My Favorite Holiday Gift

Comes from the unlikely source of A&E, the Arts and Entertainment network, presently plugging the imminent basic cable broadcast debut of The Sopranos with Etta James singing "At Last". Great song, written by Mack Gordon and Harry Warren, (who, between them, have four first names and four last names, so that if ever I try to change the billing I'm hopeless lost almost instantaneously), and an absolute primer on R&B balladeering, but especially appreciated this time around for finally removing the echo of that American Idol idolesse--the one in Dreamgirls--who belted NPR listeners out of an episode of Terry Gross' Fresh Air last week. "Belted" is used ironically here, as an ethicist might refer to Hiroshima as "an explosion". She had broken the neck of the song on the downbeat, and the first bar was yet to arrive before she had it stripped of watches, rings, cash, credit and debit cards and dental minerals and begun pummeling the corpse with a drill hammer for insufficient blingitude. The audience doesn't fare much better. I was physically exhausted by the second bar, and it took all my remaining strength to hit the off button and keep the truck on the road.

I am about as innocent of American Idol as an American can be and still own a television set. I recognized the woman's name as someone who was a major crowd favorite but lost due to hinky voting or some soft-core porn in her past or something equally mortifying, but I'd never heard her before. Then later that week--thanks to the fact that Dreamgirls seems to have been given the leftover Borat PR account to play with--I got to see a clip of her mugging what may or may not have been another tune from the movie. I can't imagine the circumstances that would make me want to find out. It's supposed to be Motown, but instead of Holland, Dozier, Holland the songs sound like Andrew Lloyd Webber and Whatever Lyricist He Found Out By The Pool This Week. Anyway, the woman is flailing her arms in close approximation to what she's doing to the scattered carnage of the song, which explains why she's such an enormous hit with the American public, for whom "subtlety" means making sure the gate gets closed after you let your six Great Danes attend to their fecal needs among the neighbor's prize petunias.

Happy Birthday

Patti Smith
born December 30, 1946

The Full Newtie

So it turns out that riff on the Roosevelt memorial wasn't Newt spouting off in an interview; it was Newt given an hour on FAUX to prove that Christians are a persecuted majority in this country because our monuments no longer quote the Bible and sweep the sky.

To be sure, that's probably as insightful a comment about Art as one is likely to get from a self-appointed spokesman for Christianity and professional history fabricator, but on the other hand The Wall is without question the most-visited and the most-inspiring (at least currently) monument in D.C. If anybody's taking rubbings off that godawful collection of bronze GI Joes at its base it's probably something actual decent Christians would rather not know about.

The former history professor--I'm still awaiting his response to my exposing his total ignorance of the history of abortion and contraception in this country in the pages of George magazine in 1996, by the way--wrote a blurb for the show on the FAUX site (find it yerself) which began with his usual dedication to accuracy:

It’s like clockwork — every Christmas there’s controversy about religious displays. This year they took down Christmas trees at the Seattle International Airport due to a complaint. A few days later they put them back up, but why was there a problem to begin with?

Well, I'm thinking the real problem was reading comprehension.

As a former professor of history, I can tell you this is not what the Founding Fathers envisioned.

Proving that even a sighted pig can find an acorn now and then. But I'm guessin' Newtie can't tell us why this is so--that even that percentage of the Founding Fathers who were Christian never envisioned anyone celebrating Christmas. Newt seems to imagine the 18th and 19th Centuries as sort of Leave It To Beaver with muskets.

I suppose it's no use to suggest that reading the Founders' intentions through a series of monuments dating no further back that the mid-18th century is a questionable exercise. Dr. Gingrich is the guy with the Ph.D., after all. And the FAUX contract.

ON EDIT: Somebody correct me if I missed Gingrich's protest when the sacred elevator to Heaven's good graces that is the steps of the Lincoln Memorial was used as a backdrop for a Rockettes kick line at the 2000 Bush Coronation Ball.

From The News Hole To The Memory Hole

Senator Tim Johnson, anyone? He was bigger'n Elvis two weeks ago, but the last CNN website mention of him was ten days previous. The Times has been keeping track of his condition, but then the Times didn't drop all other news coverage when he entered surgery.

MSNBC's inexplicable David Shuster was offended that someone at the time termed the coverage "ghoulish". He might explain why he's no longer hovering around Johnson's hospital bed now that his survival seems assured.

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