Really?

Really, David Remnick? When did you decide to improve The New Yorker with the creepiest, ugliest cover art you could find? All right, you win, I can't wait for the annual Eustace Tilly issue. Although if January 25 is anything to go by, it will be Vampire Eustace Tilly. Is that what you're going for, the teenagers who read those stupid Twilight books? (Remember when we got all encouraged that children were reading Harry Potter, that they would line up to buy a book? Look what they graduated to. Never get encouraged.)

Really, Massachusetts? The calendar boy with Sarah Palin's brainlet? Why not make Jeff Gannon your next governor?

Really, NBC? Are you still even a network? You know that nobody now gives a crap whether The Tonight Show is hosted by Jay Leno or Conan O'Brien or the re-animated corpse of Jack Paar. You still have one good show that hasn't been on the air for fifty years. I assume you'll fire Alec Baldwin next. Twenty-four hours before he wins another Emmy. By the way, nobody gives a crap about winter Olympics, either.

Really, Congress? Never mind, you know exactly what I mean. Don't look at the ceiling. You know.

Really, Andy Martin? Is that the best you can do? After the glorious foolery of the "birther" hoax, you tell us that Obama's parents weren't really married? First of all, being illegitimate wouldn't disqualify him from being president. Second, I wish it were true. He needs to be more of a bastard. Less of this "malice toward none," and a lot more LBJ arm-twisting and ass-kicking. And Andy, you need to go off your meds again. Hey, fly over Massachusetts and throw the pills out the window.

Really, Vatican? Are you prepared to let that woman throw a flying tackle on your pope every Christmas Eve? Isn't there a list? Shouldn't she be on it? Not that I care. She's pretty good. The Giants should invite her to camp.

And speaking of lists, really, Transportation Safety Administration? Mikey is eight and he's on a no-fly list. Do you think he has explosives in his Underroos?

Really.

I left my hate in Haiti

Along with food, water, shelter and medical care, most of the population of Haiti has lost access to mass communication. Thus they were spared the following:

And you know Kristi, something happened a long time ago in Haiti and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French, uh you know Napoleon the third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the Devil. They said we will serve you if you'll get us free from the French. True Story. And so the Devil said "OK, it's a deal." And they kicked the French out. You know, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since they have been cursed by one thing after the other, desperately poor. That island is Hispaniola is one island. It's cut down the middle. On one side is Haiti, on the other side is the Dominican republic. Dominican Republic is prosperous, healthy, full of resorts, etc.. Haiti is in desperate poverty. Same island. Uh, they need to have, and we need to pray for them, a great turning to God and out of this tragedy. I'm optimistic something good may come.

This indecently stupid and ignorant blather, from Marion "Pat" Robertson of course, has been all over the intertubes and has drawn criticism even from other right-wingers. At first I was bemused (my fallback position in this century) to hear apparent support for the French, even if this founder of an accredited "university" can't tell one Napoleon from another. A moment's thought brought clarity: Haiti is a Catholic country, and to Robertson, Catholics are worse than atheists, worse than Voodoo, worse even than the secular feminist lesbians who forced God to endorse the destruction of the World Trade Center. "A pact to the Devil?" Don't you mean the pope?

Unfortunately, everyone in the rest of the world, including the thousands of Haitians resident in the United States, had to hear or read this garbage. For the less spiritually inclined, there was Jabba the Rush insisting that the earthquake and its victims were nothing but a public relations opportunity for Barack Obama, who responded to the horror with unseemly promptness because -- wait for it -- most Haitians are black. (At least he didn't cite the Crips and the Bloods, but that could just reflect a lack of good "looting" footage.) Obama, of course, needs to shore up his popularity among African-Americans, who are responding to the phat beats of Michael Steele in ever-increasing numbers. I confess I felt a bit queasy when he asked George W. "Katrina" Bush to help head up the American relief effort, but Bill Clinton will be around to do the heavy lifting.

Charities, celebrities, public figures and thousands of individuals have already raised millions of dollars for relief. Countries from Venezuela to Japan are stepping up. And from the obscenely rich, non-tax-paying Robertson, not even a case of the "energy supplements" he peddles to his feeble-minded flock. Just smugness and bad history and prayers, and another opportunity to promote his medieval worldview.

It is time to tax the religion industry.

Keeping score

Domestic terror scorecard, 2009:

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

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

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

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

We're winning the war on terror.

Eyes not shot

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

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

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

Merry Christmas, gang.

Tiger, by the tail

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

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

A man can look, though...

Yesterday's hero

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

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

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

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

Faith-based initiative

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pogue mahone

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

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

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