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Having a Smoke Outside Tim Horton’s

On our trip to Canada in August, an old man having a smoke outside the Tim Horton’s in Baden, Ontario, noticed our Illinois license plates. “From the States, eh?” (Gotta say, stereotypes aside, this was the one time I heard an “Eh?” for the whole trip.)

Yep.

“They don’t treat their old folks too good down there.”

Well, there you go, a great way to start a conversation. I could callously agree and get on with my cruller-eating, or disagree and get into a discussion with someone who had obviously made up his own mind. Where are you now, Dale Carnegie?

Despite the misconception, Canada does have one national language, and it is politeness. So I had to actually try and converse with him. It really didn’t go anywhere, as he just wanted to tell me he pays $4 for his prescriptions and he knows all about the US because he and his late wife used to golf a lot in North Carolina.

But one reason to stop and talk was to get an outsider’s opinion of the whole health care “debate” now devolving. I hadn’t seen any of the town hall shouting matches, but I don’t think I needed to. If I wanted to see a bunch of middle-aged white guys shouting, I could go to a demolition derby. Unfortunately, I’m pretty uninformed about the topic. Which generally doesn’t stop anyone from having an opinion, but I’m kind of old school about such things. I also don’t like arguing with pensioners. Bad form.

But to explain to him why the arguments were happening the way they have been? Sort of impossible in a casual setting. If he didn’t know that America is more dog-eat-dog than Canada by this stage in his life, he’s not paying attention, and to make the point felt like self-flagellation. Which isn’t covered by my insurance.

I haven’t bothered to watch many of the town hall screamfests now that I’m back with a TV and broadband access. I mean, what’s there to learn, except that a huge portion of my country has been pounded by economic and social change and doesn’t like it one bit, and has decided that aligning themselves with the pharma-insurance industry will improve their lives? Today, I did watch the video clip from the NJ meeting, when a woman in a wheelchair with auto-immune problems was heckled and mocked because she might lose her home. Was it cruel? Yes. Surprising? No.

Because a large portion of Americans have no big objections to watching people’s lives collapse. Not a majority, I don’t think, but certainly a good chunk. As long as they’re not personally affected and their corner of the world stays the same, everyone else can just go to hell. You can dress it all up in flashy principles like small government, no creeping socialism, and all that, but that group of people really doesn’t mind watching others suffer. “The devil take the hindmost,” they think, and one more day when someone else is the hindmost is a good one.

Trying to explain that to a nice old Canuck in front of a donut shop isn’t easy. I didn’t try.

But at the end of our conversation, as a way of sign-off, he said, “Well, regardless, you guys seem to get things done in the end. You find ways to get it all together.”

Sure we do, as long as you don’t tally up all the costs.

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The Bardball Podcast, Starring Me

This year has been a stellar one over at Bardball, the baseball poetry website. Some of our submissions have been so well written, we may have to change our slogan from “Reviving the Art of Baseball Doggerel” to “Baseball Poetry I Wish I’d Wish I’d Written.”

And now, we’re gettin’ all high-tech and virtual on y’all, because now we’ve made our first podcast featuring poetry from the site. Unfortunately on this first “Bardcast”, I’m the one doing the narration, but there’s plenty of good writing and cool music to take your mind off my flat Midwestern A’s. This podcast is from poetry we published around the beginning of the season, but we’ll have a lot more as the summer rolls on.

Please check it out by going to libsyn. You can also find the Bardcast through iTunes. If you feel like doing us a favor, click to subscribe on the Bardcast to drive our numbers out of the single digits.

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Never Give a Sucker an Even Break

I sure am glad that we had swine flu to kick around in the news this week. The talking heads on cable probably feel a whole lot better, even purged and colonicked, now that they’ve been able to scream about “Black Death” and “pandemic” ad nauseam.

Wait, is nausea a symptom? Ooooohhhh, I don’t feel so hot.

But as the newsworthiness of the economic meltdown has subsided, there’s been a shortage of articles on a topic that I was really beginning to enjoy: First person accounts of the people who lost money with Bernard Madoff. I gobbled these news reports up whenever I found them, even reading more than one article in an issue of Vanity Fair, which is probably a first.

Now, I’ll say up front, to avoid looking like a heartless bastard, that of course I’m sorry that this guy got away with swindling people for all those years, even as the SEC was tipped off again and again that the returns Madoff was getting were incredibly suspicious. I’m also sorry that charities were devastated, and that many people lost their life savings. Terrible thing. Horrible thing. And I think Madoff is a criminal of the first order.

But as I absorbed the articles, a faint glow of satisfaction would often came over me, that reassured me that I wasn’t quite as ignorant about financial matters as I’d thought. I try and keep up with things, and show a little economic acumen (especially around the first of the year, when resolutions and good intentions are flying through the air), but finance simply not my area. My father was an economic whiz, slaving for Ford Motor Credit Company for almost two decades, in a job his successor told me would burn him out in three years. My eldest brother has made a nice career in the tech industry balancing costs and savings and keeping his company at the top of its field. But I try to be honest with my limitations and don’t get fancy with my money.

But at least I can attest to one investing principle that works: DIVERSIFY!

That’s exactly what most of Madoff’s victims failed to do. Many got greedy, mortgaged their houses and sank every penny into his brokerage. And, as so many articles pointed out, these were people who knew how to make money. They weren’t greenhorns, they were very successful and had been around the block several times. But the desire for more riches–and the need to be let in to Madoff’s inner circle of investors, the cognoscenti, the non-suckers, which seems to be at least as strong a motivator here–proved so strong that they ignored the most basic single word that an investor should remember. Diversify your holdings, or you’ll get burned.

My heart goes out to these people, but my sympathy is also tempered by incredulity. How could they let this happen to themselves? Is it true what Fields said, that you can’t cheat an honest man? Sometimes I read the articles to find the one or two voices of reason that, amid all the wailing and the anger, points out common sense, and the negligence people showed in trusting all their money to a single company. But maybe sometimes, I read them to realize again that not being overly clever with my money has generally worked out for us.

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Free of the Torture of Christopher Buckley

I’ve always tried to be generous with Christopher Buckley. Though I don’t know him, he apparently was insightful enough 15 years ago to assert that I was obviously a conservative if I wrote Politically Correct Bedtime Stories. I cut him some slack, probably out of professional courtesy/envy. I can’t think of anyone else who gets paid to write satirical novels on a regular basis (though I’ve only managed to finish one of them), so slagging him might collapse the whole genre. And many of his articles are funny, though not as funny as he seems to think.

But something he wrote for The Daily Beast yesterday takes him off the protected list. On the subject of the released torture memos, he upbraids many commentators for getting “sanctimonious” about the fact that the US tortured its prisoners at Gitmo and Abu Gharaib. For those of us who are appalled that our government engages in torture, he takes pains to remind us that:

It is, yes, good that the U.S.A. is not doing this anymore, but let’s not get too sanctimonious about how awful it was that we indulged in these techniques after watching nearly 3000 innocent Americans endure god-awful deaths at the hands of religious fanatics who would happily have detonated a nuclear bomb if they had gotten their mitts on one. And let us move on. There is pressing business. (Are you listening, ACLU? Hel-lo?)

The operative question becomes: What do we do now with captive bad guys who possess information that could prevent another 9/11? We may have moved on. They, assuredly, have not.

If he thinks the “captive bad guys” are fleshy repositories about Islamic doomsday plans (especially after being in custody for 6 years), then Buckley’s not as smart as he thinks. (The question of what to do with the men themselves is certainly thorny, now that they will either be tortured more in their home countries or set loose on the streets, living testimony that America is some kind of devil.) If he thinks it’s “sanctimonious” to want to hold people accountable for giving the order to torture, then he’s a suck-up to power.

And since elsewhere in the article he makes joking comparisons between the now-open torture techniques and his rough handling from the senior boys at boarding school, then he’s a turd, pure and simple.

In the days and weeks after 9/11, I remember telling people that we should take every one of those filthy desert barbarians and remove them to places where they could be tortured until they gave up every name in their rolodexes. And if they died in the meantime, small loss. And I bet a lot of other Americans were screaming the same thing. But I’m not a leader. This country would be in ridiculous shape if I were even given an honorary mayorship for the day. But there are smarter, saner heads than mine in Washington. Some were in leadership positions 7-8 years ago. We need to find out who overruled them and made torture our policy against our enemies.

I’m not being naive. I’m aware this country has engaged in secretive torture (and worse) during my lifetime. And at the risk of sounding cynical or paranoid, nothing will ever be done about that. But during this decade, torture has been used as an official tool in the “war on terror,” and I want it investigated, repudiated, degraded, eliminated. Not to have a witch hunt for lower-level ops, but to get to the highest levels, the ones who told the agents in the field, impressed with their machismo in the face of moral uncertainty, to “take the gloves off.” Because when the higher-ups sanctioned torture, they did it in my name as a citizen.

I was ecstatic on the day that Illinois set a moratorium on the death penalty because I didn’t want the state killing people in my name. Regardless of whether it was an effective deterrent for criminals (it isn’t), or whether victims’ families need “closure”, I don’t want Illinois as a policy killing people in my name. It’s too bad it wasn’t done legislatively, but I’ll take it anyway I can.

Sure, people will make political hay out of the torture memos, but such is life. You can get as realpolitik as you want here, but you’re still faced with the question: What’s the right thing to do? If you cast the whole struggle as a battle of civilization vs. barbarism, where did we land? Do you want to look your kid in the eye–or your mother, or John Wayne, or Abe Lincoln–and say, “Yes, some fanatic medievalists hate America, and blew up innocent citizens, so in response we gathered up a bunch of people on the battlefield in that part of the world and tortured them repeatedly over years until they told us some stuff that may or may not be accurate, just to stop the pain, though it wasn’t really torture, more like hazing, really–and it was the right thing to do. We’re all safer now. And they had it coming to them anyway. So let’s move on.”

If that’s how Buckley thinks, then I should be grateful he was honest. Now I don’t have to feel obliged to read any more of his dry satires of Washington. He always seemed too comfortable with the bullshit he was ostensibly making fun of, now we know why. (I’ve always been suspicious ever since I saw a blurb from him on someone’s novel–possibly one by Stephen Fry– praising it as “Trenchantly, tootingly funny.” For that, he deserves a punch in the kiwis and a week chained to Carlos Mencia.)

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Momentous Inauguration, but Occasional-ly Lousy

That was quite some inaugural yesterday. Hope you had a chance to see it as it happened. The TV was on CNN almost all day around here, and I sat down to watch more than I should of parades and balls. I haven’t watched that much TV in a long time, and I was beginning to feel it by early evening. Bloated, unmotivated, a little down–this must be how couch potatoes always feel, but some of it was also due to the passing of the moment. The glitz and glamor will dissipate as our long time of rebuilding begins. Obama might be ready to roll up his sleeves, but I’m always a fan of the interim, the suspense, the what if. It’s safer than commitment.

But the event was a marvelous thing to see, even if W failed to fall down the steps or grab the microphone for a few “clairifcatures” like I hoped. At least Cheney had the sense of theatricality to show up in a wheelchair. I just couldn’t tell if he reminded me of old Mr. Potter, some Bond villain, or Joe Flaherty doing Guy Caballero. (“The wheelchair is for RESPECT!”)

While Obama’s swearing in was thrilling, and his speech pretty darn good (I liked his victory speech in Grant Park a little better), I think everyone would agree that the occasional poem recited by Elizabeth Alexander was a waste of time. (I joked to my wife that it was a surefire way to get 1 million people off the mall quickly, and by gosh if Jon Stewart didn’t use the same joke last night. I still got it!) Of course, it’s no picnic following a speech by the new president, but her “Prasie song for the day” sounded like a laundry list of “Dumb Things I Gotta Do.” The delivery was flat, the words limp, the sentiment mundane. Other than that, it was great. (For more comments, check out the forum at the Poetry Foundation HERE.)

It’s a challenge to capture the spirit of a momentous occasion in a few lines of poetry. Few in history have ever done it well, and the pressure can be taxing. An article caught my eye last fall about the British Poet Laureate, who in his tenure has felt his spring of inspiration dry up. In sympathy for Andrew Motion and the difficulty of poetizing for state events and special occasions, I wrote the following sonnet:

On the Occasion of a New Shopping Center

From Cairo’s souks, the alleys of Tibet,
The saffron-flaked bazaars of Bangalore—
This HyperMart, tho’ newly opened, yet
Does put to shame all those that went before.
In all of England stands there not a shop
To match its offerings in magnitude:
Such produce fresh, such lean and meaty chops,
A deli counter of such plentitude.
In contrast does my soul constrict from want
Of any inspiration, hope or spark,
An empty cupboard, dusty, full of….ants
And metaphors that somehow miss their mark.

Such bargains here, a shopper can’t refuse,
Yet none can match how cheap I sold my muse.

Maybe some zoning commission needs a laureate?

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Warm Cuddlies and Inescapable Afterthoughts

It’s a little bit hectic around here this morning. Carpeting guys are in to take care of the mess that happened Dec. 27, when our record snow cover was hit by near-record heat and pounding rain, creating a nice flood in the basement. The same basement that flooded in Sept with our “once in a century” rainfall. My wife isn’t sure she can take many more of these “rare” events. (I’m sure the flooding was a lot worse downstate that week, so we don’t feel much more than inconvenienced, relatively. There’s always someone worse off than you, til you’re dead, and even then, who knows?)

Our Christmas trip to Michigan between our families was fine and uneventful. Would’ve wished for more snow, so we could’ve gone X-country skiing like we did so many times last year. It was rather frazzle-making, though, as every single day was spent in the car on the way to somewhere. I expected to hear a lot more stories about the sinking economy from Michiganders, but since that’s what we’ve heard on visits there for the past 15 years, the current mess didn’t particularly stand out. If the country has enjoyed any kind of economic boom in this century, the Great Lakes region didn’t see it. It’s still a place where people are working two or three jobs to keep their head above water, and barring any big changes in the way the world works (like the Federal government protecting pensions or offering health care) I think it’s going to stay that way.

Among other events, we visited The Henry Ford Museum (now known as “The Henry Ford”, b/c some marketeer told them “People won’t come visit you if you call yourself a museum.” Next up for renaming: proctologists, prisons, and possibly Detroit itself). It’s a great place, as anyone can tell you. Though it’s changed a lot since I worked there during college, it’s still a remarkable collection of artifacts from America’s industrial heyday. The museum also contains the limo that Kennedy rode in Dallas, the Rosa Parks “Sorry, Lady, I ain’t doin’ it” bus, and the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile, so you can’t fault them for variety.

The current special museum exhibit displayed costumes from sci-fi and adventure movies. The tourists were in complete awe of seeing the nippled Batsuit, the Star Trek Gorn, and Darth Vader’s togs. I’ve never been able to understand this. Have you ever seen a movie prop or costume that didn’t look like a cheap trinket up close? This very day, in shop classes around the country, kids are welding together Star Wars blasters that look more feasible, durable and just plain cool than the cheap tire iron on display there (probably more deadly, too). It must be a unique skill for prop and costume designers to put together things that look so good on screen out of such cheap material (granted, most items have been heavily used during filming). Conversely, anytime I’ve visited an art museum and seen a familiar painting or sculpture in its original form and scale, it’s almost never failed to blow me away. It’s one of the paradoxes of living, solved only by copious amounts of drinking.

A visit to one’s childhood stomping grounds elicits an endless litany of “Oh, such-and-such used to be there” or “That’s where we used to ride bikes before it was a mall.” It’s a tediously surefire path to geezerhood. But driving through Dearborn we passed by the redoubtable Dearborn Music, and I did a quick swerve into the parking lot. The place is still hanging on (it’s even bigger than it was when I was young). It used to be an old style store that sold guitars, pitch pipes, harmonicas, small percussion instruments, sheet music, and LPs. I bought my first few 45s there–Glen Campbell, Tom Jones, and the Cowsills singing the theme from “Hair”. Now in the era of digital downloads, they’re still there selling new and used CDs, DVDs, and LPs for the purists, plus shirts, posters, 3 Stooges pint glasses, etc., and the guys behind the counter told me, “We plan on being here a long time.” Huzzah for you, noble and tenacious retailer! I salute you!

Years ago, I sped out of Dearborn and Detroit lickety-splitly when I had the chance. Now when I visit, my brain is tickled by ridiculous notions of what my life would’ve been like had I stayed. Maybe my subconscious is just playfully creating an alternate reality, a “What If?” universe to keep itself entertained. Driving through Dearborn and seeing its brick bungalows and Dutch colonials decorated for Christmas, I feel the warm cuddlies pulling at me, and I try and imagine relocating my family there.

I think of the simple satisfaction of eating in an old pizzeria, a place in which we never ate when I was a kid. Enamored with the idea of parents and grandparents living nearby, I think of the generational framework of families I knew, which in reality have scattered to the four winds over the past 30 years. I wonder how happy I’d have been if I went to high school there, and didn’t get a taste of the wider world. And all these thoughts are based on nothing, since I was a very solitary youngster and only came out of my shell in high school. I may have been so grateful to gain a couple of friends in my teenage years that I would misplace my affection to the area and hang onto its dwindling possibilities too long. Just because a place is familiar doesn’t mean it’s suitable. While writers are ignored just about everywhere in the country except New York, they are an extreme oddity in an industrial city like Detroit. I was able to reinvent myself in Chicago just enough to retain my sanity.

I love my life now–city streets, restaurants, theaters and opera, two baseball teams to choose from, interesting yet down-to-earth friends, and a cottage to retreat to when necessary. What would’ve happened if I’d stayed in town and married Suzie Schmaltzkopf (my dad’s invariable name for an unknown girlfriend)? Thankfully, it’s just a daydream.

But oh, memories of Belle Isle, Bookie’s Club 870, Buddy’s Pizza in Hamtramck, Stroh’s Beer, and the soundtrack of the Four Tops, the MC5 and Iggy Pop (RIP Ron Asheton)……

Many a fine life could be built with such a foundation.

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GOP to Unions: Drop Dead

I must have been so busy last week with holiday matters that I missed the story of Republican senators explicitly detailing their blockage of the Big 3 automakers’ loan request. Not for any high-minded purpose, of course. Not because they don’t believe in government intervention in industry, or want to teach the capitalists a lesson in free market discipline, or want to protect taxpayer money.

They only want to bust the UAW and embarrass the Democratic party. From the Senate Republicans “Action Alert” internal memo:

This is the democrats first opportunity to payoff organized labor after the election. This is a precursor to card check and other items. Republicans should stand firm and take their first shot against organized labor, instead of taking their first blow from it.

At least after all these years, the Republicans can’t be bothered to hide how little they care for people trying to earn a living in this country. If they want to eliminate their support in the industrial belt and really cement their standing as a backwoods party, they can be my guest. As Crooks & Liars’ John Amato said today, “If Republicans want to immolate themselves into even further irrelevancy, I’m inclined to let them. The trick is to keep them from taking the whole country down along with them.”

I was raised in Dearborn, Mich., hometown of the Ford Motor Company (my dad worked for the Ford Moter Credit Company), so I don’t have to hear any stories about fat union workers earning way too much money. I heard plenty growing up, and most of them were true. The “job bank” that the unions squeezed from the companies a few years was one of the most wasteful ideas ever conceived. But the program is almost gone now, and union membership has been shrinking for decades. It is NOT the impediment to producing cars economically in this country. The impediment is the huge cost of health care and pensions for retirees, and until the government does something about it, the auto companies will not be able to operate.

But to hear these tinpot hillbilly senators, it’s time to teach the union a lesson. It’s also time to give a huge boost to the foreign car companies who have built union-free factories in their states. If the Big 3 go into Chapter 11 (or god help us, Chapter 7), the union contracts will be weakened or voided, and the physical assets like factories (of both the companies and their suppliers) will be put up for sale and grabbed by….my only guess is foreign automakers.

The last thing this country needs is to have our industrial policy held hostage by jerkwater senators from Tennessee, Kentucky and Alabama. For decades, their states produced nothing but rickets and moonshine until they threw a lot of public money at foreign car companies to build factories there. Now they’re trying to tell us what’s best for the country? Or is it what’s best for “real Americans”? (Where did they go in the past six weeks, anyway?)

You can bore me with all the whiny anecdotes about bad-quality American cars (which are outdated, of course, if you bother to check things like the JD Power rankings) and the stupidity of the company management (who apparently should’ve foreseen the credit meltdown this year, when everyone in the financial industry missed it). But unions CREATED the middle class in this country, Clem, and without them, the quality of life for the vast majority of us would be appalling. No one would need a pension, because people would have to work until they keeled over dead. How these GOP hyenas can blithely speak of letting the car industry go belly up (crap, think of the implications to national security, if nothing else) just to bust the union and embarrass the Democrats is beyond appalling.

What is the OPPOSITE of patriotism?

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Here’s My Latest Radio Essay

Boy, remember a week ago when the big news was that the city was going to lease out our parking meters? Seems like a long time ago, now that Governor “Crazy Rod” Blagojevich (“I’ll sell anything! My prices are so high, I must be bleeping INSANE!!!!!”) has focused the world’s attention on us.

Well, anyway, back in those carefree days, I wrote a little essay on leasing out all the properties in the city. This morning WBEZ broadcast it on the “848” program, and you can listen to it by clicking below.

[audio:http://www.jamesfinngarner.com/audio/City that Leases.mp3]

After which, you can return to the scandal of the day.

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No Wonder the Right Thinks We’re Pussies

One of my worst memories of the 2004 election–the second worst, actually, and by a very wide margin–was everyone on the web who started apologizing to Europe and the rest of the world for electing Bush again. All those po’ faced students in their dorm rooms, holding up hand-scrawled notes of apology to the rest of mankind, just because the election didn’t go like it “should” have. “We’re Sorry, Europe! Don’t hate us!” Apparently they even published a book with these little solicitations, perfect for passive-aggressive Francophiles everywhere. I’m sure the foreign image of the rugged American spirit was vastly improved by such whimperings.

I didn’t have long to wait for a web-based, grass-roots show of mealymouthed pussitude to emerge in 2008. Even though the Democratic candidate won, there had to be some way for leftists to show that they really can be clueless and masochistic. This morning, I found it.

At the website of one zefrank, progressive and otherwise slaphappy viewers are invited to submit pictures of themselves with notes to those in the Red States, offering hands of friendship and uplifting civic attitudes. “From52to48” messages include “We’re not that Different, You and I”, “We need one another”, “We can only do it together,” and “Dear 48, You Complete Me, Love 52.”

Gawd, please STFU. (That’s not an acronym I use often or lightly, but since we’re being all webby here…)

People, listen. The election is less than 48 hours from being finished. It was a close one, and an expensive one, but history was made. It was hard fought and hard earned. Don’t take it lightly, or assume it means an era of enlightenment for us all.

For the past two months, the right has called Obama everything from a baby-eater to a Marxist to an evil hypnotist to a Muslim sleeper agent. They’ve touted the idea that his wife runs around talking to third-world journalists and freely uses the word “Whitey” with them. They’ve said Obama hates his country, even as he engaged in and triumphed in the process that makes this a unique place on earth. Do you think all that hate was just “politics as usual”? Do you think that now, with McCain reverting to the “real” McCain and Palin off to smoke the year’s moose jerky, they’ll want to lick their wounds and their embarrassment alongside you in your little latte-powered salon? That everyone is as reasonable and open-minded as you obviously think you are? Do you think it’s time to break out with the Kumbaya?

Holy shit, people, get a grip. As Mr Dooley once said, “Politics ain’t beanbag.” I’m not for excessive partisanship, but I don’t believe in rolling over like a fat puppy either, just because I want everyone to like each other. Progressives won, and that’s been rare enough that we should savor the victory. To start reaching out for warm hugs the very next day? Nauseating. Fey. Childish. Everything that fills the caricature that talk-radio hosts paint of you.

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The Benefits of Slow TV Watching

Last Saturday night, I settled in to watch a very old-school horror movie, all by myself. “Son of Frankenstein” is not fancy in its storytelling, or even very coherent. Somehow the monster had been struck by lightning and fell into a coma, yet while in that coma Igor had sent the monster off to murder the burgomeisters who’d condemned him to the gallows. Now the son of the original doctor revives the monster, filled with excitement yet horrified by what he’s done. The police chief, who’s arm had been wrenched out of his body as a child by the monster, suspects the doctor but protects him from the mob. In the end, in a presaging of the end of “Terminator 2”, the monster is pushed into an 800-degree liquid sulphur pit and burned alive.

Yeah, how can anything go wrong when your laboratory is built over the bubbling miasma of an 800-degree liquid sulphur pit?

So, not as creepy as the original, and not as stylized and surprising as “Bride of Frankenstein.” But Boris Karloff gets to wear the fur vest later made popular by Sonny Bono, and many scenes inspired terrific material in Mel Brooks’ “Young Frankenstein”. More like a Transylvanian pot roast than a fancy meal, yet, it satisfies. Every Halloween, I promise myself to watch an old Universal horror film, for old times’ sake–where would Halloween be without those characters? Sometimes the kids will join me, but this year the movie scared my 10-year-old, and my 13-year-old was too busy with parties.

Watching old, mediocre horror movies is not just an exercise in nostalgia (though don’t knock that–it’s the only exercise I get). There’s something enjoyable about watching bad movies with outlandish sets and dialog, something ephemeral yet instructive. In the age of Netflix and cable TV and Tivo, we could watch quality programming any time we flip on the boob tube. Yet we don’t. We save and watch episodes of America’s Top Model and Jim Belushi sitcoms and everything the vast wasteland offers. Perhaps it’s a fear that too much quality can kill a person, or at least turn him into an NPR host.

I watch old movies looking for surprises, like strange interior architecture (lots of suspended staircases in “Son of Frankenstein”, for some reason), stilted dialog, and actors who may have been given all of 30 seconds of screen time in their lives. I also use them to slow myself down, to get away from clips and fast-forwards and every other time convenience that has speeded up our lives so much. (Why does it feel that we are saving time yet always short of it? Is it another manifestation of human greed? Can you ever have enough time, especially when the time you save is spent on learning new ways to save time?) It used to be that entertainment on television was limited and started and stopped at certain times. Now that offerings are “on-demand” more and more, there’s a certain pressure to suck more of it up.

A familiar scenario: It’s 11:30 and I should be in bed, but I’ve saved “Seven Samurai”, “The Hustler” and a bunch of NatGeo specials on Tivo. I ask myself, “Shouldn’t I watch at least some of each of them, just as a signal that I’ll get to them eventually?” And an unsatisfying hour is spent managing the TV workload, depriving me of the sleep I need the next day. Shouldn’t entertainment be relaxing and not an exercise in multitasking and time-wrangling? Maybe I like mediocre movies just for the fact that, if I don’t make it to the end, I don’t have to feel guilty about not finishing it.

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Dear Red States:

This email has probably made the rounds already, but I still find it funny and appropriate:

An open letter from the Blue States to the Red States:

Dear Red States:

If you manage to steal this election too we’ve decided we’re leaving. We intend to form our own country, and we’re taking the other Blue States with us. That includes California, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois and all the Northeast. We believe this split will be beneficial to the nation, and especially to the people of the new country of New California.

To sum up briefly: You get Texas, Oklahoma and all the slave states.

We get stem cell research and the best beaches. We get the Statue of Liberty. You get Dollywood.

We get Intel and Microsoft. You get WorldCom.

We get Harvard. You get Ole’ Miss.

We get 85% of America’s venture capital and entrepreneurs. You get Alabama.

We get two-thirds of the tax revenue, you get to make the red states pay their fair share.

Since our aggregate divorce rate is 22% lower than the Christian Coalition’s, we get a bunch of happy families. You get a bunch of single moms.

Please be aware that Nuevo California will be pro-choice and anti-war, and we’re going to want all our citizens back from Iraq at once. If you need people to fight, ask your evangelicals. They have kids they’re apparently willing to send to their deaths for no purpose, and they don’t care if you don’t show pictures of their children’s caskets coming home. We do wish you success in Iraq, and hope that the WMDs do turn up, but we’re not willing to spend our resources in Bush’s Quagmire.

With the Blue States in hand, we will have firm control of 80% of the country’s fresh water, more than 90% of the pineapple and lettuce, 92% of the nation’s fresh fruit, 95% of America’s quality wines, 90% of all cheese, 90% of the high tech industry, 95% of the corn and soybeans (thanks Iowa!), most of the U.S. low-sulfur coal, all living redwoods, sequoias and condors, all the Ivy and Seven Sister schools plus Stanford, Cal Tech and MIT.

With the Red States, on the other hand, you will have to cope with 88% of all obese Americans (and their projected health care costs), 92% of all U.S. mosquitoes, nearly 100% of the tornadoes, 90% of the hurricanes, 99% of all Southern Baptists, virtually 100% of all televangelists, Rush Limbaugh, Bob Jones University, Clemson and the University of Georgia. We get Hollywood and Yosemite, thank you.

38% of those in the Red states believe the earth is only 6,000 years old and Jonah was actually swallowed by a whale; 62% believe life is sacred unless we’re discussing the war, the death penalty or gun laws; 44% say that evolution is only a theory; 53% that Saddam was involved in 9/11, and 61% of you crazy bastards believe you are people with higher morals than us lefties.

Finally, we’re taking the good pot, too. You can have that dirt weed they grow in Mexico.

Peace out,

–the Blue States

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Only a Week Left? Say It Ain’t So!

Last week Larry David and other commentators on the Huffington Post lamented how long this campaign was taking, and how they wanted the election over with. I’m sympathetic to the adverse health effects that anxiety, anticipation and Sarah Palin’s voice may be having on people. I can also commiserate that my own work output has been reduced to a trickle trying to keep up with the latest news and polls. The productivity gains the internet has given us, the internet shall taketh away.

But do I want this campaign over next week? Hell no. Have you taken a moment to consider how much free entertainment has been contained in the daily news cycle since the end of August? Do you realize that just last week, from Monday through Friday, we got enjoy stories about:

• Minnesota’s Senator Bachman trying to explain away her out-of-body channeling of Joe McCarthy;
• Sarah Palin’s $150,000 shopping spree, which was only revealed last Wednesday (think how far that kind of money would go in a consignment shop!)
• Ashley Todd’s self-assault at the ATM (Oh, how much longer the lie could’ve been strung along if she’d only learned how to write backwards!)

That’s just from the everyday news. It doesn’t include the backbiting and Dr. Scholl salads that the conservative talking heads endured on the cable chat shows. That has been entertainment of a rare caliber. As fewer and fewer commentators will defend the McCain-Palin campaign, the news shows have had to move further and further down the pecking order for Republican “strategists” and “observers” to interview. If this campaign went on for another month, we’d get to see a tattoo-parlor owner from Idaho wired up and telling “Fox & Friends” all he knows about socialism.

If these stories give a person too much agita, I suggest they cowboy up and deal with it. Take to drinking if you have to. Because these developments are necessary, vital, even healthful. The Republican Party has spent the past 25 years getting elected by mixing race, religion and class consciousness into a fear cocktail to keep their faithful out and voting. While the Republicans have spouted about lower taxes, smaller government, and a “humble” foreign policy stance, they’ve done their best to ignore all three. Now they are reaping the results of the lies they’ve sown and the stupid ideas they’ve espoused. Such a process takes time.

Maybe I’m ODing on the schadenfreude, but I say, keep it coming. A couple more months, at least, so that we can see every hypocrisy and dirty deal exposed in the open air. I want to hear more filth about everything: John McCain’s secret deals with al-Qaeda, Sarah Palin’s plastic surgeries (which she will promise to undo or auction to charity later), Todd Palin’s clandestine Inuit love igloo that he visited on long snow-machine races.

I want to see Nancy Pfotenhauer snap on camera and take a bite out of someone’s neck. I want to watch William Kristol melt into a puddle of blame-dodging ooze. I want to learn about a Robo-call accusing Obama of laughing in the past at Flip Wilson’s “Rev. Leroy and the Church of What’s Happenin’ Now” routine. I want to hear Limbaugh actually use a phrase like “Hide your women” or “the sanctity of our precious bodily fluids”.

I want to see all of this for the same reason Van Helsing wanted to be the one to drive the stake through Dracula’s heart, because it’s the only way I’ll be certain that the reputations of these people and the policies of unbridled conservatism are dead. Deader than dead. Dead and buried under Yucca Mountain with radioactive garlic strung around their necks dead.

Because you know when this is over, the news for at least the next ten weeks is going to be about plant closings, foreclosures, and how no one will be able to afford to buy holiday presents this year. That’s the harsh truth, beyond any paranoid fantasies about October surprises or the GOP stealing the election again.

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Nostalgia for a Wonderful Campaign

For two weeks now, my laptop has been acting like it belongs in a retirement community. Slow moving, unresponsive, can’t stand to play videos or music (“It’s all just NOISE.”). So I was faced with the prospect of buying a new one, having to run Windows Vista and replacing what has become an extension of myself (I know there are geekier people out there who can say Amen.) with something either flashy and expensive, or shabbily assembled. (An aside to Toshiba: Whoever thought of making every surface of your laptops glossy, including the keyboard, should be out of a job. My thoughts are dirty enough; I don’t need to work on a laptop that shows every smudge and fingerprint.)

Luckily, we still have a retail computer store in Chicago, and one of the salesman casually mentioned that my problem sounded like a defective hard drive. If I wanted to get all Handy Andy, I could buy a new one for $80, and if it didn’t work, I could apply that cost to a new computer.

Hey, you don’t have to ask me twice. It took me more time to watch a handheld video of a teenager replacing the HD in his VAIO with one hand than it did to install. How’s that for DIY geekery? Small potatoes, I realize, but it’s the kind of thing our thrifty forefathers would’ve appreciated.

Now I’ve regained the power to waste half my day watching videos and browsing websites about the election. Can it really be only 19 days away?? Say it ain’t so! What will we do without it? Where else can we find so much self-generating entertainment? The desperation, the slander, the anger, the schadenfreude–it’s going to be a long, lonely winter when Obama wins and we have nothing left to look forward to except rebuilding the economy of the world (let alone Iraq and Afghanistan).

I’ll accept that outcome, of course, even though I predict it will be slim pickins for comedians and satirists in an Obama administration. Sober, thoughtful and level-headed–looks like a arid wasteland to me. Better start working on comic light verse. Oh wait, I already am. Oh well, the local political scene is a complete dog’s breakfast, so there’s that consolation.

I don’t put much credence in polls, especially this year. I’m certain more people have been saying they’ll vote for Obama than actually will, but not enough to tip things toward McCain. My guess is Obama will take 55-60% of the vote, and will have a momentous victory in the Electoral College. I have never thought of attending a party for election night coverage, but this year, it’s tempting. It will be as close to a landslide as I’ll probably see in my lifetime. And justifiably so. After eight years of the Bush Administration (don’t think back to it–it will boggle your mind), we need to purge our systems of the fear, the hate, the culture warfare, the dessication of the economy, the complete and utter failure of everything W and his henchmen have touched. Remember Ford’s phrase, “Our long national nightmare is over”? Well, almost, Gerry, but October’s only half over. Still plenty of time for Bush to declare martial law because Iceland’s attacking.

But the campaign? I’ll miss it. It’s been such a joy to watch the Republicans and the conservative movement flail and sputter and wallow in the shit they’ve been cultivating for so long. Obama has actually turned into a colossal bore, but how could he keep up with the McCain-Palin Show? Come January, the right-wing screeds will have all the substance of sea foam. Truthiness will recede, but not disappear. Obama’s plans will be derided as socialism, as if the economic bailout endorsed by both parties isn’t. We won’t have the money to enact most of his plans anyway. Expect dim job growth, melting ice caps, deteriorating infrastructure–and from the right, a lot of screaming about gay test tube babies and marauding Mexican zombies.

Comic high notes like the Couric-Palin interview? We’ll have to savor them like a Frank Sinatra song, because we won’t see the likes of them again.

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Three Items, Not Worth the Paper They’re Printed On

Today thee different stories are on my mind, one of personal importance, one of artistic, and one of global.

First, my back and glutes are absolutely killing me today after eight hours Sunday of bailing out our basement and hauling out wet carpet. The record rainfall of Saturday raised the water level all around Chicago, and in my house, it found the seam between the old and new foundations and dribbled in like the subtle wall fountain in a classy sushi joint. It wasn’t much compared with the flooding that other neighborhoods around here suffered, which was remarkable, but still a drag. (There are times when the news will show footage of volunteers helping to sandbag when the Mississippi runs to flood stage, and the little self-deluding part of my brain says, “Yeah, I should gather the brood up in the station wagon and go help those people.” And so, my capacity for empathy fills my heart. If the pain in my back is any indication, a trip like that is never going to happen. Sorry, riverbank dwellers.)

Second, I was shocked to read of the suicide of David Foster Wallace over the weekend. I was also shocked to read that he was younger than me. I’ve only read his shorter pieces, intimidated by Infinite Jest’s length and apparent position in the modern canon. And frankly, I was professionally jealous and fearful. What if it was as good as everyone always said? How insecure would it have made a glorified gag writer like me, who still aspires to write something with at least a little intellectual heft behind it? Can professional jealousy exist beyond the grave? We’ll find out, if I ever get around to reading DFW’s opus. At least now, I still have the chance to work to overtake him, an advantage he ceded when he hanged himself. (Just being honest here. The news was sad, but since I didn’t know the guy, it was only sad-puzzling, not sad-grievous.)

And finally, the implosion of the financial services sector this weekend makes me wonder why the hell the Obama campaign doesn’t just hammer McCain on economic policies. I know the average voter doesn’t care or much understand what Wall Street does, but that doesn’t mean they don’t feel the uncertainty in the air. Saying “the fundamentals of our economy are strong,” as McCain did this morning, would look disingenuous when coming from someone already in office. To say it as the candidate for president is positively delusional. It makes him look like a shill for the White House, which his current position basically forces him to be. There’s no way to escape that he’s the continuation (at least in the short term) of current policies. He’s already said he doesn’t know anything about the economy, and as a Republican, he certainly isn’t going to push for more regulation in the financial markets. I don’t know how much about economics Obama knows either, frankly, but it’s time to knock McCain down hard. My free advice, BO.

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For the Thousandth Time: “Politics Ain’t Beanbag”

There are few writers/bloggers I look forward to reading more than James Wolcott at Vanity Fair. His wit is one of the most pungent and feral alive, and always brings unexpected pleasures. When you’re expecting him to lay out a few sharp asides, he offers a bomb hidden in a layer cake. When you’re expecting him to start carpet-bombing, he turns into a logical, passionate and unassailable sage. This weekend he posted a marvelous response to the high-minded liberal hankie-twisters who simply cannot bring themselves to vote for Hillary, who would rather see four more years of Republican rule than let her anywhere near the Oval Office. You should definitely check it out.

If only returning to the womb were a viable escape option from Hillary’s taloned deathgrip!

I find my writing wants to orient itself to his style whenever I read him. But it doesn’t come close.