Flop.

ABC has a new show called “Splash.” Perhaps you saw it. I didn’t mean to, but it was happening right next to me and it was kind of like a car wreck.

Near as I could tell, what happens is, Louie Anderson does a slow free-fall off a diving platform, watched by a live audience who are in rapt attention and, in some cases, covering their mouths in fear. When he gets out of the pool, Joey Lawrence interviews him. (What the hell happened to Joey Lawrence, by the way?) Then Louie walks over somewhere a few feet away and Charissa Thompson (from ESPN2. Not ESPN… ESPN2) interviews him. This is all very serious, as if he just competed for a gold medal in the Olympics. Then he faces a former Olympic diver and a dive team instructor, and they give him scores. Totally seriously. And then a tweet pops up on the screen from a random person saying she’s glad diving is finally getting some attention because it’s so crazy hard to do.

And I believe that. I believe that actual diving, in which you point your toes and do a bunch of flips and twists and stuff, and you try to enter the water while creating as little splash as possible, is difficult to do.

So after that, Katherine Webb comes out. I immediately have my doubts because she’s wearing a bathing suit that would definitely, definitely come off if I wore it and dove from a 10-meter platform. Who is Katherine Webb? you wonder quietly to yourself. She’s the girlfriend of a college quarterback, and also Miss Alabama, made more famous by Bret Musberger’s compliment of her looks on live TV as she sat in the stands at her boyfriend’s bowl game than by her crowning as Miss Alabama.

Anyway, so she dives, which is kind of impressive because she does a backflip. And keeps the bathing suit on. But her score for that is somehow lower than Louie Anderson’s freefall.

They interview her. Somehow her makeup has not run down her face. Her conversation with Charissa Thompson is like Hot Brunette With Wet Hair Talks To Hot Blonde With Dry Hair. Ratings gold in the male 14-Dead demographic.

Then some guy who’s a trick skier or something comes out in trunks and he’s all cut and muscley, and he does a dive with a couple flips and a couple twists and somehow his score is only a little higher than Louie Anderson’s.

Then out comes – are you ready for this? – Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. He’s wearing a purple robe and he looks, I swear, like some kind of wizard. For some reason he is not wearing his goggles, which is weird because he wore them to play ball but apparently does not think he needs them to swim. He dives off the kind of diving board we’re all familiar with – the bouncy kind that’s not high off the water. And he totally belly-flops.

Admittedly, I crack up laughing.

But I cannot believe this is where we’ve gone as a society. This is entertainment now? Watching Louie Anderson plummet off a slab into a pool in (thank God) a full body bathing suit?

Look, we’re writers. We all know “reality” television sucks ass. It started more than 20 years ago (gah) with the first Real World on MTV and it’s been a long, steady progression into hell since. But now we are seriously entertaining ourselves watching a fat guy and a midget (a midget, people) do dives?

And yes, I totally resorted to assholery in my description in the previous sentence, but do you know why? Because that’s what ABC did in casting them. You put Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Louie Anderson and Chuy Bravo in a diving “competition” with Katherine Webb and Rory Bushfield (the extreme skier), you’re totally going for the Some Of These Folks Are Not Like the Others vibe. Unabashedly.

So if you watch the show and enjoy the spectacle of the comparative figures… you’re an asshole, too.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, there’s no charity fundraising involved or anything. It’s really just like watching the folks at your community pool try to dive, but with cameras and lights.

Who came up with this idea? Who sat in a board room and said, “Okay, here it is. Ready? So great. Okay. So. We take these D-list celebrities, right? I mean people you haven’t seen in decades. Sometimes people you’ve never even heard of, right? And we have them dive into a pool.”

And the exec said, “…And?”

And the idea guy said, “…Isn’t it awesome?”

And then they made the show.

In other news, ABC has announced that its next show will feature camera crews watching me get out of bed every morning, just in case I fall down.

Go ‘Merica.

 

History In the Making

I used to think my grandparents had lived through amazing times in history.

Now I’ve realized I have, too.

On my days off last week, I watched hours of the Olympics. They are, among other things, a fantastic way to pass time. It goes faster when you watch the Games, I’m pretty sure. Then on Sunday night and the wee hours of Monday morning, I watched the newest episode of “The Newsroom,” which dealt with the night Osama bin Laden was killed. I won’t say where I was or what I was doing that night, but in sum, there are a lot of reasons I’ll never forget it. (No, it wasn’t dirty. Geez, people.) I happened to finish the episode on my laptop at 1:30am, the perfect time to flip on the TV and watch the rover Curiosity land on Mars. Live.

Ho-hum.

It has struck me over and over in the last week or two that we are constantly witnesses to astounding things. So constantly, in fact, that we have become impervious to them. That’s what makes us, sadly, so different from the Greatest Generation. We have lost so much of our ability to be amazed and humbled.

I am typing this - typing it – on a laptop computer no heavier than the slab of ribs I’m defrosting in the kitchen. This laptop can bring me live images of something happening literally a world away. My phone, connected to no wires and requiring me to stay in no perimeter (unlike the days when I was frustrated that the phone cord didn’t reach into the dining room from the kitchen), contains almost as much data processing hardware as the laptop does, but is a fraction of the size.  On either of them, I am able to communicate instantly with friends as close as the next room and as far as Australia and Hong Kong. I can even see them, if I choose.

“The Newsroom” begins each episode with a theme montage that features, first in a series of images, and old-timey satellite soaring through space. Just the fact that there is such a thing as an old-timey satellite is sort of mind-blowing.

These things are parts of our everyday life now. We barely notice.

But for some reason, the confluence of recent events has my mind on a different track. I’m grateful that knowing my grandparents and their experiences as I did has taught me an appreciation for history as it happens. I have parlayed that appreciation into other elements of my life. And so at a time when the Olympics converge with the Mars Curiosity landing, an epic (if nearly intolerable) presidential campaign, a global economic crisis and a chaotic assimilation to endless social media, sometimes I just have to stop, look around, and catch my breath.

Those of us who weren’t awake for it may not have reacted much to the Curiosity landing. After all, it’s not the first time we’ve landed something on Mars. The Opportunity is still there, you know, roving. But this was the first time we landed something the size of a car there, without any real testing to see if the whole thing would actually work. It did. It landed perfectly in the perfect spot, unbroken to our knowledge. Within seconds of watching the live reaction from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California to the news that Curiosity had successfully touched down after what NASA had termed “seven minutes of terror” for its landing sequence, that thing was beaming back images of the planet it was on. Sending pictures through space of a planet none of us have ever set foot on.

Why is that not every bit as awe-inspiring as when we sent men to walk on the moon?

In 35 years, I have lived through the return from an oil embargo; the election of a Hollywood movie star as president; the invasion of Grenada; the Iran-Contra affair; the war in the Persian Gulf; massive world-changing earthquakes in California, Japan, China, Indonesia and Haiti; Hurricane Katrina; the World Trade Center bombing (1993); the Oklahoma City bombing; September 11th; the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; the impeachment of a president; the election of an African-American as president; the appointments of the first and second African-American Secretaries of State; appointments of the first, second and third female Secretaries of State; the dissolving of the Soviet Union; the destruction of the Berlin Wall; the Velvet Revolution in Poland; the protest in Tienanmen Square; the Occupy Movement; the Arab Spring and similar uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Libya and Iran; countless space missions, landings and discoveries, including the International Space Station in cooperation with the Russians we previously tried desperately to humiliate in the Space Race; the dawn of the personal computer; video cameras (Beta/VHS/digital); the invention of the internet; laptops, cell phones, digital cameras, cell phone cameras, the microwave, answering machines, voicemail, Facetime and Skype, Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, dating sites, Twitter and innumerable other technological marvels; the turn of a century that once seemed only fantasy (without computer meltdown); the arrival of unfathomable diseases and the cures and effective treatments for so many more; pet microchipping; heart valve replacements; artificial hearts; lifelike prostheses; cars that park themselves…

I could go on and on.

And yes, some of these things exist now only to make our lives easier and allow us to be lazier. We may mutter that it would have been better if they’d never been invented at all.

But watching the Olympics… watching people of every race and nation break down in tears at the triumph of victory and the pain of defeat, watching pride and heartbreak combine, watching people do things I could never, ever do… I find myself cheering for every single athlete, every single time. I don’t care that they’re from China or Russia or Korea. I don’t care that they come from a country diametrically opposed to mine. I don’t care that, by and large, we view their nation’s people as threats to ours. Because when they are united in competition and congratulations as individuals, each with a story, each with a suffering, each with hopes and fears and families they have loved and perhaps lost, it is never more clear that we are all the same. I cry when they cry. I cheer when they cheer. Watching the Curiosity land on Mars, it is undeniable that, everywhere on this planet, every person is subject to the life-ending fragilities and immortalizing strengths of the human condition.

What these things, all these histories I have lived through, show is that we as a species crave and strive for purpose, understanding and unity. What almost all of these things do is bring us together, search for life, and sustain life.

I watched a room full of geniuses at NASA’s JPL jump up and down, cry and cheer endlessly over what had been accomplished at 1:31am Eastern Daylight Time on Monday morning when they learned that all their work over 12 years had finally landed on Mars. On Tuesday, I watched an entire Olympic stadium full of people from all over the world roar their heart-swelling support for a Dominican runner who sobbed on the first place podium after kissing his grandmother’s photo on the track where he’d just become the fastest man to run the 400-meter hurdles.

I watched history unfold, with the common strings of pride and sacrifice uniting the planet, and discovering another one.

And I am still amazed.

*******
Video worth watching:
Felix Sanchez’s Olympic Gold Medal Ceremony
http://www.nbcolympics.com/video/track-and-field/highlights-mens-400m-hurdles-medal-ceremony.html

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, Monday, 1:31am EDT/10:31pm PDT
http://www.nasa.gov/mp4/673828main_curiosity.mp4

One Day In My Head: A WTF Post

That second part of the title should be in script font, underneath the first part. Like an after-school special titleboard.

SO. Today is Friday, my day off, and I am all over the place. Bud over at Older Eyes once asked me, very very early in my blogging “career,” whether I’m really as neurotic as I seem. Um…..

…Yes.

Well, kind of.

I do play up the comedy a lot of times, but mostly I really do spool out thoughts until the end of the roll, unraveling all sorts of terrible and tragic possibilities along the way. You know. Just in case. So I’m ready. Prepared. Because I don’t like bad surprises. Which is dumb, because obviously nobody likes bad surprises.

By the way, the spool always, always ends with me dying alone in some godforsaken house or apartment in a recliner in front of a television (which for some reason is always a model from like 1978 with rabbit ears), wearing a terrible nightgown and not being found for days. But Darla at She’s A Maineiac points out that this is a good reason to maintain the blogging. So that people will notice they haven’t heard from me in a while.

That said, I didn’t post for two weeks and nobody checked on me.

So.

Anyway. I thought, given today’s mental gymnastics, I thought I would just let you in on what it’s like to be in my head. Note: I thought about the serious stuff seriously. This isn’t intended as flippant.

First I thought about coffee.

When that was taken care of, I saw the news about the shootings at the movie theater in Colorado. I imagine my reaction was the same as anyone’s. I went from the incapability to even register the information to the anger about it happening before settling in on how awful, how indescribably awful, it is. My historical perspective kicked in and I realized it was easily the worst mass shooting ever. God, all those people. I wondered if they even realized what was happening at first, or if they thought the noise was somehow related to the booming audio from the movie. Even as I sit here typing these words, I’m shaking my head.

Of course, that put me on the road to thinking about guns. I suppose it’s possible that we don’t hear the stories about when guns do good things. I respect responsible gun owners, but I just don’t get the need unless you hunt for food or protect your family from wild animals. (No, seriously, that’s valid, I get that.) I certainly don’t see the need for semi-automatics and assault weapons. Nobody needs those. Ever. For anything. My father was telling me the other day that my cousins had visited relatives on the other side of their family in New Mexico and wound up firing AK-47s in the desert.

…Why?

I thought about all the terrible things that have happened in my recent memory because of guns and disturbed individuals. And you can’t protect the people you love from that. You can’t do anything about someone who snaps.

Unless you keep them from ever getting their hands on a gun.

I thought about the Colorado shootings a lot today, here and there, interspersed with things like going to the grocery store and trimming flowers for a vase and watching Darla Maineiac’s second-anniversary vlog post, which was freaking fantastic. And she made me think about baton twirling. Which I did when I was a kid, with a baton that looks exactly like hers.

She also made me think about Green Day’s song “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life),” which sent me back to two things: my college days, and my friends’ wedding. Which sent me to my (fictional) wedding.

Which ended in blankness.

I went from the chiropractor (where I thought about bulging discs) to the post office (stupid, stupid construction traffic patterns that jam up ev. ery. thi. ng. Also stamp designs.) to my therapist’s office.

Well, what didn’t I think about at the therapist’s office, right?

Then I went to the car shop to have the oil changed and tires rotated and some other stuff checked, and I thought about the inability of some younger women (they’re actually women now) to speak a sentence without throwing in the word “like” five times. I do it, I admit, but not this much. And not every one of my sentences ends in a question mark.

And I know that it’s not really okay to have four different kinds of tires on a car.

Which made me think about how I have to think about not making faces in front of strangers as I listen to their conversations.

I thought about the house I almost made an offer on until I found out yesterday that there had been a triple shooting on the corner the week before the seller listed the house. Oh. So that’s why he’s moving. Got it. You know, I loved that house. I did. But I was looking for clarity on the neighborhood, and I guess you could say I received that.

Which, of course, led me back to guns and Colorado and stupid, senseless things. And drugs, and what I will and will not put up with in order to prove that I believe in a community.

Which got me thinking about “The Wire” on HBO, which I’m only now starting to watch, courtesy of BIL 2′s willingness to let me access his hbogo.com account. It’s a fantastic show and I’m only eight episodes in. But it’s so, so sad. It’s not sad content, not intentionally. But I know it’s real, the places are real, the boarded up houses and projects are real, and it’s at once both a great and terrible thing to know that. Great because we tend to shelter ourselves from those things, and when we don’t see them we forget that they exist, that real people live there, that children are growing up in that environment and there will never be hope for them until we stop pretending they’re not there. Terrible because real people live there and children are growing up in that environment. And we haven’t found a way to fix it.

And then I thought about how Dominic West (“Jimmy McNulty” on the show) can’t do a proper regional accent because he gets tripped up on his Britishness, and yet you’d never know Idris Elba (“Russell ‘Stringer’ Bell”) was British. Dude can throw a phrase around like he been ballin’ American-style since birth.

And then I thought about listening to Prime Minister’s Questions on C-SPAN and practicing my British accent in the car on the way home from work the other night.

As I was carving up a quarter of a watermelon I’d bought at the grocery store, I was smacked in the head with the idea of using it to infuse some vodka and create yummy delicious refreshment. I finally canned my own fruit. Mason jar and everything. Like a prairie woman. What’s that you say? Prairie women didn’t fill their fruit jars with vodka? Pfft. I win.

Just now I thought about how I really have to call the pathologist’s office from when I had my endoscopy and tell them why I haven’t paid them a single penny of the $476 the insurance company says I owe them. (I’m in a fight with the insurance company. Unsurprisingly.) I just talked to the anesthesiologist’s office about the $797 the insurance says I owe those jokers. I’m trying to buy a house. I don’t need bills going to collections.

Now I’m thinking about all these things, and all the stuff I thought about at the therapist’s office, and also dinner.

And nail polish.

And Syria.

And how fish oil caplets are made.

By the way: while I was at the car shop not rolling my eyes at the stupid chick, I came across an article in the July 9th issue of Time Magazine that dovetails I mean almost exactly with my last post, Keeping Track. I swear, I had not read the article before I wrote that post.

Now I’m thinking about housing starts.

It never ends.

At the Risk of Offending the Mafia…

My scintillating Friday night is none of your business, except that I watched two hours worth of shows about mobsters on whatever cable channel it was on. Damn, I love a good mobster story. What sucked me in was that the first episode featured a (highly truncated) version of the events that unfolded in Philadelphia between the ’70s and early ’90s. Being from there and having lived there during a lot of the really messy mayhem, I couldn’t help but indulge myself. It’s part of my cultural lore.

Have I ever told you that my dad kind of knew a guy? I mean not really. He was acquainted with a guy who was not in the mob, but rather was a business associate of a mob boss by the name of Angelo Bruno, aka “The Gentle Don.” Bruno only killed people if he really, really had to. Anyway, so my dad knew this associate guy very casually, but did once watch him peel $3,000 in cash out of a wad and hand it to a bar manager to get him to shut up already about a charity event they were having. Dad didn’t know what the deal was – he was a teenager at the time. And now said associate is dead. Courtesy of the mob. Naturally.

The show I was watching detailed all the connections between who had who whacked over what, including the associate my dad knew. It had all the old news footage of the crime scenes where the bodies were found… even the footage from right after Phil “the Chickenman” Testa got blown up, as referenced in the very beginning of Bruce Springsteen’s “Atlantic City.” Oh, you ain’t know that was historical? It is, Jack. Springsteen is talking very pointedly about all the rigamarole surrounding the casinos in AC vis-a-vis the Local 54 and the Local 30 unions. Everything dies, baby. That’s a fact. (Take a look at Atlantic City these days if you want evidence. Sheesh, what a hole.)

Nobody was as bad as Nicodemo “Little Nicky” Scarfo. Nobody called him that to his face, either, if they wanted to keep their own. Little Nicky had a height problem and a problem with having the problem, know what I’m sayin’? And he had a lot of other problems, too. (The Riccobene War wasn’t set in Malta, folks.) He’d been in and out of prison a few times,  still running the Philly operation from the inside. But the feds finally nailed Little Nicky for good in 1989 after an associate turned. Scarfo was convicted in the hits on seven other mobsters. This guy killed people if they looked at him funny, so his body count was a lot higher, but along with charges in racketeering, loan sharking, drugs and extortion, Scarfo will be in an Atlanta prison until at least 2033, at which time he’ll be 104.

After that episode came another that detailed the murderous career of a man known as Joe “Mad Dog” Sullivan, the only guy to ever escape from Attica. They actually interviewed this guy. Sat down and talked to him all casual-like. And let me say, he looks really good for a 70-year-old inmate, recovering drug addict and alcoholic who made his first kill at the age of 13 and was in and out of prison his whole life since. And he doesn’t look crazy or mean. He looks haunted. Which he apparently was. He says the anger that made him a mad dog started when he was 13 and his father died. I’m sure there was a screw or two loose before that, something that set up the dominoes, but he got mad and his mom got poor and abusive and drunk a lot, and he just never made good of his life. Mad Dog is the guy who eventually killed (among others) Antonio “Tony Bananas” Camponigro… the guy who’d had the Gentle Don whacked because he wanted to be Boss. That hit wasn’t sanctioned by the Big Bosses in New York, see. So a month later they set up Tony Bananas. When Mad Dog shot him who knows how many times, and he was good and dead, the bosses stuffed him with cash. A message. This is what happens when you get greedy.

Is that hilarious or what?

No, really. Think about it. The mafia is all about greed. Greed and power. That’s the whole idea. Everything else is circumstantial, a byproduct. So when a bunch of guys go after another guy because he got greedy? That’s just delicious, bloody irony right there.

If you think I’m sick for finding all of this so fascinating, ask yourself if you’ve ever seen any of the following movies on purpose:

The Godfather – I, II or III
Goodfellas
On the Waterfront
The Boondock Saints – I or II
A Bronx Tale
Carlito’s Way
The Departed (alternatively pronounced “Da Dee-pah-ded.”)
Bugsy
The Untouchables
Scarface
Once Upon A Time In America

…Or the hit HBO series The Sopranos.

Eh-heh. See?

The Mafia functions on greed, power and loyalty. Do someone a solid and they’ll have your back. Do something even a little wrong and they’ll shoot you in it. And not subtly, either. Deeze guys. Brazen. Broad daylight hits. Openly hostile shakedowns. Calling cards. Messages in crime scenes. Totally transparent stuff that practically screams The mob did it. And we eat it up.

Gangs these days are just the modern incarnations of mob families. Slightly different motives, maybe. More desperation. Less patience. Not hittin’ the big time like the Gambinos or the Genoveses. But still based on loyalty. Still based on turf. Still about the money.

Still with the crazy nicknames, only fewer guys whose middle name is “The.”

Why don’t we find them quite so charming?

As usually happens when I dig in to some good true crime mob fare, the whole thing left me a little depressed in the end. My hometown is an ugly place, and its history is gory. The development of Penn’s Landing? Mob deal. It’s everywhere. The Philly guys didn’t live in opulent houses. Their houses looked like mine. In the end, the charm is tarnished. The glamour fades. The promise becomes pathos. Loyal associates turn. The feds catch up.

Everything dies, baby. That’s a fact.

What the…? A Non-Political Post. (Mostly.)

I have no material with which to write a regular post and I’m trying to give you a break from the politics. I’m not even going to write a full post on Gingrich winning South Carolina despite his ex-wife accusing him of asking for an open marriage two days before the primary, probably because he took John King to task over asking him about the interview and King totally wussed out instead of telling Gingrich to stick it. (See? Debates matter.)

So instead of writing about that, I thought I’d present you with a Summary of the Ridiculous, Week of Jan. 15.

******

At the chiropractor on Friday, while she was making me do all sorts of things against my back’s will, the doc asked me a bunch of random questions that seemed rather disconnected. But none of them threw me like the one she tossed out while she was trying to feel the iliopsoas muscle that runs under the abdominal organs.

“Do you have trouble gaining weight?”

“Ummm…” I started to reply. And then I stopped.

Wait, what?

I don’t understand the question. Do I have “trouble?”

Ow!

What are you saying? I’m not too thin, surely you’re not saying I’m too thin.

Do you feel some sort of bad organ in there? Some sort of weight controlling organ?

Are you a real doctor?

Ach!

I groped for an answer to the question as all these thoughts ticked through my head. I finally blurted: “Why would I try?”

She just smiled.

Now I’m afraid that her treatments are going to somehow make me gain weight.

******

Someone posted a link on Facebook that made me go cross-eyed with despair for what is going on in local television news these days. There’s a politician in Cleveland up on 26 criminal corruption charges. But there are no cameras allowed in the court room, and these kinds of stories, while important to the local community, are dry and have no video to go with them. How to present? How to solve the dilemma of imparting important information on people who will be bored by it? You won’t believe the answer WOIO came up with.

Just watch.

I can’t even…

Just… Here.

*****

There was a freak-out on the interwebz last night because everybody thought Joe Paterno had died. He didn’t die until this morning. Turns out, CBS Sports had reported it last evening, and Huffington Post, People Magazine and a few other outlets picked it up – but here’s your first clue it’s not a sure thing: CBS News didn’t run with it. CBS Sports got it from some student website (onwardstate.com), which is clearly about as reliable as a Yugo. A Paterno family spokesperson denied the report. Then there were tweets from two of Paterno’s sons, also denying the report. He was (as of last night) very seriously ill, but not dead.

Now he’s dead.

It’s a sign of the danger of using unreliable sources. Clearly I am your only reliable source for information. Remember that.

******

Sister 1 posted a video of Twin Neph 2 on Facebook Monday. He was chanting the beginning of a particularly angry “alternative metal” song: “Let the bodies hit the floor! Let the bodies hit the floor!” over and over again. He is four years old, and so freaking cute that you almost overlook the fact that he’s chanting in his speech-impeded way about bodies hitting floors. Drowning Pool (the band that recorded the song) says the lyrics are about “the brotherhood of the moshpit.” My nephew loves music, but particularly two kinds: hip-hop and Disney songs. “Bodies” is neither. But the beginning of it is spoken, and that’s close enough to hip-hop for him.

******

On Tuesday night, Entertainment Tonight presented a full complement of coverage it had no business doing on the Costa Concordia cruise ship tragedy on the Italian coast. What did they call it? Check out the graphic.

Psst. ET. There’s a reason everybody knew how the movie ended. Morons.

******

It got really cold here and snowed a bit – just a bit, but the cold was enough to make me try something I never do: a hat. My parents brought me a handknit Irish wool beret when they went to Ireland last year. It’s beautiful, but not being a hat person, I wasn’t sure I could pull it off.

I was right.

It has a pompom on the top, which, since it’s a beret, is not really the top so much as it is a jaunty cockeyed adornment. It doesn’t seem right on me. I tried just pulling the hat down straight. I wound up looking like the top of a ceramic sugar canister.

Sigh.

I do better with bucket hats. Can I get a wool knit bucket hat?

I’ll Never See Rudolph the Same Way Again

I don’t know why, but the Universe is apparently trying to kill all of my dreams and fantasies.

(Not those.)

It may or may not have started when CBS began airing the Victoria’s Secret Angels Fashion Show immediately following the Rankin/Bass claymation holiday favorite, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” with the song stylings of Burl Ives. I remember being absolutely dumbstruck by the juxtaposition of the shows. It seemed a treacherous pairing, at best. “Mommy, why are the angels only wearing shiny underwear?” It might have happened then, I’m not sure, but I started to realize some things about my beloved Rudolph claymation Christmas special. Some ugly things.

Hope you've got good insurance, Pops. Kid's gonna need a shrink.

Rudolph’s father is an ass.
Donner may be Santa’s lead reindeer, but as is so often the case with honored and outstanding athletes, he’s also a jerk. As soon as his adorable new son’s nose starts glowing (which is approximately five minutes after he’s born), Donner pitches a fit and rejects the kid. He looks for ways to make him more normal, including scraping up some reindeer house dirt and making Rudolph wear it on his nose. Does he ever wonder from where Rudolph inherited this glow? No. Does he ever self-reflect? No. Does he show his son loving kindness and acceptance? Nope.

Fast-forward to a claymation sequel: “Rudolph Goes to Therapy.”

You're not that cool, pal. And your hat looks stupid.

I Hate Comet.
The name says it all, really – the guy can fly, so it makes sense that he’s in charge of teaching the little reindeer how to take off and land. Apparently, he’s also in charge of telling the kids who to shun. When Rudolph’s new friend, Fireball, accidentally outs him as a beak-blinker, Comet goes bugnuts and tells all the other reindeer not to play with Rudolph anymore. Dude. He’s your buddy’s son. His dad and you go flying around the world together every year, hauling a fat guy and a planet’s worth of gifts on a deadline. You’ve been through so much together – sideways snow, sideways ice, wind shear, tricky landings, dodgy takeoffs, near-misses with planes, that year Blitzen hit the sauce and you had to pick up the slack… Donner’s always got your back. This is how you show that brotherhood?

Dude, what is your problem?

The Head Elf is, like, Elfie Dearest.
First of all, why is an elf allowed to be this miserable? He’s so angry! He’s glowering and mean and he yells at the other elves all the time! He’s a terrible conductor and he thinks the elf choir sucks, when they actually sounded perfectly lovely and charming when they sang for Santa (who didn’t like the song, either, the old coot). And then he’s totally cruel to Hermey just because he doesn’t like to make toys.

Tell us why you really hate Hermey, claymation people. Hmmm?

And Hermey… poor Hermey…
Hermey is gay, okay? Can we just agree? Hermey is gay and that’s why he’s a misfit. It’s not because he wants to be a dentist. Have you noticed the stereotypical difference between the way he talks and the way the other elves talk? Have you noticed he’s the only one who has sweet pink lips? Have you noticed he’s the only boy elf with flowing locks? It’s so obvious. (By the way, his name is definitely Hermey, not Herbie. I looked it up.)

Santa is a d-bag. Santa.
This might have been the most disturbing realization. Santa comes into the Donner cave all “Ho! ho! holy crap what’s up with thiskid?!” He flat-out tells Donner there’s no way the little guy’s going to ever be on his Christmas Eve Dream Team if his schnoz shines like that. He just waltzes in, sees the kid, laughs at him, declares that Donner’s newborn son is defective, and leaves.

Santa breaks Rudolph's heart and kills his little baby dreams

What the hell, Santa? You’re supposed to be the spirit of love and light and joy and magic and wonder. You’re not supposed to be a judgmental hater.

I am so. Disappointed. In you.

So then Hermey and Rudolph run away and Donner and Mrs. Donner are upset but apparently nobody gives a flying fruitcake about Hermey… and they go deal with a scary snow monster and a half-crazy prospector and stumble upon an island full of toys that are messed up except for the doll. There is nothing wrong with that doll. It’s bothered me for years – what’s the problem with Dolly? She seems perfectly fine. So I looked it up, and apparently the Rankin/Bass people claim that her problem is psychological.

So, what, she just has self-esteem issues?

Are you freaking kidding me?

Initially, Dolly’s part in the show was super-small. They wrote her part larger in two subsequent versions and it’s my personal belief that they forgot to give her a misfit problem and now they want to claim she’s got unexplained mental problems.

So wrong.

Have I had the wrong idea of the North Pole all this time? I have it in my head as some happy place where no one ever cries and nothing bad ever happens except maybe a snowstorm that leaves peppermint-flavored piles of softness that are actually quite tolerable in temperature, and nobody’s a sexist who just blames a sad doll’s problems on some sort of mild female hysteria.

Apparently I equate the North Pole with heaven.

Interesting. I did not realize that until just now.

Oh, sure, everything's just fine now...

Of course all’s well that ends well in Christmas Town, North Pole, because Hermey the Gay Dentist Elf fixes the Abominable’s hurty teeth and Yukon survives a terrifying cliff dive and Rudolph guides Santa’s sleigh through the worst snowstorm in centuries so all the children of the world can be happy on Christmas morning (because Santa was going to be a big quitter until it dawned on him that the little reindeer he punked could save his cranky hide). Sure, everything gets resolved in Christmas Town. It’s just me who’s left with unresolved angst.

Me and Dolly.

Total crap.

Perhaps It Was Inevitable

I have a confession to make.

I kind of really like the Harry Potter movies.

(I just typed that with a scrunched-up face and one eye closed.)

When the Harry Potter hullabaloo started, I rolled my eyes. I continued rolling my eyes as J.K. Rowling wrote seven books out longhand in a cafe somewhere until she had amassed a fortune that could buy her her own Hogwart’s Castle. (NaNoWriMo peeps – you hate her, don’t you?) I rolled them while children and adults my own age and older sat up all night with a flashlight and a fake witch hat, plowing through the latest release in the series.

I rolled my eyes through the movie releases, too, by the way. And every time speculation popped up: “What will happen to Hermione? Will Dumbledore die? Is Snape in league with Voldemort?” I thought, Kids, I understand. I think it’s great that they’re reading. The adults though… the adults need to get a life.

Anyway, I never read the books.

Okay, fine, I read the first one, like seven years after it came out, because I wanted to see what all the fuss was about and I was looking for an entertaining escape that maybe didn’t involve the parsing of interpersonal relationships in adulthood. And I did enjoy it. But I never cared to read the second book. So… meh.

But now that these danged movies are on television all the live-long day, well, I’ve gotten a little bit sucked in. Just a little.

I haven’t seen any of the films all the way through yet. But that’s mostly because they’re on when I’m busy and ready to walk out the door. But I can already tell, oh, with that sense of say-it-isn’t-so, that it’s going to become a new holiday classic series. Like The Wizard of Oz and Home Alone (and its sequels) and the Lord of the Rings trilogy (which I also resisted valiantly), it’s destined to show up in those months of the year when I love curling up on my cozy couch with red wine or a cup of hot tea and a blanket and just indulging in childlike imagination and wonder.

But I’m super-picky about imagination. Which seems sort of counter-productive to the imaginative process. I don’t like sci-fi; in all my life, the only sci-fi films I’ve ever liked were the original Star Wars movies: Episodes IV, V and VI, which came out long before Episodes I, II and III ever did. I love those old Star Wars movies. Terrible acting, marginal special effects, groan-worthy dialogue and all. Love them. But that’s it. Not “Alien.” Not “Predator.” Not that awful amalgam of the two. Not “Star Trek” (TV or film incarnations) or anything involving robots or computer war games. Leaves me cold. Not interested.

And I’d never read a fantasy book, stuff about faeries (that’s how it has to be spelled, apparently, in fantasy-land) and elves and whatever… I’d never read those. Yet, give me some celluloid of munchkins and a green witch and some flying monkeys and talking lions and tin men, et al, and I’m sold.

Actually, I’ve never liked the flying monkeys. They scared me when I was a kid and to this day my least favorite scene in “The Wizard of Oz” is when the Wicked Witch is sending her minions out to get Dorothy’s friends.

But you take my point.

And Harry Potter looks to be my newest “comfort film” series. I’ve always allowed for the fantastic cast: Michael Gambon, Richard Harris, Alan Rickman (on whom I have the bizzarest of crushes), Maggie Smith (who reminds me of a lifelong friend of my family), Helena Bonham Carter… ridiculously good and wholeheartedly “in” on the game. But what I’m learning is that, aside from my growing love of British accents, I also love the colors, the richness of the visuals, the grandness of the cinematography, the fact that I can watch giant spiders run across the screen at Hermione and Harry and that redheaded kid whose name I can’t remember and I totally believe it.

I can’t actually watch the spiders. I hate spiders. Giant spiders, most of all.

But I kind of really like the rest of it. I love that I can retreat from reality and get absorbed in a fun, magical place where I can believe that anything is possible.

Ugh. I just threw up in my mouth.

Then again, I have very diverse taste. I mean, I’m writing this post while lounging on my couch, having  just switched from a Piers Morgan interview of Gen. Colin Powell to an episode of “Sex and the City.” So maybe it’s okay that I can go from Ken Burns’ “Prohibition” to “American Horror Story.” One night I caught myself flipping between a PBS presentation of “La Boheme” and a football game.

And I have a very special place in my heart for movies that make me feel safe and happy and cozy, and particularly movies that show up around Thanksgiving and Christmas. And so it seems I am going to be sucked into the Vortex of Voldemort, the Black Hole of Hagrid, the Grandeur of Gryffindor… the Pull of Potter.

I’m just a muggle, after all. Powerless to resist.

Thrill Me, Chill Me, Make Me Scream

Jack won’t watch scary movies with me.

*Pouty face.*

This time of year I always get all excited about scary movies in theaters and ghost shows on TV. And there is nobody who will watch them with me. Which is so not good, because that means I have to either go to the scary movie by myself or watch it by myself at home on TV and then watch Comedy Central for at least 30 minutes afterward so I can go to bed without thinking I’m going to open my eyes and see a very bad person standing really, really still in the doorway.

Gah!

I like to watch Ghost Adventures, which I think would be scarier if the host guy wasn’t such a d-bag, but which still makes me think I see a little ball of light in the hallway out of the corner of my eye. Oh, and Ghost Hunters International, in which the people once went to Wolf’s Lair in Poland and taunted. The ghost. Of HITLER.

Such a bad idea. Lose-lose. No good for anybody. What are you doing?!

I want to see Dream House. I figure it has to be good because Daniel Craig and Naomi Watts and Rachael Weisz are in it, and why would they waste their time on a crappy horror flick? They wouldn’t. So I want to see it.

I’ve spent two weeks watching a bunch of previews for the new FX series, American Horror Story, with Connie Britton and Jessica Lange and Dylan McDermott (who is not scary at all, knowwhatimsayin’?). And I’ve thought it looks totally freaky and I’ve been so excited.

Even the font is scary.

And when I got home from work Wednesday night, The Exorcism of Emily Rose was on cable. Ohhhhh, but that movie freaked. Me. OUT when I saw it in the theater a few years ago with my friend Jay. For days, I was afraid to wake up at 3:00am. Weeks, even.

It’s what Jack calls a “devil movie.”

“I’m not watching any devil movies!” he tells me when I poke him about watching something scary with me.

Sigh.

He did actually watch about an hour of The Exorcism of Emily Rose once, on TV. Allegedly. I wasn’t there, so I can only take him at his word. I don’t know which hour, but if it was the first hour, then he was probably pretty skeeved. That’s the hour where all the really OMG stuff happens. Emily Rose goes to college and gets possessed and winds up convulsing all over the place and eating spiders and jumping from her knees to her feet and back to her knees again in the corner of a room with, like, mindbending speed–

That's a pile of bugs near her hand. She's been eating them. Also she's been clawing at the walls.

–or is she just suffering a rare form of epilepsy so severe that it causes psychotic episodes and hallucinations of the Virgin Mary? You walk away from the movie trying to figure out if demons are real and denying them means you’re making God sad, or if all those people who supposedly had demons back in the proverbial Day were actually just mentally ill. And then that leads to wondering whether the supposedly mentally ill among us are actually possessed by demons.

You don’t know.

Alright, fine, you probably know, but it’s still spooky. And since Jack and I are both Catholic, the possession/exorcism thing is more real for us and makes those movies even scarier.

I love that.

I hate fake scary movies. If it’s not something that could actually happen in real life, it’s not going to scare me. Some burned up guy with blades for hands? Please. Never gonna happen. A guy who climbs out of a lake with a hockey mask on? Nope. A leprechaun with a voracious appetite? Dumb. I’ll admit that dolls and clowns scare the bejeesus out of me, which is completely unreasonable, but those are both universally regarded as creepy, so it’s not a failure of logic so much as it’s an inexplicable, but established, wrong. But you give me a call that’s coming from inside the house, or a fleeting human figure flashing noiselessly past a doorway in shadow so that you’re not quite sure whether you saw something or not, or a family man who loses his mind and picks up an ax, or a recurring nightmare that leaves you so sleepless that you can’t tell whether it’s real or not when it seems to start actually happening during your waking hours… I’m a sucker for that.

In the itty bitty hours of Thursday morning, I actually watched the pilot of American Horror Story (after I watched the end of The Exorcism of Emily Rose). And honestly, it didn’t “scare” me as much as it made me sort of go, “What the hell is going on here?” It introduced a lot of craziness that is probably supposed to confuse me, and explained just enough to make me go, “No. Way. That is messed up!“

Can’t wait for the next episode.

Meanwhile, Jack and I are watching Game 5 of the NLDS together tonight. He’s from St. Louis. I’m from Philly.

This is going to be terrifying.

How do you react to scary movies? What’s your favorite scary movie?

Dear Discovery Channel: I Am So Disappointed In You

Sunday night, Jack and I were hangin’ in the hizzie all late-night. We like to do this: I go there after work and make him stay up until well past the normal person’s bedtime (he usually naps first), and we watch TV. Sometimes good TV, sometimes bad TV. Sports of some kind. The occasional movie. Whatever floats his boat, as he has the clicker and I don’t really care (even when he’s at my place I give him the clicker; I don’t mind man-handling of the remote). Though sometimes I do catch sight of something on the cable channel guide at the bottom of the screen and hit him in the arm or the leg and go “Ooh!” demand that we watch it.

I mean we talk and stuff, but if it’s not the right weather for balcony cocktails and drunk people-watching (them, not us… well, sometimes us) we watch TV, too.

Sunday night was a particularly bad night for television. The channel surfing landed on the one program we could find with an interesting title:

When Fish Attack 2.

“When Fish Attack 2?! Fish can attack?” I asked.

“Well…” Jack thought about it. He was tired.

“Okay, so, piranha and barracuda. What else?”

“Um…”

“And there are two of these shows?” I wanted to confirm.

“How could one of those shows be enough?” Jack replied.

I’m embarrassed to admit this, but we sort of got sucked in. This giant elephant seal was floating around in some ocean somewhere nomming on a guy’s head. You can’t not watch a swimming mass of blubber with a huge proboscis nom on a guy’s head. But something was off. It wasn’t, like, ferocious. It didn’t look scary. The show kept cutting over to an interview with a guy who had a scar in the middle of his forehead that looked like it matched elephant seal teeth, but the video of the “attack” didn’t look very attack-y.

“This video looks like…not scary,” I said to Jack without taking my eyes off the screen.

“No,” he agreed, staring sort of half-consciously. “It doesn’t seem urgent.”

We watched.

“I feel like it’s a dramatic reenactment,” I said, “but I can’t figure out how you get an elephant seal to dramatically reenact something.”

The elephant seal had switched from the guy’s head to his arm. The narrator was talking about how the seal was feasting on this guy’s flesh, but it looked to me like the dude could totally have just yanked his arm out of the seal’s mouth, swum away, grabbed a bushel of crabs and gone for dinner, no problem. There was no blood in the water and this big lug of a swimming blob wasn’t looking very savage. I watch Shark Week. I know what I’m talking about. This wasn’t savage.

“Also I think those things are… um…” I poked myself in the forehead. “What’s the thing that’s opposite of carnivore?”

“Herbivore?” Jack offered helpfully.

“Yes. Herbivores. Like, they have kind of flat teeth. So they don’t really maul humans, I don’t think,” I decided.

Okay, so I’ve looked it up and technically elephant seals are pescetarian.   Sting rays, baby sharks, etc. So I was wrong there. But still. No blood in the water, and also the camera, which was held by another diver, wasn’t foundering around like the cameraman was all, “OMG, my buddy is being eaten alive by an elephant seal!”

"I will nom your head! But just a little."

We watched. Silent. Possibly slack-jawed from the lateness of the hour.

A couple of minutes went by.

“That isn’t a fish,” I observed.

“Not a fish,” Jack confirmed immediately on the heels of my observation.

Beat.

Beat.

“I mean the show is called ‘When Fish Attack.’”

“Two.”

“Right. But…”

“Not a fish.”

We watched.

“Hey, you know that Hillbilly Handfishin’ show?” Jack was suddenly animated and looking at me instead of the screen.

“Yeah?” We had watched it before on a similarly late night get-together and mocked it and the people on it, and the concept in general.

“So I know these two guys, and they’re gonna be on it.”

“Shut. Up.” I turned my body entirely toward him. “When? How did that happen?”

Jack told me the story of how he knows these guys and how they wound up getting on “Hillbilly Handfishin’,” which involves sticking your hands  - or feet – into crevasses under water in muddy rivers somewhere in the south to snag catfish without benefit of bait or line. It’s ridiculous and the guy who takes these people out on these little adventures is so furry he looks like he’s wearing a sweater when he’s shirtless in the water.

The guy on the right. So furry.

“They’re gonna be on on the… uh… 23rd,” Jack finished.

“We have to watch that!” I demanded. And then I told him about my friends who are going to be on one of those New Homeowner shows on TLC or HGTV or DIY or something, which he was slightly less interested in, evidently because it didn’t involve my friends sticking their feet into crevasses under water to goad catfish into chomping them.

Back on the Discovery Channel, we were now treated to a storyline about a giant whale that attacked a sailboat by breeching and body-slamming it. This was more compelling. This was actually sort of great video of this whale hurling itself out of the sea and ka-powing this boat with this South African couple on it. We were sufficiently impressed by the craziness of this kind of thing happening while you were minding your own business in he middle of the ocean. But…

Body-slam!

“Also not a fish,” I said.

“Nope. Not a fish,” Jack agreed.

I found some energy. “This show’s title is very misleading,” I groused.

Jack nodded and made a disapproving face.

“I mean this is the Discovery Channel. It’s supposed to be educational.”

“That’s true.”

“They’re really doing children a disservice,” I opined.

The show moved on to a third storyline, about apparently crazy people who lie on a dock to feed tiny fish to tarpon. Tarpon are sport fish. The guy getting interviewed explained that they are strong and fast and they have gullets that allow them to swallow their prey whole and something about a bone that lets them crush their food as they swallow. And these people were leaning down with little fish in their hands so the tarpon could jump up out of the water and eat them. Sometimes, they’d latch on to the crazy people’s hands and leave bloody marks.

“Augh!” Jack exclaimed, squeezing my knee reflexively, scrunching up his face and curling his upper lip back. Jack doesn’t like blood. He won’t ever watch surgery shows with me, even fictional ones.

Another tarpon fish grabbed a littler fish from some kid’s hand and left a bite.

“Gah!” Jack twisted away, averting his eyes.

“Well, at least it’s a fish,” I said.

Bravo for correctly identifying the species.

He agreed.

“But you know, they’re not really attacking,” I said. “They’re just… eating.”

“Yeah, and the people getting bitten are just holding the food.”

“Right!”

“Which is dumb.”

We watched.

Jack winced.

We watched some more.

“You know, I don’t–”

“This show is very disappointing,” Jack concluded, and flipped the channel.

“And misleading,” I insisted. “Don’t forget misleading.”

“Yes. Misleading.”

“I’m going to write a letter.”

“You should.”

He flipped to ESPN. We compared NFL records and rolled our eyes about people who think they can predict the outcome of the season, two weeks in. And then he started falling asleep and I felt bad, so I left.

It was a good night. For us, I mean. Not for the Discovery Channel. Lying jerks. Fish attacks. Hmph.

Monuments To Mediocrity: How Soundbites Ruined Government (and Why It’s Our Fault)

We live in an age of immediacy and abbreviation. Email instead of snail mail. Texts instead of voicemails. One hundred forty (oh, sorry, 140) characters in a tweet. Four hundred thirty-two (432) characters in a Facebook status update. Drive-thru restaurants. ATMs. (We can’t even spell those words out.) Give it to me quick and let me get on with my life. If it can be done without me having to actually listen to you, so much the better.

So is it any wonder that the world of politics is what it is today?

The clearest example I can find in recent history is the 2004 presidential campaign. Kerry v. Bush. Why did Kerry lose that election? I, personally, don’t believe it was because of the Swiftboat thing. I believe it was because Kerry did not know how to speak in easily-digested, clever, 15-second soundbites. He was mocked, made the subject of late-night comedy, for his tendency to go on and on about any particular topic. I remember a Jon Stewart bit, years later, about what he named his boat. (If you don’t have the patience to watch the whole thing, just fast-forward to the 2:04 mark.) It was hilarious, sure. But was the joke actually on us?

What Senator John Kerry understood, for which the rest of us just didn’t have time, is that governing is not easily boiled down to a quick snippet of memorable slogans. This is complicated stuff. And one needs a complicated mind to understand it and do it well.

In American history, there are examples of complicated minds who understood how to govern while also understanding how to speak to the American people. Bill Clinton. Ronald Reagan. Ted Kennedy. Ann Richards. You’ll notice I’m giving relatively recent references. That’s not because of politics. That’s because of Americans.

When Americans pioneered and then embraced the nature of the mass media (r)evolution, politics had to change. No longer could we put up with wordy fireside chats.

(Who wants to sit and stare at a radio?)

No more did we tolerate laborious discussion in a public forum without some flash to entertain us. As the digital age dawned and then grew, we didn’t want to sit for hours and watch debates. We wanted soundbites. We wanted low-effort ways to figure out in an instant who we liked and who we didn’t. Maybe it mattered what they said. Maybe it only mattered how they said it.

Suddenly, there was a ubiquitous poll question on every network’s graphics: Which candidate would you rather have a beer with/invite to a backyard barbeque?

Really? This is how we’re deciding who will run the country? I don’t know about you, but I’ve had enough beers and been to enough backyard barbeques to tell you in no uncertain terms that I do not want any of the people with whom I spent that time to become the leader of the free world. Beer pong and badminton skills do not a president make.

Except for President George W. Bush, the first man elected almost exclusively, you have to figure, because he won the backyard barbeque poll.

Look where that got us.

Somehow, in the technology age, wit and pith overtook erudition and intelligence as our main standards of leadership. We favored sassy over smart, savvy over strategic, composed over considerate. We wanted style instead of substance and punch instead of precision. “Bring it on” instead of “Achieving our goals does not require us to build a flawless democracy, defeat the Taliban in every corner of the country, or create a modern economy—what we’re talking about is “good-enough” governance, basic sustainable economic development and Afghan security forces capable enough that we can draw down our forces.”

Ironically, when it comes to politics, the Information Age is actually keeping us from truly being informed. And now, we blame politicians for the fine mess we’ve gotten ourselves into.

I’m not saying they shouldn’t shoulder some of the blame. By and large, they’ve given in to the hype, and the next thing we know, they’re offering Sarah Palin as John McCain’s running mate. But what would we do if they all bucked the trend and spoke like Senator John Kerry instead of like President George W. Bush?

When we think of our most honored leaders, our most revered patriots, we think of Lincoln, Roosevelt, Washington and Kennedy. We remember Jefferson and Dr. King. Those are the men to whom monuments have been erected. And we cherish them not only because they could give fine speeches with soaring rhetoric, or write documents that give us chills. We cherish them because they had the brains to back it up.

Somehow, we’ve gone from that level of appreciation to completely writing off an impressive leader because he said he was for the Iraq war spending bill before he was against it, (halfway down the page) and then trying to offer his reasons. Fine, so Kerry wasn’t the best at playing the game. Since when is changing one’s position in the face of the facts – and wanting people to understand why – such a loathsome quality?

Now, we’re gearing up for the next presidential race. No one has announced for sure that they’re running, but here’s who’s stirring the pot:

Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, who paints himself as “the opposite of Obama.” Interesting, since he’s a good ol’ Southern white boy with a Confederate flag hanging in his office.

Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, who thinks the American Revolution began in New Hampshire rather than Massachusetts, and holds up tea bags when she talks.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who is widely regarded as one of the most cerebral politicians around, who thought Sen. Kerry was a flip-flopper… and then flip-flopped on Libya.

Former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty.The only person so far to form an exploratory committee (required to start raising campaign funds). His present strategy includes apologizing for his support of cap-and-trade.

Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, Donald Trump and Sarah Palin are still out there, floating around in the pool of potential candidates, but none of them have really committed to anything, and none of them showed up in Iowa or New Hampshire recently.

Is anyone else completely underwhelmed by this lot? These Packers of the Populist Punch who bring nothing formidable to bear on the national conversation? Who may be capable, but apparently aren’t desirous, of articulating anything other than party lines?

This week, we’re back to hearing soundbites about the budget battle. House Speaker John Boehner and Majority Whip Eric Cantor squaring off against Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Senator Chuck Schumer (who got caught on tape this week telling fellow Dems what words to use in interviews about the budget process. Like this is a huge surprise, and everyone thought it was pure coincidence that all of the Republicans use the same words, and all of the Democrats use the same words). “The Democrats need to show that they’re serious about fixing the problem” vs. “The Republicans need to decide which is worse: angering their Tea Party base or shutting down the federal government.”

And both sides repeatedly spouting the new favored line in modern rhetoric: that the other side is “kicking the can down the road.”

My personal opinion, based on the actual budget proposals in play, is that both sides still have it wrong. And I think they both know it. There is a $1.5 trillion deficit. Democrats want to cut $21 billion in spending for the fiscal year, but might be willing to take it to $33 billion if they trim defense and “mandatory” programs that get automatic funding. Republicans want to cut $61 billion, including funding for Planned Parenthood, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Environmental Protection Agency, and education programs. They’re not willing to lower the number. And lest we believe that the Republicans are the closest to the correct answer because they want to cut the most, we should require them to show their work: their $61 billion cut would make it basically impossible to enact the health care overhaul. So now you know their motive.

That doesn’t really work in a soundbite, though.

I’m sitting here now, staring at how I’ve wound up this entry, and I’m thinking, “It needs something. It needs… pizzazz.” But you know what? I’m going to leave it like it is. Because reaching for pizzazz just means I’ve fallen for the same tricks I’ve been ranting against.