I'm not clear on her position in the vast Catholic pantheon.) His irrational hatred of Bill Clinton, apparently dating from some Oxford slight, did not prevent Clinton from winning, and serving, two full terms. His equally bizarre fondness for George Bush was hardly decisive, except insofar as it led him to take up US citizenship and presumably vote for the shit. Unlike Judith Miller and other hacks, his cheerleading for the Iraq war did not carry the imprint of the Newspaper of Record. True, he never acknowledge being "misled" about the war, but few polemicists ever admit their mistakes, or Sunday morning television would be nothing but cartoons. (An exception was David Brock, who retracted his smear of Anita Hill, but so what? Professor Hill's onetime harasser continues to sit on the Supreme Court despite his manifest lack of ability and integrity, and there isn't even a movement to impeach him.)

God Is Not Great is a terrific read, and I can see it influencing a bright adolescent on the brink of agnosticism, but it hasn't exactly emptied the houses of worship. It adds little to Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian except to extend the argument: a sort of Why I Am Not a Christian, a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Mormon Or Anything Else. (Actually, Hitchens decided some years ago that he was a Jew, or as he might say, echoing Jonathan Miller, "Not a Jew -- just Jew-ish," but he didn't let it slow him down. It turned out that the things he admired about Jews -- love of argument, secular culture -- where precisely the things he admired in himself. I couldn't help thinking of Moliere's Monsieur Jourdain, who is delighted to learn he has been effortlessly speaking prose his entire life.)

Nobody is right all the time -- George Orwell was apoplectic on the subject of men who wore sandals, for some reason -- and everybody has the right to be an ass without being blamed for appalling and unnecessary wars. Had Hitchens with his last breath dictated an apology for the WMD fantasy, the shambles we have opted to call "Iraq sovereignty" would be just as bloody. Millions would be without electricity or reliable water, Sunnis and Shiites would still blow up each other's shrines, the dead would still be dead. If a man goes from being the scourge of Henry Kissinger to flattering the likes of Paul Wolfowitz in exchange for drinks and meals, let us not rejoice in his death. Let us rather pass over his errors with silence and pity, and be grateful for the lovely writing he did.

End of days

December has come round, and soon all the usual suspects will be publishing their lists of the famous dead and the crucial events of 2011. Time Magazine will reveal its Whatsit of the Year, to the delight of Charlie Rose and literally dozens of others. Given the hostility of Nature and the fragility of world peace, we at the Sky are by no means certain of seeing the ball drop, so let the reminiscing begin early.

Some fucking year, huh?

I can just remember a more innocent time, when we were caught up in the shenanigans of Anthony Weiner and Charlie Sheen. Was it mere months ago? Weiner never demanded that a woman give him a blowjob in return for a real job, and Sheen didn't rape children on the Penn State campus (or cover for anyone who did). I feel as if we owe these two guys an apology. The goalposts have been moved way back for skeevy behavior, out of reach of most politicians and celebrities. Being a public scumbag is now a twenty-four hour job, with the glittering prizes for the best/worst being "reality" TV and the White House itself.

At this point in the runup to a presidential election, the party out of power has usually winnowed its field down to two or three, with the no-hopers and the designated joker already at work on their ghost-written books. But there's a different Republican front-runner every two weeks, out of what seems like dozens of candidates, as The Base swings like a compass needle vainly seeking True Right. "I say you are the Messiah, and I should know -- I've followed a few!" John Cleese exclaimed in The Life of Brian. So many messiahs, so many disappointments. And instead of one joker, they have a whole deck, even without Sarah Palin, Fred Thompson and Donald Trump.

There's Mitt Romney, who makes Thompson look almost lifelike. When Romney bought a house in Crazytown a couple of years ago, he set about changing his position 180 degrees on absolutely everything, from Afghanistan to zygotes -- and still his neighbors view him with suspicion. He has nothing left to change, unless he shows up in New Hampshire next month as a woman named Mitzi.

Then there was Herman Cain, who studied ethics under Clarence Thomas and made Palin look like a foreign policy expert. Yesterday his campaign was "suspended," which is the political equivalent of putting a sitcom on hiatus: you won't see it again. Credit The Base with consistency -- they won't support someone who has plausibly been accused of the stuff that would get a Democrat impeached, no matter how much they might love his cockamamie tax proposals.

From out of the west came Rick Perry, with hollow promises of Texas secession. Whatever is causing his incoherence, it's easy to see why Perry has been called "Bush without the brains." When he was unable to remember the Cabinet departments he wants to abolish, supporters in Florida became uneasy, perhaps afraid he might mistakenly close the office that mails out their Social Security checks.

Michele Bachmann's public statements have been so unhinged, people are starting to whisper the "N" word -- neurosyphilis. We could try sprinkling her lunch with penicillin; if she starts sounding like Bella Abzug, she's cured.

Who's that climbing out of the clown-car? The old perennial, Newt Gingrich! Accused of collecting large sums of money to represent corporate interests in Washington, the Georgia Leech retorted that it isn't lobbying because he isn't registered as a lobbyist. Which is like telling the cop who just pulled you over, "I can't possibly be driving this car -- I don't have a license."

Jon Huntsman, Rick Santorum, Ron Paul, the voters wander aimlessly from one to another, finding all wanting, yearning in their hearts for Ronald Reagan to return from the blessed isle of Avalon (or Catalina), to rescue them from the enforced vegetarianism and gun confiscation of the Kenyan Muslim Usurper, to lead them into the Promised Land of small government, no taxes, hermetically sealed borders, and non-white people working in the kitchen or mowing the lawn. But you can't always get what you want. Probably none of us will.

iDissent

"Everyone who cares about music and art and movies and heroic comebacks and rich rewards and being able to carry several kinds of infinity around in your shirt pocket is taken aback by this sudden huge vacuuming-out of a titanic presence from our lives. We've lost our techno-impresario and digital dream granter."

Thus, and much more, wrote Nicholson Baker in The New Yorker of October 17, 2011, grieving the death of Steve Jobs. As usual when writing about anything but his libido, Baker is full of crap. No towering figure of invention has passed. Nothing Jobs devised, alone or with his employees, has changed history as decidedly as the telegraph, the internal combustion engine, the motion picture camera, or even air conditioning. He was simply the most dynamic gadget salesman in history. He convinced millions of consumers that they could not possibly leave the house without a device which would enable them to locate a tapas bar in Towson, Maryland, play Angry Birds, listen to the complete works of Pearl Jam and, in a pinch, even make a phone call. They mourn him the way an earlier generation of affluent, permanent children mourned Unca Walt Disney: He sold them new ways to amuse themselves. And exactly what the hell does "several kinds of infinity" mean? "Infinity" is now just another empty Apple word, like "genius."

Are these ubiquitous devices making life better, or just making it cruder? Have you tried to talk to someone who keeps glancing down at a screen where something more engaging might have appeared? Is it helpful that millions of self-involved key-thumpers can fill Twitface with their witless observations and quotidian updates from practically every place but the bottom of the Marianas Trench? Do we really want our shirt pockets to contain a phone which makes it easy for persons and agencies unknown to pinpoint our locations? I don't want to sound libertarian/paranoid, but if I want the police to know where I am, I could probably arrange to be fitted with an electronic monitoring device, at little or no cost to myself. And I do care about "music and art and movies," just as I did when I discovered them in concert halls and museums and movie theaters. I mourn for those who never will, and will have no idea what has been taken from their lives -- not for Steve Jobs.

Friday night lights out

I have seen the end of civilization. I know, most of us have said that at least once a day since the Nixon Administration, but this is the real thing.

Lingerie League Football.

Two teams of women, in bras and garter belts (and helmets), playing football. When did this become a thing? It was too sleazy even for E! or ESPN; it was on one of those VH1 channels. The coaches (all male) appeared to be taking it seriously, too -- not like Tom Hanks at the beginning of A League of Their Own, when he's too drunk even to make out the lineup. If this were a one-off, some dumb National Lampoon movie for mental fourteen-year-olds, I could have changed the channel with a shrug and a sigh. Instead, I have this permanent cramp behind my forehead and a sense that Rush Limbaugh has had his revenge for not being allowed to buy into the NFL.

As for the women, I hope they make a decent wage and have major medical. What more do I have a right to wish? In 2011, that's beyond the dreams of millions.

Vast wasteland 2.0

I have been taking a break from television thanks to Comcast, The World's Shittiest Cable Company. ("We didn't get rich enough to buy NBC by providing quality cable service!") Tomorrow someone will install yet another reconditioned cable box, in time for me to catch up with the endless iterations of 9/11 -- the pageantry, the speeches, the bagpipes. The Second Amendment guarantees that every American has a significantly better chance of being shot by a robber, or in a drive-by, or by accident, or just for the hell of it, than ever being within a hundred miles of a "terrorist," but all those billions of dollars spent to make us "safe" can't be wrong, can they?

After the solemnities comes the new television season, and the signs are not good. MAD MEN has evidently spawned two imitations, set in the Sixties when women wore uncomfortable uniforms and did as they were told; I predict early cancellation for both PAN AM and PLAYBOY CLUB. TV has long tried to cover both ends of the crime-fighting spectrum, state-of-the-art science as well as shows where some woman talks to dead people; this year there's a lawyer who chats with his dead wife. (No, it's not called THE DEAD WIFE. They didn't think of it in time.) I think it's meant to be taken seriously. And of course, "reality" rolls on and on.

It's been a brutal year, though, by any standards -- earthquake, drought, excessive snow, floods, hurricanes, wildfires, tornadoes, numberless challenges to what we laughingly call the infrastructure, and the intractable economic mess. The public is in a mean mood, restive, pacing, looking around anxiously for something else to go wrong. They're just a little jaded, hungry for fresh thrills such as these shows used to provide. Americans want distraction, and they want it bad. "Reality TV" may just have to turn up the voltage. After all, it's a truism that people go to auto races (and air shows, and boxing matches, and let's be honest, high school football) hoping that death, as Tom Lehrer put it, will brighten an otherwise dull afternoon. What if it were a certainty?

"Survivor." Really? Watching somebody get voted off an island is a little too much like our pointless electoral process -- idiots in, idiots out. What if they were hurled over a cliff into a shark-filled cove? Would you watch? Just to be sure they don't turn up a week later on The Tonight Show?

"Toddlers, Tiaras and Traffickers." Just following a line of thought. Did I cross a line? Sure, moms dress four-year-olds like tiny hookers, but I'm the pervert.

For our more mettlesome friends in the UK, "The Real Housewives of Whitechapel." Every week a spoiled, useless, facelifted, drink-hurling bimbo is eviscerated in an alley. Relax, you get to vote on which one. Best thing on BBC America, which isn't saying much.

There have been complaints about "Dancing With the Stars," no dancing and this season no stars. What if they revive apache dancing, a performance style popular in low-end French cabarets in the 1920s? The man hurls his partner sadistically about the stage in a display of machismo calculated to cause bruises and broken bones. (Clueless about most things American, the French apparently thought this was how Apaches, i.e. savages, treated women.) Hard to picture? Wait till some NFL veteran grabs Nancy Grace by her ankle, pinwheels her around and tosses her away, her head splitting open like a pumpkin! If you don't have hi-def, this is the time to get it.

Ice may love Coco, but market research says a hefty share of the public wants to see him go Ike Turner on her ass. Vox populi, vox dei, nome sane?

And finally, we're tired of waiting for the Jersey Shore crew to develop skin cancer. How far is it from the shore to the Pine Barrens? If you know what I mean.

Puzzling evidence

Thirty thousand Texans christurbating as one...and still, it doesn't rain.

Maledizione!

Rigoletto on PBS


What would it take to make me turn off a production of Rigoletto within fifteen minutes?

1. It would need to be presented by a British woman with a posh accent, emphasizing that it was filmed in "authentic" Mantua locations.

2. It would involve a superannuated tenor whose giant ego has led him to believe he should remain before the public in baritone roles, doing violence to the composer's intentions.

3. It would be conducted by Zubin Mehta.

4. It would open with a chorus dressed as 16th century courtiers, dancing the polka.

5. You need more? I repeat: the polka.