Former North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms Has Died.

Out Of Propriety, I Left “And Gleeful, Legislation-Twisting Racist Homophobe” Out Of The Main Headline, And Placed It Here Instead Because I Have Class.

(CBS) Jesse Helms, the five-term Republican Senator from North Carolina, has died. He was 86.

Helms died in Raleigh at 1:15 this morning, according to the Jesse Helms Center in Wingate, North Carolina.

Helms built a career along the fault lines of racial politics and battled liberals, Communists and the occasional fellow Republican during his decades in Congress.

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CBS News correspondent Bob Fuss called Helms a politician who knew no middle ground, one of the most conservative men to ever sit in the Senate - and proud of it. Bigger than life in his native North Carolina, he sometimes seemed that way to his political enemies in Washington, too.

Born in Monroe, N.C. in 1921, Helms worked as a reporter and a Navy recruiter before entering politics after World War II, when he worked for North Carolina Senator Willis Smith in Washington.

He returned to Raleigh where he won a seat on the city council, but became best known when he joined Capitol Broadcasting Company, the owner of WRAL (which is now a CBS affiliate), in 1960.

Over the next decade, Helms offered editorial messages, broadcast after the nightly newscasts, which were decidedly ideological - in one, he proposed building a wall around UNC-Chapel Hill (which he dubbed "the University of Negroes and Communists") to contain its "liberal" influence.

The CBS News obit is being a bit kind, seeing as how Helms was one of the network's air personalities ironically enough, during its halcyon, muck-raking “Age of Murrow”. So, let me be blunt here, in my obit of Mr. Helms.

Condolences to his family and survivors who did not share his twisted vision. Because you simply can't pick your family. Good or bad, they are who they are. They're human beings with feelings, regardless oft-times of your transgressions. So again...condolences to those decent members of Mr. Helms' family.

I will not be so sanguine about the late Senator, though.

Helms' and his fellow travelers racist demagoguery drove more Black folk from North Carolina than GM, Ford and Chrysler vehicles combined. My mother, father and at least eight other uncles and aunts ran like runaway slaves from that intentionally racially backward-ized state during Helms' media heyday of 1960 to his Senate Tenure beginning in 1972 and at least a decade into it.

He giddily meant the million or so African Americans in the state, and the twenty-nine million outside his state in the greater United States nothing but ill will and used his legislative cudgel to beat them down every single chance he got. There is no redeeming feature in my eyes to remember him with. Unlike several undeniably talented bigots who strode the last century like colossi—the likes of a Leni Rifenstahl or a D.W. Griffith—genuinely evil-enabling people who still boasted world and culture changing talents, Helms was not talented. Nor was he particularly smart. What he was, was dogged, and vicious—and he applied that doggedness and viciousness to the task of promoting White Supremacy for the better part of half a century. If he had a talent, it was in the application of his personal racial animus in writing and voting for oppressive legislation that denied people of color their so-called inalienable rights. He damn sure managed to somehow make inalienable, “alienable”, so in that respect alone perhaps—in his blunt-trauma-to-the-skull harshness—he was a “talent”. But then...Charlie Manson clearly evidenced a proficient “talent” for psychotic murder, so take that for what it's worth.

Helms left this mortal coil early this morning of The Fourth Of July, Two-thousand and eight, and I could not help but note the brutal irony of that “timing”.

He passed away on Independence Day...a holiday celebrating this country's finally breaking the shackles of a brutal tyranny, while he himself worked his entire life towards the unjust shackling of the freedoms, dreams, aspirations and in many cases, the actual legs and arms of some thirty million African Americans.

Something to note there.

And it happened THIS YEAR, in 2008...so let me say this—I actually wish Helms had hung on to life just a bit longer. Never mind the suffering or pain. I truly wish he'd managed to hang on through a bit of 2009. Not because I cared for him in any way, but for the same reason I wish William F. Buckley and other bigoted, recently-departed retrogrades had stuck around, too.

I wanted to hear the rolling thunder of a million indigestion-sparked, racist gut-rumbles led by Helms' on the day their worst nightmare ever came to pass—namely the extreme likelihood of a Black person being elected to the highest office in the land. Commander-in-Chief. President of The United States of America.

I wanted to hear the half-inch thick rubber band “snap” of an inflexible mind like his giving way under the inexorable push of progress. And have the banshee howl of “Noooooooooooooooo!” be the last thing said as the tattered wraiths from “Ghost” rose from the earth and dragged his wretched soul below.

To hear the cement-mixer-full-of-boulders grinding noise of a thousand Klaverns worth of teeth—gnashing and breaking from rough friction, and maybe Helms' own cheap dentures shattering like a stale fortune cookie under grinding pressure from the unspeakable thing's happening.

But alas, I will not. And for that alone about him, I am sad.

I pray in that steamy place beyond where he has gone to, the words of Frederick Douglass are blasted at him full-volume from a massive, vintage boom-box on an endless loop—with Public Enemy's “Fight The Power” instrumental in the background:

“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy -- a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.”

Those words were for the likes of you, Jesse Helms. You.

Now, you are gone...and the world spins on without you and advances past the boulderous roadblocks you pushed into place.

I shall shed not a single tear. Nor will those who truly cherish the ideals of freedom, justice and equality.

Be on your way, Senator.


















Beyond that, A Very Happy Fourth Of July, all.

There's more...

Campaign '08: Republicans' Law

If It Can Go Wrong...It Absolutely Will. Yikes!

From the Department of “From Bad To Worse”, you may remember this piece of news from the recent GOP bed-shit post dealing with the potential loss of New York's one Republican Congressional seat —“Baby Daddy Trauma: Vito Power-less

NY's wingnuts finally found a sap to run for Fossella's abandoned seat, Todt Hill resident Frank Powers, but not without having several candidates they asked say 'Are you out of your fucking minds? I got belly-button lint to pick, man!, and keep on steppin'. Thus with one fell swoop, or actually several rather unfortunate boudoir up-swoops and down-swoops, yet another Empire State Republican not only screwed up his political career and for extra measure, very possibly chucked a sure seat the party desperately needed to hold against an elephant-drowning sea-change on the way...

Well, even having chosen Vito's replacement candidate, that seat was going to be a tough one to hold, especially with the rampant apathy towards Republican candidates in New York City. But hey, there was a chance to hold serve at least with a fill-in firmly in place, right?

I mean, what could happen next? Powers ending up as the old saying goes “caught with a live girl or a dead boy”?

Er...I guess there's no delicate way to say this...Um...how about just ending up dead.?

Yes...D-E-A-D, dead.

Francis H. Powers, a retired Wall Street executive who was recently selected by Republican leaders on Staten Island as their candidate for the Congressional seat being vacated by Representative Vito J. Fossella, died on Saturday at his home on Staten Island.

Mr. Powers, who was 67, died in his sleep of a heart attack, family members and friends said. His death came less than a month after he became the Republican candidate after other potential candidates decided not to run.

Mr. Powers’s death leaves Republicans in the Congressional district, which also includes part of Brooklyn, with a new set of political challenges. The decision to endorse Mr. Powers came after a long and dispiriting process for party leaders, who had initially hoped to get one of the island’s Republican elected officials to run for the seat.

But one by one, each of them declined to run, citing a variety of reasons.

You can not make this stuff up...

So now, the party is back at square minus eleven or something like that, scratching about yet again for someone...Goddammit, ANYBODY! Please!, to run in Fossella's stead—a seeming herculean task to begin with as the initial approach-ees as noted above upon Vito's fade-out ran from the opportunity like it had a big, runny boil on its lip and was movin' in close, whispering “Kissy-kissy!”

New York State's GOP isn't just imploding, people—it is imploding on a freaky karmic level that mere coincidence can't explain. Now, I'm not reveling in any way in Powers' death, but my God, just looking at the situation electorally you just have to shake your head and say “Wow. Right about now, it truly sucks to be a wingnut in New York”.

Well, suck might be too light a word for what's going on for them in New York State. Vacuums like a space-station airlock gone awry is more like it. Enter, or rather...exit...stage right, the state's highest ranking GOP pol—State Senator Joe Bruno...

Joseph L. Bruno, the Senate majority leader and New York State's highest-ranking Republican, said Monday evening that he would not seek re-election in November, after a 32-year career in the Senate.

His announcement startled people in the Capitol, many of whom have come to view Mr. Bruno, a former Army regimental boxing champion who still spars for the cameras, as almost indestructible at the age of 79.
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The Daily News reported this morning that when Bruno made his decision to leave, he had his lawyer call the FBI to ask if his stepping down might influence their investigation.

According to the paper, the FBI never got back to Bruno's lawyer, and no deal was ever offered.

But Bruno has denied that the FBI investigation had anything to do with his decision. For the time being, Bruno will continue in his Senate seat, but he says he has not decided if he will carry out the remainder of his term.

Meanwhile, CBS 6 political analyst Fred Dicker is also reporting in today's New York Post that federal agents removed some 30 boxes of papers -- some dating back more than a decade -- from Bruno's office just before he made the decision to step down as Senate Majority Leader.

Bruno if you don't remember was the beté noir of disgraced former NY Governor Eliot (“Black Sox”) Spitzer. Those two went at each other hammer and tong, macheté to hatchet for years, going back to Spitzer's Attorney General days upstate, and Spitzer's ignominious exit should have cemented Bruno's power cornerstone-hard. He was at the point of his retirement/booking the hell up, the state's second-most powerful politico, and not to put too macabre an edge on it, the next in line of succession to the Governorship under the state's arcane rules. Were anything to happen to the present governor David Paterson, (and the way the NY press has swarmed him seemingly every week since his swearing-in for term-ending dirt, the possibility wasn't a terribly distant one) Bruno stood the most to gain.

But inexplicably to outsiders, and painfully clear to even casually-acquanited NYers, Bruno's stepping down and away was very much related to the increasingly intense federal investigation around his years of upstate skullduggery and feather-bedding for himself and a northern state GOP that ripped off the more populous and higher revenue-generating downstate to the tune of billions of dollars.

It was the nerdy, bean-counting, pasty-faced and sock garter-wearing ghost of Eliot Spitzer's investigations coming a' calling. That, and a punk-ass's fear of a couple of other things too...

One: The state senate's going Dem majority for the first time in thirty-odd years, (on the verge of and with a Dem wave, a near certainty) relegating the high-flying, egomaniac Bruno to the low-down bust-down to minority back-bencher—which in the New York State Senate is to be powerless to the N'th anti-power. That is a bruising insult he could not stand, and his beloved senate district of Muttontown (NY's a big state people, and that's a tame name for an upstate hamlet—trust me...) bearing the brunt of Democrats retribution for his own punishment of opposition party cities was probably too much to take.

And Two: Fear of being held responsible in any way for the state's GOP strengths melting away like a bodybuilder's physique when the he can't get the 'roids any more. The coming Republican debacle is going to spawn one lovely schadenfreude-ic thing for a lot of people—namely the Republican Party's calling out of scapegoats for the disaster. When the party bosses tally up the carnage, especially the utter defoliation of elected Republican pols in the northeast, they're gonna look to blame people. And while Bruno doesn't run the state party per sé, he is its most powerful member in New York, and his upstate fiefdom was the incubator for the party's congressional talent. They're all gone now though. GOP Reps Sue Kelly, John Sweeney and Sherwood Boehlert all lost their seats in the House during the last disastrous “The Math”-filled go-round. All of 'em. And when the man comes around lookin' to “git somebody”, 'cause somebody's always got to be 'got' when the shit goes down, I don't think Joe Bruno wanted his name in that unholy number.

We see this in spades (insert obligatory wingnut racist Obama joke du hour here) all over the country as Republican fortunes become as popular as buy orders for Countrywide stock and candidates run from the party's damaged brand like light-struck roaches. The only wingnut stupid enough to proudly run on typical GOP talking points and the ValuJet-like Bush legacy is the odious Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, and that saggy, nad-faced viper isn't even up for re-election this year. Not that you'd know that from his seemingly twice-weekly TV appearances from his office in Outer Idiotville—Population: Him. It's comical really, watching him run with stale-ass talking points that barely carried the day post September 11th, today in 2008.. This so-called former “democrat” (small “d” in-fucking-tentional, thank you) mind you, embarrassingly waving the standard like an extra in a dinner theater “Les Miz” for his fucked-to-all-hell masters, singing “One Sellout More”—and not realizing that the damned thing is ablaze in his hands, and there is no “crusade” to join. Just him. Woefully out of step with the reality his “new” friends are running from.

But perhaps a better visual for the folly of Lieberman's dim-witted pimping all of that old, laughable folderol is one that actually involves...a pimp. Picture a goofy, over-the-top, one-time “playa” who's been “away” from the game for too long—and decides to make the public scene again.

Except he's out of step with everything going on and looks like a Goddamned fool sporting the hopelessly dated trappings of his one-time heyday.

Joe...you are so, sooooooooo not a “fly guy”...



The words that breaks the poor pimp's spirit—and his glass-bottomed, fishy-filled platform shoes are the guffawed “This brotha is an endangered species!”, and “You look like a clown!”

“Endangered species”, indeed. It's the plight of elected Northeastern Republicans like Joe Bruno, Vito Fossella, and the Connecticut Dodo-to-be himself, ol' “Short Ride Joe” Lieberman himself. It's an almost sad spectacle to see. Like seeing old faded photos of slow-moving Bison being picked off by blunderbusses from the caboose of a hunting train. And it's not just northeastern GOP'ers fearing the electoral shotgun's blast. Embattled Republican Senator Gordon Smith of Oregon doesn't want anybody in the Beaver State to think for a second during this election season that he even knows the letters G-O-and-P are in the Goddamned alphabet. His grasping little campaign ad makes him out to be a first-class “P.O.O.” (“Pal Of Obama”) and doesn't dare ever mention the Republican party that got him in there any-fucking-where.

God! Either they don't wanna run for office at all, or those that are pressured into it, have the worst of luck befall them. And the ones fighting to remain in office don't seem to even wanna identify with the party proper.

Oh yes...the GOP's fortunes this year certainly are shaping up to be what we on the internets like to call a “fail”.

An “epic fail” in fact. Where everything that can go wrong does go wrong, Like the ironic fire truck fire shown at the top of this post.

But confidentially...I think the picture below just might sum up the nature of things GOP that...much...better...

There's more...

“The Mick”

Rest In Peace, Harlem's George Carlin—1937-2008


We knew we weren't going to have him for long very early in the game.

George Carlin. comedian, monologuist , and member of the “Willie, Mickey and the Duke” troika of dazzling comedy talent of the sea-changing 1970's has passed away—although, as Hubris says downpage a touch—“What (are we) thinking? George hasn't passed way, we didn't 'lose him'. He didn't go to the other side. He's dead.”

Which is a perfectly apt, Carlin-esque way of summing it up.

George Carlin IS dead. And we should thank our lucky, brick wall-backdropped stars that we had his talent for as long as we did. By my count, he'd suffered at least three heart attacks (that we knew of) and kept bouncing back from those should-have-been-life-stealing-episodes to bring us the funny, make us think—and yeah, give everyone who listened a little lesson on writing with wit in the english language. And mind you, those debilitating health issues didn't just crop up as he wizened into a raging old lion trodding the comedy circuit boards. No. He was just shy of forty and at the peak of his popularity when he first dodged death's swinging scythe pointed at his fragile heart, and basically called the black-clad ender of things, word number six—“Motherfucker”—to his face, and then proceeded to keep on steppin'. He would duck and slide away from that bastard's blade at least two more times we knew of, and still he returned to entertain and challenge us again and again.

I referred to him up-page here as “a member of the “Willie, Mickey and the Duke” troika of dazzling comedy talent of the sea-changing 1970's”, and he absolutely was—with Richard Pryor as Willie Mays, Carlin as Mickey Mantle, and the great Robert Klein as Duke Snider. If you don't get that reference, it's to the great trio of Hall of Fame major-league center-fielders who all played here in New York during the halcyon 1950s and were immortalized in the song, “Willie Mickey and the Duke”. If that's too “in” for ya, think of heavyweight boxing in the seventies when it was ruled by colossi like Ali, Frazier and Foreman. Pryor, Carlin and Klein were like those three in the comedy world—dominant, mega-talented forces who changed the game for everyone who followed in their wake. Now, only Klein remains. But if you're a comedy newcomer, or managed to be unlucky enough to miss 'em when they—and particularly George Carlin were hurling thunderbolts of laughter from the heavens, you need to understand just how good these three were and how their work changed the game.

Pryor, who I have discussed at length before, was the most protean talent of the three in my mind. For all of his unfortunate bacchanalian excesses, there may have never been a more all-around gifted comedian and yes, no-holds-barred social commentator. A rubber-face and body, a keen intellect and sense of unsparing anyone for their transgressions—especially including himself, and finally, a sense of verbal rhythm that made him the “Charlie Parker” of the comedy game—were the formidable weapons Pryor brought to the stage, and no one as far as I can see, ever outgunned him. You throw in as an extra his having perhaps the most tuned-in observational powers of regular folks ever bestowed by the creator on a funny person and you get the magic that was him—so much more than dirty words and a bushy 'fro as some liked to discount him as—he was damn near a Will Rogers 2.0, tearing away the veil of false propriety on America's issues of race, sex, class,and justice. He did this not by impersonating the famous, but rather—by channeling the voices of WASPS, winos, and women. Dogs, doctors and Dracula. An old, Black man, a young spotted giraffe, and even a horny spider monkey on the loose in the palm tree fronds canopying Hollywood. And tapping into ALL of those people, animals and more, (yes, he even personified a heart attack trying to kill him), he soared to prominence in the early seventies. But he wasn't alone...

The Bronx's own Robert Klein also came down the pike, and he too was a student of the observational school. But Klein was effectively the first, great, post Borscht-Belt, post-Goodman/Cheney/Schwerner Jewish comic. Relying on the old archetypes of irony and self-deprecation, he flipped the script in dealing with subjects as Joe McCarthy, the stupidity of cold-war excesses and of course, his beloved whipping post of Watergate, in which he took on a president in ways the late Vaughn Meader could only hint at. He took the old cadences of the Catskills and ran the new subversive material through them, while also subtly mocking the style to boot. It was unabashedly “Noo Yawk”-ey, yet it had a deciely college-educated vibe running through it as well, and his exasperation with the world he grew up in, only to see it replaced with the crazier world he was now an adult in only heightened the laughs. His work was finely-crafted and yet...had that corduroy-ed college professor prowling the stage at the lecture hall vibe, riffing on history and seeming to discover some wild, new shit right there in front of you as he spoke and fairly explodied with new energy to “hip” you to his breakthrough. What a time that was.

And we come to the great Carlin, (who was from what he joked was “White Harlem”, aka West 121st Street—the “Morningside Heights” section of the nabe)...who may have been the best pure wordsmith of the three. I am hard-pressed to think of another comedian who worked harder at perfecting his craft than George Carlin did. In his peak years, he Pryor and Klein ALL busted their asses coming up with new material, but it was Carlin who chiseled at the marble more, with finer tools and then buffed it to a glowing finish better than any of 'em. He workshopped his material so hard as he toured the country, and with such a discerning eye for pacing, and just the right phrasing and even intonation, that by the time you saw him at a big venue of on one of his annual HBO specials, you were watching something pretty damned close to stand-up perfection.

You see, every comedian's goal/wish/dream/necessity is to come up with “a fresh fifteen” every three months or so. A “fresh fifteen” being a new, and solid fifteen minutes of new material—staggered in such a way that at the end of every year, you'd end up with a different hour's worth of stand-up than you had the previous year. (Ostensibly so that when you hit spots on “the circuit” for the second time within a year's cycle, you're not booed off the stage for bending ears with the same old stuff) That's a damned hard thing to come up with, that whole new hour—but it starts with that supremely difficult “fresh fifteen” every three months, and Carlin was fucking superhuman at this. He would work from a handful of index cards when starting a new quarter's worth of material, stuff he painstakingly wrote himself, testing it, floating it and then honing it or ditching it based on the audience's reaction. He crafted his sets with an architect's eye almost, with special attention to pacing—when to run for twenty seconds breathlessly, and then, when to pause for a long beat, and hit with that one-liner with the vocal curl up at the end.

Which would of course, push the verbal boulder down the mountainside to start the next run of funny anew.

Where Pryor was an improvisational wizard, springing new additions from his basic outline of things, Carlin wrote these perfect pocket symphonies of comedy. Arranged just so, and when performed by the master—himself, they were quite simply brilliant. Especially when mated with that well-honed stream-of-consciousness, slightly buzzed delivery of his. (He would abandon much of that “stoner” timing as his work got sharper in tone over the years.)

And that goes without even dipping into the nature of the material itself—another observational genius, he—Carlin was also an unabashed observer of language itself. Playing with it, noting it's foibles and inherent silliness in how we fuck it up every damned day. Not to mention his constant highlighting of words' power, and how we as a society constantly mis-ascribe power to certain words to make points beyond the words' meaning.

Thus, we get Carlin's most infamous and subversive bit—“The Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television”. You know 'em...

“Shit, piss, fuck, c*nt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits.

The routine itself is damn near a doctoral dissertation on the words and the hypocrisy of the so-called “affronted” so outraged by their use. It's a masterful piece of wordplay, timing and knife-edged in way that simultaneously draws the guffaws while ridiculing the posers who would stand in judgment. It also drew the ire of those posers who held power in media here in America, placing Carlin right where he wanted to be—diametrically opposite them, but also NOT exactly where he wanted to be—which was in a fucking courtroom with these stodgy bastards fighting this shit out like some property-line case in Levittown. Carlin, something of a Lenny Bruce acolyte (who yes, was there in the club the night Bruce was arrested on obscenity charges, and in defending Bruce wound up going downtown with him in the same cop car!) believed whole-heartedly in using language to challenge, and did so with that bit. However, in the most classic case of “You can't fight City Hall”, not only did the powers-that-be use all of their “oomph” to keep their verbal ban in place, but they then ascribed huge fines for broadcast outlets that dared flout said ban—fines in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for usage “on-air”. I know from that ban close-up. The radio station I worked at for years here in NY had on the wall of the Master Control room (and still does to this day) an ‘Olde English” scroll featuring the calligraphed words you must not ever fucking say displayed in plain view, lest you bankrupt the joint with fines. The ironic thing was that their fighting Carlin on this only gave him that much more fame, and in the end—respect—and it only helped him far more than it ever hurt him. Folks don't give a shit about the “rightness” of the government in it's crusade for morals per se—they remember Carlin's routine, and that cadence of how he rolled those words off the tongue—“Shit, piss, fuck, c*nt, cocksucker, motherfucker and...tits.”, and how he stuck it to the man.

And of course, he'd have the ultimate last laugh in doing his routines unexpurgated on TV whenever he wanted thanks to the birth of Cable which didn't have to hew to the FCC's whips and thus gave Carlin (and other envelope-pushing funnymen) bigger audiences than ever with his perennial one-man shows, centered around his anti-bullshit mantra. He tackled with rough hands society's hang-ups over sex, religion and violence, while brutally making light of our superficial ways of dealing with the supposedly bad outgrowths of those things. He railed—far longer than I ever thought he would, considering his repeatedly failing heart—against those hypocrisies and was damn near as sharp now at it as he was at his youthful peak.

Maybe even sharper.

Having worked professionally in comedy for twenty years, I can say with no doubt that this is a loss of huge proportions for the biz. He was a professional's professional, and cared enough about the craft to keep honing his shit, and never gave in to the temptation to be a lazy-ass, and fall back on lame-ass material because he didn't respect his audience—the ultimate stand-up no-no that some so-called “pros” shittily engage in, as noted by one of my favorite bloggers, Mark Evanier:

It's just the nature of comedy to deflate the privileged and the powerful. It was the Marx Brothers tormenting Margaret Dumont, not the other way around. Lately, Dennis Miller seems to be trying to reverse this principle. I used to really like Miller, though not all the time. One of the "not" times came after I saw him perform years ago at the MGM Grand in Vegas. Rita Rudner was the opening act and she was funny and fresh and giving it her all. Miller came out next and did horribly dated “topical” material — nothing I hadn't heard him do a dozen times — with an attitude of, “Gimme my check and let me get out of here.”

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What struck me when I saw Miller on with Leno the other night was that given the state of the world right now, a comic who decides to not joke about the President really hasn't got a lot to say. He started his Tonight Show spot by hauling out his joke about Michael Jackson and George Hamilton officially crossing on the pigmentation chart. It's a joke that has now been rerun more often than the I Love Lucy about John Wayne's footprints and one that really shows its age. I suspect that were it not for Miller and that joke, George Hamilton would not have been mentioned on network television in the last decade.

That's a disease that afflicts many of today's comics—be they big names or guys booked at “The Yuk-Yuk Hut” on Route 11. There's an ugly laziness there, and sadly now—minus the borderline-crazed professionalism of a George Carlin, there's one less person working to point to as a sterling example of “how it should be done”. It's no mere coincidence that in the first year of NBC's Saturday Night (the show's REAL name at first before the change to a bunch of things ending with “Saturday Night Live”), he, Klein and Pryor would be guest hosts, and that Carlin himself would host the very first episode . “Willie, Mickey and the Duke” indeed. And damned if he didn't hit some serious tape-meausre shots like “The Mick” did when he prowled the stage with a mic.

He was a giant. A pro's pro, and as someone who also values the weight and worth of “the word”, I shall especially miss him, as we all should. Because I think we're all a little bit dumber, and a little less brave without his needling, cranky and “How could we not notice this?” presence.

“Sigh!” I guess I'll have to find “a place for my stuff” all by myself now. Damn.

There's more...

That Was The Week That Was—Part One:

The End Of The Beginning Is The Beginning Of The End...

Oh thank God it's over.

This past week, that is.

It was a bearish one for me, as I was toiling on a project I'm hoping sends a little coin my way, and it's bringing back the heart-rending memory of the loss of The Big Fella one year ago, and yes...in seeing the “It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World”-ish finale of the Democratic primary season.

Just. Brutal.

The personal work was hard enough to get through—changes on a project started long ago, that new eyes and a new time dictated some serious alterations on. But it was the thinking about Steve that really weighed on me. Loss is difficult for me—in huge and overly childish ways, and this blog is a thing that has helped me grow up a little bit in handling it. But I'm human. Disgustingly, unshakably so—and as I found myself grinding through that project, I couldn't help but think of how things would be if The Big Fella, one of the best writers I've had the pleasure to know, were here now.

Would he have gotten “The Big Gig”? Or would something he'd written during this oh-so-fertile newsy period in the last 365 days caught fire in that way things do, and he have at the very least gotten his just due as a journalist and expert chronicler of the America and world we all live in? I don't know if “survivor's guilt” is the exactly apt framing for these feelings, but thoughts of “What if? and “Why Him” so permeated my thinking that it made it somewhat difficult to do the thing he did such a bang-up job of—which is to write. I could sort of feel him over my shoulder a lot this week—peering in, as if to say “So, one year hence...“How do you feel about this. Are you any better than you were at this than you were last first week of July?”

That's one hell of a question. But I realize it was me asking it of myself just as much as any paranormal apparition's doing so.

Haggling over the answer is a non-starter for me—quite literally, as time is such a Damoclean sword that to linger over the answer too long is to in effect answer it. “No. You ain't. 'Cause a real writer doesn't get put off his game wondering if he's any good. 'Said writer's too busy bustin' his ass trying to do good work in the first place.”

Corporate mantras make for awful life lessons, but that damn Nike tag sums it up well. “Just Do It.”

And I have.

The world however did its best to trundle in like a wild, hungry bear into my pastoral campground of creativity. Particularly the 72 hours spanning from Saturday evening to well into the inky pre-dawn of Wednesday.

It was “The Final Comedown.” “The Brawl For It All”. “The Supa-Dupa Thrilla Between Chocolate and Vanilla”. The Clinton / Obama Reality Show's thrill-packed season finalé as it were.

I caught a good chunk of the big DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee meeting that Saturday, and realized again how important tone is in putting across a message. From the impassioned (maybe too impassioned) advocacy of Florida's Bob Wexler on Obama's behalf, to the unfortunate, smarmy lawyer-joke come-to-life of Cinton backer Harold Ickes. Facts matter, yes—but by God, presentation is nothing to sneeze at, and Ickes for all his lawyerly acumen managed to almost single-handedly torpedo public opinion for his cause, thanks to his almost hissing, contemptuous delivery. I was outright flummoxed that someone wasn't put up there who was a bit more sympathetic and able to connect with folks—in the room and in the homes of TV viewers. And when that impromptu uprising took place at the end of Ickes' huffy jeremiad, I had to pay attention. Taking the facts of what happened with Florida and Michigan into account, along with precedent and the byzantine wonkery that is state election rules. I found the meeting's outcome at the very least Solomonic, and at best, fairly well-reasoned.

But it was that group of noisy protesters (who a friend in local politics would later derisively dub “The Boneva Brigade”) who kind of stole the show, and one in particular—New York's own Ms. Harriet Christian, who would steal folks' breath away with one extended, YouTube-a-licious, verbal earth-scorching that peeled away a mask and revealed something ugly but known, and unhealthy but undeniable in 21st century America. Namely, the herpes-like nature of much of modern-day American racism. It never really goes away, but the outbreaks can be ugly to look at. If you haven't seen the clip, here's Harriet—with nary an amiable Ozzie in sight to put a smile on things.



I was out at a Starbucks working on my project when I checked on the internet—specifically FireDogLake—where I stumbled upon Ms. Christian's optimism-stomping rant. She managed to make Harold Ickes look like Captain-Fucking-Kangaroo. I watched her venomous tirade several times, wincing at her spitting of the words, “An inadequate Black man.”—words unprompted by any racial foreshadowing whatsoever by her questioner. She went there all by herself. In fact, it's clear that she was already “there” from jump, but she simply wanted to let the world know “where she was from” opinion-wise. I had my headphones unplugged for a couple of the listens when a woman next to me asked if what I was watching was coverage of the RBC meeting and I said “Yes.”

She asked me if the woman I was watching—the batshit Ms. Christian— was a delegate or something, and whether she had heard her say “what she thought she'd heard” on the YouTube clip. “No. She's not a delegate, she's a supporter.” I answered, and I sadly also said “Yeah. She said what you thought she said.”

The woman asked if she could see it again, so I obliged her.

Before I knew it, there were three other people looking on over us, and when Christian hit that sour, end of “The Muppet Show” talking point note—one woman looking on said, “Oh yeah. Thanks for that one, honey. Way to represent New York. Fucking idiot.” The original woman asked “Is she drunk?”. The guy to my right said, “That's no excuse. Alcohol don't make you do things you wouldn't do. It just removes your inhibitions. That's the real her right there.” The other young woman looking on simply said. “Wow.” and shook her head in disgust. There were the obligatory requests to see it again and I acquiesced, as the group seemed incredulous, and fortunately, the WiFi signal happened to be a free one that bleeds into the Starbucks bubble, so it was no skin off my nose. The clip was just starting to go viral when we were watching it, but the young man near me simply noted, “People in NY are gonna remember her name, and that face and voice. I'd be real careful once I got back home if I was her.”

“If she gets someone at the DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles) who remembers her, that'd be interesting.” I said, noting without having to elaborate the preponderance of African American clerks who handle your business there.

“Hope she can cook, 'cause eating out's gonna be an adventure for awhile.”, he chuckled. “You never know...”

“Then there's the mail, maybe her super, all kinds of people she may depend on who ain't gonna take kindly to that clip either.” I said.

“Ohhhhhh, maaaaannnnnn. Awk-warrrrrrrd!”, he barked in a perfect Fred Armisen voice.

Such is the potential price of stupid when you live and fuck up in the world's biggest little town.

On to Monday, and my work was interrupted several times by my buddy from uptown who works with people in Rep. Charlie Rangel's office.

“Charlie wants this shit over. He's catching hell from his people.”

“We're in limbo here. Nobody in town can endorse Obama yet. It'd make the Clinton people crazy. But the pressure! Brooklyn's ready to say 'Fuck it' and go.”

“You wanna come to the thing? I can get you in. The food's supposed to be off the hook!”

No thanks. Work to do, man.

Tuesday rolls in like a tidal wave on crack as the day is unavoidably full of minute-to-minute reports of early exit polling and then, a report about a concession from Senator Clinton that is quickly rescinded. But too late—it's a media wildfire, and my buddy calls me up with some news, saying that Rangel's really pissed, because “it has to end tonight, and he's getting signals that they're gonna drag this shit out.” I get a follow-up call from homeboy and he hips me that “It's on. The super-delegates are gonna be released today 'steady'.. Five an hour to put Obama over the top and squash this 'fucking Bataan death march' shit”.

Of course, I couldn't get Blogger to do a Goddamned thing to post on my news , so I put this up at Democratic Underground:

(Click to enlarge)


And so it went that afternoon. Every 25 minutes a call from buddy boy counting 'em off—through the twenties and then the teens.. The last count-call he was at nine needed to lock things up.

“This shit is done but for the shoutin'.”

I toiled on, half-listening to the news when my pal calls again saying it's gonna be “radio silence” for a while as the end event for Sen. Clinton was going to be held in the subbity-sub-basement at the new Baruch College complex off Lexington Avenue near Little India—the pocket nabe off Kips Bay in Manhattan where all the Indian restaurants are concentrated, “This is how they want it.” I ask if I can still get in to see—just out of curiousity.

He laughed so hard into the phone he almost hurt my ear.

“Man, I don't know what the fuck I was thinking. My ass can barely get in, and I've got reason to be there. Lock-down mode, br'uh. They ain't playing.”

So, I watched from home while working on my project, and saw instead of Senator Clinton's event...what simply had to be one of the worst political speeches ever delivered—by a person who didn't have an axe imbedded in their skull or wasn't Leon Spinks after nineteen novocaine needles jabbed in his jaw.

Good God. Who told John McCain it would be a good idea to grandstand on the Dem candidates final big day with a speech that reeked of John Candy's batshitteldy amiable Mayor Tommy Shanks from SCTV? His people know he doesn't have the goods—“the skillz, son!”—to pull this off on a no-pressure day, so how many brain-eating, mad-cow burgers were consumed by his handlers to make them think this ode to oratorical oafishness seemed like a good idea? Normally, I can sort of half-listen / half-work when speeches are on, but this one? This disaster required my full attention. I couldn't look away. Calling it a train wreck is an understatement.

It was a twenty-five car derailment of a special shipment of cutlery spilled everywhere—just before the locomotive plowed a gaping hole through the security fence of a Home For the Criminally Insane. A multi-stage tragedy.

They posed him in front of a green background, leaving him looking like a dollop of runny cole slaw on a bed of wilted lettuce. And the speech itself was a hodgepodge of monotonous line-readings that would have gotten him cut from the community ensemble from “Waiting For Guffman”. It doesn't help that Stevie-fucking-Wonder reads a teleprompter better, and McCain seemed as if he were told to not go into “Angry Old Man Yells At Cloud” mode, and then, fearing he wouldn't listen, his handlers dosed his Postum or something. He came off almost drugged, and he exhibited an annoying little chuckle that scanned like he was hallucinogenically seeing everyone in the crowd as characters from a vintage “Funny Face” drink mix ad.

It was that damned bad.

So bad, even FOX News had to smack it down. I'd love to tell you what he said, but that would be like describing what a hairy, 450-pound streaker said while screaming and running across the stage during a performance of Othello. You just ran your sloppy ass across a stage, man. Fuck what you had to say!

Olbermann and crew on MSNBC mercifully cut away mid-turd pinch by McCain to go live to the Baruch College bunker where Senator Clinton was addressing her supporters.

And yes, I said “addressing” her supporters because I had NO reason to believe that she would be capitulating in any way that night. And she most certainly did not disappoint. From the moment Terry McAuliffe (“McAwfuliffe”) hit the stage looking higher than a NASA satellite, crowing “The next President of the United States” as Ms. Clinton's intro, I knew: “If It's Tuesday, And Terry's Talking, It Must Be Bullshit.” There would be no acknowledgment of what a large number of the remaining 299,997,000 Americans not in Baruch College's bowels already knew by that point. The shit was done. The 2118 delegate number was easily eclipsed and would steadily mount even before the reports on the Montana totals came in. But there in that warm, enveloping cocoon of irreality, the Senator could bait, switch, tease and cajole for one last grand time with people who would NOT question her whatsoever. What in the last crazy final weeks of this campaign would lead one to think this was going to end tidily?

Please.

It was a rousing speech. meant to fire up her base and little else, in spite of the final, ugly math she surely knew as she strode onto the dais. The “supers” had in effect called her into the coach's office and said “Oh, and bring your playbook”. The dreaded “Turk” had spoken. But she was going home to the folks after being cut from the team and blithely telling them that she'd not only made the final roster, but thrown for five nifty TDs in the practice scrimmage that day. Ouch.

Now, let's slow it down here for a moment folks. Yes, a lot of that braggadocious roaring last Tuesday was indeed hubris-driven. The old inevitability thang is hard to shake still, some 18 months later, even when you've lost and the porters are sweeping peanuts and mustard packets down the stadium steps. The Clinton effort was deemed from the start as a dominant force “on paper”—a “Fantasy” team that could not lose based on the numbers. And it had been something akin to that for the years before this campaign when it was clear to power brokers, interested parties and folks looking to get a leg up that she was going to run. Am awful lot of those people / organizations did a lot of nice things for the Clintons and were probably assured access at the least, and specific deeds at the most when they re-ascended. A lot was invested in this campaign ending with her at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue by people you don't just say, “Eh, we tried.” to. Imagine a casino where a person supposedly has a major “in” at a table. Said person is backed by folks who want to capitalize on that “in”, so they float that person a lot of capital up front, assuming the investment's a solid lock with this “in”. Throw the player a hundred now 'cause you know they're bringin' back a thousand, right?

Except, the “in” doesn't pan out. Some mook from outta nowhere sits down at the table and cleans up like a 30-gallon drum of Tide™, Roll, BOOM! Roll, BOOM! Roll, BOOM! He cleans up for what seems like an eternity, racking up a fat stack of chips. You eventually win again. but he's so depleted your stack from your losses, you can never really catch up. He's got the “in” now, and you're in a position where the people who backed you for what looked like a sure thing won't be pleased if you fold.

So...off comes the pinky ring onto the table. “Clonk!” The watch. The gold money clip and the keys to the car. Fuck how you get home or if you even do get home at this point. You are betting it all on the big, unlikely Goddamned miracle that if it came in a movie, you'd throw your popcorn at the screen.

“Snake-eyes”...all the way down the line.

You're busted. No car, No watch. No ring. And a chorus line of bad checks bouncing like caffeinated Can-Can girls.

There's still those people behind you. The ones who kept you flush and hooked you up in return for capitalizing on that “in”.

What do you tell them? You make like you can still win. And that's what that speech last Tuesday night was about—as well as keeping the rank-and-file support base's spirits up in the face of reality's swift kick to the ol' nads. I understood it. The tone was not what people looking for an ending to all the rancor and getting on with the business of fucking up the GOP standard-bearer, Professor Irwin Corey's act were looking for (Count me in that heckling number), but I had a feeling based on my discussions with my buddy that this was all gonna be settled in short order. Especially when he called me after leaving “The Bunker” and cryptically, but perfectly summed up what his connected pals were calling the oddly haughty display.

“Man, a dude next to me shook his head and said 'Oh God. 'It's 'Top of the world, ma!'”

“Top of the world, ma!” As in Jimmy Cagney's wild-eyed, literal flame-out at the end of the classic film “White Heat”. Trapped, Hopelessly outgunned. Brutally outmanned. Even if you've seen it a thousand times, the visuals still speak volumes.



It wasn't pretty. But again, I understood it.

There was no time to dwell on it though, even with the bug-eyed pans of the speech's tone and content by the talking head-class...

...Cause the surreal shit was coming hard on its heels. Barack Obama was now, now somehow officially The Presumptive Democratic Nominee for President.

Um...can I keep it real with you? Just reading those words on a page or computer screen—“The Presumptive Democratic Nominee for President.”—and considering who he is...well, the sentence still looks like something written in an indecipherable alien language to me.

I...just wanted to get that out there.

(End of Part One—Continued in Part Two)

There's more...

A Sad Loss Of Direction

It Was A Tough Weekend If You're A Fan Of Television And Film With These Losses.

I spent a huge chunk of this past weekend scooting up and down the Eastern Seaboard visiting family and relaxing (it's been a bearish last month, more on that later), so there were lengthy hours spent in a car either focusing on the road and directions while driving, or snoozing as a passenger. In being out of that loop for a hot minute, I missed the news of the passings of damned notable folks in the Hollywood community—former “Laugh-In” co-host and noted TV director Dick Martin at age 86, and the very sad loss of film director Sydney Pollack at the age of 73.

I myself have been quite busy the last few weeks what with the WGA Strike-delayed “Up Fronts”—the network showcases put forth for ad buyers hyping the new shows on this fall's sked— and the ensuing frenzy it brings as folks (yours truly included) scramble to nab meetings and get new material in the hands of production execs. I've been a little immersed in TV and film doings, augmenting my writing for that medium (and helping me through a bout of serious pain issues as noted before) by watching as much “good” material as I could. Turner Classic Movies has been on a continuous loop at Casa dé LM as have my piles of classic TV DVD box sets.

If you haven't figured it out, I'm a huge TV and film buff. In large part due to being a child of the sixties and seventies when there were a lot of great things to see—on TV with it's then-limited three networks and a clutch of local independents who picked up the best of “yester-vision™”—and in film—where I lived through that second golden age of brilliant rebel filmmaking of 1966-1980 (Basically from 67's Point Blank to 1980's Apocalypse Now). How closely did I identify with “the biz”? The Dick Van Dyke Show's Rob Petrie was an idol of mine. Great job in television, the cool, sofa-appointed office, good friends, natty attire, a gorgeous wife and a beautiful home. (This will be explored further in a future piece called “Why We Write”) One of my lifelong dreams always was to work in television, and I've been lucky enough to have that dream come true. An added bonus is the fact that I've had the opportunity to work with some of the people who worked on shows that I (and a lot of others) hold in high regard.

Here's where the late Dick Martin comes into play. He and I are separated by one degree career-wise. We both had the distinct pleasure of working for an extended time with a talented, award-winning director who shared knowledge with and mentored me in directtion—and I would assume Dick as well, as post-“Laugh-In” he would also go on to excel as a TV director. It was a thrill to work with someone who worked so closely with Martin on a show (“Laugh-In”) that was one of my all-time favorites, and in that time, I learned a great deal about the inner craft of television directing, as well as learning from behind-the-scenes tales of life on the wild “Laugh-In” set. Martin in every one of these stories was an absolute professional, and apparently one phenomenally funny man. What you saw on “Laugh-In” was only half of how uproariously funny the program was. The out-takes were legendarily hilarious, and a lot of that had to do with the chemistry between Martin and his comedy partner, the late Dan Rowan. Martin played the semi-oblivious “goofball” role of the two, punctuating the pointed jokes with seeming bumbling naiveté, but in reality deftly deploying a biting undercurrent that stuck it to the personalities and issues of the day. He was according to people I trust, a kind and warm-hearted man, and a joy to work with—on set, and “in the control room” where a lot of TV direction is helmed. He'd go on to direct numerous episodes of the original, classic “The Bob Newhart Show”, “House Calls”, and “Archie Bunker's Place”, to name a few, so he was no slouch.

But his passing hit me hard when I got wind of it, because it was yet another small, tangible loss of one of those things I hold dear—part childhood memory, part career inspiration, and part of my own professional history (personal and shared). I'm of an age where a lot of people who inspired and taught me are of an age themselves where they're passing on at an increasing frequency. And unfortunately taking that considerable talent with them. I know i'll sound like a fogey here, but the reality I've encountered is that the folks who now fill many of those gaps in the talent continuum just don't seem as gifted, or as sharing as the people who've since gone on. This drives me all the more to go to “those who know”—the masters I can get to, to soak up that much more of their knowledge. It's something we should all do when the opportunity presents itself. For example, during Tribeca Film Festival week here in New York recently, the Apple Store here in Lower Manhattan had a series of seminars and discussions hosted by prominent people in film, and I got the chance to soak up info from people like Martin Scorcese's film editor Thelma Schoonmaker, documentary film maker Errol Morris, “The Daytrippers” and “Superbad” director Greg Mottola, and the actress/filmmaker Isabella Rosselini. It was free, and they practically had to throw mw out of the place at week's end. But the main thing was I had a chance to learn from these seasoned professionals, and I would urge every one of you with a creative yen to take any opportunity you can to keep yourself inspired and on the front end of the learning curve by taking whatever you can from talents you respect. Be it through in-person or one-step removed instruction or as I was doing for much of this month, simply surrounding myself with their works as inspiration.

That's where the work of the late Sydney Pollack comes in.

I'd see him around town here every now and then in his signature suede shirt-jacket, t-shirt and corduroys, walking here and there in the West Fifties (most often near the Director's Guild theatre on 57th street), but I never got a chance to meet him. His work however, particularly his material during that aforementioned “Second Golden Age” of filmmaking is indeed inspirational. Starting officially with his uncredited work on the existential Burt Lancaster vehicle “The Swimmer” (one of the great cinematic treatises on mid-life crisis, and based on the paragon of this genre, John Cheever's New Yorker short story), moving to his dark turn on the exploitation of human suffering “They Shoot Horses Don't They?” from 1969, and then to the prescient, and frightening youthful sibling in the 70's great paranoia trilogy, “Three Days Of The Condor” (preceded by equally disturbing “The Parallax View” and “The Conversation”), and from there to the highly popular and artistically excellent (and award-winning) “Tootsie” and “Out of Africa”. The two-time Oscar-winning Pollack was a directorial “everyman”, capable of handling a wide range of genres, ranging from bleak drama, to suspense thriller, straight action and farcical / romantic/ light comedy. He cut his eye teeth (like a major directorial influence of mine, John Frankenheimer) in the fertile training ground of fifties and sixties television on projects like The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Ben Casey and The Fugitive. Pollack's directorial works are Cable TV evergreens—you can always catch Tootsie or Condor on a weekend somewheres, so he's ubiquitous—and that's good—because the work is so damned good. Aside from the simple enjoyment factor of the films, they are splendid lessons in filmmaking unto themselves.

As a teenager, I saw “They Shoot Horses Don't They” on an ABC Sunday Night Movie and found myself riveted to the movie for its subject as well as the intentionally stark and unflattering way it was shot—depicting depression-era America in an un-romanticized and harrowing way that just got under your skin. That's what a director (along with his Director of Photography/Cinematographer) does—fuse script, carefully cajoled performances, and a stylistic vision into a cinematic whole. And the good ones do it well. Pollack was damn sure one of the good ones and was considered something of a “dean” of the craft to the younger set. I know he was to me, and I frequently consulted his works (particularly “Condor” and “Tootsie”) as learning works. But alas, he is now gone as a direct teacher, although he was a gifted raconteur in discussing the craft (and a not bad actor in his own right in roles that played on his paterfamilia persona) and informative interviews with him exist in abundance. And fortunately, with the super-repository that is YouTube, you can also find Dick Martin at his faux-dim best, cracking 'em up still in clips from the seminal “Laugh-In”.

It's easy to forget now how ground-breaking Laugh-In was in the late sixtoes and early seventies, but consider that we were coming off the staid, but still-entertaining classic template of variety television exemplified by the almost eternal Jackie Gleason and Red Skelton comedy shows. Laugh-In broke the template into a million little pieces, grabbing from the Ernie Kovacs school of irreverence and blasting out a thousand little sketchlets and “blackouts” that were also daring for their time in terms of taking on “the establishment” and its icons.

That was a huge portion of Laugh-In's appeal for me, and many others, which dovetails nicely into my love for my favorite of Sydney Pollack's films, “Three Days Of The Condor”, a subversive, sour take on government, the intelligence industry, the ugly and evil side of our involvement in the Mid-East oil biz, and as fully revealed at the end, how all of that ties into media manipulation. Just the last fifteen minutes of “Condor” will leave you looking over your shoulder forever for where the powers-that-be lurk. Pollack challenged them with thst film and maybe that's why I have such a soft spot for it.

Like Laugh-In, it stuck a finger in the eye of those who needed to know they were NOT untouchable.

For that alone, a tip of the cap to both men is more than in order. So Godspeed while on to that better place, Mr. Pollack and Mr. Martin.

And thanks for bodies of work that will long continue to “Sock it to us”.

There's more...

The Crazy Old Man In The Broken-Down House

First Ridicule. Then Pity. And Then, You Can't Wait For Someone To Come Take Him Away.

As a teenager growing up in Southeast Queens, I encountered a phenomenon that every kid at some point has probably experienced.

That “phenomenon” is that of The Neighborhood Kook.

It's a guy—almost always a guy—who regularly and sometimes entertainingly acts out in embarassingly nutty ways. Our neighborhood kook was a gentleman I shall refer to as “Mr. R”.

Now, “Mr. R” was something of a neighborhood legend. At one time he was supposedly “something” I guess. But by the time I'd moved there in 1975 he'd already become “something else”. Disheveled, with what hair he had matted down in a greasy comb-over, he'd come out onto the steps of his ramshackle home—similar to others in the block, but now festooned with all manner of aftermarket, and post-whack out add-ons. Strange small structures cobbled out of particle board and that odd wood amalgam that looks like slabs of lumber yard head-cheese now jutted from various outer walls of the house. The driveway was lined with large rocks gotten from...God only knows where you get large Flintstionian rocks in Jamaica, Queens. Odd hubcaps and trash lids were affixed to those outer walls as well, and the garage looked like one of those freak-show photos of a man with 200 cigarettes crammed in his mouth, as it was fairly stuffed to overflowing with pipes, long strips of stainless steel and planks of wet, bowing lumber. His car was a vintage Chevy El Camino, with the back truckbed painfully weighted down with what was either a huge, green diesel engine, or a massive old printing press—I never got close enough to the house to see which.

Probably because of “Mr. R” himself. To this day, (And he's still alive, living there and freaking out a third generation of neighbors) I don't know, and apparently nobody knows just what his mental issue is, but whatever it is—it was a doozy. You'd walk by his house and see him there on the sun-scorched remnant of his lawn as he was blow-torching a shiny new trash can into pieces of bent steel for God-knows-what, and he'd see you passing by and grunt.

“Hurnnnnngh-Hurnnngh!”

And you'd just say “Hey, Mr. R.” and keep the hell on walking—because you never knew what would come next. It could be either a primal howl that Yellowstone Coyotes could hear, or he'd scuttle over to a scraggly azalea and dig out some bits of plumbing and start chucking it in your direction. Never strong enough to hit you, but disturbing nonetheless. Sometimes, he'd simply pace from one end of his block to another in his prerequisite stained overalls (guess what with—ecccccch!) and work shirt, muttering, moaning, throwing his hands in the air and occasionally looking heavenward. Sometimes he'd dash half the block, run across the street and just kick a particular neighbor's fence, growl and run back to his yard to putter, grunt and throw things again.

You never knew with him.

And as the years went by, he got worse and worse. Odd new protrusions sprouted from his roof—a mini “Watts Towers” of shaped chicken wire and traffic cones he'd pinch from road crews along Hollis Avenue. His hygeine worsened. You smelled him long before you saw him. And many a middle of the night was perforated with one of his ungodly howls that sounded like a wolf caught in a bear trap on one end while being eaten by the bear at the other. He'd effectively gone from chuckle-worthy eccentric, to flat-out worrisome crazy. He capped this off one day as me and my friends played baseball down in the wide intersection at the head of his block. My friend Darryl had just blasted a long drive well down to the next corner and was tearing around the bases as we all whooped and hollered, windmilling our arms to signal “Everybody score!”. In all the hoopla, we didn't see Mr. R creep up near the bushes at the corner near home plate, but in a flash—and it almost was a literal flash—he rushed out from behind the bushes, clad only in a dingy button-down shirt that was wide open, black socks and underwear that looked like C/W. McCall's “Convoy” had skidded up the back of, and grabbed the bat Darryl had just swung and suddenly screamed and swung it for all he was worth at the stop sign on the corner—three times.

“Bwooooonnnnng! Blaaaannnnnng! Pwhaaaaammmmmm!”

And then he ran away, back past the bushes to his ramshackle house as quickly as he'd come.

We all stood there, open-mouthed as he scuttled back home, arms waving and soiled underwear flashing. And then we looked at that stop sign—still shaking from his blows and listened to itys “whoo-whoo-whoo-whoo-whoo” tuning-fork sound for a good twenty seconds before we wordlessly stopped our game and I guess telepathically said to each other “He. Has. Totally. Lost. It. Wow.”. And one of us actually did—intoning ruefully, “That shit was crazy”, and we went our separate ways.

I hadn't thought of the loopy Mr. R for many years—until this past week, when President Bush decided to do his own executive branch equivalent of Mr. R's half-naked, stop sign-walloping during his trip to Israel, and then some. He stood there, at the Knesset and with the 7 1/2 years of a skidmark of his presidency showing for all to see, effectively lost what cookies he had left.

In his speech, Bush said, “As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: 'Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, ‘all of this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is – the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

CNN’s Ed Henry reported that, while “President Bush never uttered the words Barack Obama,” his White House sources tell him it was clearly intended to be a partisan shot:

White House aides are acknowledging that this was a reference to the fact that Sen. Obama and other Democrats have publicly said that it would be ok for the U.S. President to meet with leaders like the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad.

Now, never mind the fact that the little coward ran halfway across the globe to take a shot at a possible successor who forgot more things last week than the President has in his head at this writing, and let's look past the sadness of his clumsily injecting himself into a campaign and really, a world event cycle that has brusquely moved past him—only he hasn't caught on yet. Let's instead peruse the 200-proof crazy he was peddling that day—as Israel, the country he was in—celebrated it's 60th anniversary of existence.

One: The stumblebum-grade invoking of Godwin's Law in his making a direct comparison of Barack Obama to the Nazi-appeasing windmills in his mind. Does this man not know the difference between talking and appeasing? Talking is what Jimmy Carter did with Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin. It's what Bill Clinton did with Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin when the Oslo Accords were formulated. It's also what Bush himself has done in dealing with North Korea insofar as negotiating over their amassing a nuclear arsenal. Of course, appeasing is when you give somebody something in the hopes that they will not do something else. Like perhaps, sending a nation like Korea 500,000 metric tons of grain in the hopes of I dunno...gaining a favorable negotiating position? How soon we forget...or perhaps, didn't really even know jack about from jump. But it's that panicky-assed dog-whistling of “He's like the guys who enabled the Nazis...wink-wink, nudge-nudge, know what I mean? What's that thing you guys like to say? Oh yeah...Oy vey! 'Snicker-snicker!” that simply screamed “Are you...crazy?” to almost everyone who heard it—except for the polarizing doofuses who couldn't help but chime in alá The Three Stooges' “Hello” harmonics on this dumb bleat. Yes, you, Senators McCain and Lieberman. In the end it was as much a whackdoodle non-sequitir as one of Mr. R's insane puttering grunts. “Hurnnnnngh-Hurnnngh!”, and meant just as much to anyone with a shred of sanity. But let's look closer at that inability to discern facts that he should know, as we probe the stygian depths of this ocean of crazy.

Two: The mayfly's grasp of history the man has. The senator who uttered that 'Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler' statement was one of his own—a Republican, and a fairly prominent one of the time—one William Borah of Idaho. Bush witlessly peddled this tripe, injecting U.S. politics into a nation's celebration as he ham-fistedly tried to help the man he's ostensibly trying to get elected, John McCain. Except, he was apparently spiking his cups of Kedem™ with grain alcohol and ground-up goofballs and either didn't realize, or went totally off script and didn't remember that Senator McCain is painfully on-record talking about talking with Hamas in the same terms Senator Obama has:

"They're the government; sooner or later we are going to have to deal with them, one way or another. And I understand why this administration and previous administrations had such antipathy towards Hamas because of their dedication to violence and the things that they not only espouse but practice.

But it's a new reality in the Middle East. I think the lesson is people want security and a decent life and decent future, that they want democracy. Fatah was not giving them that."

Be it mid-20th century American history, or a statement made as recently as a year ago, the surest sign of a person who's—I'll say it, lost their bearings is an inability to grasp the nature of, or the “time-stamp” of the events occurring around him. To go before hundreds of people and babble like Professor Irwin Corey about the world and what's happened in it as if he was some sort of authority is what the flour sack-clad lunatic who prowls the afternoon “B” Train does. And no one listens to him, but him. But here is the sadly revealing thing about Bush's gossamer grasp on the facts about “appeasement” through history...

What was it that Sly Stone used to sing? “It's a family aff-air

George Bush's grandfather, the late US senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany. The Guardian has obtained confirmation from newly discovered files in the US National Archives that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism.

His business dealings, which continued until his company's assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, has led more than 60 years later to a civil action for damages being brought in Germany against the Bush family by two former slave labourers at Auschwitz and to a hum of pre-election controversy.

The evidence has also prompted one former US Nazi war crimes prosecutor to argue that the late senator's action should have been grounds for prosecution for giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

Yes. Grandpa Prescott Bush, Senator from the state of Connecticut, who surely bounced little “W” on his double-dealing knee had a bevy of sweet, little back-room deals with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party that lined his pockets as folks around the way would say “something lovely, son”. Even had his firm's assets snatched by the gub-mint because it undermined the war effort. A sitting U. S. Senator. Not the one that Bush railed about there at the Knesset, but actually someone who was much, much worse. I'll use the word that Dubya himself likes to toss around like Kennebunkport horseshoes—traitor. Thinking about this, the image that comes to mind is an unnerving one one from the film “Citizen Kane” where during the newsreel on the life of the just-passed mogul Kane, we see him in a series of “clips” with other powerful men of his time as a voice-over sonorously regales us.






Scene from Citizen Kane—Adolf Hitler at far left, Sen. Prescott Bush Charles Foster Kane chillin' with him at right.

(Kane again appears with Teddy Roosevelt) ...“No public man whom Kane himself did not support or denounce—often support... (Kane is pictured with a preening Hitler on a balcony)...then denounce.”

Your own flesh and blood, Dubya. Your esteemed grandfather. Cutting deals with Nazi Germany. Not even for a negotiated peace. But for the almighty, handed-down-to-generations-afterward dollar. And you rail at someone else for daring to say they'll talk? When the public record is so clear on grandpapa's death-enabling perfidy? Rant on, crazy man. Rant on.

And if you can imagine it—it gets worse. You see, merely a day or so before his manic yowling at the Knesset, he sat down for an interview with Politico.com and deigned to share with said interviewer and an anxious public the depths of his personal sacrifice for the war he pushed down the throats of 300 million Americans and 25 million Iraqis—From Countdown With Keith Olbermann:

Then came Mr. Bush‘s final blow to our nation‘s solar plexus, his last re-opening of our common wounds, his last remark that makes the rest of us question not merely his leadership or his judgment but his very suitably to remain in office.

“Mr. President,” he was asked, “you haven‘t been golfing in recent years. Is that related to Iraq?”

“Yes,” began perhaps the most startling reply of this nightmarish blight on our lives as Americans, on our history.

“It really is. I don‘t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the Commander-in-Chief playing golf. I feel I owe it to the families to be as—to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.”

Golf. He sat there and proudly let us know that his sacrifice was his letting go of his piss-poor golf game—and even that was a fabrication of an addled mind as the time frame he gave for riding away in a golf-cart for the last time from his beloved game is at odds with the historical video evidence. He was apparently hacking about roughs and sand traps for months after his trumpeted August “retirement from the game”. But the key thing here is his utterly twisted sense of priorities and propriety. Said with all the conviction and cold-eyed crazy of a Charlie Manson in one of his kooky televised interviews.

“And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.”

As does pretty much anything he's done since committing hundreds of thousands of American soldiers lives and futures to a horrifically evil war. Be it clearing brush, spastically shaking his ass on the one-and-three to ceremonial African music, or worst of all—joking about the reason he sent the soldiers off to war at a champagne and caviar dinner. Maybe some day he''ll return to his beloved game—albeit one or two steps removed. Some soldier back from two—maybe three tours in Iraq, will stand on a course at the tee. Unsteadily though, as he'll be balancing on one flesh and blood leg, pocked with shrapnel, and a titanium prosthetic from his stumped other knee down. His depth perception'll be off. His replacement left eye is a glass ornament that handles images as a marble would—simply reflecting them.

But he'll try to reclaim his life by doing something he used to love when he was whole. That soldier'll rock his weight back a little and address the ball...and then visualize something to give him focus. He'll see a face on the ball. The face of a man who supposedly sacrificed important something for him. The hands'll go back as the good eye flashes hot. Somehow, the titanium leg handles the weight shift and the one eye works like stereo instead of mono—and the ball will rocket off the club like old times. Maybe further. “Boom!” He'll mash every one off the tee...visualizing all the way. Seeing that man's smirking face as he swings. That out-of-his-mind man who's so far around the bend that the damned curve isn't even visible any more.

That crazy, old man in the broken-down house. A tumble-down White House of his own wrecking over 7 1/2 ruinous years. Ranting at whoever happens past. A world passing him by now, and driving him dottier by the day. He rattles sabres made of mop handles and occasionally rushes out into the street to scream and bang on street signs.

“Bwooooonnnnng! Blaaaannnnnng! Pwhaaaaammmmmm! Nazis! Appeaser! Myyyyyyy Warrrrrrrr-time Sac-ri-fiiiiiiiiiice!”

Old “Mr. R” is still there down the block from my childhood home, but the years have not been kind. And sooner, rather than later...he'll be gone. We can see it coming. Our own collective kooky “Mr. B” of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue'll be gone soon too..

Again...sooner rather than later.

It was my colleague Hubris Sonic who noted:

249 days to go. Honestly, I think these next months will be some of the most dangerous under this administration as the frat boy comes to realize, more and more, that his days in the limelight are rapidly waning.

And we'll also see some of the most embarrassing, unbalanced skid mark-flouting and primal screaming you've ever seen in a chief executive on the way out, too.

But then, he's been grunting unintelligibly since day one, hasn't he? “Hurrrrnnngh!

There's more...

The “Bitter” End

A Nap...Or Something Seems Necessary Here. For Her. For All Of Us.


It was almost a month ago when the lower right side of my jaw turned against me and played LAPD on my nerve endings. It was during the height of what was deemed “Bittergate”, in which Senator Barack Obama while at a San Francisco fundraiser sparked a national “conversation” with these now infamous words:

“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years. ... And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or anti-pathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

I was in the midst of writing a post on the whole brouhaha when the tooth fairy got ahold of some bad acid and spaced out in my mouth with a shotgun, but this is what I was working on at the time:

While this was a private function with its words not meant for general consumption, the age we live in is what historians may well call years from now “The Peek-a-boo-isticeine Era”, where nothing one wishes to remain clandestine or for one audience alone ever would. Be the recorder friend or foe, expect that your words and actions will be recorded somehow—especially on the campaign trail, as found out to the ultimate of dismay by former Virginia Senator George Allen via his infamous “Macaca” statement.

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What Obama said, is something that many wonks and think-tank babies have postulated for years. Senator Clinton herself used even more brusque language to describe that demographic in 1992. Obama's near-grievious mistake was those words issuing forth from an erudite, and yes—somewhat aloof and “edumacated” Black man's mouth. It was an inartful and clunky phrasing more suited to the hash-it-out style of an academic bull ses