Accidents

I certainly don't hold to any supernaturalist views of history and determination, viewing the world situation of today, as Vonnegut would put it, as the result of a series of accidents. But were I apt to credit an unseen force I would certainly believe that the Prime Mover is doing his/her best to embarrass the Republicans and provide the Democrats with sufficient fodder to make a resurgence in popularity, if only as the alternative to an endless stream of apparent secretiveness and low-and-high level corruption.

The Dick Cheney/Harry Whittington shooting derby is the latest in a string of Republican mishaps and miscalculations, and has yet to be fully digested by the press and the public, as Whittington has had a health setback that indicates the shooting could shorten his life, if not quickly stifle it. When a 78-year old person is peppered with hundreds of little metal pellets, some of which enter the bloodstream, the possibilities of one of them strafing the heart (as has happened), or clogging an already occluded blood vessel and causing a stroke, are surely potentially lethal. Whittington seemed healthy at first (but so did Reagan after he was shot), which allowed for the pundits to crack wise all over the world. Now that the jollies are out, we may have to face the potential for a Vice President to be tried for involuntary manslaughter. Try as they might, the White House flaks have no way to spin this story to their advantage, and Cheney being so Darth Vaderlike a figure, the media is not likely to let it go, even if Whittington recovers.

The best possible eventuality here--and I'm not going to root for anyone's demise, even if it is a fatcat Texas lawyer, not my favorite species--is that Cheney's embarassment is so great that he decides to resign. That is about as likely, though, as Whittington rising from his hospital bed and competing in the men's luge. After all, Cheney is the de facto president, the architect of our foreign policy, and Bush would be flailing without his so-called guidance. On the other hand, if Bush had the chance to name a new Vice President, he might do his party's prospects good by selecting someone who could actually run for President in 2008 from a position of strength. He could even name Jeb.

For now, though, the Republicans are facing a very troubling year having to deflect accusations of misuse of power and downright incompetence. If David Letterman's writers were to concoct a top-ten list of Republican woes, it could be reduced to a simple roster of ten names--Bush, Cheney, Rove, Delay, Frist, Abramoff, Brownie, Chertoff, Katrina and Libby. Not a lot of positive spin to work with, unless, like so many Evangelicals, one believes that Bush and his disciples are messengers of God. But even they would be hard-pressed not to see this as God testing us, rather than helping.

So with all this ammunition you'd think the Democrats would be dancing in the streets like peasants in a Breugel painting. But there's not a lot of noise yet, and the second a cry of dismay emerges, it is rendered a scream of stridency by the Fox News people. Nobody really listens to Kerry or Kennedy anymore; Gore is a loser, despite his plurality; Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton are harpies; and Howard Dean still has a hoarse voice from his indelicate cheerleading. On top of that, Democratic senate leader Harry Reid has had dealings with Abramoff (as I'm certain a lot of Democrats have, though not to the extent of the majority party), so partisian attacks there would be certain to generate recriminations and revelations of hypocrisy from both sides of the aisle (which I'm shocked, shocked, to discover).

It seems we'll have a stalemate this year, with Republican incompetence balancing Democratic communication ineptitude. It would be hard to imagine the Dems won't make some gains in the mid-term elections, since there is nothing forseeable in the next six months that would be very advantageous to the Republican cause, and the scandals are more than likely to widen. But unless voters are willing to, fairly or not, ascribe the sins of their party leaders to their indivdual congresspersons, there's not likely to be any change in our national power structure.

A Shot in the Dark Side

This week it's a good thing to be a late-night gag writer, like my friend Wayne, who's been penning jokes for the Tonight Show for two decades. After most weekends there's not a lot of material to mine, with Sundays being slow news days. But today there's a plethora of riches.

The Olympics, being a widely-viewed event, always provides risible matter, and after three days there's a running--or should I say stumbling--theme, from the overproduced yet underwhelming Opening Ceremonies to the flopping of several American favorites. As beautifully colorful as the ceremonies were on Friday night, the event did not begin for 45 minutes (an unforgiveable delay, seeing as the program was prerecorded). As we waited we were treated to shots of Bode Miller on practice ski runs and at home, pontificating dimly about nothing, fairly guaranteeing that the overhype would lead to an underperformance, which it did. Then the show began, a clumsy affair with Italians gamely trying to emulate the clever marching bands from Big Ten schools as they formed a ski jumper in flight. With no commentary from the announcers and dreadful execution, it took well into the leap for us viewers to decipher what they wre trying to portray. Then, after a weird cavalcade of dancing cows and Alpine grandmothers, and the tolerable march of the athletes, the event concluded with a performance by Luciano Pavorotti looking impossibly awful, hair and beard blackened unnaturally, and his face stiff and tightened, like a cadaver badly prepped for an open casket.

Then the American favorites started falling by the wayside, some literally, like Ohno, who tripped over a Chinese skate (clumsy Apolo!); some cosmically, like Michelle Kwan, who pulled a groin muscle (which is even worse for a skater as it is for a ballplayer), and called it quits. Bode Miller, for all his bravado, finished fifth in the Downhill (the worse for Nike), and another American female skiier fell so calamitously she had to be hospitalized. On the positive side, I did learn what a slider on the skeleton team was (skeleton being a sort of mini-luge).

Then moving from the sporting world, or segueing gracefully into political sports, there's the Republican self-immolation show. Last Friday saw a slew of recriminations from Heckuva Job Brownie and Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff over FEMA and Federal ineptitude concerning the Katrina response. And of course there's the interesting discrepancy between President Bush's claim to have never met uber-Lobbyist Jack Abramoff and Abramoff's insistence that they confabed a dozen times, including at three Hanukkah parties. I guess Bushie was spending all his time spinning the dresden, or is it the dryden? Or the dirndl? But when the Reps got tired of shooting themselves in the foot, they started shooting their friends in the face. That's right, Vice President Cheney, taking his cue apparently from his idol Aaron Burr, put some buckshot into his hunting partner on Saturday. Apparently the victim "got in the way," while Dick was trying to kill some innocent wildlife.

This is so fucked in so many ways it makes my head swirl. It does seem fittingly appalling that Cheney, he of "The Dark Side," who abjured military service unless other people's children had to go get killed, would finally get his chance to pull a trigger at a human target. Now I largely disapprove of hunting unless it is actually for food, which at least is a biological imperative one can justify, as opposed to killing for fun. There is a certain acceptable irony, then, in a hunter getting peppered with the same buckshot that he so generously sprays at unsuspecting fowl.
It would have been so much more satisfying if Cheney had been the victim, though, rather than the perpetrator. But Karma does not always work in exact ways, "My Name Is Earl" notwithstanding.

That the accident also illustrates the dangers and foolishness of sport hunting is a by-product of this incident, and something the NRA and its toadies in Congress will happily sweep under the rug. Nor will it help gun control advocates any more than the recent post office shootings or Michael Moore's "Bowling for Columbine." Pro-and-con attitudes are firmly embedded there. But as grist for the Daily Show and the Tonight Show and the editorial cartoonists, searching desperately for ways to sidestep the Muhammad cartoon storm, this is a godsend.

Going for the Gold, Red, Green, Etc.

Tonight (actually today) marks the beginning of the 2006 Winter Olympics, or as they've been pointlessly renamed, the Winter Games of the Olympiad. I will be celebrating with some neighbors, whom I've invited over to watch the Opening Ceremonies from Torino (or Turin, town of the Shroud) on my magnificent HD-TV picture. We are going to dine on pizza, salad, and chocolate mousse. None of these is especially pertinent to winter athletics, but if anyone complains I'll just put on my ski pants and serve cocoa. The festive gathering should help compensate for the fact that I watched the Super Bowl alone.

I always enter the Winter Olympics expecting them to somehow be involving, and I am usually disappointed. Historically there have been some good moments--Dorothy Hamill skating to perfection in 1976, the U.S. hockey do-you-believe-in miracle of 1980, and Tanya Harding crying when her shoe laces broke in 1994. But the expansion of winter sports into arcane varieties of snow and ice frivolity have diminished its appeal. For instance, today I read that an American athlete named Zach Lund, a slider on the skeleton team, was banned from the games for using a hair-restoration product with the potential to mask steroid use. Well, I understand what hair loss is (it's something that happens to other men), and I know about steroids; but I couldn't possibly tell you what a slider does or what a skeleton team is. So the tragedy doesn't exactly resonate for me, even if Zach is all broken up.

In the Olden Days, when there were simply ice skating, ski runs and hockey, American victories were rare and therefore more meaningful. Wining three, four or five gold medals was a national triumph. Now the medal count has gone the same way as grade inflation. If I insist on rooting American, which is very chauvinistic of me, we don't even have a worthy adversary. No more USSR, who played the Red Sox against the American Yankees in the past. Germany narrowly edged out Team USA in the last medal count of 2002. I did not lose any sleep over this.

Winter sports are generally not designed for fan participation. Aside from hockey, there are no team sports, though there is now a speed-skating relay event. Watching athletes compete against the clock is not very captivating; one needs to heightened excitement of the commentator to make it the least bit compelling. Some personalities are likely to emerge, but to learn about them we're forced to endure the up-close-and-personal features that clog the coverage. Some of these stories can be inspirational, but they usually leave me with a sense of irony, wondering how the families of these specialized athletes could endure all the training and expense for the potential of One Shining Moment, one which most often does not arrive.

The glamour event of the Winter Games is, of course, figure skating, which is always good for a scoring scandal or two. This year scoring rules have been changed, and individual judges are not being identified, for their own security. That takes out much of the drama; now all we have to do is wait for the American pair skaters to fall on their asses as usual, and for Michelle Kwan to come up short one last time. At least she will always have a role in the Ice Capades if she wants it, or on "Skating with the Celebrities" if life turns cruel. Bode Miller and all the other skiiers have no particular future except as quadrennial commentators. Perhaps some Olympic medals to entice some late-night female company, but other than that, he'd best go into investment banking. As for Zach Lund, he won't have medals or hair or muscles or, just bitter memories.

I won't have many memories at all, except for sharing my home with good company, and some extremely vivid flag and uniform colors glistening on a white background.

Picture This

So the world is agog with the latest absurdist outrage, which involves a series of editorial cartoons published in Denmark and Norway that depict the prophet Mohammed satirically wearing bombs in his turban, or so I gather, since no American paper dares to reprint the "offending" drawings. Needing even more fodder for their weekly jihad, militant Islamists have fomented major protests throughout the Eastern Hemisphere, trashing Danish embassies and screaming about European insensitivity to their religion, which proscribes any pictoral description of its Founding Father.

Even within the context of religious insanity, this is a standout example of the irrationality and instability that superstition in the form of religious fervor has so dangerously foisted on our planet. As I understand major world religions, it's been arbitrarily determined by the ruling fascists who claim to represent their particular Almighty whether it's appropriate or blasphemous to depict the major prophets. The Egyptians, Sumerians, etc., had little Osirises and Baals all over the place for convenient supplicating. The Greeks and Romans erected statues by the thousands portraying Zeus et al. When the Jews rolled in, they also had early idols (as revealed by archeological digs) but these were destroyed, along with evidence of the female goddess influence, by misogynistic tribal leaders who preferred the concept of an invisible, and therefore, unknowable god. (It is more than likely that the "invisible God" idea is the greatest con ever perpetrated on the human species, even worse than anything devised by James Frey, Clark Clifford or Dick Cheney).

The proscription against idol worship, established in the final edition of the Torah to help distinguish Jews from other Semitic tribes, only applies to Yahweh, and even he gets some kind of representation via fire in "The Ten Commandments." Other Jewish prophets are fair game for depiction, which was good news for Charleton Heston, as well as those actors doing Jacob and Joseph et al. on the cheesy Old Testament flicks on KXPN. The Christians, though borrowing much of the Jewish values, had no problem at all drawing and painting and whittlin' Jesus and his disciples and his countless martyrs. Without this laxity there would have been absolutely no Renaissance art, or the Christ in a bottle of piss. In fact, some Christians are so enamored of their icons that they project them hopefully onto barn rooves and grilled cheese sandwiches. The Buddhists have no objection to their Head Honcho being rendered usually as a jolly fat man, or worse, as Keanu Reeves. The Hindus like to display those funny figurines of weird humanoids with eight arms, not to mention the elephant deity that guards Apu's Kwik-e-Mart in "The Simpsons."

But the Moslems, god bless 'em, they don't want nobody messing with their main man. This is somewhat counterproductive if they wish to proselytize with movies like the one Mel Gibson just made. In fact, an epic was recently attempted about Mohammed, but eventually was scrapped because, well, he was the lead character but we weren't allowed to see him. A lot of off-screen pronouncements do not make for an involving film, it seems. On the other hand, you couldn't blame actors from shying away from their agent's calls to play the Prophet. That would be the first role to earn an Oscar and a Fatwa. Well, maybe Russell Crowe.

But let's address the issue of insensitivity as charged by the poor, poor Arab nations. They are declaiming against Denmark and Norway, two countries with a history of tolerance, decency and humanism (which makes them fair game, I guess). Denmark was the only country not to blithely hand in its Jews for slaughter in World War II. The Kind of Denmark wore a Jewish emblem on his sleeve, for Heaven's sake. And now they're supposed to apologize till the end of time for a tacky cartoon by one of their journalists?

Insensitivity, huh? These hurt feelings are emanating from the same governments that officially demand the destruction of Israel and the deaths of Jews worldwide. They decry any military action taken during Ramadan but were gung-ho to invade Israel on Yom Kippur. They claim as official truths that the Holocaust never happened but that the Protocols of the Elder of Zion was a real book (which the Egyptians turned it into a TV miniseries). Furthermore, it's the positions of the leading Iranians and Syrians and Saudis that not only were no Jews killed by the Nazis, but the Jews caused World War II in the first place in order to establish some kind of hegemony over the other 99.9% of the world population. Now THAT, my fucking Islamists--and may you all have little Muhammad figurines dipped in chile sauce and shoved up your collective asses--is insensitive. And if the craven governments of the world refuse to say so, then it's up to the truth-speaking bloggists such as myself to speak out.

A Month of Sundays

February, normally a dour, frigid month, is shaping up as a festival of Big Events just made for Hi Def party-mode viewing. This weekend promises the Super Bowl hoopla, and I will be able to see every crag in Mick Jagger's face during his half-time performance. I will need the visual delights to carry me through most of the four-hour event, since I have zero rooting interest and am too chicken to log onto Internet sports-betting sites. Sports fans can then hair-of-the-dog recover from Super Bowl hangover by indulging in two weeks of Winter Olympics, during which the word "mogul" means something different than an asshole defendant in the current Enron trial.

Then, quickly ensuing, is the annual Oscar fest, my local Brouhaha, with the stars, the outfits, the helicopters and the security nightmares, all just down the street. I don't have much rooting interest herein, not because of indifference but because I like most of the nominees. Not to toot my own trumpet, but my prognostications from last week were on the money. In a pretty easy field to handicap, I was correct in four of the five Best Picture nominees, and my #6, "Good Night and Good Luck," edged out my #5, the Johnny Cash flick. In retrospect this was not surprising during these politically charged months. Hollywood cannot elect a President but it can make a point, and this year, it is thoughtful humanism that wins out over heartless spectacle.

I'm not kvetching about the nominees I missed. The fifth Best Actor slot went to Terence Howard. I didnt see "Hustle and Flow," though his reviews were glowing. He was very impressive in "Crash," however, as was its only acting nominee, Matt Dillon, who was the only "featured" actor in that stellar ensemble to be cited. Dillon is an actor of limited range but pulled out the stops with this stressed-out, well-written role. He will not win--that honor is likely to go to the the character actor's nonpareil, Paul Giamatti. The Academy will do penance for "snubbing" him as Best Actor in "Sideways" and "American Splendor." I missed a few of the actress nominees, totally forgetting Charlize Theron and her summer release "North Country," which also featured former Oscar winner Frances McDormand. Either Felicity Huffman or Reese Witherspoon will win Best Actress, with the advantage to Felicity for genderbending and the guts to look really awful on the screen, like Charlize in "Monster."

Best Supporting Actress probably goes to Michelle Williams, who may be the only "Brokeback" cast member to win. Rachel Weisz and Amy Adams have their fans, and Catherine Keener is a popular "professional" who will win one day but whose role was probably not showy enough. This is really a very competitive race. Philip Seymour Hoffman is almost a certainty as "Capote," however brilliant his fellow nominees were. Only a groundswell for "Brokeback" might sweep Heath Ledger in, but "Brokeback" will do well anyway. It will win Best Picture, Best Director and probably for Adapted Screenplay and Cinematography. "Capote" could take more than one Oscar, if Keener wins or if it triumphs in the strong Original Screenplay division. But I'd like to see "Crash" recognized in the latter category becuase it won't win elsewhere, and is too deserving to be shut out. A few technical nods to "King Kong" would be fitting, though Peter Jackson is probably still sore from toting his 13 Oscars, or whatever, for "Return of the King."

A final prediction--two days after the Awards show, all the winners, save for the Best Picture, will be largely forgotten. But who cares, we'll be heading into the baseball season. Or actually involved in one, the so-called "World Baseball Classic," slated for much of March, during which Major League players will do their best to win under arbitrarily determined national banners while trying to avoid straining their hamstrings. Which should engage the ESPNers until the Final Four tournament. Connecticut seems the favorite there, but I'm sure we'll forget UConn too a couple of days afterward. Sic semper gloria.