Happy Birthday

Neon Park (born Martin Muller)
December 28, 1940--September 1, 1993

Xmas Report, Nought Six

In my neighborhood this sort of thing is called "understated elegance". Sorry the photo crew got there after the enormous inflatable Santa and Polar Bear were already deflated for the night.

Good news this Yuletide for the sincerely religious--our travelling survey racked up another Nativity scene in each category (church property, private property) this year, for a total of three each. The new private creche was discovered because of my half-dozen trips to the hospital in the past week (Mom now released, with some new meds and an "atypical dementia" tag since some of her short-term memory works remarkably well--much better than mine, for example) and had the bonus distinction of being teamed with a couple of those blow-up lawn globe things. Christmas lawn Dada.

The addition to the religious category, alas, was a photo spotted in the Indianapolis Star (the rules being unclear on this point I decided to count it), which seemed to feel that in a notably warm and snowless December Christians themselves could use a little fluffing:

The manger scenes with their baby dolls nestled on the hay are all aglow across the city....

At least a good half-dozen, anyway

The thing I enjoy about this story is the same thing I enjoy every year when they run their "putting the Christ back in Christmas" story, now in its forty-fifth year and showing no signs of being even slightly disconcerted by what outsiders call "reality": how some poor schnook of a reporter, already forced to work Christmas week, gets assigned to collect three quotes (four, if they include a rabbi somewhere for ecumenicalism, which, as you know, is not in fashion this year) and manages to obviate all doctrinal distinctions among the hundreds of Christian sects in our little burg alone. This, despite the fact that many, if not most, denominations recognize that the whole Christmas story thing is mere fable--one some even actively oppose--even before we get to that virgin stuff. This year included a fine bit of preacherese:

Living in a culture in which people go out of their way to avoid pain and suffering is one reason the Christmas story is easier to latch onto than the bloody Crucifixion, said the Rev. Larry P. Crawford, pastor at St. Gabriel the Archangel Catholic Church on the Westside.

As opposed to what culture, exactly? North Korea? Sparta? the Klingons?

There's more cheering news this Advent [note: "Advent" is my new preferred tactic in the War on Xmas, inspired by the Allied POWs at Colditz who infested the place with wood rot knowing it would take fifty years to have any effect. "Have a solemn and mortifying Advent season!" is now my standard greeting for complete strangers. I want to see the professional Christians wriggle out of that one]. The local news hairdos finally got away from all that secular "Black Friday" business and right down to the real Reason for the Season: encouraging people to shop their fucking brains out. It's gone beyond the helicopter-assisted reports on mall parking, which, now that I think of it, I've yet to see this year--they've probably been shelved as "too negative"--and onto actual exhortations to Just Buy Stuff. The change is actually subtle, because a good 30% of the regular news the other eleven months is now taken up with reports of Grand Openings and Site Selections and Zoning Disputes (followed by the inevitable Zoning Variance Announcement, sometimes later in the same newscast) and all other matters of news-esque Shopping Foreplay. The big difference I saw was that the entire final week before Xmas is now given over to scolding viewers for "procrastination". I saw two separate reports on different channels sternly lecturing "Last Minute Shoppers" last Friday, December the Fucking Twenty-Second, with an entire weekend left before the birth of the Lord. This is what happens when all your "news" comes from people who have personal shoppers on their own payrolls.

1st Airborne Unicorn Division Reporting For Duty, Sir!

I was tooling around town in the Doghousemobile this afternoon and heard Fred Kaplan taking on the Surge Mentality, and specifically Fred Kagan's part in it, which led me to his Slate piece on the subject, which is well worth a read.

(One highlight: After 9/11 Congress authorized an increase of 35,000 troops. In the interim we've raised 23,000. Five years, just over 4,000 troops/year. Our training maximum seems to be about 7,000/year. In three years now of researching the subject I had never come across that figure, though I'd kept an eye out. I always assumed we were not overly willing to spread those sorts of numbers around--the military has been fairly coy about recruitment numbers in recent years, for example. Of course I don't have Lexis/Nexis and I may have overlooked it somewhere, but I suspect that there's a new willingness out there to lay this stuff on the line before we compound our Fuck Up in the name of De-Fucking Up.)

The big question now is: where does John McCain, e.g., get off in suggesting 20,000, 50,000, or whatever number anyone wants to dredge up additional troops when we don't have them, except as an accounting trick? These are the people who were in charge through all of this. They're the ones who kept insisting we were making progress. They're the ones who claimed the call for a draft was "playing politics".

Well, it was. But it was also "playing Reality."

Oh, one more note: not that anyone other than Tim Russert can possibly imagine something coming out of Dick Cheney's mouth is worth listening to, but the idea that we could just go in and start wiping out Sunnis with impunity has already been disproven, even absent the idiocy of imagining a monolithic Shi'a. Everybody hates us more than they hate each other, though God knows why that might be.

Happy Birthday

Joshua Gibson
December 21, 1911--January 20, 1947

Today is also the birthday--a full week past the due date, in AD 1953--of one James "Jimbo" Riley, born in the back of a cab on the way to the hospital in Downer's Grove, Illinois, where his parents were appearing in a roadshow revival of Whoops, Dearie!, a series of blackout sketches based on Peter Arno's New Yorker cartoons. Mother had left the show due to being "with child", as the Playbill had it, just a week earlier. The baby's almost supernaturally large cranium caused a cop the cabbie had flagged down to make a crack, and my father spent half the night in jail. The young family was stranded in Indianapolis the following Spring when the promoter absconded with the week's take.

ADDENDUM: At the old Avalon Playhouse, the same place Frances Farmer ended up four years later.

Life Lessons

First, Hoosiers have always looked upon Kentucky the way the rest of the nation looks at us, i.e., as the mildly Learning-Disabled cousin you try to include in everything so long as nothing important gets broken. And second, it's no secret that our recurring theme here is that we've got practically everything bass-ackwards in this country and there's no improving things until we recognize and try to correct that. So Tara Connor is a perfect object lesson:

A) Who Are We Kidding?

1. Popularity of hot girl/girl action: Large

2. Popularity of leaky drunks: Very small

B) Where Is Our Perspective?

1. Number of recent articles extolling the "role model" status of contestant in a Paleolithic peep show who most successfully parades her surgically reconstructed body in front of a television audience basically consisting of the Powerline boys: Large

2. Number of House bills demanding impeachment of George W. Bush because his daughters are as far from role models as pageants are from civilized behavior: Very small.

C) Extenuating circumstances:

1. Tara Connor: small town girl, Big City

2. Bush Twins: small minds, Big Money

D) Number of additional Chances:

Tara Connor: one

Bush Twins: unlimited

Once Again Missing The Distinction Between "Bullshit" And Aromatherapy

"The army is stressed."

Stressed. Stressed.

Hello? Mrs. Whittington? I sorry to report there's been an accident, ma'm. The Vice-President accidentally stressed your husband's face with birdshot.

Like teenaged Laura Bush stressed her beau at a four-way stop. Like the number of times the "youthful" George W. woke up in a pool of his own stress.

Like Eric Shinseki's career was stressed.

Stressed, motherfucker? You walked outta the shop with a crystal vase and you come back with two handfuls of sand, and stressed is all you have to say?

What stopped you from increasing the size of the army in 2002? In 2003? What in the name of Allah stopped you from asking the American taxpayer, and the American corporation, to pay for it? Certainly not the economic miracle your tax cutting has wrought.

What stopped you from creating a genuine coalition to remove Saddam Hussein? The mess it would have made of your reelection schedule? The precision of defining an actual mission? The potential for competence on the ground, and the lost potential for ill-gotten gain?

What stopped you? What stopped you from making sure the plan in place was sound, or at least finding someone who'd could tell you if it was rather than telling you what you wanted to hear? What stopped you from doing something about the looting? What kept you from immediately, and forcefully, and honestly addressing Abu Ghraib and the attendant breakdown of discipline and ethical behavior and following that trail right into the Pentagon?

What's caused you to stand by while men of both parties who had served honorably, even heroically, in the war of your youth were slimed for your personal political gain? A war they fought and bled and suffered in, a war you relied on string pulling and wheel greasing to keep you clear of (and even then screwed around)?

Now the army is stressed? Time effing Magazine asked the question in 2003. Funny how it didn't trickle up to the White House until after the last midterms.

Stressed.

Thank God it doesn't matter what you say anymore, though I bite my tongue as I type that. It was hard enough to believe that people would vote for you in the 2000 Republican primaries, let alone the general election. It was hard enough to believe an election could be stolen so blatantly, or that a major political party would, far from being apologetic, actually revel in the fact. It was understandable that after 9/11 many people would try to convince themselves that you were competent. Even so those things were bound to come with a price; how much more so the senseless, worthless slaughter in Iraq? By 2004 there was no excuse whatever for anyone to imagine you were something other than the slow-witted, cocksure frat boy you've been all along, the one who has mistaken the toadying deference he's been shown his entire adult life for people, somehow, missing his obvious low self-esteem and even lower IQ. The President of the United States who had to outdo his Daddy.

Mend the army? Fix the army? Soothe its troubled brow? Maybe a nice mudbath, some scented candles, stake it to a half-hour at that Asian massage parlor on Route 12?

Yep, just a little TLC and pretty soon it'll be back to being that army we'd all like to have a beer with. An' guess who's buyin'?

The Gift That'll Keep On Giving For Another Generation Or Two, Minimum

Buy it through World O'Crap and do a good deed while you're at it.

Rajiv Chandraserkaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone

I'm still fifty pages from the end (I remember the days when this city used to go ballistic over a Colts appearance on Monday Night Football; now it's just an interruption) but so much of this book makes you want to shout out loud I have to start. Paul "Jerry" Bremmer. Doug Feith. Dan Senor. Bernie Karik. Custer Battles, LLC. The 24-year-old real estate salesman who decides to remake the Iraqi bourse.

• The closest thing there was to a study of postwar Iraq, the Future of Iraq Project, had been organized by Thomas Warrick, an international lawyer who had gone to work on war crimes at the State Department. Jay Garner convinced him to come to work for him. Rumsfeld ordered Garner to remove him--on Cheney's orders, because Warrick saw through Ahmad Chalabi.

• The Iraqi people got their news from al-Jazeera, in part because the contract to remake Iraqi television was given to Science Applications International Corporation, a defense contractor with no broadcast experience. They hired a veteran television producer named Don North to head the operation. He was told he didn't need to do any Stateside planning; SAIC had people in Iraq taking care of it. When he arrived he found thirteen camera tripods with no base plates for the camera, a receiver for satellite transmissions with no power cord, and no instruction booklets for anything. "It was like they bought everything from a flea market in London," he said. Bremmer soon had Iraq TV filling air time with American propaganda.

• After the rocket attack on the al-Rasheed hotel, inside the Green Zone, in October 2003--an attack facilitated by the opening of the opening of the nearby Fourteenth of October Bridge just fifteen hours earlier--Maj. Gen. Martin Dempsey, who had told the crowd at the bridge opening ceremony "the safety and security [of Baghdad] has been achieved", informed Paul Wolfowitz that the attack showed the weakness of the insurgent forces, because the rocket launcher was crudely welded.

• In his February 2004 Iraq photo-op, Tommy Thompson used the Ibn Sina Hospital as an example of how the US was "reestablish[ing] Iraq as a center of excellence for medical protection and medical care." The hospital served only the coalition military forces, Provisional Authority personnel, and American contractors. The real Iraqi hospitals were hellholes. The American in charge of the Iraqi health-care system was a Michigan social worker who had been the director of a Christian-proselytizing relief organization who operated one of those anti-abortion adoption agencies back home.

There's more. Believe me, there's more.

Happy Birthday

Philip David Ochs
December 19, 1940--April 9, 1976

My Eyes! My Eyes!

I do not get much of my news from television. My Poor Wife watches the local news, or tries to while I yell at the vapid singsong and celeb updates. I watch Olbermann. I may flip to CNN if there's a big story and I want an update, but just as often I click it off again stupider than when I turned it on. If television was the only source for news I would get all my news from the Daily Show.

My mother got moved to the psyche ward Friday--it's so they can monitor her drug regimen for a week or two--so instead of going to see her Sunday mornings as usual I'm stuck with visiting hours. And so I idly turned in on Colin Powell on Face the Nation, just until he started lying, which, due to some careful questioning from Bob Schieffer actually took a good forty-five seconds. I knew my resistance was nearly at an end and I switched over to The Tim Russert Comedy Hour to find I'd missed Newt Gingrich (what the...?) but was just in time for the big panel discussion with everybody's favorite serving of faux-balanced Timesmen, David Brooks and Thomas Friedman.

Brooks, Friedman and Russert. The Three Self-Inflating Magi in America's Xmas Kitsch Lawn Display. What have we done to deserve this? I know, I know, we've done plenty. But how is it that Russert still hosts a Sunday news program? His conflicted ass should have been tossed a decade or more ago, and would have been under any fair system. Friedman may belong in the world of ideas, perhaps, as a chronicler, but as a thinker? Aren't we now a couple years beyond questioning the analytical powers of everyone who backed "regime change in Iraq", or whatever other justification was popular that day? Isn't having then suggested the French be removed from the UN Security Council for their outrageous failure to toady to us enough to cashier the guy now? Shouldn't everybody who supported the war, or at least those who stuck with it beyond the initial looting phase--I mean looting by people who actually lived there, not the Coalition of Willing Defrauders--be forced to compete for the right to speak in public by eating Madagascar cockroaches washed down with a liter of Haliburton™ Brand Spring Water?

And bad as it is to see those two, what is the point of David Brooks continuing to exist? He's Vaughn Meader after the Kennedy assassination, Stephin Fetchit at the March on Washington, a 27-year-old former touring company Annie. His stint as the prissy but mildly-tolerant spokesmarm of the Right was already on life support before November 7. Absent a Republican height he can sneer down from, Brooks is nothing.

Here are two men, filling two influencial spots in American political life, who have learned exactly nothing about Iraq in four years of (mostly) telling the rest of us our presence there was vital for the continued existence of civilization itself. There is, at best, a grudging acknowledgment that their little plan wound up somewhat south of the mark, and Brooks still trots out his Mad Max of the Middle East video in hopes he can continue to hope about '08, but there's no depth of understanding and no understanding the depth of our failure. There's no recognition of Bush administration duplicity in the run-up to war, no stain of Abu Ghraib, no outrage over a shockingly mismanaged occupation, an assault on the Bill of Rights, of seriously damaged US standing in the world or a worn-out, used-up, shamelessly wasted military at home and abroad. But you guys are the ones who were let down. The level-headed among us expected just what happened.

The National Broadcasting Company brings us Friedman and Brooks as the Yin and Yang of American political thought just six weeks after some Republicans less supportive of the war than what Friedman has been were tossed out of Congress on their ears. Three guys who helped sell this disaster in the first place now sit in our living rooms and rearrange headlines to see what combination would look good in the den.

Happy Birthday

Abe Martin
first appeared December 17, 1904

The Indianapolis News, the afternoon newspaper back when there were such things, and the home of Abe's creator Kin Hubbard, re-ran one every day on its back page when I was a lad. The paper generally hit the screen door about an hour after school let out, and Abe Martin was always the first thing I turned to. Which was a mite odd, since I usually didn't get it.

For one thing, I never could figure out just what I was looking at. That's an early Abe above; Hubbard later stylized him so that the whiskers--you didn't see many of them in the early 60s--looked more like the stuffing was leaking out of a scarecrow. And the humor wasn't always humorous, not to the 9-year-old mind. I don't know how many years of five-a-weeks went by while I earnestly sought some connection between drawing and the caption, as in every other cartoon on the planet, but there never was one. For some reason I stuck with it, and at some point--I don't remember quite when--I became a huge fan. Hubbard moved Abe from Indianapolis to Brown County a couple months after his debut, and he's still a fixture in the half tourist-trap/half artist colony of Nashville, and the inn at Brown County state park is named for him.

I owe him my love of metaplasmus, in particular my mildish apocope addiction (and how cheering it is that my present spellchecker doesn't recognize either!), but particularly for making me understand that what seemed a hundred years old when I was reading it forty years ago was nevertheless smart and funny and modern.

A few favorites:

Nobuddy ever forgets where he buried a hatchet.

Next t' a circus ther hain't nothin' that packs up an' tears out any quicker'n th' Christmas spirit.

Anybuddy that ever tried t' git rid of a chew o' terbacker at an art exhibit kin appreciate how terrifyin' it must be t' try t' stash a torso.

A friend is like a umbreller. He's never there when you want him, an' if he is he's broke.

We'd all like t' vote fer th' best man, but he's never a candidate.

Nothin's as mean as givin' a little child somethin' useful fer Christmas.

Regrets, I've Had A Few

For one, there's the fact that Leni Riefenstahl didn't live long enough to film the Rumsfeld Farewell Rally.

Alternately, that somebody tossed out Nixon's old Palace Guard uniforms.

Help, My Clorox™ Brand Revolving Toilet Brush Clashes With My Dated Kitchen Appliances!

Or, yes, I occasionally channel James Lileks, but the difference is the very real possibility that I will hunt some of these people down and kill them.

• Let's say you happen to be, I dunno, let's call you the Rolf C. Hagen (USA) Corporation of Mansfield, MA. And let's speculate further on the odds a rapidly aging but still sexually attractive blogger, in a moment of Yuletide consumerist weakness, picks up some cat water-fountain gizmo you make, or distribute, or something. Let's imagine that his Poor Wife managed to break the cats' water bowl, and that she has demanded it be replaced by something with handles or ears or bowl-circling gargoyles so that she (who never is the one to fill the thing) can pick it up more easily. And let's imagine that this long-suffering dutiful spouse (who's still quite virile) goes in search of one, but in the back of his mind is the nagging realization that leaving the cats without drinking water for a week or two while shopping for Just The Right Bowl is probably unworkable, and, also, that No Corporation or Distributor or Whatever In Its Right Collective Mind would produce such a thing. So he figures on cutting the Gordian Knot with some schlocky gizmo, which you happen to produce a variety of, and here he is holding it, scanning the quatrolingual box for the one bit of information important to him: Does the thing require plugging in? Because the preferred location for it, the one where the cats were, until last evening, accustomed to find potable water, is about fifty feet from any usable outlet. And this gentleman reads the back of the box, in English, Spanish, French, and what he takes to be a sub-dialect of Neo-Phrygian transliterated into Roman characters, and at least three of them appear to say "Detachable AC adapter included".

He is, or perhaps imagines himself to be, justified in two assumptions here, neither of which is supported nor abnegated by any other information he can find on the packaging: one, that the thing is powered by a DC motor, and two, that it will run on either said direct current or, with the detachable adapter in positive attachment mode, by plugging it into a wall socket. He further assumes that this option, which he does not plan to take advantage of, would use standard US plugs and operate on 120V., though this does not enter his conscious mind.

So you might imagine his surprise when, upon unpacking the thing, he finds that the only way the motherfuckin' thing will work is plugged in. In other words, the package did not contain a Detachable Adaptor, but, rather, a Two-Piece Power Cord, without which its merchantability would be, roughly, Zero. And the packaging actually read: "Contains electric appliance and includes the cord you'll need to plug it in," only in a way which made this idiotic statement the subject of a guessing game the consumer doesn't realize he's playing. Supposing he could calm down for a moment--which is not likely since he now must repackage the piece of shit and take it back to the pet store, braving in the interim a surface-roadful of drivers who apparently come out only in December and whose remarkably universal dyslexia causes them to believe the speed limit on every road between here and there is "04", and who through some heretofore unexpected psychic emanation cause their turn signals to behave sympathetically--if he could calm down, I say, it might occur to him to consider some alternative location for the thing, but it's a no-go. So the question for you is, why wouldn't he sneak a mention of it into his blog?

• In my mid-adolescence, during the Pax Nixonia, we used to drive three or four miles one-way just to sneer at a guy who had five or six lighted Xmas monstrosities on his lawn, in his trees, and on his roof. Now, other than my own little suburban castle, I practically have to drive that far to find one that doesn't.

Honest to God, it's like the official symbols of the holy season of White Trash Advent or somethin'. It started, what, half a dozen years ago when those icicle light strings came out, and they looked pretty cool until the second year when they were on every other house. Plus they're uniformly in Glaring Eggshell or Temporary Night Blindness Beige, or something, which really raises the question of how we wound up with so many American homeowners so bereft of drug-induced-trance behavior experience that they choose the brightest possible bulbs for their personal Pink Floyd lawn displays. Then came the wire reindeer and candy canes and shit, also in Flashbulb-in-the-Eyes Frost Tone, and the light blankets, which made it possible to simply hurl the shit in the general direction of where you'd like the display set up, and forget it. Now it's the giant inflatable crap, which collapses like busted styrofoam coolers at a NASCAR short track when the power's turned off, except when it's Santa and he falls just so and looks like the victim of some prison violence. The other day I saw a house with eighteen of the things on a standard suburban lawn. I'm not exaggerating; I nearly caused an accident slowing down to count them, which I felt was the only fitting way to show my appreciation.