A Tina Fey bus tour would put Palin’s in perspective

Posted on June 2, 2011 by oddmanout215

Where’s Tina Fey when we need her? The question sprang to mind when I read about Sarah Palin’s latest publicity stunt:

…Unless Palin decides to formally explore a possible presidential run, she is free to spend the money raised by SarahPAC for “any lawful purpose” under federal law, experts said. That means it doesn’t matter whether the trip is a holiday, a political event or something in between…

Traveling in a brightly decorated bus — which is labeled “Paid for by SARAHPAC” — Palin kicked off the “One Nation Tour” Sunday with an appearance at the Rolling Thunder motorcycle rally on the Mall. Stops since then have included Mount Vernon in Virginia, the Gettysburg Civil War battlefield in Pennsylvania and the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor…

Reporters are being kept at bay throughout much of the trip, with even lodging details kept secret.

My policy is, if I can help it, to post only once about celebrity clowns — one post on Glenn Beck, one on Donald Trump. Today’s clown is Palin, whom mainstream reporters continue to pursue because… well, because she’s Palin. The half-baked Alaskan never makes sense when she speaks, but she’s good looking and flirty and therefore deemed newsworthy by the powers that be.

I was going to suggest that you, my legion of readers, contact Tina Fey and urge her to launch a nationwide tour posing as Palin, in a bus covered with patriotic images and slogans. Fey could cover costs with a “TINAPAC” and, like Palin, travel to random destinations without notifying the press in advance. (Although it’s pretty hard to keep the press “at bay” when you’re traveling in a bus that looks like a redneck art installation.)

If neither Palin nor Fey were announcing appearances, then reporters would have an even harder time telling them apart than they did in 2008, when Fey was lampooning Palin on Saturday Night Live.

Alas, Fey, due to her pregnancy, is out of action for the summer, according to a publicist I contacted today. The closest you could get to her, which wouldn’t be close at all, would be through William Morris Endeavor Entertainment (phone 310-285-9000, fax 310-248-2020).

It looks like the best we can do is personally remind print reporters and talking heads on TV, through e-mails, tweets, and so on, that their knee-jerk coverage of the Paris Hilton of politics is an absurd and unprofessional waste of time and resources.

This might shame them into living up to their responsibility to keep the public informed of serious issues, including the mystery of why the Obama Justice Department is ignoring evidence that Goldman Sachs executives such as Lloyd Blankfein and Daniel Sparks lied under oath to a Congressional subcommittee investigating Wall Street’s role in creating the mortgage bubble that ate America.

But that’s wishful thinking. Hacks have no shame.

Posted in Congress, economic collapse, Goldman Sachs, Great Recession, mainstream media, Obama, Politics, Wall Street, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

In praising Scott-Heron, Inquirer buries his message

Posted on June 1, 2011 by oddmanout215

Gil Scott-Heron, the African-American poet and musician who died this week at age 62, was most famous for his recording of “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” a funny and uncompromising call-to-arms that envisions the downfall of the corporate masterminds who distract poor black people from the fact that they have no power. A sample verse:

The revolution will not be right back after a message
About a white tornado, white lightning, or white people.
You will not have to worry about a dove in your
bedroom, a tiger in your tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl.
The revolution will not go better with Coke.
The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath.
The revolution will put you in the driver’s seat.

The fact that The Philadelphia Inquirer would extol Scott-Heron today – in a piece directly underneath an editorial about the late punk rocker Mikey Wild, no less — is a testament to the fact that everything Scott-Heron stood for was inexorably crushed by the corporations that control the political process, the economy, and the hundreds of mainstream news outlets that arguably deaden us to what’s really going on in the world.

If Scott-Heron symbolized an actual threat to the corporate state, The Inquirer wouldn’t be saluting him. You can tell this is true by the editorial writer’s tone and word choices:

America isn’t the same tortured nation it was when Gil Scott-Heron suggested that “the revolution will not be televised.” That’s not to say this country has solved every problem it had when Scott-Heron famously made that pronouncement in his 1970 poem. It is to say that in part because of the consciousness-raising of Scott-Heron and other politically oriented artists, this nation was confronted with its racism, sexism, classism, militarism, and myriad addictions, and led into meaningful dialogues, if not solutions.

Blah blah. America today is an even more tortured nation now than in 1970, when there was hope the plight of the poor could be solved by education and jobs training. That the middle class would keep growing thanks in part to a booming economy, reasonably priced housing and a fairly equitable tax structure. That the military machine might be overhauled and tamed in the wake of the ongoing disaster in Vietnam.

None of those things came to pass. We now have less institutionalized racism, but the black unemployment rate is as high as ever, and the rate for whites is almost as bad.

Scott-Heron was wrong. The “revolution” has not only been televised, it has been co-opted, shanghaied, downloaded, e-mailed, Facebooked and neutered by forces too powerful for naive idealists to seriously challenge.

Here’s what I’d ask if I had your ear, Mr. Editorial Writer: What’s the good of “consciousness-raising” if it doesn’t result in a better quality of life, materially and spiritually? What’s the point of “dialogue” if it goes on and on, deliberately skirting solutions?

Posted in arts, economic collapse, globalization, Great Recession, mainstream media, Philadelphia, Politics, pop music, taxes, unemployment, Wall Street, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

A society that renews the ‘Patriot Act’ isn’t free

Posted on May 31, 2011 by oddmanout215

The bizarre Francophobia of columnist Roger Cohen, brought to you by The New York Times:

After Osama bin Laden was killed, a prominent French radio station called me for an interview. It turned into a mildly hallucinogenic experience. Everybody from the president of the United States to Al Qaeda itself was saying Bin Laden was dead, but my interviewer kept pressing me for “the proof.”

…And now we have the Dominique Strauss-Kahn sexual assault case, viewed, it seems, by close to 60 percent of French society as a conspiracy against the putative Socialist presidential candidate…

Cohen writes that “conspiracy theories are the refuge of the disempowered,” as if there are more conspiracy theorists in France than in “freer societies” such as our. He implies that the French are uniquely inclined to believe that Jews secretly funded the terrorists who carried out the 9/11 attacks, as if anti-Semites in others countries haven’t made the same accusations.

It makes me sick that good old boys like Cohen get paid to write “op-ed” drivel as a reward for having worked as real reporters in their younger years, but hey, that’s how the mainstream media works.

Not surprisingly, Cohen writes nothing critical about the high-ranking American officials who worked hard to drum up support for war in Iraq, or about the fact that the Times and other major media outlets played a key role in helping these officials make their case. (Hello Judith Miller and Bill Keller! Why haven’t you guys been drummed out of the journalism business?)

If “freer societies” are those that neglect the poor, ignore the unemployed, exclude millions of people from healthcare and subvert civil liberties with laws like the Patriot Act, then I’ll take France, or almost any other European country.

Memorial Day thought: I don’t know what happened between Strauss-Kahn and that hotel maid, but I’d feel a lot less suspicious about his arrest if George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and their co-conspirators had been hauled off in handcuffs after proof that they had lied about WMD in Iraq became available.

Too bad Cohen would rather dis the French than the monsters responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths and the destruction of the U.S. economy.

Posted in Great Recession, mainstream media, New York Times, New York Times op-ed, Obama, Politics | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Subterranean homesick Bob

Posted on May 25, 2011 by oddmanout215

I tried, but the hundred Inevitables dogged me all day. By the time I got back to the bunker the medicine man was gone and Beethoven had unwrapped a bedroll with Ma Rainey. I’d missed my chance to give Bob Dylan his props on Birthday No. 70.

No sweat, the songs are timeless. We never have to worry about missing the birthday of “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” from Bringing It All Back Home, as fresh now as it was in 1965. It’s a rap, a blues, an electrified protest song, a vision of the future, a time-lapsed photographic look at how easy it is to fall asleep, Rip Van Winkle-style:

…Get born, keep warm
Short pants, romance, learn to dance
Get dressed, get blessed
Try to be a success
Please her, please him, buy gifts
Don’t steal, don’t lift
Twenty years of schoolin’
And they put you on the day shift
Look out kid
They keep it all hid…

Look out, kid, only one thing is different. In 2011, twenty years of schooling is more likely to put you in deep debt than on the day shift.

But Dylan threw in those famous aphorisms and koans to remind us that life needn’t be as dreary as the people who, out of self-interest, dictate what’s good for us and what isn’t. Forget cable news, satellite transmissions, picture phones, Twitter and blogs, you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

And don’t follow leaders/Watch the parking meters sounds wise all over again when ten-year-old wars and record unemployment don’t even make the news, and when a president elected because he promised sweeping change turns out to be in bed with the biggest crooks in history.

Dylan didn’t need a crystal ball or polling data to know some things are unlikely to change, that democracy is just a punchline if most politicians are on the take, that the pump don’t work/’Cause the vandals took the handles.

Happy birthday, Bob. Good luck, America.

Posted in arts, economic collapse, Goldman Sachs, Great Recession, Iraq war, mainstream media, Obama, Politics, pop music, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Thump Trump once, it’s all he deserves

Posted on May 21, 2011 by oddmanout215

(This one’s a little late but hey, so’s my mortgage payment…)

Here’s to the Earnest Weasel, David Brooks, and all the other insiders who get paid big bucks to bloviate. Thanks, guys, for wasting thousands of words speculating that Donald Trump might end his trash-TV show and run for president. Special thanks to the clown/pundits who predicted he definitely would run. (You were one of them, Weasel.)

The mainstream media shies away from iconoclasts but it embraces certain sideshow freaks who can be counted on to attract the attention of Middle America. Trump, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin are only a few of the freaks who repeatedly blow the same hot air, on the birther issue and other lies, and yet never fail to make it into the news.

The fact that Trump presided to some extent over three Atlantic City casinos that went bankrupt multiple times was worth reporting, as was his failed attempt to open a casino in Philadelphia. The fact that he was making false noises about running for president — an obvious ploy to boost his TV ratings — was not worth reporting, except maybe once, on Page 10 in the C section.

It’s not news that Trump is the prototypical Ugly American. He comes from privilege and brags he’s a self-made man. His wealth is a vehicle for imposing his vulgarity on the world. His arrogance is matched only by his ignorance, which is evident every time he comments on a serious issue.

My favorite Trump story is from my Atlantic City friend Sterling and dates from well over a decade ago. Sterling was heading one way on the Boardwalk, The Donald was heading the other way, surrounded as always by his goons. They all wore business suits and identical red ties. As he passed them, Sterling said, “Yo, Donald, you got a special on the ties?” The biggest of the goons made a move toward Sterling and appeared ready to throttle him, but another goon pulled the big guy back into lockstep.

That’s Trump — Mussolini with a muskrat on his head, surrounded by goons marching in lockstep, protecting him from uncontrolled exposure to real people.

And that’s the one and only time I’ll mention this ridiculous creep, unless his shaky real estate empire implodes.

Posted in casinos, David Brooks, economic collapse, Great Recession, mainstream media, Obama, Philadelphia, Politics | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

It’s Rapture time. Do you know where your dog is?

Posted on May 19, 2011 by oddmanout215

Holy eschatology, the end is near. Worthy folks across the land are wrapping up their earthly business and getting ready to be summoned, or assumed, or maybe just whooshed into heaven at 6 p.m. Saturday.

There has been much debate on whether all good people will ascend en masse on May 21 or in groups over the next couple of months, but 89-year-old Harold Camping, prophet and MC of Judgment Day, is unequivocal on this point. The Rapture will be an all-in-one-day affair, like one of those mass weddings presided over by the Rev. Moon in the 1980s. So spend your savings and forget your debts, amen.

But don’t forget your pets. There is still time to connect with the good folks at Eternal Earthbound Pets who, for a small fee, will make sure you’re not too sorely missed by the “four-legged and feathered friends” you leave behind to await world’s end.

Some preachers have doubts about Camping’s prediction, and many skeptics have pointed out that rapture time will vary according to what time zone you’re in. But would you take the word of naysayers and risk the health of your pet(s), not to mention the wrath of the Divine Timekeeper?

BTW, those of us who remain unraptured can look forward to a few months of lag time while the Divine One puts the final touches on Armageddon. Not a bad prospect if you stock up on the right drugs and the greatest hits of Mahalia Jackson.

Footnote: In case the Rapture doesn’t happen, there is still a good chance the Rupture will. The latter is from novelist Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story and refers to the near future when the United States goes bankrupt, microcomputers eliminate privacy and the government does away with the poor. Now that’s a prediction I can believe.

Posted in economic collapse, Great Recession, livable cities | Tagged , , , , , , | 4 Comments

The hole where Borders was, and the dummies who dug it

Posted on May 17, 2011 by oddmanout215

Writers hate the idea of slush piles, where agents and editors dump unpublished works. On the last weekend of business at Borders in Philadelphia, I saw the equivalent of a slush pile for published works.

It wasn’t a pretty sight. The titles, all marked down by 80 percent, included Norah Marler’s No More Dating Pigs, Suzan Hilton’s Feng Shui, Seth Meyers’ Dr. Seth’s Love Prescription, Susan Boyle’s Dreams Can Come True. There was Lacrosse for Dummies and titles by Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Bill O’Reilly and other contemporary sages.

That’s a small sampling. The store was jammed with books no one would want, even if they’d been marked down 100 percent. The scene was a testament to the mind-boggling number of bad books in print and to the waste of enormous amounts of money by publishers, not to mention waste of trees.

It was a reminder that, in the not-too-distant future, the books industry will be selling more e-books than new printed books. Publishers and distributors can’t hurt themselves making stupid guesses about press runs for e-books. They provide exactly as many e-books as the public demands, and consequently will clear higher profits as book buyers become hooked on the e-reading habit.

Did I mention this is some depressing shit? I can get used to a world with a dwindling number of bookstores, just as I got used to fewer record stores, no video stores and almost no decent movie theaters. But it’s hard to imagine a world without these destinations as anything but diminished, especially in regard to in-person social interaction.

Footnote: Ideally, the three-story corner space in the heart of Center City where Borders was would become another bookstore, but this time with smarter owners — for instance, the people at Joseph Fox Bookshop. (“Distant Star by Roberto Bolano? Not in stock but we can have if for you by 11 a.m. tomorrow, sir.”) But Fox would have to invent its own e-reader to compete with the surviving monster chains.

The bottom-liners who own the former Borders building — they’re in New York — will simply rent it to the highest bidder, regardless of whether that bidder’s business is as good a fit for the area as a bookstore-coffee bar-eatery.

And this: Ever wonder about the dim bulbs at the top who make the disastrous decisions, or non-decisions, that ultimately drive good businesses into bankruptcy? You don’t have to — they almost always land on their feet in new executive positions, as opposed to rank-and-file employees, who end up jobless. Ironically, there were probably a dozen employees at Borders Center City — people who actually work with customers — who knew years ago that the execs were making a big mistake by not confronting the challenges posed by Amazon and, much later on, by e-books.

The chiefs in the chain were probably too busy gambling on new acquisitions to check on the health of what they assumed was a herd of cash cows.

Posted in arts, Great Recession, livable cities, Philadelphia, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

‘Low-stoop’ fiction writer seeks agent, brand

Posted on May 16, 2011 by oddmanout215

Balzac at the Rodin Museum in Philly

Citations from an article about the importance of tireless self-promotion in trying to establish a brand for your work:

For artists, the great problem to solve is how to get oneself noticed.

— Honore de Balzac, Lost Illusions

Great success is not possible without a certain degree of shamelessness, and even of out-and-out charlatanism.

— Stendhal, Memoirs of an Egotist

I slacked off blogging this month, mostly to focus on my manuscript, from the Latin manu scriptus, “written by hand.” A funny word, because nobody writes anything by hand anymore, and because it connotes the promise of special knowledge or even wisdom. “I sent the whole manuscript to an agent,” a fellow writer said to me the other day in a self-reverential tone that made me think of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

A doubly funny word because, on any given day, thousands of fiction writers seek agents for their manuscripts, and we aren’t talking precious scrolls here. Most manuscripts end up in so-called slush piles. Increasingly, virtual manuscripts are assigned to virtual slush piles.

And yet writers persist, mainly because we’re egotists, as Stendhal noted. We think our manuscripts will be embraced if only the world can get a look at them. We know we’re one lucky break away from gifting Western civ with something as enduring as The Red and the Black.

I exaggerate, but you get the point. We want to be read.

Sometimes a writer breaks through to an agent who may actually skim a manuscript because of a clever cover letter or an influential intermediary and then try to “place” the thing because he/she likes it and thinks it might be salable. As a last resort, there’s self-publishing — you will read my stories, damn it, even if I have to peddle them personally!

For the record, I haven’t yet sent my manuscript — a collection of short stories called Idiot Lights — to any agents, but rather to an English professor friend for suggestions and, most importantly, praise, whether or not it’s deserved. I’m pitching individual stories to magazines.

I harbor no illusions. None of my stories will find a champion at the New Yorker, and they’re much too raw for whitebread literary publications such as… I won’t drop names, there’s always the chance someone actually reads these posts.

Let’s just say my stories have provoked mixed reactions among the few people who’ve read them. My favorite was a workshop leader in New York who’d made a name for himself working with a famous minimalist short story writer. He said my characters are “low-stoop,” meaning low-class — pimps, junkies, psychos, whores, musicians, produce vendors and so on — and that my fiction therefore wouldn’t appeal to middle-class readers, the group that buys the most books.

What could I say? One writes what one knows, and I think there’s an audience somewhere for my low-stoop fictional friends. One of these days an agent will agree and it will on my head to push push push to establish recognition and sales, so I’d better start practicing now.

Or maybe not — “It’s a crap shoot,” as my professor friend says — and I’ll try to worm my way back into copywriting and PR. Hey, where do you think I learned so much about pimps and whores?

Posted in arts, fiction, mainstream media, Philadelphia | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Again, Bernie plays the Obama we thought we elected

Posted on May 12, 2011 by oddmanout215

This from Bernie Sanders, who stands out from most of his fellow U.S. senators like a St. Bernard in a pack of toy poodles:

The United States is the only major nation in the industrialized world that does not guarantee healthcare as a right to its people. Meanwhile, we spend about twice as much per capita on healthcare and, in a wide number of instances, our outcomes are not as good as others that spend far less. It is time that we bring about a fundamental transformation of the American healthcare system. It is time for us to end private, for-profit participation in delivering basic coverage. It is time for the United States to provide a Medicare-for-all, single payer health coverage program.

The key word is “basic.” Sanders thinks most Americans are smart enough to understand the most important step toward reform is to eliminate the middleman; to provide an option that doesn’t involve for-profit private companies — Aetna and so on — that have made our healthcare system an international joke. He knows we don’t like this system, that it only thrives because insurance companies pay politicians big bucks to maintain the status quo.

That’s why Sanders just introduced a bill that would do for the nation what single-payer health insurance is doing for Sanders’ home state of Vermont — lowering costs while providing care for all who may need it.

A companion bill to Sanders’ was introduced in the House by Rep. Jim McDermott, a long-time advocate of health insurance reform who stands out from most of his House colleagues like a Great Dane in a pack of… I’d say rat terriers, but rat terriers have more courage than congresspeople.

If the new legislation were to miraculously come to fruition it would be a big improvement over Barack Obama’s health reform law, which provides coverage for 32 million more Americans but does not cover 23 million others. And the new law does nothing to bring down soaring healthcare costs.

Ironically, Republican corporatists scornfully refer to the reforms as Obamacare, as if they’re a radical departure from the old healthcare system instead of a watered-down version of reform that makes insurance companies richer than ever.

Which only goes to show that half-measures usually earn you nothing but contempt from legislators determined to never give an inch on issues crucial to the continued outlandish profits of the companies that own them.

One can only wonder what would have happened if Obama had fought for single-payer insurance — i.e., taken the issue to the American people in a series of appearances and speeches — or for the so-called public option, a government-funded alternative to the private insurance companies.

Instead, he caved to right-wing demands before demands were even made, possibly because of advice from dirtbags such as Rahm Emanuel, who called Dem advocates of the public option “fucking retarded.” Or because Obama himself simply wasn’t into significant healthcare reform, just as he wasn’t into ending bonus tax cuts for the rich, backing labor unions, creating jobs programs for the unemployed or taking steps to discourage outsourcing of what used to be American jobs.

OK, it’s all water under the bridge. But it’s good to know there are still a few public servants who fight the good fight instead of surrendering without firing a shot. And that’s enough cliches for one column. Go Bernie!

Posted in Congress, globalization, Great Recession, health care, Obama, Politics, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

What does ‘killing evil’ mean, Maureen?

Posted on May 9, 2011 by oddmanout215

Here’s the Beltway sage Maureen Dowd, defending those who danced in the streets and shouted “USA!” at the news that Osama bin Laden had been killed by the U.S. military:

I don’t want closure. There is no closure after tragedy. I want memory, and justice, and revenge. When you’re dealing with a mass murderer who bragged about incinerating thousands of Americans and planned to kill countless more, that seems like the only civilized and morally sound response.

I don’t want closure either. It’s a meaningless concept in the real world, where cause and effect ripple through all of our actions. All I want is some intelligent discourse in the mainstream media, where almost all opinion pieces are written by hacks such as Dowd, who can always be counted on to poke fun at the Washington D.C. establishment without ever — not once — writing from a point of view outside the narrow range of opinions acceptable to that establishment.

Dowd is either too dishonest or too feeble-minded to address the implications of her gung-ho remarks about bin Laden. In World War II, Gen. Curtis “Bombs Away” LeMay gave the order to incinerate not thousands, but hundreds of thousands of civilians in the air war against Japan. And this was before nukes were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Wouldn’t the only “morally sound” response to LeMay’s savagery have been to kill him by whatever means necessary? Or was his savagery morally sound because Americans were the good guys?

Similarly, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, from 1969 to 1973, secretly and illegally ordered air raids in Cambodia that killed a half-million civilians and led to the takeover of the country by the Khmer Rouge, who subsequently massacred millions. (Sideshow, by William Shawcross, is the book to read.)

Nixon lived long enough to partially “rehabilitate” his reputation. Kissinger, arguably the most well-known living mass murderer, is regarded as a respected elder statesmen by much of the mainstream press. But wouldn’t it be morally sound to indict and prosecute Kissinger for his well-documented crimes?

And what about George W. Bush and Dick Cheney? Wouldn’t it be morally sound to bring charges against them for misleading America into a war in Iraq that resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths? There are prosecutors in Europe who think so. Both men know they might end up in jail if they were to set foot in some civilized country where jurists don’t turn a blind eye to the crimes of the rich and powerful.

The headline on Dowd’s column was “Killing evil doesn’t make us evil.” This is a silly pronouncement (how does one “kill” evil, a force stoked by killing?) that assumes a conveniently reductive definition of evil. History has shown that people often become so convinced of their own inherent goodness that they fail to recognize the point at which their conduct makes them no better than their enemies.

Midway through her column, Dowd writes, “I leave it to subtler minds to parse the distinction between what is just and what is justified.”

Too bad she didn’t take her own advice. And too bad NYT editors are too intellectually lazy — or, more likely, too cowardly — to publish op-ed pieces on such a serious subject by writers who don’t stoop to using the written word to wave the flag.

Posted in Iraq war, mainstream media, New York Times, New York Times op-ed, Politics | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment