Minority report

WHITEFACE MINSTREL DIES --
blogger not impressed

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

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

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

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

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

Two cultures

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

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

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

Life styles

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

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

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

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

Even Stephen?

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

Iraq changed you, man.

Hello, Sully?

Have you seen this man?

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

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

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

I hope he's all right.

I stand corrected

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

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

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

Farewell?

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

Tuesday morning ramble

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

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

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

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

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

What might have been

My fellow Americans:

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

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

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

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