Archive Listing
April 13, 2009 - April 6, 2009

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

DAMN YANKEES. Yes, all Americans are American and every part of America is America, but the events of the past week have shown that there's a big part of our nation Senator Barack Obama knows precious little about. The above map illustrates the problem. Much of his childhood and youth was spent in Hawaii, outside the continental United States. After finishing his private schooling there, he went to exclusive Occidental College in Los Angeles for two years before transferring to Columbia University in New York City. He remained in New York for a while before moving to Chicago's South Side, which has been his home since, except for three years at the Harvard Law School and attendance at a handful of votes over the past four years in the U.S. Senate in DC.

It's obvious he's worked hard and thinks he knows a lot about America. It's also obvious that there are some gaps in both his knowledge and his life. For example, does this look like a man who knows anything about having fun?


He's smiling, sure, but he couldn't be more completely out of his element having to play a game he knows nothing about while everyone watches him making an ass of himself in a suit. He scored a 37. Now, lots of people are bad at bowling, but they at least know a few reliable tricks for getting out of bowling when their personal dignity is on the line. (Damn, guys, I'd love to but I jammed my finger in a skeet shooting accident yesterday...) It's this kind of utter ignorance of one's surroundings that landed Dukakis in that tank and John Kerry in the big bunny suit at NASA.

And it's even more dangerous now with the reign of YouTube. Obama's bowling has already been immortalized in less than flattering clips.

We want to help. It's entirely possible that Barack Obama could become president of the United States. He needs a crash course in ordinary American life as it is lived in what conservatives call the Heartland and what liberals call Flyover Country. His campaign has taken him to many destinations in this vast area between the coasts, but business trips are no way to learn anything about a place and its people. You're lost in a blur of planes and hotels and rushed meals and not much time for anything but endless handshakes, forced smiles, and hitting your appointments and the airport on time. It's even worse when you're the absolute center of attention, always expected to be the star performer at a dead run. No wonder he thinks the whole country is filled up with needy people who are all expecting the government to solve their problems.

There is a way to help him out before Inauguration Day (if that's what's in the cards). Time is clearly in short supply on the campaign trail, but the need is also great, which makes it worthwhile to run some risks. We propose that Obama employ Saddam's old stratagem of finding a double who can fill in for him on the campaign trail -- just on weekends, mind you -- and use those two precious days every week between now and January to make the acquaintance of his countrymen. We're sure there are talented actors who could handle the Saturday and Sunday appearances without arousing too much suspicion. (Who watches the TV news on weekends anyway?) For example, we're willing to bet the amazingly talented Don Cheadle would be willing to help.


Which would leave Obama free to become Barry the Everyman, footloose in America.


We also have some suggestions about what the 'course of study' might include:

Pennsylvania seems to be pretty much of a blank slate for him. A good place to start might be the state parks, where it turns out there are thousands of people enjoying the outdoors with their families in dozens of ways that don't all involve guns, including backpacking, canoeing, fishing, golf, rollerblading, wildlife watching, and picnicking. Of course, there is hunting, too, but there's also an educational family-appropriate activity in which guns play an important part but hurt no one -- like the Civil War Reenactment at Neshaminy State Park next weekend. Which reminds us that it might be worthwhile to take the tours and meet the embittered Americans who show up at Gettysburg and Valley Forge. Going to a Steelers game would be permissible (too urban perhaps), but it might not be quite as insightful as spending a leisurely spring evening at a minor league baseball park, say, the Reading Phillies, or better yet, the Little League World Series in Williamsport this summer. For a glimpse of how (un)friendly ordinary whitebread Pennsylvanians are to people who aren't just like them, Lancaster County is an excellent place to visit. Eager-beaver retailers and the Amish seem, oddly enough, to have developed a mutually profitable co-existence, and for city boys who have never seen horses used as everyday transportation, the experience can be transforming.

Obama lost Ohio, too, didn't he? And no doubt thinks they're as benighted as the Pennsylvania folks. But Ohio isn't all Cleveland and Akron and dying auto plants. There are all kinds of places in the state where one could discover towns full of optimistic and friendly people, but we'd suggest one in the beautiful Miami River Valley. Dayton's representative of so much. It's where the Wright Brothers came from, using their entrepreneurial talents to turn a bicycle shop into one of the most important and technologically advanced industries in human history. Dayton's Wright-Patterson Air Force Base is named in part for them, and Obama might go there to see the moving exhibits at the Air Force Museum and perhaps take in the family-filled spectacle of an air show. And if he finds that too militaristic and noisy he can leave early and head for one of the great hot-air balloon events that dapple the Ohio skies with so much color.


If he's still anxious to leave Ohio -- and if he timed it right -- Obama could arrange to be in the town of Defiance on August 9 for the last day of the Longest Yard Sale, which runs 630 miles from Ohio to Alabama. It's a fine way to meet people and see capitalism at work with nary a regulator or bureaucrat in sight.

Truthfully, Obama could discover natural wonders, historical attractions, and abundant family activities of the sort described above in every state that isn't wall-to-wall with urban sprawl. If he'll bother to look, he'll find that it isn't just Ivy graduate students who go to museums, botanical gardens, open-air art festivals, and outdoor concerts featuring every kind of music. We've focused a little more attention on Pennsylvania and Ohio because they've been so rudely stereotyped as helpless losers in recent weeks. It's not true of them any more than it is for the residents of any other state. So we'd encourage the undercover Obama to visit as many flyover states as possible.

In the course of his visits he should try some simple things that can be done in just about any small town or hamlet:

Spend a couple of hours at Lowes or Home Depot or the local hardware store. Watch men and women buying tools, paint, parts, and fixtures for the unending home improvement project that so many Americans devote years to accomplishing.

Hang out at the local garden center this spring and observe the zeal with which families select perennials, trees, peat moss, and mulch for the beautification of their yards. When they leave, they're going home to get their hands dirty with the kind of work that can't help but make one ponder God and creation. If one asked politely, I'm sure a homeowner might let a city visitor experience the sensual delight of cutting the lawn and smelling that perfect green smell of fresh-cut grass.

Drive outside of town through some back country roads and discover the roadside stands where, depending on the season, there's asparagus, strawberries, corn, squash, tomatoes, peaches, and beans for sale next to a stash of plastic bags and a box with a slit in the top for you to put the money in. These are the original self-serve operations and they're still working.

Go to church. Not just the ones you know, or think you know, but others too. Attend a Jewish bar mitzvah. A Jewish wedding, a Polish wedding, an Italian wedding, a Methodist wedding, etc, etc, in the same town, and see how many of the guests you recognize from one of the others. Go to a Catholic christening and a Catholic funeral -- not the media kind where politicians show up because someone has been horribly murdered and the cameras are rolling, but just some parishioner who has died -- and listen to what the priest has to say on each occasion. Isn't this a kind of social gospel, too, without the ranting and the anger? Go to any event advertised on any church billboard -- supper, breakfast, chicken barbecue -- and see if you're not warmly welcomed and treated despite being an utter stranger.

Make sure to be in some small town anywhere on Independence Day and ask someone where the nearest fireworks and big-time celebration are being held. Go. Have a beer. Talk to people. Have fun.

Seek out the hobbies, amusements, obsessions, and avocations that live under the surface of flyover America. Hitch a ride on a Harley-Davidson poker tour. Go to a dog show. A county fair (and make sure you don't miss the 4H exhibits or the junior riders competition). Find a classic car show in any town's WalMart parking lot. Go fishing with some old guys in a bass boat on a cedar lake at dawn. Go to an antique auction in the country. Roll the dice and pick one of a hundred thousand small-town street fairs to wander through on a nice Saturday afternoon. Check out the local historical society. Go to a rodeo outside of Texas. Sit in the stands for a whole little league game. Seek out a Halloween hayride. At Christmas-time volunteer to go carolling with a local church group, sign up for the candlelight tour (whatever it consists of), or ask any stranger on the street the location of the "house with the most Christmas lights." And, uh, yeah. Go bowling. You'll be surprised how many people are willing to teach you. Same with darts, golf, shooting, motorcycling, and home carpentry.

Explore the universe of local charities and charitable acts. The AA meetings in all those church basements. The priests, ministers, rabbis, ordinary folks, and therapy dogs who visit the hospitals and nursing homes. The animal rescue organizations that run on a wing and a prayer. The small companies, churches, and local associations that gather up toys for the needy at Christmas or supplies for disaster victims at home and abroad. The volunteer fire departments and fire police in every single town, village, and hamlet in the whole country.

Do everything and go everywhere you can to acquaint yourself with the incredible richness, variety, vitality, curiosity, generosity, and optimism of life in these United States that isn't a function of some government program or agency. You'll find it's almost infinite. Of course you'll meet a jerk or two along the way and some diehard pessimists, but they won't be the rule. They'll be the exceptions who will probably want to bring up politics without being asked. Try not to let them ruin your day. Or your month or your year. Try very hard to remain focused on the challenge of reveling in the amazing kaleidoscope of American life.

Then come back, Mr. Obama, and tell us of your devout belief in bitterness and the overwhelming mandate of government to intercede in peoples' lives for their own good.

It's a tight schedule. But Obama really can't afford not to do it. And the country can't afford to elect him if he doesn't.

Could somebody get Don Cheadle on the phone...?

GREETINGS FROM SOUTH AFRICA! Hey, I found a country with real internet! My last port of call, whence I posted my last entry, didn't. Or they did, but it was run by Western Union, using the old telegraph lines.

Here's how it works. They're still training telegraph operators out here. I didn't have the heart to break their obselescence to them. You write out their email in longhand, along with address and password information, and they hop on the old signal clicker thing. From there your message, letter by letter in Morse Code, goes across the ocean to some non-profit on the other end. For a while, there was a huge network of telegraph wires going out of Asia that had long ago been cut loose from America, floating in the Atlantic. This confederation-- I forget their acronym-- of Peace Corps types and amateur radio fanatics got a grant from the UN to sail out, grab the wires, and hook them up to a call center where unpaid volunteers hand-translated the morse code back to text.

One of these selfless missionaries must have developed a hand cramp or something, because the last three paragraphs of my last essay didn't show up in the post. I'll spare you the lengthy recap. It's not like you need me to tell you Lou Dobbs is a sham ideologue, or that conservative commentary has become simply another career option for broadcasters, like becoming the sports guy on local news or issuing traffic reports from the helecopter. That's simple math.

Even with the internet difficulty, I was having a great trip. Until my good friend and (inside joke -- sorry) noted novice Gordo Seclorum sent me the above picture attached to this tersely exuberant email: "I FOUND ONE". It's a '68 Mercury Monterey with yacht deck paneling, as seen on Wikipedia. I printed this picture out and put it in my wallet months ago.

He couldn't have more expertly killed my world traveling buzz. We've talked about finding this gorgeously opulent car, this stunning artifact of sledgehammer class, the way scientists talk about finding the unified field theory. Instead of enjoying partying across the globe, I've spent the last few hours pining for home, so I can mortgage my blood to get behind the wheel of this beautiful beast. Gordo knows how to chum my waters, and now I've got a taste for a very different type of journey: The American Road Trip.

I'm drifting again. Any Mercury from that era will have more horsepower than any two of its contemporaries, with ten times the noise. Imagine screaming down Route 66 in that. It'd cut the country open like a [dull--ED] scalpel. I could speed [trailing blue, blown-engine smoke and felonious levels of ugly high-decibel exhaust sounds--ED.] to impoverished inner-city schools where I'd be able to preach to the innocents about a better time and a bygone age. When men were men and [thanks to 4.000-lb agglomerations of incompetent spot-welding--ED.] generally suffered more hearing loss than today's average 12-year-old girl with a 3-oz iPod.

That might be a hard sell, come to think of it. Depends how "inner" we're talking.

Anyway. South Africa. It's almost too arbitrarily high-tech to be that interesting in a backpacking context. That's interesting, in that it contrasts w/ the rest of the world's largest inhabited land mass. The poor people are poorer, way poorer than back home, including that sick-looking alley right behind my apartment where even the cats won't eat what the Mi-ou Chinese restaurant flings onto the pavement. That's something I've set a date to think about on my PDA. Circa 2013 (after the Mayan Apocalypse). But the black people here are totally smug and pleased with themselves about not killing all the whites when apartheid ended. It's bad of me, I know, but I can't stop wondering what would happen if the UN or somebody air-dropped 40-million DVDs of Saw IV into this powder keg. (Only, who'd spring for the 10-million DVD players you'd have to air-drop next?) (Or the extension cord you'd need to plug those DVD players into the ass-end of Europe, which is where anyway? In the bottom of Sicily?) Oops.

If that's the socket that provides all the energy to Africa, I'm thinking it really is time to get out of here. I mean, I love murderous Afrikaaners who hate everyone that doesn't resemble a parboiled beet as much as the next person, but what the hell are we going to do when some goombah in Sicily trips over the cord and all the lights in Africa go out? I don't know any fucking Dutch. My guess is, they know plenty of American and don't like what they've heard anyhow.

Do you think if I explained, very very politely, to American Airlines that I have an absolutely-not-to-be-broken appointment with a Mercury Monterey in one of the most left-handedest state of the union, named after one of the founding fathers no less, that they'd make an exception to their total anti-transportation strategy of the past few weeks, and let me go HOME?

VROOOOOOOM!!! Or is that too pushy? VRoooooom? How about vrooooooooom? Please?

No?

What if I also agreed to submitting tamely to the abuse the Old Man is certain to give me about the Monterey?

[Your ticket is prepaid and waiting at Johannesburg--ED.]

Okay. You win. But I'm going to kill that Silarkey shit. Got it? I don't take crap from nobody but real Afrikaaners.

Saturday, April 12, 2008

SNOOTY AIN'T NEW. The conservatives seem to think they're really on to something with Obama's trashing of Pennsylvania small town folks. Over at Hot Air, Ed Morrissey has done a good job of explaining why the remarks should be so damaging:

But that’s intellectually dishonest. Let’s break this statement into its component insults:

• “[T]hey cling to guns…” Cling to guns? Americans have “clung” to guns since the founding of the Republic. It’s such a core value to this nation that its founders placed it second on the Bill of Rights, right after freedom of speech and religion. Speaking of which …
• “or [they cling to] religion …” People don’t become religious because the economy hits a few bumps in the road. Obama may have chosen his religion based on politics, but most people follow a religion out of a deeper sense of spirituality. I can’t think of a more condescending and contemptuous analysis of religious dedication than this statement.
• “or [they cling to] antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment…” Small-town voters are bigots and xenophobes; there’s no other way to read the first part of this statement. The second part, about them being “anti-immigrant”, is a non-sequitur. They may be anti-illegal immigrant, but that’s a far different issue. Obama offers no proof that small-town voters are xenophobes, but the Frisco audience didn’t demand any, either. It’s part of their own bigotry that makes them see middle America in those terms.
• “or [they cling to] anti-trade sentiment …” And this is just jaw-droppingly hypocritical. This comes from the same candidate who opposes the Colombian free-trade agreement and wants to throw NAFTA out the window. Who’s clinging to anti-trade sentiment? Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Big Labor.

It would be difficult to be any more condescending or insulting in so many ways to so many voters in a single sentence. It reveals a deeply elitist and shockingly callow candidate. It’s the “Let them eat cake” of 2008.

I'm not going to do the big round-up thing. You can find that at practically every conservative site. They think they've got their teeth into something big here, and they're using each other's opinions for support. I'm not convinced. The only additional quote I'll cite is also linked from Hot Air:


And so he did. He spelled it out in some detail. But the ABC news piece ends with this:


It's hardly a secret that the Democratic Party hates guns, Christianity with few exceptions, opposition to any and every form of immigration no matter how blatantly and catastrophically illegal, and most of the people who live between the two enlightened coasts of the continental United States.

That doesn't mean there aren't loyal Democrats who are Christian, gun-loving, prejudiced against this or that ethnic group or nationality, or lifelong citizens of the most stereotyped states in flyover country. Of course there are. And they're used to hearing various aspects of their own identities and values trashed by Democratic pols seeking election. In fact, they routinely expect to be slandered and lied to by their candidates. The Democratic 'Big Tent' includes millions of moderate foreign policy hawks, for example, who are sure neither of their party's presidential candidates will execute the kind of precipitate withdrawal from Iraq they're promising. It's understood that this kind of rhetoric is simply a sop to the crazy -- but electorally necessary -- left wing.

This is the most important thing to understand about Democrat elitism. It's not just that all the real movers and shakers of the party's leadership are Old Money snobs with Ivy law degrees and a profound contempt for the lowly church supper. It's that their three-quarter-century-old New Deal coalition has bought into the concept of a patrician political class they don't really expect to understand or respect them -- as long as they can be pressured to support the legislative agendas of the various plebeian groups who will never dine with them in the Hamptons: labor, minorities, single women who think abortion is a dandy birth-control device, government employees of all kinds, especially teachers, and fleets of non-Ivy lawyers whose livelihood depends on their ability to assault every legitimate business with frivolous lawsuits.

The truth of the matter is that these groups don't have much in common with each other apart from being necessary parts of the Coalition. Mostly, they don't care at all what the aristocrat politicians say, or have to say, or slip up and say, as they're campaigning for public office. The one postulate that matters is that Demorats aren't Republicans, meaning naifs who consistently let ideology get in the way of all the mundanely pragmatic deals that protect various blocs of government dependents.

Conservatives in particular never seem to understand this. They believe stubbornly that most people have deep beliefs which must be respected by those who seek office. They mistake all the ideological pap Democrats utter to appease the one small but influential subset of the faithful that does have ideological convictions -- the mass media, the academics, and the guilt-ridden limousine liberals -- as the philosophical core of the Democratic Party. It's no such thing. The Democrat Party is simply a cold-blooded alliance held together by a desire to loot the public treasury in plain view.

The small-town Democrats of Pennsylvania know this. They don't care that Obama thinks they're dogshit any more than they care that Hillary lies her ass off at every opportunity. They -- and all the much sought after independents -- will choose their horse in the general election the way they always have. By picking the one self-important rich prick who promises them the most loot.

It may not be pretty, but it's the way it is.

JEFFREY. A friend of mine died today. It's no big deal. He wasn't interested in living any longer, and I, who had spoken with him via cell on his deathbed, realized there was no there there when we talked. An on-again off-again friendship of close to 40 years was unequal to the shell of charm that was the calcified residue of what had made us friends in the first place. Not even the imminence of death in a hospice could precipitate a breakout from that shell. It was cool to the touch, even over the phone, and it poisoned my memory of what I used to think of as good times. I mourn his passing. He was brilliantly talented. I'm prepared to believe he inspired other people with that talent. But in his death he reminded me of my own father, a desiccated ruin who welcomed the end of his disappointments.

I have had an extraordinarily fortunate life. I was raised to be part of the prep school, Ivy League elite who rule the world with their minds. By an accident of geography I was also raised in a pair of predominatly rural counties that take hold of your soul with an anti-rational mix of vistas, smells, sounds, people, and pursuits which become part of your blood. The salt smell of the marshes and the burning rubber smell of drag and motorcycle tires cutting swaths through the moonlit silence. Serpent roads and internal combustion engines that slice through the mist of back roads, back woods, the river, the ocean, the bay, and the back streets of villages, towns, and even Philadelphia.

So I was always divided. Thomas Wolf said "You can't go home again," but he was an asshole. Going home again was the only thing that ever had the chance to save my soul. I had been brought up to be one of the Paper People, those whose province in life was supposed to be ideas but is instead the pillorying of all ideas, in the name of bookish superiority, a continuous demonstration of the power of wit and learning over the native creativity that is supposed to animate our best efforts. The only thing I learned from the Paper People was a certain superciliousness, the kind of preemptive dismissal of all things philosophical which is responsible for the exceptionally high percentage of our so-called 'best and brightest' who go to law school and business school and occupy the empty wastelands of stock trading, investment banking and corporate law.

I went so far as to go to business school myself. I actually did better at statistics and business case analysis than I had done at Dickens and Shakespeare in college, but there came a day when I realized that I was in danger of becoming a certified public accountant or a banker.

That's when I returned home -- to the grave disappointment of my father, who had lived most of his life in a town whose people he had never met, unless they were the right sort.

Now I know how wrong he was AND how right he was. In a curious way John Edwards is right. There are two Americas. But the difference between them is not what government can do to reconcile them. There's only what they both need to learn from each other. The Paper People think they have figured out everything important. They have their books and their goddamned smarts, and they have certain gifts at administration, organization, discipline, and rectitude. But they almost always make an unholy mess of their own lives. They're always the person tapping the outside of the aquarium thinking they can make the fish conform to their irrelevant will.

Then there are the real people. The ones who live in their senses and the moment. The ones who never have any money but always know where the best party is being held tonight. They don't have any books. They're the ones who know how to cut off dangerous tree limbs, pump your septic tank, put the power back on after an ice storm, catch the snake in your crawlspace, and reshingle your roof. They're also the ones who shoot bullet holes in road signs, think stripping is an okay profession, and will kill you in a barfight because they didn't really imagine what life in prison is like.

My PRIVILEGE in life is that I'm both these people. The blood of the Real People makes sense of the Paper People. I've lived in both their worlds. Real People are more fun but they repeat the same mistakes so endlessly you reach a point of wanting to be done with them permanently. (No, you really don't need to slash her tires and bust all her fenders just because...) Paper People are genuinely enthralling -- they know so much and can be so charismatically captivating -- but they live their whole lives without the slightest idea of what life is about, and they're actually proud of that fact. Their wit and intellect can kill you stone dead over a decade, and if you don't believe me, look at what happens to their children.

My ARTICLE OF FAITH is that most Americans are more like me than unlike me. We believe in the virutes of both Real People and Paper People. We subscribe to a sublime if naive notion that the ultimate of our breed is someone who knows how to live AND how to think.

To be honest, I go back and forth. Sometimes I can't stand Real People. Other times, like now, I positively hate the Paper People. What's the point of all that intelligence and talent if your only response to the sound file on this post is that it's "boring"? What I DO know is that Europe has become a wholly owned subsidiary of the Paper People. Their entirely rational refusal to reproduce is the purest possble refutation of the rightness of their philosophy. They won't exist in another fifty years. America will. Because even though bipolar examples like me may seem like victims, in reality we are simply evidence of the roiling process that continuously rejuvenates our nation. When you get sick enough of the Paper People, you will stop buying their newspapers and magazines, and you will demand some combination in your leaders. Maybe that's Obama's real role: the reductio ad absurdem of the Paper People. Learn fast, my friends. Four years of superior platitudes is a lesson. Eight is a cataclysm.

You can see that nothing is going to be resolved in this post. Perhaps that's why I'm obsessed with the promise of Christianity, which does not conflate intellect with virtue. Intriguingly, the story appeals to all facets of human experience. It befuddled George Bernard Shaw as much as it does your local bartender. That's why I love it so.

Sleep well, my friend. You don't like this music, but I do. We'll argue the point later.

Friday, April 11, 2008

GREETINGS FROM, UH, ASIA MINOR! I THINK. I'd be more geographically specific, but I have no clue what country I'm in, or if I've ever heard of it. After the fiasco in Jakarta, I just ran for the first train I saw. Didn't have the luxury of knowing where it was headed, other than "away."

I'm the only American I've seen in three days. My cell doesn't work here. Their coinage AND bank(?) notes are shaped like heptagons. When I ask my local guide where I am, he only says "Amakakhlakhbakhkakhlakh, Meester Zoni," which I hope isn't the name of this place. I asked him to write it down, but their alphabet looks like a cursive Korean, with lots of umlauts. I could solve this mystery in a flash if I hadn't left my Regional Ethnicity Color Wheel in the hostel back in Bangkok.

Luckily the gentle Bakalakhaberkaberkatalakh people and I get along well, because I'm stuck here for only the FAA knows how long. Here's a picture of me with my guide (couldn't spell his name if I knew it) chatting up the locals, who turned out to be every bit as lost as we were:


Sorry about the hair. They don't sell gel here. But their McDonald's has shish-ka-bobs! Can you believe it? Gotta take the good with the bad, I guess.

What am I doing backpacking in the ass-end of rural India (Bali? Sri Lanka?) when there's terribly important news stories in America to blog about? Here's the gist: I won 50 percent of the publishing royalties for the music in the first Mario game on a bet, and had to fly to Tokyo to collect. I had a day free, so I figured I'd fly in, catch a rickshaw or whatever to Yamamoto-san's brownstone, get the paperwork, have a couple rounds of sake, a few laughs, and fly out. Solid way to spend 24 hours, right?

I must be jinxed. I bought my (first) return ticket on discount carrier BlueFlush (I may be a young, sexy jet-setter, but I'm not made of money) the day before they declared bankruptcy and ceased operations. Every discount airline I booked with that day folded almost immediately after my credit card went through, one after the other. Finally I got fed up, and decided any trip that costs this kind of scratch needs to net me more than a measly Shinjuku pub crawl.

I bought a backpack, some clothes, a hackysack, turned my yen into traveler's cheques, and became an unwashed American youth painting the Orient red on five dollars a day.

First stop: Burma. Or, on odd numbered days, Myanmar. Everyone, and I mean everyone, I met told me all the coups and protests and riots you've heard about lately were all staged, to shoo away all the unwashed backpacking youths.

They seemed cool with me being there, though. Let me tell you something: The dollar still floats like a motherfucker on this half of the globe.

From there I hit all the typical tourist spots: Thailand (always, always check for penis. It's a cliche for a reason, folks), Seoul, Singapore, Fiji, all those temples in India with tons of short candles and finger cymbals lying everywhere, and I spent exactly 47 minutes on what I'm pretty sure was a real life Kong Island. I took a picture, but the big black blur at the top left looks like my finger over the lens. I'd tell you where it is, but my Taiwanese street vendor GPS has worse reception than my cell. Total blind luck I stepped on that ferry in the first place.

Ooh! Almost forgot Micronesia-- like the rest of the world, ha ha. Speaking of funny currency, the tiny island of Yap uses giant rocks for money! Which almost makes sense, when you think about it... and sort of squint. The more expensive ones are heavier. See?

Cool people, though. Cool people everywhere, mostly (just stay away from the Muslim countries. Jesus). And I heard Russia hates us again. And stay away from every non-English speaking country in the Western hemisphere, except for Tijuana, whose economy depends on the safe partying of rich white kids, and one or two cities in Brazil.

I tried to do the responsible thing and book a flight home 2 days ago. Done being burned by cheapo airlines, I picked a real one: American. Whoops. Told you I was jinxed.

You know what? I'm in no hurry to come home. I may be the only chance these people have of seeing an iPod in person before they die (and screw that, they'll break it), but they get CNN on satellite. I'm watching Lou Dobbs Tonight as I eat my big bowl of plain rice for breakfast. You ever watch this calvalcade of sham conservatism? He's enough to drive a man to fill his hollowed-out cat skull with rice wine before morning harvest.

OUT OF THE GUTTER FOR ONCE. Somebody got offended that we responded to a commenter who accused us of being obsessed with 'boobies' by posting a Google search of the term. What they didn't realize was that we had employed the rarest stratagem on the Internet for finding interesting content -- the 'Strict Safe Search.' You see there really is a whole bunch of stuff that's completely SFW and fascinating to boot. Worse, these are subjects no one ever learns anything about because they're too sophisticated to screen out the flood of vulgarity that ensues when they are tolerant enough to think they're better than the censors of the Info-Gush called Google.

Tell me. Honestly. How many of you knew there were these extraordinarily beautiful birds out there called boobies? Have you ever discovered the Wikipedia entry?


They sound something like Coleridge's albatross. But damn, they're intriguing. And a lot more charismatic than most of the boobies we seem to spend so much time looking for.


Well, end of lesson. Filtering isn't necessarily censorship. It's just discrimination, which has -- oddly enough -- become something of a dirty word in its own right. But if you practice it, you just might find, for example, that even a relentless search for 'tit' can yield something other than dirty thoughts:


Yup. You ultra-sophisticates miss a thing or two along the way. Me, I feel sorry for people who never had maiden aunts. Try a few 'safe' searches of your own. You might be surprised.

P.S. Mrs. IP has more or less ordered me to stop (over)using the audio clip I added to this post. I think she'll forgive me this time. Maybe it isn't rationally relevant, but it seems kind of right. Somehow.

Thursday, April 10, 2008

A DAUGHTER OF ED. Yeah, I know it's probably premature to believe that Randi Rhodes is really off the air at Air America. The Not-Ready-For-Profit radio network has been pronounced financially dead a score of times and come back with refinancing schemes that would make most South American governments green with envy. If liberals were as creative with their social solutions as AAR has been about staving off market disasters like no audience, no advertising, and no clue about the radio business, one could almost believe in the Dems' too-good-to-be-true promise of free universal healthcare. Still, this does sound like a big step toward an official parting of the ways:


I won't pretend that I've ever liked her. But it's also true that politics in this country is a game of savagely violent chess.


Randi Rhodes was always a pawn in the game. I don't think she knew that because she carried real arms and took her habitual one step forward with real passion. Like her colleagues, she began the Air America experiment with a two-step move that gained her lots of national attention (the original link is gone, but I quoted it fairly at the time).


Was that opening gambit really so much different from the non-broadcast outburst that got her suspended in recent weeks? Here's what we have of the offending performance:


Has anyone complained about her calling the Vice President of the United States an anti-semitic racist? No. Anymore than anyone seriously complained when she sponsored a radio skit declaring John McCain a sodomite because all 'prisoners' automatically become homosexual.


Perhaps she thought that wasn't offensive because she assigned the notion to Mitt Romney's Mormon supporters. (And if you're planning to defend her by pointing out that her voice doesn't appear in the bit, then acknowledge that you don't hold Limbaugh responsible for this or this.)

She had also convinced herelf, like a lot of other, uh, progressives, that the mass media were somehow in the pocket of the Republican power structure. Something about Reagan.


How could she possibly have known that she would eventually become the victim of a double standard? She couldn't. After all, do pawns ever understand that they're merely cannon fodder? That when they confront knights or rooks or bishops, they're dealing with people who have more exotic and deadly moves than they do? There's no question Rhodes thought she had scored a signal victory when she announced her desire to "kick Ann Coulter in the nuts."


(And here she is swapping spit with another college drop-out know-it-all.) Problem is, Coulter isn't a pawn. She's a knight, at least, endowed with the ability to skip spaces and strike from unexpected angles.


Which is why Coulter is still standing and Rhodes is headed for minor syndication. So I do feel sorry for Randi. Unlike Coulter, she has no law degree, not even a college degree, no real connections. She was a useful tool of the Democratic Attack Machine until she attacked the wrong targets.

But, as I said, I'm feeling sorry for her. She's a radio guy, schooled in the same bruising arena as Limbaugh and Hannity. Here's her Wikipedia bio.

Limbaugh knows the wisdom of the truism, "Be careful who your friends are." Rhodes apparently doesn't. (Who knows about Hannity? We have our doubts about him, too.) She thought she had carved out a special place for herself. She hadn't. Unlike even the oh-so-vulnerable Hannity, she never acquired an audience big enough to protect her from random execution.

But that doesn't mean we should celebrate her downfall. She's an ordinary person who did her best to make a difference. I disagree with almost every political opinion she's ever expressed, but I don't think she's as revolting as, say, Michael Savage.

Here's what I'll say for her. She is a veteran. She is passionate. Sometimes she's funny, whether I like it or not. And every once in a while she is right. She was right about the Republicans fawning disgustingly over the ghost of Ronald Reagan. And she was right during her ominous calm in handling this caller:


She shouldn't have been drummed off the air for doing to Democrats what she routinely did to Republicans. If the one is okay [applause, applause, standing ovations], so is the other [boo, hiss, disgust, revulsion, shock]. Conservatives aren't made of glass. Liberals shouldn't be, either. Thing is, they are.

Radio is a big wide field. [Choke.] We wish her well in her future gigs.

Wednesday, April 09, 2008

A Penny's Worth:

A YOUTUBE-ISH WEDNESDAY. It seems the big new fad of the moment is YouTube clips of girls fighting. We're not going to link that crap here. What you may not know, though, is that there also seems to be a building trend for people making Greyhound Music Videos. The production values vary, but they're all more fun to watch than that other fad. The video above is "Daisy the Greyhound," and here are some others: "Bandit Dreaming," "Born to Run," "Run Cecil Run," and "Harvey the Lurcher & Glen the Greyhound." (If you want to see what they look like going flat out in a straight line without the music, go here. It's stunning.)

Of course, we can't mention greyhounds without doing our bit for rescue. "Running for Their Lives" is a short vid about the thousands of dogs who need homes after their lives at the racetrack. It's British, but still informative. We have the same problems here. The good news is that there are many active rescue organizations doing a good job of placing greys. But there are always more new dogs. End of commercial.

We've got a few more feel-good stories for you, too. So take a break from Hillary-Obama, the congressional hearings on Iraq, and the Chinese Olympic mess. Take a look at this picture:


There's a nice story that goes with it. Jeff Guidry works at the Sarvey Wildlife Center near Seattle. About four years ago, the Center received a bald eagle fledgling that had fallen out its nest and suffered two broken wings. Guidry explains what happened subsequently here.


You can guess part of what happened but not all of it. Read the link above and then take a look here..


Our next item is quite a puzzler. It concerns a young woman who received, at death's door, a heart-and-lung transplant from a young male donor (above) she was obviously told almost nothing else about. Her experiences after that were remarkable enough that she felt obliged to write a book about them. You can read the short version here and draw your own conclusions.

By now you've probably figured out that most of our "good news" isn't all quite new. But that's the way of things and why screaming headlines are usually screaming about something bad. Some stories just take a very long time to develop and the end result doesn't make the front page of the New York Times. I discovered the long-developing tale of 'Charlie Brown' at the Snopes.com website, which routinely researches viral Internet legends that usually turn out to be all or mostly false. In this case the legend went all the way back to World War II, where Charlie Brown was supposedly the pilot of a very badly damaged B-17 trying to limp back to England from Germany with half the crew dead and no remaining ability to defend itself. According to viral versions of the story, a German fighter pilot was ordered up to finish the bomber off but instead escorted it back to the channel, saluted, and flew away.

Well, this time the legend is true, and there was a second chapter many years later. Chivalry may be dead, but not quite all the chevaliers.

Another story of dire mechanical urgency actually did make headlines this week. It happened in Cleveland. A bus full of children began rolling out of a gas station down an adjacent street toward inevitable collision. Fortunately, there was someone on board who knew what to do.


Read the whole thing. For awhile there, he thought he was going to get into trouble.

Our final item takes us all the way to the other end of the age spectrum. It's about a rock and roll choral group consisting entirely of very senior citizens. They're having a blast. Here's the background. And here's one of their music videos.


That should put a smile on your face for a few hours.

Back to Archive Index